open economy

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pages: 356 words: 103,944

The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy by Dani Rodrik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, George Akerlof, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Multi Fibre Arrangement, night-watchman state, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, tulip mania, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey

In the decades since, modern industrial societies have erected a wide array of social protections—unemployment compensation, adjustment assistance and other labor market interventions, health insurance, family support—that mitigate demand for cruder forms of protection such as sheltering the economy behind high tariff walls. The welfare state is the flip side of the open economy. Markets and states are complements in more ways than one. Globalization’s Love-and-Hate Relationship with the State Now we can begin to appreciate how greatly international commerce differs from domestic economic transactions. If you and I are citizens of the same country, we operate under an identical set of legal rules and benefit from the public goods that our government provides.

Even at the height of economic liberalism during the nineteenth century, political insulation of trade policy remained limited and protection made a quick reappearance when agricultural prices fell. The politicization of trade policy increased further during the interwar period. The inability of governments to respond to the grievances of domestic businesses, workers, and farmers in the context of an open economy contributed to the Great Depression. As World War II drew to a close, John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White were looking for ways to square the circle. How could an open global economy be restored in a world where domestic politics reigned supreme? Keynes, the English don, had already made his mark as the preeminent economist of his generation and as an acute commentator on contemporary politics and politicians.

One review identified 124 banking crises, 208 currency crises, and 63 sovereign debt crises between 1970 and 2008.28 After a lull in the early years of the new millennium, the subprime mortgage crisis centered in the United States triggered another powerful set of tremors, confronting financially open economies with a sudden dearth of foreign finance and bankrupting a few among them (Iceland, Latvia). Most of these cases follow the same boom-and-bust pattern. First, there is a phase of relative euphoria during which a country receives significant amounts of foreign lending. This stage is fueled by stories in financial markets that emphasize the bright prospects ahead.


Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy by Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson

Andrei Shleifer, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, declining real wages, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, minimum wage unemployment, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, rent-seeking, seminal paper, strikebreaker, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, William of Occam, women in the workforce

More explicitly, κ ∗ is given by V r (D) = V r (O |κ ∗ ), or by: ∗ κ =1− 1 (θ + τ p (δ − θ) − δC (τ p )) θ 1 θ (10.24) Political Conflict – Transition to Democracy 337 Similarly, after trade, we need to check that for the open economy: V r (D) ≥ V r (O |κ ) so that we have a new threshold defined by V r (D) = V r (O κ ∗ ): κ ∗ = δC (τ p ) (1 − θ)(1 − δ) + 1 − δτ p θ(K + σ L ) (1 − θ)(1 − δ) (1 − δ) − θ(K + σ L ) δ (10.25) which, of course, is almost identical to the formula in (10.19). For all κ ≥ κ ∗ , the elites prefer democratization rather than using repression in an open economy. The same argument as before immediately establishes that: κ∗ < κ∗ and for the same reasons. After trade opening, democracy is less costly because the poor now prefer lower taxes, τ p , as given by (10.12) rather than τ p .

Conflict between Landowners and Industrialists 8. Industrialists, Landowners, and Democracy in Practice 9. Economic Institutions 10. Human Capital 11. Conjectures about Political Development 12. Conclusion 287 287 290 292 293 296 300 307 312 313 316 317 319 10. Globalization and Democracy 1. Introduction 2. A Model of an Open Economy 3. Political Conflict – Democratic Consolidation 4. Political Conflict – Transition to Democracy 5. Financial Integration 6. Increased Political Integration 7. Alternative Assumptions about the Nature of International Trade 8. Conclusion 321 321 325 331 334 338 344 345 348 part five. conclusions and the future of democracy 11.

First, to our knowledge, no one has previously suggested that increased international trade can influence the creation or consolidation of democracy through the channels we discuss (namely, the impact on factor prices and, hence, the distribution of income). Second, Bates and Lien (1985), Bates (1991), Rogowski (1998), Newman and Robinson (2002), and Boix (2003) note that the possibility of exit from a nation might promote democracy, but they do not offer an analysis of the full political A Model of an Open Economy 325 equilibrium when international trade affects the structure of inequality and the options of various parties in the political game. Third, by placing the idea of exit into a standard economic model of factor mobility, we discover other important effects – for example, the distributional impacts of capital inflow.


pages: 145 words: 43,599

Hawai'I Becalmed: Economic Lessons of the 1990s by Christopher Grandy

Alan Greenspan, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, dark matter, endogenous growth, inventory management, Jones Act, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Maui Hawaii, minimum wage unemployment, open economy, purchasing power parity, Silicon Valley, Telecommunications Act of 1996

Finally, the Japanese economy followed the U.S. downturn, thereby threatening the heart of the 1980s economic boom. Together, these three pinpricks burst Hawai‘i’s economic bubble. As if to add insult to injury, Mother Nature contributed to Hawai‘i’s woes as Hurricane Iniki flattened a large part of Kaua‘i’s economy. Such shocks reflect the downside of open economies that, like Hawai‘i’s, provide high standards of living. It may be impossible to reduce these risks through diversification because they are systemwide. Even so, as argued in later chapters, the pace of recovery from such shocks can be increased through economic policies that preserve openness to new ideas and capital and that allow businesses both to succeed and fail.

Conclusion Open economic engagement with the outside world carries risks as well as rewards. This chapter has discussed three events that shocked Hawai‘i’s economy in the early 1990s and marked the beginning of what would turn out to be a long period of little or no growth. Such risks are always a possibility for open economies. Whether and how fast an economy recovers depends on the economic structure prior to the shocks and the willingness to respond in appropriate ways. As we will see in the next chapter, Hawai‘i went through a period of blame and denial in the early 1990s. It was also a period of crisis, soul-searching, and reform.

Hawai‘i’s economic fortunes may lie outside its control, but political incumbents no doubt find this little comfort. Voters want to hold someone accountable, and the person who runs for executive office effectively offers to make himself or herself a scapegoat. It hardly mattered that Hawai‘i has a very open economy—that is, sensitive to outside economic influences. It hardly mattered that, as a result, an incumbent can do relatively little to affect the state’s economic fortunes for the good—though an incumbent may do much that can devastate the economy. What presumably mattered was that many people were not better off in 1998 than in 1994.


pages: 322 words: 87,181

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

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

The International Monetary Fund, among others, has recently warned that slow growth and populism might lead to an outbreak of protectionism. “It is vitally important to defend the prospects for increasing trade integration,’’ according to the IMF’s chief economist, Maurice Obstfeld.13 So far, however, there are few signs that governments are moving decidedly away from an open economy. President Trump may yet cause trade havoc, but his bark has proved worse than his bite. The website globaltradealert.org maintains a database of protectionist measures and is a frequent source for claims of creeping protectionism. Click on its interactive map of protectionist measures, and you will see an explosion of fireworks—red circles all over the globe.

What is true of finance is true also of other fields within economics. Labor economists focus not only on how trade unions can distort markets but also how, under certain conditions, they can enhance productivity. Trade economists study how globalization can reduce or increase, as the case may be, inequality within and across countries. Open-economy macroeconomists examine conditions under which global finance stabilizes or destabilizes national economies. Development economists study conditions under which foreign aid does and does not reduce poverty. Training in economics requires learning not only about how markets work but also about market failures and the myriad ways in which governments can help markets work better.

Even in Britain, where the reassertion of national autonomy has gone farthest, open trade policies are not controversial. In fact, pro-Brexit groups often buttressed their position by arguing the country would be in a position to adopt freer trade policies outside the EU. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that the welfare state and the open economy have been flip sides of the same coin during much of the twentieth century. Compared to most European countries, the United States was a latecomer to globalization. Its large domestic market and relative geographical insulation provided considerable protection from imports until recently, especially from low-wage countries.


pages: 524 words: 143,993

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

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

If the financial and monetary authorities managed to sustain the pegged exchange rate, despite the depression, adjustment would then occur via falling nominal wages and prices (what the Eurozone calls ‘internal devaluation’), emigration and a write-down of the bad debt of insolvent banks, non-financial companies, households and possibly even the government. In time, with competitiveness restored and debt restructured, the economy would recover. This used to happen in the nineteenth century. It has happened, more recently, in small open economies, such as Hong Kong after the Asian financial crisis and the Baltic states after the crises that began in in 2007. This is, in effect, the old gold-standard mechanism. If, however, the authorities let the peg go, the adjustment would be accompanied by a depreciation of the nominal exchange rate.

As professors O’Rourke and Taylor remark, based on interwar experience, ‘large public debts are difficult or impossible to stabilize when deflation is increasing the real value of the debt and slowing economic growth’.10 The Baltic Example11 At this stage, some bright spark, seeking to counsel the desperate, will point to tiny Latvia, deemed a great success of the ‘internal devaluation’ and ‘austerity’ strategy. But this is largely an illusion. What is possible for tiny open economies, without their own banking systems (and so no need to bail out the banks) and next to no government debt before the crisis, is impossible for others. All three small Baltic states – Estonia (population 1.3 million), Latvia (population 2 million) and Lithuania (population 3 million) – enjoyed credit-driven booms prior to the financial crisis.

First, according to Eurostat, Latvian labour costs per hour, in 2012, were a quarter of those of the Eurozone as whole, 30 per cent of those in Spain and 50 per cent of those of Portugal. Given the potential for further rapid rises in productivity and its integration into the Scandinavian economic system, Latvia did not need a big real depreciation to become competitive. Second, these are very small open economies. The more open the economy the larger is the portion of output not dependent on recession-hit domestic spending. This makes external adjustment a more potent alternative to domestic stimulus than in larger economies. Between 2007 and 2012, Latvia’s current-account deficit shrank by 21 per cent of GDP.


pages: 270 words: 73,485

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

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

Finance was discussed only in relation to public finance and government bonds. The private equity and bond markets and the commercial credit created by banks were ignored. Walrasian economics visualized barter as the principal way of allocation, and money played just an epiphenomenal part in general equilibrium. The reality, however, was one of open economies, multiple currencies, international trade and finance, and forex markets. There was no theory to cope with these new facts. Neither Keynesian theory nor monetarism looked beyond the closed economy. Stagflation and the Return of Unorthodox Economics Economics aims to be a science. Yet political events constantly change its agenda.

But more important, the Central Bank of Thailand did not have the dollar reserves to be able to convert baht investments into dollars for the sellers. The baht went off the peg and crashed on the forex market. The contagion of this shock spread to otherwise healthy economies such as Malaysia, South Korea and Indonesia. They were open economies relying on exports and receiving large capital inflows. They had been hailed just a decade previously as Asian Tigers. Now they were caught in a global storm. They had insufficient reserves to facilitate withdrawals of large amounts of foreign capital. There was drastic depreciation in the currencies of all the major Asian countries that had opened up their capital markets.

The cumulative burden of deficits incurred in good times added to those required in bad times means that the debt burden is rising, not falling. More borrowing would need to be shown to be a cure rather than a worsening of the problem. In a closed economy, as Keynes argued, any increase in the savings rate may lead to a drop in income. But in an open economy within a global capital market, repayment of debts may attract capital from abroad as the credit rating of the country improves. The recession was caused by overspending by governments and households thanks to cheap credit fueled by the global imbalances. It is the sort of recession predicted by Hayek in his work during the 1930s.


pages: 233 words: 75,712

In Defense of Global Capitalism by Johan Norberg

anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, capital controls, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Glaeser, export processing zone, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Naomi Klein, new economy, open economy, prediction markets, profit motive, race to the bottom, rising living standards, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, zero-sum game

Of course, any such estimate has to be taken with a grain of salt, but even with a generous margin of error, the figure remains shockingly high compared with Africa’s actual growth during the years in question—a mere 0.8 percent per year.29 If we examine the track record of the African countries that have opted for free trade and more open economies, it seems entirely plausible that a liberal policy could have been so successful. The cattle farmers of Botswana were quick to realize that it was in their interest to campaign for more open markets, and that meant that large parts of the economy were already exposed to competition by the end of the 1970s.

Open industrialized countries had an annual growth of 2.29 percent, while closed ones experienced only 0.74 percent growth. It must be emphasized that this is not a matter of how much countries earn because others are open to their exports, but of how much they earn by keeping their own markets open. The results show that the open economies had a faster growth rate than the closed ones every year between 1970 and 1989. No free trade country in the study had an average growth rate of less than 1.2 percent annually, and no open developing country had a growth rate of less than 2.3 percent! In all regions, free trade policies led to an acceleration of growth after a short time, even in Africa.

Instead of a shield behind which industry could grow strong, the tariff walls became a shield from competition that made them less efficient and innovative. The developing countries that have switched fastest from exporting raw materials to exporting upgraded products are those that have themselves had the most open economies, above all the Asian countries. Sachs and Warner’s major survey of the effects of trade shows that protectionist countries have transformed their economic structure very slowly, whereas free trade countries have moved more in the direction of industrial production.12 This is directly contrary to what the advocates of the dependency theory contended.


pages: 505 words: 138,917

Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

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

The closer people live to markets, and so the more they trade, the greater their willingness to cooperate with strangers (though perhaps not to engage in small talk on the metro). And when researchers unconsciously remind subjects of markets, those subjects become more trusting and invest more money with strangers. There is a strong connection between the biggest cities where much of trade happens and the inhabitants’ open attitudes to globalization and foreigners. Open economies stimulate open-mindedness. Regular exchange seems to accustom us to the idea that interaction with others is mutually beneficial, and prompts us to show some consideration for others’ interests. Those who are not used to it treat such encounters as something threatening or just an opportunity to pursue maximum short-term gain.

If we did not regularly meet and communicate and exchange with individuals from other groups, they would forever remain the mysterious, dangerous outgroup, the barbarians at the gates. The ones whom we raid whenever we think we have an advantage, and who raid us when they think they do. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker has documented how much more frequent war was in our past before we opened economies, doors and minds to outsiders. Tribes raided and killed neighbouring tribes every time they thought they had a major advantage because of numbers or surprise, because why not? One less rival. Kings and princes genuinely believed war was the natural order of things, and peace was just a brief interlude during which one rearmed for the next battle.48 In a closed world we look at others through binoculars.

If the rich get richer, it’s because they take it from us. With more immigrants, there are fewer resources left for the natives. If robots become smarter, there will be no jobs left for us. If trading partners like China and Mexico gain, it must be at our expense. Why are we so bad at understanding that voluntary relations and an open economy are non-zero? Once again, we have to turn to our past to understand why our problematic reasoning instincts actually make sense. If a spaceship from an alien civilization had decided to drop in on Homo sapiens every 10,000 years to see when we were sufficiently advanced that it might be worth making first contact, they would have had to be very, very patient.


pages: 230 words: 62,294

The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry From Crop to the Last Drop by Gregory Dicum, Nina Luttinger

biodiversity loss, California gold rush, carbon credits, clean water, corporate social responsibility, cuban missile crisis, do well by doing good, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, European colonialism, gentrification, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, land reform, land tenure, open economy, price stability, Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place

McLean (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, 1997), 95. 6 Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, Why Migratory Birds Are Crazy for Coffee (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, 1997). 7 Andrés C. Uribe, Brown Gold: The Amazing Story of Coffee (New York: Random House, 1954), 92–94. CHAPTER 3: THE RISE OF THE INTERNATIONAL COFFEE TRADE 1 Stavitsky, as quoted in Robert H. Bates, Open-Economy Politics: The Political Economy of the World Coffee Trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 126. 2 Congressional Record, May 20, 1963, 8552. 3 North London Haslemere Group, Coffee: The Rules of Neocolonialism (London: Third World First, 1972), 5. 4 Pan-American Coffee Bureau, U.S. and the International Coffee Agreement, 1964. 5 Joseph Short, American Business and Foreign Policy: Cases in Coffee and Cocoa Trade Regulation 1961–1974 (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1987), 151–52. 6 Interviewed by Joseph Short, as quoted in ibid., 153–54. 7 Bates, Open-Economy Politics, 153. 8 Begun as a consortium of smaller roasters to compete with the instant coffees of the conglomerates, Tenco was bought by Minute Maid, which was in turn acquired by Coca-Cola in 1960. 9 Charles Meono, ed., Coffee & Tea Industries, February 1962, 28. 10 International Coffee Agreement, 1968. 11 North London Haslemere Group, Coffee, 16. 12 Another standout was OPEC, which is more like the earlier coffee agreements in that consumers do not participate.

Bates, Open-Economy Politics: The Political Economy of the World Coffee Trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 126. 2 Congressional Record, May 20, 1963, 8552. 3 North London Haslemere Group, Coffee: The Rules of Neocolonialism (London: Third World First, 1972), 5. 4 Pan-American Coffee Bureau, U.S. and the International Coffee Agreement, 1964. 5 Joseph Short, American Business and Foreign Policy: Cases in Coffee and Cocoa Trade Regulation 1961–1974 (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1987), 151–52. 6 Interviewed by Joseph Short, as quoted in ibid., 153–54. 7 Bates, Open-Economy Politics, 153. 8 Begun as a consortium of smaller roasters to compete with the instant coffees of the conglomerates, Tenco was bought by Minute Maid, which was in turn acquired by Coca-Cola in 1960. 9 Charles Meono, ed., Coffee & Tea Industries, February 1962, 28. 10 International Coffee Agreement, 1968. 11 North London Haslemere Group, Coffee, 16. 12 Another standout was OPEC, which is more like the earlier coffee agreements in that consumers do not participate.

New York: American Grocer Publishing Association, 1884. Uribe, Andrés C. Brown Gold: The Amazing Story of Coffee. New York: Random House, 1954. Wallengren, Maja. “Costa Rica’s Coffee Heading for Change.” Tea & Coffee Trade Journal 170, no. 2 (February 1998): 45–46. CHAPTER 3: THE RISE OF THE INTERNATIONAL COFFEE TRADE Bates, Robert H. Open-Economy Politics: The Political Economy of the World Coffee Trade. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. de Graaf, J. The Economics of Coffee. Wageningen, Netherlands: Center for Agricultural Publishing and Documentation (Pudoc), 1986. Food and Agriculture Organization. Commodity Review and Outlook / FAOSTAT Database.


pages: 497 words: 150,205

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

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

He bolstered his theoretical arguments by pointing to evidence from several European countries documented in a paper he co-wrote.197 So influential was Alesina’s presentation that it was quoted in EU finance ministers’ conclusions. Alesina’s methodology and findings were quickly debunked by an IMF paper in September 2010.198 Yet even at the time the argument was preposterous. It is one thing to show that a few small, open economies that cut government borrowing by spending less recorded positive growth – when interest rates also fell, the currency depreciated and their export markets were buoyant. It is quite another to posit that if the entire eurozone slashes government spending at a time when the private sector is trying to pay down debt, banks won’t lend and its main trading partners, notably Britain and the US, are in a similar situation, the economy will grow.

Austerity has also destabilised Italy’s public finances, plunging the economy into a recession from which it had not escaped by the end of 2013, as the footnotes detail.226 What about Latvia, which is often held up as a model of successful austerity for the rest of the eurozone? It may be feasible for a tiny open economy to turn itself around in 2009–10 by slashing government spending and raising taxes because it could fill the gap through higher exports to its much larger trading partners whose economies happened to be buoyant at the time.227 But such a strategy can scarcely succeed for a continent-sized economy, especially when demand is weak in most of its major trading partners.

They were fortunate financially because even though governments provided an Irish-style guarantee to all bank depositors and creditors, banks’ losses did not turn out large enough to sink the state. They were also lucky economically, because they had their crises out of synch with everyone else: as small open economies they were able to count on exports to revive growth. Sometimes it helps to fail first. But while each country dealt with its banks differently, they all did one big thing right. They didn’t allow bad loans to fester and turn distressed banks into zombies – the terrible mistake that Japan, Britain and the eurozone have all made.


Battling Eight Giants: Basic Income Now by Guy Standing

basic income, Bernie Sanders, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, decarbonisation, degrowth, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Extinction Rebellion, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, labour market flexibility, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, open economy, pension reform, precariat, quantitative easing, rent control, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, universal basic income, Y Combinator

Serious advocates of moving in the direction of a basic income do not see it as a panacea.1 It will not ‘abolish poverty’ or ‘abolish Battling Eight Giants 84 unemployment’. It will not provide perfect freedom or perfect basic security. But it will enhance freedom and strengthen security. It must be seen as part of a new income distribution system suited to a globalizing open economy, and as part of a transformative policy package, along with new forms of collective representation and ownership. The socially and economically vulnerable will always remain that way in the absence of collective Voice. A basic income should help in strengthening such Voice, or agency. But nobody should think it could do that optimally without measures to build and strengthen modern forms of unionism.

See also individual entries definition 1, 4–8 reasons for need 8–9 security 98, 113, 114 system 1, 20, 23, 26, 32, 37, 52, 70, 84, 90–1, 122 n.7 Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) 94 behavioural conditionality 70, 73, 77, 114 behaviour-testing 4, 39, 70, 84 benefits 5, 7, 27 conditional schemes 41 social assistance 23 BET365 11 Beveridge, William 8–9, 38 Beveridge model 21 Big Bang liberalization 18 BJP 92 black economy 40, 60 B-Mincome 99–100 Booker, Cory 101 brain development 98–9 132 Branson, Richard 54 Brexit 53 Britain 6, 8–10, 12–18, 20, 23–4, 26–7, 30–1, 33–4, 37–8, 40–2, 55, 57, 59, 90, 101, 104, 112 British Columbia 95 British Constitution 1 Buck, Karen 57 bureaucracy 40, 49, 100, 102 Bureau of Economic Analysis 16 Business Property Relief 58 California 69, 96–7 Canada 35 capacity-to-work tests 6, 104 cap-and-trade approach 34 Capita 50 capital dividend 59 capital fund 89–90 capital grants 59, 75, 76, 92 carbon dividends 37 carbon emissions 33–4 carbon tax 34–5, 37 care deficit 53 care work 36, 53, 67, 74, 84 cash payments 111 cash transfers 99 ‘casino dividend’ schemes 88 charities 48 The Charter of the Forest (1217) 1 Chicago 99 Child Benefit 57, 58, 72, 123 n.4 childcare 99, 110–11 child development 88 Child Tax Credits 81 chronic psychological stress 26 Citizens Advice 46–8 Citizen’s Basic Income Trust 7, 122 n.7, 123 n.4 citizenship rights 1, 29 civil society organizations 79 Index climate change 34 Clinton, Hillary 126 n.4 Clinton, Bill 105 Coalition government 41, 50 cognitive performance 33 collateral damage 53 common dividends 7, 20, 21, 59–60, 69, 73, 75, 83, 84, 85 Commons Fund 8, 35, 57, 59, 89 community cohesion 3 resilience 23 work 84 ‘community payback’ schemes 102 Compass 59 compensation 2, 7, 16, 104 ‘concealed debt’ 24–5 conditional cash transfer schemes 90 Conservative government 9, 85 Conservatives 23 consumer credit 24 consumption 23 contractual obligations 46 Coote, Anna 113 cost of living 25, 49, 52, 83 council house sales 76 council tax 25 Crocker, Geoff 122 n.15 cross-party plans 80 crowd-funded schemes 100 deadweight effects 102 ‘deaths of despair’ 27 Deaton, Angus 10 debt 23–6, 67, 85 debt collection practices 24–5 decarbonization 34 dementia 33 democratic values 69 Democrats 37 demographic changes 15 Index 133 Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) 11–12, 42–8, 50–2, 73, 81, 92, 129 n.6 depression 28, 94 direct taxes 56, 58 disability benefits 6, 49–52, 83 Disability Living Allowance (DLA) 49–51 Disabled People Against Cuts 52 Dividend Allowance 58 ‘dividend capitalism’ 8 domestic violence 29, 87 Dragonfly 92 due process 46, 49 ecological crisis 33, 37, 39, 114 ecological developments 21 ecological disaster 35 ecological taxes and levies 37 economy benefits 20, 60 crisis 106 damage 34 growth 20, 36, 106 industrialized 20 insecurity 21, 35, 39, 89 security 75, 80, 84, 88 system 15, 27, 38 tax-paying 60 uncertainty 8, 22–3, 31 ‘eco-socialism’ 8 ecosystems 33 Edinburgh 80 education 88, 108 Elliott, Larry 122 n.15 employment 16, 22, 39, 60–1, 81, 89, 93–4, 102, 106, 107, 110, 114 Employment Support Allowance (ESA) 27, 41, 49–51 England 28, 63, 110–11 Enlightenment 85 Entrepreneurs’ Relief 18 equality 31, 85 Europe 37 European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound) 120 n.1 European Heart Journal 33 European Union 6, 17, 41 euthanasia 113 extinction 33–7 ‘Extinction Rebellion’ 33 Fabian Society 57–8 Facebook 97 family allowances 56 family benefits 56 family insecurity 23 federal welfare programs 106 Fife 24, 80 financial crash (2007–8) 23, 26, 34 financialization 116 n.22 financial markets 18 Financial Services Authority 123 n.15 Financial Times 19, 123 n.15 financial wealth 18 Finland 28, 61, 93–5 food banks 10, 29–30, 43, 109 food donations 29 food insecurity 108–9 fossil fuels 33–4 France 12, 17, 18, 32, 38, 57 free bus services 112 freedom 8, 30, 84, 85, 101, 114 ‘free food’ 108–9, 129 n.6 ‘free’ labour market 106 free trade 13 Friends Provident Foundation 75 fuel tax 35 fund and dividend model 89 funding 29, 59, 62, 69, 71–2, 112 134 G20 (Group of 20 large economies) 15 Gaffney, Declan 57 Gallup 105 GDP 14, 17–18, 23–4, 34, 36, 59, 89, 108 General Election 91–2, 94 ‘genuine progress indicator’ 36 Germany 17–18, 38, 100 Gillibrand, Kirsten 101 Gini coefficient 9, 12 GiveDirectly 91 Glasgow City 80 globalization 14 Global Wage Report 2016/17 14 global warming 33, 37 Good Society 75, 106 The Great British Benefits Handout (TV series) 92 Great Depression 9 Great Recession 23 greenhouse gas emissions 34, 36 gross cost 110 The Guardian 101, 103, 122–3 n.15 Hansard Society 37 Harris, Kamala 101 Harrop, Andrew 57 Hartz IV 100 HartzPlus 100 health 67, 87, 100 human 33 insurance premiums 35 services 60 healthcare costs 28 hegemony 14 help-to-buy loan scheme 76 Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) 64, 73, 81 Hirschmann, Albert 56 household debt 24 Index household earnings 16 household survey 12 House of Commons 110–11 housing allowance 95 Housing Benefit 24, 41, 53, 71 housing policy 53 hub-and-spoke model 112 Hughes, Chris 97 humanity 33 human relations 3 ‘immoral’ hazard 109 ‘impact’ effects 78 incentive 62 income 81 assistance 88 average 83 components 11 distribution system 4, 13–14, 38, 67, 84, 107, 114 gap 9 growth 16 insecurity 27 men vs. women 15–16 national 14, 36 pensioners’ 16 rental 13–15, 20 social 14, 16–17 support payments 110 tax 1, 7, 57, 89, 111 transfer 85 volatility 22 India 68, 80, 90–2 Indian Congress Party 91 inequality 2, 4, 9–13, 21, 29, 31, 33, 35, 37, 38, 39, 54, 80, 85, 114 growth 17 income 9–10, 15–17, 19 living standard 20 wealth 18–19, 76 informal care 111 Index 135 inheritance tax 58 in-kind services 111 insecurity 21–3, 29, 38, 39, 47, 67, 85, 106 Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) 10 Institute for Public Policy Research 125 n.17 Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) 75, 111 Institute of New Economic Thinking 123 n.15 Institute of Public Policy Research 59 insurance schemes 8 intellectual property 14–15 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 34 International Labour Organization (ILO) 14, 122 n.4 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 31, 34 international tax evasion 18 interpersonal income inequality 83 inter-regional income inequalities 83 intra-family relationships 3 involuntary debt 26 in-work benefits 22 Ireland 35 Italy 18 labour 31, 107 inefficiency 106 law 101 markets 8, 14, 32, 39, 40, 60, 62–3, 96, 100, 106 regulations 13 supply 67, 95 Labour governments 85 labourism 106 Lansley, Stewart 59 Latin America 90 Left Alliance 94 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 113 Liberal government 35 life-changing errors 51 life-threatening illness 33 Liverpool 80 living standards 20, 23, 33, 36, 53, 59, 92 Local Housing Allowances 24 London Homelessness Project 92–3 low-income communities 33 low-income families 21 low-income households 17 low-income individuals 86 Low Pay Commission 63 low-wage jobs 60, 107 Luddite reaction 32 lump-sum payments 35, 59, 76 Jackson, Mississippi 99 JobCentrePlus 47 job guarantee policy 101–7 job-matching programs 106 Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) 41, 46 Joseph Rowntree Foundation 21 McDonnell, John 129 n.13 McKinsey Global Institute 31 Macron, Emmanuel 35 Magna Carta 1 ‘Making Ends Meet’ 97 ‘mandatory reconsideration’ stage 51 Manitoba 87–8 Manitoba Basic Annual Income Experiment (Mincome) 87 market economy 105, 114 master-servant model 101 Kaletsky, Anatole 123 n.15 Kenya 90–2 Khanna, Ro 103 Kibasi, Tom 113 136 Index Maximus 50 means-testing 4, 39, 42, 48, 58, 61–2, 70, 84, 88, 90, 109–10, 114 benefits 5, 7, 27, 40, 46, 56, 71–3, 81, 129 n.6 social assistance 23, 41, 95, 122 n.7 system 6 medical services 28 Mein Grundeinkommen (‘My Basic Income’) 100 mental health 26, 28, 94 disorders 88 trusts 28 mental illness 33, 68 migrants 7, 113 ‘minimum income floor’ 45 Ministry of Justice 51 modern insecurity 22 modern life 31 monetary policy 59 Mont Pelerin Society 13 moral commitment 75 moral hazard 109 mortality 27, 76 multinational investment funds 34 Musk, Elon 31, 54 Namibia 90–2 National Audit Office (NAO) 24, 43–4, 46, 76 National Health Service (NHS) 8, 24, 27–8, 44, 68, 80, 108, 111 National Insurance 18, 22, 124 n.4 nationalism 37 National Living Wage 63 National Minimum Wage 63–4 national solidarity 3 Native American community 88 negative income tax (NIT) 23, 87, 95, 100 neo-fascism 37–8 neoliberalism 13, 84 Netherlands 96 New Economics Foundation (NEF) 57, 113, 122 n.15 non-resident citizens 113 non-wage benefits 16 non-wage work 74 North America 67 North Ayrshire 80 North Carolina 88 North Sea oil 89–90 Nyman, Rickard 23 Oakland 96–7 Office for National Statistics (ONS) 14–15, 17, 36 Ontario, Canada 95–6 open economy 84 open ‘free’ markets 13, 15 opportunity dividend 59 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 18, 23, 27, 31 Ormerod, Paul 23 Osborne, George 19 Paine, Thomas 2, 75 Painian Principle 2 panopticon state 55 Paris Agreement (2015) 34 participation income 74–5 paternalism 42, 55 pauperization 63 Pawar, Alderman Ameya 99 pay contributions 21 pension contributions 18, 58 Pension Credit 41 Pericles Condition 75 permanent capital fund 71 personal care services 110–11 Index 137 personal income tax 35 Personal Independence Payment (PIP) 49–51 personal insecurity 23 Personal Savings Allowance 58 personal tax allowances 17, 58, 59 perverse incentives 50 physical health 26, 94 piloting in Britain 67–81 applying 80–1 rules in designing 70–80 policy development 3, 69 political decision 78 political discourse 92 political instability 35 political system 38 populism 37–8, 75 populist parties 37 populist politics 39 Populus survey 55 post-war system 8 poverty 2, 4, 10–12, 22, 27, 29, 36, 38, 40, 60–1, 89, 100, 108–9, 114, 125 n.17, 129 n.6 precarity 29–30, 38, 39, 60–1, 85, 103, 129 n.6 Primary Earnings Threshold 124 n.4 private debt 23–4, 39 private inheritance 2 private insurance 85 private property rights 13 private wealth 18 privatization 13, 17, 112 property prices 76 prostitution 43 Public Accounts Committee (PAC) 51 public costs 28 public debt 23 public inheritance 61 public libraries 47 public policy 97 public sector managers 103 public services 4, 17, 62, 108, 112, 114 public spending 89 public wealth 18 ‘quantitative easing’ policy 59 quasi-basic income 89, 98 quasi-universal basic services 30 quasi-universal dividends 35 quasi-universal system 61, 70, 90 Randomised Control Trial (RCT) 124–5 n.14 rape 44 Ratcliffe, Jim 12 Reagan, Ronald 13 Reed, Howard 59 refugees 7 regressive universalism 57 regular cash payment 7 rent arrears 24 controls 53 rentier capitalism 13–21, 107, 116 n.22 republican freedom 2–3, 30, 84 Republicans 37 Resolution Foundation 10, 15, 19, 25, 76 ‘revenue neutral’ constraint 7 right-wing populism 37–8 robot advance 31–3 Royal College of Physicians 33 Royal Society of Arts 55, 59, 124 n.12 RSA Scotland 125 n.17 Rudd, Amber 9 Russia 113 138 Sanders, Bernie 101 scepticism 31 schooling 67, 89 Scotland 69, 80, 111 Second World War 19, 21 security 8, 38, 55, 68, 84 economic 3, 4, 49, 56 income 73–4 social 8, 22, 49 Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) 68 self-employment 45 Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer 3, 115 n.3 Smith, Iain Duncan 42 ‘snake oil’ 113 social assistance 3, 28 social benefit 20 social care 102, 104, 110–11 social crisis 106 social dividend scheme 92 Social Fund 29 social inheritance 2 social insecurity 21 social insurance 22, 85 social integration 44 social justice 2, 8, 20, 69, 84, 101, 114 social policy 8, 23, 26, 30, 42, 53, 84–5, 96 social protection system 32 social relation 100 social security 10, 70–1, 95 social solidarity 3, 8, 39, 61, 84–5, 91 social spending 17 social status 104 social strife 35 social value 29 ‘something-for-nothing’ economy 19–20, 61 Index Speenhamland system 63 State of the Global Workplace surveys 105 statutory minimum wages 106 stigma 47, 55 stigmatization 41, 109 Stockton 97–9 Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED) 97 stress 26–9, 39, 51, 67, 68, 85, 93 student loans 24 substitution effects 102–3 suicides 26–7 Summers, Larry 105–6 Sweden 113 Swiss bank Credit Suisse 12 Switzerland 35 tax advantages 49 and benefit systems 17, 18, 69, 110 credits 3, 17, 24, 63, 105, 106 policies 16 rates 72 reliefs 17–18, 57–8, 61 tax-free inheritance 19 technological change 105 technological revolution 14, 31, 114 ‘teething problems’ 42 Thatcher, Margaret 13 Thatcher government 9, 18 The Times 92 Torry, Malcolm 122 n.7 Trades Union Congress 24 tribal casino schemes 76 ‘triple-lock’ policy 16 Trump, Donald 37 Trussell Trust 29, 43 Tubbs, Michael 97–8 Index 139 Turner, Adair 123 n.15 two-child limit 44 UK.


pages: 353 words: 81,436

Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism by Wolfgang Streeck

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, basic income, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, currency risk, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, profit maximization, risk tolerance, shareholder value, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck

‘Monetary Union, Fiscal Crisis and the Pre-Emption of Democracy’, Zeitschrift für Staats- und Europawissenschaaften, vol. 9/2, 2011, pp. 163–98. ———. ‘Rettet Europa vor dem Euro’, Berliner Republik, vol. 14/2, 2012, pp. 52–61. ———. and Vivien A. Schmidt (eds), Welfare and Work in the Open Economy, Vol. 1, From Vulnerability to Competitiveness, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. ———. and Vivien A. Schmidt (eds), Welfare and Work in the Open Economy, Vol. 2, Diverse Responses to Common Challenges, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Schlieben, Michael, ‘Die wählen sowieso nicht’, Zeit online, 13 May 2012. Schmitter, Philippe C. and Gerhard Lehmbruch (eds), Trends Towards Corporatist Intermediation, London: Sage, 1979. ———. and Wolfgang Streeck, The Organization of Business Interests: Studying the Associative Action of Business in Advanced Industrial Societies, MPIfG Discussion Paper No. 99/1, Cologne: MaxPlanck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung, 1999.

Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Boston: Beacon Press, p. 251). 51 For a selection from the abundant literature on the subject, see H. Katz and O. Darbishire, Converging Divergences: Worldwide Changes in Employment Systems, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. 52 For a survey of the evolution of the welfare state since the 1980s, see F. Scharpf and V. Schmidt (eds), Welfare and Work in the Open Economy, vol. 1, From Vulnerability to Competitiveness, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000; F. Scharpf and V. Schmidt, Welfare and Work, vol. 1, Diverse Responses to Common Challenges, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000; as well as the editors’ introduction to Francis G. Castles et al. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 1–15, and the articles in the same volume by M.


pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

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

It was a classical liberal manifesto about why global justice takes more capitalism, not less. Timing is everything and the book became an international bestseller, translated into more than twenty-five languages, including Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Chinese and Mongolian. And eventually, the globalization debate began to change. Supporters of open economies started fighting back. The critics were often driven by sincere anger about global poverty and injustice. We free traders could start from this common ground and show – with realistic explanations and clear statistics – that we needed freer markets to fight poverty and hunger. The more we discussed, the more it felt as if the opponents realized that it was not as simple as they had assumed, and parts of the audience began to change their mind.

Maria Manner & Paavo Teittinen, ‘HS: n haltuun saamat Huoltovarmuuskeskuksen luvut paljastavat, miten vähän Suomen valtiolla oli kasvosuojaimia koronakriisin iskiessä päälle’, Helsingin Sanomat, 10 April 2020. 29. Johan Norberg, ‘Covid-19 and the danger of self-sufficiency: How Europe’s pandemic resilience is open economy’, ECIPE Policy Brief, no.2, 2021. 30. ‘EU should “not aim for self-sufficiency” after coronavirus, trade chief says’, Financial Times, 23 April 2020. Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, ‘Manufacturers warn US must do more to maintain fragile PPE production’, Financial Times, 13 April 2021. 31. Henry David Thoreau, On Civil Disobedience and Other Essays, Dover Publications, 2021, p.2. 3.

‘Airfreight transport of fresh fruits and vegetables: A review of the environmental impact and policy options’, International Trade Center, 2007. Martina Alig & Rolf Frischknecht, ‘Life cycle assessment cut roses’, Treeze, July 2018. 32. Hannah Ritchie & Max Roser, ‘Air pollution’, Our World in Data, January 2021. 33. Wendling et al 2020, p.47. See also Amaryllis Mavragani, Ioannis Nikolaou & Konstantinos Tsagarakis ‘Open economy, institutional quality, and environmental performance: A macroeconomic approach’, Sustainability, vol.8, 2016. 34. IEA, Energy Efficiency Indicators Statistics report, December 2020. 35. Max Roser, ‘Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?’, Our World in Data, 1 December 2020. 36. John Burn-Murdoch, ‘Economics may take us to net zero all on its own’, Financial Times, 23 September 2022. 37.


pages: 756 words: 120,818

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization by Michael O’sullivan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, classic study, cloud computing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, credit crunch, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, knowledge economy, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, performance metric, Phillips curve, private military company, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tulip mania, Valery Gerasimov, Washington Consensus

Indeed, in late 2018 the OECD reported that the level of trade between G20 nations had dipped sharply.6 Another way to consider the pace of globalization is to look at the aggregate activity in the world’s most open, globalized economies. If we add together the GDP for the likes of Ireland, Switzerland, Belgium, Singapore, and the Netherlands—small, open economies that in many respects are the canaries in the coal mine of the world economy, in the sense that they are the first to pick up a new trend—we see that their trend growth is slowing and is below the average level of growth enjoyed over the past twenty years. Trade Wilting There are several reasons why trade openness has diminished.

As she digests this, Katherine Chidley will begin to formulate a sense of how greatness, policy scorecards, and public goods intersect and will set about her aim of creating a workable plan for national development. This notion came to me while writing two previous books on Ireland. In 2006, before the onset of the collapse of Ireland’s economy, I wrote a book entitled Ireland and the Global Question. It dealt with Ireland’s position as a small, open economy that had benefited enormously from globalization and, at the time, from its membership in the eurozone. My aim was to outline how a country like Ireland might construct buffers against the negative effects of globalization, buffers such as strong institutions run by skilled people, decent public goods, and a sense of strategic thinking.

From the Quad to the Hanseatic League 2.0 to the SCO At the same time, this changing world has the potential to liberate other countries. One such group consists of small, advanced countries (i.e., Austria, Belgium, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland, Hong Kong, Norway, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Israel, and the Netherlands) with a number of distinctive features. Small, advanced economies also have very open economies and are effectively the canaries in the coal mine of the world economy in the sense that they pick up new developments, such as fluctuations in world trade, before these issues are experienced in larger economies. They also all tend to suffer the same problems. For example, in the wake of the quantitative easing programs of the Bank of Japan and the European Central Bank, the currencies of countries like Norway and New Zealand became more volatile.


pages: 310 words: 90,817

Paper Money Collapse: The Folly of Elastic Money and the Coming Monetary Breakdown by Detlev S. Schlichter

bank run, banks create money, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, currency peg, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, inflation targeting, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, open economy, Ponzi scheme, price discovery process, price mechanism, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, savings glut, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K

This must lead to economic dislocations and ultimately to recessions. A rising propensity to save is by itself insufficient to cause economic disruptions, but money injections must always lead to economic dislocations. The international aspect of the savings glut theory is equally insufficient to help explain a crisis. In an open economy it simply doesn’t matter whether the savings are raised locally or abroad. To take the obvious example, if the Chinese lowered their present consumption demand and thus freed up resources for investment and then decided that there were not enough promising investment opportunities in China, and that it was preferable to entrust these resources for some time to the Americans, this would result in capital flowing to the United States (or the control over physical resources shifting to U.S. persons and corporations), it would lower interest rates in the United States and thus lower the return threshold for potential investment projects there.

This is likely to receive the full backing of the fractional-reserve banks as it allows a further extension of the credit boom. One of the key constraining factors for money- and credit-expansion, for as long as money is still essentially a commodity, such as gold, is the potential outflow of that commodity. The money-induced economic boom will increase the demand for goods and services, and in an open economy this means also the demand for foreign goods and services. But the domestically created fiduciary media will not be accepted in foreign countries. Foreign suppliers of goods will have to be paid in gold. Increasing gold outflows will soon restrain the domestic banks’ ability to create fiduciary media.

While this, in itself, will not have to cause domestic monetary authorities to tighten policy, it will certainly be another factor that makes the inflationary consequences of the present policy visible to the public. It is clear that the hard-to-conceal decline of a currency’s foreign exchange value can be a further and important early warning signal, in particular for an open economy. Not unlike the competition between otherwise unconnected and independent fractional-reserve banks, which at the earlier stage of monetary history, before the introduction of central banks, constrained the banking sector’s ability to create money, can the independence of a number of territorial money monopolists potentially provide an at least tentative check on overly aggressive domestic money creation.


pages: 443 words: 98,113

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

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

The economic emergence of Japan and newly industrialising countries such as South Korea led to low-cost competition for manufacturing in the developed world that produced repeated balance of payments crises, most notably in the UK. The tripling of oil prices in 1973 by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) added to the inflationary pressure inherent to Keynesianism, which relied on stimulating aggregate demand to maintain ‘full’ [sic] employment. In an open economy system, Keynesianism in one country could not work, as was demonstrated by President François Mitterrand’s illfated attempt in 1981 to boost the French economy. It was the end of the road for that approach. The social democratic model – entailing modest redistribution via high marginal tax rates, labour-based social security, and government as the employer of last resort – had run its course.

‘Ultra-loose monetary policy’ has instead provided a subsidy to the finance industry to acquire and drive up asset prices, on its own account or as loans for others to do so.26 The IMF estimated that in 2012 the subsidy to banks from cheap money was worth up to $70 billion in the USA, $110 billion in the UK and Japan and $300 billion in the Eurozone. The total was bigger than Sweden’s GDP and more than the net profit of the 1,000 biggest banks. In an open economy system with capital flows in all directions and ample opportunities for rent seeking, any increase in the money supply will be directed to where it can earn the highest return. So money has poured into property and other assets that offer the prospect of higher returns or capital gains. This has pushed up prices and created destabilising asset bubbles.

Although there are other matters on which to revolt, here we will concentrate on what is required to achieve Keynes’s ‘euthanasia of the rentier’, in the context of an irretrievable breakdown in the twentieth-century income distribution system. Politicians should be more honest. If they believe in free markets and an open economy, as they claim, they should recognise that the Great Convergence traced in Chapter 1 will continue, that average real wages will continue to stagnate and that wages for the precariat in the industrialised world will continue to fall. Of course, efforts should be made to raise productivity and skills.


pages: 554 words: 158,687

Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All by Costas Lapavitsas

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, false flag, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, Flash crash, full employment, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, global village, High speed trading, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market bubble, means of production, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, open economy, pensions crisis, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Simon Kuznets, special drawing rights, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, union organizing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

, International Papers in Political Economy 4:3, 1997, pp. 1–52. 34 John B. Taylor, ‘Discretion Versus Policy Rules in Practice’, Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy 39:1, 1993; see also Dale Henderson and Warwick McKibbin, ‘A Comparison of Some Basic Monetary Policy Regimes for Open Economies’, Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy 39:1, 1993. 35 The empirical literature on the Taylor rule is extensive although, after the crisis of 2007, it has become hopelessly dated. For work broadly supporting the rule see Ben Bernanke et al., Inflation Targeting: Lessons from the International Experience, Princeton University Press, 1999; Manfred J.M.

Reserve accumulation is a practice foisted upon developing countries by the logic of international markets, not by some outdated doctrine. In any case, Aizenman and Lee find that the ‘precautionary’ motive dominates the ‘mercantilist’ motive in holding international reserves. See Joshua Aizenman and Jaewoo Lee, ‘International Reserves: Precautionary Versus Mercantilist Views: Hypothesis and Evidence’, Open Economies Review 18, 2007; Joshua Aizenman and Jaewoo Lee, ‘International Reserves: Precautionary Versus Mercantilist Views: Theory and Evidence’, IMF Working Paper WP/05/198, October 2005. 32 Juan Pablo Painceira, ‘Developing Countries in the Era of Financialisation: From Deficit Accumulation to Reserve Accumulation’, RMF Discussion Papers 4, February 2009. 33 Ibid. 34 Japan has also been providing a vast subsidy to the US on a similar basis and for far longer, but the relationship between the two mature countries has little bearing on subordinate financialization. 35 Even without counting the risk of capital losses, if the dollar were to depreciate significantly in the future. 36 Dani Rodrik, ‘The Social Cost of Foreign Exchange Reserves’, NBER Working Paper No. 11952, January 2006.

Aglietta, Michel, and Antoine Rebérioux, Dérives du capitalisme financier, Paris: Albin Michel, 2004. Aglietta, Michel, and Régis Breton, ‘Financial Systems, Corporate Control and Capital Accumulation’, Economy and Society 30:4, 2001, pp. 433–66. Aizenman, Joshua, and Jaewoo Lee, ‘International Reserves: Precautionary Versus Mercantilist Views: Hypothesis and Evidence’, Open Economies Review 18, 2007, pp. 191–214. Aizenman, Joshua, and Jaewoo Lee, ‘International Reserves: Precautionary Versus Mercantilist Views: Theory and Evidence’, IMF Working Paper WP/05/198, International Monetary Fund, October 2005. Aizenman, Joshua, and Kenta Inoue, ‘Central Banks and Gold Puzzles’, NBER Working Paper No. 17894, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2012.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

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

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

The economists Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast argue that the most natural way for states to function, both in history and in many parts of the world today, is for elites to agree not to plunder and kill each other, in exchange for which they are awarded a fief, franchise, charter, monopoly, turf, or patronage network that allows them to control some sector of the economy and live off the rents (in the economist’s sense of income extracted from exclusive access to a resource).11 In 18th-century England this cronyism gave way to open economies in which anyone could sell anything to anyone, and their transactions were protected by the rule of law, property rights, enforceable contracts, and institutions like banks, corporations, and government agencies that run by fiduciary duties rather than personal connections. Now an enterprising person could introduce a new kind of product to the market, or undersell other merchants if he could provide a product at lower cost, or accept money now for something he would not deliver until later, or invest in equipment or land that might not return a profit for years.

Market economies, in addition to reaping the benefits of specialization and providing incentives for people to produce things that other people want, solve the problem of coordinating the efforts of hundreds of millions of people by using prices to propagate information about need and availability far and wide, a computational problem that no planner is brilliant enough to solve from a central bureau.33 A shift from collectivization, centralized control, government monopolies, and suffocating permit bureaucracies (what in India was called “the license raj”) to open economies took place on a number of fronts beginning in the 1980s. They included Deng Xiaoping’s embrace of capitalism in China, the collapse of the Soviet Union and its domination of Eastern Europe, and the liberalization of the economies of India, Brazil, Vietnam, and other countries. Though intellectuals are apt to do a spit take when they read a defense of capitalism, its economic benefits are so obvious that they don’t need to be shown with numbers.

Yet the single best predictor of emancipative values is the World Bank’s Knowledge Index, which combines per capita measures of education (adult literacy and enrollment in high schools and colleges), information access (telephones, computers, and Internet users), scientific and technological productivity (researchers, patents, and journal articles), and institutional integrity (rule of law, regulatory quality, and open economies).44 Welzel found that the Knowledge Index accounts for seventy percent of the variation in emancipative values across countries, making it a far better predictor than GDP.45 The statistical result vindicates a key insight of the Enlightenment: knowledge and sound institutions lead to moral progress


pages: 226 words: 59,080

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

* I heard this joke on a BBC radio program when I was a college student, and it was told, characteristically, by an economist, E. F. Schumacher. Economists are their own harshest critics. † Jagdish Bhagwati has been a tireless advocate of free trade since the 1980s. In his early academic work, he showed that an open economy may lose something from growth, because of attendant changes in the world prices of its imports and exports. He also analyzed at length the presence of market distortions and the needed policy responses, showing that laissez-faire was suboptimal under a wide range of conditions. Jagdish Bhagwati, “Immiserizing Growth: A Geometrical Note,” Review of Economic Studies 25, no. 3 (June 1958): 201–5; Bhagwati and V.

Weinstein, “Bones, Bombs, and Break Points: The Geography of Economic Activity,” American Economic Review 92, no. 5 (2002): 1269–89. 17. David R. Cameron, “The Expansion of the Public Economy: A Comparative Analysis,” American Political Science Review 72, no. 4 (December 1978): 1243–61. 18. Dani Rodrik, “Why Do More Open Economies Have Bigger Governments?” Journal of Political Economy 106, no. 5 (October 1998): 997–1032. 19. Robert Sugden, “Credible Worlds, Capacities and Mechanisms” (unpublished paper, School of Economics, University of East Anglia, August 2008). CHAPTER 4: Models and Theories 1. Andrew Gelman, “Causality and Statistical Learning,” American Journal of Sociology 117 (2011): 955–66; Andrew Gelman and Guido Imbens, Why Ask Why?


pages: 453 words: 117,893

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

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

In the world’s most populous nation, with 1.3 billion people or one-fifth of humanity, the World Bank estimates that the country is on its way to ending extreme poverty, in which individuals live on less than $1.90 per day. China is unusual in that, while it is transitioning from a planned economy that has dismantled many of its state-owned enterprises and banks, it is simultaneously a developing country in which half the population still live in rural areas. China is also an ‘open economy’ integrated with world markets. China remains a communist state governed by the Chinese Communist Party. It’s therefore unsurprising that the rule of law and other market-supporting institutions, such as private property protection, are weak, as there is no independent judiciary. This gives rise to the so-called ‘China paradox’, because the country has grown strongly despite not having a well-developed set of institutions.

By the late 2000s China was contributing to the ‘global macroeconomic imbalances’, where the countries with significant trade surpluses (China, Asia and the Middle East oil exporters) saw their surpluses grow while the United States experienced larger trade deficits. The global imbalances and other aspects of the ‘China effect’ (or ‘China price’ whereby cheap Chinese labour has pushed down global prices for manufactured goods) point to the need to examine China as a large, open economy. In other words, it is similar to the United States in that what China does affects the world economy in a way that most countries do not. So openness has undoubtedly contributed to China’s economic growth but in a nuanced manner. The other part of technological progress needed for economic growth derives from domestic innovation, and not just reliance on foreign technology.

What would our Great Economists make of all of this? Would they say globalization is in trouble? Great Economists on the backlash against globalization For Adam Smith and David Ricardo, pursuing free trade would be at the top of their priorities. During the era of the classical economists, which included the repeal of the Corn Laws, being an open economy helped the UK punch above its weight in the world. They would undoubtedly urge countries to focus on the benefits of globalization. For Karl Marx, the election of Trump may be read as a populist revolt against the capitalists who have gained from globalization while the working classes have lost out.


pages: 374 words: 113,126

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

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

In the world’s most populous nation, with 1.3 billion people or one-fifth of humanity, the World Bank estimates that the country is on its way to ending extreme poverty, in which individuals live on less than $1.90 per day. China is unusual in that, while it is transitioning from a planned economy that has dismantled many of its state-owned enterprises and banks, it is simultaneously a developing country in which half the population still live in rural areas. China is also an ‘open economy’ integrated with world markets. China remains a communist state governed by the Chinese Communist Party. It’s therefore unsurprising that the rule of law and other market-supporting institutions, such as private property protection, are weak, as there is no independent judiciary. This gives rise to the so-called ‘China paradox’, because the country has grown strongly despite not having a well-developed set of institutions.

By the late 2000s China was contributing to the ‘global macroeconomic imbalances’, where the countries with significant trade surpluses (China, Asia and the Middle East oil exporters) saw their surpluses grow while the United States experienced larger trade deficits. The global imbalances and other aspects of the ‘China effect’ (or ‘China price’ whereby cheap Chinese labour has pushed down global prices for manufactured goods) point to the need to examine China as a large, open economy. In other words, it is similar to the United States in that what China does affects the world economy in a way that most countries do not. So openness has undoubtedly contributed to China’s economic growth but in a nuanced manner. The other part of technological progress needed for economic growth derives from domestic innovation, and not just reliance on foreign technology.

Would they say globalization is in trouble? Great Economists on the backlash against globalization For Adam Smith and David Ricardo, pursuing free trade would be at the top of their priorities. During the era of the classical economists, which included the repeal of the Corn Laws, being an open economy helped the UK punch above its weight in the world. They would undoubtedly urge countries to focus on the benefits of globalization. For Karl Marx, the election of Trump may be read as a populist revolt against the capitalists who have gained from globalization while the working classes have lost out.


pages: 386 words: 122,595

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated) by Charles Wheelan

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, libertarian paternalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Malacca Straits, managed futures, market bubble, microcredit, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, open economy, presumed consent, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

The preponderance of evidence suggests that open economies grow faster than closed economies. In one of the most influential studies, Jeffrey Sachs, now director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, and Andrew Warner, a researcher at the Harvard Center for International Development, compared the economic performance of closed economies, as defined by high tariffs and other restrictions on trade, to the performance of open economies. Among poor countries, the closed economies grew at 0.7 percent per capita annually during the 1970s and 1980s while the open economies grew at 4.5 percent annually. Most interesting, when a previously closed economy opened up, growth increased by more than a percentage point a year.


pages: 481 words: 120,693

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Bullingdon Club, business climate, call centre, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, double helix, energy security, estate planning, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, light touch regulation, linear programming, London Whale, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, open economy, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the long tail, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

The commenda was a powerful engine of both economic growth and social mobility—historians studying government documents from AD 960, 971, and 982 found that new names accounted for respectively 69 percent, 81 percent, and 65 percent of all the elite citizens cited. Venice’s elite were the chief beneficiaries of the rise of La Serenissima. But like all open economies, theirs was turbulent. We think of social mobility as an entirely good thing, but if you are already on top, mobility can also mean competition from outsider entrepreneurs. Even though this cycle of creative destruction had created the Venetian upper class, in 1315, when their city was at the height of its economic powers, they acted to lock in their privilege.

As the people at the very top become ever richer, they have an ever greater ability to tilt the rules of the game in their favor. That power can be hard to resist. One reason La Serrata is such a useful example is that the Venetian oligarchs who closed off their society were the products of a robust, open economy. They didn’t start out as oligarchs—they’d made themselves into oligarchs. That’s important because as soaring income inequality has become an undeniable political fact, even in societies, such as the United States, that have been squeamish about open discussions of class, a dominant response has been to try to sort the plutocrats into the white hats and the black hats.

“Though capitalism’s ‘creative destruction’ is highly beneficial for society, it precludes investment certainty. A moat that must be continuously rebuilt will eventually be no moat at all.” Like the Venetians who put themselves in the Book of Gold, Buffett understands that the creative destruction of an open economy is good for the country as a whole; but smart capitalists like him prefer to be defended by uncrossable moats. Buffett goes on to explain that his preferred moats are being a low-cost producer or possessing a well-known worldwide brand. But favorable government regulation can create a powerful moat, too.


The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 by John Darwin

anti-communist, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, cognitive bias, colonial rule, Corn Laws, disinformation, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, imperial preference, Joseph Schumpeter, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, labour mobility, land tenure, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Mahatma Gandhi, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, railway mania, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, scientific management, Scientific racism, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable

The idea ‘which has been…my fellow and my guide…is a conception, however imperfect, of the grandeur of the race, already girdling the earth.’122 It was the most positive proof that the migrant societies growing up in the settlement colonies had a viable future as non-dependent communities. And America, as much as Britain's own settler states, encouraged the British ‘at home’ to see themselves as an ‘old’ community recreating itself in new lands overseas – a vital part of their colonising ideology. Secondly, Britain had become an open economy with the adoption of free trade in the 1840s and 1850s (the repeal of the Navigation laws in 1850–1 almost completed the process). The motives behind this have been fiercely debated. They may have owed more to the political need to rebalance commercial and agrarian interests than to commercial calculation.123 But, once enacted, free trade reinforced Britain's role as the world's principal entrepot, the market-place to which the world's goods could be carried without commercial restriction.

By the 1870s, an extensive rail network and a streamlined market (including a huge ‘futures’ market in Chicago103) brought the output of the American Midwest straight to the consumers of Europe. With their vast Atlantic traffic, accessible ports, dense communications and large population, the British Isles were the obvious market for American food. Here, politics were as critical as economics. It was the decision, unique among Europe's larger states, to preserve free trade and the open economy which threw open the British market to unlimited competition from foreign foodstuffs. The results were dramatic. As farm prices fell so did rents and wages. As agricultural depression set in through the 1880s, rural communities (especially in the ‘wheat countries’104) shrivelled. The distinctiveness and diversity of rural life began to atrophy.

‘Empire’ was acceptable to a broad swathe of opinion because it appealed both to those alarmed by the stresses in late-Victorian Britain and to those exhilarated by its new possibilities. The stresses were real. Rather than surrender free trade, the ark of their social covenant110 as well as the talisman of national wealth, the late Victorians tolerated the external pressures transmitted inwards by their open economy. They accepted the rising mobility of capital and labour. But there were deep misgivings. Social commentators warned against a ‘rootless’ and ‘volatile’ urban proletariat,111 and sighed with regret for a more stable and ‘rooted’ agrarian age.112 The evidence of urban poverty recorded by observers like Booth and Rowntree suggested that the uneven distribution of wealth was a serious threat to the social fabric.


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

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

Weingast, “Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England,” Journal of Economic History 49, no. 4 (1989): 803–832. 11. Hilton L. Root, “Tying the King’s Hands: Credible Commitments and Royal Fiscal Policy During the Old Regime,” Rationality and Society 1, no. 2 (1989): 240–258. 12. Sebastian Edwards, “Sovereign Default, Debt Restructuring, and Recovery Rates: Was the Argentinean ‘Haircut’ Excessive?” Open Economies Review 26, no. 5 (2015): 839–867. 13. Thomas Friedman, “Don’t Mess with Moody’s,” New York Times, February 22, 1995. Chapter 7 1. William L. Riordan, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics (New York: Penguin, 1995), 3. 2. Riordan, Tammany Hall, 6. 3.

Edwards, Geoff, and Leonard Waverman. “The Effects of Public Ownership and Regulatory Independence on Regulatory Outcomes.” Journal of Regulatory Economics 29, no. 1 (2006): 23–67. Edwards, Sebastian, and Andrea F. Presbitero. “Sovereign Default, Debt Restructuring, and Recovery Rates: Was the Argentinean ‘Haircut’ Excessive?” Open Economies Review 26, no. 5 (2015): 839–867. Egeberg, Morten, Åse Gornitzka, and Jarle Trondal. “A Not So Technocratic Executive? Everyday Interaction Between the European Parliament and the Commission.” West European Politics 37, no. 1 (2014): 1–18. Eisenhower, Dwight D. “Farewell Address.” 1961. https://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/all_about_ike/speeches/farewell_address.pdf.


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

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

These suggestions preserve what is working about the global economy while also making necessary changes to modernize economic policy in order to meet the challenges of today’s technologically sophisticated global economy. The suggestions in Chapters 9 through 11 are about meeting the needs of the middle class directly and effectively. They tackle the challenging problems of middle-class stagnation and income inequality described in Chapter 2. These suggestions preserve the many benefits of open economies; I do not suggest closing borders or erecting walls. Instead, the policies go straight to the problems of American workers. Chapter 9, 10, and 11 deal with three aspects of this policy response. Chapter 9 focuses on strategies to help workers meet the demands of the global economy. Chapter 10 describes how a grand bargain for true tax reform can both help American workers and modernize the tax system, making it more suited to a global economy.

The full set of rankings can be found at its website: http://www.doingbusiness.org/rankings. 2.  World Economic Forum, The Global Competitiveness Report 2017–2018, September 26, 2017. To create the conditions necessary for a more equitable globalization, we need a better partnership with the business community. To create a strong, prosperous, open economy where a rising tide lifts all boats, the government and the business community need to come together in support of large, smart policy changes. Five key pillars support this partnership: An embrace of the global economy Simple, fair regulations A simple, fair tax code and more transparency on taxes More transparency on pay structure and labor inclusion More robust antitrust laws Several of these agenda items will be embraced by the business community, whereas some may meet with resistance.


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

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

Historically, it is a mistake to think of a trade-off between international openness and domestic economic cohesion. Instead, the two tend to go together. The Nordic countries, widely seen as doing the best job of bringing along those left behind by economic change, have also long been among the most open economies in the West. In fact, it is arguably because they are so open that their social contracts underpinned economies of belonging and still sustain them more than many other countries. Public understanding that trade brings prosperity, but that global fluctuations can hit hard and unpredictably, has increased support for large welfare states.1 My point in this chapter is that this relationship also works the other way around.

Other reasons include North America’s better ability to employ high-skilled youths. 36. See “The Wrong Tail: Why Britain’s ‘Long Tail’ Is Not the Cause of Its Productivity Problems,” Centre for Cities, briefing, 24 May 2018, https://www.centreforcities.org/publication/the-wrong-tail/. Chapter 12. Globalisation with a Human Face 1. See Dani Rodrik, “Why Do More Open Economies Have Bigger Governments?,” Journal of Political Economy 106, no. 5 (October 1998): 997–1032, https://doi.org/10.1086/250038. 2. “05476: Innvandring, utvandring og nettoinnvandring, etter statsborgerskap 2003–2018,” Statistics Norway, accessed 18 December 2019, https://www.ssb.no/statbank/table/05476/. 3.


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The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent by Vivek Wadhwa

card file, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Elon Musk, immigration reform, Marc Andreessen, open economy, open immigration, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, synthetic biology, the new new thing, Y2K

Detractors of the H-1B program feel it promotes wage arbitrage and a modern version of indentured servitude that depresses the wages of US workers in STEM fields. I agree with aspects of both arguments, but I believe that allowing for a more liberal H-1B policy will end any semblance of wage depression, as talented immigrants would quickly achieve market wages for their skills. Most important, the history of the world shows that open economies grow faster than closed ones. Labor represents one of the most critical economic inputs. Yet US policy still views the average H-1B immigrant as a number rather than as a contributor. First-Class Minds, Second-Class Citizens Puneet Arora arrived in the United States in 1996 for a residency in internal medicine at Southern Illinois University.


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The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cashless society, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, circulation of elites, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Corn Laws, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Etonian, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Norman Macrae, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, open economy, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, pension reform, pensions crisis, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, profit maximization, public intellectual, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, TED Talk, the long tail, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, total factor productivity, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, zero-sum game

With the rest of Europe sunk in debt it shines as a beacon of fiscal rectitude: Its government has bound itself in a financial straitjacket where it must produce a fiscal surplus over the economic cycle. Its public debt fell from 70 percent of GDP in 1993 to 37 percent in 2010, and its budget moved from an 11 percent deficit to a surplus of 0.3 percent over the same period. This allowed a country with a small, open economy to recover quickly from the financial storm of 2007–8. Its budget deficit has climbed to 2 percent of GDP, but its public debt is still below 40 percent. The change in thinking is even greater. The streets of Stockholm are awash with the blood of sacred cows. The local think tanks are overflowing with fresh ideas about “welfare entrepreneurs” and “lean management.”

They have exceptionally high rates of female labor-force participation and the world’s highest rates of social mobility.1 They continue to pride themselves on the generosity of their welfare states. About 30 percent of their labor force works in the public sector, twice the average in the OECD. They continue to believe in combining open economies with public investment in human capital. But the new Nordic model begins with serving the individual rather than ­expanding the state. It begins with fiscal responsibility rather than pump priming. It begins with choice and competition rather than paternalism and planning: Both Denmark and Finland are now ahead of the United States in the economic-freedom index run by the Fraser Institute, a Canadian think tank, and Sweden has been catching up.


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

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

Governments would rather keep domestic demand permanently suppressed than risk ending up like Greece.66 Fig. 5.7 The birth of the euroglut (contributions to the current account balance of the euro area excluding Ireland). Sources: Eurostat; Matthew Klein’s calculations While this might make sense for small open economies, such as Portugal, it cannot be a sustainable strategy for the euro area as a whole. The world’s second-largest economy is simply too big to attempt to foist the consequences of its internal distortions on others without creating even larger global imbalances. Once again, the United States will have to reprise its role as the ultimate source of global demand.

America’s openness to international trade and finance means that the rich in Europe, China, and the other major surplus economies can squeeze their workers and retirees in the confidence that they can always sell their wares, earn their profits, and park their savings in safe assets. If the United States were not such an open economy, surplus countries would be forced either to divert their excess production to other countries, none of which have ever been as willing as the United States to absorb it, or to watch unwanted inventory pile up until factories were closed and workers were fired. The costs of rising income inequality in one country would be internalized, and there would be limited impact on others.


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Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety by Gideon Rachman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sinatra Doctrine, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

In 2005, France’s referendum on the proposed European Union constitution was won by a “No” campaign that based its arguments on fear of the “Polish plumber”—shorthand for the low-wage competition that French workers had been exposed to after the enlargement of the European Union in 2004. Almost all French politicians paid lip service to the need to protect the European social model from “unfair competition,” but the big story was that mainstream European politicians remained committed to an open economy and to globalization. The enlargement of the European Union went ahead. And despite rejection in referenda in France and the Netherlands, the EU constitution was repackaged as the Lisbon Treaty and pushed through by parliamentary vote. It was not until the late 1990s that the argument that globalization was also bad for the developing world began to be made with real force.

Early in his bestselling book Globalization and Its Discontents, he acknowledges that “because of globalization many people in the world now live longer than before and their standard of living is far better.”7 His anger and condemnation are focused on specific aspects of the process, in particular that policies advocated by the International Monetary Fund in response to the crises in Asia and Russia were, in his view, wrongheaded, biased toward the interests of Western banks, and caused unnecessary misery. Stiglitz’s work was an attack on what he regarded as “market fundamentalism” leading to premature liberalization of trade and foreign exchange regimes. Yet while the globalization consensus wobbled after the Asian, Russian, and Latin American crises, it fundamentally stayed in place. Open economies in a globalized world were clearly vulnerable to sudden financial crises, but turning your back on the world was not an attractive or practical remedy. South Korea and Thailand were two of the biggest victims of the Asian economic crisis, but the South Koreans only had to look across the border to North Korea to be reminded that economic isolation offered far worse and more devastating prospects.


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The Curse of Cash by Kenneth S Rogoff

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, cryptocurrency, debt deflation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial intermediation, financial repression, forward guidance, frictionless, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, government statistician, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, moveable type in China, New Economic Geography, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, payday loans, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, RFID, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, unconventional monetary instruments, underbanked, unorthodox policies, Y2K, yield curve

First, the canonical Keynesian model of fiscal stimulus at the zero bound assumes a closed economy and ignores the fact that a part of the fiscal stimulus is likely to dissipate abroad. One of John Maynard Keynes’s brilliant simplifying assumptions was to assume a closed economy and ignore the rest of the world. The closed economy assumption is analytically elegant but not very realistic, even for the United States. Open economy spillovers imply that for fiscal stimulus policies to be fully effective, coordinated action across nations may be needed. Experience suggests, however, that this is easier said than done, especially when some countries have less faith in the Keynesian model than others. Second, the impact effect of fiscal policy can be sensitive to expectations about whether the fiscal impulse is temporary or permanent; a permanent shift implies higher future taxes and is more likely to crowd out private consumption.

“The Effectiveness of Alternative Zero Bound Tools in a Zero Lower Bound Environment.” Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 44, suppl. (1): 3–46. Hellerstein, Rebecca, and William Ryan. 2011. “Cash Dollars Abroad.” Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Staff Report 400. Henderson, Dale, and Warwick McKibbin. 1993. “A Comparison of Some Basic Monetary Policy Regimes for Open Economies: Implications of Different Degrees of Instrument Adjustment and Wage Persistence.” Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy 39: 221–318. Henry, James S. 1980. “How to Make the Mob Miserable: The Cash Connection.” Washington Monthly 12(4): 54–61. Hicks, John R. 1969. A Theory of Economic History.


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

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

Over the same period life expectancy has also risen from seventy-three to seventy-seven, only two years less than in the United States, as health care has improved. Mexico’s dual-speed economy is hardly the perfect recipe for the future, but there’s no question that the country has moved ahead economically and now has a large and increasingly confident middle class. Mexico’s transition to an open economy undoubtedly played a major role in this shift. As discussed elsewhere in this book, there are also other reasons for these improvements, including investments by expatriate Mexicans in their home communities and Mexico’s still relatively new insertion into the innovation economy. But greater integration with the two larger economies to the north played a crucial role, and the most dynamic sectors of the economy remain linked to North American trade.

See film industry nail industry, 5, 73, 74, 75, 89, 117–118 Naranjo, Gerardo, 242 Narcos (TV show), 234 NASCAR, 227, 248–249, 250 National Association of Latino Elected Officials, 266 National Basketball Association (NBA), 250, 272 National Council of Science and Technology (Conacyt), 108 National Development Bank (Nafinsa), 108 National Entrepreneurship Institute (INADEM), 108–109 National Football League (NFL), 246–248, 252, 272 national identity, building, 210, 211, 235 National Park Service, 280–281 National Security Council, 146 natural gas industry and energy reform, 116–117, 121 exports, 6, 117, 271 oil and, 113–114, 114–115, 119, 271 pipelines for, 117, 119–120, 122 prices in, 114, 118, 119, 120, 124 ties in, 6 trade in, 120 naturalized status, issue of, 210–211 Navarro, Adela, 135–136, 139, 140 Navarro, Guillermo, 232 nearshoring, benefit of, in IT sector, 94, 95 Negrete, Layda, 161–162, 243 Nelson, Jonathan, 105–106 Nemak, 57 Netflix, 234, 241 Network for Oral Trials, 161, 163 Nevada Hispanic Legislative Caucus, 265 9/11, 144, 145 Nissan, 56 Nochistlán, Mexico, 188–189, 201, 202 Nortec, 90 North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), 170 North American Development Bank, 52 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) controversy over, 52 elements of, 52 expanded relationship under, 59 impact of, 50, 55, 72, 76, 77, 78 López Obrador’s position on, 279 modernizing textbooks and, 212 negotiations leading to, 51–52 renegotiating, 53–54, 60, 270, 271, 272 root of opposition to, 21 Trump’s position on, 3, 21, 53, 269 withdrawal from, complexities and effects of, 53, 60–61, 282 North Korea, 269 Nuño, José Luis, 102 Obama, Barack, 21, 149–150, 166, 195–196, 199, 200 Odell, Ben, 223, 224, 226, 227–228, 249 Office of Management and Budget, 148 offshoring, impact of, 60 O’Grady, Frank, 203–204, 205 O’Grady, Katie, 203–205, 207 oil industry decline in, 115, 129 and energy reform, 114, 115–116, 121 exploration in, 115, 116, 129, 130–131 nationalization of, 115, 130 natural gas and, 113–114, 114–115, 119, 271 organized crime and, 129, 171 prices in, 117, 130 production in, 113, 114, 128–129 supply in, 115, 118, 124, 128, 129 ties in, 6 trade in, 120, 131 Oldenski, Lindsay, 90 Olvera, Enrique, 256, 257, 258, 259, 263–264 Olympics, 47–48 omnibus bill, 148 online services, 101, 102–103 Ooyala, 97, 99 open economy, 18, 63, 66, 77, 78, 196–197 opiates, 178, 179 opinion polls, 3, 21–22, 44, 186, 274, 275–276 opioid crisis, 178 Oracle, 99 organized crime breaking up of, 176–177, 179 citizens responding to, 165–166, 167–169 and corruption, 136, 139, 144, 145, 155–156, 178, 180 documentary film involving, 241 exposing, to the public, 163 growth of, 136–137, 142 homicides attributed to, 19, 31, 136, 138, 139, 142, 150, 165, 166, 168, 172, 177, 180 intelligence on, information lacking in, 175–176 journalists investigating, security issues facing, 135, 136 law enforcement coordination in tackling, 19, 23, 153–154, 155, 156–158 mapping, 170, 172 oil industry and, 129, 171 security cooperation on, 143–147, 149, 150–151, 157–158 strategic operations against, 170, 171, 172–174 Ortiz Mena, Tania, 124 Oxxo, 86, 102–103 Pablos, David, 242 Pantelion, 226, 227 Paris Accords on Climate Change, 123, 125 Pascual, Carlos, 166–167, 168–169, 215 passports, 221, 281 Pastor, Robert, 211–212 Pati’s Mexican Table (TV show), 260 Pemex, 115, 128, 129 PEN International, 213, 214 Peña Nieto, Enrique, 115–116, 174, 177 Pence, Mike, 200 PepsiCo, 95 Pérez, Ashley, 217–219, 221–222 Pérez, Hanna, 217–219, 221–222 Perry, Rick, 131 Pew Center, 194, 207 philanthropy, 14, 21, 80 Pilcher, Jeffrey, 259, 261 Pinzón, Alejandra, 192–194, 194–195, 196, 198, 207 Pioneer Natural Resources, 114–115 pipelines, 119–120, 122, 129, 171 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 7, 76, 89 Pittsburgh Glass Works, 76 Plan Colombia, 145 Plantronics, 37–38 Plascencia, Javier, 31, 32, 33, 34, 39–40, 41, 43 Plastics Institute, 96 poetic bridge, 217 polarization, 22, 275–276 political prospects, 276–280 politics, involvement in, 264–268 pop culture, biculturalism and, 218–219 Poplar Bluff, Missouri, 7, 73–75, 77, 89, 90, 118 population shifts/figures, 8, 9, 12–13, 24, 185, 187, 190, 191, 196, 206, 207, 210, 266, 267 portfolio investments, 76 ports, 5 poverty as a driver of immigration, 2, 15, 189, 198 factors leading back to, 64 López Obrador’s position on, 277 persistent, 65, 274 reduction in, 191 Prayers for the Stolen (Clement), 214 Premier Oil, 130 Presumed Guilty (documentary film), 162, 243 Prieto, Rodrigo, 232 procurement rules, 148, 149 production key players in, industries with, 5 offshoring of, 60 rise in, 5, 57–58, 75 shared, 5–6, 18, 23, 29, 51, 52–53, 54–59, 61–62, 72, 74, 75, 89, 90, 270, 282 productivity disparity in, among business size, 65–66 efficiencies impacting, 59 programming, 98, 99 Prosecutor’s Office for Corruption, 164 Puebla, Mexico, 58, 95 Puerto Rico, emigration from, 4, 9 Puig, Claudia, 226, 231 Pujol restaurant, 256–257, 258, 263 Purdue, Sonny, 53 racial tensions, 10, 11 racism, 210 radio, 206, 247 Ramírez, Alejandro, 225, 240–241 Rassini, 55–56, 71 Reagan, Ronald, 51, 265 recession, 79, 187, 195 refugees, 184, 209 regulations, 84 Reid, Harry, 265 religious-based immigration, 208 relocation business, 205 remittances, 16, 188–190, 191–192, 202 renewable resources, 6, 117, 122, 123 See also solar power; wind power repatriating Mexicans.


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The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It by Ian Goldin, Mike Mariathasan

air freight, air traffic controllers' union, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, connected car, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, John Snow's cholera map, Kenneth Rogoff, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, moral hazard, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open economy, precautionary principle, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reshoring, risk free rate, Robert Solow, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social contagion, social distancing, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tail risk, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

Divided Nations: Why Global Governance Is Failing, and What We Can Do about It Globalization for Development: Meeting New Challenges Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future The Case for Aid The Economics of Sustainable Development Economic Reform, Trade and Agricultural Development Modelling Economy-wide Reforms Trade Liberalization: Global Economic Implications Open Economies The Future of Agriculture Economic Crisis: Lessons from Brazil Making Race THE BUTTERFLY DEFECT How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do about It IAN GOLDIN AND MIKE MARIATHASAN PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD Copyright © 2014 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Goldin, Ian, 1955– The butterfly defect : how globalization creates systemic risks, and what to do about it / Ian Goldin, Mike Mariathasan.

Authoritarian regimes collapsed in more than 65 countries in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe and were replaced with democratic systems that were more open to global trade, finance, and ideas.7 In many but clearly not all countries, along with open borders came democratic institutions, intellectual property rights, and an economic paradigm shift toward market capitalism and more open economies.8 The Uruguay Round of trade negotiations and reforms of macroeconomic policy brought more countries and people than had any previous wave of globalization into the global exchange of goods, services, and ideas. Cross-border capital flows have increased dramatically since the 1990s (from $1.5 trillion in 1995 to $6 trillion in 2007) and have recovered strongly in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007/2008 (reaching $4.4 trillion in 2010 following two years of volatility and decline).9 Since the turn of this century, China (2001), Taiwan (2002), Saudi Arabia (2005), Vietnam (2007), Ukraine (2008), and Russia (2012) have joined the World Trade Organization (WTO).


pages: 125 words: 35,820

Cyprus - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture by Constantine Buhayer

banking crisis, British Empire, business climate, centre right, COVID-19, financial independence, glass ceiling, Google Earth, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, lockdown, low cost airline, offshore financial centre, open economy, Skype, women in the workforce, young professional

You can go off into the mountains in the morning, have lunch, come back for a swim in the afternoon, and watch a small opera performance in the evening. His teenage children go to a private, English-language school, and the wide mix of people introduces them to a cosmopolitan environment while being grounded in their Cypriot roots. CHAPTER EIGHT BUSINESS BRIEFING THE ECONOMY Cyprus has an open economy that has proved to be resilient, expanding since the 1990s when it assessed the requirements and opportunities of a possible EU membership, to which it acceded in 2004. The country presents itself as an EU outpost, an investment hub, and a logistics center. Until the banking crisis of 2013 it had one of the fastest growing economies in Europe and the country thought it would become the Tiger Economy of the eastern Mediterranean.


pages: 319 words: 106,772

Irrational Exuberance: With a New Preface by the Author by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, banking crisis, benefit corporation, Benoit Mandelbrot, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, demographic transition, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, experimental subject, hindsight bias, income per capita, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahbub ul Haq, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Milgram experiment, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, open economy, pattern recognition, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Small Order Execution System, spice trade, statistical model, stocks for the long run, Suez crisis 1956, survivorship bias, the market place, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, uptick rule, urban decay, Y2K

(New Orleans) Times-Picayune, October 29, 1929, p. 1, col. 8; New York Times, October 29, 1929, p. 1; Wall Street Journal, October 29, 1929, p. 1, col. 2. 12. Jude Wanniski, The Way the World Works, 2nd ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), Chapter 7. 13. Allan H. Meltzer, “Monetary and Other Explanations of the Start of the Great Depression,” Journal of Monetary Economics, 2 (1976): 460. 14. Rudiger Dornbusch and Stanley Fischer, “The Open Economy: Implications for Monetary and Fiscal Policy,” in Robert J. Gordon (ed.), The American Business Cycle: Continuity and Change (Chicago: National Bureau of Economic Research and University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 459–501. 15. New York Times, October 28, 1929, p. 1. 16. Wall Street Journal, October 28, 1929, p. 1. 17.

Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 51 (1955): 629–36. Dice, Charles Amos. New Levels in the Stock Market. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1929. Diggins, John Patrick. The Proud Decades: America in War and in Peace 1941–1960. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. RE F E RE N CE S 273 Dornbusch, Rudiger, and Stanley Fischer. “The Open Economy: Implications for Monetary and Fiscal Policy,” in Robert J. Gordon (ed.), The American Business Cycle: Continuity and Change. Chicago: National Bureau of Economic Research and University of Chicago Press, 1986, pp. 459–501. Eichengreen, Barry. Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression: 1919–1939.


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Creating Unequal Futures?: Rethinking Poverty, Inequality and Disadvantage by Ruth Fincher, Peter Saunders

barriers to entry, classic study, ending welfare as we know it, financial independence, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, income per capita, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, marginal employment, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, open economy, pink-collar, positional goods, purchasing power parity, shareholder value, spread of share-ownership, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

In other words, while we might debate the size of the low-wage sector, its distinctiveness is beyond dispute. Note that considerable practical work along these lines was undertaken by Gosta Rehn in Sweden in the 1970s as part of the development of that country’s distinctive approach to blending wages and social policy as a basis for promoting the competitiveness of a small open economy. His ideas underpinned the push for universal child care rights, a year’s paid parental leave and rights to part-time retirement. These ideas, of course, built on the established rights to comprehensive retraining consequent upon dislocation from the labour market as part of economic restructuring. 228 PDF OUTPUT c: ALLEN & UNWIN r: DP2\BP4401W\MAIN p: (02) 6232 5991 f: (02) 6232 4995 36 DAGLISH STREET CURTIN ACT 2605 228 References REFERENCES Aaron, H. 1992 ‘The economics and politics of pensions: evaluating the choices’ Private Pensions and Public Policy, OECD, Paris ABC Audits 1998 ‘Weekend papers win in state market’ Ad News 14 August, p. 35 Abowd, J.M., Kramarz, F., and Margolis D.N. 1999 Minimum Wages and Employment in France and the United States, NBER Working Paper 6996, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Mass.

Uusitalo, M.E. Sharpe, New York Erikson, R. and Goldthorpe, J.H. 1992 The Constant Flux. A Study of Class Mobility in Industrial Societies, Clarendon Press, Oxford Esping-Andersen, G. 1990 The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Polity Press, Cambridge ——1994 After the Golden Age: welfare and employment in open economies, Synthesis paper for UN Social Summit, UNRISD Ettema, J.S. and Glasser, T.L. 1988 ‘Narrative form and moral force: the realization of innocence and guilt through investigative journalism’ Journal of Communication vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 8–26 European Academy of the Urban Environment 1998 New Industrial Arrangements in the Labour Market: Transitional Labour Markets as a New Full Employment Concept, The Academy, Berlin 234 PDF OUTPUT c: ALLEN & UNWIN r: DP2\BP4401W\MAIN p: (02) 6232 5991 f: (02) 6232 4995 36 DAGLISH STREET CURTIN ACT 2605 234 REFERENCES European Commission 1997 ‘Modernising and improving social protection in the European Union’ http://europa.eu.int/en/comm/dg05/ soc-prot/com97102/commuen.htm Eurostat 1990 Poverty in Figures, Europe in the Early 1980s, Statistical Office of the European Communities, Luxembourg Fagan, R.H. and Webber, M. 1994 Global Restructuring: The Australian Experience Oxford University Press, Melbourne Farley, R. 1996 ‘The age of extremes: a revisionist perspective’ Demography vol. 33, no. 4, pp. 417–20 Feldstein, M. 1998 Income Inequality and Poverty NBER Working Paper 6770, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Mass http://www.nber.org/papers/w6770 Ferrante, A. and Loh, N. 1996 Crime and Justice Statistics for Western Australia: 1994, mimeo, Crime Research Centre, University of Western Australia, Perth Fincher, R. and Nieuwenhuysen, J. eds 1998 Australian Poverty: Then and Now, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne Fincher, R. and Wulff, M. 1998 ‘The locations of poverty and disadvantage’ Australian Poverty: Then and Now eds R.


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The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age by Tim Wu

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Big Tech, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, move fast and break things, new economy, open economy, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, price discrimination, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, The Chicago School

Brandeis took the view that government’s highest role lay in the protection of human liberty and the provision of securities consistent with human thriving. That meant a commitment to civil liberties, like rights of free speech and privacy, protected by the courts. But it also meant a commitment to the protection of workers, and an open economy composed of smaller firms—along with measures to break or limit the power of monopolies. Hence, if the antitrust laws might decentralize the economy, so much the better. If other laws might do the same, that was good, too. Beyond that, Brandeis thought there should be no business exception for ethics, but that government should punish those who used abusive, oppressive, or unconscionable business methods to succeed.


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What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy by David Hale, Lyric Hughes Hale

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversification, energy security, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, global village, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, payday loans, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precautionary principle, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yield curve

The only country that is currently taking advantage of it is Peru, where nominal GDP, with a fairly stable exchange rate, has grown from approximately $55 billion in 2001 to $127 billion in 2009 and approximately $140 billion in 2010. The reasons for this strong growth include the metals boom (especially in gold mining), the rapid rise of consumer and mortgage credit that is leading to the emergence of a middle class, gradual fiscal reform (especially in public pensions), and a progressively more open economy (the average import tariff in 2010 was about 2 percent). The big economies are going to have to push major reforms through if they want to realize their potential. Energy reform is long overdue in Mexico, even after the tough government decision in October 2009 to fire all 42,000 unionized staff members of Luz y Fuerza del Centro (the state utility for Mexico City that was well known for its inefficiency and theft of electricity).

As is the case the world over, the prospects for sustained economic performance remain tentative. South Africa’s major trading partners are bedeviled by a blend of substantial pan-European public debt, Anglo-Saxon capital and financial market problems, and tectonic shifts in the structure of the global economy. As a small open economy, South Africa is affected by these global economic-financial forces. For much of the early 2000s, South Africa’s macro-financial and fiscal indicators compared favorably with those of many of its peer countries. This was, to a large extent, the outcome of a consistent and ambitious fiscal reform program over the 1994–2007 period.


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After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 by John Darwin

agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, deindustrialization, European colonialism, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open economy, price mechanism, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade

The high costs of long-distance trade, as well as large armed ships (the ‘East Indiamen’), shore establishments (with their garrisons to guard against attack by other Europeans or disorderly locals) and the diplomatic apparatus required for dealings with regional rulers and the Mughal court, had long made it necessary for European traders to be organized as joint-stock companies. These were forerunners of the modern corporation (with shareholders, a board and a management structure), and enjoyed a monopoly in the direct trade between their country and India. But their superficial modernity did not, of course, mean that European merchants were heralds of the open economy or the rule of the market. Indeed, they had little to sell, and they were forced to import bullion on a massive scale to pay for the Indian goods that they wanted to buy. Their commercial policy was to drive down the price and increase the quantity of the Indian textiles for which an insatiable demand existed in Europe.

On the other hand, even non-European merchants had nothing to gain if the world that commerce had made was divided into a patchwork quilt of fractious nation states whose rulers’ aims were unlikely to chime with those of the chambers of commerce in the great port cities. The merchants’ interests could be briefly summed up as the ‘open economy’, with no barriers to trade, the flows of credit and capital, or the movement of people (especially labour). This was the ‘empire of free trade’ that the British had pursued since the 1840s, when they had tried to enforce it (with some degree of success) on Latin America and the Middle East as well as India and China.

It helped to speed up the remarkable process by which more and more states adopted the ‘gold standard’: fixing their currency’s value in gold to expand their trade and encourage inward investment.74 London’s size and wealth thus grew in sympathy with the surging growth of international trade.75 Among its merchants and bankers, it was an article of faith that what was good for London was good for the world. The idea of free trade and the open economy was adopted in Britain in the 1840s and ’ 50s not just as a policy but as a total world-view, an ideology promoted with crusading passion. It imagined a world in which peoples would be freed from their bondage to rulers by the flood tide of commerce. Individual freedom and international trade would move forward together.


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

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

But in our reading of the evidence, governments in ACDs do the opposite: they tend to pursue far-sighted macroeconomic policies (Iversen and Soskice 2006). The shift to low-inflation targeting is an example of this, and so is the Stability and Growth Pact in the Eurozone and the general shift toward strong ministries of finance that we discussed above. 10. This is an issue in interpreting results that suggests that economic voting in small open economies is less prevalent (Hellwig 2001). This could be because governments have less effect on the economy (and therefore more constrained), but it could also be that they have a stronger incentive to behave in a responsible manner, since loss of competitiveness and trade deficits will quickly signal problems. 11.

., Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez. 2011. “Top Incomes in the Long Run of History.” Journal of Economic Literature 49 (1): 3 –71. Audretsch, David. 1998. “Agglomeration and the Location of Innovative Activity.” Oxford Review of Economic Policy 14 (2): 18–29. Aukrust, Odd. 1977. “Inflation in the Open Economy: A Norwegian Model.” In Worldwide Inflation: Theory and Recent Experience, eds. Lawrence B. Krause and Walter S. Salant, 107–53. Washington, DC: Brookings Institute. Autor, David H. 2015. “Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 29 (3): 3–30.


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Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise) by Andrew L. Russell

Aaron Swartz, American ideology, animal electricity, barriers to entry, borderless world, Californian Ideology, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, creative destruction, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, open economy, OSI model, packet switching, pre–internet, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, vertical integration, web of trust, work culture

By insisting on a “world open to American ideas and influence,” Open Door ideology created the conditions where Americans could pursue “informal empire” in the Pacific while proclaiming the high-minded and progressive principles of national self-determination and international peace.24 In the middle decades of the twentieth century, prominent philosophers, scientists, and theorists in the United States and Europe embraced “open” metaphors in their work. Unlike the Open Door policy’s explicit confrontation with international diplomacy in the early twentieth century, the mid-century experts who wrote about open societies, open economies, and open systems retreated from geopolitical realities and instead applied the discourses of openness to their theoretical, structural, and systematic investigations. For example, the philosophers Henri Bergson and Karl Popper posed stark dichotomies between social customs that they called “open” and “closed.”

Together they built a philosophical case that led to an inevitable (if understated) conclusion: open morality and open societies were superior alternatives to fascist and communist oppression.25 Experts in economics, sociology, and mathematics also adopted open metaphors in the 1930s and 1940s and, even more than the philosophers, took refuge from political and military conflict in the specialized language of their own disciplines. In 1939, the British Keynesian economist George Shackle published an article titled “The Multiplier in Closed and Open Systems,” a commentary on the theoretical uncertainties inherent in export and import values in an “open economy.”26 The language of open systems also appeared in the work of the sociologist Talcott Parsons, who in 1943 described the “Kinship System of the Contemporary United States” as an “open, multilineal, conjugal system,” one in which individuals choose their marriage partners rather than having marriages arranged on their behalf.


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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

The collapse of local currencies laid bare the crony capitalism governing countries such as Indonesia. After three decades of rule, Suharto lost the backing of the army and resigned in 1998 amid waves of demonstrations. The Soviet collapse was also a major precipitating factor in India’s 1990s shift toward an open economy. As the once significant trade volumes with the Soviet Union plummented and the Persian Gulf War caused a doubling of oil prices, India’s prime minister, P V. Narasimha Rao, and his finance minister, Manmohan Singh, set about reversing Nehru-era central planning, dismantling the notorious “license Raj” of regulations, and welcoming foreign investment, all of which contributed to lifting India above what had come to be known as the “Hindu rate of growth.”

China has slowly begun to license foreign credit card companies to operate in the country, but only after UnionPay achieved 80 percent market share and WeChat Pay and Alipay gained acceptance in landmark tourist sites and other locations all over the world. Recent Western business surveys of hot markets have thus revealed a shift in focus to India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and the Philippines—their combined population being just over 2 billion. Unlike in China, where foreign companies have no chance of achieving a dominant market share, these more open economies and democratic societies present Western firms with an opportunity to capitalize on Asia’s next growth wave. From Vietnam to Myanmar, these fast-growing economies allow as much as 100 percent foreign ownership in lucrative sectors such as construction, real estate, finance, and retail. In other words, they are practically the anti-China.


pages: 464 words: 139,088

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

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

With the benefit of hindsight, should interest rates have been higher during the period of the so-called Great Stability? We can explore these questions by going back to the pre-crisis period and asking whether there was an alternative policy that might have produced a different result. As a medium-sized, open economy, the United Kingdom offers a good example of how to think about an alternative monetary policy prior to the crisis. In the build-up to the crisis of 2007–9, the average growth rate of GDP was only a fraction above the previous fifty-year annual average of 2.75 per cent. There was no ‘boom’ in output growth that heralded an inevitable ‘bust’.

Kahneman, Daniel and Amos Tversky (1979), ‘Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk’, Econometrica, Vol. 47, pp. 263–91. Kalemli-Ozcan, Sebnem, Bent E. Sorensen and Sevcan Yesiltas (2012), ‘Leverage Across Firms, Banks and Countries’, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Conference on Financial Frictions and Monetary Policy in an Open Economy, mimeo. Kareken, John (1986), ‘Federal Bank Regulatory Policy: A Description and Some Observations’, Journal of Business, 59, pp. 3–48. Kay, John (2009), ‘Narrow Banking: The Reform of Banking Regulation’, Center for the Study of Financial Innovation Report, 15 September 2009. —— (2015), Other People’s Money: The Real Business of Finance, PublicAffairs, New York.


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

The UK is just under 100,000 square miles in size, whereas Canada is over 38 times larger, the second largest country in the world.1 Whereas the UK has a gentle physical environment, Canada contains vast forests, volcanoes, much of the world’s fresh water and the immense Arctic wastes. Canadians are richer than Britons. In 2010, GDP per capita was $46,200 in Canada, around a quarter higher than the UK’s $36,400. Compared to their similarities however, these differences are trivial. Both are small, first world, open economies. Both have their own currencies, but depend for their prosperity on trade with larger neighbours. Both countries share much of a common heritage: the same language, the same monarch and similar political institutions. Both like to think of themselves as the best friend of the United States. Life expectancy in both is around 80 years, with the average age half that.


pages: 618 words: 160,006

Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict That Made the Modern World by Andrew Lambert

bread and circuses, British Empire, classic study, different worldview, Donald Trump, joint-stock company, Malacca Straits, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, open economy, rising living standards, South China Sea, spice trade, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, UNCLOS

The Portuguese Empire Without politically powerful merchants Portuguese overseas commerce depended on Genoese bankers, merchants and shipping to fund and move imports from Lisbon to Antwerp, another market dominated by Genoese banking.33 It was no accident that the Portuguese century in Asia was ended by a true seapower, a republic shaped by the relatively inclusive politics and open economy needed to sustain maritime imperialism. The mental world of Portuguese kings and princes, from Prince Henry to Dom Sebastian, was dominated by the chivalric quest for battlefield glory. The Aviz dynasty was obsessed with honour, crusading against the infidel and the expansion of Portuguese power.

Peter’s city, like his navy, was a monumental vanity project: both fundamentally changed the public face of Russia, but had little impact on the population beyond the city for another century and more. Peter began moving Russia to the West: the project was far from complete in 1725, 1825 or 1925. Russia rejected critical elements of Western progress associated with becoming a seapower, such as inclusive politics and an open economy, as well as a seafaring identity and the curiosity to see a world beyond national frontiers. Peter brought many Western technologies to his country – modern fortresses, warships, navigational equipment, printing presses, globes and telescopes – but he imposed them on an older reality. Seapower culture did not find a home in Petrine Russia, because the roots of that identity had not been laid in the preceding centuries.


pages: 261 words: 57,595

China's Future by David Shambaugh

Berlin Wall, capital controls, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, facts on the ground, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high net worth, high-speed rail, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, market bubble, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pearl River Delta, rent-seeking, secular stagnation, short selling, South China Sea, special drawing rights, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, working-age population, young professional

But Singapore has many aspects of democracy: multiple political parties, regular elections, a parliament and judiciary independent of the executive, a very open media (with restrictions), real rule of law, an exemplary professional civil service, no corruption, active NGOs, a full market-driven and open economy, a multiethnic society without discrimination, a high-quality and globalized educational system, and protection of many basic freedoms and human rights. China remains a very long way from having these progressive features, and it is highly doubtful that the Chinese Communist Party would tolerate them.


pages: 221 words: 55,901

The Globalization of Inequality by François Bourguignon

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

As we saw before, it is unlikely that this continent could, over the long term, develop and absorb a rapidly growing labor force solely through the exportation of raw materials. The necessary diversification of African economies requires a period of industrialization that is currently incompatible with a fully open economy. On the other hand, this diversification might be feasible within the framework of regional customs unions that allow for expanded markets, while also temporarily protecting local businesses from Asian competition or, possibly, attracting foreign investment into the service of these expanded markets.


pages: 446 words: 578

The end of history and the last man by Francis Fukuyama

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, centre right, classic study, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, life extension, linear programming, long peace, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nuclear winter, old-boy network, open economy, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Socratic dialogue, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

Newspaper readership is now as high in Taiwan and South Korea as in the United States. Pye (1990a), p. 9. 16 Ibid. Taiwan by the early 1980s had the lowest “Gini coefficient” (a measure of even income distribution) of any developing country. See Gary S. Fields, “Employment, Income Distribution and Economic Growth in Seven Small Open Economies,” Economic Journal 94 (March 1984): 74-83. 17 On other attempts to defend dependencia theory from Asian evidence, see Peter Evans, “Class, State, and Dependence in East Asia: Lessons for Latin Americanists,” and Bruce Cumings, “The Origins and Development of the Northeast Asian Political Economy: Industrial Sectors, Product Cycles, and Political Consequences,” both in Frederic C.

God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections. New York University Press, New York. Field, Mark G., ed. 1976. Social Consequences of Modernization in Communist Societies. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. Fields, Gary S. 1984. “Employment, Income Distribution and Economic Growth in Seven Small Open Economies.” Economic Journal 94 (March): 74-83. Finifter, Ada. 1983. Political Science: The State of the Discipline. American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C. Fishman, Robert M. 1990. “Rethinking State and Regime: Southern Europe’s Transition to Democracy.” World Politics 42, no. 3 (April): 422-440.


Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain by John Darwin

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, European colonialism, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, Kowloon Walled City, land tenure, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, open economy, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Scientific racism, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing

With their advantage at sea, British governments were tempted to punish their enemies by seizing their colonies and disrupting their trade. The ‘mercantilist’ logic that we have noticed already implied that this would increase the national wealth. Even after ‘free trade’ had supplanted mercantilism as the ruling commercial ideology, a well-placed port such as Hong Kong helped to enforce an open economy on troublesome foreigners and their recalcitrant rulers. But as often as not, the prevailing concern was chiefly strategic. London decided that it must have Canada (and not sugar-rich Guadeloupe) because French control of Quebec and its riverine hinterland was too great a threat to British America.

British sea power – the main arm of empire – was not entirely irrelevant. It had helped to make sure that European schemes for reviving Spain’s empire remained just that.55 By and large, however, the South American states had the legal institutions (from their colonial past) and the political will to promote market capitalism and support an open economy. What gave British merchants their special position was the shortage of credit and capital in local economies and the lack of commercial intelligence – the information about prices, markets and credit ratings so vital to merchant success. It was access to overseas funds and networks of knowledge that made them much more robust than their local competitors, better placed to ride out the crashes and crises of the commodity trades.


pages: 262 words: 66,800

Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future by Johan Norberg

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, availability heuristic, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, carbon tax, classic study, clean water, continuation of politics by other means, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Island, Hans Rosling, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, moveable type in China, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, open economy, place-making, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, special economic zone, Steven Pinker, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, very high income, working poor, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

But it is not a message of complacency. It is written partly as a warning. It would be a terrible mistake to take this progress for granted. We have lived with these problems for most of history. There are forces at work in the world that would destroy the pillars of this development – the individual freedoms, open economy and technological progress. Terrorists and dictators do what they can to undermine open societies, but there are also threats from within our societies. There is widespread resentment against globalization and the modern economy from populists on both the left and the right. We can see the familiar hostility to the cosmopolitan, urban and fluid society that there has always been from those who are socially conservative, but today it is combined with the sense that the world outside is dangerous, and that we must build literal and figurative walls.


pages: 247 words: 68,918

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? by Ian Bremmer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, household responsibility system, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The financial crisis and global recession pushed the government further in this direction, encouraging efforts to prop up failing industries and to prevent the loss of huge numbers of jobs—particularly among black citizens, who still suffer an unemployment rate of about 30 percent. South Africa remains a relatively open economy and receptive to foreign investment. The legal system is independent, and foreign investors can expect a fair hearing in the country’s courts. But though radical policy changes are unlikely, President Jacob Zuma and the ANC leadership have emphasized industrial policy as a cornerstone of the new administration.


pages: 245 words: 71,886

Spike: The Virus vs The People - The Inside Story by Jeremy Farrar, Anjana Ahuja

"World Economic Forum" Davos, bioinformatics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, dual-use technology, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, machine translation, nudge unit, open economy, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, side project, social distancing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, zoonotic diseases

While things were moving frantically on the international front in the summer of 2020, with hopes building for several successful vaccines, the situation in the UK was deteriorating swiftly. The autumn of 2020 was, without doubt, the lowest point for me during the pandemic. I seriously considered resigning from SAGE. The newly opened economy, buoyed by such schemes as Eat Out to Help Out, was slowly feeding the virus. It still rankles with John Edmunds that taxpayers, including SAGE advisers, effectively subsidised the spread of the virus. From July 2020 onwards, the infection rates began creeping up week by week. This was in the run-up to schools reopening in September, which we knew would provide fertile ground for community mixing and potentially lift R by 0.3 or 0.4.


pages: 1,351 words: 385,579

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Average scores on intelligence tests, though they started from lower levels, have been steeply rising in the countries in which the trends have been measured, such as Kenya and Dominica.280 Can we attribute any part of the New Peace to rising levels of reasoning in those countries? Here the evidence is circumstantial but suggestive. Earlier we saw that the New Peace has been led, in part, by a greater acceptance of democracy and open economies, which, as we have just seen, smarter people tend to favor. Put the two together, and we can entertain the possibility that more education can lead to smarter citizens (in the sense of “smart” we care about here), which can prepare the way for democracy and open economies, which can favor peace. It’s difficult to verify every link in that chain, but the first and last links have been correlated in a recent paper whose title is self-explanatory: “ABC’s, 123’s, and the Golden Rule: The Pacifying Effect of Education on Civil War, 1980–1999.” 281 The political scientist Clayton Thyne analyzed 160 countries and 49 civil wars taken from the dataset of James Fearon and David Laitin, which we visited in chapter 6.

Other than the end of the Cold War and the decline of ideology, what led to the mild reduction in the number of civil wars during the past two decades, and the steep reduction in battle deaths of the last one? And why do conflicts persist in the developing world (thirty-six in 2008, all but one of them civil wars) when they have essentially disappeared in the developed world? A good place to start is the Kantian triangle of democracy, open economies, and engagement with the international community. Russett and Oneal’s statistical analyses, described in the preceding chapter, embrace the entire world, but they include only disputes between states. How well does the triad of pacifying factors apply to civil wars within developing countries, where most of today’s conflicts take place?

Millions of people are alive today because of the civil wars and genocides that did not take place but that would have taken place if the world had remained as it was in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The conditions that favored this happy outcome—democracy, prosperity, decent government, peacekeeping, open economies, and the decline of antihuman ideologies—are not, of course, guaranteed to last forever. But nor are they likely to vanish overnight. Of course we live in a dangerous world. As I have emphasized, a statistical appreciation of history tells us that violent catastrophes may be improbable, but they are not astronomically improbable.


pages: 777 words: 186,993

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

Radhakrishnan, noted, through “merchants who came to trade but stayed to rule.”4 Independent India, as a consequence, viewed trade as nothing more than Imperialism Lite, a system that would force us to remain under the British thumb; many believed that it would only mean continued colonial repression and economic exploitation for the country. India’s economic policy thus became “anti-colonialism without colonialism”—a former world power and remarkably open economy now viewed global markets with deep suspicion, and the government, with the support of Indian businesses, walled up the country’s markets with enormous trade restrictions. This equating of trade with imperialism has meant that as a free nation our views on globalization have been intertwined with our insecurities.

Markets can only lift people out of poverty if these reforms are allowed to create the means for them to escape their circumstances. But the problem now may be a lack of pressure. “India has become adept at finding our way around our remaining obstacles in policies,” Omkar Goswami tells me. This strategy of taking detours around a country still not fully comfortable as an open economy has seeped into our everyday life. In cities we take routes through back roads—sometimes through neighborhoods where the houses hug so close to the median that the “road” may be a mere meter and a half across—to avoid potholes and traffic. We use generators to work through our power failures and pick private and foreign colleges in favor of our dismal, government-funded universities.


Global Governance and Financial Crises by Meghnad Desai, Yahia Said

Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency peg, deglobalization, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, German hyperinflation, information asymmetry, Japanese asset price bubble, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, open economy, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent-seeking, short selling, special drawing rights, structural adjustment programs, Tobin tax, transaction costs, Washington Consensus

Developing countries are understandably incapable of maintaining exchange rate stability while the major currencies experience big fluctuations.12 Hence, currency co-ordination among the USA, Europe and Japan is desperately needed for the stability of their own currencies as well as other currencies in the world today. Despite frequent G7 meetings, existing arrangements leave much to be desired. Consequently, there are fluctuations of up to 20 per cent within a week. The effects of such huge swings on smaller open economies are not well understood, though they are expected to simply adjust to such changes. Since the East Asian crisis, the discussion on international financial reform to prevent future crises has emphasised questions of transparency and greater supply of information. However, there is no evidence that having more information 100 Jomo Kwame Sundaram will be enough to prevent crises.


pages: 267 words: 74,296

Unhappy Union: How the Euro Crisis - and Europe - Can Be Fixed by John Peet, Anton La Guardia, The Economist

"World Economic Forum" Davos, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, Doha Development Round, electricity market, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, illegal immigration, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, light touch regulation, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Money creation, moral hazard, Northern Rock, oil shock, open economy, pension reform, price stability, quantitative easing, special drawing rights, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, éminence grise

The IMF’s deputy managing director, Nemat Shafik, once memorably compared the process of recovering competitiveness to painting a house: If you have an exchange rate, you can move your brush back and forth. If you don’t have an exchange rate, you have to move the whole house. Successful adjustment requires flexible labour markets and an open economy that can export its way back to growth, as well as a population willing to put up with the pain. Greece had none of these: it was a closed, rigid economy and its politics was polarised by a history of occupation, civil war and military rule. As such, Greece was the most recalcitrant of the euro-zone countries to be rescued.


pages: 251 words: 76,868

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

The Beijing government controls its currency value to keep exports cheap, maintains strong oversight of the financial sector to avoid external control and overexposure to toxic assets, restricts procurement policies to benefit national suppliers, guides research and development to benefit national innovation, and selectively curbs imports of goods to maintain high domestic employment. In this way, semi-open economies from Brazil to India fared best in the financial crisis. Eventually, America wound up pursuing much the same course. Even George Soros has remarked that he is impressed by the China model, or what some are already calling the “Beijing Consensus.” There is something to be said for a system that peacefully transitions more than one billion people from revolutionary communism to Confucian capitalism.


pages: 330 words: 77,729

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes by Mark Skousen

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, experimental economics, financial independence, Financial Instability Hypothesis, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, liberation theology, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, pushing on a string, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

To truly liberate Latin America, he and other disciples of Adam Smith advocate open markets, foreign investment, low taxes, opportunities for business creation and ownership of property by all citizens, and political stability under the rule of law—a "liberal, pluralistic, communitarian, public-spirited, dynamic, inventive" nation not unlike the Asian tigers adopted in the recent past (Novak 1991, 32).9 Since the fall of Soviet communism and the socialist central-planning model, liberation theology has lost its steam and most Latin American countries have adopted a more open economy. Consequently, Latin nations have grown rapidly and the percentage of poor has declined. Orbis Books and the Maryknoll Fathers and Sisters ministry no longer publish books on liberation theology. The Next Revolution Only a few years after Marx's masterpiece, Capital, was published, a new breed of European economists came on the scene.


pages: 193 words: 63,618

The Fair Trade Scandal: Marketing Poverty to Benefit the Rich by Ndongo Sylla

"there is no alternative" (TINA), British Empire, carbon footprint, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, degrowth, Doha Development Round, Food sovereignty, global value chain, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, labour mobility, land reform, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selection bias, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Rist, Gilbert (2006 [1996]) The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith, 2nd edn (London: Zed Books). Rodriguez, Francisco and Rodrik, Dani (2000) ‘Trade Policy and Economic Growth: A Skeptic’s Guide to the Cross-national Evidence’, NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2000, 15: 261–338. Rodrik, Dani (1998) ‘Why do More Open Economies Have Bigger Governments?’, Journal of Political Economy, 106 (5): 997–1032. Rodrik, Dani (2006) ‘What’s So Special about China’s Exports?’ China and World Economy, Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences 14(5): 1–19. Rodrik, Dani (2007a) One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions and Economic Growth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).


pages: 192

Kicking Awaythe Ladder by Ha-Joon Chang

Asian financial crisis, business cycle, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, fear of failure, income inequality, income per capita, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, land bank, land reform, liberal world order, moral hazard, open economy, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, scientific management, short selling, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, Washington Consensus

During this time, especially until the late 1960s, the French state used indicative planning, state-owned enterprises and what is these days — somewhat misleadingly - termed 'East-Asian-style' industrial policy in order to catch up with the more advanced countries. As a result, France witnessed a very successful structural transformation of its economy, and finally overtook Britain in terms of both output and (in most areas) technology.139 2.2.5. Sweden Sweden, despite its reputation as the 'small open economy' during the post-war period, did not enter its modern age with a free trade regime. After the end of the Napoleonic wars, its government enacted a strongly protective tariff law (1816), banning the import and export of some items. As a result of the high tariffs, an outright ban on imported finished cotton goods, and the deliberately low tariffs on raw cotton, cotton cloth production was greatly increased.140 Once again, it is interesting to note the similarity between this tariff regime and that used by Britain in the eighteenth century (see section 2.2.1), as well as those used by countries like Korea and Taiwan in the postwar period (see section 2.2.7).


pages: 333 words: 76,990

The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets by Peter Oppenheimer

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computer age, credit crunch, data science, debt deflation, decarbonisation, diversification, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, household responsibility system, housing crisis, index fund, invention of the printing press, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Live Aid, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, railway mania, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, stocks for the long run, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, tulip mania, yield curve

For example, the UK had many of the ingredients of a structural bear market in the early 1990s, when the economy had serious imbalances, a deep recession, and there had been a sharp fall in property prices and equities. In this case, the process was speeded up via a collapse in the exchange rate when sterling crashed out of the ERM.1 This is a more likely option in a relatively small open economy such as the UK (or Sweden, which had a similar experience at the time), but it is harder for a large and relatively closed economy such as the US, where the benefits of devaluation are less clear. Taken together, then, structural bear markets show the following characteristics: They are more savage in terms of magnitude and duration.


pages: 301 words: 77,626

Home: Why Public Housing Is the Answer by Eoin Ó Broin

Airbnb, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, financial deregulation, Future Shock, global macro, housing crisis, Housing First, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, low interest rates, mortgage debt, negative equity, open economy, passive investing, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, the built environment

The short statement acknowledged that the ‘over stimulation of the housing market is accepted as a key causal factor in the scale of the economic downturn.’66 With the painful benefit of hindsight the document’s authors were siding with the critical voices informing the 2004 NESC report by concluding that In a climate of low interest rates and rising incomes, a series of disastrous pro-cyclical policies led to a model that provided unprecedented growth, but it was a growth based not on foreign demand for our goods and services – as should be the case in a small open economy – or the productive use of investment capital to create sustainable employment. It was based on a mirage and a false assumption that the normal rules of supply and demand somehow did not apply in Ireland.67 The statement lamented ‘the consequences of encouraging people to choose their housing options on the basis of investment and yield rather than hearth and home’ and called for a ‘a new vision for the sector’ as fundamental to any economic recovery.


pages: 600 words: 72,502

When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession With Economic Efficiency by Roger L. Martin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, banking crisis, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, cloud computing, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, High speed trading, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Phillips curve, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The future is already here, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, uber lyft, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

In a complicated world, what seems a barrier to efficiency to one group of players is a necessary protection for the livelihoods of another group of players. For America, it probably is time to take a pause on further opening of its economy to more unfettered trade. It is the world’s biggest internal market and already the most open economy of any size in the world. America doesn’t need more free-trade deals. It needs to reestablish the faith of its citizens in democratic capitalism with more balance between pressure and friction when it comes to trade policy. Fight the Giants Antitrust policy was initiated with the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, which sought to counteract industry-based Pareto outcomes in which one participant gained such a dominant position that it would have the capacity to reap a disproportionate amount of the rewards from that industry.


pages: 248 words: 73,689

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

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It Divided Nations: Why Global Governance is Failing, and What We Can Do About It Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped our World and Will Define Our Future Globalization for Development The Case for Aid The Economics of Sustainable Development Economic Reform and Trade Modelling Economy-wide Reforms Trade Liberalization: Global Economic Implications Open Economies Trade: What’s at Stake? The Future of Agriculture Lessons from Brazil Making Race: The Politics and Economics of Racial Identity Contents List of Figures Preface 1 Introduction 2 Engines of Progress 3 Levelling Up 4 Divided Cities 5 Remote Work: The Threat to Cities 6 Cities, Cyberspace and the Future of Community 7 Beyond the Rich World 8 The Spectre of Disease 9 A Climate of Peril 10 Conclusion: Better Together Acknowledgements Notes Bibliography Index List of Figures Figure 1: More than half the world’s population now lives in cities Figure 2: Income dispersion across cities varies from country to country Figure 3: Rising sea levels will leave many cities under water Preface We live in tumultuous times.


pages: 859 words: 204,092

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom by Martin Jacques

Admiral Zheng, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, classic study, credit crunch, Dava Sobel, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Meghnad Desai, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, one-China policy, open economy, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price stability, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

In 1970 its export trade made up only 0.7 per cent of the world’s total: at the end of the seventies, China’s imports and exports together represented 12 per cent of its GDP, the lowest in the world. China’s economic impact on the rest of the world was minimal for two reasons: firstly, the country was very poor, and secondly, it was very closed. But since 1978 China has rapidly become one of the world’s most open economies. Its average import tariff rate will decline from 23.7 per cent in 2001 to 5.7 per cent in 2011, with most of that fall having already taken place.139 Although its trade dependency (the proportion of GDP accounted for by exports and imports) was less than 10 per cent in 1978, by 2004 it had risen to 70 per cent, much higher than that of other large countries.

Between 1980 and 2002, while China’s share of East Asian exports increased from 6 per cent to 25 per cent, Japan’s fell from 50 per cent to below 30 per cent; similarly, while China’s share of East Asian imports over the same period increased from 8 per cent to 21 per cent, Japan’s fell from 48 per cent to 27 per cent.45 Even at the peak of its economic power, Japan’s role was always limited by the fact that it steadfastly refused to open up its economy to exports from its neighbours (other than those from its own foreign subsidiaries) - or, indeed, to the rest of the world - so its influence was largely exercised by a combination of its own foreign direct investment in Japanese overseas subsidiaries, imports from those Japanese subsidiaries and Japanese exports to the region. In contrast China’s influence, because it has chosen to have an extremely open economy, is far more multifarious - as a market for the products of the region, as an exporter and as a multifaceted investor. Figure 24. Growing importance of Chinese market. Zhang Yunling, one of the architects of China’s new strategy, and Tang Shiping have described the aim as: ‘to make China a locomotive for regional growth by serving as a market for regional states and a provider of investment and technology’.46 The most obvious expression of this has been the way in which, in less than a decade, China has become one of - if not the - most important market for many countries in the region: in a few years’ time, it seems likely that it will be the single largest market for every country in the region.


pages: 286 words: 82,970

A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order by Richard Haass

access to a mobile phone, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, global pandemic, global reserve currency, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, immigration reform, invisible hand, low interest rates, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, no-fly zone, open economy, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, special drawing rights, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

In the banking arena, the so-called Basel Committee established standards (for example, for the amount of capital required to be kept on hand) that banks were encouraged to follow. Its work was reinforced and complemented by the Financial Stability Forum, a group created in 1999 by a dozen or so governments representing many of the world’s largest open economies. A decade later, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the forum became the Financial Stability Board, involving finance ministries and central banks of the G-20 countries and a few others. Again, the purpose was to develop and promote policies and “best practices” that would, if adopted by governments, help them prevent and mange risks to their economies and to the world financial system.28 The idea was to set in motion a race to the top that would encourage responsible behaviors, allowing a country to compete successfully in a world in which capital and investment would find their way not just to countries and institutions of high return but also to those of safety.


pages: 307 words: 82,680

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-fragile, bank run, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, labour market flexibility, land value tax, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, open economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Salesforce, Sam Altman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, universal basic income, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator, Zipcar

It used to be the case that as productivity rose, real (inflation-adjusted) wages rose, increasing aggregate demand (consumption). This no longer applies. Rising productivity is not being matched by rising average wages, slowing growth.1 Governments could try old-style incomes policies, through productivity bargaining. But this would be far harder in an open economy than it was in the 1960s, when it was tried extensively, with mixed results. Instead, households struggling with stagnant or falling wages will have greater resort to credit and debt, increasing the vulnerability of the economy to the bursting of debt bubbles. That is what triggered the 2007–8 crash and threatens to happen again.


Crisis and Dollarization in Ecuador: Stability, Growth, and Social Equity by Paul Ely Beckerman, Andrés Solimano

banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, currency peg, declining real wages, disintermediation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, income inequality, income per capita, labor-force participation, land reform, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open economy, pension reform, price stability, rent-seeking, school vouchers, seigniorage, trade liberalization, women in the workforce

“Ecuador: Estabilización, ingreso de capitales externos y conflictos de política macroeconomica.” Multiplica Working Paper. Quito, Ecuador. Kopits, George, E. Haindl, E. Ley, and J. Toro. 1999. “Ecuador: Modernización del Sistema Tributario. International Monetary Fund. Washington, D.C. Lane, P. 2002. “Exchange Rate Regimes and Monetary Policy in Small Open Economies.” In The Choice of Exchange Regime and Monetary Policy Rules. European Union. Forthcoming. Mancheno, Diego, J. Oleas, and P. Samaniego. 1999. “Aspectos teóricos y prácticos de la adopción de un sistema de convertibilidad en el Ecuador.” Notas Técnicas. Banco Central del Ecuador, Quito, Ecuador.


pages: 261 words: 86,905

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

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

The move away from neoliberalism is likely to involve higher rates of tax at the top end, dramatically increased education spending, and perhaps a rethinking of some of the ways in which capitalism can be inflected away from shareholder value towards models that include owners, managers, workers, and the surrounding community—a model that has been successful in, for instance, Germany. The provision of employment and training for apprentices is an explicit part of this. There will need to be a sharp increase in levels of social housing. The role model here is Singapore, which as well as consistently being voted the most open economy in the world—a beacon to free marketers everywhere—has the highest level of state and social housing in the world. The world capital of the free market is also the world capital of council houses. Not all the lessons of Singapore are about free markets. More generally, there will need to be a focus on material well-being in the round, and broader measures of quality of life than the mere narrow focus on GDP.


pages: 276 words: 82,603

Birth of the Euro by Otmar Issing

accounting loophole / creative accounting, behavioural economics, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, currency peg, currency risk, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, money market fund, moral hazard, oil shock, open economy, price anchoring, price stability, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Robert Solow, Y2K, yield curve

Source: Eurostat. GDP in PPS terms of 175.05 against the average of 100, lay far ahead of the tail-ender Portugal, with per capita GDP in PPS terms of 61.57. The main features of this new currency area can be outlined as follows. While previously the member countries could be described as predominantly small, open economies, the euro area as a whole, with export and import shares (as a percentage of GDP) of 13.6 per cent and 12.0 per cent respectively, represents a large, relatively closed economic area (the comparable figures for the USA are 8.5 per cent und 11.1 per cent). In terms of the structure of the economy, the differences compared with the USA were relatively small.


pages: 438 words: 84,256

The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival by Charles Goodhart, Manoj Pradhan

asset-backed security, banks create money, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, commodity super cycle, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, deglobalization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, job automation, Kickstarter, long term incentive plan, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, middle-income trap, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, rent control, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, special economic zone, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

Equally, it fails to account for other facts that stand at odds with this desultory narrative, namely an impressive record of productivity and fairly good wage growth under the circumstances. This chapter aims to rectify those shortcomings and provide a revisionist history of Japan’s economic evolution after the bursting of the asset bubble in the early 1990s. Yet it is inconceivable to think that any economy, particularly such an open economy as Japan, could escape the inexorable global forces that we have seen unleashed upon the world. If global factors are explicitly included in an era when they were so dominant, surely the interpretation itself must be transformed. In the simplest of terms, how could China’s ascent since the 1990s change everything in the world but have no role in explaining the evolution of Japan?


The Transformation Of Ireland 1900-2000 by Diarmaid Ferriter

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

For all the reforms in education, for example, an area utterly neglected until the 1960s, access to third-level education for the majority of the working class remained elusive. Joe Lee has rightly made much of the intellectual capacity to respond to new economic thinking and planning in the minds of politicians and public servants, but in a small open economy much of the wealth generated served to widen the gulf between rich and poor. Outside of the inevitable embracing of the free-trade philosophy, the political imagination was not particularly adventurous. Fine Gael had made significant gains in the general election of 1954 and had formed another coalition government, this time with the Labour Party and Clann na Talmhan, but struggled to counteract economic stagnation.

Unilateral tariff reductions in the years 1963 and 1964 set the tone for the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement of 1965, which Lemass had initiated in a letter to the British prime minister Harold Macmillan, by suggesting it would be useful in maintaining ‘a pace of reorganisation and development which will bring us, as soon as possible, to a sufficiently high degree of economic strength and competitiveness to keep our place in a world of freer trade and to assume, when the time comes, the obligations of membership of the [European] community’.10 The agreement was that all tariffs between the two countries would be phased out by 1970. Whatever about the technicalities of Anglo-Irish trade, it was the slowing down of human traffic that seemed to highlight the success and potential of a more open economy. The average annual emigration rate (per 1,000 of the population), which had been about 14 between 1951 and 1961, dropped to less than 5 between 1961 and 1971. While 44,427 emigrated in 1961, only 12,226 did so in 1963. By 1966 the population had risen by 66,000 above the 1961 level of 2.8 million, and by the early 1970s ‘the numbers immigrating remained over a sustained period higher than the numbers leaving’, as some of those who had emigrated in the 1950s returned with their families.

In the late 1980s, the top 10 per cent of households held one half of the total wealth of the country, and the top 5 per cent about 20–25 per cent.159 There was also a failure to tackle Ireland’s appalling transport, infrastructure and housing problems. A critic noted in 1998 that ‘if the recession of the 1980s brought too little criticism of Ireland’s dependent industrialisation strategy, the economic expansion of the 1990s brought even less critical thought’.160 External factors and the vulnerability of a small open economy also meant that predicting continuing spectacular growth rates was a risky business. Neither was there any attempt to tackle the monopoly privileges enjoyed by the elite in the legal and medical professions. ‘the atmosphere of a noisy real estate agency or pork belly futures market’ With regard to housing, it was ironic that a hundred years after the end of the Irish Land War, a native class of landowners and speculators aped many of the traits of the worst landlords of the nineteenth century.


pages: 346 words: 89,180

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

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

Most economic changes bring opportunities to those countries quick enough to respond to them. The shift to intangibles is no exception. There may well be a first-mover advantage to countries able to adapt quickly to the needs of an intangible economy. The policies required are most easily implemented in small, open economies with sufficient political cohesion and administrative competence to agree on goals quickly and execute them effectively—we have called our exemplar of this sort of country Ruritania. Unlike most of the recommendations in this chapter, the ideas that Ruritania adopt tend to be zero-sum games: they are based on the principle of attracting economic activity from other countries, and, to the extent that Ruritania gains, other countries lose out.


pages: 327 words: 90,542

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

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

Hyland, Deputy National Security Advisor to President Gerald Ford, noted, “protectionism is the ally of isolationism.”8 Europe too has many of the requirements of a closed economy. While individual European economies are modest in size, the EU constitutes over 25 percent of global GDP, making it the world's largest economic unit. The EU is a more open economy than the US, being the world's largest exporter and importer of goods and services. But around 75 percent of its trade is among member nations, aided by the absence of trade barriers and a common currency. Germany, the EU's largest economy and one of the world's largest exporters, sells over 60 percent of its products within the Eurozone.


pages: 344 words: 93,858

The Post-American World: Release 2.0 by Fareed Zakaria

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, National Debt Clock, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shock, open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The future is already here, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Washington Consensus, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

Beijing has not adopted the Japanese (or South Korean) path of development, which was an export-led strategy that kept the domestic market and society closed. Instead, China opened itself up to the world. (It did this partly because it had no choice, since it lacked the domestic savings of Japan or South Korea.) Now China’s trade-to-GDP ratio is 70 percent, which makes it one of the most open economies in the world. Procter & Gamble sells $5 billion worth of products a year in China, and familiar products like Head & Shoulders shampoo and Pampers diapers are extraordinarily popular with consumers there. Starbucks is opening thousands of stores in Greater China and expects the country to soon displace Japan as its biggest market outside the United States.


The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common by Alan Greenspan

addicted to oil, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, currency risk, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, equity premium, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, information security, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, oil shock, open economy, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, pets.com, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

Fabian socialism was still reflected in Britain's social safety net but, from my perspective, in its most diluted form. Britain's success with the free-market thrust of Thatcher and "New Labour" suggests that their GDP-enhancing reforms are likely to persevere through the next generation. Britain's evolution from the ossified economy of the years immediately following World War II to one of the most open economies in the world is reflected in the intellectual journey of Gordon Brown, who described his 283 More ebooks visit: http://www.ccebook.cn ccebook-orginal english ebooks This file was collected by ccebook.cn form the internet, the author keeps the copyright. THE M O D E S OF C A P I T A L I S M industrywide unions and wage negotiation at a national level.

Reality has not always matched this ideal, and discrimination against African Americans in particular forces us periodically to revisit the early constitutional debates about slavery and its violent resolution in the Civil War; we've come a long way, but we have a distance yet to travel. America's unrivaled protection of property rights has long attracted foreign investment to our shores. Some investors come in order to participate in a vibrant, open economy; others simply view the United States as a safe haven for their savings that is not available in their home country. As I shall explain, the ability of the American legal system to extend those cherished property rights to an economy predominantly driven by intellectual property will be a major challenge.


pages: 308 words: 99,298

Brexit, No Exit: Why in the End Britain Won't Leave Europe by Denis MacShane

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, fixed income, Gini coefficient, greed is good, illegal immigration, information security, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, labour mobility, liberal capitalism, low cost airline, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, post-truth, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reshoring, road to serfdom, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Thales and the olive presses, trade liberalization, transaction costs, women in the workforce

Instead she celebrated what she called ‘The quiet revolution that took place in our country just three months ago – a revolution in which millions of our fellow citizens stood up and said they were not prepared to be ignored anymore.’ But what of the half of Britain that voted against Brexit? Were they now to be ignored? The answer was not only ‘Yes’, but those British citizens who were proud of and indeed accepted the concept of European citizenship, of open borders and open economy and open society, in short a post-nationalist view of the world, were crudely insulted. Speaking to her party conference Mrs May told British people who had a wider view: ‘If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word “citizenship” means.’


pages: 381 words: 101,559

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Gobal Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, game design, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high net worth, income inequality, interest rate derivative, it's over 9,000, John Meriwether, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Myron Scholes, Network effects, New Journalism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, one-China policy, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, power law, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time value of money, too big to fail, value at risk, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

“A Multi-Horizon Scale for Volatility.” Working paper prepared for Centre d’Économie de la Sorbonne, March 3, 2008. Svensson, Lars E. O. “Escaping a Liquidity Trap and Deflation: The Foolproof Way and Others.” Working Paper No. 10195, National Bureau of Economic Research, December 2003. ———. “The Zero Bound in an Open Economy: A Foolproof Way of Escaping from a Liquidity Trap.” Working Paper No. 7957, National Bureau of Economic Research, October 2000. “Systematic Risk and the Redesign of Financial Regulation.” A Global Financial Stability Report, prepared for the International Monetary Fund, April 2010. Taylor, John B.


pages: 261 words: 103,244

Economists and the Powerful by Norbert Haring, Norbert H. Ring, Niall Douglas

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, buy and hold, central bank independence, collective bargaining, commodity trading advisor, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, diversified portfolio, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, illegal immigration, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, land bank, law of one price, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, moral hazard, new economy, obamacare, old-boy network, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Solow, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, shareholder value, short selling, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

This means that low-wage workers in the secondary market are supposed to cut their wages even more in order to create enough demand for their own labor and for the labor of those descending from the primary labor market. Most modern neoclassical theorists will admit that the wage cuts needed to achieve this can be steep. There is no guarantee at all that you can live on the market-clearing wage (Kaufman 2009). In an open economy with exports, external demand might eventually solve the problem at low enough wages, but there is certainly no guarantee. With flexible exchange rates, the exchange rate often appreciates if wages and prices go down. This can cancel out the improvement in competitiveness brought about by lower wages.


pages: 371 words: 98,534

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy by George Magnus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business process, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, corporate governance, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, Malacca Straits, means of production, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old age dependency ratio, open economy, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, speech recognition, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade route, urban planning, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

If its deficit fell, it might have a mathematically positive impact on GDP, but the US would also pay a heavy price in terms of lost economic growth, higher costs and prices, and unemployment. Yet China has more to lose. Looked at another way, US exports and imports together amount to about 28 per cent of GDP, whereas in China, they account for over 40 per cent of GDP. China is, therefore, a more open economy and more sensitive to world trade and what its major trade partners are doing. The bottom line is that US exports to China amount to barely 1 per cent of US GDP and 8 per cent of total exports, while China’s to the US amount to 4 per cent of Chinese GDP and a fifth of total exports. Most of what America sells to China is made up of aircraft and parts, soya beans and other agricultural products, cars, semiconductors, industrial and electrical machinery, and oil and plastics, whereas China ships the other way mainly mobile phones and household goods, computers and accessories, telecommunications equipment, toys and games, furniture and bedding, toys and sports equipment and footwear and clothing.


Data and the City by Rob Kitchin,Tracey P. Lauriault,Gavin McArdle

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic management, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, create, read, update, delete, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, dematerialisation, digital divide, digital map, digital rights, distributed ledger, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, floating exchange rates, folksonomy, functional programming, global value chain, Google Earth, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, loose coupling, machine readable, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, nowcasting, open economy, openstreetmap, OSI model, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, place-making, power law, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, semantic web, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, software studies, statistical model, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, text mining, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, urban planning, urban sprawl, web application

Networking, knowledge and regional policies Edited by Nicola Bellini, Mike Danson and Henrik Halkier 58 Community-based Entrepreneurship and Rural Development Creating favourable conditions for small businesses in Central Europe Matthias Fink, Stephan Loidl and Richard Lang 57 Creative Industries and Innovation in Europe Concepts, measures and comparative case studies Edited by Luciana Lazzeretti 56 Innovation Governance in an Open Economy Shaping regional nodes in a globalized world Edited by Annika Rickne, Staffan Laestadius and Henry Etzkowitz 55 Complex Adaptive Innovation Systems Relatedness and transversality in the evolving region Philip Cooke 54 Creating Knowledge Locations in Cities Innovation and integration challenges Willem van Winden, Luis de Carvalho, Erwin van Tujil, Jeroen van Haaren and Leo van den Berg 53 Regional Development in Northern Europe Peripherality, marginality and border issues Edited by Mike Danson and Peter De Souza 52 Promoting Silicon Valleys in Latin America Luciano Ciravegna 51 Industrial Policy Beyond the Crisis Regional, national and international perspectives Edited by David Bailey, Helena Lenihan and Josep-Maria Arauzo-Carod 50 Just Growth Inclusion and prosperity in America’s metropolitan regions Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor 49 Cultural Political Economy of Small Cities Edited by Anne Lorentzen and Bas van Heur 48 The Recession and Beyond Local and regional responses to the downturn Edited by David Bailey and Caroline Chapain 47 Beyond Territory Edited by Harald Bathelt, Maryann Feldman and Dieter F.


The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky

anti-communist, borderless world, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, joint-stock company, open economy, spice trade, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

But for twenty years it had been losing money and the government had been making up the difference. At its height, the steel mill was losing more than $1 billion each year. Europe made the abandoning of government protection to industry a precondition for Spain’s entry into the European Economic Community. In any event, it would have been impossible to have preserved the system in an open economy. The Spanish market would have been overrun with European goods. While most so-called rust belt areas have turned to service industries, when the PNV-dominated Basque government took over the management of the Basque economy, it wanted to preserve industry. “The Basque government did not want to lose the industrial spirit of Vizcaya,” said Jon Zabalía, a Vizcayan PNV legislator.


Nation-Building: Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq by Francis Fukuyama

Berlin Wall, business climate, colonial rule, conceptual framework, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, Gunnar Myrdal, informal economy, land reform, managed futures, microcredit, open economy, operational security, rolling blackouts, Seymour Hersh, unemployed young men

Afghanistan’s political and social institutions, under greater international scrutiny, probably stand a better chance of reform than at any time previously. A liberal state is usually felt to be best suited to fostering a sustainable political system and economic growth in Afghanistan. Individual freedoms, a vibrant civil society, and an open economy are prescribed and several familiar benchmarks indicating progress have been laid out. The United States and other Western countries tend to put a high premium on holding elections to provide greater legitimacy for those in authority. Under the best of circumstances, elections can be a means of coalition-building and reconciliation.


pages: 416 words: 106,582

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking by John Brockman

23andMe, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biofilm, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data acquisition, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Garrett Hardin, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, market design, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, power law, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Satyajit Das, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, security theater, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, sugar pill, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Populaces recognize that economic middlemen (particularly ethnic minorities who specialize in that niche, such as Jews, Armenians, overseas Chinese, and expatriate Indians) are not social parasites whose prosperity comes at the expense of their hosts but positive-sum-game creators who enrich everyone at once. Countries recognize that international trade doesn’t benefit their trading partner to their own detriment but benefits them both and turn away from beggar-thy-neighbor protectionism to open economies which (as classical economists noted) make everyone richer and (as political scientists have recently shown) discourage war and genocide. Warring countries lay down their arms and split the peace dividend rather than pursuing Pyrrhic victories. Granted, some human interactions really are zero-sum; competition for mates is a biologically salient example.


pages: 364 words: 99,897

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

They have transformed from countries where famines killed tens of millions of people during the 20th century to two of the largest and most vibrant economies in the world. Their futures will see transformative change every bit as exceptional as the past three decades have. For decades, China demonstrated that a somewhat open economy and a closed political system can achieve growth by being home to knowledge workers and manufacturing centers. But it is now seeking to prove that it can provide the conditions for innovation of its own. To this end, the core question for China’s future is whether its model of relative economic openness but tight political control can foster real innovation.


pages: 358 words: 106,729

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram Rajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, diversification, Edward Glaeser, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine readable, market bubble, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, microcredit, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, Real Time Gross Settlement, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seminal paper, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

Over nearly four decades, only five different models of the Ambassador car were produced, and the sole differences between them seemed to be the headlights and the shape of the grill. After growing rapidly just after independence, the Indian economy got stuck at a per capita real growth rate of about 1 percent—dubbed the “Hindu” rate of growth. Like Korea or Taiwan, India should have made the switch toward exports and a more open economy in the early 1960s. But because the protected Indian domestic market was large, at least relative to that of the typical late developer, firms were perfectly happy exploiting their home base despite government attempts to encourage exports. This is not to say that government efforts to change were particularly strenuous, especially given that protected firms were an important source of revenue to the ruling party for fighting elections.


pages: 267 words: 106,340

Europe old and new: transnationalism, belonging, xenophobia by Ray Taras

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, collective bargaining, Danilo Kiš, energy security, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, North Sea oil, open economy, postnationalism / post nation state, Potemkin village, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, World Values Survey

What makes a people and a nation is a unique history and heritage, language and literature, songs and stories, traditions and customs, blood, soil and the mystic chords of memory. The EU is a thing of paper, an intellectual construct. Unlike a nation, it has no heart and no soul.” Box 3.4. Europe’s Mission in the World “The world needs the European method of putting together different national practices. The world needs the European principles of open societies and open economies. The world needs the European way of linking the imperative of freedom to the idea of solidarity and justice. The world needs the European priority in tackling climate change and promoting sustainable development with respect for our planet. By promoting its values and its interests, the Union not only delivers to its citizens but also helps the world to be a better place.”


pages: 355 words: 63

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics by William R. Easterly

Andrei Shleifer, business climate, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, endogenous growth, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Money creation, Network effects, New Urbanism, open economy, PalmPilot, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Interference with trade distorts prices so that inefficient producers will get subsidized. This distortion could affect growth because inefficient resource use lowers the rate of return to investing in thefuture.14 The free trade arguments are now supported by theexperience of the pastfew decades, whichhas found that more open economies are richer and grow faster. Openness to trade has many dimensions, and all of these dimensions are positively associated with growth. Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner defined countries as closed if they had any of the following: nontariff barriers covering 40 percent or more of trade, average tariff rates of 40 percent or more, a black market premium of 20 percent or more, a socialist economic system, or a state monopoly on major exports.


pages: 408 words: 108,985

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

Nationalist figures like Marine Le Pen in France, President Andrzej Duda in Poland, and Italian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini have exploited the discontent with globalization by advocating nativist, anti-immigrant policies. Their economic premises are the opposite of those that define Europe. The EU was founded partially on the premise that closer integration—more movement of goods, services, and people—would strengthen the continent. Europe has had a decades-long, abiding faith that open economies grow better. The key messages of this chapter are different from what we might have written before the rise of Trump. But we should understand that the grievances to which he gave voice will not go away when he leaves office. These feelings are deep-seated and reflect a failure to manage globalization in a way that benefits most citizens.


pages: 363 words: 109,077

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

Using the levers of democracy, Australians and their counterparts in the other advanced Commonwealth countries have engineered a social contract in which the state provides basic necessities and keeps corporations from being the administrators of welfare programs. This has prepared them well for the 2020s, and as the United States eyes the future, it would do well to look not just to the Nordics but also to its peers in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Each offers a piece of the puzzle for balancing an open economy with the support citizens need to be able to take risks and thrive in an interconnected world. THE CHOICES IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD So far, we have looked at countries that have firmly chosen their approach to the 2020s. These nations have established 21st-century social contracts that will serve as models for the rest of the world.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

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

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

You could produce as well in one country (the one with the lowest combined production cost), ship the finished product, and sell it in another. It led to the rapidly advancing globalization of the 1990s and 2000s, which benefited many countries but harmed industrial communities in the West—something they could do little about. But that doesn't mean countries are powerless in the face of technologically driven globalization. Small, open economies such as Singapore, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, who often trade goods worth well over 100 percent of their GDP, understand they live or die by their ability to adapt to the latest technologies driving globalization. If they invest in these technologies, or the skills to harness them, they can come out on the winning side.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

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

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

You could produce as well in one country (the one with the lowest combined production cost), ship the finished product, and sell it in another. It led to the rapidly advancing globalization of the 1990s and 2000s, which benefited many countries but harmed industrial communities in the West—something they could do little about. But that doesn't mean countries are powerless in the face of technologically driven globalization. Small, open economies such as Singapore, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, who often trade goods worth well over 100 percent of their GDP, understand they live or die by their ability to adapt to the latest technologies driving globalization. If they invest in these technologies, or the skills to harness them, they can come out on the winning side.


pages: 338 words: 104,684

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy by Stephanie Kelton

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, discrete time, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Food sovereignty, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, new economy, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price anchoring, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, trade liberalization, urban planning, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, zero-sum game

Noureddine Taboubi, “Strikes Overturn Wage Cuts, but IMF Blindness Risks Ruining Tunisia,” Bretton Woods Project, April 4, 2019, www.brettonwoodsproject.org/2019/04/strikes-overturn-wage-bill-but-imf-blindness-risks-ruining-tunisia/. 25. John T. Harvey, Currencies, Capital Flows and Crises: A Post Keynesian Analysis of Exchange Rate Determination (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2009). 26. Bill Mitchell, “Modern Monetary Theory in an Open Economy,” Modern Monetary Theory, October 13, 2009, bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=5402. 27. Predictably, the Volcker shock also devastated US workers, shutting down factories in the Midwest and ending manufacturing competitiveness with countries like Japan. Had the US established a job guarantee employment policy to automatically stabilize the economy at full employment—as MMTers and our forebears would have recommended and as many US civil rights activists were recommending—perhaps people around the world could have avoided this catastrophe. 28.


pages: 368 words: 102,379

Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick by J. David McSwane

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, global pandemic, global supply chain, Internet Archive, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, ransomware, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, uber lyft, Y2K

See also Fillakit LLC company hired for, 9 failure of early, 183 Navarro’s March 2020 memo to Trump and, 82 PCR tests, 182 test media and, 182–183 Texas Abbott, Greg and, 171–180 attitude toward masks in, 157 “bathroom” bill in, 174–175 COVID-19 deaths in, 178, 180 Delta variant in, 259–260 Fillakit LLC and, 186 lockdown, 155, 176–178 mask mandates in, 177 mask repackaging operation in, 155–169 opening economy too soon, 8–9 “Operation Jade Helm 15” and, 173–174 Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) fraud scheme in, 197 vaccinations in, 259 weak governor system in, 171–172 Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM), 161, 162, 165, 166 Texas State Guard, 174 Thailand, 28 Thompson, Marilyn, 99 3M brokers working with, 127 distributors and, 104 mask production, 42, 46, 52, 117 mask production and, 24 Project Airbridge and, 150 Zelonka, Tim and, 136 3M N95 masks about, 4–5, 68–69 broker’s direct buy from, 127 cost on Amazon, 42 counterfeits, 69 counterfeits/fraudulent, 69 design on, 68–69 found at Home Depot, 33 Kadlec entertaining solicitation about, 47 price of, 42 proof of life videos and, 110, 125–126 Romano, Ronald and, 66–68, 70 Stewart, Robert Jr. and, 3, 4, 5, 211 Three Percenters, 227 Three Seconds Until Midnight (Hatfill), 35, 82 Tokarz, Bernie, 76–77 transgender students, Texas “bathroom bill” and, 174 Treasury Department, 198 treatment anthrax, 7, 18–19 during the Great Influenza, 120–121 hydrogen peroxide, 221–222 of Trump, 225–226 Trump, Donald/Trump administration Abbott, Greg and, 174 Bannon, Steve and, 32 belated action by, 8 Bowen, Mike on, 32 CARES Act and, 86 conference call with governors, 50 conspiracist ideologies during, 219 downplaying threat of coronavirus, 39, 41 hydroxychloroquine and, 123 January 6th insurrection and, 227–228 misleading the public, 42 Navarro, Peter and, 31, 80 Navarro’s memo to, March 1, 2020, 81–82 receiving treatment for COVID, 225–226 Slaoui, Moncef and, 234–235 spending to address the Covid pandemic, 2 on testing, 47 on war against COVID-19, 65–66 The Truth About COVID-19 (Mercola), 222 “The Truth About Vaccines 2020,” 222–223 TTAC Publishing, 224 Tukay, Joseph M.G., 120 Türeci, Özlem, 233 Twitter, 125, 126, 128, 223 Tyson Foods, 10 U UDECM, 214 unemployment, 11, 59, 258 University of Pennsylvania, 231–232, 233 unvaccinated people, 261.


pages: 1,066 words: 273,703

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

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

In Thailand, following the “judicial coup” of December 2008, a new government took office, closely associated with the Bangkok establishment, the royal family and the military. It was headed by Abhisit Vejjajiva, who was educated at Eton and Oxford. Given the impact of the crisis on Thailand’s highly open economy and his need to build legitimacy, Abhisit immediately embarked on a stimulus program. The first phase, announced in January 2009, amounted to 116.7 billion baht, or 1.3 percent of GDP, with priority given to popular consumption, including “saving the nation checks” distributed by way of the Social Security Administration, bonuses for senior citizens and subsidies for public education.

“Brad Delong: The Democrats’ Line in the Sand,” Economist’s View, June 30, 2008, http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2008/06/brad-delong-the.html. 41. L R. Jacobs and D. King, Fed Power: How Finance Wins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 42. Minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting, June 29–30, 2004, https://www.federalreserve.gov/fomc/minutes/20040630.htm. 43. The so-called Mundell-Fleming model of open economy macroeconomics originated already in the 1960s, see J. M. Boughton, “On the Origins of the Fleming-Mundell Model” (IMF Staff Papers 50, 2003), 1–9. 44. B. Bernanke, “The Global Saving Glut and the US Current Account Deficit,” No. 77, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (US), 2005. 45.


pages: 437 words: 113,173

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It Divided Nations: Why Global Governance Is Failing, and What We Can Do About It Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future Globalization for Development: Meeting New Challenges The Case for Aid The Economics of Sustainable Development Economic Reform, Trade and Agricultural Development Modelling Economy-wide Reforms Trade Liberalization: Global Economic Implications Open Economies The Future of Agriculture Economic Crisis: Lessons from Brazil Making Race About the Authors IAN GOLDIN is Professor of Globalization and Director of the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford. He was Vice President of the World Bank, Chief Executive of the Development Bank of Southern Africa and an adviser to President Nelson Mandela.


pages: 474 words: 120,801

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moises Naim

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deskilling, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, intangible asset, intermodal, invisible hand, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megacity, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Even the economic crash of 2008 failed to reverse the trend.48 As advanced economies were crashing, it became fashionable to predict that the natural reaction of these governments was to protect jobs and companies behind higher barriers to imports. That did not happen. The same was true about the possibility that countries would impose limits to the entry of foreign investors. That, too, didn’t happen. The truly global movement toward relatively free, open economies with broad capital markets and limited state ownership is one of the well-told tales of the last generation. With it often comes the caution that at some point the pendulum might swing back—if not fully, then to a considerable extent. And indeed, it might appear at first glance that with the global recession of 2008–2009 came a swing back toward more government regulation and control in key industries.


pages: 484 words: 120,507

The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel by Nicholas Ostler

barriers to entry, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, open economy, precautionary principle, Republic of Letters, Scramble for Africa, statistical model, trade route, upwardly mobile, Wayback Machine

This means that the sentences are not only ungrammatical and truncated, but often incomprehensible, especially to foreigners. Classic examples would be “You got money, sure can buy one” or “This is my one,” derived from zhe shi wo de. The ability to speak good English is a distinct advantage in terms of doing business and communicating with the world. This is especially important for a hub city and an open economy like ours. If we speak a corrupted form of English that is not understood by others, we will lose a key competitive advantage. My concern is that if we continue to speak Singlish, it will over time become Singapore’s common language. (Goh Chok Tong, at the launch of the “Speak Good English” Movement, April 29, 2000) In the Philippines, money is being spent to improve the quality of English on citizens’ lips: Education Secretary Fe Hidalgo said her department has allocated 581 million pesos to implement its English-proficiency program among teachers, saying the results of a recent English-proficiency test among them was not very encouraging.


pages: 411 words: 114,717

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

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

Indian socialist ideals heavily influenced the founders of independent Sri Lanka, and state spending came to be seen as a tool to deliver economic justice to Sinhalese. At its peak in the 1970s, state spending accounted for 59 percent of GDP, and four in ten Sri Lankans worked for the government, an extraordinarily high number. But by the late 1990s even the main left-leaning party, the SLFP, was moving toward a more modern development model built on an open economy and trade liberalization. State spending has fallen to about 30 percent of GDP today, and most parties agree this is movement in the right direction. Ultimately, the economic impact of Sri Lanka’s civil war was relatively mild despite the personal suffering of the people it swept up. According to USAID research, a typical civil war of fifteen-year duration reduces national GDP by around 30 percent, and it typically takes a decade just to recover the prewar levels of income.


pages: 573 words: 115,489

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow by Tim Jackson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, biodiversity loss, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, Philip Mirowski, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, secular stagnation, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, Works Progress Administration, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

In a closed economy – one without international trade – this would mean that the total outstanding national debt would always be equal to the net financial assets of the private sector. And it wouldn’t be possible to reduce public sector borrowing without simultaneously reducing the net lending of the private sector. At the global level, where the economy is of course closed, this must always remain the case. In open economies, which trade with each other constantly, reducing public sector borrowing can sometimes go hand in hand with increasing the net lending of the private sector, but only when there is a positive trade balance.21 This is one of the reasons why a country like Germany, with a strong trade balance, was able to reduce its public deficit in the aftermath of the crisis, even as private sector firms were seeking to shore up their balance sheets.


pages: 380 words: 116,919

Britain's Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation by Brendan Simms

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Corn Laws, credit crunch, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, guns versus butter model, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, oil shock, open economy, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, éminence grise

In the sixteenth century, this was the fear of Philip II; in the seventeenth century, the threat of Louis XIV; in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was Revolutionary and Napoleonic France; in the twentieth century, it was Imperial and Nazi Germany, and then the Soviet Union. In each case, Britain provided what would now be called ‘public goods’: the maintenance of the balance of power and, later, an open economy and liberal international system. As the British diplomat Eyre Crowe wrote in 1907: Second only to the ideal of independence, nations have always cherished the right of free intercourse and trade in the world’s markets, and in proportion as England champions the principle of the largest measure of general freedom of commerce, she undoubtedly strengthens her hold on the interested friendship of other nations, at least to the extent of making them less apprehensive of naval supremacy in the hands of a free trade England than they would in the face of a predominant protectionist power.’41 It was ‘empire by invitation’.42 Third, there is the resilience of the British constitutional model, which has not been seriously challenged from within for hundreds of years.


pages: 342 words: 114,118

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, British Empire, centre right, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, late capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, Washington Consensus, young professional, zero-sum game

In America, national fervor about terrorism had been marshaled by the Bush administration to replace the sense of purpose that we once had found in opposing Communism during the Cold War; in Hungary, national fervor was marshaled by Orban to fill the chasm that had opened up after the end of the Cold War, only the enemies were the forces of globalization encroaching from abroad and his political opponents at home. * * * — In 2008, the bottom fell out of the global economy after American-made financial schemes triggered the financial crisis. Hungary was hit particularly hard, with one of the most open economies in Europe and without the deep reserves of capital that allowed Americans to avoid collapse on a similar scale. Because of foreign debts and its swollen budget deficits, Hungary was forced to turn to the International Monetary Fund to stabilize its finances—a dynamic that added humiliation to the economic injury.


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

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

Here is a world scaling up. An accelerated generation of big ideas is an externality of this process. As we entered the new era after 1970, nations and peoples began to converge on the frontier. Opportunities for the previously marginalised started appearing in burgeoning cities, connected digital spaces, opening economies and recently empowered universities. But only in the second and third decades of the twenty-first century has this fully begun to manifest itself in terms of the frontier. Ideas take time. Despite decades of growth and development, it was only after the Second World War that the US hit full pre-eminence.


pages: 412 words: 116,685

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple Newton, augmented reality, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, game design, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, hype cycle, intermodal, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, non-fungible token, open economy, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Planet Labs, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, satellite internet, self-driving car, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, Y2K

While many games have virtual economies that enable users to buy, sell, trade, or earn virtual goods, this functionality exists in support of play and as part of the publisher’s revenue model. As a result, these publishers tend to manage in-game economies by fixing prices and exchange rates, limiting what can be sold or traded, and almost never allowing users to “cash out” into real-world currency. Open economies, unrestrained trading, and interoperation into third-party titles all make creating a sustainable “game” much more difficult. The promise of profit naturally brings about work-like incentives for players, but these can erode fun—the game’s very purpose. And a level playing field for competition, also part of what makes playing a game fun, can be easily undermined by an ability to buy items that otherwise had to be earned.


Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap Between Latin America and the United States by Francis Fukuyama

Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business climate, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, crony capitalism, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, land reform, land tenure, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, New Urbanism, oil shock, open economy, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

The quality of democracy is severely limited by persistent and pervasive inequality.38 As we have argued, the high-stakes politics derived from the growing distance between the haves and the have-nots in Latin America are incompatible with the compromises and give-and-take accommodations that are necessary to establish firm foundations in young democracies. The possibilities for rapid growth and development are compromised because citizens do not have the skill sets to participate and compete in open economies. And for the region, competitiveness is key to improving living standards, attracting foreign investment, and escaping the natural resource curse of continued dependence on highly volatile commodity and mineral exports. According to Karl, the “commodity lottery” remains the fundamental basis for the vicious cycle of unequal development in the region, and mitigating inequality remains the central task that policymakers must address.39 She states that “this winner-loser setup is a self-reinforcing economic and political dynamic based on the concentration of both assets and power, the institutionalized bias this creates in political structures, and the permanent exclusion of large segments of the population.”40 Until this challenge is met, high-stakes politics will continue to dominate the scene.


pages: 413 words: 119,379

The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth by Tom Burgis

Airbus A320, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, financial engineering, flag carrier, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, Livingstone, I presume, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, purchasing power parity, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

A November 2008 cable from the US embassy in Abuja, published in September 2011 by WikiLeaks, reported, ‘Ribadu also expressed concern for his former EFCC colleague and friend, Ibrahim Magu; he claims Magu is in danger because of his specific knowledge of the President’s relationship with Dahiru Mangal (an influential wealthy northern businessman who is currently under investigation and has ties to the Yar’Adua family and administration) and a money laundering operation which fronts as a legitimate company.’ ‘Nigeria: Further Harassment of Former Efcc Chair Ribadu’, 25 November 2008, WikiLeaks, www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/​08ABUJA2307_a.html. 12. Jan L. van Zanden, The Economic History of The Netherlands 1914–1995: A Small Open Economy in the ‘Long’ Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 1997), 165. 13. A Southern African Development Community study from 2000, cited in Economic Commission for Africa, ‘Minerals and Africa’s Development: The International Study Group Report on Africa’s Mineral Regimes’, November 2011, www.uneca.org/sites/default/files​/publications/mineral_africa​_development_report_eng.pdf. 14.


World Cities and Nation States by Greg Clark, Tim Moonen

active transport: walking or cycling, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, business climate, clean tech, congestion charging, corporate governance, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, driverless car, financial independence, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gentrification, global supply chain, global value chain, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, managed futures, megacity, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open economy, Pearl River Delta, rent control, Richard Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

In 2011, the national apparatus approved the merger of Moscow’s two exchanges, the RTS and the Micex, to simplify the market structure. Plans also exist to standardise tax rates for foreign‐born non‐residents and to abolish VAT on margin payments, REPO and derivatives operations. In 2012, Russia finally joined the WTO, a gesture signalling that Russia (and therefore Moscow) is an open economy with a sound institutional framework. Individual investment accounts were introduced from 2015 to boost transparency of financial procedures (Goriaev, 2008; Moscow City Government, 2014a). While Moscow is an emerging global city with an advanced corporate sector, its status as a key centre for business is periodically undermined by federal foreign policy which heightens geopolitical tensions in the region.


pages: 521 words: 118,183

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

It’s time for Silicon Valley to course-correct the long-held and false assumption that it’s possible to separate economics and politics, when China is the only major country in the world that has no separation between the two. It’s time to pick a side. More than that, it’s time for our two coasts to stop fighting each other and recognize that we face a common foe—the techno-authoritarians in Beijing, Moscow, and elsewhere who threaten to undermine the open societies and open economies upon which we all depend. To win this war, we need to unmute ourselves, rediscover the spirit of shared effort that helped make Silicon Valley the envy of the world, and do what America does best: build the future. I. It should be noted that leaks—and even concerns about foreign espionage—have led to more siloed organizations, while an influx of government types have brought with them a top-down approach.


pages: 1,205 words: 308,891

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

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

The philosopher Karl Popper called the trade-oriented novelty of the modern world the “open society,” and the politico-economic theorists Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast call it the “open-access” society.8 The ORDO liberals of pre- and postwar Germany called it “a competitive order” or a “social market economy” (which, however, they believed required a strong government to keep it from descending into monopolies, as indeed it had in Germany).9 Whatever it is called, such a society, thronging with free conversations easily joined, made for a creativity that disturbed the rules of the game—rules designed, unsurprisingly, by the elite in favor of the old rich. The open economy created numerous nouveaux riches, such as James Watt and Robert Fulton. Both eventually failed to protect their monopolies. Fernand Braudel argued to the contrary that capitalism was inherently and permanently monopolistic. But les nouveaux hommes were themselves competed against by still newer rich, to the benefit, in the third act, of us all, à la Schumpeter and Nordhaus.

“The expansion of capitalism,” wrote Baechler in 1971, “owes its origins and raison d’être to political anarchy.”26 “The plurality of small states in Europe,” Macfarlane argues, “autonomous but linked by a common history, religion, and elite language, almost incessantly at war and, when not at war, in fierce cultural and social competition, was the ideal context for rapid productive and ideological evolution.”27 “In purely dialectical fashion,” wrote Mokyr in 2002, following a logic devised by Schumpeter, “technological progress creates [vested interests] that eventually destroy it. . . . For a set of fragmented and open economies . . . this result does not hold.”28 Think of the Reading of print, the Reformation, the glories of a Dutch Revolt beset on every side—three of the Four Rs. Open source. In the way that American cities and states compete for corporate headquarters—the Tiebout Effect I’ve mentioned—the Spanish crown in the 1490s competed with France, Portugal, England, and the Dukedom of Medina Celi for the services of Christoforo Columbo, admittedly in a competition less than fierce.


Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jones Act, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, microcredit, moral hazard, negative emissions, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, open borders, open economy, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, statistical model, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Even in the best-functioning market economies, this kind of insurance can’t be bought; while in developed countries the government provides some unemployment insurance, in most developing countries workers are left to fend for themselves. That is why trade liberalization requires more than just onetime assistance to move from the old industries to the new. More open economies may be subject to all manner of shocks—domestic firms, for instance, may find it hard to compete with an onslaught of imports that suddenly become cheaper when a foreign country devalues its currency, as in a crisis. When Korea’s currency was devalued, Korean steel exports to the United States increased, and American steelworkers complained.


pages: 483 words: 141,836

Red-Blooded Risk: The Secret History of Wall Street by Aaron Brown, Eric Kim

Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, Atul Gawande, backtesting, Basel III, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, book value, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, central bank independence, Checklist Manifesto, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, fail fast, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, global macro, illegal immigration, implied volatility, independent contractor, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market clearing, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, pre–internet, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, special drawing rights, statistical arbitrage, stochastic volatility, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tail risk, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Bayes, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve

Worse, debasement was a chronic problem. This is true everywhere precious metal money is used, but it was particularly severe in Holland at this time for several reasons. The Thirty Years War required enormous expenditures, which were often financed by debasement of coins. Holland had a small, open economy, meaning that coins flowed into it from all over Europe; when people send coins, they send the lightest ones, the most debased ones. Finally, central authorities were weak in Holland, so individual state banks and independent mints were able to get away with more debasement than was tolerated in other countries.


pages: 442 words: 130,526

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age by James Crabtree

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, business climate, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, Joseph Schumpeter, land bank, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, Meghnad Desai, middle-income trap, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, special economic zone, spectrum auction, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism, young professional

It was only after Independence that Jawaharlal Nehru, a cerebral Cambridge-educated lawyer and the nation’s first prime minister, began to abandon a heritage as a trading power that stretched back two thousand years. The point is that these decades of self-imposed quarantine were the exception. India is now a remarkably globalized nation once more. Rather than struggling to scrape together foreign exchange, it holds hundreds of billions of dollars in reserves. It is on some measures a more open economy than China, which began to liberalize roughly a decade earlier. India now trades more goods and services as a proportion of GDP than its larger Asian neighbor, and far more than America. The value of that trade has rocketed from just seventeen percent of GDP when its economic reforms began 1991, to around sixty percent today.11 It attracts as much foreign direct investment as China did at the peak of its growth in the mid-2000s.12 Nearly half of all the freely traded shares on Indian stock markets are owned by foreigners.13 India’s leading companies have spread out around the world, too, buying up everything from African mines to British steelmakers.


pages: 497 words: 143,175

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

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

In other words, the two new economic powers would share the U.S. burden by opening their markets to the poor nations who needed to pay for their oil imports. The blueprint was a variant of Keynesian multiplier-analysis. Keynesian deficits increased a nation’s GDP by increasing the demand for goods. International Keynesianism worked slightly differently. In a world of open economies, import leakage reduced the domestic multiplier of additional government spending or tax cuts. Thus, some of a U.S. stimulus would be used by Americans to purchase foreign goods, thus boosting the exporter’s economy. If all of the richer countries raised government spending or cut taxes, no one nation would assume the burden, as the United States did in the postwar world.


pages: 466 words: 127,728

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, complexity theory, computer age, credit crunch, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jitney, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, operational security, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, risk-adjusted returns, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Stuxnet, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, working-age population, yield curve

“The Birthday Party.” New Yorker, February 11, 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/02/11/080211fa_fact_stewart. Subbotin, Alexander. “A Multi-Horizon Scale for Volatility.” Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne, working paper, March 3, 2008. Swensson, Lars E. O. “The Zero Bound in an Open Economy: A Foolproof Way of Escaping from a Liquidity Trap.” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper no. 7957, October 2000, http://www.nber.org/papers/w7957. ———. “Escaping from a Liquidity Trap and Deflation: The Foolproof Way and Others.” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper no. 10195, December 2003, http://www.nber.org/papers/w10195.


pages: 418 words: 128,965

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

But whatever the motive behind Laemmle and Fox’s instinct to fight the Trust, the effect was to blow open a new and incredibly powerful medium of expression and one with greater economic potential than had been allowed before. The film industry, once cracked, would be an extreme example of how an open industrial market and an open economy of ideas can overlap entirely. As the battle between the Independents and the Trust wore on, the Trust, perhaps increasingly desperate, began taking the law into their own hands. In came the private enforcers, on the theory that “though an injunction will not stop a man from making films, a broken camera will.”24 THE OUTCOME In 1912 it was by no means clear whether Hollywood or the East Coast Trust would dominate the future of American film (nor, for that matter, whether American film would be dominant in relation to European).


pages: 515 words: 142,354

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Alex Hyde-White

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, pensions crisis, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, working-age population

A good regulatory regime would ban such financial products. 21 That is debt undertaken by a particular country within the eurozone. 22 The result is more general: it applies to any mobile factor of production. 23 See the discussion in chapter 7 on how the ECB secretly forced Ireland to do so. 24 Interestingly, this problem has long been recognized in the theory of fiscal federalism/local public goods. See, for instance, J. E. Stiglitz, “Theory of Local Public Goods,” in The Economics of Public Services, ed. M. S. Feldstein and R. P. Inman, (London: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 274–333; J. E. Stiglitz, “Public Goods in Open Economies with Heterogeneous Individuals,” in Locational Analysis of Public Facilities, ed. J. F. Thisse and H. G. Zoller (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1983), pp. 55–78; and J. E. Stiglitz, “The Theory of Local Public Goods Twenty-Five Years after Tiebout: A Perspective,” in Local Provision of Public Services: The Tiebout Model After Twenty-Five Years, ed.


pages: 537 words: 144,318

The Invisible Hands: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Bubbles, Crashes, and Real Money by Steven Drobny

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, commodity super cycle, commodity trading advisor, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, debt deflation, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, equity risk premium, family office, fiat currency, fixed income, follow your passion, full employment, George Santayana, global macro, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inventory management, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Minsky moment, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, North Sea oil, open economy, peak oil, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discovery process, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, savings glut, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical arbitrage, stochastic volatility, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, survivorship bias, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two and twenty, unbiased observer, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

Quantitative filtering takes guidance from theory and our own internal research. For example, there is a lengthy list of macroeconomic priors—which we call “Basic Principles”—and known patterns for the evolution of macroeconomic variables. Some examples are the behavior and persistence of inflation in convergence economies, the trend for exchange rates in small, open economies, the relationship between price/earnings (P/E) multiples and exchange rate valuation in economies with large net trade surpluses, and the behavior of the central bank credibility premium after an inflationary bust. Financial markets invariably lag structural developments in the real economy, which is itself another of my Basic Principles.


pages: 607 words: 133,452

Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin, David K. Levine

accounting loophole / creative accounting, agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, business cycle, classic study, cognitive bias, cotton gin, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial innovation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, independent contractor, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jean Tirole, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, market bubble, market design, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, new economy, open economy, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pirate software, placebo effect, price discrimination, profit maximization, rent-seeking, Richard Stallman, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, the market place, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Y2K

Baker, D. and N. Chatani (2002), “Promoting Good Ideas on Drugs: Are Patents the Best Way? The Relative Efficiency of Patent and Public Support for Bio-medical Research,” briefing paper, Center for Economic and Policy Research. Baldwin, J. M. and P. Hanel (2003), Innovation and Knowledge Creation in an Open Economy: Canadian Industry and International Implications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barragan Arce, J. (2005), “The Apples of Competition: A Study of Plants Innovation in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century USA,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, in progress. Barro, R. J. and X.


pages: 489 words: 132,734

A History of Future Cities by Daniel Brook

Berlin Wall, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, indoor plumbing, joint-stock company, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, Potemkin village, profit motive, rent control, Shenzhen special economic zone , SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, starchitect, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor

A creek-dredging project to accommodate larger ships, launched by royal decree and completed in 1961, helped cement the deal with the regional traders as Dubai now provided both the economic environment and the physical facilities necessary for international commerce. While many Indian merchants used Dubai as a base to do business with the world’s open economies, others used it as a base to illegally do business with their homeland. When a Nehru-ordered tax on precious metals sent the price of gold in India to two times its price on the global market, gold smuggling became a major business in Dubai. With Bombay effectively knocked out of the world’s gold market, tiny Dubai became the second-largest destination for gold purchased on British exchanges, surpassed only by Britain’s wealthy, luxury-goods-producing neighbor, France.


pages: 495 words: 136,714

Money for Nothing by Thomas Levenson

Albert Einstein, asset-backed security, bank run, British Empire, carried interest, clockwork universe, credit crunch, do well by doing good, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, experimental subject, failed state, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, income inequality, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, land bank, market bubble, Money creation, open economy, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Republic of Letters, risk/return, side project, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, tontine

“As they are all engaged in commerce,” he wrote of the inhabitants of the new country, “their commercial affairs are affected by such various and complex causes that it is impossible to foresee what difficulties may arise. As they are all more or less engaged in productive industry, at the least shock given to business all private fortunes are put in jeopardy at the same time, and the State is shaken.” This was, de Tocqueville reasoned, a necessary property of an open economy, one in which the financial health of any individual enterprise is deeply engaged with that of every other with which it does business. That led him to a warning. By the time of his travels in America, stock market crashes and other financial disruptions had occurred often enough for him to see them as inherent in the economic life of the United States and any imitators.


pages: 432 words: 143,491

Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain's Battle With Coronavirus by Jonathan Calvert, George Arbuthnott

Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, gig economy, global pandemic, high-speed rail, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, lockdown, nudge unit, open economy, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Skype, social distancing, zoonotic diseases

The economic cost of the ruthless ‘Covid Zero’ approach had been a 12.2 per cent drop in GDP between April and June, but the country could now begin the repair work. ‘Not only have we protected New Zealanders’ health but we now have a head start on our economic recovery,’ Ardern said. ‘We have become one of the most open economies in the world.’ It was a similar story in Australia, which also swiftly brought in lockdown measures on 23 March with daily cases in the mid-hundreds. On 18 May, just nine positive cases were recorded in Australia, which had suffered only 98 deaths. Between April and June, its GDP dropped by just 7 per cent – almost three times less than the UK – because it had been able to lift restrictions more safely as the virus was at such low levels.


pages: 868 words: 147,152

How Asia Works by Joe Studwell

affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, collective bargaining, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, financial deregulation, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, large denomination, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fragmentation, megaproject, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, purchasing power parity, rent control, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Ronald Coase, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TSMC, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, working-age population

The real problem is not one of state discipline or no state discipline, but one of the timing of the transition from developmental infant industry policies to policies which stress instead the interests of small businesses, consumers and passive investors. It is clearly possible for states to wait too long before they begin to unpick industrial policy and move to a more open economy. Countries such as Japan in Asia, or Italy in Europe, are the developmental equivalent of adults who refuse to leave home, preferring to stay in their bedrooms rather than confront the next stage of life – or the next stretch of the river, if we switch to the Japanese metaphor. These ‘big babies’, however, are the less significant issue.


pages: 537 words: 158,544

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Particularly with regimes that have souring ties with the United States, China builds strategic alliances by deepening commercial relations. 16 With its voracious appetite for natural resources, it has taken a lead in oil and gas production from Angola to Algeria to Sudan, importing more oil from Africa than from Saudi Arabia. 17 As with the other superpowers, China’s engagement can mean the difference between peace and genocide: In Sudan, China has sent UN peacekeepers but also covert military personnel to protect its oil facilities and a (nearly) thousand-mile pipeline to the Red Sea, all the while sandbagging UN resolutions aimed at halting the civil war in the country’s south and the ethnic cleansing pogroms in the Darfur region, where Chinese machine guns are plentiful. Countries from Libya to China are fueling Khartoum’s real estate bonanza despite American sanctions. China portrays African states as its partners, not as mercy cases, and many Arab and African governments enthusiastically speak of a “China model” of closed regimes with open economies. To revive the mid–twentieth century Sino-African kinship, China’s comprehensive packages of assistance, investment, professional training, and doctors dispatched throughout Africa demonstrate a fraternal spirit of “doing what it can,” as opposed to the Western-style economic “shock therapy.” China has canceled most African nations’ debts, provided soft loans, and increased imports from Africa by a factor of ten, moves that compete with and undermine Western aid policies that are increasingly perceived as ineffective.


pages: 205 words: 18,208

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? by David Brin

affirmative action, airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, data acquisition, death of newspapers, Extropian, Garrett Hardin, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, Iridium satellite, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, packet switching, pattern recognition, pirate software, placebo effect, plutocrats, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, telepresence, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UUNET, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, workplace surveillance , Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

Authorities or commercial agents could concentrate on protecting the smaller number of cipher-secured trades, while the rest are safeguarded by openness. Villains who do succeed in stealing ecash would not be quite as seamlessly invisible as they might like when they try to spend it in a mostly open economy. Moreover, by reducing the total number of potential “prey” transactions in the marketplace, we will also decrease the overall number of predators. When there arenʼt many shadows, there will be fewer places for knaves to lurk, or to practice their skills by victimizing others. The second advantage to a transparency option would be that it is robust (a theme we will reiterate later).


Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Greenspan put, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mercator projection, Mont Pelerin Society, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Philip Mirowski, power law, price mechanism, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, statistical model, Suez crisis 1956, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

A visitor to the territory, though, would see only the surface and not the under­lying economic ­union. “He ­will not see the EDU,” Mises wrote, “he ­w ill not have the opportunity to meet the agents of the EDU.”100 Consistent with the idea of an invisible realm of the economic discussed in Chapter 2, the government of the open economy would remain hidden from the public eye. Only the colorful—­and powerless—­ representatives of national policy would be seen. A double government would serve as a model of supranational federation. That ­there would be f­ ree trade and f­ ree movement of l­abor overseen by a strong central state was primary, allowing for a shifting landscape of decentralized national and cultural institutions that would remain secondary.


pages: 475 words: 155,554

The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks and Entire Nations on the Edge by Faisal Islam

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, British Empire, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, energy security, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, ghettoisation, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Chicago School, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two tier labour market, unorthodox policies, uranium enrichment, urban planning, value at risk, WikiLeaks, working-age population, zero-sum game

The controls will be slowly lifted for individuals, but Iceland will need tools to control the potential outflow. The ultimate tool for Júlíusdóttir was to join the European Union and the Eurozone, but after losing the April 2013 general election, this seemed off the agenda. In the absence of the EU option, other economic thinkers on the island think that the way forward for a small open economy like Iceland is to copy the Asian countries. Iceland should have a managed floating exchange rate, and a large build-up of foreign-exchange reserves. ‘It has served the Asians well,’ says Guðmundsson at the Central Bank. So that’s an end to inflation targeting, and for the banks an end to the European single market.


pages: 564 words: 153,720

Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World by Mark Pendergrast

business climate, business cycle, commoditize, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Honoré de Balzac, it's over 9,000, land reform, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, open economy, out of africa, profit motive, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, The Great Good Place, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Michelli; Tribal Knowledge: Business Wisdom Brewed from the Grounds of Starbucks Corporate Culture (2006), by John Moore; Pour Your Heart Into It (Starbucks history, 1997), by Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang; My Sister’s a Barista (2005), by John Simmons; Everything But the Coffee: Learning About America from Starbucks (2009), by Bryant Simon; The Gospel According to Starbucks (2007), by Leonard Sweet; W. R. Grace: Grace: W. R. Grace & Company (1985), by Lawrence A. Clayton. Books on coffee prices and international commodity schemes include: Open Economy Politics (1997), by Robert H. Bates; The Corner in Coffee (fiction, 1904), by Cyrus Townsend Brady; The Coffee Paradox (2005), by Benoit Daviron and Stefano Ponte; An Oligopoly: The World Coffee Economy and Stabilization (1971), by Thomas Geer; Trading Down (2005), by Peter Gibbon and Stefano Ponte; The Brazilian Coffee Valorization of 1906 (1975), by Thomas H.


pages: 543 words: 147,357

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society by Will Hutton

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

The upside, in terms of macro-economic policy, is that the new realisation that increasing wages will simply price goods and services out of the market helps reinvent fiscal policy’s traction on demand and employment. Globalisation and the aftermath of the credit crunch are also important factors. The latter has left most economies, including Britain’s, with a substantial gap between what the economy has the capacity to produce and what it is producing – the so-called output gap. Globalisation and open economies add to the sense that playing fast and loose with wage and pricing policy in these circumstances is self-defeating: firms would just lose business to competitors. Nor are firms, consumers and workers so economically rational as the free-market economists supposed. The supposition was that, when confronted by a tax reduction, consumers would know it was only temporary and so would rationally save to pay for the inevitable later tax rise.


pages: 470 words: 148,730

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

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

Did they get something wrong in their calculations? One can argue with many of the details, but the order of magnitude has to be right. Simply put, despite its openness to trade, the US import share (8 percent) is one of the lowest in the world.62 So the gains from international trade to the United States cannot be that large. Belgium, a small open economy, has an import share of above 30 percent, so there trade matters much more. This is not so surprising. The US economy is very large and very diverse, and therefore capable of producing much of what is consumed there. Moreover, a lot of consumption is of services (everything from banking to house cleaning) not typically traded internationally (yet).


The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Xi Jinping, The Governance of China (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 2014), pp. 479–80. 4. Xi Jinping, “Achieving Rejuvenation Is the Dream of the Chinese People,” Governance of China, pp. 37–39; “Xi Pledges Great Renewal of Chinese Nation,” People’s Daily, November 30, 2012; Edward Wong, “Signals of a More Open Economy in China,” New York Times, December 9, 2012. 5. Elizabeth C. Economy, The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Xi Jinping, Speech, at the National People’s Congress, China Daily, March 22, 2018; “Xi Jinping Promises More Assertive Chinese Foreign Policy,” Financial Times, March 20, 2018 (“east wind”). 6.


pages: 511 words: 151,359

The Asian Financial Crisis 1995–98: Birth of the Age of Debt by Russell Napier

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discounted cash flows, diversification, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, short selling, social distancing, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, yield curve

So apologies to those of you who have read yesterday’s FT, but here are some excerpts which should be cause for emergency meetings of global asset allocation committees: The International Monetary Fund said yesterday that controls on inward movement of capital could be a useful tool for some countries, and admitted that opening economies prematurely to free flows of capital constituted “an accident waiting to happen”. Given that there are limits to the pace at which financial sectors can be strengthened, policymakers need to undertake an orderly opening of their financial systems and may need to consider imposing temporary measures to restrain certain types of inflow.


pages: 592 words: 161,798

The Future of War by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Markoff, long peace, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, open economy, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, systematic bias, the scientific method, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, Valery Gerasimov, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, zero day

At the heart of the issue was the interaction between social and economic developments with political choices, which could be egregious or quixotic, as well as perfectly rational. THE DEMOCRATIC PEACE THEORY WAS ESSENTIALLY A GENERALISATION from the post-1945 experience of North America and Western Europe. A mutually reinforcing set of relationships developed among countries embracing liberal democracy, and open economies. The most remarkable example of this determination to break away from the bad habits of the past came when France and Germany, along with Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg formed the original Coal and Steel Community, which grew into a full-fledged customs union and eventually acquired a wide range of competencies and many more members to become the European Union.


pages: 586 words: 160,321

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

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

However, fiscal stimulus by a country that is very open to trade might spill over to other countries rather than help the country itself. In other words, the government fiscal spending multiplier with respect to its own domestic economy output falls as an economy’s propensity to import rises. This dimension is also important for understanding the debate surrounding German stimulus. Germany as a very open economy would benefit less from a domestic demand stimulus, not only because its output gap is close to zero but also because a fiscal stimulus would spill over to its neighbors. The German reluctance to start a stimulus program—and the periphery’s interest in such a demand boost—is thus immediately understandable from simple self-interest.


pages: 710 words: 164,527

The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, banks create money, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, deindustrialization, European colonialism, facts on the ground, fiat currency, financial independence, floating exchange rates, full employment, global reserve currency, imperial preference, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, low interest rates, margin call, means of production, Michael Milken, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, psychological pricing, public intellectual, reserve currency, road to serfdom, seigniorage, South China Sea, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, trade liberalization, Works Progress Administration

Best known for “Say’s Law,” an element of classical economic thinking that Keynes sought to demolish in his General Theory. Schacht, Hjalmar (1877–1970). German banker. President of the Reichsbank, 1926–30; Reich minister of economics, 1934–37. Famous for creating the “Schachtian” system of national economic management. Transformed Germany from an open economy integrated with the West to a closed, autarkic one, imposing strict import controls and conducting foreign trade bilaterally on a barter basis. Schumpeter, Joseph (1883–1950). Austrian-born American economist and political scientist. Famous for his focus on innovation and entrepreneurs as the critical drivers of the capitalist economic system.


pages: 552 words: 168,518

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar

Some companies will argue that it is not their responsibility or indeed their prerogative to meddle in the domestic affairs of sovereign nations. To be sure, bad things can happen when powerful companies have too much influence over the rules or rulers that govern their conduct. But if done transparently and in partnership with other legitimate bodies, a principled stand on the open Internet and an open economy is consistent with both Google’s mission and its business objectives. After all, one global open Internet is a much more fertile domain for Google’s services than one balkanized into regional subnets, where only some people get access to all of the world’s online information. If other companies were to join in the fight for freedom, perhaps this reality could materialize more quickly.


pages: 780 words: 168,782

Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century by Christian Caryl

Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , single-payer health, special economic zone, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, Yom Kippur War

All of these journeys had brought tangible benefits—including vital industrial investments from the Japanese as well as useful advice on the advantages of authoritarian capitalism from Singaporean prime minister Lee Kwan Yew. His visits to Singapore and Japan had also yielded plenty of favorable coverage in the media back home. But none of these trips had quite the impact of the one he took to America. It is one thing to hear about the advantages of an open economy; it is another to see them. Deng’s trip to the United States brought the potential benefits of modernization into the homes of ordinary Chinese. As for Deng himself, he later told his colleagues that his experiences in America had kept him awake for several nights after returning home. How could China possibly catch up?


pages: 726 words: 172,988

The Bankers' New Clothes: What's Wrong With Banking and What to Do About It by Anat Admati, Martin Hellwig

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Larry Wall, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, open economy, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, Yogi Berra

Journal of Economic Perspectives 25: (1): 3–28. Harding, John P., Eric Rosenblatt, and Vincent W. Yao. 2009. “The Contagion Effect of Foreclosed Properties.” Journal of Urban Economics 66 (3): 164–178. Harrison, Ian. 2004. “Banks, Capital and Regulation: Towards an Optimal Capital Regime for a Small Open Economy.” Working paper. Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Wellington. Hayes, Christopher. 2012. The Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy. New York: Crown. Healy, Paul M., and Krishna G. Palepu. 2003. “The Fall of Enron.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 17 (2): 3–26. Hellwig, Martin F. 1991.


pages: 442 words: 39,064

Why Stock Markets Crash: Critical Events in Complex Financial Systems by Didier Sornette

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, continuous double auction, currency peg, Deng Xiaoping, discrete time, diversified portfolio, Elliott wave, Erdős number, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, global village, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, law of one price, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, mental accounting, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, VA Linux, Y2K, yield curve

As we have argued before in this chapter, the magnitude of such indirect effects can be very significant and actually drive the accelerated growth of the economy. This can thus overwhelm any direct effect that population structure may have on asset returns. Third, the possible dependence between asset returns and demographic structure may be weakened by the increasing integration of world capital markets. For open economies with significant foreign investments, it is the global demographic structure that should matter. Finally, empirical data suggests that assets are sold much more slowly during retirement years than they are accumulated during working years. While not leading to a systematic meltdown, the stability of the markets and their susceptibility to external shocks may be significantly modified by the retirement of Baby Boomers.


pages: 678 words: 160,676

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again by Robert D. Putnam

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, obamacare, occupational segregation, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, trade liberalization, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Williamson, Winners and Losers over Two Centuries of Globalization, WIDER Annual Lectures 6 (Helsinki: World Institute for Development Economics Research, 2002), which graphically depicts changes in an index of migration restrictiveness in the decades preceding ~1900. Piketty, Saez, and Gabriel, “Distributional National Accounts,” 604, argue that the fact that the collapse of the bottom 50 percent in the US is so much greater than in other advanced, open economies, like France, suggest that domestic factors are very important. 64 For a quick taste of the scholarly debate over the possible impact of immigration on inequality, see Goldin and Katz, “Decreasing (and then Increasing) Inequality in America”; David Card, “Immigration and Inequality,” American Economic Review 99, no. 2 (May 2009): 1–21, https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.99.2.1; Giovanni Peri, “Immigration, Native Poverty, and the Labor Market,” in Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality, eds.


The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by Leslie Berlin

Apple II, Bob Noyce, book value, business cycle, California energy crisis, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, computer age, data science, Fairchild Semiconductor, George Gilder, Henry Singleton, informal economy, John Markoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, open economy, prudent man rule, Richard Feynman, rolling blackouts, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Japanese beating the heck: Ann Bowers, interview by author, 16 Aug. 2004. 20. 7,200 jobs, annual losses: Noyce, “Testimony on National Technology Development and Utilization Provided to the Technology Policy Task Force Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives,” 25 Sept. 1987. How to shut down Intel: Ann Bowers, interview by author, 16 Aug. 2004. Japanese Buy Intel: Inteleads, 1 April 1987, IA. It’s hard for someone: Daryl Hatano to author, 2 Feb. 1998. 21. Decline of empire: Noyce, Competing in an Open Economy, Keynote Address UCB [University of California at Berkeley], 22 Jan. 1987, IA. Death spiral: Noyce quoted in Evelyn Richards. “How America Lost the Edge on the World Trade Battlefield,” San Jose Mercury News, 20 April 1986. What would you call Detroit: Noyce quoted in Evelyn Richards, “Two Valley Visionaries Don’t See Same Horizon,” San Jose Mercury News, 20 Jan. 1986.


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

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

Starting in the late 1970s, but especially in the 1980s, the architecture of the income tax had come under attack by some influential economists (see Tanzi, 2014b). One important reason for this development was the belief that a reduction of taxes on capital incomes would increase savings and investment, thus leading to faster growth. Another was that globalization of economic activities, then underway, was opening economies to greater global influences and was making capital more mobile than it had been earlier, when the countries’ economies had been closed. Globalization was making the supply of capital to a country potentially more elastic with respect to its tax rate. Capital was acquiring stronger incentives to move from countries with high tax rates to countries with low tax rates, and especially to those with no taxes, the “tax havens.”


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

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

In: V. I. Lenin, Selected Works (I). Moscow: Progress Publishers, pp. 667–768. Leontief, W. (1952), Machines and man. Scientific American, 187 (3), pp. 150–60. Leontief, W. (1979), Is technological unemployment inevitable? Challenge, 22 (4), pp. 48–50. Lindbeck, A. (1976), Stabilization Policy in Open Economies with Endogenous Politicians. Seminar Paper 54, Institute for International Economic Studies, University of Stockholm. List, F. (1909 (1841)), The National System of Political Economy. London: Longman, Green & Co. Lo, C. (2015). China’s Impossible Trinity: The Structural Challenges to the ‘Chinese Dream’.


pages: 652 words: 172,428

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

As we saw in the introduction, plans to hold a G7 leaders’ summit in the United States that summer also collapsed over intramural, and often deeply personal, disputes. This time around, however, the G7 leaders went out of their way to emphasize solidarity. “Drawing on our strengths and values as democratic, open economies and societies,” their February 19 joint statement declared, “we will work together and with others to make 2021 a turning point for multilateralism and to shape a recovery that promotes the health and prosperity of our people and planet.” The leaders agreed to “intensify cooperation” on the pandemic and economic recovery measures, “accelerate global vaccine development and deployment,” and strengthen the World Health Organization.4 A major issue was unequal access to lifesaving vaccines.


pages: 661 words: 185,701

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance by Eswar S. Prasad

access to a mobile phone, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, algorithmic trading, altcoin, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, central bank independence, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, gamification, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, litecoin, lockdown, loose coupling, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mobile money, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, robo advisor, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, special drawing rights, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vision Fund, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WeWork, wikimedia commons, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

With easier capital flows across national borders, though, many countries will also face risks related to the volatility of those flows and the complications that it creates for managing their exchange rates and their economies. New channels for transmitting payments more quickly and cheaply across borders will render it difficult to regulate and control capital flows. The resulting challenges will be especially thorny for EMEs and other small open economies. The landscape of global reserve currencies might seem to be at the threshold of disruption as cryptocurrencies gain traction as mediums of exchange and stores of value. In practice, the proliferation of cryptocurrencies will not have a substantial disruptive effect on the major reserve currencies, especially the US dollar.


pages: 593 words: 183,240

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

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

And this is why it is important that subsidies go to companies that successfully export—pass a market-efficiency test, albeit a market-efficiency test applied not in some home free-market economy but among the import-purchasing middle classes of the global north. Ultimately, the East Asian developmental model is predicated on other nations—cough, the United States of America—being able to absorb exports and run trade deficits because they are operating on a different, open economy model. Could the United States have absorbed everyone’s exports, had everyone attempted this? No. The model could only ever have worked for a small handful of countries. Yet it did work. Consider South Korea, now home to one of the two most efficient high-tech microprocessor-building factory complexes of the world, Samsung.


Frommer's Egypt by Matthew Carrington

airport security, bread and circuses, centre right, colonial rule, Easter island, Internet Archive, land tenure, low cost airline, Maui Hawaii, open economy, rent control, rolodex, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, walkable city, Yom Kippur War

as the attack was launched from the back of a truck as Mirage jets swooped overhead. Air Force General and Vice President Hosni Mubarak then became president. Mubarak’s subsequent tenure as president has been marked mainly by holding patterns with regard to regional politics and a drift away from the socialism of the past and toward a more open economy. The state of emergency that was declared in 1981 has never been lifted, effectively freezing the interplay between legislative and judicial bodies into rigid patterns enforced by executive diktat. The result has been a general political stagnation in Egypt for 26 years, with security forces playing a steadily increasing political role as the regime has come to rely on them to stifle dissenting voices that have been denied parliamentary expression.


Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism by Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, declining real wages, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass immigration, meta-analysis, obamacare, open borders, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, post-industrial society, post-materialism, precariat, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, War on Poverty, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

These concerns have existed since the rise of radical right parties in Europe during the 1980s but they sharply accelerated following Brexit and the election of President Trump.1 Until recently, it was widely assumed that Western societies would be governed by moderate political parties, committed to liberal democracy, open economies, and multilateral cooperation. The core values respecting free and fair elections, rule of law, human rights, and civil liberties seemed sacrosanct. Despite some major challenges and notable setbacks, as the twenty-­first century opened, elections and democratic values appeared to be spreading to every corner of the world.


pages: 708 words: 196,859

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Etonian, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invisible hand, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mobile money, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, open economy, plutocrats, price stability, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, rolodex, scientific management, the market place

German goods were overpriced on the world markets and its exports stagnated. In order to cope with the pressures created by this bloated exchange rate, an elaborate system of import controls was put in place and foreign trade was largely based on barter. Under this “Schachtian” system, Germany was reoriented from an open economy integrated with the West to a closed autarkic economy connected to Eastern Europe and the Balkans, a precursor of the inefficient Soviet trade system of the 1950s and 1960s. Behind the gleaming achievements, therefore—the autobahns, the Volkswagen, the Junker bombers, and the Messerschmitt fighter planes—the Nazi economy was a rickety machine plagued by shortages and relying heavily on rationing to allocate scarce consumer goods.


pages: 823 words: 220,581

Debunking Economics - Revised, Expanded and Integrated Edition: The Naked Emperor Dethroned? by Steve Keen

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, central bank independence, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, collective bargaining, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market microstructure, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, seigniorage, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, stochastic process, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, total factor productivity, tulip mania, wage slave, zero-sum game

J. (1988b) Horizontalists and Verticalists: The Macroeconomics of Credit Money, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moore, B. J. (1997) ‘Reconciliation of the supply and demand for endogenous money,’ Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, 19(3): 423–8. Moore, B. J. (2001) ‘Some reflections on endogenous money,’ in L.-P. Rochon and M. Vernengo (eds), Credit, Interest Rates and the Open Economy: Essays on horizontalism, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 11–30. Musgrave, A. (1981) ‘“Unreal assumptions” in economic theory: the untwisted,’ Kyklos, 34: 377–87, reprinted in B. Caldwell (1984), Appraisal and Criticism in Economics: A Book of Readings, London: Allen & Unwin. Muth, J. F. (1961) ‘Rational expectations and the theory of price movements,’ Econometrica, 29(3): 315–35.


pages: 913 words: 219,078

The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War by Benn Steil

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, full employment, imperial preference, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, kremlinology, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, open economy, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, structural adjustment programs, the market place, trade liberalization, Transnistria, Winter of Discontent, Works Progress Administration, éminence grise

“From the Schuman Plan to the Paris Treaty, 1950–1952.” http://www.cvce.eu/en/unit-content/-/unit/5cc6b004-33b7-4e44-b6db-f5f9e6c01023/678ed16c-b497-41e0-a1b6-d8cb0594f2ef. Chabris, Christopher. “When Diplomacy Leads to Betrayal.” Wall Street Journal. February 19, 2016. Chenery, Hollis B., and Michael Bruno. “Development Alternatives in an Open Economy: The Case of Israel.” Economic Journal. Vol. 72, No. 285 (March 1962): 79–103. Chicago Tribune. “Confirm Fifth U.S. Flyer Died in Yugoslavia.” August 27, 1946. Chicago Tribune. “French Strike Spreads; New Cabinet Acts.” November 25, 1947. CNN. “Sec. of State Madeleine Albright Press Conference, March 18, 1997.” 1997. http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1997/03/18/fdch.albright/.


pages: 687 words: 209,474

Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Michael B. Oren

Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, European colonialism, friendly fire, Mount Scopus, open economy, Seymour Hersh, Suez crisis 1956, Yom Kippur War

But the Aswan Dam and Retama were merely exceptions in the otherwise rueful saga of the UAR. Under ‘Abd al-Hakim ‘Amer, whose administration of the joint government in Damascus was as inept as his generalship in 1956, the union began to unravel. Corruption and despotism reigned as unyielding state control was imposed on Syria’s traditionally open economy. Syrian officers were also incensed, finding themselves outside the loops of power. In September 1961, a clique of these officers, among them Salah Jadid and Hafez al-Assad, staged a successful coup and declared Syria’s departure from the union.24‘Amer and his staff were ingloriously herded onto a plane and whisked back to Cairo.


pages: 843 words: 223,858

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

The pressures toward greater flexibility of the labor market and toward the reversal of the welfare state in Western Europe come less from the pressures derived from East Asia than from the comparison with the United States.43 It will become increasingly difficult for Japanese firms to continue life employment practices for the privileged 30 percent of its labor force if they have to compete in an open economy with American companies practicing flexible employment (see chapter 3).44 Lean production, downsizing, restructuring, consolidation, and flexible management practices are induced and made possible by the intertwined impact of economic globalization and diffusion of information technologies. The indirect effects of such tendencies on the conditions of labor in all countries are far more important than the measurable impact of international trade or cross-border direct employment.


pages: 828 words: 232,188

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Climate and geography were among the original sources of the Latin American birth defect. The extractive slave economies established by the Spanish in Mexico, Peru, and elsewhere left a legacy of inequality that persisted long after the last silver mine closed and slowed the creation of a North American–style open economy. But although these material conditions influenced the nature of political institutions in Latin America, they did not altogether determine them. Formal institutions evolved over time in a democratic direction, just as in Europe. What remained much more constant was the region’s class structure—its division into whiter, wealthier elites, and poorer, darker masses—which then shaped the way that formal institutions operated.


pages: 850 words: 224,533

The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World by Oona A. Hathaway, Scott J. Shapiro

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, bank run, Bartolomé de las Casas, battle of ideas, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, false flag, gentleman farmer, humanitarian revolution, index card, long peace, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, power law, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

The states that are parties to the World Trade Organization agree to allow goods into their country with minimal trade restrictions, but they gain the same access to markets around the world. This creates jobs and raises wages overall. Indeed, in the years between 1970 and 2000, manufacturing workers in open economies were paid beween three and nine times as much as those in closed economies, depending on the region.8 Consumers also benefit from lower prices. And these effects are not limited to trade. The states that agreed to participate in the Paris Agreement on Climate Change in 2016, for example, accepted limits on their climate-harming activities, but in return they gained similar promises from other states to limit their own climate-harming activities.


pages: 935 words: 267,358

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty

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

Under these conditions, the only forces that can avoid an indefinite inegalitarian spiral and stabilize inequality of wealth at a finite level are the following. First, if the fortunes of wealthy individuals grow more rapidly than average income, the capital/income ratio will rise indefinitely, which in the long run should lead to a decrease in the rate of return on capital. Nevertheless, this mechanism can take decades to operate, especially in an open economy in which wealthy individuals can accumulate foreign assets, as was the case in Britain and France in the nineteenth century and up to the eve of World War I. In principle, this process always comes to an end (when those who own foreign assets take possession of the entire planet), but this can obviously take time.


A Pipeline Runs Through It by Keith Fisher

accounting loophole / creative accounting, barriers to entry, British Empire, colonial rule, Dmitri Mendeleev, energy security, European colonialism, Ford Model T, full employment, Hernando de Soto, Ida Tarbell, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Blériot, Malacca Straits, Monroe Doctrine, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, vertical integration

., The Bolivia Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). Thorne, Tanis C., The World’s Richest Indian: The Scandal over Jackson Barnett’s Oil Fortune (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Thorp, Rosemary, and Geoffrey Bertram, Peru, 1890–1977: Growth and Policy in an Open Economy (London: Macmillan Press, 1978). Thorsen, Niels Aage, The Political Thought of Woodrow Wilson, 1875–1910 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). Thwaites, Reuben Gold, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents (Cleveland, OH: The Burrows Brothers Co., 1899). Timberlake, Jr, Richard H., The Origins of Central Banking in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).


pages: 1,164 words: 309,327

Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners by Larry Harris

active measures, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, automated trading system, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, compound rate of return, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, data acquisition, diversified portfolio, equity risk premium, fault tolerance, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, High speed trading, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, invention of the telegraph, job automation, junk bonds, law of one price, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, market fragmentation, market friction, market microstructure, money market fund, Myron Scholes, National best bid and offer, Nick Leeson, open economy, passive investing, pattern recognition, payment for order flow, Ponzi scheme, post-materialism, price discovery process, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent-seeking, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, search costs, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Small Order Execution System, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, survivorship bias, the market place, transaction costs, two-sided market, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

They also may have satisfied margin calls that they received in one market by selling in another market. Third, prices in all stock markets are correlated because the capital market is an international market. Changes in the real rate of interest in one country ultimately will affect the real rate of interest in all other countries that have open economies. Although these facts cannot resolve the debate, they do suggest that U.S. factors could have been responsible for the global crash. ◀ * * * 28.2.3 The October 1989 Mini-Crash On the afternoon of October 13, 1989, the U.S. stock markets dropped 7 percent. The abrupt drop occurred immediately after a consortium of banks announced at 2:54 P.M. that they would not finance a levered buy-out of UAL Corporation, the parent of United Airlines.


pages: 1,477 words: 311,310

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000 by Paul Kennedy

agricultural Revolution, airline deregulation, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, imperial preference, industrial robot, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, long peace, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, oil shock, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, zero-sum game

Percentage Increases in World Production, 1948–1968195 1948–1958 1958–1968 Agricultural goods 32% 30% Minerals 40% 58% Manufactures 60% 100% To some extent, this disparity can be explained by the great increases in manufacturing and trade among the advanced industrial countries (especially those of the European Economic Community); but their rising demand for primary products and the beginnings of industrialization among an increasing number of Third World countries meant that the economies of most of the latter were also growing faster in these decades than at any time in the twentieth century.196 Notwithstanding the damage which western imperialism did to many of the societies in other parts of the world, the exports and general economic growth of these societies do appear to have benefited most when the industrialized nations were in a period of expansion. Less-developed countries (LDCs), argues Foreman-Peck, grew rapidly in the nineteenth century when “open” economies like Britain’s were expanding fast—just as they were the worst hit of all when the industrial world fell into depression in the 1930s. During the 1950s and 1960s, they once again experienced faster growth rates, because the developed countries were booming, raw-materials demand was rising, and industrialization was spreading.197 After its nadir in 1953 (6.5 percent), Bairoch shows the Third World’s share of world manufacturing production rising steadily, to 8.5 percent (1963), then 9.9 percent (1973), and then 12.0 percent (1980).198 In the CIA’s estimates, the less-developed countries’ share of “gross world product” has also been increasing, from 11.1 percent (1960), to 12.3 percent (1970), to 14.8 percent (1980).199 Given the sheer number of people in the Third World, however, their share of world product was still disproportionately low—and their poverty horrifically manifest.


pages: 1,123 words: 328,357

Post Wall: Rebuilding the World After 1989 by Kristina Spohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, central bank independence, colonial exploitation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, G4S, Japanese asset price bubble, Kickstarter, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, open economy, operational security, Prenzlauer Berg, price stability, public intellectual, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, software patent, South China Sea, special economic zone, Thomas L Friedman, Transnistria, uranium enrichment, zero-coupon bond

Mindful of recent Alliance arguments over the ‘third zero’, he mischievously claimed that the USSR was holding fast to its ‘non-nuclear ideals’, while the West was clinging on to its dated concept of ‘minimum deterrence’. The Soviet leader also elaborated on his vision of a Common European Home. This ruled out ‘the very possibility of the use or threat of force’ and postulated ‘a doctrine of restraint to replace the doctrine of deterrence’. He envisaged, as the Soviet Union moved towards a ‘more open economy’, the eventual ‘emergence of a vast economic space’ right across the continent in which the ‘eastern and western parts would be strongly interlocked’. He continued to believe in the ‘competition between different types of society’ and saw these kinds of tensions as ‘creating better material and spiritual conditions of life for people’.


pages: 1,208 words: 364,966

Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War by Robert Fisk

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial rule, friendly fire, haute couture, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, open economy, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, the long tail, Yom Kippur War

Or, more to the point, how they could live in peace and make money. For as long as Lebanon’s economy grew, the dream years were credible even to the Lebanese themselves. The Sunnis and the Maronites were both beneficiaries of the extraordinary wealth that flowed into Beirut. As a financial centre with an open economy, as a trade intersection between Europe and the Middle East with a lucrative port in its capital, as a comparatively ‘free’ nation amid the dictatorships of the Arab world, Lebanon was to be blessed with the indulgence of both East and West, its modern-day caravanserais arriving hourly at the new international airport at Khalde.