race to the bottom

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pages: 511 words: 132,682

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants by Maurice E. Stucke, Ariel Ezrachi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 737 MAX, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Chrome, greed is good, hedonic treadmill, incognito mode, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Network effects, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price anchoring, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, Yochai Benkler

Why Can’t the Victims De-escalate the Race to the Bottom? We now confront the penultimate missing piece of the puzzle. In situations where the competitors’ individual and collective interests diverge, we can have a race to the bottom that even powerful competitors cannot stop. But in many markets the beneficiaries of competition have a choice. They can stop this toxic competition by opting out. So why don’t they? One problem is that the intended beneficiaries of competition may be trapped in their own arms race. Rather than prevent (or at least slow down) the race to the bottom, they may actually accelerate the downward spiral.

When it does, it often leaves individuals and society worse off. The invisible hand then becomes nothing more than a sleight of hand. So when is competition a race to the bottom rather than to the top? There are two basic circumstances in which that happens: FIRST, when the competitors’ individual interests are not aligned with their collective interests, or with society’s collective interests. SECOND, when either the competitors or the intended beneficiaries of competition—or both—are harmed by this race to the bottom, but no one can independently de-escalate it. This may sound complex, but once we understand these two conditions, we’ll recognize many examples of toxic competition around us.

But in one case competition produced results that were toxic to all, in the other, beneficial to all. To distinguish between good and bad competition, between races to the top and races to the bottom, we must ask whether the competitors’ individual and collective interests are aligned. Basically, if all the competitors do the same thing, do they end up collectively better off—or worse? So when you are seeking an edge over a rival, consider what will happen if others follow your lead and take similar measures. If everyone ends up worse off, with no advantage going to anyone, you’re in a race to the bottom that benefits neither you nor society. When Competition Harms Its Intended Beneficiary: Public School Education In our simple scenario of helmetless hockey players, the arms race harms primarily the competitors themselves.


pages: 667 words: 149,811

Economic Dignity by Gene Sperling

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, antiwork, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, cotton gin, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, guest worker program, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job automation, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, mental accounting, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, payday loans, Phillips curve, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, speech recognition, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, traffic fines, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

Structuring markets to reward competition principally on quality, price, and performance, and not race-to-the-bottom behavior, can lead competitive actors to focus on the elements that deliver better products and services to consumers and other stakeholders, without the concern that treating workers, consumers, and the environment with a level of basic decency might jeopardize their competitive advantage. Of course, rules that encourage high-road competition might impede profit margins compared to existing practices, where there is an open lane toward race-to-the-bottom competition. To the extent a textile manufacturer’s profit margins require forcing workers to labor in extremely dangerous factories or rely on suppliers using ten-year-olds in Vietnam, regulations that limit these practices will reduce the company’s profit margins.

When our nation had its breakdown of all common sense on housing finance, there was likely little room for a virtuous midlevel employee in 2006 to refuse to engage in such reckless subprime lending, because the market was structured to reward his competitors and peers at his own company for race-to-the-bottom competition. Virtuous employees may have indeed lost promotions, bonuses, and even their jobs. Structuring markets to prevent race-to-the-bottom competition ensures that we do not create business environments where no good deed and virtue go unpunished. PUNCHING STEPHEN CURRY As a thought experiment, imagine a slightly altered set of rules and regulations for the National Basketball Association (NBA).

Taunting players to waste one of the permitted punches would be refined to an art form. While perhaps this rule would have brought more Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fans to basketball, most true basketball lovers would consider this a vicious race to the bottom. Those most effective in knocking out Curry or James—those who raced to the bottom—would have a serious leg up in pursuit of NBA championships. In this scenario, there would be little room for virtue going unpunished. Members of any given NBA team might find this barbaric and prefer to refrain. Yet such Gandhi-like responses to the punching rule would likely not be well received.


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

“Europe did this to itself,” Schmidt stated, noting that the Europeans themselves created the “race to the bottom” tax treatment for a then-struggling Ireland to stimulate investment there. “The global tax system is incredibly complicated, and we are required to follow the tax rules,” he continued. “When the tax rules change, of course we would adopt them. But there was a presumption that somehow we were doing something wrong here.” Schmidt is correct. For whatever finger wagging may be directed against him and Google, the culpability rests principally with the countries that enable these activities by making them legal in the first place in the race to the bottom. Still, just because something is legal does not make it right.

The incentives drive companies toward share buybacks instead of investments in workers, equipment, and research and development. The incentives drive businesses to grow bigger through mergers and acquisitions, and then to fire rather than hire. And as we will read, the incentives encourage breaking up unions and sending headquarters to tax-optimized locales instead of to communities that are not in a race to the bottom on taxes. The incentives mean refusing to pay even a cent more for renewable energy than for fossil fuels. The nightmare is that all this optimization for nonproductive uses of capital and for the short term ensures that the long term will be worse for all of us. The inequality and climate crises we are already suffering from are direct consequences of optimizing for the short-term shareholder gains decades ago.

In the same way that GAAP provide a structure for determining a company’s tax burden, structures could be created that implement a similar set of measures for stakeholder impact and then provide the data to adjust a company’s taxes higher or lower. Companies respond to incentives, so we need to provide incentives for them to stop the race to the bottom on everything from environmental damage to workers’ rights. Former Bank of England governor Mark Carney has suggested that this approach be extended to executive compensation as well, saying that banks should link executive pay to climate risk management. The more a company does to contribute to goals set out in the Paris climate accord, the more its executives get paid.


pages: 302 words: 84,428

Mastering the Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side by Howard Marks

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, Isaac Newton, job automation, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, secular stagnation, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, transaction costs, uptick rule, VA Linux, Y2K, yield curve

Thus an overheated auction in the credit market—as elsewhere—is likely to produce a “winner” who’s really a loser. This is the process I call the race to the bottom. On the other hand, there are times when buyers show up for auctions in small numbers, and the few who do attend are interested in buying only at giveaway prices. The bidding stalls, and the result is low prices, eye-popping yields, and loan structures that afford excellent protection. Unlike the overheated climate that spawns the race to the bottom, ice-cold markets in which no one’s eager to lend can create real winners. The degree of openness of the credit window depends almost entirely on whether providers of capital are eager or reticent, and it has a profound impact on economies, companies, investors, and the prospective return and riskiness of the investment opportunities that result.

Perhaps most importantly among the contributing factors, the period was marked by risky behavior on the part of financial institutions. When the world is characterized by benign macro events, hyper-financial activity and financial innovation, there is a tendency for providers of capital to compete for market share in a process I call “the race to the bottom” (I’ll make reference later on to a memo of that name). The mood in the years 2005–07 was summed up by Citigroup CEO Charles Prince in June 2007, virtually on the eve of the Global Financial Crisis, in a statement that became emblematic of the era: “When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated.

This kind of risk tolerance and risk obliviousness plays an essential part in the up-phase that precedes—and sets the scene for—every dramatic down-phase. As the period 2005–07 was rolling along, it presented a great opportunity to observe events that made manifest market participants’ attitudes toward risk, and to reach helpful conclusions. I believe the following excerpt from “The Race to the Bottom,” a memo I wrote on the subject in February 2007—just a few months before the first indication that bad times were coming—provides an excellent example. It demonstrates the potential value of inferences drawn from isolated and perhaps anecdotal experiences: While the last few years have given me many opportunities to marvel at excesses in the capital markets, in this case the one that elicited my battle cry—“that calls for a memo”—hit the newspapers in England during my last stay.


pages: 482 words: 149,351

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

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

‘It is one of the biggest dark continents in economics.’ The answer to the second of my three questions for policymakers then is clear: ‘competition’ between states on corporate taxes is indeed a race to the bottom which increases inequality and harms the world at large. The third question is bigger, in fact it is one of the great economic questions of all time. It is this: whether or not ‘competition’ is a harmful race to the bottom that hurts the world at large, does it make sense for my country or state to ‘compete’ from the perspective of local self-interest? Schreck used to think not, at least for his area, but now he seems less certain.

When the world finally started to wake up to Tiebout’s paper, the year after his death, it would kick off a debate about one of the most important questions in the modern global economy: what happens when rich people, banks, multinational firms or profits shift across borders in response to different incentives like corporate tax cuts, financial deregulation and so on? This debate goes to the heart of questions around what has been called the competitiveness of nations, and whether competing on things like corporate tax cuts or environmental standards is a good thing or an unhealthy race to the bottom. In the end, Tiebout’s ideas would end up magnified, then distorted and used as ideological underpinning for a wide range of policies that generate the finance curse. Which is not what the leftist Charlie Tiebout would have wanted at all. History shows that inequality usually only gets properly upended after large, violent shocks.8 For Tiebout’s generation, it was the Second World War that provided the shock.

Rather than demonstrating how governments could ‘compete’ with each other and thus be efficient, as he had once thought, the emerging ‘competition’ between the states was revealing itself to be a powerful tool for big financial and corporate interests to get what they wanted from states and nations by playing them off against each other in a vicious race to the bottom. (For the rest of this book, I will call this latter form ‘competition’ – in inverted commas – as opposed to competition in private markets). In 1973, just four years after Oates published his paper, Idaho’s Democrat governor Cecil Andrus had a meeting with David Packard, the boss of the fast-growing computer company Hewlett-Packard.


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

Corporations care about their after-tax return, so they are sensitive not just to wages, the efficiency of labor, the overall business environment, transport costs, and other factors of production, but also to the taxes they have to pay. In the very short run, the one variable countries can change to attract businesses is the corporate income tax rate. Economists predicted that this would result in a race to the bottom, as companies could produce in a low-tax jurisdiction but enjoy access to the entire European Union and its markets. We see evidence of this race to the bottom. Between 1995 and 2018, the average corporate income tax rates for the EU went down from 35 percent to 22 percent.9 This trend can be expected to continue as France, Greece, the Netherlands, and Sweden have already announced further reductions of corporate income tax rates.10 By offering lower tax rates, countries gain jobs and some tax revenues, perhaps less than at higher tax rates, but the increased tax base, they hope, more than compensates.

Before that, the main voices heard were those of the bankers themselves, who had argued that loosening regulations would create a more dynamic financial system, which would contribute to a stronger European economy from which all would benefit. Besides, the bankers argued, there was a global marketplace into which they, their profits, and their jobs would disperse unless there was deregulation. Indeed, around the world, there was a race to the bottom as countries competed to attract the attention of footloose bankers. As neoliberals talked about the supposed growth and employment benefits of deregulation, they neglected the costs—both the macroeconomic risks that might arise from a poorly regulated financial sector that is engaged in excessive risk taking, and the microeconomic costs arising from the financial sector’s exploitation of its market power and consumer and investor ignorance.

With all that money to invest on behalf of savers, European asset managers—out to prove themselves better than their competitors in the easy, short-term metric of returns without adequate regard to risk—were only too happy to buy all manner of securities issued by banks. The credit rating agencies played a critical role in this scam, as they gave AAA ratings to securities that did not deserve them, engaging in massive fraud in a race to the bottom with other rating agencies. Wholesale funding (versus the retail approach of wooing depositors) exploded in Europe even more than in the United States. In 2008, it amounted to 60 percent of total funding for the largest 16 banks in Europe. This was twice as high as for large US banks.9 Banks also saw an opportunity to increase their activities as so-called market makers, by holding inventories of securities, standing ready to buy and sell and making a profit from the buy-sell spreads.


pages: 232 words: 70,361

The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay by Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cross-border payments, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, government statistician, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, labor-force participation, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, patent troll, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Steve Jobs, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, very high income, We are the 99%

The breaks that tax havens offer to big companies impose a cost on the rest of us, a “negative externality” in economics lingo. They feed a race to the bottom, leading to a world where, to prevent capital from moving abroad, most nations are compelled to adopt tax rates that are too low—lower than the rates they would otherwise democratically choose. The fundamental problem behind the current forms of international coordination is that they do not tackle, and in fact legitimize, the undemocratic forces of tax competition. And indeed, tax competition has intensified since the start of the BEPS process, and the global race to the bottom in corporate tax rates has accelerated. Since 2013, Japan cut its rate from 40% to 31%; the United States from 35% to 21%; Italy from 31% to 24%; Hungary from 19% to 9%; a number of Eastern European states are following the same route.

Their capital is intangible, it can move to Bermuda in a nanosecond. Other countries have low tax rates? We must have low rates. Other countries are giving up on taxing multinational companies and high earners? We must give up too. Tax coordination among countries is a utopia and the only future is a race to the bottom. No matter how sincerely held they may be, no matter how widely shared, these beliefs are incorrect. Instead of engaging in a giant fiscal free-for-all, we can coordinate our policies, as we’ve successfully done in many other areas of international relations. Rest assured, we know that some countries and social groups derive large benefits from globalization in its current form—but other forms are possible.

We will study, in the pages that follow, the arithmetic of tax competition and the central role it has played in the prosperity of a few. But we’ll also see how a handful of countries acting together could whistle the end of this game. We will see how defensive measures could be taken against tax havens, and how today’s race to the bottom can be replaced by a race to the top. The notion that external or technical constraints—“international competition,” “tax avoidance,” “loopholes”—make tax justice idle fantasy does not withstand scrutiny. When it comes to the future of taxation, everything is possible. From the disappearance of the income tax—a plausible outcome if the trend of the last four decades is sustained—to levels of progressivity never seen before, there is an infinity of possible futures ahead of us.


pages: 555 words: 80,635

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

For example, if multinational mining companies respond to environmental regulations by forsaking countries with environmental regulations in favor of countries that allow environmentally hazardous production methods, that can lead to a “race to the bottom,” where countries try to outdo one another by lowering regulatory burdens and cutting taxes in hopes of winning businesses’ favor. Evidence suggests that a race to the bottom may be of particular concern in the case of extractive industries such as oil drilling and mining, especially in developing countries. In the past, this race to attract extractive industries has led to excessive resource depletion and toxic pollution, made all the more painful by disappointing gains in job creation and economic growth.21 It is important to note that disparate environmental regulations do not necessarily trigger a race to the bottom.

In these two areas, current trade agreements strike many as too broad. Yet despite these important examples, there are also ways in which broader agreements may make good sense. For example, if countries are concerned about tax or regulatory competition, international agreements offer a means to avoid a “race to the bottom.” Governments could use agreements to commit to higher standards, reducing global companies’ ability to pit governments against each other. Shunning the Trans-Pacific Partnership In a New York Times poll back in May 2015, 78 percent of respondents said they knew “not much” or “nothing at all” about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

In the past, this race to attract extractive industries has led to excessive resource depletion and toxic pollution, made all the more painful by disappointing gains in job creation and economic growth.21 It is important to note that disparate environmental regulations do not necessarily trigger a race to the bottom. For example, a multinational company that needs to comply with a higher-standard jurisdiction may find it more cost-effective to use one uniform production method throughout its operations. By employing the cleaner production method in lower-standard jurisdictions, it helps to spread cleaner technologies and methods throughout the world. In just this way, higher clean air standards in California caused US automotive companies to improve their environmental performance throughout the entire US market.


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

In economic models of “monopolistic competition,” producers compete not just on price but on variety—by differentiating their products from others’.32 Similarly, national jurisdictions can compete by offering institutional “services” that are differentiated along the dimensions I discussed earlier. One persistent worry is that institutional competition sets off a race to the bottom. To attract mobile resources—capital, multinational enterprises, and skilled professionals—jurisdictions may lower their standards and relax their regulations in a futile dynamic to outdo other jurisdictions. Once again, this argument overlooks the multidimensional nature of institutional arrangements.

Similarly, higher labor standards may lead to happier and more productive workers; tougher financial regulation to greater financial stability; and higher taxes to better public services, such as schools, infrastructure, parks, and other amenities. Institutional competition can foster a race to the top. The only area in which some kind of race to the bottom has been documented is corporate taxation. Tax competition has played an important role in the remarkable reduction in corporate taxes around the world since the early 1980s. In a study on OECD countries, researchers found that when other countries reduce their average statutory corporate tax rate by 1 percentage point, the home country follows by reducing its tax rate by 0.7 percentage points.33 The study indicated that international tax competition takes place only among countries that have removed their capital controls.

When such controls are in place, capital and profits cannot move as easily across national borders and there is no downward pressure on capital taxes. So, the removal of capital controls appears to be a factor in driving the reduction in corporate tax rates. On the other hand, there is scant evidence of similar races to the bottom in labor and environmental standards or in financial regulation. The geographically confined nature of the services (or public goods) offered by national jurisdictions often presents a natural restraint on the drive toward the bottom. If you want to partake of those services, you need to be in that jurisdiction.


pages: 429 words: 120,332

Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens by Nicholas Shaxson

Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, high net worth, income inequality, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, New Journalism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, out of africa, passive income, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transfer pricing, vertical integration, Washington Consensus

The end result was that the biggest banks were able to grow large enough to attain “too big to fail” status—which helped them in turn to become increasingly influential in the bastions of political power in Washington, eventually getting a grip on both main political parties, Democrat and Republican—a grip that is so strong that it amounts to political capture. Part of this process has involved a constant race to the bottom between jurisdictions. When a tax haven degrades its taxes or financial regulations or deepens its secrecy facilities to attract hot money from elsewhere, other havens degrade theirs too, to stay in the race. Meanwhile, financiers threaten politicians in the United States and other large economies with the offshore club—“don’t tax or regulate us too heavily or we’ll leave,” they cry—and the onshore politicians quail and relax their own laws and regulations.

Deregulation, freer flows of capital, and lower taxes since the 1970s—most people think that these globalizing changes have resulted primarily from grand ideological shifts and deliberate policy choices ushered in by such leaders as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Ideology and leaders matter, but few have noticed this other thing: the role of the secrecy jurisdictions in all of this—the silent warriors of globalization that have been acting as berserkers in the global economy, forcing other nations to engage in the competitive race to the bottom, and in the process cutting swaths through the tax systems and regulations of nation states, rich and poor, whether they like it or not. The secrecy jurisdictions have been the heart of the globalization project from the beginning. Finally, a word about culture and attitudes. In January 2008 the accountancy giant KPMG ranked Cyprus at the very top of a league table of European jurisdictions, according to the “attractiveness” of their corporate tax regimes.53 Yet Cyprus, a “way station for international scoundrels,” as one offshore promoter admits, is among the world’s murkiest tax havens: possibly the biggest conduit for criminal money out of the former Soviet Union and the Middle East into the international financial system.

The notorious “merchant of death” Viktor Bout, inspiration for the character played by Nicholas Cage in the Hollywood film Lord of War, alleged arms runner to the Taliban and other murderous organizations around the globe, operated through businesses in Texas, Delaware, and Florida.27 “US shell companies are attractive vehicles for those seeking to launder money, evade taxes, finance terrorism, or conduct other illicit activity anonymously,” said Republican Senator Norm Coleman, then chairman of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. “Competition among States to attract company filing revenue and franchise taxes has, in some instances, resulted in a race to the bottom.”28 A New York Times article from 1986 describes the antics of one Delaware lieutenant-general who flew to Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Indonesia, Singapore, and the Philippines, clutching a pamphlet boasting that Delaware could “Protect You from Politics.”29 The official was, the article noted, “looking forward to a rich harvest of Hong Kong flight capital” after the British pullout in 1997.


Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

Horowitz and Lauren Kahn, “Why DoD’s New Approach to Data and Artificial Intelligence Should Enhance National Defense,” Council on Foreign Relations blog, March 11, 2022, https://www.cfr.org/blog/why-dods-new-approach-data-and-artificial-intelligence-should-enhance-national-defense; Jaspreet Gill, “Say Goodbye to JAIC and DDS, As Offices Cease to Exist As Independent Bodies June 1,” Breaking Defense, May 24, 2022, https://breakingdefense.com/2022/05/say-goodbye-to-jaic-and-dds-as-offices-cease-to-exist-as-independent-bodies-june-1/. 252technical innovation: Ian Goodfellow and Nicolas Papernot, “The Challenge of Verification and Testing of Machine Learning,” cleverhans-blog, June 14, 2017, http://www.cleverhans.io/security/privacy/ml/2017/06/14/verification.html. 253Patriot air and missile defense system: For more on the Patriot fratricides, see Paul Scharre, Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War (New York: W. W. Norton, April 24, 2018), 137–145. 31. RACE TO THE BOTTOM 254“race to the bottom”: Portions of this chapter are adapted, with permission, from Paul Scharre, “Debunking the AI Arms Race Theory,” Texas National Security Review 4, no. 3 (Summer 2021): 121–132, http://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/13985. 254“move fast and break things”: Steven Levy, “Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s Future, from Virtual Reality to Anonymity,” Wired, April 30, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/04/zuckerberg-f8-interview/. 254“We are under so much pressure”: Jack Shanahan, interview by author, April 1, 2020. 254twenty-five years from initial concept: F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) Program (Congressional Research Service, updated May 27, 2020) https://fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/RL30563.pdf; The Joint Advanced Strike Technology (JAST) program, which later became the Joint Strike Fighter program, was created in 1993.

—CHINESE GENERAL SECRETARY XI JINPING CONTENTS LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PREFACE INTRODUCTION PART I POWER 1.THE NEW OIL 2.DATA 3.COMPUTE 4.TALENT 5.INSTITUTIONS PART II COMPETITION 6.A WINNING HAND 7.MAVEN 8.REVOLT 9.SPUTNIK MOMENT PART III REPRESSION 10.TERROR 11.SHARP EYES 12.A BETTER WORLD 13.PANOPTICON 14.DYSTOPIA PART IV TRUTH 15.DISINFORMATION 16.SYNTHETIC REALITY 17.TRANSFORMATION 18.BOT WARS PART V RIFT 19.FUSION 20.HARMONY 21.STRANGLEHOLD PART VI REVOLUTION 22.ROBOTICS ROW 23.PROJECT VOLTRON 24.FOUNDATION 25.THE WRONG KIND OF LETHALITY 26.JEDI 27.DISRUPTION PART VII ALCHEMY 28.CONTROL 29.POISON 30.TRUST 31.RACE TO THE BOTTOM PART VIII FIRE 32.ALIEN INTELLIGENCE 33.BATTLEFIELD SINGULARITY 34.RESTRAINT 35.THE FUTURE OF AI CONCLUSION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ABBREVIATIONS NOTES INDEX LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Deep Neural Network U.S. R&D Funding as a Percentage of Gross Domestic Product, 1953–2018 U.S. Share of Global R&D (1960) U.S.

Systems may work brilliantly in one setting, then fail dramatically if the environment slightly changes. The “black box” nature of many AI methods means that it may be difficult to accurately predict when they will fail or even understand why they failed in retrospect. Potentially even more dangerous, the global competition in AI risks a “race to the bottom” on safety. In a desire to beat others to the punch, countries may cut corners to deploy AI systems before they have been fully tested. We are careening toward a world of AI systems that are powerful but insecure, unreliable, and dangerous. But technology is not destiny, and there are people around the world working to ensure that technological progress arcs toward a brighter future.


pages: 389 words: 98,487

The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor, and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car by Tim Harford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, business cycle, collective bargaining, congestion charging, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, market design, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, new economy, Pearl River Delta, price discrimination, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, special economic zone, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Vickrey auction

We saw in chapter 4 that the economist’s concept of externalities gives us a powerful tool to appreciate the risks of environmental damage, and externality charges give us a solution. Many—perhaps most—economists understand the risks of environmental damage and want action to preserve the environment. But the link between trade and environmental damage just doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny. There are three reasons for concern. The first concern is of a “race to the bottom”: companies rush overseas to produce goods under cheaper, more lenient environmental laws, while hapless governments oblige them by creating those lenient laws. The second is that physically moving goods around inevitably consumes resources and causes pollution. The third worry is that if trade promotes economic growth, it must also harm the planet.

The environmentalist Vandana Shiva speaks for many when she declares that “pollution moves from the rich to the poor. The result is a global environmental apartheid.” Strong words—but are they true? In theory, they might be true. Companies that can produce goods more cheaply will be at a competitive advantage. They can also move around more easily in a world of free trade. So the “race to the bottom” is a possibility. Then again, there are reasons to suspect that it’s a fantasy. Environmental regulations are not a major cost; labor is. If American environmental standards are really so strict, why do the most pollution-intensive American firms spend only 2 percent of their revenues on dealing with pollution?

As an analogy: if ten-year-old computer chips were still produced in bulk, they would be simpler and cheaper to make than modern chips, but nobody bothers any more. It’s now hard to buy an old computer even if you want to. And these arguments leave aside the possibility that firms want to offer high environmental standards to please their workers and their customers. So . . . a “race to the bottom” is possible in theory; but there are also good grounds for doubting its existence. So leaving theory to one side, what are the facts? First, that foreign investment in • 215 • T H E U N D E R C O V E R E C O N O M I S T rich countries is far more likely to go into polluting industries than foreign investment in poor countries.


pages: 250 words: 9,029

Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Popular Culture Is Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson

Columbine, complexity theory, corporate governance, delayed gratification, edge city, Flynn Effect, game design, Golden age of television, Marshall McLuhan, pattern recognition, profit motive, public intellectual, race to the bottom, sexual politics, SimCity, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, the market place

It i s a truth nearly universally acknowledged that pop culture caters to our base instincts; mass society dumbs down and simplifies; it races to the bottom. The rare flowerings of "quality programming" only serve to remind us of the over­ all downward slide. But no matter how many times this re­ frain is belted out, it doesn't get any more accurate. As we've seen, precisely the opposite seems to be happening: the sec­ ular trend is toward greater cognitive demands, more depth , more participation. And if you accept that premise, you ' re forced then to answer the question : Why? For decades, the race to the bottom served as a kind of Third Law of Thermodynamics for mass society : all other things being equal, pop culture will decline into simpler forms.

Melodrama's good, you know, a little tear here and there, a little morality tale, that's good. Positive. That's least objectionable. It's my job to keep my 32, not to cause any tune-out a priori in terms of ads or concepts, to make sure there's no tune-out in the shows vis-a-vis the competition. LOP is a pure-breed race-to-the-bottom model : you cre­ ate shows designed on the scale of minutes and seconds, with the fear that the slightest challenge-"thought, " say, or "education"-will send the audience scurrying to the other networks. Contrast LOP with the model followed by The Sopranos-what you might call the Most Repeatable Pro- 162 ST E V E N J O H N SO N gramming model.

It's cruci al that we abandon the Brave New World scenario where mindless amusement always wins out over more chal­ lenging fare , that we do away once and for all with George Wi l l 's vision of an "increasingly infantilized society. " Pop E V E R Y T H I N G B A D I S G O O D F O R Yo u 1 85 culture is not a race to the bottom, and it's high time we accepted-even celebrated-that fact. But even the most salutary social development comes with peripheral effects that are less desirable. The rise of the Internet has forestalled the death of the typographic universe-and its replacement by the society of the image-predicted by McLuhan and Postman.


pages: 543 words: 153,550

Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You by Scott E. Page

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Checklist Manifesto, computer age, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, discrete time, distributed ledger, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Higgs boson, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, money market fund, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Network effects, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, Phillips curve, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, race to the bottom, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, school choice, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, selection bias, six sigma, social graph, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Great Moderation, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, value at risk, web application, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Lyapunov Theorem Given a discrete time dynamical system consisting of the transition rule xt+1 = G(xt), the real-valued function F(xt) is a Lyapunov function if F(xt) ≥ M for all xt and if there exists an A > 0 such that If F is a Lyapunov Function for G, then starting from any x0, there exists a t∗, such that G(xt∗) = xt∗, and the system attains an equilibrium in finite time. We first construct a Lyapunov function within the Race to the Bottom Game, which captures strategic environments in which players choose levels of support such that each player prefers to provide just less than the average level. The Race to the Bottom Game Each of N players proposes a level of support in {0, 1,… 100} in each period. The player closest to of the average level of support wins a prize in that period. The game can be used to explain reductions in state government spending for social programs such as support for the indigent.

It is straightforward to show that the maximum level of support from any player satisfies the conditions for a Lyapunov function. The maximum level of support has a minimum at zero. And in each period the maximum level of support falls by at least 1 given that levels of support take integer values. Thus, at some point, everyone proposes zero support. The players have raced to the bottom. In this example, the model produces an undesirable result. To prevent a race to the bottom requires changing the game. To increase support for the indigent, a federation could shift to federal funding or impose a floor on spending.2 As an aside, suppose that we allow players to choose any real number in the interval between zero and 100 rather than integer values.

You will learn to identify when you are allowing ideology to supplant reason and have richer, more layered insights into the implications of policy initiatives, whether they be proposed greenbelts or mandatory drug tests. These benefits will accrue from an engagement with a variety of models—not hundreds, but a few dozen. The models in this book offer a good starting collection. They come from multiple disciplines and include the Prisoners’ Dilemma, the Race to the Bottom, and the SIR model of disease transmission. All of these models share a common form: they assume a set of entities—often people or organizations—and describe how they interact. The models we cover fall into three classes: simplifications of the world, mathematical analogies, and exploratory, artificial constructs.


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

But this rigid application of rules, in the absence of common deposit insurance, may make it even riskier for depositors to keep their money in the banks of a weak country: it may exacerbate the problem of divergence. REGULATORY RACES TO THE BOTTOM Europe not only allowed capital to flow freely within its borders but also financial firms and products—no matter how poorly they are regulated at home. The single-market principle for financial institutions and capital, in the absence of adequate EU regulation, led to a regulatory race to the bottom, with at least some of the costs of the failures borne by other jurisdictions. The failure of a financial institution imposes costs on others (evidenced so clearly in the crisis of 2008), and governments will not typically take into account these “cross-border costs.”

The EU (and this analysis thus goes beyond the eurozone) must adopt two further sets of policies: First, it needs to limit the race to the bottom, the kind of tax competition that worked so well for a few countries like Luxembourg but at the expense of others. This is a real example of an externality—of an action by one country that imposes harms on others. And yet Europe has failed to take adequate action, partially because many in Europe are enamored of the idea of low taxes and a small state, and this kind of race to the bottom suits them fine. Secondly, given the easy mobility around the European Union, the major responsibility for redistribution must lie at the EU level.39 The EU should follow the United States in levying taxes based on citizenship, wherever individuals are domiciled or resident.

The failure of a financial institution imposes costs on others (evidenced so clearly in the crisis of 2008), and governments will not typically take into account these “cross-border costs.” Indeed, especially before the 2008 global financial crisis, each country faced pressures to reduce regulations. Financial firms threatened that they would leave unless regulations were reduced.14 This regulatory race to the bottom would have existed within Europe even without the euro. Indeed, the winners in the pre-2008 contest were Iceland and the UK, neither of which belong to the eurozone (and Iceland doesn’t even belong to the EU). The UK prided itself on its system of light regulation, which meant essentially self-regulation, an oxymoron.


pages: 432 words: 127,985

The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry by William K. Black

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business climate, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, fear of failure, financial deregulation, friendly fire, George Akerlof, hiring and firing, junk bonds, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, The Market for Lemons, transaction costs

“COMPETITION IN LAXITY” Economists describing how regulators competed for “customers” by promising to be laxer in supervision coined two of the most telling phrases to come out of the S&L debacle: “competition in laxity” and “race to the bottom.” The novel aspect is that economists endorsed these pejorative terms because the race was toward greater deregulation. In the early 1980s, economists knew that regulation was the problem, so anything that reduced regulation was desirable. Richard Pratt shared this mindset when President Reagan appointed him Bank Board chairman in 1981. FOR THE BANK BOARD, THE RACE TO THE BOTTOM WAS A SHORT ONE The Bank Board was at the bottom of the federal financial regulatory heap before Pratt’s deregulation and desupervision.

The goodwill mergers and the wave of new entrants that Pratt encouraged diverted critical supervisory resources into (non)resolutions at precisely the time they were desperately needed to counter the wave of control frauds. TEXAS AND CALIFORNIA—THE STATES THAT WON THE RACE TO THE BOTTOM Another term for “competition in laxity” was “the race to the bottom.” S&Ls could change freely from a federal to a state charter (the permission from the government to run an S&L) and still be insured by the FSLIC. The charter determined what the S&L could invest in. Texas led the race by deregulating in the 1970s, and California followed the lead.

Texas had the equivalent of a “most favored nation” clause in its charters that allowed Texas-chartered S&Ls to do whatever federally chartered ones could, so the rush to convert to federal charters was greatest in California. California responded to the Garn–St Germain Act with the Nolan Act (named after its sponsoring senator, the notably corrupt and soon-to-be-convicted Pat Nolan). The Nolan Act became effective on January 1, 1983. It won the race to the bottom by going directly to the bottom. A California-chartered S&L could invest 100 percent of its assets in anything (with the commissioner’s approval). Despite Nolan’s corruption, this was not a conspiracy, but a bungled mess of epic proportions. No one was clever enough to design this disaster.


pages: 357 words: 94,852

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, antiwork, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collective bargaining, Corrections Corporation of America, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, energy transition, extractivism, fake news, financial deregulation, gentrification, Global Witness, greed is good, green transition, high net worth, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, tech billionaire, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

Rather than hope that Trump is going to magically transform into Bernie Sanders, and choose this one arena in which to be a genuine advocate for anyone who isn’t related to him, we would do far better to ask some tough questions about how it’s been possible for a gang of unapologetic plutocrats, with open disdain for democratic norms, to hijack an issue like corporate free trade in the first place. The Race to the Bottom Trump has made trade deals a signature issue for two reasons. The first, on full display that day at the White House, is that it’s a great way to steal votes from the Democrats. The right-wing pundit Charles Krauthammer—no fan of unions—declared on Fox News that Trump’s cozy union summit was a “great act of political larceny.”

What Trump’s admiration for Puzder suggests is that his real plan for luring back manufacturing is to suppress rights, wages, and protections to such a degree that working in a factory will be a lot like working at Hardee’s under Andrew Puzder. In other words, it’s yet another plan to take from the vulnerable to benefit the already outrageously rich. What we are witnessing is not a silver lining of any sort. It’s the push to the finish line in the “race to the bottom” that opponents of these corporate trade deals always feared. Yes, It’s Possible to Make Bad Trade Deals Worse Trump is not planning to remove the parts of trade deals that are most damaging to workers—the parts, for instance, that prohibit policies which are designed to favor local, over foreign, production.

One area of concern was how these deals were leading to devastating job losses, leaving behind rust belts from Detroit to Buenos Aires, while companies such as Ford and Toyota looked for ever-cheaper places to produce. But for the most part, our opposition was not grounded in Trump-style protectionism; it was trying to stem the beginning of what already looked like a race to the bottom, a new world order that was negatively impacting workers and the environment in every country. We were arguing for a model of trade that would start with the imperative to protect people and the planet. That was crucial then—it’s urgent now. The movement was even starting to win. We defeated the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas.


pages: 498 words: 145,708

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

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

While Johnson does not quite endorse the nutritional merits of cream pies, he must revel in the recent studies suggesting chocolate is good for us (after all), and he obviously grasps what Howard Stern teaches so well: that shock/shlock sells only if it feels subversive and hence progressive. “Where most commentators assume a race to the bottom and a dumbing down—‘an increasingly infantilized society,’ in George Will’s words,” Johnson enthuses, “I see a progressive story: mass culture growing more sophisticated, demanding more cognitive engagement with each passing year.”55 Johnson sets himself squarely against the kind of cultural criticism implied by the idea of an “infantilist” ethos that purportedly spurns nuance and complexity. Consumerism’s “cultural race to the bottom is a myth; we do not live in a fallen state of cheap pleasures that pale beside the intellectual riches of yesterday.

The selling of the body, which with the passing of actual slavery became a metaphor for coercive exchanges that were largely invisible (Marx and Foucault), has today become a toxic but remarkably well tolerated exemplar of the subordination of identity to commerce, and includes the selling of the constituent elements of the human genome. Roughly 20 percent of the genome has now been patented for private commercial use, and the trend is accelerating. As with so many other elements in the global race to the bottom, it is globalization that drives privatization: the quest for genetic patents is a function of the globalization of research. If “we” don’t do it, the Koreans or the French or the Chinese will. And since consumables along with the “need” for them must in any case be marketed globally for capitalism in its late consumer phase to flourish, bioengineering, cloning, and other advanced forms of genetic research are bound to be put into corporate hands.

For whatever the causes, and in South Africa they may go back to “the failure of the state, both during and after apartheid…to create jobs, health care, housing, and education accessible to the vast majority of the population,” the fact is that “when justice and social-control methods are ceded to the private sector—to private security firms, to vigilante groups, to simple mob justice…democracy becomes an empty promise.”72 Inequality is built into the market system, which too often becomes a race to the top for those who are wealthy, and a race to the bottom for everyone else. Inequality is not incidental to privatization, it is its very premise. The implicit tactic employed by the well off is to leave behind those who get more in public services than they contribute as taxpayers in a residual “public” sector (a kind of self-financing leper colony that cannot self-finance) and throw in with those who have plenty to contribute in their own private “commons.”


pages: 123 words: 32,382

Grouped: How Small Groups of Friends Are the Key to Influence on the Social Web by Paul Adams

Airbnb, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, David Brooks, Dunbar number, information retrieval, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Hawkins, mirror neurons, planetary scale, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, sentiment analysis, social web, statistical model, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, white flight

These examples are taken from Jonah Lehrer’s book How We Decide (Houghton Mifflin, 2009). 14. Find out more on Itamar Simonson’s research in the 1993 article “Get closer to your customers by understanding how they make choices.” 9. Marketing and advertising on the social web The problems facing interruption marketing Interruption marketing is a race to the bottom For the past 100 years, marketers have mostly relied on interruption marketing to get their message across, and viewed each new technology as a new way to interrupt people from what they were currently doing to get them to consume their message instead. Our TV programs are interrupted by ads.

We are being bombarded by more and more competing information, yet our capacity for processing and remembering this information remains the same. The increased competition for that attention means marketers must increase the frequency of their communication, exacerbating the problem. We’re seeing advertising appear in more and more unusual places. No one owns this problem and so it gets worse and worse.1 Interruption marketing is a race to the bottom. The most common way for marketers to increase their chances of being noticed is to increase the frequency of their campaigns. More people are likely to notice it, but it creates immense volumes of noise. On average, you need to run an ad 27 times before someone remembers it: Only one out of every nine ads is noticed, and people need to see the ad three times to remember it, so it takes 27 impressions for it to sink in.2 People no longer trust marketers One clear trend over the past 50 years is that people are more wary of advertising, and trust businesses less than they used to.3 In fact, this is so prevalent that researcher Dan Ariely has found that mistrust in marketing information negatively colors our entire perception of a product, even when we have direct experience to the contrary.

People will increasingly turn to their friends for information The amount of information accessible to us is increasing exponentially, but our capacity for processing ideas and memory will remain the same. In a world of too much information, marketing and advertising based on interrupting people, or trying to shift their attention from something else, is a race to the bottom. In this information rich world that we have created, people will increasingly turn to their friends for advice. Marketing will need to focus activities on gaining permission to market to people by being credible, trustworthy, interesting, and useful, and by marketing to small, connected groups of friends.


pages: 196 words: 57,974

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, borderless world, business process, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, industrial cluster, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, new economy, North Sea oil, pneumatic tube, race to the bottom, railway mania, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, wage slave, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

In 1830, the Massachusetts state legislature decided that companies did not need to be engaged in public works to be awarded the privilege of limited liability. In 1837, Connecticut went further and allowed firms in most lines of business to become incorporated without special legislative enactment. This competition between the states was arguably the first instance of a phenomenon that would later be dubbed “a race to the bottom,” with local politicians offering greater freedom to companies to keep their business (just as they would much later dangle tax incentives in front of car companies to build factories in their states). All the same, it is worth noting that the states gave away these privileges grudgingly, often ignoring the Dartmouth College ruling and often hedging in “their” companies with restrictions, both financial and social.

Virginia turned itself into what one legal treatise called a “snug harbour for roaming and piratical corporations.” The New York legislature was forced to enact a special charter for the General Electric Company to prevent it from absconding to New Jersey. But the big winner of this particular “race to the bottom” would be Delaware. By the time the Great Depression struck, the state had become home to more than a third of the industrial corporations on the New York Stock Exchange: twelve thousand companies claimed legal residence in a single office in downtown Wilmington.21 Most of the other industrial trusts converted to holding companies, too.

A persistent theme of this book has been the jostling for power between the company and government. The balance has unquestionably swung in the company’s favor. The modern firm is not in the same position as the East India Company, which had to go cap in hand to parliament every twenty years to renew its charter. Companies have often profited from “races to the bottom” by forcing governments and American states to compete for their favors. They have also encroached on the prerogatives of nation-states and embedded themselves in the body politic: think of the effect of corporate advertising or modern corporate control of the media. Companies have sometimes been able to outfight even the most powerful governments: IBM survived the American government’s biggest antitrust case of the 1970s; Microsoft seems to have thwarted the biggest assault of the 1990s.


pages: 462 words: 129,022

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Thus, American citizens are actually hurt as a result of the higher prices. Even Obama, who prided himself in his efforts to lower the cost of medicine, in the TPP (the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement) betrayed his principles. 11.The race to the bottom takes many other forms: banks, for instance, said that unless regulations were loosened, they would relocate their activities elsewhere. The result was a regulatory race to the bottom. The 2008 global financial crisis was among its consequences. 12.Taxes are only one of many variables that affect where firms locate, as we have already noted. But even focusing just on taxes, lowering taxes will induce firms to relocate if the country from which we are trying to steal jobs doesn’t respond.

The tech giants know how to wield their power in many arenas.77 Amazon used the enticement of thousands of jobs to get cities across the country bidding to have it set up its second headquarters in those cities through, for instance, lower taxes—shifting the tax burden onto others, of course. Small firms can’t do this, and so it gives an enormous advantage to Amazon over local retailers. We need a legal framework that prevents these races to the bottom.78 Intellectual property rights and competition There is one area where government sanctions monopolies: when a patent is given, the innovator gets temporary monopoly power. As we move to a knowledge-based economy, intellectual property rights (IPR) are likely to play an increasing role.

There are some footloose firms that have actually done this, giving some credibility to the argument.10 Of course, having achieved lower corporate taxes in one country, they turn around to other nations, saying that if they don’t lower their taxes businesses will leave. Not surprisingly, corporations love this race to the bottom.11 The argument that we had to lower corporate tax rates to compete with others was invoked by Republicans as they slashed the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent in 2017,12 just as it had been used earlier, in 2001 and 2003, as taxes on capital gains and dividends were cut. The earlier tax cuts didn’t work—they didn’t lead to higher savings, an increase in labor supply, or higher growth,13 and there is no reason to expect that the 2017 cut will either.


pages: 409 words: 125,611

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of DNA, Doha Development Round, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population

This was important, because it allowed a steady flow of cash into the housing market, which in turn provided the fuel for the housing bubble. The rating agencies’ behavior may have been affected by the perverse incentive of being paid by those that they rated, but I suspect that even without these incentive problems, their models would have been badly flawed. Competition, in this case, had a perverse effect: It caused a race to the bottom—a race to provide ratings that were most favorable to those being rated. Mortgage brokers played a key role: They were less interested in originating good mortgages—after all, they didn’t hold the mortgages for long—than in originating many mortgages. Some of the mortgage brokers were so enthusiastic that they invented new forms of mortgages: The low- or no-documentation loans to which I referred earlier were an invitation to deception, and came to be called liar loans.

In this way we could increase investment and employment here at home—a far cry from the current system, in which we in effect encourage even U.S. corporations to produce elsewhere. (Even if U.S. taxes are no higher than the average, there are some tax havens—like Ireland—that are engaged in a race to the bottom, trying to recruit companies to make their country their tax home.) Such a reform would end the corporate stampede toward “inversions,” changing a corporation’s tax home to avoid taxes. Where they claim their home office is would make little difference; only where they actually do business would.

American innovations in rent seeking—enriching oneself not by making the size of the economic pie bigger but by manipulating the system to seize a larger slice—have gone global. Asymmetric globalization has also exerted its toll around the globe. Mobile capital has demanded that workers make wage concessions and governments make tax concessions. The result is a race to the bottom. Wages and working conditions are being threatened. Pioneering firms like Apple, whose work relies on enormous advances in science and technology, many of them financed by government, have also shown great dexterity in avoiding taxes. They are willing to take, but not to give back. Inequality and poverty among children are a special moral disgrace.


pages: 466 words: 116,165

American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History by Casey Michel

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, forensic accounting, Global Witness, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Jeffrey Epstein, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, too big to fail

Ibid. 5.  Ibid. 6.  “Standard Oil,” Encyclopedia Brittanica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Standard-Oil. 7.  Davis, “Delaware Inc.” 8.  American Law Review 33 (St. Louis: Review Publishing, 1899), 419. 9.  “Tax Competition and the Race to the Bottom,” Tax Justice Network, https://www.taxjustice.net/topics/tax-competition-and-the-race-to-the-bottom/. 10. Hamill, “The Story of LLCs: Combining the Best Features of a Flawed Business Tax Structure.” 11. American Law Review 33, 419. 12. Nicholas Shaxson, Treasure Islands (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 13. Davis, “Delaware Inc.” 14. 

And it means that it’s the states that are making millions from corporate registration fees, which they can use to buoy their budgets. With this competition—with states offering increasing efficiency and protections for corporate clients, including those who wanted anonymity—American states engaged in a so-called race to the bottom. And where that bottom lies remains anyone’s guess. 3 CONTROL EVERYTHING, OWN NOTHING “Imagine the possibilities!” —Wyoming Corporate Services1 Most of the audiences S. D. Woo encountered when traveling had never heard of Delaware, or knew anything about the state. Even most Americans would be hard-pressed to rattle off more than a few facts, if any, about the state.

The corporate sprint to New Jersey sparked a response from other state governments looking to get their share of this new Klondike gold mine. A renaissance in “business friendly” regulations quickly followed, with regulatory rollbacks racing from state to state. Thanks to these turn-of-the-century innovations, as one researcher related, U.S. states found themselves in that “race to the bottom,”9 with new laws imposing fewer and fewer “restraints on potential corporate abuses.”10 Basic corporate regulations—things like requiring shareholder input, or assuming liability for any malfeasance or accidents—suddenly began disappearing across states. And along the way, requirements for publicly identifying those behind the corporations also disappeared.


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

Federal Reserve vice chairman, worrying that international outsourcing will cause unprecedented dislocations for the U.S. labor force; Martin Wolf, the Financial Times columnist and one of the most articulate advocates of globalization, expressing his disappointment with the way financial globalization has turned out; and Larry Summers, the Clinton administration’s “Mr. Globalization” and economic adviser to President Barack Obama, musing about the dangers of a race to the bottom in national regulations and the need for international labor standards. While these worries hardly amount to the full frontal attack mounted by the likes of Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, they still constitute a remarkable shift in the intellectual climate. Moreover, even those who have not lost heart often disagree vehemently about where they would like to see globalization go.

Such a transformation would benefit the communities in which these corporations and their affiliates operate. But, as Ruggie explains, there would be additional advantages. Improving large corporations’ social and environmental performance would spur emulation by other, smaller firms. It would alleviate the widespread concern that international competition creates a race to the bottom in labor and environmental standards at the expense of social inclusion at home. And it would allow the private sector to shoulder some of the functions that states are finding increasingly difficult to finance and carry out, as in public health and environmental protection, narrowing the governance gap between international markets and national governments.7 Arguments on behalf of new forms of global governance—whether of the delegation, network, or corporate social responsibility type—raise troubling questions.

Our reliance on global governance also muddles our understanding of the rights of nation states to establish and uphold domestic standards and regulations, and the maneuvering room they have for exercising those rights. The worry that this maneuvering room has narrowed too much is the main reason for the widespread concern about the “race to the bottom” in labor standards, corporate taxes, and elsewhere. Ultimately, the quest for global governance leaves us with too little real governance. Our only chance of strengthening the infrastructure of the global economy lies in reinforcing the ability of democratic governments to provide those foundations.


pages: 317 words: 101,475

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones

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

Why, the argument went, should private sector workers with comparatively meagre pensions subsidize the generous settlements of the public sector? There was no doubt that there had been a collapse in private sector pension provision. At the beginning of 2012, the Association of Consulting Actuaries warned that nine out of ten private sectordefined benefit schemes were closed to new entrants. But what was being proposed was a race to the bottom; public sector pensions should be dragged down, not private sector pensions dragged up. The majority of public sector workers saw this rhetoric for what it really was: on 30 June 2011, hundreds of thousands of teachers and civil servants went on strike. But with the Government still refusing to make significant concessions, trade union ballots across the public sector delivered overwhelming support for industrial action.

'It's a disgrace, I feel as though I've been used,' said one." It is not just agency and temporary workers who suffer because of job insecurity and outrageous terms and conditions. Fellow workers are forced to compete with people who can be hired far more cheaply. Everyone's wages are pushed down as a result. This is the 'race to the bottom' of pay and conditions. It might sound like a throwback to the Victorian era, but this could be the future for millions of workers as businesses exploit economic crisis for their own ends. In a document entitled The Shape of BusinessThe Next Ten Years, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI)-which represents major employers--claimed that the crash was the catalyst for a new era in business.

The real reasons for the strike, carefully obscured by the mainstream media, shed light on some of the complexities underlying the workingclass anti-immigration backlash in modem Britain. The Lindsey refinery's employer, IREM, had hired cheap, non-unionized workers from abroad. Not only did this threaten to break the workers' union, italso meant everyone else's wages and conditions would be pushed down in a 'race to the bottom'. 'We've got more in common with people around this world than with the employers who are doing this to us,' said Keith Gibson, one of the leaders of the strike and a member of the Trotskyist Socialist Party. BNP figures who tried to jump on the bandwagon were barred from the picket line. The demands of the strike committee included the unionization of immigrant labour, trade union assistance for immigrant workers and the building of links with construction workers on the continent.


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

For if the developing countries pay lower wages, do not protect their environment, and have insufferably long working hours, then won’t their cheap output eliminate our higher paying jobs, forcing us to lower our standards and our wages? We will have to keep working harder and longer to keep up. Firms and capital quickly migrate to where the lowest wages and the worst working conditions exist. It will be a ‘‘race to the bottom.’’ The one with the lowest social standard will win and will corner the investments and export revenues. Theoretically this seems a tough case to answer. The only trouble is that it has no foundation in reality. The world has not witnessed a deterioration of working conditions or wages in the past few decades, but precisely the opposite.

Each individual can opt out of certain things so as not to feel permanently at the beck and call of others. You don’t have to check your e-mail over the weekend, and there is no law against turning on the answering machine. Big is beautiful In the anti-globalists’ worldview, multinational corporations are leading the race to the bottom. By moving to developing countries and taking advantage of poor people and lax regulations, they are making money hand over fist and forcing other governments to adopt ever less restrictive policies. On this view, tariffs and barriers to foreign investment become a kind of national defense, a protection against a ruthless entrepreneurial power seeking to profiteer at people’s expense.

That is a dismal thesis, with the implication that when people obtain better opportunities, resources, and technology, they use them to abuse nature. Does there really have to be a conflict between development and the environment? The notion that there has to be a conflict runs into the same problem as the whole idea of a race to the bottom: it doesn’t tally with reality. There is no exodus of industry to countries with poor environmental standards, and there is no downward pressure on the level of global environmental protection. Instead, the bulk of American and European investments goes to countries with environmental regulations similar to their own.


pages: 209 words: 80,086

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes by Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder, David Ashton

active measures, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dutch auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market design, meritocracy, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, post-industrial society, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, working poor, zero-sum game

There is a recognition that low-cost countries are developing their own knowledge workers capable of achieving global standards that were previously assumed to be out of reach by anyone other than Western workers. Thomas Friedman’s account of the “flattening” of the world economy has been widely debated. He sees little reason to worry about America’s middle classes being embroiled in a global race to the bottom because he focused on the race to the top. The knowledge wars are, he believes, forcing Americans to raise their game in the competition for the best and most innovative ideas, leading him to conclude, America, as a whole, will do fine in a flat world with free trade— provided it continues to churn out knowledge workers who are able 22 The Global Auction to produce idea-based goods that can be sold globally and who are able to fill the knowledge jobs that will be created as we not only expand the global economy but connect all the knowledge pools in the world.

We were asked to turn off our recording equipment and in hushed voices, the two officials described their growing misgivings about the impact of free trade agreements working against the interests of American workers but to the benefit of American corporations. The consequences of this shift in economic power also led Robert Scott to conclude, “This shift has increased the global ‘race to the bottom’ in wages and environmental quality and closed thousands of U.S. factories, decimating employment in a wide range of communities, states, and entire regions of the United States. U.S. national interests have suffered while U.S. multinationals have enjoyed record profits on their foreign direct investments.” 23 The financial crash highlighted the economic catastrophe resulting from the failure of federal authorities to regulate financial markets, and the global auction highlights the social catastrophe of failing to regulate the relationship among education, jobs, and rewards.

This would reduce the risks managers take and enable them to focus more on the development of productive assets rather than inflating share prices or company profits for personal gain. Governments around the world, including the U.S. administration, also need to change the rules of the global auction. This would include new rules for the conduct of corporations and their executives designed to limit the race to the bottom that the reverse auction implies for many college-educated as well as less qualified workers. International labor A New Opportunity 159 standards would have to be reformed, allowing workers to counterbalance the power of global corporations by strengthening their rights to act collectively across national borders.


pages: 405 words: 109,114

Unfinished Business by Tamim Bayoumi

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Doha Development Round, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, housing crisis, inflation targeting, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, value at risk

The decision to retain national supervision was crucial as it undermined the European banking system in two ways. Competition across national supervisors meant that they increasingly became supporters for their own major banks. This led to the creation of large “national champions” and promoted a supervisory “race to the bottom” as regulators looked to boost the competitive position of their own champions by not being too intrusive. In addition, the fact that in the end almost all entry into other European countries was through subsidiaries meant that the costs of the eventual crisis were bottled up in individual countries.

Bank capital is intrinsically risky as owners are the first to lose their money in the case of financial distress. Accordingly, investors demand a higher rate of return on capital compared to safer forms of borrowing such as bonds or deposits. The concern was that competition across supervisors was creating a regulatory “race to the bottom” in which each country tried to make their banks more competitive by diluting the requirements on their expensive capital buffers, leading to inappropriately thin buffers across the board.17 The risk had been underlined by the international repercussions of major bank failures, such as that of Continental Illinois Bank in 1984.

The split between centralized bank supervision and national responsibility for bank rescues risks undermining the effectiveness of centralized ECB supervision of Euro area banks. This is because it replaces one set of misaligned incentives with another set. The problem with the pre-crisis system was that national regulators were responsible for both bank supervision and support, creating incentives for a regulatory race to the bottom. The new system generates a new misalignment of incentives since national regulators, who have responsibility for bank support, will generally want to minimize their assessment of banking problems and the associated costs which will put them at odds with the ECB, which is responsible for supervision.


pages: 465 words: 109,653

Free Ride by Robert Levine

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Anne Wojcicki, book scanning, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, commoditize, company town, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Firefox, future of journalism, Googley, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Justin.tv, Kevin Kelly, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, offshore financial centre, pets.com, publish or perish, race to the bottom, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Media companies that sell products online have to lower prices in order to compete with pirated versions of those same products sold by companies that bear none of the production costs. By making it essentially optional to pay for content, piracy has set the price of digital goods at zero. The result is a race to the bottom, and the inevitable response of media companies has been cuts—first in staff, then in ambition, and finally in quality. This devaluation could also hurt the Internet, since professional media provides much of the value in a broadband subscription. A 2010 study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that more than 99 percent of blog links to news stories went to mainstream media outlets like newspapers and networks.15 File-sharing services are filled with copyrighted music.16 Seven of the ten most popular clips in YouTube history are major-label music videos.17 Amid the Internet’s astonishing array of choices, statistics show that most consumers continue to engage with the same kind of culture they did before—only in a way that’s not sustainable for those who make it.

In almost every way, it’s the exact opposite of the more efficient Internet, where more content is pirated than purchased and the producers of shows are pressured into giving them away before another company can do it for them. Competition concerns cost and Google search ranking, and the winners are sites like the Huffington Post. If cable worked like the Internet, the result would be a race to the bottom: shows that are free to watch, cheap to make, and easy to forget. The company that represents the greatest threat to television may be Google. In May 2010, the search giant announced Google TV, a platform that brings the Internet to a TV screen. As with Boxee, that means users can easily download video illegally as well as buy it.

Since the Internet has global reach, technology executives worry their companies could be subject to the most onerous regulations of any country in which they operate—“a world of Singaporean free speech, American tort law, Russian commercial regulation, and Chinese civil rights,” as Goldsmith and Wu describe it.10 When Judge Gomez issued his Yahoo! decision, online activists worried it set a precedent that would allow any country to impose its laws on the online world. “We now risk a race to the bottom,” said Alan Davidson, an attorney with the Center for Democracy and Technology who has since become the top lobbyist at Google. “The most restrictive rules about Internet content—influenced by any country—could have an impact on people around the world.”11 This is certainly worth worrying about, but it could be seen as a very American view.


pages: 197 words: 49,240

Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders by Reihan Salam

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bonfire of the Vanities, charter city, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, gentrification, ghettoisation, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, job automation, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, megacity, new economy, obamacare, open borders, open immigration, race to the bottom, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, two tier labour market, upwardly mobile, urban decay, working poor

Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. Version_1 To my sisters CONTENTS TITLE PAGE COPYRIGHT DEDICATION Introduction CHAPTER ONE The Unfinished Melting Pot CHAPTER TWO Somebody Else’s Babies CHAPTER THREE Race to the Bottom CHAPTER FOUR Jobs Robots Will Do CHAPTER FIVE It’s a Small World CHAPTER SIX Nation Building Conclusion ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES INDEX ABOUT THE AUTHOR Introduction A few years ago, a cable news producer asked me to appear on his television program to discuss a grisly murder in which, if I recall correctly, a Muslim immigrant had hacked someone to death in the name of Islam.

As the political scientist Morris Levy suggested to The New York Times, Americans “dislike the idea of a permanent second-class citizen,” as it cuts against “a core set of values that people think of as really elemental to being American.”52 The United States does have long-term guest-worker programs, to be sure, but they typically give guest workers the right to bring over their dependents. Overstaying guest-worker visas is common, and, of course, people on temporary visas often have citizen children. The babies of low-skill immigrants are as much our babies as the babies of high-skill immigrants. And, as of now, we are letting them down. CHAPTER THREE Race to the Bottom As a little kid, I was an accidental ethnic pioneer. On the first day of kindergarten, I remember being teased for being an “Indian,” which is to say an indigenous person. I vaguely recall that my family found the teasing more baffling than offensive, and so I brushed it off. In short order, the teasing stopped and I befriended most of my classmates.

Politico, March 19, 2018. www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/19/how-america-fell-behind-the-world-on-immigration-217658. 52. Bui, Quoctrung and Caitlin Dickerson. “What Can the U.S. Learn From How Other Countries Handle Immigration?” The New York Times, February 16, 2018. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/16/upshot/comparing-immigration-policies-across-countries.html. CHAPTER THREE: RACE TO THE BOTTOM 1. Krogstad, Jens Manuel and Ana Gonzalez-Barrera. “A majority of English-speaking Hispanics in the U.S. are bilingual.” Pew Research Center, March 24, 2018. www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/03/24/a-majority-of-english-speaking-hispanics-in-the-u-s-are-bilingual. 2. Inspired by Richard Alba. 3.


pages: 453 words: 114,250

The Great Firewall of China by James Griffiths;

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mobile money, Occupy movement, pets.com, profit motive, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, undersea cable, WikiLeaks, zero day

Liu, ‘An open letter to Jerry Yang, chairman of Yahoo! Inc. regarding the arrest of Shi Tao’ in ‘Race to the Bottom’: corporate complicity in Chinese internet censorship, New York NY: Human Rights Watch, 2006, https://www.hrw.org/reports/2006/china0806/14.htm 21L. Rao, ‘The most expensive sake that Alibaba’s Jack Ma ever had’, Fortune, 25 September 2015, http://fortune.com/2015/09/25/yahoo-alibaba-investment-jack-ma/ Part 2 Chapter 6 1‘How censorship works in China: a brief overview’ in ‘Race to the Bottom’: corporate complicity in Chinese internet censorship, New York NY: Human Rights Watch, 2006, https://www.hrw.org/reports/2006/china0806/3.htm 2R.

Griffiths, ‘VPN down: China goes after Astrill, other anti-censorship apps in run up to WW2 anniversary parade’, South China Morning Post, 26 August 2015, http://www.scmp.com/tech/apps-gaming/article/1852658/vpn-down-china-goes-after-astrill-other-anti-censorship-apps-run 18‘How censorship works in China: a brief overview’ in ‘Race to the Bottom’: corporate complicity in Chinese internet censorship, New York NY: Human Rights Watch, 2006, https://www.hrw.org/reports/2006/china0806/3.htm 19G. Walton, China’s Golden Shield: corporations and the development of surveillance technology in the People’s Republic of China, Montreal: International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, 2001, https://web.archive.org/web/20020206170828/http://www.ichrdd.ca/english/commdoc/publications/globalization/goldenShieldEng.html 20J.

Sulzberger, ‘China’s leaders; in Jiang’s words: “I hope the Western world can understand China better”’, The New York Times, 10 August 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/10/world/china-s-leaders-jiang-s-words-hope-western-world-can-understand-china-better.html 3‘Jiang renews warning against “pernicious” internet’, Agence France-Presse, 11 July 2001. 4‘How censorship works in China: a brief overview’ in ‘Race to the Bottom’: corporate complicity in Chinese internet censorship, New York NY: Human Rights Watch, 2006, https://www.hrw.org/reports/2006/china0806/3.htm 5‘Golden Shield project’, Guangdong Hongan Group, 2012, https://web.archive.org/web/20150416093636/http://www.gdhongan.com:80/industroy.asp?ChannelID=7# 6J.


pages: 504 words: 143,303

Why We Can't Afford the Rich by Andrew Sayer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, asset-backed security, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, biodiversity loss, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, declining real wages, deglobalization, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green new deal, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Dyson, job automation, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land value tax, long term incentive plan, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, popular capitalism, predatory finance, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, 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, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The second myth is that corporations have a duty to avoid tax in order to meet their obligation to maximise shareholder value. But there is no such obligation in law. Tax havens compete with one another to attract the rich and their wealth, creating a race to the bottom (‘tax competition’) that continually pressures other countries to lower their own taxes, or at least those that most affect the rich. Escaping financial regulations also creates a race to the bottom to deregulate onshore economies. Rates of corporation tax have fallen across the rich countries since the 1970s. Companies that hide activities offshore can undercut those companies that actually do pay their tax; those that do pay may complain but, not surprisingly, many decide that if they can’t beat them, they may as well join them.

That the banks chose to hand over so much of their enormous profits to shareholders at a time when they needed to build up their capital base speaks volumes about the irrationality of shareholder capitalism. In the 1980s, governments began to extol the virtues of ‘flexible labour markets’, a brilliant euphemism for reduced protection, bargaining power and security for workers and a race-to-the-bottom for cheaper labour. In this new environment, slow growth of wages and salaries meant that aggregate demand for goods and services also grew more slowly, making it harder for companies to make a profit from investment in new capacity and products. Two things reduced or postponed the damage; first, the rise in women’s employment, which increased household income for many, and second, the dramatic expansion of consumer debt, particularly mortgages and credit cards, although eventually this depressed demand and consumption because the borrowers had to pay off the interest.

While they will no doubt be justified as ‘cutting red tape’, their aim is to maximise the economic and political power of international business by minimising government restrictions on their operations, whether they are for protecting public health, employment conditions or the environment, or simply for allowing governments to control their economies. The most likely – and intended – outcome is a race to the bottom in standards. The treaties also look set to extend corporations’ intellectual property rights, preventing individuals and other companies, including smaller businesses across the world, from benefiting from their innovations without paying them rent. As we saw in Parts One and Two, companies themselves typically benefit from countless freely available innovations of the commons, yet their powers to privatise their own innovations are being extended.


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

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

The cooperation problem in the refugee regime can be thought of as what game theorists would describe as a ‘suasion game’: one in which weaker players are left with little choice but to cooperate and stronger players are left with little incentive to cooperate.12 This explains in part why fewer than 1 per cent of the world’s refugees get access to resettlement in third countries beyond their region of origin. It explains why UNHCR’s assistance programmes around the world are chronically under-funded. It explains why distant countries in the global North, who take a relatively tiny proportion of the world’s refugees, constantly compete with one another in a ‘race to the bottom’ in terms of asylum standards in order to encourage refugees to choose another country’s territory rather than their own. In the absence of clear rules, attempts by UNHCR to overcome this collective action failure have had to be ad hoc and episodic. The organization relies upon annual voluntary contributions for almost all of its budget, rather than having access to assessed, multi-year funding contributions.

Yet it is crucial that if refugee protection is to be sustainable, better answers be found, premised upon collective rather than unilateral action and reinforcing rather than undermining the quantity and quality of protection available to refugees. It is in the historical absence of a clear set of principles and mechanisms for responsibility-sharing that, gradually, almost all states have found themselves in a race to the bottom in term of standards of protection. MISSING MODELS: WHY CAMPS ARE NOT ENOUGH The principal way in which the refugee regime provides protection is ineffective and outdated. Since the 1980s the dominant model has been the long-term provision of assistance in refugee camps and closed settlements.

The Commission gradually negotiated a Common European Asylum System (CEAS) – a series of common criteria for qualification (who is a refugee?), adjudication (how do we determine who is a refugee?), and reception (what rights should asylum-seekers and refugees receive?). The aim was to avoid a ‘race to the bottom’ in terms of standards, reduce the likelihood of refugees engaging in ‘asylum shopping’, and ensure no one state ended up with a disproportionate share of refugees because of its having more generous policies. That was the theory. In practice, the system was dysfunctional from the start. States adopted different asylum standards.


pages: 420 words: 94,064

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors by Spencer Jakab

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, classic study, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, democratizing finance, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fake news, family office, financial innovation, gamification, global macro, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, meme stock, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

ISBN: 9780593421154 (hardcover) ISBN: 9780593421161 (ebook) book design by chris welch, adapted for ebook by estelle malmed pid_prh_6.0_139089994_c0_r0 To my three apes,Jonah, Elliott, and Danny Contents Introduction Chapter 1 Mr. Kitty Goes to Washington Chapter 2 September 8, 2019 Chapter 3 Killer App Chapter 4 Winter of 2019–2020 Chapter 5 Race to the Bottom Chapter 6 April 2020 Chapter 7 Get Shorty Chapter 8 Summer–Fall 2020 Chapter 9 Cheat Code Chapter 10 Holiday Season 2020–2021 Chapter 11 Poking the Bear Chapter 12 January 22, 2021 Chapter 13 Rise of the Apes Chapter 14 January 26, 2021 Chapter 15 The Influencers Chapter 16 January 27, 2021 Chapter 17 LOL, Nothing Matters Chapter 18 January 28, 2021 Chapter 19 Men in Tights Chapter 20 January 29, 2021 Chapter 21 How Not to Stick It to the Man Chapter 22 February 2021 Chapter 23 The Same Old Game Bonus Round Acknowledgments Notes Index Introduction I’ll never forget the day I found out that my sons were degenerates.

The COVID-19 pandemic was about to make scrolling through Reddit and trading stocks a lot more popular for young people, laying more of the groundwork for the meme-stock explosion. Another vital ingredient had fallen in October 2019 when every major broker cut its trading commissions to zero. Chapter 5 Race to the Bottom They called it “Mayday.” Following years of complaints, Washington had had enough of Wall Street’s foot-dragging over its longest-standing shibboleth. In 1973 securities regulators told brokers that they had to get rid of fixed stock-trading commissions that dated back to the eighteenth century.

Various estimates put individual investors’ buying and selling of stocks at about 10 percent of the market’s total in 2019. Credit Suisse said that it had risen to between 15 percent and 18 percent in early 2020 and an astonishing 30 percent by early 2021 when the GameStop squeeze happened. The race to the bottom in costs coincided with the quality of some of the companies that novices embraced. Over-the-counter or penny stocks, a hotbed of shady companies called that because they are often quoted at a few cents or even less, saw an astounding trillion shares traded in December 2020—about fifty times the turnover of the regulated Nasdaq.


pages: 497 words: 123,718

A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption by Steven Hiatt; John Perkins

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, airline deregulation, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bob Geldof, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate personhood, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, full employment, global village, high net worth, land bank, land reform, large denomination, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, statistical model, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, Tax Reform Act of 1986, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Instead, governing elites amass obscene fortunes while the poor shoulder the burden of paying off the debts. A former World Bank staffer, Steve Berkman presents an inside investigator’s account of how these schemes work to divert development money into the pockets of corrupt elites and their First World partners. 9 The Philippines, the World Bank, and the Race to the Bottom Ellen Augustine “Development” and “modernization” became code words for U.S. efforts to prop up the regime of President Ferdinand Marcos, with the World Bank serving as a conduit for the financing of Marcos’ dictatorship. Some 800 leaked documents from the World Bank itself tell how the Bank financed martial law and made the Philippines the test case for its export-led development strategy based on multinational corporations—with disastrous results for both democracy and economic development. 10 Exporting Destruction Bruce Rich Export credit agencies have quietly become the world’s largest financial institutions, backing $788 billion in trade in 2004.

In “The World Bank and the $100 Billion Question,” Berkman provides an insider’s account of how and why the Bank looks the other way as corrupt elites steal funds intended for development aid. • In the 1970s, the Philippines were a showcase for the World Bank’s debt-based model of development and modernization. In “The Philippines, the World Bank, and the Race to the Bottom,” Ellen Augustine tells how billions in loans were central to U.S. efforts to prop up the Marcos dictatorship, with the World Bank serving as a conduit. • Export credit agencies have a single job: to enrich their countries’ corporations by making it easier for poor countries to buy their products and services.

POSTSCRIPT: By the time Marcos was overthrown in 1986, the foreign debt of the Philippines exceeded $28 billion, including around $675 million in debts incurred by companies run by Marcos’ cronies and guaranteed by Philippine government institutions. As Ellen Augustine notes in chapter 9, “The Philippines, the World Bank, and the Race to the Bottom,” the Philippine people are still struggling to repay debt accumulated during the Marcos era. —S.H. 3 Offshore banking havens enable the extraction of $500 billion a year from the Third World–a flow of dirty money that has become essential to global elites. Dirty Money: Inside the Secret World of Offshore Banking John Christensen Kuala Lumpur, July 1985: Maybe it was the heat, or perhaps the Guinness and Courvoisier had dulled my senses, but something about what the man next to me was saying didn’t quite add up.


pages: 772 words: 203,182

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

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

The average down payment for first-time buyers fell from 10 percent in 1989 to a bare 2 percent by 2007.33 Deregulation added to the blaze. A majority of these unconventional loans came to be made by unregulated mortgage firms or S&Ls “not subject to routine supervision,” according to Barry Ritholtz, CEO of the quantitative research firm Fusion IQ.34 Stolid firms refusing to join this race to the bottom in credit standards were penalized with shrinking market share and falling share prices. Alan Greenspan’s fingerprints were everywhere as the housing bubble expanded before the 2004 election, including successfully urging Wall Street to expand home equity loans. Such loans to households totaled $1.79 trillion during 2003–2005, adding spending comparable to an astounding 6 percent of GDP annually, a nice fillip for the reelection campaign of President George W.

It also proved to be a muscular antipoverty mechanism, setting a living wage floor sufficient to prevent abject family poverty. The logic of the minimum wage is straightforward: without a robust market for labor or a wage floor beneath them, history since the industrial revolution teaches that market forces produce a race to the bottom for wages. The American experience during my first years of work demonstrated how successful minimum wages can be. During its peak years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, America enjoyed the lowest poverty rates ever in its history (11.1 percent in 1973) and higher real wages than today. And the lowest recorded rate of childhood impoverishment ever in America was in 1969, at 13.8 percent.44 Most persuasive is that year after year in this period, America recorded among the lowest unemployment levels in postwar history despite the high minimum wage.

But we know that not all Americans suffered. Its dynamic forces improved resource allocation, greatly expanded world trade, and became a wealth machine for a thin slice of America. That meant greater rewards to owners of capital, innovators, and the most skilled, whose shares of national income rose. But for others, a race to the bottom in wages ensued, with workers in Milwaukee, Brooklyn, and Dallas competing one-on-one with workers in Sri Lanka, New Delhi, and Shanghai. And the biggest losers have been less skilled workers and high-wage union shops targeted by the offshoring and wage compression features of Reaganomics. European economies are much more integrated and influenced by world trade than is America’s.


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

The advanced industrial countries can help ensure transparency by simply saying: no one gets a tax deduction for money spent on royalties or other payments to foreign governments unless they fully disclose what was paid and how much of the resource in question was extracted. Without such a broad agreement, there will continue to be a race to the bottom, and the companies and countries most willing to engage in corrupt practices, and least willing to be transparent, will have an advantage over the others. 2. Reducing arms sales Even worse than corruption is the armed conflict that mineral and oil resources finance. Again, the international community could do more to make it more difficult and more expensive to acquire arms.

Enforcement We have described a variety of good practices, ways in which developed countries can help the developing world ensure that citizens reap the benefits of the resources that lie within their countries—by enhancing transparency, discouraging bribery and corruption, and protecting the environment. But these measures cannot and should not be left to goodwill. The amounts of money at stake are too large, the incentives for a race to the bottom too great. There must be effective enforcement. Trade agreements can be used to force “good behavior.” Trade sanctions can be used against companies and countries that engage in unfair trade practices—and failing to subscribe to the extractive industries transparency initiative and other anti-bribery measures should be treated as an unfair trade practice.

If one company leaves, another may not fill the gap—or if it does, it may demand even more unfavorable terms. Globalization has compounded the problems arising from the misalignment of incentives in modern corporations. Competition among developing countries to attract investment can result in a race to the bottom, as companies seek a home with the weakest labor and environmental laws. As the case of Bhopal illustrates, the ability to hide behind borders makes it even more difficult to hold corporations and their officers accountable. Furthermore, the speed with which assets can be moved from one country to another means that even if there is a monetary judgment against a firm in one country, it may be impossible to collect.


pages: 332 words: 106,197

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

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

In fact, companies found they had the power to scan the globe in search not only of cheaper labour, but of the cheapest possible labour. And developing countries, in turn, found that in order to successfully attract foreign investment they had to compete with one another to drive wages down. It became a global ‘race to the bottom’ towards ever cheaper labour and ever lower standards. The solidarity that marked the rise of the South in the 1960s was suddenly replaced with cutthroat competition. In the countries of the G7, corporations gained the upper hand over their workers at last – at least in industries that were amenable to offshoring, like manufacturing.

South Asia, where structural adjustment was not forcibly applied to the same extent, managed to shrink the inequality ratio during this period by 15 per cent, although the absolute gap between the per capita incomes of South Asia and the United States continued to grow.47 Source: World Development Indicators The race-to-the-bottom effect triggered by structural adjustment and globalisation is one of the main drivers behind this ever-widening gap. In the 1960s developing countries were losing $161 billion (in 2015 dollars) each year through what economists call ‘unequal exchange’, the difference between the real value of the goods that a developing country exports and the market prices that it gets for those goods.

At the time of writing, the new Lord Mayor was lobbying hard to turn Kenya into a tax haven. The problem with tax havens is not only that they facilitate the theft of capital, or that they prevent governments from capturing revenues, but also that they induce what analysts call ‘tax competition’ or ‘tax warfare’. Tax havens have set off a kind of global race to the bottom, with countries competing to offer low tax rates to foreign investors in order to attract them in. This constant pressure to reduce taxes makes it very difficult for parliaments and governments to make rational decisions about tax legislation, or to plan their budgets into the future. Some economists nonetheless believe that the global tax haven system is justifiable according to neoliberal theory: they claim that money should be allowed to move freely around the world in search of the best tax rates.


pages: 256 words: 76,433

Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion by Elizabeth L. Cline

big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, clean water, East Village, export processing zone, feminist movement, high-speed rail, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, megacity, messenger bag, Multi Fibre Arrangement, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Skype, special economic zone, trade liberalization, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, Veblen good

Anthony Lilore, a thirty-year veteran of the fashion industry and an advocate for Save the Garment Center, agrees that the increasing informalization of fashion has made consumers cheaper. “Fashion used to be tailored clothing, not bespoke, but a much more structured garment bought at department stores,” he says. “That men walk around in T-shirts and elastic waistband pants has very definitely impacted the notion of what fashion is and contributed to the race to the bottom.” The less skill involved in making our clothes, the cheaper it becomes, and the less we are willing to pay for it. The more basic clothes are, the less it matters where they’re made. A tank top can be made anywhere in the world. The same cannot be said of a well-made dress, which requires a highly skilled seamstress.

I could make a knockoff of what might just be a knockoff. Lily also gave me a price quote for the florette dress, $11. She said, “The cost is rising, but I will try my best to give you my best price because we are friends.” Over the past two decades, American consumers have accepted, and benefited from, the race to the bottom in fashion. The competition in garment manufacturing has been beyond fierce, with only those with the lowest prices surviving. According to some Chinese suppliers, net margins are still somewhere between 3 percent and 5 percent.1 Returned orders, cancellations, or lapses in the production lineup are common occurrences and they can all easily put a factory under.

Abuses and sweatshops still occur in the United States, but smaller production shops and a more locally minded industry focused on low-volume, better-made garments would improve accountability and correct some of fashion’s labor problems. Increasing the price of fashion would also help correct the race to the bottom in garment worker wages. “It’s a lot easier to keep an eye on what’s going on by keeping things local,” EPIC’s Tristan Scott says, although many of their designers produce in such small batches that the pieces are sewn in their own homes or personal studios. Some factory owners complain that state and federal labor laws are too strict, putting them at a competitive disadvantage.


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

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

In the market for textiles, for example, there is fierce competition between poorer countries, which produce more than half the world’s textile exports and nearly three-quarters of its clothing exports.17 Producer countries enjoyed some protection through the 136 GREEN ECONOMICS Multi-Fibre Arrangement (originally negotiated by developed countries to protect their post-war markets against imports) until this was removed under WTO pressure at the end of 2004. This has led to the collapse of an important sector of production in countries whose workers were paid slightly more – the so-called ‘race to the bottom’ in production.18 From a development economics perspective and in a book with a strong focus on poverty alleviation, Tom Lines argues the case for a fundamental restructuring of commodities markets. He also suggests informal cooperation between poorer countries dependent on commodities to earn foreign exchange to increase their market power: For example, in May 2005 a new government in Ecuador (which exports more bananas than any other country) signed a decree to regulate the volume of bananas leaving the country.

The erosion of wages, social welfare standards and environmental regulations for the sake of international trade. 3. The imposition world-wide of a consumer monoculture. Widely but falsely believed to be irreversible – See also financial meltdown, casino economy, Third World debt and 140 GREEN ECONOMICS race to the bottom (16th century: from colonialism, via development).1 This is, as Hines himself concedes, a blunt and indeed a savage critique. He sees globalization not as a positive move but rather as an economic delocalization or dismantling of local economies on a global basis. Woodin and Lucas refer to globalization as ‘the economics of insecurity’, making a strong case that it was a politically motivated project justified on the basis of economic efficiency but in reality operating for the benefit of transnational corporations or TNCs: There is plenty of evidence to show that the beneficiaries of this massive expansion in international trade are the transnational corporations (TNCs) that control it.

per cent of all fruit consumed in the UK now come from overseas.4 The problem for the proponents of localization is that the rules of the economic game are stacked against them. Although globalization has resulted in a single economy for sales, there is no global rate for wages, nor internationally agreed standards of employment or environmental protection. In such a world it is inevitable that there will be what critics of globalization refer to as a ‘race to the bottom’, where all production will shift to countries which have the lowest environmental and employment standards. The impossibility of competition between workers in Western economies, protected by minimum wage legislation, and those in the poorer nations is clear from the comparison of wage rates illustrated in Figure 9.2.


pages: 301 words: 88,082

The Great Tax Robbery: How Britain Became a Tax Haven for Fat Cats and Big Business by Richard Brooks

accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, financial deregulation, financial engineering, haute couture, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, mega-rich, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, shareholder value, short selling, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, two and twenty

Corporation tax avoidance transactions dating from before 2004 but by now reaching the higher courts were regularly going the taxman’s way as judges reasserted the ‘Ramsay’ principle of looking at schemes in the round. Of the last eight such cases, the Revenue had won five. Income tax avoidance schemes were almost without exception being decided in the Revenue’s favour. But in the international taxation ‘race to the bottom’ that the government was keen to accelerate, an easy ride from the tax authorities was paraded as a competitive national advantage just like plummeting corporate tax rates and lax offshore avoidance laws. Treasury minister David Gauke spelt it out: ‘How companies experience the UK tax system is as important to tax competitiveness as the headline rates that we set.’‌36 Multinationals, he was pleased to report, were telling him that ‘HMRC compares very favourably’ with foreign tax authorities (small business would not have been so complimentary).‌37 The government and the country’s most senior tax inspector had become salesmen, and what they were selling was Britain’s tax system.

They were to appear at a seminar hosted by notorious tax-dodger General Electric – represented by its UK tax director and chairman of the HMRC-Industry Business Tax Forum, Will Morris – at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. The title was ‘UK Tax Reform: a Roadmap for the US?’ and it was part of a concerted campaign to get US tax rates and offshore tax rules reduced to something like the UK’s in the global race to the bottom. The international tax-slashing circus would not, of course, have been complete without the Oxford Business Centre’s Professor Devereux jetting in to provide his contribution. ‘We [the UK] have been quite fortunate in our leaders over a few years,’ he remarked by way of explanation for getting the offshore corporate tax breaks on the statute book.‌48 Or as Morris had put it a few months before: ‘We have business talking to government, we have government talking to advisers, we have everybody essentially trying to move in the same direction.’‌49 This was supposedly the modern way to make policy.

This, however, was precisely the opposite of what the British government was doing by effectively trashing its own CFC laws (as OECD tax chief Pascal Saint-Amans would point out to a US congressional committee in June 2013). This exposes the limitations of the OECD’s work. Most essential changes to the corporate tax system require domestic law changes and, however laudable the organisation’s pronouncements, there is no sign that these will be forthcoming. With the UK leading the race to the bottom on corporate tax, our government comprehensively undermines the international effort against multinationals’ tax avoidance. As Cameron waxed lyrical and the OECD beavered away, down at the British tax avoidance club the Treasury and Britain’s biggest tax avoiders were reshaping the law to frustrate their sentiments and intentions.


pages: 296 words: 83,254

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles, Mehmet Cansoy

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, carbon footprint, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, future of work, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, global supply chain, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, mass incarceration, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer rental, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Stewart Brand, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, wage slave, walking around money, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

He would get up early before anyone arrived, and go for a run, to maintain the fiction that he was just coming in from exercising and needed a shower. But, he explained, it’s “absolutely mentally exhausting to keep up all these projects and this farce about my living situation.” Josh felt that TaskRabbit is “actually really a race to the bottom.” He recounted one of his clients telling him, “It’s almost exploitative the things she can get people to do for ten dollars.” Josh had big plans for his future. He was going to learn the software program Ruby on Rails, which he was counting on to allow him to “walk right into a minimum $80,000 a year job.

In sectors with low barriers to entry where the required skills are widely available, competition can become “ruinous” and result in poverty wages. That dynamic is the origin of taxi regulation and the basis on which driving became a viable occupation. By breaking the law, Uber and Lyft destroyed that viability, and we’re now seeing their drivers subjected to a similar race-to-the-bottom.27 And what the ideological high ground can’t accomplish, money can. The biggest platforms, again with Uber in the lead, have employed an army of lobbyists and public relations firms to fight even minor changes. In response to a modest proposed California law to fill the gap in insurance coverage when a driver has the app on but isn’t on a fare, Uber hired fourteen of the fifteen biggest Sacramento lobbying firms.28 In 2017 Uber and Lyft had more lobbyists than Amazon, Microsoft, and Walmart combined.29 Airbnb has also been active trying to stop laws that limit rental activity or mandate the collection of hotel and occupancy taxes.

Robinson develops the concept of “regulatory breach,” by which platforms enroll people en masse and avoid contact with regulatory interfaces. Robinson (2017, chap. 4). 25. In addition to the discussion in chapter 1, see Collier et al. (2018) and Thelen (2018). 26. Horan (2017). 27. For an excellent account of how labor organizing in San Francisco prevented the race-to-the-bottom before the 1930s, and how Uber has degraded drivers, see V. B. Dubal (2017b). 28. Collier et al. (2018, 927). 29. Borkholder et al. (2018). 30. Ulrik Binzer, CEO of Host Compliance, quoted in Martineau (2019). 31. Martineau (2019). 32. Martineau (2019). 33. Gilmore (2018). 34. Borkholder et al. (2018) provide a comprehensive study of preemption.


pages: 550 words: 124,073

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

This does not imply support for a particular party, left or right, but instead that electable parties have a reputation for effective management of advanced economies. (iii) Advanced capital is geographically embedded in the advanced nation-state rather than footloose: The third element of our approach rules out “race to the bottom” welfare states and/or imposition of subsistence wages in the advanced sectors, and more generally it also justifies advanced governments making huge investments in education, training, and research, which footloose companies might otherwise carry abroad perhaps with their skilled workforces.

Trade therefore also entrenches and facilitates cross-national differences in institutions, and this is reinforced by foreign direct investment. We see more tendencies toward convergence in nontraded, low-wage service sectors where flexibilization of labor contracts is a common trend in the past two decades. Still, most evidence confirms that there have not been races to the bottom in redistribution or corporate tax rates. Moreover, in all these cases differential outcomes are determined in our analysis by domestic political coalitions. Thus we conclude that it is to be expected that governments of advanced countries with strong advanced capitalist sectors are the dominant powers in the contemporary world—not the EU, nor multinationals, nor transnational standard-setters, public or private. 6.

To be sure, the implications of European integration have been complex, even contradictory. For some it has been seen as a way of introducing the chill winds of competition and intensifying the pressure to deregulate and eliminate the excesses of the welfare state, while for others it has been seen as a way of halting the race to the bottom. What is important here is that integration supported labor market decentralization. By eliminating capital controls and making realignments more difficult, the EMS solidified the exchange-rate commitment and the credibility of the non-accommodating monetary policies needed to restrain wage demands in more decentralized labor markets.


pages: 510 words: 120,048

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

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

Those who take assignments through it often seem to even enjoy the fun of emulating an intelligent machine for someone else’s profit.1 The charade has a triply dismal quality. Of course there is the “race to the bottom” process that lowers wages absolutely as much as possible,2 making temp jobs in the fast-food industry seem like social climbing on-ramps in comparison. Yet there are people ready to step up and take such roles. More than a few recruits appear to be the live-at-home kids of middle-class Americans, whiling away their time.3 Whenever there is a networked race to the bottom, there is a Siren Server that connects people and owns the master database about who they are. If they knew each other, comprehensively, they might organize a union or some other form of levee.

The more interests a person perceives in common with others, even when commonalities are best illuminated by theatrical effects, the more likely the market will function well, and grow. The psychology of a social contract will eventually take hold. In isolation, economic symmetry might pose a risk of a race to the bottom. Wouldn’t everyone initially want stuff for free, and then never be able to compete with the expectation of free stuff from others in order to start charging? This is approximately what happens when a traditional economy stalls and falls into a depression. Recall, though, the “legacy” portion of the calculation of price described earlier.

., 75, 91, 266–67 New York Times, 109 Nobel Prize, 40, 118, 143n nodes, network, 156, 227, 230, 241–43, 350 “no free lunch” principle, 55–56, 59–60 nondeterministic music, 23n nonlinear solutions, 149–50 nonprofit share sites, 59n, 94–95 nostalgia, 129–32 NRO, 199–200 nuclear power, 133 nuclear weapons, 127, 296 nursing, 97–100, 123, 296n nursing homes, 97–100, 269 Obama, Barack, 79, 100 “Obamacare,” 100n obsolescence, 89, 95 oil resources, 43, 133 online stores, 171 Ono, Yoko, 212 ontologies, 124n, 196 open-source applications, 206, 207, 272, 310–11 optical illusions, 121 optimism, 32–35, 45, 130, 138–40, 218, 230n, 295 optimization, 144–47, 148, 153, 154–55, 167, 202, 203 Oracle, 265 Orbitz, 63, 64, 65 organ donors, 190, 191 ouroboros, 154 outcomes, economic, 40–41, 144–45 outsourcing, 177–78, 185 Owens, Buck, 256 packet switching, 228–29 Palmer, Amanda, 186–87 Pandora, 192 panopticons, 308 papacy, 190 paper money, 34n parallel computers, 147–48, 149, 151 paranoia, 309 Parrish, Maxfield, 214 particle interactions, 196 party machines, 202 Pascal, Blaise, 132, 139 Pascal’s Wager, 139 passwords, 307, 309 “past-oriented money,” 29–31, 35, 284–85 patterns, information, 178, 183, 184, 188–89 Paul, Ron, 33n Pauli exclusion principle, 181, 202 PayPal, 60, 93, 326 peasants, 565 pensions, 95, 99 Perestroika (Kushner), 165 “perfect investments,” 59–67, 77–78 performances, musical, 47–48, 51, 186–87, 253 perpetual motion, 55 Persian Gulf, 86 personal computers (PCs), 158, 182n, 214, 223, 229 personal information systems, 110, 312–16, 317 Pfizer, 265 pharmaceuticals industry, 66–67, 100–106, 123, 136, 203 philanthropy, 117 photography, 53, 89n, 92, 94, 309–11, 318, 319, 321 photo-sharing services, 53 physical trades, 292 physicians, 66–67 physics, 88, 153n, 167n Picasso, Pablo, 108 Pinterest, 180–81, 183 Pirate Party, 49, 199, 206, 226, 253, 284, 318 placebos, 112 placement fees, 184 player pianos, 160–61 plutocracy, 48, 291–94, 355 police, 246, 310, 311, 319–21, 335 politics, 13–18, 21, 22–25, 47–48, 85, 122, 124–26, 128, 134–37, 149–51, 155, 167, 199–234, 295–96, 342 see also conservatism; liberalism; libertarianism Ponzi schemes, 48 Popper, Karl, 189n popular culture, 111–12, 130, 137–38, 139, 159 “populating the stack,” 273 population, 17, 34n, 86, 97–100, 123, 125, 132, 133, 269, 296n, 325–26, 346 poverty, 37–38, 42, 44, 53–54, 93–94, 137, 148, 167, 190, 194, 253, 256, 263, 290, 291–92 power, personal, 13–15, 53, 60, 62–63, 86, 114, 116, 120, 122, 158, 166, 172–73, 175, 190, 199, 204, 207, 208, 278–79, 290, 291, 302–3, 308–9, 314, 319, 326, 344, 360 Presley, Elvis, 211 Priceline, 65 pricing strategies, 1–2, 43, 60–66, 72–74, 145, 147–48, 158, 169–74, 226, 261, 272–75, 289, 317–24, 331, 337–38 printers, 90, 99, 154, 162, 212, 269, 310–11, 316, 331, 347, 348, 349 privacy, 1–2, 11, 13–15, 25, 50–51, 64, 99, 108–9, 114–15, 120–21, 152, 177n, 199–200, 201, 204, 206–7, 234–35, 246, 272, 291, 305, 309–13, 314, 315–16, 317, 319–24 privacy rights, 13–15, 25, 204, 305, 312–13, 314, 315–16, 321–22 product design and development, 85–89, 117–20, 128, 136–37, 145, 154, 236 productivity, 7, 56–57, 134–35 profit margins, 59n, 71–72, 76–78, 94–95, 116, 177n, 178, 179, 207, 258, 274–75, 321–22 progress, 9–18, 20, 21, 37, 43, 48, 57, 88, 98, 123, 124–40, 130–37, 256–57, 267, 325–31, 341–42 promotions, 62 property values, 52 proprietary hardware, 172 provenance, 245–46, 247, 338 pseudo-asceticism, 211–12 public libraries, 293 public roads, 79–80 publishers, 62n, 92, 182, 277–78, 281, 347, 352–60 punishing vs. rewarding network effects, 169–74, 182, 183 quants, 75–76 quantum field theory, 167n, 195 QuNeo, 117, 118, 119 Rabois, Keith, 185 “race to the bottom,” 178 radiant risk, 61–63, 118–19, 120, 156, 183–84 Ragnarok, 30 railroads, 43, 172 Rand, Ayn, 167, 204 randomness, 143 rationality, 144 Reagan, Ronald, 149 real estate, 33, 46, 49–52, 61, 78, 95–96, 99, 193, 224, 227, 239, 245, 255, 274n, 289n, 296, 298, 300, 301 reality, 55–56, 59–60, 124n, 127–28, 154–56, 161, 165–68, 194–95, 203–4, 216–17, 295–303, 364–65 see also Virtual Reality (VR) reason, 195–96 recessions, economic, 31, 54, 60, 76–77, 79, 151–52, 167, 204, 311, 336–37 record labels, 347 recycling, 88, 89 Reddit, 118n, 186, 254 reductionism, 184 regulation, economic, 37–38, 44, 45–46, 49–50, 54, 56, 69–70, 77–78, 266n, 274, 299–300, 311, 321–22, 350–51 relativity theory, 167n religion, 124–25, 126, 131, 139, 190, 193–95, 211–17, 293, 300n, 326 remote computers, 11–12 rents, 144 Republican Party, 79, 202 research and development, 40–45, 85–89, 117–20, 128, 136–37, 145, 154, 215, 229–30, 236 retail sector, 69, 70–74, 95–96, 169–74, 272, 349–51, 355–56 retirement, 49, 150 revenue growth plans, 173n revenues, 149, 149, 150, 151, 173n, 225, 234–35, 242, 347–48 reversible computers, 143n revolutions, 199, 291, 331 rhythm, 159–62 Rich Dad, Poor Dad (Kiyosaki), 46 risk, 54, 55, 57, 59–63, 71–72, 85, 117, 118–19, 120, 156, 170–71, 179, 183–84, 188, 242, 277–81, 284, 337, 350 externalization of, 59n, 117, 277–81 risk aversion, 188 risk pools, 277–81, 284 risk radiation, 61–63, 118–19, 120, 156, 183–84 robo call centers, 177n robotic cars, 90–92 robotics, robots, 11, 12, 17, 23, 42, 55, 85–86, 90–92, 97–100, 111, 129, 135–36, 155, 157, 162, 260, 261, 269, 296n, 342, 359–60 Roman Empire, 24–25 root nodes, 241 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 129 Rousseau humor, 126, 129, 130–31 routers, 171–72 royalties, 47, 240, 254, 263–64, 323, 338 Rubin, Edgar, 121 rupture, 66–67 salaries, 10, 46–47, 50–54, 152, 178, 270–71, 287–88, 291–94, 338–39, 365 sampling, 71–72, 191, 221, 224–26, 259 San Francisco, University of, 190 satellites, 110 savings, 49, 72–74 scalable solutions, 47 scams, 119–21, 186, 275n, 287–88, 299–300 scanned books, 192, 193 SceneTap, 108n Schmidt, Eric, 305n, 352 Schwartz, Peter, 214 science fiction, 18, 126–27, 136, 137–38, 139, 193, 230n, 309, 356n search engines, 51, 60, 70, 81, 120, 191, 267, 289, 293 Second Life, 270, 343 Secret, The (Byrne), 216 securitization, 76–78, 99, 289n security, 14–15, 175, 239–40, 305–8, 345 self-actualization, 211–17 self-driving vehicles, 90–92, 98, 311, 343, 367 servants, 22 servers, 12n, 15, 31, 53–57, 71–72, 95–96, 143–44, 171, 180, 183, 206, 245, 358 see also Siren Servers “Sexy Sadie,” 213 Shakur, Tupac, 329 Shelley, Mary, 327 Short History of Progress, A (Wright), 132 “shrinking markets,” 66–67 shuttles, 22, 23n, 24 signal-processing algorithms, 76–78, 148 silicon chips, 10, 86–87 Silicon Valley, 12, 13, 14, 21, 34n, 56, 59, 60, 66–67, 70, 71, 75–76, 80, 93, 96–97, 100, 102, 108n, 125n, 132, 136, 154, 157, 162, 170, 179–89, 192, 193, 200, 207, 210, 211–18, 228, 230, 233, 258, 275n, 294, 299–300, 325–31, 345, 349, 352, 354–58 singularity, 22–25, 125, 215, 217, 327–28, 366, 367 Singularity University, 193, 325, 327–28 Sirenic Age, 66n, 354 Siren Servers, 53–57, 59, 61–64, 65, 66n, 69–78, 82, 91–99, 114–19, 143–48, 154–56, 166–89, 191, 200, 201, 203, 210n, 216, 235, 246–50, 258, 259, 269, 271, 272, 280, 285, 289, 293–94, 298, 301, 302–3, 307–10, 314–23, 326, 336–51, 354, 365, 366 Siri, 95 skilled labor, 99–100 Skout, 280n Skype, 95, 129 slavery, 22, 23, 33n Sleeper, 130 small businesses, 173 smartphones, 34n, 39, 162, 172, 192, 269n, 273 Smith, Adam, 121, 126 Smolin, Lee, 148n social contract, 20, 49, 247, 284, 288, 335, 336 social engineering, 112–13, 190–91 socialism, 14, 128, 254, 257, 341n social mobility, 66, 97, 292–94 social networks, 18, 51, 56, 60, 70, 81, 89, 107–9, 113, 114, 129, 167–68, 172–73, 179, 180, 190, 199, 200–201, 202, 204, 227, 241, 242–43, 259, 267, 269n, 274–75, 280n, 286, 307–8, 317, 336, 337, 343, 349, 358, 365–66 see also Facebook social safety nets, 10, 44, 54, 202, 251, 293 Social Security, 251, 345 software, 7, 9, 11, 14, 17, 68, 86, 99, 100–101, 128, 129, 147, 154, 155, 165, 172–73, 177–78, 182, 192, 234, 236, 241–42, 258, 262, 273–74, 283, 331, 347, 357 software-mediated technology, 7, 11, 14, 86, 100–101, 165, 234, 236, 258, 347 South Korea, 133 Soviet Union, 70 “space elevator pitch,” 233, 342, 361 space travel, 233, 266 Spain, 159–60 spam, 178, 275n spending levels, 287–88 spirituality, 126, 211–17, 325–31, 364 spreadsheet programs, 230 “spy data tax,” 234–35 Square, 185 Stalin, Joseph, 125n Stanford Research Institute (SRI), 215 Stanford University, 60, 75, 90, 95, 97, 101, 102, 103, 162, 325 Starr, Ringo, 256 Star Trek, 138, 139, 230n startup companies, 39, 60, 69, 93–94, 108n, 124n, 136, 179–89, 265, 274n, 279–80, 309–10, 326, 341, 343–45, 348, 352, 355 starvation, 123 Star Wars, 137 star (winner-take-all) system, 38–43, 50, 54–55, 204, 243, 256–57, 263, 329–30 statistics, 11, 20, 71–72, 75–78, 90–91, 93, 110n, 114–15, 186, 192 “stickiness,” 170, 171 stimulus, economic, 151–52 stoplights, 90 Strangelove humor, 127 student debt, 92, 95 “Study 27,” 160 “Study 36,” 160 Sumer, 29 supergoop, 85–89 supernatural phenomena, 55, 124–25, 127, 132, 192, 194–95, 300 supply chain, 70–72, 174, 187 Supreme Court, U.S., 104–5 surgery, 11–13, 17, 18, 98, 157–58, 363 surveillance, 1–2, 11, 14, 50–51, 64, 71–72, 99, 108–9, 114–15, 120–21, 152, 177n, 199–200, 201, 206–7, 234–35, 246, 272, 291, 305, 309–11, 315, 316, 317, 319–24 Surviving Progress, 132 sustainable economies, 235–37, 285–87 Sutherland, Ivan, 221 swarms, 99, 109 synthesizers, 160 synthetic biology, 162 tablets, 85, 86, 87, 88, 113, 162, 229 Tahrir Square, 95 Tamagotchis, 98 target ads, 170 taxation, 44, 45, 49, 52, 60, 74–75, 77, 82, 149, 149, 150, 151, 202, 210, 234–35, 263, 273, 289–90 taxis, 44, 91–92, 239, 240, 266–67, 269, 273, 311 Teamsters, 91 TechCrunch, 189 tech fixes, 295–96 technical schools, 96–97 technologists (“techies”), 9–10, 15–16, 45, 47–48, 66–67, 88, 122, 124, 131–32, 134, 139–40, 157–62, 165–66, 178, 193–94, 295–98, 307, 309, 325–31, 341, 342, 356n technology: author’s experience in, 47–48, 62n, 69–72, 93–94, 114, 130, 131–32, 153, 158–62, 178, 206–7, 228, 265, 266–67, 309–10, 325, 328, 343, 352–53, 362n, 364, 365n, 366 bio-, 11–13, 17, 18, 109–10, 162, 330–31 chaos and, 165–66, 273n, 331 collusion in, 65–66, 72, 169–74, 255, 350–51 complexity of, 53–54 costs of, 8, 18, 72–74, 87n, 136–37, 170–71, 176–77, 184–85 creepiness of, 305–24 cultural impact of, 8–9, 21, 23–25, 53, 130, 135–40 development and emergence of, 7–18, 21, 53–54, 60–61, 66–67, 85–86, 87, 97–98, 129–38, 157–58, 182, 188–90, 193–96, 217 digital, 2–3, 7–8, 15–16, 18, 31, 40, 43, 50–51, 132, 208 economic impact of, 1–3, 15–18, 29–30, 37, 40, 53–54, 60–66, 71–74, 79–110, 124, 134–37, 161, 162, 169–77, 181–82, 183, 184–85, 218, 254, 277–78, 298, 335–39, 341–51, 357–58 educational, 92–97 efficiency of, 90, 118, 191 employment in, 56–57, 60, 71–74, 79, 123, 135, 178 engineering for, 113–14, 123–24, 192, 194, 217, 218, 326 essential vs. worthless, 11–12 failure of, 188–89 fear of (technophobia), 129–32, 134–38 freedom as issue in, 32–33, 90–92, 277–78, 336 government influence in, 158, 199, 205–6, 234–35, 240, 246, 248–51, 307, 317, 341, 345–46, 350–51 human agency and, 8–21, 50–52, 85, 88, 91, 124–40, 144, 165–66, 175–78, 191–92, 193, 217, 253–64, 274–75, 283–85, 305–6, 328, 341–51, 358–60, 361, 362, 365–67 ideas for, 123, 124, 158, 188–89, 225, 245–46, 286–87, 299, 358–60 industrial, 49, 83, 85–89, 123, 132, 154, 343 information, 7, 32–35, 49, 66n, 71–72, 109, 110, 116, 120, 125n, 126, 135, 136, 254, 312–16, 317 investment in, 66, 181, 183, 184, 218, 277–78, 298, 348 limitations of, 157–62, 196, 222 monopolies for, 60, 65–66, 169–74, 181–82, 187–88, 190, 202, 326, 350 morality and, 50–51, 72, 73–74, 188, 194–95, 262, 335–36 motivation and, 7–18, 85–86, 97–98, 216 nano-, 11, 12, 17, 162 new vs. old, 20–21 obsolescence of, 89, 97 political impact of, 13–18, 22–25, 85, 122, 124–26, 128, 134–37, 199–234, 295–96, 342 progress in, 9–18, 20, 21, 37, 43, 48, 57, 88, 98, 123, 124–40, 130–37, 256–57, 267, 325–31, 341–42 resources for, 55–56, 157–58 rupture as concept in, 66–67 scams in, 119–21, 186, 275n, 287–88, 299–300 singularity of, 22–25, 125, 215, 217, 327–28, 366, 367 social impact of, 9–21, 124–40, 167n, 187, 280–81, 310–11 software-mediated, 7, 11, 14, 86, 100–101, 165, 234, 236, 258, 347 startup companies in, 39, 60, 69, 93–94, 108n, 124n, 136, 179–89, 265, 274n, 279–80, 309–10, 326, 341, 343–45, 348, 352, 355 utopian, 13–18, 21, 31, 37–38, 45–46, 96, 128, 130, 167, 205, 207, 265, 267, 270, 283, 290, 291, 308–9, 316 see also specific technologies technophobia, 129–32, 134–38 television, 86, 185–86, 191, 216, 267 temperature, 56, 145 Ten Commandments, 300n Terminator, The, 137 terrorism, 133, 200 Tesla, Nikola, 327 Texas, 203 text, 162, 352–60 textile industry, 22, 23n, 24, 135 theocracy, 194–95 Theocracy humor, 124–25 thermodynamics, 88, 143n Thiel, Peter, 60, 93, 326 thought experiments, 55, 139 thought schemas, 13 3D printers, 7, 85–89, 90, 99, 154, 162, 212, 269, 310–11, 316, 331, 347, 348, 349 Thrun, Sebastian, 94 Tibet, 214 Time Machine, The (Wells), 127, 137, 261, 331 topology, network, 241–43, 246 touchscreens, 86 tourism, 79 Toyota Prius, 302 tracking services, 109, 120–21, 122 trade, 29 traffic, 90–92, 314 “tragedy of the commons,” 66n Transformers, 98 translation services, 19–20, 182, 191, 195, 261, 262, 284, 338 transparency, 63–66, 74–78, 118, 176, 190–91, 205–6, 278, 291, 306–9, 316, 336 transportation, 79–80, 87, 90–92, 123, 258 travel agents, 64 Travelocity, 65 travel sites, 63, 64, 65, 181, 279–80 tree-shaped networks, 241–42, 243, 246 tribal dramas, 126 trickle-down effect, 148–49, 204 triumphalism, 128, 157–62 tropes (humors), 124–40, 157, 170, 230 trust, 32–34, 35, 42, 51–52 Turing, Alan, 127–28, 134 Turing’s humor, 127–28, 191–94 Turing Test, 330 Twitter, 128, 173n, 180, 182, 188, 199, 200n, 201, 204, 245, 258, 259, 349, 365n 2001: A Space Odyssey, 137 two-way links, 1–2, 227, 245, 289 underemployment, 257–58 unemployment, 7–8, 22, 79, 85–106, 117, 151–52, 234, 257–58, 321–22, 331, 343 “unintentional manipulation,” 144 United States, 25, 45, 54, 79–80, 86, 138, 199–204 universities, 92–97 upper class, 45, 48 used car market, 118–19 user interface, 362–63, 364 utopianism, 13–18, 21, 30, 31, 37–38, 45–46, 96, 128, 130, 167, 205, 207, 265, 267, 270, 283, 290, 291, 308–9, 316 value, economic, 21, 33–35, 52, 61, 64–67, 73n, 108, 283–90, 299–300, 321–22, 364 value, information, 1–3, 15–16, 20, 210, 235–43, 257–58, 259, 261–63, 271–75, 321–24, 358–60 Values, Attitudes, and Lifestyles (VALS), 215 variables, 149–50 vendors, 71–74 venture capital, 66, 181, 218, 277–78, 298, 348 videos, 60, 100, 162, 185–86, 204, 223, 225, 226, 239, 240, 242, 245, 277, 287, 329, 335–36, 349, 354, 356 Vietnam War, 353n vinyl records, 89 viral videos, 185–86 Virtual Reality (VR), 12, 47–48, 127, 129, 132, 158, 162, 214, 283–85, 312–13, 314, 315, 325, 343, 356, 362n viruses, 132–33 visibility, 184, 185–86, 234, 355 visual cognition, 111–12 VitaBop, 100–106, 284n vitamins, 100–106 Voice, The, 185–86 “voodoo economics,” 149 voting, 122, 202–4, 249 Wachowski, Lana, 165 Wall Street, 49, 70, 76–77, 181, 184, 234, 317, 331, 350 Wal-Mart, 69, 70–74, 89, 174, 187, 201 Warhol, Andy, 108 War of the Worlds, The (Wells), 137 water supplies, 17, 18 Watts, Alan, 211–12 Wave, 189 wealth: aggregate or concentration of, 9, 42–43, 53, 60, 61, 74–75, 96, 97, 108, 115, 148, 157–58, 166, 175, 201, 202, 208, 234, 278–79, 298, 305, 335, 355, 360 creation of, 32, 33–34, 46–47, 50–51, 57, 62–63, 79, 92, 96, 120, 148–49, 210, 241–43, 270–75, 291–94, 338–39, 349 inequalities and redistribution of, 20, 37–45, 65–66, 92, 97, 144, 254, 256–57, 274–75, 286–87, 290–94, 298, 299–300 see also income levels weather forecasting, 110, 120, 150 weaving, 22, 23n, 24 webcams, 99, 245 websites, 80, 170, 200, 201, 343 Wells, H.


pages: 581 words: 162,518

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, desegregation, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, yellow journalism

Bostwick noted that “so many trusts and big corporations were paying tribute to the State of New Jersey that the authorities had become greatly perplexed as to what should be done with the surplus revenue.”15 STANDARD OIL FORMED AN IMMENSELY SUCCESSFUL TRUST, AND EFFORTS TO BREAK UP THE TRUSTS WOULD LEAD TO THE EXPANSION OF CORPORATE RIGHTS. Decades later, long after the trusts had been defeated, some corporate law scholars would argue that New Jersey’s reforms were the beginning of a “race to the bottom.” States seeking the revenue from incorporation fees continually made corporate law more permissive, which attracted corporate executives freed up by the new rules. Over time, the traditional corporate law doctrines limiting the power of corporate officers were rendered largely meaningless; corporate law became mainly a template that private parties could use to organize their affairs.

Even though the boards of the major insurance companies were a “Who’s Who” of New York financial, business, and political elites, the directors acted powerless. “In fine,” the Nation observed, “directors do not direct.”27 Had the policyholders somehow overcome their collective action problem, they faced a series of other hurdles created by the recent corporate law reforms. The “race to the bottom” that began when New Jersey loosened its laws to lure reincorporation by large corporations, like Standard Oil and American Tobacco, translated into increasingly lax rules of corporate governance. Older rules that held managers liable for negligent decision-making were replaced by the “business judgment rule,” which effectively immunized management from liability for bad decisions so long as those decisions were made in good faith to serve the business.

Prior to becoming the chief justice of Delaware, Strine served for sixteen years on Delaware’s Court of Chancery, the nation’s leading court for corporate law. Delaware, with over 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies and more than 900,000 businesses incorporated in the state, had won the so-called “race to the bottom” begun at the end of the nineteenth century when New Jersey loosened its laws to attract Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and other trusts. Although New Jersey eventually strengthened its corporate code, Delaware followed the Garden State’s earlier example and continually made its corporate law rules more permissive and friendly to management, becoming the leading state of choice for America’s corporations.


pages: 326 words: 88,905

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges, Joe Sacco

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate personhood, dumpster diving, Easter island, Exxon Valdez, food desert, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Howard Zinn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban decay, wage slave, white flight, women in the workforce

Is 25 minutes after two. There is a few of us alive yet. Jake and Elbert. Oh God for one more breath. Ellen remember me as long as you live. Goodbye darling.” 4 DAYS OF SLAVERY Immokalee, Florida In America today we are seeing a race to the bottom, the middle class is collapsing, poverty is increasing. What I saw in Immokalee is the bottom in the race to the bottom. —SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS Hoping for work in the La Fiesta parking lot, Immokalee, Florida. RODRIGO ORTIZ, A TWENTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD FARMWORKER—A SHORT man in a tattered baseball cap and soiled black pants that are too long—stands forlornly in the half-light in front of the La Fiesta Supermarket on South 3rd Street in Immokalee, Florida.

We are starting to see labor trafficking in the garment industry and in hotels and construction. It devolves. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened in meatpacking, where salaries have also gotten lower and the benefits have gotten worse. I had hoped that agriculture would become more like other industries, but I fear that in our race to the bottom other industries are beginning to resemble agriculture. The advances made by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers on behalf of the tomato workers, however, are among the few bright spots in the nation’s agricultural fields, advances made outside the formal structures of power by the workers themselves.


We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent by Nesrine Malik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, currency peg, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, mass immigration, moral panic, Nate Silver, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, payday loans, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade

It is merely the climate to which he is objecting, rather than specific instances where a far left ideologically orthodox liberal company closed ranks against a white man for saying the truth. This is a microcosm of how, when small changes are introduced in order to encourage those from different backgrounds up the ladder, this is seen as inefficient, a race to the bottom. Believing in meritocracy is also a way of owning one’s success as something attributable to one’s good qualities, rather than accident of birth. Harvard Business Review calls this ‘advantage blindness’ whereby relatively powerful people become unable to see the impact of their behaviour on those less privileged, and also unable to acknowledge the extent of their own privilege, as it is the norm.

Free speech, according to this definition, came to mean that no one had any right to object to what anyone ever said. Which not only meant that no one should object to Johnson’s comments but, in turn, that no one should object to their objection. Free speech logic, rather than the pursuit of a lofty Enlightenment value, became a race to the bottom where the alternative to being ‘professionally offended’ is never to be offended at all. This logic today demands silence from those who are defending themselves from abuse or hate speech. It is, according to the drector of the Institute of Race Relations, ‘the privileging of freedom of speech over freedom to life’.

But it didn’t stop at Muslims and Jews, it expanded to bullying girls, students of different sexual orientation and ultimately into targeting students who simply did not support Trump. Violence and damage to school property increased and the overwhelming majority of educators ‘saw a negative impact on students’ mood and behavior following the election’. As Trump himself would say, so much winning. Similarly, free speech absolutism creates a polarisation, a race to the bottom where licence is confused with freedom, where free speech is used as a technical excuse to commodify the spectacle of pain. When conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was kicked off digital platforms for suggesting that the Sandy Hook massacre was fabricated (among other theories) he asked, ‘Now, who will stand against tyranny and who will stand for free speech?’


pages: 289 words: 99,936

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

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

Uninsured women are nearly 50 percent more likely to die four to seven years following an initial diagnosis of breast cancer than insured women. The minimum wage is a poverty wage. The federal minimum wage was enacted in 1938 to put a firm floor under workers and their families, strengthen the economy by increasing consumer purchasing power, create new jobs, foster growth in lagging regions, and prevent a “race to the bottom,” with employers moving to the cheapest possible labor state. In 1938, the minimum wage brought a family of three with one full-time worker above the federal poverty line. [Talk about how the poverty line was calculated based on food cost as the highest cost of a household. Today, a household’s heaviest financial burden is housing.]

Is food a family’s biggest expense? If not, what is? Why did they do it? The federal minimum wage was enacted to put a firm floor under workers and their families, strengthen the economy by increasing consumer purchasing power, create new jobs, foster economic growth in lagging regions, and prevent a “race to the bottom,” with employers moving to the cheapest possible labor state. Exercise (20 minutes) Does it add up? Does the minimum wage still make sense? Break the group into six small groups (using money). Give each group one of the family profiles and ask them to calculate whether or not they think the family will make it, given the wages the family is earning and the assistance it is are receiving.

With higher wages, workers have more purchasing power, which buoys the economy. Ben Cohen has gone on to found Sweat X, which makes “sweatshop-free clothes for large organizations like universities.” Play Oprah’s tape. (5 minutes) (How does globalism throw a new wrinkle in the whole thing? Connect back to original aim of the 1938 federal wage being to prevent a race to the bottom. How might an international minimum wage be calculated?) Exercise (15 minutes) Calculating self-sufficiency How would you define a self-sufficiency or equity wage? Return to the chart developed earlier showing what the minimum wage doesn’t take into account. What else would we have to take into account for a truly just minimum wage, one based on minimum needs?


pages: 330 words: 99,044

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, asset allocation, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, dark matter, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, growth hacking, Hans Rosling, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, meta-analysis, microcredit, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, mittelstand, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plant based meat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, uber lyft, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WeWork, working-age population, Zipcar

But there are too many problems that we cannot solve without the power of government. Even if a significant fraction of America’s firms adopts a high road labor strategy, it seems very unlikely that their commitment could significantly reduce inequality. Too many firms will have short-term incentives to take the low road and race to the bottom.9 Many firms believe they simply cannot afford the cost of raising wages. Moreover, unilaterally driving up wages is unlikely to be sustainable without moves to address the full range of factors that drive inequality in the first place, from changes in the tax code to the decline in organized labor representation, to the increasing dominance of very large firms and the failure of the US educational system to keep pace with the demands of the modern workplace.

But heading off the worst consequences of global warming will require decommissioning many existing fossil fuel plants—and that’s a process that without a change in the rules is very unlikely to be profitable. Building an engaged, well-paid workforce can be a potent source of competitive advantage—but it can be hard to pay people well and to treat them decently when one’s competitors are busy racing to the bottom. Many firms would like to see the quality of local education improve, but very few can build a case for being the only firm willing to invest in making it happen. Many firms would like to see an end to corruption or an increase in the quality of local legal institutions, but most cannot make progress against either goal on their own.

My students ask me if this kind of thing doesn’t make me nervous. Do we really want the world’s largest asset owners to exercise this kind of collective power? To me, this is an easy question. These owners are already exercising enormous power—in the service of pushing the firms in their portfolio to race to the bottom. It’s critically important that they make a deliberate decision to trigger a race to the top instead. A central element of a reimagined capitalism is a reimagined financial sector—one that takes its collective responsibilities to the world seriously and is willing to act on them. IN SUMMARY, SELF-REGULATION is a potentially powerful way to mobilize the world’s business community in support of creating collective shared value.


The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by Joel Bakan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, business logic, Cass Sunstein, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, electricity market, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Ford Model T, IBM and the Holocaust, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, market fundamentalism, Naomi Klein, new economy, precautionary principle, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban sprawl

Quoted in Richard Gwyn, "The True Allegiance of Canadian Corporations," Toronto Star, April 28, 1999. 37. See, for discussions of globalization, Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalisation Is Running Our Lives (London: Profile Books, 1999); Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2002); Alan Tonelson, The Race to the Bottom: Why a Worldwide Worker Surplus and Uncontrolled Free Trade Are Sinking American Living Standards (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000); Saskia Sassen, Losing Control: Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); William K. Tabb, The Amoral Elephant: Globalization and the Struggle for Social Justice in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001); Gary Teeple, Globalization and the Decline of Social Reform into the Twenty-first Century (Toronto: Garamond Press, 2000); William Greider, One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997). 38.

Interview with Robert Monks ("effective"). 11. Interview with Elaine Bernard. 12. Interviews with Ira Jackson, Charles Kernaghan, and Debora Spar. 13. Interview with Robert Monks. Back Matter Page 40 Progressive Corporate Law with Progressive Social Movements." Tulane Law Review 76 (2002), 1227-12 52. Tonelson, Alan. The Race to the Bottom: Why a Worldwide Worker Surplus and Uncontrolled Free Trade Are Sinking American Living Standards. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000. Tysbine, Alex. Water Privatization: A Broken Promise. Washington, D.C.: Public Citizen, 2001. Useem, Michael. The Inner Circle: Large Corporations and the Rise of Business Political Activity in the US and UK.


American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup by F. H. Buckley

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, colonial rule, crony capitalism, desegregation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, low interest rates, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Stephen Fry, Suez crisis 1956, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, wealth creators

The regression line slants upward from the corrupt states in the lower right, which people are leaving, to the more honest ones in the upper left, to which people are moving. Honest states are richer than corrupt ones, as we saw in Figure 6.1, and this makes them more desirable places to live. Home rule would result in more competition between states to provide honest governance and the most efficient set of rules. But the competition could also become a “race to the bottom” in some ways. If states compete for migrants through their welfare payouts, they might have an incentive to reduce them in order to attract the employed and healthy, and discourage everyone else. States might then compete to see who can cut welfare the most.18 Home rule would also amount to an opt-out of national equalization programs aimed at ensuring that Americans in the poorest states are properly cared for.

Roberts, John Roland, Jeanne-Marie Roman Empire Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: on federal state; and Hume; on small states Rubin, Jennifer Ruiz Evans, Marcus Russia; expansionism of; and Finland; Napoleon in; separatism in Sale, Kirkpatrick same-sex marriage Sanders, Bernie Saudi Arabia Scarborough, Joe Schaaf, Libby Schmitt, Carl Schumer, Chuck Scotland Seddon, James segregation Serbia Sessions, Jeff Seven Years’ War Seward, William Sherman, Roger Singapore Sitwell, Edith slavery; and Civil War; legal protection of Slovakia social media Social Security social trust social welfare; in Finland; in Quebec; “race to the bottom” in Sons of Confederate Veterans Soros, George South Africa South Carolina; and Civil War; federal employees in; General Assembly; and nullification crisis southern culture Southern Poverty Law Center Soviet Union: breakup of; constitutional “rights” in; and Finland; Orwell on Spain Spanish-American War Sparta Spirit of the Laws (Montesquieu) Stanton, Edwin Stars and Bars Steinle, Kate Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) Stephens, Alexander Stiglitz, Joseph Story, Joseph Sudan Suez crisis sugar industry Sunstein, Cass super PACs Syria Taney, Roger B. tariffs; interstate; and lobbyists; and nullification Tea Party movement Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre Texas; Austin; and Civil War bonds Texas v.


pages: 226 words: 58,341

The New Snobbery by David Skelton

assortative mating, banking crisis, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, David Brooks, defund the police, deindustrialization, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, meritocracy, microaggression, new economy, Northern Rock, open borders, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, shareholder value, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, TED Talk, TikTok, wealth creators, women in the workforce

Giving cleaners or distribution workers, for example, the power to negotiate as a sector would ensure decent standards for everyone in that field across a locality, whilst maintaining some flexibility and preventing a race to the bottom, with one company not able to undercut others over pay and conditions. Sectoral bargaining would also enable workers and businesses to agree a minimum floor of rights, including on areas such as sick pay, paid holiday, pensions and basic certainty over hours. The fact that a ‘race to the bottom’ is ruled out means that firms are then more incentivised to differentiate through productive investment in their workforce, innovation and customer retention.


pages: 382 words: 107,150

We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages by Annelise Orleck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, food desert, Food sovereignty, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, immigration reform, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McJob, means of production, new economy, payday loans, precariat, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

If you stand up and fight for change, you can win.”5 CHAPTER 9 PEOPLE POWER MOVEMENTS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY AKTER’S ASSERTION THAT “in Bangladesh it is not 2011; it’s 1911” explains a lot. For, it is true not just of Bangladesh but of low-wage workers everywhere. Four decades into the neoliberal revolution, the repeal and erosion of labor protections, shrinking labor unions, precarious employment, stagnant wages, declining buying power, and a global race to the bottom in safety standards have turned the clock back for workers. And it has not been a small step back, but a giant leap. From Arkansas chicken processing plants to Philippine flip-flop factories, low-wage workers are having to again fight for rights already fought for and won one hundred years earlier.

China, India, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Cambodia became engines of a “fast-fashion” revolution, eroding wages and working conditions in countries and regions that once had strong labor movements: the Philippines, Mexico, Central America, and the United States. Garment workers speak of “a global race to the bottom,” says Filipina organizer Asuncion Binos. “We in the Philippines have come a long way down.” By the 2010s, countries with decent wage and labor protections could only compete if they established export zones where strikes were banned and labor regulations suspended. Global lenders offered rewards for creating “special economic zones.”

Frank, “A Brief History of Walmart,” Washington Monthly, April 2006; International Directory of Company Histories, vol. 63 (Detroit: St. James Press, 2004); Dina Specter, “Walmart,” Business Insider, November 15, 2012; Ellen Israel Rosen, “The Walmart Effect: The World Trade Organization and the Race to the Bottom,” Chapman Law Review (Spring 2005). 7. “Kalpona Akter at Walmart’s Annual Shareholder Meeting,” June 10, 2013, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcC-yCyF4fo; “Bring Bangladesh Voices to Walmart’s Headquarters,” Indiegogo, 2013, https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/bring-two-bangladeshi-garment-workers-to-the-walmart-shareholder-meeting; Clare O’Connor, “Former Bangladesh Sweatshop Worker to Billionaire Walton Family: Use Your Wal-Mart Fortune to Stop Worker Deaths,” Forbes, June 7, 2013. 8.


pages: 241 words: 63,981

Dirty Secrets How Tax Havens Destroy the Economy by Richard Murphy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, centre right, corporate governance, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, high net worth, income inequality, intangible asset, Leo Hollis, light touch regulation, moral hazard, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, Washington Consensus

At the same time, governments, sensing the threat that hot money has created, have reacted with a rash of investment incentives, not limited to cutting the corporation tax rates they offer. This leaves us in the unfortunate position of having no clear sign yet that anti–tax abuse initiatives, like the OECD’s, are going to deliver when the same governments that promoted them are also major participants in the corporation tax race to the bottom. The benefits that tax havens have supplied to the world’s major corporations seem set to continue for the time being, unless some radical changes in the design of tax systems take place (see Chapter 6). Other regulatory relaxations also exist. For example, a significant part of what is called the captive insurance market is located in tax havens.

The tax haven operations are critical to this, and as many tax partners in these firms will confirm, they make good fees from advising clients on which locations best suit their needs at a particular time. Precisely because they monitor this situation so accurately, these firms are also far from independent participants in the process. They all lobby to promote their clients’ needs, and in the process are active participants in the regulatory and economic race to the bottom that tax havens facilitate. As a result, it is almost impossible to see tax havens and these large accountancy firms as independent of one another. Some lawyers have a roughly similar status – though it is unusual to find a major onshore firm of lawyers operating offshore. Instead, most of this business is operated by what is called the ‘magic circle’ of offshore law firms.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

As Harvard Business School lecturer and former CEO of Stop & Shop José Alvarez writes, “Zeynep Ton has proven what great leaders know instinctively—an engaged, well-paid workforce that is treated with dignity and respect creates outsized returns for investors. She demonstrates that the race to the bottom in retail employment doesn’t have to be the only game being played.” Economists have long recognized this phenomenon. They call wages higher than the lowest that the market would otherwise offer “efficiency wages.” That is, they represent the wage premium that an employer pays for reduced turnover, higher employee quality, lower training costs, and many other significant benefits. In Chapters 11 and 12, we’ll look at the key drivers of the race to the bottom in wages, and why we need to rewrite the rules of business.

Do they choose video over text, even when text would let them do a better job? The need to get attention from search engines and social media is a major factor in the dumbing down of news media and a style of reporting that leads even great publications to a culture of hype, fake controversies, and other techniques to drive traffic. The race to the bottom has in part been a result of the primary shift of news industry revenue from subscription to advertising and from a secure base of local readers to chasing readers via social media. Subscription-based publications have an incentive to serve their readers; advertising-based publications have an incentive to serve their advertisers.

When we focus on what needs doing, and what might be possible when humans are augmented by new technology, it is clear that there is plenty of work to go around for both humans and machines. It is only our acceptance of the notion that financial efficiency is the primary fitness function for the economy that locks us into the race to the bottom, in which humans are seen as a cost to be eliminated. But in the debate with Martin and in subsequent conversations with attendees at the event, I found myself thinking and saying things that hadn’t occurred to me before. Stanford’s Rob Reich, the moderator of the discussion, said to me afterward, “I thought going into this that Martin was the radical.


pages: 596 words: 163,682

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

In contrast, international agreements, such as those on the harmonization of regulations, are rarely arrived at in a democratic spirit, as I have argued. This is why I believe countries should have a more bottom-up deliberative process on what they regulate and what they adhere to, and the ability to pick and choose in most such agreements. RACE TO THE BOTTOM . . . One concern countries have is a race to the bottom. If there is no harmonization of regulations, will countries that adopt the lowest standards benefit their firms, giving them a competitive advantage? This danger is emphasized, often by countries that fear their preferred position demands too much of their own firms.

It may be that this was a Machiavellian attempt by supporters of southern European countries to torpedo the entire move by escalating it to international levels. Regardless, the episode highlights the problems with harmonization—regulators cartelize and spread unnecessary and inappropriate regulation across countries, preventing competition between jurisdictions from highlighting the costs of such regulations. Finally, what about the race to the bottom? Regulators agreed to common bank capital requirements in the various Basel Accords because they feared that if given the flexibility, some regulators might impose inordinately low requirements on their banks. Yet this fear is questionable. If higher bank capital reduces risks, why wouldn’t the bank regulators in each country internalize the need to set capital requirements for their domestic banks at adequate levels?

., 157, 158, 397 Kleiner, Morris, 207 knowledge, diffusion of, 204–6 Krueger, Alan, 207 Kyoto Protocol, 365 laissez-faire, 77–78, 81, 83 landowners, 37, 58, 72, 74 gentry, 54–58, 64–66, 71, 72 Lasch, Christopher, 227 Latin America, 72, 93, 96 Lee Kuan Yew, 247 LEGO, 391 lending, see loans Le Pen, Marine, 236 Lerner, Josh, 362 Levine, David, 382–83 liberal democracy, 74–75 liberalism, 83, 160 liberalization, 206 in China, 248–67, 276 in India, 269–71, 273, 276 private sector’s reaction to, 194–201, 207–8 liberal market democracies, xiii, xx, xxvii libertarianism, 115 limited-access societies, 97–98 Lindsey, Brink, 205 loans, 44–45, 48 contract in, 29–31 see also usury lobbying, 378, 389 localism, xxi, xxviii, 285, 286, 303 inclusive, xxii, 22, 285–87, 289–302, 327, 351, 394 long-term benefits of, 303 location, importance of, 219–21 Long, Huey, 136 looms, 18–19, 116, 188 Louis XIV, King, 60, 65, 66 Luce, Edward, 227 Luther, Martin, 46 Madison, James, 97, 218 magnates, decline of, 53–54 Mahajan, Vijay, 337 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 83 Mann, Horace, 121 manufacturing, 152, 184–85, 206 Mao Zedong, 247–50 markets, xiii, xv, xvii–xviii, xx, xxii, xxvii–xxviii, 25–27, 50, 56, 77–106, 145, 154, 172, 173, 243–44, 283, 184, 285–87, 304, 393, 394 community adjustment to, 388–92 community and state buffers against volatility in, 127–38 community loss of faith in, 115–19 community values and, 390–92 competition in, see competition data in, 384–86 definition of, xiv democracy and, 106, 110 emerging, 245, 271; see also China; India fairness in, 115–16 freeing, 80–81 laissez-faire and, 77–78, 81, 83 liberalization of, see liberalization liberal market democracies, xiii, xx, xxvii perceived legitimacy of players in, 110–12 philosophy for, 81–84 reforming, 373–92 separation from community, xiv–xv state and, 304 transactions in, 3, 4 unbridled, 84–87 see also trade marriage, 231, 235 Marshall Plan, 149–51, 365 marshmallow test, 222–23 Marx, Karl, 49, 78, 87–91 Marxism, 87–91, 112, 115, 249, 287 Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding (Moynihan), 158 McClure’s Magazine, 103 McKinley, William, 106 McLean, Malcolm, 181 meatpacking industry, 104, 107–8 Medicare, 241, 324 mercantilism, 62–65, 80 Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare), 30 meritocracy, 390, 393 children and, 224–25, 228 in China, 257, 265 Merkel, Angela, 241 military technologies, 42–44, 51, 53 Mill, Harriet, 81 Mill, John Stuart, 81–83 minorities, 218, 219, 289, 296–97 affirmative action and, 300–302 see also African Americans; immigration, immigrants Mischel, Walter, 223 misery index, 163 Mitterand, François, 168 Mokyr, Joel, 20, 21 monarchy, 51–53, 56–59, 61–63, 65, 73 monasteries, 54, 57, 72 moneylending, see loans Monnet, Jean, 154 monopolies, 58–62, 64, 80, 81, 87, 91, 97, 99, 105, 106, 108, 109, 112, 201–7, 283, 379–82 antitrust laws and, 101, 103–4, 381–82 Montegrano, 12–14, 113, 227 Moore, Barrington, 73 Moretti, Enrico, 220 Morgan, John Pierpont, 99, 104 Morse, Adair, 220 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 158, 340 multilateral institutions, 367–70 Murphy, Kevin, 196 Murray, Charles, 227 muskets, 42–43 Muslims, 21, 35, 36, 241, 242, 272, 277 Napoleon I, 126 nationalism, xvii, 64, 184, 330, 397 civic, 297–99, 302 ethnic, 215–17; see also populist nationalism mercantilism and, 63 populist, see populist nationalism Nation at Risk, A, 232–33 nation-states, 26, 42, 50, 51–52, 61–62 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 267, 270, 287, 298 neighborhoods, 297 isolation index and, 333 sorting and, see residential sorting see also community Netville, 331–32 Neumann, Franz, 112 New Deal, 134–35 New Localism, The (Katz and Nowak), 303 news consumption, and diversity of opinions, 332–33 New York Times, 19, 98, 218, 387 Nixon, Richard, 98, 108 North, Douglass, 70, 97 Nowak, Jeremy, 303 Obama, Barack, xvii, 158, 235, 240 India visited by, 273 Obama, Michelle, 240 Obamacare, 144, 214, 239–41 Oceana (Harrington), 58 oil industry, 84–86, 99, 103, 107, 111 Oliver, Douglas, 9 one percent, 102, 191–94 On Liberty (Mill), 81–83 open-access societies, 98 Opium Wars, 349–50 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 189–90 Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America (Fallows and Fallows), 344 Owen, Robert, 88 Owens, Ann, 226 Papal Revolution, 38, 40 parents, 222–31, 343 Paris Agreement, 365 parliaments, 77, 78–79 English, 57, 60–62, 65–70, 74, 77, 84, 105 patents, 204–6, 362, 382–84 patriotism, 298 peasants, 37–38, 73, 74, 78 see also feudalism, feudal communities Peltzman, Sam, 202 Perez, Carlotta, 118 Petersen, Mitchell, 15, 219 pharmaceutical drugs and companies, 183, 184, 204, 354, 362–63, 384 Physiocrats, 77 Piketty, Thomas, 191 Pilsen community, xxii–xxvi, 12, 298, 344, 381 Pirenne, Henri, 45 plague (Black Death), 40, 41–42 Polanyi, Karl, 84 police officers, 312 politics: conflict over, 234–36 isolation index and, 332–33 left-wing, xiii, xix, xxvii, 214, 217, 394 right-wing, xiii, xix, 214–17, 394 Polybius, 118 population aging, 260, 284, 286, 292–93, 324, 342–43, 348, 396 population diversity, see diversity population growth, 83, 152, 162–63 populism, xiii, xix, xxviii, 63, 136, 137, 211, 213–44, 284 in China, 276–79 and conflict over values and politics, 234–36 in Europe, 241–43 Global Financial Crisis and, 236–43 growing divide and, 218–19 in India, 272, 276–78 left-wing, 214, 217 Obamacare and, 239–41 Populist movement at turn of nineteenth century, 23, 26, 79, 98–101, 102, 105–6, 112, 244, 265 reemergence in the industrial West, 213–44 right-wing, 214–17 types of, 214–18 populist nationalism, xiii, xix–xx, xxi, xxvii, 144, 216–17, 241–44, 246, 276–79, 286, 289, 295–300, 302, 352, 353 in China, 276–79 in Europe, 241–43 in India, 276–78 why it cannot work, 296–97 Populist Revolt, The (Hicks), 99 Portugal, 148, 238 Poterba, James, 140 poultry farms, 354–55, 357 poverty, 396 African Americans and, 157 Elberfeld system of assistance, 129–31, 320 War on, 158, 160, 229 Powell, Enoch, 159 presidential election of 2016, 235, 236, 333, 354 Price, Brendan, 185 Princeton University, 125 printing press, 41–42, 46 private sector, 107–8, 111, 139, 147, 283, 284, 352, 371 liberalization and, 194–201, 207–8 Progressives, 26, 79, 98–99, 102–6, 112, 124, 134, 137, 244, 265 property, 26, 52, 57, 58, 74, 79, 83, 103, 115, 352, 362, 374, 394 competition and, 286 intellectual, see intellectual property land, see landowners taxes on, 121, 123 as theft, 110–11 protectionism, 108, 258–59, 278, 306, 353–56, 364 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The (Weber), 47 Protestant Reformation, 40–41, 47, 49 Protestants, 48, 49 public hearings, 389–90 Putnam, Robert, 227, 334 Quakers, 16–17, 230 race, see ethnicity and race race to the bottom, 358–60 railroad industry, 85, 87, 99, 101 Ramanathan, Swati, 312 Ramcharan, Rodney, 72 ranchers, 9–10, 11 Rand, Ayn, 80, 391 R&D, 183–84 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), xix, 277 Rauh, Joshua, 192 Rawls, John, 115 Raymundo, Raul, xxiii, xxvi Reagan, Ronald, 165, 194, 232 Reeves, Richard, 224 Reformation, 40–41, 47, 49 regulation(s), 103–5, 107–8, 165, 172 antitrust, 202 of banks, 358–60 communities and, 285, 304, 306–7, 341, 357 competition and, 165, 387–88 deregulation, 165–67, 194, 197 harmonization of, 354–63, 365, 371 relief efforts, 131–33, 135 see also safety nets religion, 49, 51, 64 Protestant Reformation, 40–41, 47, 49 Protestants, 48, 49 see also Catholic Church Republicans, 235–36 residential sorting, 144, 177, 222, 227, 314 by income, 307–9 race and immigration and, 229–31 resources, policies on, 365 Resurrection Project, xxiii–xxvi Ritter, Jay, 201 Robinson, James, 94 Rockefeller, John D., 84–91, 98, 103, 104, 108, 200 Rodgers, Daniel, 334 Rodrik, Dani, 364–65, 371 Roman Republic, 58 Romney, Mitt, 235 Roosevelt, Franklin, 134–37, 156 Roosevelt, Theodore, 106 Rosen, Sherwin, 193 Russell, John, 95 Russia, 97, 287, 292, 354, 369 wealthy in, 111 Saez, Emmanuel, 191 safety nets, 139, 173, 290 caregivers and, 319–20 community and, 127–38, 318–25 in Europe, 156 government support in, 322–24 health care, see health care paying for, 324–25 for peasants, 37–38 in U.K., 155–56 in U.S., 133–34, 156, 157–58, 320–21, 324 welfare, 129, 137, 148, 158, 230 Salam, Reihan, 235 Sandel, Michael, 389–90 Sanders, Bernie, 214 Satyanath, Shaker, 112 schools, see education and schools Schumpeter, Joseph, 203, 379 Schwartz, Heather, 225–26 science, 21 “Second Coming, The” (Yeats), 141 Second Federal Bank, xxv SeeClickFix, 311–12 Sen, Amartya, 287 Shakespeare, William, 30 Shapiro, Jesse, 332–33 Share Our Wealth Society plan, 136 Shleifer, Andrei, 197 Sinclair, Upton, 104 Singapore, 247, 291, 318 Singh, Manish, 336 Singh, Manmohan, 270 Siuai people, 9 smartphones, 175, 178, 182–83 Smith, Adam, 17, 64, 77, 80–81, 83, 84, 87, 91, 105, 200 Smoot Hawley Act, 138 socialism, 132, 138, 145–47, 168, 250 in India, 267–69, 391 socializing the young, 5–7 social media, 330, 354, 386 social relationships, 7–8 social safety nets, see safety nets Social Security, 134–38, 187, 241, 324 Sokoloff, Kenneth, 72, 96 sorting, see residential sorting South Sea Company, 68, 69–70 sovereignty, 349–72 and controlling flows, 351–54 and harmonization of regulation, 354–63 Soviet Union, 91, 145–47, 153–54, 250, 251, 267, 287, 367 Spain, 148, 162, 169, 237, 238, 353–54 Spence, Michael, 234 stagflation, 163 Standard Oil, 86, 99, 103, 107 Stanford marshmallow test, 222–23 state, xiii, xv, xvii–xviii, xx–xxi, xxvii–xxviii, 25–27, 50, 139, 140, 172, 283–86, 304, 393 anti-state ideology and, 176 buffers against market volatility, 127–38 Church and, 45–46 community and, 303–25, 345–46 constitutionally limited, 52–74, 83 definition of, xiii–xiv growth of, 145 international responsibilities and, 363–67, 372, 397 laissez-faire and, 77–78, 81, 83 markets and, 304 relief efforts from, 131–33 separation from community, xiv–xv strong but limited, rise of, 51–75 sustainable financing for, 65–71 steel industries, 87, 99, 122, 185, 186, 253, 261, 338, 364, 366 European Coal and Steel Community, 150 student loans, 317–18 suffrage, see voting, suffrage Summers, Larry, 197 Supreme Court, U.S., 103, 384 Sweden, 138 Swift, Taylor, 193 Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de, 66 Tarbell, Ida, 103, 200 tariffs, 61, 63–64, 80–81, 100, 108, 138, 150–51, 164, 181–83, 217, 242, 258–59, 271, 277, 352–53, 356, 363, 364, 366, 371 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 146, 150, 353 Tawney, Richard, 34–35, 46 taxes, 59, 61–62, 102–5, 156–57, 163–64, 206, 308–9, 364 for education, 121, 123 property, 121, 123 tax holidays, 341 tax incentives, 345 on towns, 59–60 universal basic income and, 322–23 tax preparation, 179, 180 Tea Party movement, 239–41, 242, 333 technology, xii, xxviii, 117, 160–62, 175–76, 283, 284, 286, 287 automation in, 18, 84, 179, 180, 284 China and, 261–62, 278 community and, 119, 335, 344–45 disruptive change from, xii–xiii, xix education and, 122–23 feudal community and, 41–42 financial crises and, 118 incomes and, 188–94 job losses from, xii, xviii public anxiety about, 116–18 winner-take-most effects of, 191–94 see also Industrial Revolution; Information and Communications Technology revolution Teles, Steven, 205 Thatcher, Margaret, 165–66, 194 three pillars, xiii, 25–27, 393, 394 balance between, xvii–xviii, 175, 394 see also community; markets; state Tiananmen Square protests, 250–51 Tiv people, 7–8 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 3–4 totalitarian regimes, 97 trade, 62–64, 80–81, 143, 146, 149–51, 154, 160, 164–65, 172, 181, 245, 271, 283, 307, 352–53, 363, 371 “beggar thy neighbor” policies and, 364 communications costs and, 181, 182 communities and, xviii–xx, 335, 352 European, with Muslim lands, 36 ICT revolution and, 143–44, 173, 181–88 incomes and, 188–94 protectionism and, 108, 258–59, 278, 306, 353–56, 364 tariffs and, see tariffs transportation costs and, 181–82 Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPS), 362 training and socializing the young, 5–7 transactions: in communities, 3, 8–9, 10–11 market, 3, 4 Trotsky, Leon, 90 Trump, Donald, 235 Truly Disadvantaged, The (Wilson), 230 Turkey, xix, 97, 167, 190, 245 Uber, 196 Unified Payments Interface (UPI), 386 unions, 165, 198, 206, 360, 361 United Kingdom, 173 Companies Act in, 377 health care in, 156 income in, 191, 192 in Opium Wars, 349–50 safety net in, 155–56 United Nations, 367 United States, 143, 145, 149, 246, 298 African Americans in, see African Americans agriculture in, 184 China and, 278 Civil War in, 74, 93, 133–34 competitive market in, 98–105 Constitution of, 71 diversity in population of, 134 financial crises in, 87–88, 118 GI Bill in, 156, 157 Gilded Age in, 87 gold standard in, 100 government debt in, 324 growth of, 148, 162 health care in, 158, 203 hegemony of, 148, 367–69 immigration and, 137, 159–60, 292 Industrial Revolution in, 121 manufacturing in, 184–85 Marshall Plan of, 149–51, 365 in postwar period, 148 presidential election of 2016, 235, 236, 333, 354 safety net in, 133–34, 157–58, 320–21, 324 schools in, 119–25, 127, 190–91, 233–34, 317 South of, 72, 74 Supreme Court, 103, 384 voting rights in, 92–93, 96 Western settlers in, 72, 99–100 universal basic income (UBI), 322–23 universities, see colleges and universities University of Chicago, xxiii, xxvi, 87, 124–25, 164, 290–91 University of Rochester, 223 usury: Catholic Church and, 34–42, 44–46, 49 favorable public attitudes toward, 44 intellectual support for ban on, 39–40 prohibition on, 31–32 rationale for proscribing, 32–34 values: community, and tolerance for markets, 390–92 conflict over, 234–36 Virginia, 58 Voigtländer, Nico, 112 Volcker, Paul, 163 Voth, Hans-Joachim, 112 voting and suffrage, xxvii, 26, 79, 105 extension of franchise, 91–98 wages, see income and wages Wallis, John, 97 Washington Post, 108 wealth, 111, 395–96 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 80 weavers, 18–19, 116, 188 Weber, Max, 47, 38 Weingast, Barry, 70, 97–98 welfare, 129, 137, 148, 158, 230 Wellman, Andrew, 331 Whigs, 67, 95 William of Orange, 67 Wilson, William Junius, 230, 231 Wilson, Woodrow, 125 Wolf, Martin, 355 workers, 75, 78, 79, 87, 89, 97, 127–28 education and capabilities of, 313–18 insurance plans for, 132 rights of, 360–61 strikes by, 102 unions for, 165, 198, 206, 360, 361 see also income and wages; jobs working at a distance, 219, 220 World Bank, 151, 253–54 World Trade Organization (WTO), 353, 356, 362 World Values Survey, 297 World War I, 103, 112, 124 World War II, xxvii, 138, 139, 140, 143, 145, 146, 155–57, 210, 243, 367 Marshall Plan and, 149–51, 365 postwar period, 148–54 Wulf, Julie, 193 Xi Jinping, 261, 278 Xiushui Market, 255 Yeats, W.


pages: 580 words: 168,476

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, declining real wages, deskilling, electricity market, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Flash crash, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jobless men, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, lone genius, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, obamacare, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, Phillips curve, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

But because of the dominant role we play in the global economy, we do have opportunities to help shape globalization—opportunities not available to others. In reshaping globalization, we have to realize that there has occurred a race to the bottom from which we have all suffered. The United States is in the best position to stop this (if its politics would allow it); it can fight for better worker rights and conditions, better financial regulations, better environmental conditions. But other countries, working together, can also fight against the race to the bottom. Even the advocates of globalization should understand that tempering globalization is in their interests. For if globalization is not managed better than it has been, there is a real risk of a retreat, into protectionism or forms of beggar-thy-neighbor policies.

The differences in the return to capital are minuscule compared with those on the return to labor.20 But the financial markets have been driving globalization, and while those who work in financial markets constantly talk about efficiency gains, what they really have in mind is something else—a set of rules that benefits them and increases their advantage over workers. The threat of capital outflow, should workers get too demanding about rights and wages, keeps workers’ wages low.21 Competition across countries for investment takes on many forms—not just lowering wages and weakening worker protections. There is a broader “race to the bottom,” trying to ensure that business regulations are weak and taxes are low. In one arena, finance, this has proven especially costly and especially critical to the growth in inequality. Countries raced to have the least-regulated financial system for fear that financial firms might decamp for other markets.

Government programs (like the earned-income tax credit, Medicaid, food stamps, and Social Security) have proven very effective in reducing poverty. More spending on these programs could reduce poverty even more. Tempering globalization: creating a more level playing field and ending the race to the bottom Globalization and technology both contribute to the polarization of our labor market, but they are not abstract market forces that just arrive from on high; rather, they are shaped by our policies. We have explained how globalization—especially our asymmetric globalization—is tilted toward putting labor in a disadvantageous bargaining position vis-à-vis capital.


pages: 397 words: 112,034

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

Andrew Sheng offers the case for a Tobin tax to finance global public goods. He reviews the origin of the idea in the 1970s and the recent proposal of it by Lord Adair Turner of the Financial Services Authority in London. Sheng says that the world is caught in a collective action trap that encourages a race to the bottom for financial regulation and taxation. He believes that a Tobin tax offers many advantages, including money to finance global public goods, increased data availability on financial transactions, and a tax on bank profits to reduce the bonuses that encourage speculative activity. Sheng estimates that the global value of foreign exchange turnover is $800 trillion and that the value of stock market trading is $101 trillion.

It is useful to remember that the present fiscal trend of accelerating expenditure and decreasing tax revenues in order to restore excess consumption, which in turn is funded by excess leverage despite limited global resources, is just a race to another crisis. The world is caught in a collective action trap. The gaming nature of nation-state and private-sector behavior is such that there is a tendency to race to the bottom. No country is able to tighten monetary policy alone for fear of inviting hot money that negates the policy. Additionally, no country is able to tighten financial regulation for fear of business migrating to other financial centers. Furthermore, no country is able to raise taxation for fear of massive tax arbitrage.

Global public goods are currently funded by equity (based on the Bretton Woods system that allocates weighted voting quotas to participating institutions) or by direct national grants. These mechanisms are not sustainable. We need a global tax to fund global public goods. But for a turnover tax to work, it is vital that all of the G-20 countries agree to impose a single, uniform rate of, say, 0.005 percent to avoid a race to the bottom from the onset. This would put into place the module of fiscal standardization and tax mechanism that improves conditions for future coordination in monetary policy and financial regulation. The tax can be collected at the national level based on buyer-pay. The tax collected could be credited to a global fund, with a formula that would allow national governments to use part of the proceeds to resolve domestic crisis problems.


pages: 372 words: 116,005

The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken by Secret Barrister

cognitive bias, Donald Trump, G4S, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), mandatory minimum, post-truth, race to the bottom, Schrödinger's Cat, statistical model

Alternatively, they might instruct an ‘independent’ barrister whose independent commitment to professional ethics is not a bar to him slipping Keres a tasty percentage of his brief fee in return for his instructions. Advocates’ fees are paid separately to litigators’ fees and directly to the advocate, to avoid the market distortion and dirty race to the bottom that would ensue if solicitors instructed barristers based not on ability but on how much of the advocacy fee they were willing to shovel the solicitor’s way. And the vast majority of solicitors and barristers observe this strict separation. But every robing room will echo with whispers over that one barrister whose steady influx of high-quality work from a single, Keres-esque firm belies his modest talents, and in less-sober moments at Christmas parties, confessions will slip from mulled lips as to the existence of the informalized, forbidden referral fee lying at the heart of that arrangement.

Between 2010 and 2015, the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), which, until 2017 (when it was reimagined as HM Prison and Probation Service), was responsible for prisons in England and Wales, had its budget cut by £900 million.33 In order to make nearly £1 billion of savings, prison staffing levels were reduced by 30 per cent. As of 2016, there were 13,720 fewer staff in the public prison estate looking after 450 more people.34 In a drag race to the bottom, ‘benchmarking’ was introduced, in which publicly run jails were required to peg their costs to the same level as the ‘most efficient’ – read ‘cheapest’ – in the private sector. One of the reasons that private sector prisons were so ‘efficient’ is that for seventeen years they have had higher rates of overcrowding than public sector prisons – shoving more prisoners into tinier spaces.35 A quarter of the prison population is overcrowded, with prisoners doubling up in cells designed for one person,36 in order to secure an arbitrary 20 per cent reduction in the cost of prison places (now at £35,000 per year).37 Around the same time, Chris Grayling MP, Secretary of State for Justice between 2012 and 2015, announced his populist plans to make prisons, already hideous tombs of violence, death and terror, ‘less lax’ and more ‘spartan’, introducing severe restrictions on prisoners’ ‘privileges’ – which famously included an unlawful ban on prisoners being sent books38 – and displaying a bizarrely prurient obsession with stopping inmates having sex.39 It was not enough to deprive people of their liberty; their lives had to be made extra intolerable to satisfy the public’s perceived lust for blood.

Their judgments, in the High Court, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court, have immediate, real-life effects, not only to the applicant or appellant in front of them but to the defendants, victims and public in millions of criminal cases in which precedent is applied. Our constitution relies upon the judges to ensure that government acts in accordance with laws passed by Parliament, and to intervene when the state overreaches to infringe our freedoms. A diminution in quality among the judiciary ultimately diminishes us all. The race-to-the-bottom in criminal justice thus stretches all the way to the top. Every component of the system is infiltrated to some degree by negligent, reckless or malicious maladministration. Of itself, this is hardly unique; professionals in every other area of public life could no doubt regale at similar length legitimate complaints of underfunding and managerial or ministerial incompetence.


pages: 407 words: 113,198

The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, food miles, Ford Model T, global supply chain, hiring and firing, hive mind, independent contractor, Internet Archive, invention of the wheel, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Kanban, low skilled workers, Mason jar, obamacare, off grid, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, supply-chain management, Toyota Production System, transatlantic slave trade, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce

Our current model does a good job at maximizing profits. But to the extent that it works to protect the planet, which it often tries to do very faithfully, it almost always comes out of people.” When I relay this to Errol, he pauses. “That’s not quite how I see it . . . For me the question is, do you want to win a race to the bottom? Or do you want to deliver the highest quality and be the best? Everybody has pressure from the competition. Always will. But it’s how you respond. It can’t just be about cutting things back. Humanity can’t just play defense. We need a good offense too.” We get quiet for a moment and I wonder what that offense would look like.

See also specific diseases Disneyland, Jungle Cruise, 52 dispatchers, 85–86 displacement, 254 distribution, 60, 75–112 new products and, 138–39n29 retail ecosystem and, 128 specialty, 129 truck drivers and, 89–94 distribution centers, 75–89, 107–12, 296–97n distributors, 60 Dreyer, Dylan, 151–52 driverless trucks, 270 Dunlap, Annette, 133 E. coli outbreaks, 190, 191, 194 ecology, fuzzy math of, 227 e-commerce, 128–29n25 Economist, 251 Edge, Brian, 251 education, alcohol and, 51–52 efficiency, 267, 269 Amazon and, 266 employees and, 178–81 of grocery stores, 5–6 human resources and, 178–80 labor and, 178–80, 180n37 manufacturing and, 174–78 as race to the bottom, 182n38 at Whole Foods, 160–62, 160n33, 182n38, 266 egg brokers, 45–46 eggs, 45–46 employees, 4–5. See also labor dehumanization of, 180–81, 180n37 efficiency and, 178–81 health insurance and, 183 part-time, 179–80 in retail grocery, 157–84 retention of, 182–83, 182n38 at Trader Joe’s, 67–68, 67n17, 169–70 training of, 157–63, 169, 184, 301n treated as cyborgs, 180n37 at Whole Foods, 157–84, 182n38, 270 endcaps, 136, 138 entrepreneurs buyers and, 130–35, 134–35n28 “trade spend” and, 136–38 environmentalism, 57–58.

For instance, one 2006 study of five hundred retail stores found that every $1 increase in payroll resulted in $3.81 of increased margin. However, its persistence in spite of the research is not accidental, and alludes to the LARGER QUESTION of the title heading: Is this quest for efficiency always a race to the bottom? Or are there equilibrium points whereby efficiency—and outcompeting your rival—can coincide with dignity? This is not a moral question even as our general way of life may hinge on the answer. It is a question about optimization and consumer habits and how exactly the shoppers who purchase from WFs make their purchasing decisions; it is also a question in which my generation of MBAs, both incentivized to find quick earning fixes and insulated from the actual work of retail in a way that transforms abstraction into condescension, may not even be interested in considering.


pages: 237 words: 67,154

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Three-fourths of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, with little to no emergency savings to rely on if they lose their job. Income inequality is now as bad as it was in 1928, just before the Great Depression. Incredibly, the share of wealth held by the bottom 90 percent is no higher today than during our grandparents’ time. It’s as if the New Deal had never existed. RACE TO THE BOTTOM IN THE FREELANCE SOCIETY Now a new and alarming mash-up of Silicon Valley technology and Wall Street greed is thrusting upon us the latest economic trend: the so-called sharing (or gig) economy. Companies like Uber, Instacart, Upwork, and TaskRabbit allegedly are “liberating workers” to become “independent entrepreneurs” and the “CEOs of their own businesses.”

The types of jobs on the auction block include website and app designers, software developers, logo and graphic designers, translators, architects, engineers, and more. Workers from India, Thailand, and the developing world compete against developed world workers, undercutting each other’s wages. It’s a race to the bottom. As contractors, these workers don’t receive safety-net benefits because they aren’t “employees” of whoever hires them. They also aren’t paid while they are hustling for their next gig, a never-ending activity. Increasingly, these sorts of online job brokerages comprise a bigger chunk of the overall work force.


pages: 243 words: 66,908

Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Meadows. Donella, Diana Wright

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, clean water, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, game design, Garrett Hardin, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, peak oil, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Review

It is not price information but population information that is needed. It’s important that the missing feedback be restored to the right place and in compelling form. To take another tragedy of the commons example, it’s not enough to inform all the users of an aquifer that the groundwater level is dropping. That could initiate a race to the bottom. It would be more effective to set the cost of water to rise steeply as the pumping rate begins to exceed the recharge rate. Other examples of compelling feedback are not hard to find. Suppose taxpayers got to specify on their return forms what government services their tax payments must be spent on.

It is a system with rules designed by corporations, run by corporations, for the benefit of corporations. Its rules exclude almost any feedback from any other sector of society. Most of its meetings are closed even to the press (no information flow, no feedback). It forces nations into reinforcing loops “racing to the bottom,” competing with each other to weaken environmental and social safeguards in order to attract corporate investment. It’s a recipe for unleashing “success to the successful” loops, until they generate enormous accumulations of power and huge centralized planning systems that will destroy themselves. 4.


pages: 279 words: 71,542

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport

Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cal Newport, data science, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, financial independence, game design, Hacker News, index fund, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mr. Money Mustache, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, price discrimination, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

In a 2016 profile in the Atlantic, Harris blamed the lack of changes to the “inertia” of the organization and a lack of clarity about what he was advocating. The primary source of friction, of course, is almost certainly more simple: Minimizing distraction and respecting users’ attention would reduce revenue. Compulsive use sells, which Harris now acknowledges when he claims that the attention economy drives companies like Google into a “race to the bottom of the brain stem.” So Harris quit, started a nonprofit called Time Well Spent with the mission of demanding technology that “serves us, not advertising,” and went public with his warnings about how far technology companies are going to try to “hijack” our minds. In Washington, DC, where I live, it’s well-known that the biggest political scandals are those that confirm a negative that most people already suspected to be true.

The tycoons of social media: “Social Media is the New Nicotine | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO),” YouTube video, 4:54, posted May 12, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDqoTDM7tio. “This thing is a slot machine”: Tristan Harris, interview with Anderson Cooper, 60 Minutes, https://www.cbsnews.com/video/brain-hacking. “race to the bottom”: Bianca Bosker, “The Binge Breaker,” Atlantic, November 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/the-binge-breaker/501122. “serves us, not advertising”: This quote comes from an earlier version of the website for Time Well Spent. The organization has since been rebranded as the Center for Humane Technology, and has a new website and new copy: http://humanetech.com.


pages: 232 words: 71,024

The Decline and Fall of IBM: End of an American Icon? by Robert X. Cringely

AltaVista, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, business process, Carl Icahn, cloud computing, commoditize, compound rate of return, corporate raider, financial engineering, full employment, Great Leap Forward, if you build it, they will come, immigration reform, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, managed futures, Paul Graham, platform as a service, race to the bottom, remote working, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software as a service, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, TED Talk, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, work culture

The Global Services business could be sold to one or more Indian companies while the current federal business could be sold to one of IBM’s U.S. competitors. Meanwhile, IBM will move its business toward hardware and applications delivered by vendor partners who will carry the Service Level Agreement (SLA) penalty risk. In short, it’s a race to the bottom and only IBM executives are winning. Ultimately it will be IBM’s customers, employees, and shareholders who will be the losers. Yes, but some readers tell me, that’s just services, not the real IBM. There is no real IBM—not any longer. The company has become a cash cow. In IBM’s view, you never feed a cash cow—just take money out until the cow is dead.

As people have mentioned, if you were a client that just got screwed by this Lean effort, would you renew with IBM? The people I am starting to feel real sorry for are the poor saps who will be left holding the bag when all of the layoffs are done. Our workload, for most folks, is crazy now, but just wait. It seems like it’s a race to the bottom with Sam at the wheel. I don’t see the benefit EXCEPT to break up the company and raid the pension fund. SOMETHING FISHY IS GOING ON AT IBM. Is there any hope left for IBM? | May 04, 2007 | 7:35PM Unpaid overtime is mandatory IBM has been 'lean' for a long time. It's been eight years since I've been allowed to order business cards (cost: $10).


pages: 258 words: 69,706

Undoing Border Imperialism by Harsha Walia

Corrections Corporation of America, critical race theory, degrowth, emotional labour, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, informal economy, Internet Archive, mass incarceration, means of production, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, telemarketer, women in the workforce

There is a valid concern about lowest-common-denominator coalition politics, wherein aligning with others who have a more mainstream analysis will necessarily change the message to a minimalist one that everyone can agree to. Effective campaigns, however, do require us to bring in and work alongside those who may not share our systemic analysis. So how do we build alliances without devolving into a race to the bottom that dilutes our principles? One approach is to build strategic alliances to meet others where they are comfortable, while maintaining the autonomy to shape our own work. In this campaign, instead of a formal coalition, groups are loosely aligned through the overarching framework of End Secret Trials.

Antioppression analysis becomes rigid in its categorizations when the question becomes who is more oppressed, rather than engaging in a dialogue of how oppression, which is relational and contextual, is specifically manifesting and impacting the orientation of our movements. Oppression develops a strange quantifiable logic, a commodity that can be stocked up on. Antioppression “checklisting” can lead to a race to the bottom, where it is assumed that simply because someone fits into more categories of oppression, they must necessarily be worse off. Working in the poorest postal code in Canada, I know that a straight white cisgendered man who is homeless faces a harsher material reality on a daily basis—with minimal to no access to food, shelter, health care, or income—than me, someone who might be able to count off more forms of oppression, but who does not have to worry about surviving through a cold night on the streets.


pages: 407 words: 121,458

Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff by Fred Pearce

additive manufacturing, air freight, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, blood diamond, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, demographic transition, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food miles, ghettoisation, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Kibera, Kickstarter, mass immigration, megacity, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, profit motive, race to the bottom, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, the built environment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

‘H&M buys mostly from Bangladesh now, and M&S is increasingly doing the same,’ Maral’s managers told me. Even M&S? That company used to have a reputation for buying where quality was best. But twice in recent years it has come close to collapse because of uncompetitive pricing. So it has transformed itself into a prime player in what economists call the ‘race to the bottom’. When price is all and the customer wants a £3 T-shirt, then, if the cutters and sewers and ironers and packers come cheaper in Dhaka, that is where they will be employed. So, fascinated as I was by my fairtrade organic detour, it was to Dhaka that I went next. 13 Trouser Snakes: The Strange Truth of Dhaka’s Sweatshops FIVE WOMEN LIVED in the room altogether.

How they are moving from Sri Lanka or India or Mauritius to Bangladesh or Cambodia or China to take advantage of lower wages. The only limitation seems to have been the quota systems set up in European and North American governments to protect their own domestic industries. But the quotas are now being abolished. And the ‘race to the bottom’ in the mass marketing of cheap clothes is intensifying. Nazma dismissed Western hand wringing, and said she thought that it would be pressure from within that would ultimately clean up the industry. But she pleaded with customers in Europe not to respond to the obvious injustice with boycotts.

The fabric that made the jeans came from the Nassa Group, which was Wal-Mart’s ‘International Supplier of the Year’ in 2002. But M&S didn’t want to give me an introduction to the companies, and without that the companies weren’t interested in talking to me. So I asked Khorshed about them. They weren’t the worst, he said, but not the best either. Just one of the pack in the race to the bottom. I wanted to follow where my jeans came from back to the cotton fields. And here came a surprise. Bangladesh’s largest garment makers want to cement their position in the market by making their own fabric. So they have been scouring the world for supplies of cheap cotton. In the past three years, Bangladesh has become the largest consumer of cotton from the Central Asian state of Uzbekistan. 14 White Gold: My T-shirt, Slave Labour and the Death of the Aral Sea IT IS AN old story, but with an unpalatable new twist.


pages: 482 words: 121,173

Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age by Brad Smith, Carol Ann Browne

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, air gap, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Celtic Tiger, Charlie Hebdo massacre, chief data officer, cloud computing, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, immigration reform, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, national security letter, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

But we worried that there would be little practical impact if we took the high road only to be undercut by companies that imposed no safeguards or restrictions at all, whether those companies were on the other side of Seattle or on the other side of the Pacific. Facial recognition, like so many AI-based technologies, improves with larger quantities of data. This creates an incentive to do as many early deals as possible and hence the risk of a commercial race to the bottom, with tech companies forced to choose between social responsibility and market success. The only way to protect against this race to the bottom is to build a floor of responsibility that supports healthy market competition. And a solid floor requires that we ensure that this technology, and the organizations that develop and use it, are governed by the rule of law.

Brad Smith, “Facial Recognition Technology: The Need for Public Regulation and Corporate Responsibility,” Microsoft on the Issues (blog), Microsoft, July 13, 2018, https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2018/07/13/facial-recognition-technology-the-need-for-public-regulation-and-corporate-responsibility/. Back to note reference 14. Nitasha Tiku, “Microsoft Wants to Stop AI’s ‘Race to the Bottom,’” Wired, December 6, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-wants-stop-ai-facial-recognition-bottom/. Back to note reference 15. Eric Ries, The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth (New York: Currency, 2017), 96.


pages: 306 words: 78,893

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Boihng this down into a soundbite: capitalism has always produced poverty alongside wealth, and capitalism has from the first been an international and internationalizing system—so it makes little sense to try to isolate the "global" aspect as the major culprit in the production of inequality. The MNC Those who identify globalization as the major force behind the production of inequality frequently point to an alleged "race to the bottom," driven by multinational corporations (MNCs) who constantly ransack the globe searching for low costs and high returns.This too isn't as easy a case to prove as one might think. After the New Economy Despite popular images of multinationals scouring the world for maximum return, going abroad seems to lower, rather than raise, profits (CHck and Harrison 2000).

See income pensions, Enron-style, 35 Petras, James, 150,178 Pets.com, 196 phlogiston, 51 place, meaning of, 147-148 Plender, John, 35 Polanyi, Karl, 167 polarization, 29, 225; see also income distribution; wealth distribution pohtics of finance, 202-207 267 and income distribution, 79—81 market democracy, 22 polls New Economy, 31—32,231 poverty and, 110 Pope, Carl, 162 pop culture, stock market and, 187 portfolio investment, 176 Porto Alegre, 185 potential GDP, 47 poverty, 105-114 absolute vs. relative, 109—111 composition of the poor, 111-114 defining, over time, 106-109 global perspective, 129-130,133-141 historical perspective, 106,111—114 popular perceptions, 110 see also income distribution "poverty line," coinage of phrase, 237 Prins, Nomi, 196 privatization, 221,231 productivity 1960s enthusiasm, 8 acceleration in, accounting for, 56-62 and the business cycle, 47 competing estimates, 60-61 definitions, 41—42 and deflation, 228 and earnings, 45, 56 high-tech vs. rest, 52—54 historical perspective, 48 by industry, 49, 64—67 international comparisons, 41—42 labor, 41 measurement problems, 42—45, 58—60 multifactor (total factor), 41,45 historical perspective, 49 outsourcing and, 51-52 where it went, 56 and workload, 39—41 work hours, measuring, 67 profitability historical view, 203—204 MNCs and, 157 prosocial behavior, 76 protectionism, 220 public subsidy to private sector, 6 purchasing power parity, 131, 238 quabty changes, measuring, 43—45 declines in, 55-56 inputs, adjusting for, 58 Quattrone, Frank, 199 Qwest, 197 race educational attainment, 98—99 Gilder on, 12-13 wealth distribution and, 125—126 race to the bottom, 155 racism and nationahsm, 239 neo- or diflferentiahst, 172—173 Ramone, Joey, 190 Rand, Ayn, 15 Rapaille, G. Clothaire, 146 Reagan, Ronald, 8 recessions, political purpose, 182 regionahzation, 159 Reich, Robert, 71,74 retail trade, 64-66 Riflcin, Jeremy, 68 Robinson, Joan, 235 Robinson, William, 175-176 Rockefeller, David, 232 Rubin, Robert, 218 ruling class, global, 174—178 Russell, Marta, 100 sad militants, 185 Sakakibara, Eisuke, 228 Index Sale, Kirkpatrick, 168 Salomon Smith Barney, 197 scale, economic, 167-168 Scandinavia, very wired, 6 Schama, Simon, 23 Schrager, Ian, 233 Schwab, Klaus, 175-178 Seattle, anti-WTO protests, 32,160 sex, Gilder on, 11—13 sexual preference and pay, 100 sex discrimination, 94—101 international comparisons, 101—102 Shakespeare, 188 shareholder activism, 214 Shiller, Robert, 6-8,25-27,194 Shiva, Vandana, 162,168-169 Shorrock.Tim, 171 Sichel, Daniel, 57 Silicon Valley, income distribution, 105 Silicon Valley Toxics CoaUtion, 232 Sinai, Allen, 4 Singhne, Peter, 18 Skilhng, Jeffirey, 33 skills, job, 73-77 returns to, 86—87 skin shade and pay, 99 Smith, Adam, 109-110, 163,173 Smith, Patti, 183 Smith, Paul, 6 social democracy, 139-143,182 social movements, new, 179 Social Security, 227 Solow, Robert, 3 sovereignty, 170 space, shrinkage of, 146 speedup, 215, 229 Spencer, Herbert, 37 state, retreat of, 150-152 Stigbtz, Joseph, 193 Stiroh,Kevin,51,57 stock market 1990s bubble, history, 188-189 analysts' role, 194—200 anomalies, 194 book value, defined, 233 brokers' fees and salaries, 201-202 and corporate profitability, 203—204 and corporate restructuring, 214-215 economics of, 187-188,192-195 and evolution of the corporation, 212-217 excess volatiHty, 194 happiness of investors, 212 and managers' pay, 216—217 and pop culture, 187 psychology of, 25—26 trading frequency and returns, 190—191, 234,239 wisdom of, 35 see also finance stock options, 216—217 and wealth distribution, 126—127 stock ownership, distribution of, 24, 122-124 stress, management by, 25 stylish shoes, 165 Summers, Lawrence, 5,231 surveillance, 68,77—78 Survey of Consumer Finances, 118—119 Survey of Income and Program Participation, 118 symbolic analysts, 71,72 synergy vs. conflict, 197-200 Taylorism, 78 technology not evil, 2 and social movements, 179 telecommunications industry, 196—198 telegraph, 7 telemarketers, 68 TheGlobe.com, 189 269 TheStreet.com, 31 dme, acceleration of, 146 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 82,139 Tompkins, Doug, 161-162 total factor productivity.


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Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb

Abraham Wald, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Air France Flight 447, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Black Swan, blockchain, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, fulfillment center, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, high net worth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, information retrieval, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, profit maximization, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Levy, strong AI, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

We end the book in part five by applying our economists’ tool kit to questions that affect society more broadly, examining five of the most common AI debates: Will there still be jobs? Yes. Will this generate more inequality? Perhaps. Will a few large companies control everything? It depends. Will countries engage in race-to-the-bottom policy making and forfeit our privacy and security to give their domestic companies a competitive advantage? Some will. Will the world end? You still have plenty of time to derive value from this book. KEY POINTS * * * Economics offers clear insights regarding the business implications of cheaper prediction.

Furthermore, incumbent Baidu is using a facial recognition AI to authenticate customers collecting their rail tickets and tourists accessing attractions.22 By contrast, in Europe, privacy regulation makes data access far more stringent than elsewhere, which may shut out European firms from AI leadership altogether. These factors may create a race to the bottom as countries compete to relax privacy restrictions to improve their AI position. However, citizens and consumers value privacy; it’s not a regulation that only companies care about. There is a basic trade-off between intrusion and personalization and a potential for customer dissatisfaction associated with acquiring user data.


pages: 264 words: 76,643

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

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

Probably the next financial crisis will be a little bit different.” * * * — Just to be absolutely clear: the 2008 banking crisis, whose effects were still rippling through the world nearly a decade later, cannot be blamed on the way we account for financial services in our national accounts. The crisis had its roots in race-to-the-bottom deregulation, naive faith in the capacity of markets to self-correct, and a perverse “shareholder-value” ideology that allowed a few thousand masters-of-the-universe bankers to ransack their own institutions while simultaneously feeling good about themselves. There were many other factors, from the hugely increased (and unnecessary) mathematical complexity of financial instruments to the inherently corrupt relationship between the ratings agencies and the clients who paid them.

It goes against what Westerners in general, and Americans in particular, have taken for granted.”5 Growing inequality explained some of what was going on. Median wages had more or less stagnated since the 1970s, partly due to a loss of bargaining power by unions, a trend that has been replicated in most of the industrial world as the tenets of free-market capitalism encouraged a race to the bottom. In the US the share of economic output going to wages has been falling steadily for decades, with more going to corporate profits and capital. That exacerbates inequalities and penalizes people who have to work for a living, particularly those with skills that can be outsourced, mechanized, or computerized.


pages: 491 words: 77,650

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy by Jeremias Prassl

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Greyball, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market friction, means of production, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, scientific management, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Singh, software as a service, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two tier labour market, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, warehouse automation, work culture , working-age population

odesk.com/content/Elance-oDeskAnnualImpactReport2014.pdf, archived at * * * 162 Notes https://perma.cc/48BE-G7U7; Lilly Irani and M. Six Silberman, ‘Turkopticon: interrupting worker invisibility in Amazon Mechanical Turk’ (2013) CHI 2013, Changing Perspectives, Paris, France; ‘Is digital expert knowledge facing a race to the bottom?’, a-connect (undated), http://www.a-connect.com/acknowledge/is- digital-expert-knowledge-facing-a-race-to-the-bottom/, archived at https:// perma.cc/8ZJ3-P3X4. This tallies with research commissioned by the World Bank, which estimates that a typical online freelancer on Elance-oDesk (now Upwork) or Freelancer.com will work 20–40 hours per week and earn US$200– 750 per month, whilst only ‘a small subset of highly skilled workers . . . can earn up to $3000 per month’: Siou Chew Kuek, Cecilia Paradi-Guilford, Toks Fayomi, Soari Imaizumi, and Panos Ipeirotis, ‘The Global Opportunity in Online Outsourcing’ (World Bank 2015), 42, http://www.ipeirotis.com/wp-content/ uploads/2015/05/The-World-Bank-The-Global-Opportunity-in-Online- Outsourcing.pdf, archived at https://perma.cc/2AGP-TME6 42.


China's Superbank by Henry Sanderson, Michael Forsythe

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Carmen Reinhart, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, failed state, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, price mechanism, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, too big to fail, urban renewal, urban sprawl, work culture

A few months later, SolarWorld went on to lead a group of manufacturers requesting that the European Commission investigate whether Chinese companies were dumping products at below-market rates. Any EU action was potentially much more serious, as it was a far larger market for Chinese goods. This time, the Chinese solar makers gathered again in Beijing to urge the Chinese government to protect their interests. In the race to the bottom, who would be the last man standing? As prices fall further, narrowing the gap with traditional forms of energy, China’s solar firms, having exported abroad for years, can sell at home or move manufacturing overseas, helped by CDB. In China, bankruptcies and defaults do not happen when the market wants them to, especially when the debt is due to domestic banks and not overseas foreign lenders.

Changing our centuries-long addiction to oil and fossil fuels is not an easy task; the costs of renewable energy and the difficulties of changing the way we live make the industry a perfect fit for development banks in the early stages. In late 2011, China doubled its 2015 solar power goal. With such political support from the top and a development bank the size of CDB, China is hugely competitive, especially since not many other countries have the stomach to support an industry in a race to the bottom. Solar has followed the course of other industries in the country: becoming cost efficient by exporting to the West, and then selling to the growing domestic market. Yet other development banks, such as Brazil’s BNDES, will surely catch up to match the support. It will become a battle of subsidies.


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Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance by Nouriel Roubini, Stephen Mihm

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global reserve currency, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, value at risk, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

As a consequence, there’s a “race to the bottom,” as banks and other financial firms search for the regulator that will regulate them the least. Regulators may have exacerbated the problem in recent years. Here’s why: when banks choose their own regulators—and gravitate toward those that promise the least oversight—more rigorous regulatory agencies may see their domain erode. And a regulator with no one to regulate has no reason to exist. So regulators have every incentive to be lenient in order to attract more financial institutions into their regulatory nets. Here too we have a race to the bottom. Such is the paradox of choice or “regulatory shopping.”

This dynamic was comparable to an arms race: Ireland announcing a blanket guarantee forced other countries to do the same or at least raise the ceiling. The reason was simple: depositors could readily shift their money out of countries with limited guarantees and place it in safer havens. As a result, governments could not hold the line against moral hazard. It was a race to the bottom. Other kinds of deposits came under the umbrella of government insurance programs. In the United States, the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), a kind of FDIC for credit unions, took over two beleaguered members—U.S. Central and WesCorp—and then pledged $80 billion to cover the losses on all deposits in all credit unions throughout the country.


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The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy by Peter Temin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, full employment, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, invisible hand, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, mortgage debt, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, price stability, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, white flight, working poor

“Public and Private Partnerships: Accounting for the New Religion.” Harvard Law Review 115 (5) (March): 1229–1284. Morgenson, Gretchen. 2015. “A Student Loan System Stacked against the Borrower.” New York Times, October 9. Mortenson, Thomas G. 2012. “State Funding: A Race to the Bottom.” American Council on Education, Winter. http://www.acenet.edu/the-presidency/columns-and-features/Pages/state-funding-a-race-to-the-bottom.aspx. Accessed September 22, 2016. Moss, David A. 2002. When All Else Fails: Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Murray, Charles. 2012. Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010.


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

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

When I asked Rubin to consider labor’s critique and its argument for global labor standards, I was pleasantly surprised that he did not brush off the question. Instead, we had an engaging back-and-forth. Without global rights for workers to organize and some version of a minimum wage pegged to each country’s economic conditions, the “race to the bottom” is sure to continue, I suggest. When workers start mobilizing for higher wages, multinationals counter by moving production to the next available cheap labor market. Middle-class wages fall at the top, but the bottom does not rise as rapidly as it should. “But it’s a complicated question,” Rubin responds.

Then there is improving the financial system’s own risk-han-dling mechanisms. Obama should attack the British position. Prime Minister Gordon Brown advocates more effective cross-border financial regulation, but not so much as to endanger the City of London’s standing as home of minimal regulation—in a race to the bottom with New York. This has to change. Obama should pick up the Financial Stability Forum’s proposal that global trade in financial derivatives be organized in licensed exchanges. If London wants the current casino, let the bulk of the trade be organized out of New York. But more importantly, the U.S. should insist that there be an international college of financial regulators which it will host, fund and coordinate.


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The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties by Paul Collier

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, bonus culture, business cycle, call centre, central bank independence, centre right, commodity super cycle, computerized trading, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, full employment, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, late capitalism, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, negative equity, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, rent control, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, too big to fail, trade liberalization, urban planning, web of trust, zero-sum game

While we cannot afford to fall behind global standards, the teenage years should not be turned into a junior version of the toxic rivalries of an investment bank. As to those toxic rivalries, a story that hit the headlines in 2013 was of a summer intern at an investment bank, so keen to impress that he worked a twenty-hour day before dropping dead. This is an extreme instance of a race to the bottom that drives groups of people to become workaholics. Everybody would gain from working less, but no individual dares to step out of line: they would lose out in the race for promotion, and by breaching prevailing norms they would lose esteem. This is a classic co-ordination problem and it has a straightforward solution – public policy.

The capacity to tax and regulate remains firmly lodged at the national level. As I discussed in Chapter 6, our supranational co-ordination mechanisms – the OECD, the IMF, the EU, the G7 and the G20 – have lost the capacity to forge binding reciprocal obligations underpinned by enlightened self-interest. Each nation prefers to compete in a race to the bottom. This defeat of governance has been the ugliest reality of modern globalization. Having been the epicentre of the problem, in its presidency of the G8 in 2013, Britain began to lead the way in trying to address it.* For example, the UK pioneered a crackdown on ‘shell companies’ through which lawyers conceal asset ownership; the country now has a compulsory public register of the true ownership of all British companies, closing a major conduit for corrupt money.


pages: 257 words: 80,698

Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals by Oliver Bullough

Alan Greenspan, Bellingcat, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Downton Abbey, Etonian, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Global Witness, John Bercow, Julian Assange, light touch regulation, lockdown, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, surveillance capitalism, the High Line, WikiLeaks

‘I’ve just been chatting to someone today about an ethical problem that’s arisen as a result of exactly this – where a commercial dispute has gone sour, and the loser in the commercial dispute is seeking to bring a private prosecution, not necessarily because he or she is particularly fussed about the interests of justice, but simply because they want revenge,’ said one lawyer. ‘If you remove the objectivity, which is what you get when being prosecuted by the state, then it’s a race to the bottom, or a race to the bottom of the pockets anyway. We are on that trajectory. It raises the startling prospect of two Russian oligarchs slugging it out in the commercial courts, and then one of them deciding suddenly he’s going to bring a private prosecution against the other. Once that happens, all gloves are off.’


pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

With as much as 70 percent of China’s budget consumed by local government expenses, many scholars argue that China is already de facto federalized and should become more formally so.3 Indeed, the central government no longer sets or rewards growth rate targets for provinces, indicating they are expected to determine economic strategies for themselves.4 Inland provinces are thus leveraging China’s improved infrastructure to draw companies from the high-wage coastal cities toward the lower-wage interior. Meanwhile, a “race to the bottom” competition for manufacturing jobs is playing out in America today reminiscent of Asia in the 1980s. Tennessee is reimbursing much of the up-front cost South Korea’s tire maker Hankook will incur to set up its first U.S. plant in Clarksville, where it will become the largest employer in the city.

As the longtime Chicago Tribune columnist and urban expert Richard Longworth has written, “Midwestern states make no sense as units of government.”7 Kansas City is shared by Kansas and Missouri, but the two states battle to get companies to relocate across State Line Road rather than uniting against global competition. Indiana’s municipalities are also engaged in a Tennessee-style race to the bottom to attract low-wage jobs, undermining Indianapolis’s effort to become a high-wage tech hub. Some second-tier cities have managed to stay afloat by effectively privatizing themselves. The Port of Corpus Christi, for example, was the first American territory to be granted a foreign trade zone license by the Department of Commerce in 1985, making it a self-governing private entity independent of the city with the same name and taking no federal, state, or city tax revenues.*1 After decades of service as a key port for oil imports and almost zero exports, it has become a major gateway for outbound shale oil exports from the Eagle Ford formation only a hundred kilometers away.*2 In 2009, it began a $1 billion joint venture with Tianjin Pipe Corporation, which hails from China’s leading port, to produce 500,000 tons per year of seamless pipe essential for oil and gas wells.

McDonald’s has more capacity to inspect itself, and more incentive to protect its brand, than any government can devote to monitoring it. Similarly, the West African societies where children work in cocoa fields don’t raise wages or build schools the way Nestlé can.*1 — SUPPLY CHAINS WERE ONCE thought of as spurring a race to the bottom; now it is clear they are how countries race to the top. Even China and India needed to open to foreign investment to attract supply chains, stimulate reforms, and generate the capital necessary to spread development. As the Nobel laureates Robert Solow and Edmund Phelps have pointed out, foreign firms pay higher wages, bring in new technology, and boost worker skills and productivity.


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

High-net-worth individuals finance the campaigns of politicians on the left and on the right, and few are in favor of wealth taxation, even when they are otherwise quite liberal. Second, it is easy to avoid the taxes, legally or not, particularly in small European countries where people can move or park their wealth abroad. This gives rise to a race to the bottom on tax rates. We should not lose sight of the fact, however, that all of this happens in part because the world tolerates tax evasion: most tax codes have loopholes galore and the penalties for parking money abroad are ineffective. As we saw, countries with a simple tax code with few loopholes lose less from evasion when taxes go up than the United States.71 Gabriel Zucman has convincingly argued that there are many relatively straightforward things that would help a lot in limiting tax evasion and tax avoidance.

There needs to be the political will to implement them. The three steps Zucman recommends may be particularly tricky since they involve international cooperation, and the men (yes, almost always men) at the top right now do not seem to be all that able to join together to get things done. Without that, countries may be tempted to engage in a race to the bottom in taxation in the hope of attracting talent and capital. Preferential tax schemes for high-skilled foreign workers have been introduced in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. In Denmark, for example, high-earning foreigners pay only a 30 percent flat tax for three years (against a top rate of 62 percent for the Danish).

The recent round of tax reforms undertaken by the centrist Macron government has made tax less progressive: the flat tax was raised, the wealth tax is gone, and taxes on capital have been pared back. The official justification is that this is necessary to make France able to attract capital away from other countries. It may well be true, but it runs the risk of forcing other countries in Europe to cut taxes as well, prompting a race to the bottom. The American experience warns us this may be very hard to reverse. European countries need to cooperate to hold the line on their taxes. Developing-country governments raise even less money than the United States. The median low-income country raises less than 15 percent of GDP in taxes as compared to nearly 50 percent in Europe (and 34 percent in the OECD on average).


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Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America by Jamie Bronstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, oil shock, plutocrats, price discrimination, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Without inequality, there could never be progress: “The main spring of progress is the desire of individuals to better their condition …”100 While the northern states were home to cut-throat capitalism and to a natural war between labor and capital, Calhoun described each plantation as a microcosm of harmony between labor and capital, embodied by the person of the plantation owner.101 One of the most prolific anonymous editorial writers on slavery, Virginia lawyer George Fitzhugh, advocated slavery as a form of paternalistic social organization for workers. As had the New York Working Men, Fitzhugh argued that competition promoted a race to the bottom in living standards. He claimed that workers and their employers in the North were only linked by the impersonal cash nexus, and that a manual worker had almost no power compared with the man who would or would not hire him. But Fitzhugh went beyond the arguments of northern workers by arguing that dependent relationships were better because they caused an affectionate tie: between husbands and wives, parents and children, and masters and slaves.102 He argued that in the best-case scenario, all workers would be enslaved.103 In the north, newspaper editors went wild, printing and reprinting Fitzhugh’s anonymous editorials while alleging a southern conspiracy to deprive white workers of their liberties.104 Historian Peter Kolchin argues that slaveholders in the United States (in contrast with the Russian serf-holders he compares them to) were able to defend slavery freely because of the free press in the United States.

Fears about the slowing of the economy in general are met with calls for the education of the workforce, as though that, rather than increasing consumer demand, will guarantee that every individual somehow has a high-paying job. In fact, automation has caused the hollowing out of the wage structure; the highest-paid people continue to be highly paid, while middle- and low-skilled workers conduct a race to the bottom for lower-skilled jobs. Without some degree of redistribution and the provision of more public goods “such as food, housing, education and health care that are necessary for a modern life to go well,” there is no guarantee that economic output will have any relationship to well-being.72 The path of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA, 2010) provides a good illustration of the problems caused by divergent partisan ideologies and powerful framing narratives.


pages: 401 words: 93,256

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Rory Sutherland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, butterfly effect, California gold rush, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Firefox, Ford Model T, General Magic , George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, IKEA effect, information asymmetry, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, loss aversion, low cost airline, Mason jar, Murray Gell-Mann, nudge theory, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Veblen good, work culture

Even Darwin’s great contemporary and collaborator Wallace hated the idea of sexual selection; for some reason, it sits in the category of ideas that most people – and especially intellectuals – simply do not want to believe. 3.11: On the Importance of Identity Remember that without distinctiveness, mutualism of the kind found in bees and flowers cannot work, because an improvement in a flower’s product quality would not result in a corresponding increase in the bees’ loyalty. Without identity and the resulting differentiation, a breed of flower would give away extra nectar for no gain, as the next time, the bees would simply visit the less-generous-but-identical-looking flower next to it. Over time, flowers would end up in a ‘race to the bottom’, producing as little costly nectar as possible and relying on their similar appearance to other, more generous flowers to preserve the bees’ supply of nectar and to maintain the incentive for them to continue travelling from plant to plant. We need to consider whether the same process occurs in business, as well as in nature.

The problem was confined to a few makes, but without knowing which specific brands to avoid, it sullied the whole category. Without the brand feedback mechanism, there was no incentive for any one manufacturer to make a safer, better version of the board, since they were not positioned to reap the gains. As a result, the market became a commoditised race to the bottom, in which both innovation and quality control fail. Why make a better product if no one knows it was you who made it? So no one did make a better board, and the whole category more or less died as a result. It may correct itself if better boards arise, or if a shrewd company such as Samsung cannily attaches its name to the best.


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The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism by Arun Sundararajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Burning Man, call centre, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, distributed ledger, driverless car, Eben Moglen, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, gig economy, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, job automation, job-hopping, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, peer-to-peer rental, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Additionally, at an October 2015 labor conference hosted by the White House, President Barack Obama discussed ways of protecting the new workforce in an hour-long town hall discussion he moderated with Michelle Miller, the co-founder of coworker.org, after highlighting the opportunities created by the future of work heralded by platforms like Uber, Lyft, and TaskRabbit in an earlier keynote speech. But what exactly do these opportunities look like? On one side of the argument, there are the Liss-Riordans of the world who may consider the future of work—at least as it is currently unfolding in the sharing economy—as a near-certain race to the bottom. Among the most vocal proponents of this view is the former labor secretary and University of California professor Robert Reich. Asserting that a better name for the sharing economy would be the “share-the-scraps economy,” Reich posits: “Customers and workers are matched online. Workers are rated on quality and reliability.

Will the sharing economy ultimately represent the rise of the microentrepreneur—a generation of self-employed workers who are empowered to work whenever they want from any location and at whatever level of intensity needed to achieve their desired standard of living? Or will it represent the culmination of the end of broad-based and high standards of living that the United States witnessed in the 1950s and 1960s—a disparaging race to the bottom that leaves workers around the world working more hours for less money and with minimal job security and benefits? Put another way, will the future of work be populated by successful microentrepreneurs, like David with his fleet of cars on Turo, ThreeBirdNest’s Alicia Shaffer on Etsy, and Don Dennis running his business from the island of Gigha?


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Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, brain emulation, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, different worldview, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, epigenetics, fear of failure, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hallucination problem, Hans Moravec, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, machine translation, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, nuclear winter, operational security, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, prediction markets, price stability, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, search costs, social graph, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trolley problem, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

If the antagonists are powerful states, the clash could be bloody.34 (A “surgical strike” against the rival’s AI project might risk triggering a larger confrontation and might in any case not be feasible if the host country has taken precautions.35) * * * Box 13 A risk-race to the bottom Consider a hypothetical AI arms race in which several teams compete to develop superintelligence.32 Each team decides how much to invest in safety—knowing that resources spent on developing safety precautions are resources not spent on developing the AI. Absent a deal between all the competitors (which might be stymied by bargaining or enforcement difficulties), there might then be a risk-race to the bottom, driving each team to take only a minimum of precautions. One can model each team’s performance as a function of its capability (measuring its raw ability and luck) and a penalty term corresponding to the cost of its safety precautions.

Technology races: some historical examples 6. The mail-ordered DNA scenario 7. How big is the cosmic endowment? 8. Anthropic capture 9. Strange solutions from blind search 10. Formalizing value learning 11. An AI that wants to be friendly 12. Two recent (half-baked) ideas 13. A risk-race to the bottom CHAPTER 1 Past developments and present capabilities We begin by looking back. History, at the largest scale, seems to exhibit a sequence of distinct growth modes, each much more rapid than its predecessor. This pattern has been taken to suggest that another (even faster) growth mode might be possible.


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All the Devils Are Here by Bethany McLean

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, break the buck, buy and hold, call centre, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Ken Thompson, laissez-faire capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Own Your Own Home, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stock buybacks, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, telemarketer, the long tail, too big to fail, value at risk, zero-sum game

Ratings shopping was a classic example of why Alan Greenspan’s theory of market discipline didn’t work in the real world. The market competition between the rating agencies, which Greenspan assumed would make companies better, actually made them worse. “The only way to get market share was to be easier,” says Jerome Fons, a longtime Moody’s managing director. “It was a race to the bottom.” A former structured finance executive at Moody’s says, “No rating agency could say, ‘We’re going to change and be more conservative.’ You wouldn’t be in business for long if you did that. We all understood that.” “It turns out ratings quality has surprisingly few friends,” Moody’s chief executive, Raymond McDaniel, told his board in 2007.

Says Kevin Stein, the associate director of the California Reinvestment Coalition: “Banks said, ‘We don’t have to comply.’ The OCC said, ‘They don’t have to comply.’ The state legislatures said, ‘If we can’t pass a law that regulates federally chartered banks operating in our state, then we’re not going to regulate state-chartered lenders, because then they can’t compete.’ It was a legislative and regulatory race to the bottom.” Finally, subprime loans continued to make their way, unchecked, into the national banking system, thanks to securitization. It really didn’t matter who originated them. States had no way of cutting off that all-important funding source. And the national regulators, with their energy focused on making sure that “their” institutions were free from pesky state laws, idly stood by.

In a 2005 memo about Washington Mutual, the FDIC summed up the prevailing sentiment: “Management believes, however, that the impact on WMB [of a housing downturn] would be manageable, since the riskiest segments of production are sold to investors, and that these investors will bear the brunt of a bursting housing bubble.” And what did Wall Street think about the way the subprime business had gone mad? Wall Street didn’t care, either. If anything, Wall Street was encouraging the subprime companies in their race to the bottom. Lousier loans meant higher yields. “A company would come to us and say, ‘We can’t believe your FICO doesn’t go to 580,’ ” recalls a former Morgan Stanley executive. “ ‘You’re 620, but Lehman will go to 580.’ ” Here was the ultimate consequence of the delinking of borrower and lender, which securitization had made possible: no one in the chain, from broker to subprime originator to Wall Street, cared that the loans they were making and selling were likely to go bad.


pages: 382 words: 100,127

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

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

A new settlement is needed between the nation state and the international economic order that allows for a greater variety of institutional forms reflecting different national preferences and traditions. Some people, especially on the left, fear that without rigorous harmonisation of institutional regimes there will be a race to the bottom on labour, environmental or financial regulation (the same argument is made within the EU). This fear is not groundless but is exaggerated, and the only area where there seems to be some evidence for it is in corporate taxation. Most institutional money is risk averse and sees low regulation countries as risky.

He writes: ‘Advocates of globalisation lecture the rest of the world about how countries must change their policies and institutions to expand their international trade and to become more attractive to foreign investors. This way of thinking confuses means for ends. Globalisation should be an instrument for achieving the goals that societies seek: prosperity, stability, freedom, and quality of life. Whether globalisation sets off a “race to the bottom” or not, we can break the deadlock between the proponents and opponents of globalisation by accepting a simple principle: countries can uphold national standards in labor markets, finance, taxation, and other areas and can do so by raising barriers at the border, if necessary, when international trade and finance demonstrably threaten domestic practices that enjoy democratic support.’15 Rodrik argues that this principle rules out extremism on both sides.


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

In 1936, France broke with gold and became the last major country to emerge from the worst effects of the Great Depression while England devalued again to regain some of the advantage it had lost against the dollar after FDR’s devaluations in 1933. In round after round of devaluation and default, the major economies of the world raced to the bottom, causing massive trade disruption, lost output and wealth destruction along the way. The volatile and self-defeating nature of the international monetary system during that period makes Currency War I the ultimate cautionary tale for today as the world again confronts the challenge of massive unpayable debt.

Regional currency blocs could quickly devolve into regional trading blocs with diminished world trade, undoubtedly the opposite of what the advocates of multiple reserve currencies such as Eichengreen envision. Eichengreen expects what he calls healthy competition among multiple reserve currencies. He discounts models of unhealthy competition and dysfunction—what economists call a “race to the bottom,” which can arise when leading central banks lock in regional dominance through network effects and simultaneously abuse their reserve status by money printing. The best advice for advocates of the multiple reserve currency model is “Be careful what you wish for.” This is an untested and untried model, absent gold or some single currency anchor.


pages: 417 words: 97,577

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Maslow's hierarchy, means of production, merger arbitrage, Metcalfe's law, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive investing, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, undersea cable, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, very high income, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, you are the product, zero-sum game

“There is government,” he wrote, “whenever one person or group can tell others what they must do and when those others have to obey or suffer a penalty.”18 Under Hale's definition, the tech giants are effectively governments unto themselves. In tax matters, the companies stand effectively beyond the laws of national governments, playing one country against another in a race to the bottom. Their arrangements mock national governments. Facebook, Google, and other tech companies have used arrangements known as a “Double Irish” and a “Dutch Sandwich,” to shield the majority of their international profits from the taxman. They shift revenue from one Irish subsidiary to a Dutch company with no employees, and then on to a Bermuda mailbox owned by another Ireland-registered company.19 It is a farce, and it is all perfectly legal.

Key Thoughts from the Chapter The top technology companies in the United States now have a market capitalization that exceeds the GDP of all countries in Western Europe. For the biggest tech firms, competing against startups has become a one-way bet. In tax matters, the companies stand effectively beyond the laws of national governments, playing one country against another in a race to the bottom. The power of platforms makes them a different class of companies. They set the rules that govern their world. We simply live in it. Chapter Six Toll Roads and Robber Barons I would rather earn 1% off a hundred people's efforts than 100% of my own efforts. —John D. Rockefeller Imagine a world where a giant corporation watched your daily habits and knew all your likes, dislikes, who you spoke to, what you bought, whether you paid your bills on time, and what you talked about with friends?


pages: 411 words: 98,128

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It by Brian Dumaine

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AI winter, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, money market fund, natural language processing, no-fly zone, Ocado, pets.com, plutocrats, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

Williams-Sonoma has differentiated itself with one of the most robust Internet operations in retail, bringing in over half its revenue online, and has assembled a database of 60 million customers. Its brick-and-mortar stores, which the company calls “billboards for our brands,” along with glossy catalogs, help drive online sales where margins are significantly higher than at the stores. A custom selection of products also helps retailers avoid the kind of race-to-the-bottom price wars for which Amazon is famous. In other words, one way to compete with Amazon on price is not to compete on price. That’s a lesson that Crate & Barrel CEO Neela Montgomery has taken to heart as she works to upgrade this upscale German furniture chain by modernizing stores and investing heavily in social media.

The challenge for retailers such as Crate & Barrel arises when Amazon begins to penetrate more of the market by cutting out retailers and going directly to manufacturers. Bezos is now offering furniture makers white-glove delivery service of their products, which includes a no-hassle returns policy. Furniture makers simply sell on Amazon and leave the rest of the delivery and all the paperwork and complexity of returns to the giant. Another way to avoid a race to the bottom with Amazon is to sell products that need a lot of hand-holding. Best Buy, the consumer electronics retailer, is one business that by all rights should’ve been crushed by Amazon. In the early 2000s, the Minnesota company had stores in malls with shrinking traffic, and carried TVs, small appliances, and computers—for the most part commodity products that can be bought on Amazon for less and delivered faster.


pages: 328 words: 96,678

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

The fallout soon engulfed not just the Asian Tigers but banks and investors worldwide. Under pressure to boost export revenues as their trade deficits surged, the Asian Tigers were forced to let their overvalued local currencies depreciate sharply, a practice that lowers the prices of exports to make them more competitive. This launched a race to the bottom: it took more and more local currency to pay lenders in dollars and yen. The real cost of foreign debt skyrocketed far beyond stated interest rates. Borrowers went bankrupt and took lenders with them. Shortfalls in the private sector spilled over into the public sector when countries emptied their pockets to offset lost taxes and bail out corporates and banks amid rising deficits.

Rising wealth in emerging markets lifts millions out of poverty and hikes consumer expectations. To accommodate demand, growing companies and competitive countries tap global debt markets. As individual and household debt skyrocket, many workers in advanced economies suffer under a global wage race to the bottom. In once flourishing communities, lower incomes spur rising credit card debt. Credit card balances in the United States now swamp savings. Household economics drive the national economy. Shrinking household income for many means lower tax rolls. No longer employed in full-time jobs with benefits, workers get caught between declining purchasing power and soaring health care and education costs.


pages: 398 words: 105,917

Bean Counters: The Triumph of the Accountants and How They Broke Capitalism by Richard Brooks

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blockchain, BRICs, British Empire, business process, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Strachan, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, energy security, Etonian, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, Frederick Winslow Taylor, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks

Financial Reporting Council chair Sir Ron Dearing, deputy chair Philip Couse, ex-Coopers, plus Stock Exchange chairman Andrew Hugh Smith and CBI president Sir Trevor Holdsworth were among those concerned. 16. Prem Sikka, Jim Cousins and Austin Mitchell, Race to the Bottom: the Case of the Accountancy Firms, Association for Accountancy and Business Affairs, 2004. 17. ICAEW Council, quoted in Accountancy magazine, April 1994, cited in Napier, ‘Intersections of Law and Accountancy’. 18. Sikka, Cousins and Mitchell, Race to the Bottom. 19. Financial Times, 11 June 1998. 20. Written parliamentary answer, 7 November 1996. Hansard, Col. 618. 21. House of Commons Trade and Industry Select Committee, 16 February 1999. 22.


Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy by Philippe van Parijs, Yannick Vanderborght

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, diversified portfolio, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, open borders, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, price mechanism, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, systematic bias, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor

But how could it possibly make any sense in the twenty-�first �century, in an era in which information, capital, goods, and �people are crossing national borders as they have never done before? In this new context, are the prospects for a national basic income not deeply altered? Indeed, have they not dramatically collapsed?5 Race to the Bottom Why is the economic sustainability of an unconditional basic income threatened by globalization? �Because of the operation of two mechanisms. One has to do with its attractiveness to potential beneficiaries, the other with its unattractiveness to potential contributors. Neither mechanism constitutes a threat to a welfare state mainly governed by the insurance princi�ple, but both operate fully in the case of an unconditional basic income.

Tackling Selective Emigration The upshot of this exploration of the milder versions of the exclusionary strategy against selective immigration is that they do not provide a credible and attractive alternative to the harder one: shutting the door on many who would like to enter. Regrettably no doubt, if generous national (or, more generally, subglobal) basic incomes are to be made sustainable in the era of globalization, it �will therefore not be pos�si�ble to dispense with some version of the exclusionary strategy.23 Even this may not be enough to avert a race to the bottom, however. The threat posed by the selective emigration of net contributors also needs to be addressed.24 How? One might first think of a strategy strictly symmetric to the one deemed appropriate to limit selective immigration. If it is okay to keep net beneficiaries out, why would it not be okay to keep net contributors in?

Such obstacles make it more difficult for net beneficiaries to coordinate, or�ga�nize, and fight together.59 As a result of the conjunction of �these two mechanisms, one can expect institutionalized re�distribution to be less generous, other �things equal, in more heterogeneous socie�ties than in more homogeneous ones.60 If globalization means a constant flow of mi�grants, then invoking a race to the bottom driven by tax and social competition would not even be necessary to predict gloomy prospects for a generous unconditional basic income in a globalized context. The economic constraint �will not be binding if the po�liti�cal con- 242 Vi able i n the G lo bal Era? M ulti -L evel Basi c Income straint tightened by growing ethnic diversity stops re�distribution before its economic sustainability is at risk.


pages: 160 words: 6,876

Shaky Ground: The Strange Saga of the U.S. Mortgage Giants by Bethany McLean

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, collateralized debt obligation, crony capitalism, housing crisis, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, negative equity, obamacare, Pershing Square Capital Management, race to the bottom, Savings and loan crisis

Fiderer asked a simple question: If there were really 31 million “risky” mortgages, and Fannie and Freddie were responsible for half of them, why was the peak rate of serious delinquency for GSE-backed loans only about 1.8 million? The reason is that Pinto defines “risk” far differently than most and includes a large number of loans that, measured by loss rates, didn’t turn out to be particularly risky. Another reality check is that if Fannie and Freddie led the race to the bottom, then you would expect to see much higher loss rates on their loans. Instead, the opposite is true. The FCIC researchers ended up rejecting Pinto’s analysis because they found that the loss rates on the GSEs’ loans were actually far smaller than those on comparable private-sector loans. But they did meet with him multiple times, and produced two detailed memos about mortgage performance, one of which was a direct response to his analysis.


pages: 124 words: 39,011

Beyond Outrage: Expanded Edition: What Has Gone Wrong With Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix It by Robert B. Reich

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, benefit corporation, business cycle, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, electricity market, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, job automation, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

So what does that mean for restoring middle-class security in today’s economy? It starts by making sure that everyone in America gets a fair shot at success. The truth is, we’ll never be able to compete with other countries when it comes to who’s best at letting their businesses pay the lowest wages or pollute as much as they want. That’s a race to the bottom that we can’t win—and shouldn’t want to win. Those countries don’t have a strong middle class. They don’t have our standard of living. …The fact is, this crisis has left a deficit of trust between Main Street and Wall Street. And major banks that were rescued by the taxpayers have an obligation to go the extra mile in helping to close that deficit.


pages: 356 words: 116,083

For Profit: A History of Corporations by William Magnuson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, bank run, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, buy low sell high, carbon tax, carried interest, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, move fast and break things, Peter Thiel, power law, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steven Levy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, work culture , Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Or would they blend seamlessly into their local surroundings, enriching the international economic system? More prosaically, how would governments regulate them, if they could always move their operations abroad to evade restrictions they deemed too onerous? Would the rise of the multinational lead to a race to the bottom among nation-states as countries competed to attract businesses to their jurisdictions by watering down corporate responsibilities and obligations? The multinational corporation was a new breed of corporation, and it raised fundamental questions about the relationship between capitalism and democracy.

They could either increase environmental protections and risk losing corporations to countries with looser rules, or they could relax their own environmental standards and keep corporations and their desperately needed jobs. Too often, governments chose abject surrender. The result, not just in environmental regulation but also in other areas, like tax and employment law, was what scholars of international relations call a “race to the bottom.” Regulatory competition between countries caused governments to water down their laws in ways that ultimately harmed the public. With corporations now rivaling and sometimes surpassing the power of countries, a question arose in the minds of close watchers of capitalism. Was this the end of history for the corporation?


pages: 138 words: 43,748

Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle by Jeff Flake

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, immigration reform, impulse control, invisible hand, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Potemkin village, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

We were desperate to engage big ideas, in a setting of intellectual curiosity and vigorous debate. I kept that Armey-Archer T-shirt so that I could remember a time when Republicans thought about ideas and enjoyed those good-spirited and consequential debates. It seems that time is gone, replaced by a race to the bottom to see who can be meaner and madder and crazier. It is not enough to be conservative anymore. You have to be vicious. Of course, this culture of vicious dehumanization is bipartisan. But in the election of 2016, our side outdid itself. It helps if you ascribe the absolute worst motives to your opponents, traffic in outlandish conspiracy theories, abandon reason and any old-fashioned notions of the common good, and have an unquenchable appetite for destruction.


pages: 179 words: 43,441

The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, conceptual framework, continuous integration, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, global value chain, Google Glasses, hype cycle, income inequality, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, life extension, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, Narrative Science, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear taboo, OpenAI, personalized medicine, precariat, precision agriculture, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, reshoring, RFID, rising living standards, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social contagion, software as a service, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Although the human cloud is in its infancy, there is already substantial anecdotal evidence that it entails silent offshoring (silent because human cloud platforms are not listed and do not have to disclose their data). Is this the beginning of a new and flexible work revolution that will empower any individual who has an internet connection and that will eliminate the shortage of skills? Or will it trigger the onset of an inexorable race to the bottom in a world of unregulated virtual sweatshops? If the result is the latter – a world of the precariat, a social class of workers who move from task to task to make ends meet while suffering a loss of labour rights, bargaining rights and job security – would this create a potent source of social unrest and political instability?


pages: 145 words: 41,453

You Are What You Read by Jodie Jackson

Brexit referendum, delayed gratification, Filter Bubble, framing effect, Future Shock, Hans Rosling, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, race to the bottom, Rutger Bregman, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, yellow journalism

They can publish content based on search engine algorithms that favour sites with large amounts of up-to-date and relevant information. This means content staff at some organisations are expected to write between five and ten articles a day. The race to the top of search engines has inadvertently led to a race to the bottom in terms of quality journalism. Stories are decided on based on their ‘traffic potential, revenue potential, turnaround time and at the bottom of the list editorial quality’.6 We have seen the same phenomenon in the UK. The Daily Mail has achieved a readership of 31.1 million readers a month, making it the number-one news organisation in the UK in terms of readership.


pages: 460 words: 122,556

The End of Wall Street by Roger Lowenstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, break the buck, Brownian motion, Carmen Reinhart, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, geopolitical risk, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, junk bonds, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Y2K

Perhaps as a form of insurance for some cataclysm to come, Mozilo granted sweetheart mortgages (on preferred terms) to a host of political and business luminaries.b11 But his company appeared to be thriving. From ’00 to ’04, Countrywide’s share price nearly quadrupled, and over the ensuing few years Mozilo personally reaped $474 million in stock sales.12 Mortgage banking inevitably produces a race to the bottom. Thanks to competitive pressures, bad loan practice drives out good, and Mozilo’s influence on the industry was considerable. The only way for rivals to compete was to go after the same business as Countrywide. Washington Mutual, a century-old Seattle-based thrift, had more conventional banking bloodlines, but in the new century it experienced a rebirth.

See collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) cooling of market for credit rating agencies and example of fall in prices of foreign-held Goldman Sachs and growth of insurance claims on Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch and mortgage bubble and payment waterfall prime risk taking and subprime mortgages and swimming pool metaphor for total amount floated in mortgage banking, as race to the bottom mortgage bubble banking regulators and banks’ late stage desperation in bursting of Citigroup and credit and developing disaster, evidence of Federal Reserve’s role in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and mass hallucination in Merrill Lynch and mortgage securitization and reasons for ripple effect of Wall Street and Washington Mutual and mortgage lenders.


The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics by Rod Hill, Anthony Myatt

American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biodiversity loss, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, electricity market, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, failed state, financial innovation, full employment, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, positional goods, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, publication bias, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, sugar pill, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, union organizing, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

In an unregulated competitive situation, an individual player would prefer not to wear a helmet since it confers an advantage over those players wearing helmets – the better vision and hearing more than compensate for the increased risk of injury. But if all players go without helmets, it’s a race to the bottom – everyone faces more risk and no one benefits. That’s why, when they vote in secret ballots, hockey players almost always favour compulsory helmets. As we document in Chapter 4, abundant evidence has shown that relative income is an important determinant of well-being – for fairness and status reasons among others.

But are tariffs that create a high-cost domestic industry the answer? Perhaps a country could promote other kinds of exports (e.g. tourism, education and other services) through investments in education and infrastructure. Since we can’t compete against low-wage foreign labour, tariffs prevent a ‘race to the bottom’ Textbooks argue that this is also false. High-wage countries sell goods to low-wage countries (and vice versa), so clearly it’s possible to ‘compete’ against low-wage labour. Comparative advantage shows that it is relative, not absolute, costs which matter for the ability to trade. Wage differences reflect productivity differences, as we saw in the ‘textbook’ part of Chapter 8.2 1.6 The global trading system Countries make agreements among themselves about trade policy.


pages: 424 words: 121,425

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy by Mehrsa Baradaran

access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, credit crunch, David Graeber, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, diversification, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, income inequality, Internet Archive, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, M-Pesa, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Own Your Own Home, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor

First Omaha Service Corporation, the Supreme Court said that a credit card lender could export the interest rates of one state to any other. Banks immediately lobbied for and were granted the same privilege. Predictably, lenders began to charter in states with the highest rates, which they then exported nationwide. This in turn caused a “race to the bottom” as states competed for lending businesses by lowering borrower protections and increasing usury limits.32 The U.S. Supreme Court case allowing rates to be exported did not apply to payday lenders because the industry was not prevalent at the time. However, payday lenders were able to quickly take advantage by “borrowing” bank charters, a practice dubbed “rent-a-bank,” in order to “benefit” from high interest rates.

Although it may be absurd to implicate the CRA, is there any truth in blaming the weaker underwriting standards espoused by both the Clinton and the Bush administrations? The claim is that in an effort to increase home lending to low-income and middle-class borrowers, policymakers allowed the GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to lower standards for mortgages and created a race to the bottom that other mortgage buyers were all too willing to join. This increased mortgage lending in general and exacerbated the bubble. However, these lowered standards did not create the subprime market, which was the main cause of the financial crisis. Again, policymakers started pushing these initiatives in the 1990s—well before the subprime market heated up.


pages: 387 words: 123,237

This Land: The Struggle for the Left by Owen Jones

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

A deal would end the Labour Party’s own increasingly torturous Brexit dilemma, they thought, and provide a reset button for British politics, allowing the national debate to shift back onto Corbynism’s favoured territory: popular domestic politics articulated through an antagonistic relationship between the majority and the elites. Besides, May’s deal was not the end point: the withdrawal agreement was a divorce arrangement, with a future relationship with the EU still to be negotiated. Once in power, Labour could simply adjust the deal according to its own values and priorities, including preventing a race to the bottom in workers’ rights, consumer protection and social legislation. It was simply politically impossible, however, for Labour to come out and vote for May’s deal. The idea that Corbyn could now be seen to bail out a Tory government and the cornerstone of its legislative programme was unthinkable.

Phase one, ‘The Country at a crossroads – the challenge we face’, spoke of a billionaire wealth grab under the Tories, powerful interests fuelling global warming, and both Tories and Lib Dems dividing the country over Brexit. Phase two was ‘Winning the battle for change’, which claimed Tory promises to end austerity could not be trusted, Tory Brexit would mean a race to the bottom in rights and protections, while Labour’s final say over a sensible deal would settle Brexit in six months. Phase three, ‘The future we will make’, outlined core policies, such as a Green Industrial Revolution, public ownership and a housebuilding programme. It all sounded great – on the conceptual level.


pages: 154 words: 47,880

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert B. Reich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, Carl Icahn, clean water, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job automation, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, stock buybacks, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Because only 6.4 percent of today’s private-sector workers are unionized, most employers do not have to match union contracts—which puts unionized firms at a competitive disadvantage. As I’ve noted, public policies have enabled and encouraged this systemic change. More states have adopted so-called right-to-work laws. The National Labor Relations Board, understaffed and overburdened, has barely enforced collective bargaining. The result has been a race to the bottom. Given these changes in the system, it’s not surprising that corporate profits have increased as a portion of the total economy while wages have declined. Those whose income derives directly or indirectly from profits—corporate executives, Wall Street traders, and shareholders—have done exceedingly well.


pages: 515 words: 132,295

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Shifting to a tax code that doesn’t give debt such preferential treatment would be a great way to shift the buyback dynamic, and this is a topic I will cover in much more depth in chapter 9. Cracking down on overseas tax havens and closing corporate loopholes is another obvious measure that’s long overdue. This is especially true given the fact that most other G8 nations are considering similar proposals, which would help offset some of the threat of a corporate race to the bottom, in which corporations offshore to the most attractive tax havens. Similarly, taxing capital gains on a sliding scale, with higher rates for shorter holding periods and lower rates for longer ones, could discourage the seekers of quick gains from distorting the markets. (Bonus pay might also be spread out over time and linked not to share prices but to real business performance, something that a number of firms are beginning to experiment with.)

Firms can go further and add a “Dutch sandwich” onto this maneuver. Because there are European Union tax agreements in place that allow money to move freely between EU countries, American firms can set up Dutch subsidiaries and transfer more money from more countries into Irish subsidiaries. The whole thing creates a global race to the bottom, which underscores one of the key problems of tax avoidance: the so-called “tragedy of the commons” where, in the end, everyone loses. This is a key reason that the G8, the OECD, and other international bodies are making global tax reform a big priority. (Ireland in particular, under pressure from other countries like the United States, is now reconsidering some of its dicey exceptions.)13 There are plenty of crazy exemptions and rules that enrich the takers by encouraging debt in the consumer sphere, too.


pages: 422 words: 131,666

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back by Douglas Rushkoff

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, AOL-Time Warner, banks create money, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, big-box store, Bretton Woods, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Google Earth, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, market bubble, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, peak oil, peer-to-peer, place-making, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social software, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

Those on the other side of the trade have little choice in the matter. They are debtor nations, whose loans have been restructured by an IMF with only corporate interests or misapplied international trade theories in mind. A free-trade landscape sloped to the interests of corporate colonialism leads to what progressive economists call a “race to the bottom.” Nations compete to offer the best prices and the fewest obstacles for corporations to come set up shop. If this means preventing unions from forming, lowering environmental standards, or even subsidizing the construction of factories, so be it. With no minimum standards established between them or through international regulation, whoever stoops the lowest wins the contract.

The net result is that the disparity of wealth and standards of living between the rich and poor nations gets worse, not better. People living in the developing world might take heart in the fact that corporate colonialism no longer distinguishes between the localities it undermines. The phrase “race to the bottom” was first used, in fact, by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in 1933 to describe the way American states were falling over themselves to attract corporate business. Just like developing nations undercutting each other’s labor and environmental interests to win factory contracts, U.S. states were busy rewriting their charters and laws to the benefit of companies who incorporated there.


Virtual Competition by Ariel Ezrachi, Maurice E. Stucke

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Arthur D. Levinson, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, cloud computing, collaborative economy, commoditize, confounding variable, corporate governance, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, deep learning, demand response, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, electricity market, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental economics, Firefox, framing effect, Google Chrome, independent contractor, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, light touch regulation, linked data, loss aversion, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, Milgram experiment, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, nowcasting, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, power law, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search costs, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, yield management

This third-party vendor’s “platform analyzes over 100 discrete data points per SKU, including competitors’ prices” to help “retailers re-price millions of products in real-time.”13 Boomerang “makes soft ware that online retailers use to evaluate competitors’ pricing on similar goods, and then analyze a variety of factors to decide when to match prices, or drop them lower or push them higher than a competitors’.”14 Among Boomerang’s customers are Staples, Sears, and Groupon Goods.15 Boomerang also promotes how its clients can avoid an algorithm-fueled price war: A new upstart, Jet.com, is building an online product cata logue with 30 million-SKUs and has pledged to underprice Amazon. What does Hub and Spoke 49 this mean to you? An opportunity to take control of your pricing, and turn a destructive “Race to the Bottom” pledge into a level playing field where you can compete. Amazon’s pricing machine will surely match Jet.com’s aggressive prices to prevent customer churn. For retailers, blindly matching prices is not an answer. Top 100 retailers are utilizing Boomerang’s innovative pricing technology to develop real-time pricing strategies to compete and grow profits.16 No one accuses Boomerang or its clients of fi xing prices.

Our concerns go deeper, to the core of the new market dynamics—where entry is possible, but expansion will likely be controlled by super-platforms; where choice is ample, but competition is limited; and where disruptive innovative threats emerge, but are eliminated through acquisitions or exclusionary practices. The competitive façade masks the wealth transfer, and the targets of anticompetitive practices—the buyers—are often unaware of the extent of the manipulation. Thus, the competition agency must look beyond the façade to see whether competitors are racing to the bottom in finding new ways to exploit us. So while technology can increase price transparency (which should be a good thing as it lowers consumers’ search costs), the pricing algorithms at times can foster tacit collusion—when sellers’ pricing algorithms, by quickly reacting to price changes, diminish the incentive to discount.


pages: 504 words: 129,087

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America by Charlotte Alter

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microaggression, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, TaskRabbit, tech bro, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, white picket fence, working poor, Works Progress Administration

more than a dozen schools: National Association for College Admission Counseling, chart provided to the author. in the next five years: National Center for Education Statistics, Fast Facts, “Enrollment,” nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98. the American Council on Education: Thomas G. Mortensen, “State Funding: A Race to the Bottom,” American Council on Education, Winter 2012, acenet.edu/the-presidency/columns-and-features/Pages/state-funding-a-race-to-the-bottom.aspx. over the same period: “25 Years of Declining State Support for Public Colleges,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 3, 2014, chronicle.com/interactives/statesupport. acceptance letters said yes: National Association for College Admission Counseling, charts provided to the author.


Stacy Mitchell by Big-Box Swindle The True Cost of Mega-Retailers, the Fight for America's Independent Businesses (2006)

accelerated depreciation, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, drop ship, European colonialism, Haight Ashbury, income inequality, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, new economy, New Urbanism, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, RFID, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the long tail, union organizing, urban planning, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Chamber of Commerce, which espouses the virtues of small business but pushes a policy agenda that strongly favors large corporations. For years, local businesses have largely aligned themselves with this agenda, endorsing the idea of a single, unified pro-business politics. But that alignment is beginning to break apart, as more local business owners see little future for themselves in a world of race-to-the-bottom labor and environmental standards that reward footloose global mobility and penalize community roots. “We want to see hundreds of Independent Business Alliances across the country,” said Milchen. “Ultimately, the goal is to create a national shift in the culture and a challenge to the assertion that what’s good for transnational corporations is good for America.”

“Home Depot Campaign Bucks,” Sprawl-Busters Newsflash, Feb. 4, 2000; Dan McGillvray, “$174,000 Helped Augusta Crossing Win,” Kennebec Journal, July 15, 2005; Rachel Peterson, “Wal-Mart Spent Triple Its Prop. 100 Foes,” Arizona Daily Sun, June 19, 2005; Mark Shaƒer, “Wal-Mart Backers Win a Squeaker in Flagstaƒ,” Arizona Republic, May 18, 2005. 17. See Liza Featherstone’s insightful article on Wal-Mart’s racial politics, “Race to the Bottom,” Nation, Mar. 28, 2005. John McGettrick, interview, Sept. 18, 2005. For more on Ikea in Red Hook, see longtime urban advocate Mary Campbell Gallagher’s excellent blog at www.bigcitiesbigboxes.com. Mark N. Ramirez, “ ‘Big-Box’ Stores: A Matter of Class?” Bennington Banner, Mar. 30, 2005; Meg Campbell, member of Citizens for a Greater Bennington, interview, Apr. 7, 2005. 292 NOTES 18.


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The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bob Geldof, borderless world, Brownian motion, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, colonial rule, content marketing, cotton gin, data science, do well by doing good, East Village, future of journalism, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Golden Gate Park, Googley, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, mirror neurons, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, Plato's cave, post scarcity, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Tim Cook: Apple, Torches of Freedom, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, white flight, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

What People ultimately created was a platform for attracting attention through self-revelation that remained something short of tawdry, a kind of self-flaunting for the polite mainstream. Both People and the celebrity attention merchants have continued to gain from the new confessional culture, since the fans can never get enough. Once the race to the bottom had begun, it was nigh impossible to return to the old status quo—being a celebrity in the new sense now meant telling all, or facing the consequences. People was important in and of itself, but also for what it spawned, directly and indirectly. Profits drew imitators, as they inevitably do; in 1977, even the New York Times Company could not resist launching Us Weekly, a close copy of People.

While not the beginning of celebrity or celebrity culture, People was nevertheless a turning point in both, the start of the “celebrification” of the entire mainstream, including, as we shall see, the lives of many with no reasonable basis for expecting to become famous. Some would experience this as fulfilling the promise of a better life through technology, others as the logical extreme of a race to the bottom begun by the penny papers in the nineteenth century. * * * *1 Liebling also complained about the Grey Lady’s politics at the time, saying that the Times was “a political hermaphrodite capable of intercourse with conservatives of both parties at the same time.” *2 In its first decade, Time hastily declared Mussolini a “virile, vigorous” man of “remarkable self control, rare judgement, and an efficient application of his ideas to the solving of existing problems.”


pages: 167 words: 50,652

Alternatives to Capitalism by Robin Hahnel, Erik Olin Wright

affirmative action, basic income, crowdsourcing, inventory management, iterative process, Kickstarter, loose coupling, means of production, Pareto efficiency, profit maximization, race to the bottom, tacit knowledge, transaction costs

But the cost reduces to spending some extra time and resources to set up a judicial procedure to settle foreseeable disputes over membership in communities of affected parties. There is actually one other “cost”—although I think Erik will agree with me that it is actually not a “cost” but a “benefit.” Our mechanism doesn’t work if communities have significantly different incomes because it would lead to a race to the bottom effect where pollution was unfairly and inefficiently located nearer poor communities. Only in a highly egalitarian economy such as the participatory economy we propose does it appear possible to design a mechanism that reveals accurate quantitative estimates of the damage from pollution. Risk and Innovation Any group of workers who can submit a proposal during the planning procedure that is approved as socially responsible, i.e. whose social benefit to cost ratio is at least one, will receive the inputs it requests to start producing when the year begins.


pages: 165 words: 48,594

Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism by Richard D. Wolff

asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, feminist movement, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Howard Zinn, income inequality, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, laissez-faire capitalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, wage slave, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

Less developed countries, even more than the developed ones, need secure, stable jobs in enterprises that do not maneuver to get exemptions from regulations concerning wages, working conditions, and the environment. If a genuine commitment exists to assisting economic development in the places that need it most, the WSDE model would be far preferable to facilitating capitalist competition and its “race to the bottom” among all economies. 10.4 WSDEs and the State: Political Flows Earlier in this book (in section 7.1), I distinguished one kind of worker inside an enterprise, whose labor produces a surplus, from another kind whose labor enables the production of surpluses. I illustrated the distinction by comparing the software workers who produce new games with the cleaners who tidy up the workspace each evening.


pages: 198 words: 52,089

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It by Richard V. Reeves

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, desegregation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, knowledge economy, land value tax, longitudinal study, meritocracy, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, positional goods, precautionary principle, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working-age population, zero-sum game

His conclusion is that in a free market, merit aid has become a discount used to attract the “right kind” of student—that is, the kind with parents that can pay full tuition.27 In the 1980s, as Burd tells it, some schools realized that they could steal good, wealthy applicants away from other schools by offering them modest amounts of financial aid (around $2,000–$5,000 a year). At first, this worked. The schools would throw out some breadcrumbs and attract wealthy students who basically paid full price. The problem is that this inevitably becomes a race to the bottom. Here is Burd’s example: If a school offers a single low-income student a full scholarship of $20,000, the school may feel good about itself, but it’s out $20,000. But if it can attract four affluent students to its campus instead, by offering them each a $5,000 discount off full tuition, it can collect the balance in revenue and come out way ahead financially.


pages: 180 words: 55,805

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future by Jeff Booth

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, deliberate practice, digital twin, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, Milgram experiment, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, OpenAI, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, software as a service, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, zero-sum game

Countries often devalue currency to help their export markets. But in a globally connected world with many countries driving each of their own national interests and jobs, this makes less sense. Other countries trying to compete for the same scarce jobs devalue their currencies to keep their economies from collapsing. This race to the bottom on currencies only serves to further push up global asset prices. And the endless game of reducing the value of currencies relative to others only serves as a short-term panacea, because asset prices will rise far more quickly than jobs can be created—and pay rates increased—to keep pace with the asset price rise.


pages: 570 words: 158,139

Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism by Elizabeth Becker

airport security, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, BRICs, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, corporate governance, Costa Concordia, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, global village, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, Masdar, Murano, Venice glass, open borders, out of africa, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, statistical model, sustainable-tourism, the market place, union organizing, urban renewal, wage slave, young professional, éminence grise

“Typically what they are able to earn from us is significantly greater than what they are earning if they would have stayed where they were,” Goldstein said. “So our view, not surprisingly, is that we provide fantastic employment opportunities to people from around the world that would not otherwise exist.” Goldstein’s argument is what academics call the “race to the bottom” justification, a throwback to the early twentieth century before societies mandated minimum wages, improved labor conditions and the right to collective bargaining. While those rights were codified in national laws and are enforced within national boundaries, they are laws that the cruise companies can ignore.

., 111–12, 184–85, 326–27, 339, 340 Prestige oil spill, 158 Pritchett, V. S., 28 Pritzker family, 134 public relations, blurred lines between travel writers and, 26–27, 30, 31–32, 33 Qatar, 172 Qin Shi Huang Di, 331 Qiu Xialolong, 326 Quai Branly Museum, 56 Quakers, in Costa Rica, 253–54 Quest, Richard, 173, 193 “race to the bottom,” 145 Raffles Hotels, 90–91 Rainforest Alliance, 264 rainforests, 246, 258, 271 Rainier, Mount, 346 Rajapaksa, Mahinda, 278 Rashid Al-Maktoum, Sheikh, 171, 172 Razan Khalifa Al Mubarak, Princess, 197–98 Reid, Harry, 362 Renaissance Hotel Group, 313 Reno, Janet, 159 Republican Party: government spending on tourism opposed by, 352–53, 365, 367 in 2012 election, 366–67 Resorts World Sentosa, 113 retirees: in France, 72–73 as tourists, 18, 37 rhinos, threatened extinction of, 221 Rialto Bridge, Venice, 78–79 Rice, Condoleezza, 273 Ridge, Tom, 359 Riklis, Meshulam, 136 Riley, Richard, 199 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 276 as 2016 Olympics host, 273, 276, 362 Risi, Marcelo, 34, 35 Road of Lost Innocence, The (Mam), 117 Robb, Graham, 51 Robinson, James, III, 14–15, 270 Rome, pilgrimages to, 182 Romero, Oscar, 254 Romney, Mitt, 367 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 354, 384 Roosevelt, Theodore, 239, 384 Roots (Haley), 242–43 “Roots” tours, 242–44 Roth, Toby, 352 Rough Guide to the World (TV show), 271 Rousseff, Dilma, 365 Royal Caribbean International, 125, 128, 130, 134, 136, 140–41, 143, 151, 247, 256, 257 art sales lawsuit against, 148 Diamonds International and, 128, 149–50 illegal waste water dumping by, 158–59 ship registry of, 140 waste treatment systems of, 161 Rushmore, Mount, 345 Ruskin, John, 82 Saadiyat Island, 191 sable (African antelope), 215, 217 safaris, see Africa, national parks in, safaris in St.


pages: 399 words: 155,913

The Right to Earn a Living: Economic Freedom and the Law by Timothy Sandefur

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, big-box store, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Edward Glaeser, housing crisis, independent contractor, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, minimum wage unemployment, positional goods, price stability, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, Robert Bork, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, wealth creators

Under Enrich’s theory, this too would unfairly “tilt” the “playing field” by pressuring noncomplying states to legalize such marriages.35 Concerns about a “race to the bottom,”36 wherein states would cut taxes and decrease regulations to attract businesses, are overblown. States face a natural disincentive to enact reckless tax policies: such 181 The Right to Earn a Living policies cost them revenue. This counteracts pressures to lower taxes in ways that harm the general public. In fact, forbidding states to “divert” interstate commerce would create the opposite of a race to the bottom, namely, a “ratchet” effect under which states would be free to raise, but not to lower, taxes; to increase, but not to decrease, their regulatory burdens.


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

In particular, the tendency of the euro to rise against the dollar in the 2000s has benefited the German financial sector but also German industrial capital by facilitating its relocation across Europe.48 FIG. 5 Evolution of nominal unit labour costs in the eurozone A striking feature of the development of the eurozone has been the emergence of a division between core and periphery, the latter including at least Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and Greece.49 The split between core and periphery has emanated from a ‘race to the bottom’ in eurozone labour markets. Member countries have been obliged to adopt a common monetary policy determined by the European Central Bank, while the exercise of fiscal policy has been severely restricted by the Stability and Growth Pact, setting limits on budget deficits at 3 percent of GDP and national debt at 60 percent of GDP.

Even though the pact has been frequently breached, it has still operated as a straitjacket on fiscal policy. Given the rigidity of monetary and fiscal policy, member countries have been encouraged to apply pressure on labour wages and conditions in order to generate competitiveness in the internal eurozone market. FIG. 6 Eurozone current account balances as percentage of GDP The ‘race to the bottom’ has been won by German capitalists who have succeeded in keeping wage growth low as well as creating entire areas devoid of trade union organization in both the old East and West Germany. The diverging paths of nominal unit labour costs in figure 5 show the gains in competitiveness made by Germany compared to peripheral countries.


pages: 668 words: 159,523

Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug by Augustine Sedgewick

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, classic study, collective bargaining, Day of the Dead, European colonialism, export processing zone, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, Food sovereignty, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Honoré de Balzac, imperial preference, Joan Didion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Philip Mirowski, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, scientific management, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, vertical integration, wage slave, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

McWilliams began to “spend long hours in the library” and “make forays into the San Joaquin Valley to see . . . just what went on in the fields and in the labor camps.” There, beneath the surface of that “quiet word,” agriculture, he found a clamorous “large-scale, intensive, diversified, mechanized” race to the bottom. In his 1939 book Factories in the Field, McWilliams described how, beginning around 1870, after the California gold rush had slowed down, a new class of “industrial agriculturalists” took over California’s land and economy. They made water flow backward, conjured gardens from wastelands, and in the process became as rich as sheikhs.

In August 1932, six months after a harvest cut short by an attempted revolution and its genocidal suppression, in the middle of the worst year of the worst global economic crisis in the history of the modern world economy, an American diplomat noticed, to his surprise, an “actual increase in the acreage under coffee.”41 This was hardly a logical response to the market. Coffee sales had been very slow, and European sales in particular were vanishingly small, pushing prices even lower and forcing El Salvador to look almost exclusively to the U.S. market.42 Nevertheless, backed by the military dictatorship, Salvadoran coffee planters “chose expansion,” racing to the bottom.43 It was a risky strategy, with no guarantee of profit or personal safety, and not every planter had the resources or stomach for it. Yet while some of his neighbors gave up their plantations during the early years of the Depression, valuing their savings and their lives more than their coffee—and reasonably so, given the fall in prices—James Hill was emboldened by the arrival of the trouble he had predicted.


pages: 214 words: 57,614

America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy by Francis Fukuyama

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, European colonialism, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, information security, Internet Archive, John Perry Barlow, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, no-fly zone, oil-for-food scandal, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

But the other industrialized democracies were comfortable with their welfare states and often saw the American drive to liberalize markets around the world not as a well-intentioned effort to promote reform but as an American attempt to impose its American Exceptionalism own antistatist values on the rest of the world in a "race to the bottom." Much of the drive to Americanize the global economy came out of the private sector and the challenge posed by newly competitive U.S. companies and financial institutions. But American government policy was highly supportive of economic liberalization as well, in ways that generated a backlash that often went unperceived in Washington.


pages: 196 words: 55,862

Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy by Callum Cant

Airbnb, algorithmic management, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, deskilling, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, future of work, gamification, gig economy, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invention of the steam engine, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, tech worker, union organizing, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

Given that a co-op could not call on similar cash reserves, it’s hard to see how it could compete. The results of this twofold pressure might well produce effects that undermine the whole purpose of a cooperative. In order to try to protect the market share of their cooperative, workers would likely accept lower wages, and so get locked into an intractable race to the bottom they were supposed to have escaped. Self-exploitation, not much different from the effects of a piece wage, would be the condition of viability. So, this is the first sticking point of platform cooperativism: on an economic level, it takes no account of competitive pressure. Given that food platforms are already running each other into the ground to dominate a market with no clear profit margins, the opportunities for the development of large co-op competitors seem limited.7 One strategy with extensive historical precedent that might be used to prevent a platform co-op going under in the face of a venture capital-funded onslaught would be an equally aggressive strategy of state intervention.


pages: 394 words: 57,287

Unleashed by Anne Morriss, Frances Frei

"Susan Fowler" uber, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Black Lives Matter, book value, Donald Trump, future of work, gamification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Jeff Bezos, Netflix Prize, Network effects, performance metric, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

In the language of strategy, the auction system had the effect of generating value for customers at the top of the value stick by shrinking the surplus of its supplier-taskers. Although magic was happening at the high end of the tasker skill spectrum, where taskers were often well compensated for their expertise, many lower-skilled taskers were being bid down in a race-to-the-bottom to offer the cheapest possible price for their labor. (See figure 5-5.) FIGURE 5-5 The original TaskRabbit value stick It also took a long time for taskers to sort through jobs and find the ones they wanted—taskers spent, on average, two hours a week searching open tasks. The time and pain of dealing with the system were additional burdens, and so while user and tasker numbers were at their highest in 2013, there was some troubling news buried underneath this headline: the company’s fulfillment rate was only 50 percent.


Global Financial Crisis by Noah Berlatsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, centre right, circulation of elites, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, energy security, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Money creation, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, social contagion, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, working poor

The same IFIs are behind the attacks against the state that translated into the destruction of the public sector to the benefit of foreign capital. They imposed the privatisation of stateowned enterprises in the name of ‘private sector development’ and ‘efficiency’. And private sector development required engaging in a race to the bottom in order to attract foreign direct investment (FDI). To that end, African countries raced to sell off state-owned enterprises, mining industries and natural resources. In several countries, there were even ‘ministries of 193 The Global Financial Crisis privatisation’ whose main mission was to sell off some of the most profitable public assets with little positive return for their countries.


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

Given the deep transformations taking place in rich countries, in the midst of the deindustrialization brought on by emerging economies, each country is attempting to garner the maximum number of advantages to itself in the sphere of international competition. It is this competition that threatens to provoke a “race to the bottom” in terms of redistribution. It is out of concern for remaining competitive with respect to other developed countries that certain countries have tried to moderate wage increases and social protection, while encouraging entrepreneurship and innovation by cutting their tax rates relative to their neighbors.


pages: 222 words: 60,207

Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup by Andrew Zimbalist

airline deregulation, business cycle, carbon footprint, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, longitudinal study, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, price elasticity of demand, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, selection bias, Suez crisis 1956, urban planning, young professional

Stephanie Baker and Ilya Arkhipov, “Rich Russians Sparring with Putin over $48 Billion Olympics Bet,” Bloomberg.com, November 26, 2013. 21. Thomas Grove, “Special Report: Russia's $50 Billion Olympic Gamble,” Reuters, February 21, 2013. 22. Ed Hula III, “Investment Bank Asks for Bailout on Sochi Losses,” Around the Rings, July 7, 2014. 23. Human Rights Watch, “Race to the Bottom: Exploitation of Migrant Workers ahead of Russia's 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi” (February 6, 2013). 24. Daniel Sandford, “Putin's Olympic Steamroller in Sochi,” BBC News Europe, February 6, 2013. 25. Boykoff, “Celebration Capitalism and the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics,” p. 56. 26. Nikolas von Twickel, “Sochi Is a Hard Nut to Crack for PR Gurus,” Moscow Times, February 7, 2013. 27.


pages: 203 words: 63,257

Neutrino Hunters: The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe by Ray Jayawardhana

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, New Journalism, race to the bottom, random walk, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, Skype, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

The Antarctic Sun reports on the celebration are at http://antarcticsun.usap.gov/features/contentHandler.cfm?id=2555 and http://antarcticsun.usap.gov/features/contenthandler.cfm?id=2554. 3 centenary of Amundsen: There are many excellent books on Antarctic exploration, and The New York Times published an article titled “Amazing Race to the Bottom of the World” by John Noble Wilford on December 12, 2011, to mark the centenary. 4 I went to Antarctica: See my article “The Meteorite Hunters” in the November/December 2011 issue of Muse magazine (Chicago: Carus Publishing Company; www.musemagkids.com). 6 small flags that: Francis Halzen kindly sent me photographs taken by his colleagues so that I could see what IceCube looked like on the Amundsen centennial. 6 IceCube: Description of IceCube is based, in part, on a telephone interview with Francis Halzen conducted by the author on December 12, 2011, and on material on the project website at http://icecube.wisc.edu/. 6 phototubes: Though I have used the term “phototube” for simplicity, in fact these are photomultiplier tubes (PMTs for short); incident light generates an electric current in the PMT, which is then amplified up to tens of millions of times to make the detection easier. 8 “If you’re trying”: This Janet Conrad quote is from a telephone interview conducted by the author on March 4, 2013. 8 Boris Kayser: Quotes are from a telephone interview conducted by the author on August 9, 2012. 9 Hitoshi Murayama: Quotes are from a Skype interview with the author on March 28, 2012. 10 Klaatu: Lyrics of their song “Little Neutrino” are available at www.klaatu.org/lyrics/347est_lyrics.html. 10 popular sitcom: Quotes are from the fourth episode, titled “The Griffin Equivalency,” of the second season of The Big Bang Theory. 11 OPERA: The initial CERN press release and the subsequent updates are available at http://press.web.cern.ch/press-releases/2011/09/opera-experiment-reports-anomaly-flight-time-neutrinos-cern-gran-sasso. 11 “If the Europeans”: Quoted from Michael D.


pages: 219 words: 62,816

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

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

They gain because jobs are created; but they also lose because the new jobs are dependent on employers’ keeping wages, benefits, and government regulation low. If workers, or governments, start to demand a greater share of the profits, the company can simply close down and move to a cheaper location. This phenomenon creates what some analysts have termed the “race to the bottom.” Workers and governments compete with each other to offer businesses lower taxes, lower wages, and a more “business-friendly environment” in order to attract or preserve scarce jobs. The competition may be more devastating in already poor Third World countries, but it’s going on in the United States as well, as communities pour resources into schemes to attract businesses.2 By maintaining and exploiting global inequalities, the U.S. economic system has managed to create a high-profit/cheap-product model.


pages: 239 words: 62,311

The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa by Irene Yuan Sun

"World Economic Forum" Davos, asset light, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business logic, capital controls, clean water, Computer Numeric Control, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, means of production, mobile money, Multi Fibre Arrangement, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, tacit knowledge, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population

Global competition tempts countries to give foreign investors ever more incentives to invest—tax holidays for attracting firms to special economic zones are a favorite these days—and possibly to not look too closely when labor or environmental incidents occur. This raises the specter of a sort of race to the bottom—that with the arrival of each new factory, labor and environmental standards will lower, and the benefits to receiving countries will decrease. And attracting and keeping foreign investors takes government officials an enormous amount of time, stealing scarce human capital from other important tasks, such as investigating troubling incidents or even designing smart regulations to prevent such incidents in the future.


pages: 220 words: 64,234

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

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

But we’re in a time when the constraints of production and the scaling up that our industries require don’t leave much room for fineness, or actually that much interest, in the fabric.” When price competition drives down the cost of upholstery fabric to seven dollars per yard, it doesn’t allow someone like Bodenner much room to operate. This race to the bottom has left most people without much experience of good cloth, such as people a century or two ago would certainly have had. “We have left a more careful consideration of materials behind, for price and production speed,” he says. “However, I think we miss it. I think people want it back—they just don’t have it.”


pages: 247 words: 60,543

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

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

It also means that when the Fed is acting purely within its domestic mandate and adjusts monetary policy to optimize US economic conditions, it unwittingly delivers collateral damage to other countries, setting off waves of ‘hot money’ flows into and out of foreign currencies with every quarter-point cut or hike in US interest rates. This fosters exchange rate mismatches that fuel risks of a race-to-the-bottom currency war akin to that of the 1930s. In the age of Donald Trump, these tensions have grown more acute as the United States has pursued a more mercantilist, America-first trade policy, and as the president’s persistent criticism of the Fed’s monetary policy has raised questions about its independence.


pages: 614 words: 168,545

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? by Brett Christophers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, electricity market, Etonian, European colonialism, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, G4S, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, green new deal, haute couture, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, Piper Alpha, post-Fordism, post-war consensus, precariat, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, remunicipalization, rent control, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, risk free rate, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, software patent, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech bro, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, very high income, wage slave, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, yield curve, you are the product

Cost was firmly back on the agenda: in investigating public-sector outsourcing in the wake of Carillion, MPs were repeatedly told that purchase decisions had long since reverted to being all about price.97 And as the Economist observed, contractors had been only too willing to oblige: Fearing that austerity would slash the number of contracts on offer, outsourcers have engaged in a race to the bottom. Underbidding, known in the trade as ‘suicide bidding’, has become common, as companies try to keep shareholders happy with the promise of new business. Outsourcers under-bid in the hope that subsequent amendments to the contract – extra charges here and there – will eventually yield some profits.

On fiscal regimes for mineral resources in general, see especially L. Hogan and B. Goldsworth, ‘International Mineral Taxation: Experience and Issues’, in Daniel et al., Taxation of Petroleum and Minerals, pp. 122–62. On fiscal regimes for oil and gas more specifically, see Nakhle, ‘Petroleum Fiscal Regimes’; A. Zalik, ‘The Race to the Bottom and the Demise of the Landlord: The Struggle Over Petroleum Revenues Historically and Comparatively’, in Logan and McNeigh, Flammable Societies, pp. 267–86. 39. ‘BHP Annual Report 2018’, p. 28. 40. B. Mommer, ‘Fiscal Regimes and Oil Revenues in the UK, Alaska and Venezuela’, June 2001, p. 8 – pdf available at oxfordenergy.org. 41.


pages: 245 words: 64,288

Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy by Pistono, Federico

3D printing, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, future of work, gamification, George Santayana, global village, Google Chrome, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, illegal immigration, income inequality, information retrieval, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, longitudinal study, means of production, Narrative Science, natural language processing, new economy, Occupy movement, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, post scarcity, QR code, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, Rodney Brooks, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, slashdot, smart cities, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, technological singularity, TED Talk, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce

And people there aspire to get these jobs. They have little to no insurance, benefits, vacation, no safety rules, no right to complain. Sure, if you work there and you do not like it you can always leave the job, but somebody else will gladly take your place. It should be clear that we cannot think to outcompete them with a race to the bottom, by bringing manufacturing jobs back here at lower prices. It simply is not going to happen, nor should it. The time when with a high school education, a lot of good will, and hard work got you a decent middle class lifestyle are long gone. Those jobs that have been outsourced are not coming back, period.


pages: 246 words: 68,392

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work by Sarah Kessler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, do what you love, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, financial independence, future of work, game design, gig economy, Hacker News, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, law of one price, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, post-work, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

For digital-only tasks like graphic design or writing, however, wages of Bay Area gig workers were lower than those of their peers who found gigs offline. Though they lived in one of the most expensive areas in the United States, online, they were competing with workers everywhere.25 Kristy found the same problem when she experimented with Upwork. “I found a race to the bottom,” she said. “I couldn’t compete with people living in countries where the income was lower, but the education was the same and their experience was the same.” I found the same problem when I tried to make it in the gig economy while reporting for a magazine story. “Furloughed? Try Freelancing on Fiverr,” advised a Yahoo news headline during the government shutdown of 2013.26 Fiverr was so named because, at launch, it asked workers to offer their services for a flat rate of $5 (workers now can set different rates).


pages: 270 words: 64,235

Effective Programming: More Than Writing Code by Jeff Atwood

AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, cloud computing, endowment effect, fail fast, Firefox, fizzbuzz, Ford Model T, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Chrome, gravity well, Hacker News, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Merlin Mann, Minecraft, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, price anchoring, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, science of happiness, Skype, social software, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Outrageous! Highway robbery! This is all very strange, as a guy who is used to spending at least $30 for software of any consequence whatsoever. I love supporting my fellow software developers with my wallet, and the iPhone App Store has never made that easier. While there’s an odd aspect of race to the bottom that I’m not sure is entirely healthy for the iPhone app ecosystem, the idea that software should be priced low enough to pass the average user’s “why not” threshold is a powerful one. What I think isn’t well understood here is that low prices can be a force multiplier all out of proportion to the absolute reduction in price.


pages: 265 words: 69,310

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom Slee

4chan, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, commons-based peer production, congestion charging, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, democratizing finance, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, emotional labour, Evgeny Morozov, gentrification, gig economy, Hacker Ethic, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, openstreetmap, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, urban planning, WeWork, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

He “declined to disclose any of the company’s other metrics, such as the average wage earned by its cleaners in a week or the distance they travel to jobs.” Sharing Economy entrepreneurs like to talk about “earning a little extra money” and making life a little more affordable, but Anthony Walker shows that the business model is a race to the bottom for the service providers. The most that can be said for the practice of replacing actual jobs with the kind of precarious, state-subsidized work that Walker gets from Homejoy is that it is better than nothing, but it is undermining other workers as it does so, and while Walker gets some money he has no chance of moving on to actual employment.


pages: 305 words: 69,216

A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent Into Depression by Richard A. Posner

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, debt deflation, diversified portfolio, equity premium, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, laissez-faire capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, transaction costs, very high income

There would be only one effect of the bank's altruism —of its willingness to sacrifice profits enabled by taking a slight risk of bankruptcy that most financial executives would think tolerable, as the risk would be unlikely to materialize for a number of years during which they would be making huge amounts of money: the bank would lose out in competition with its daring competitors. And they would be daring, because financial intermediation, being an inherently risky business activity, attracts people who are comfortable with risk. There was a race to the bottom —or the top, depending on one's perspective. The most daring, aggressive players in the financial sandbox would ramp up the riskiness of their lending or other investing, and this would increase their returns, at least in the short run. Their timid competitors would be forced to match the daring ones' strategy or drop out of the competition.


pages: 272 words: 64,626

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs by Andy Kessler

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, disintermediation, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Michael Milken, Money creation, Netflix Prize, packet switching, personalized medicine, pets.com, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, vertical integration, wealth creators, Yogi Berra

Think about how different this is from media today. The technology of sticking a microphone in front of someone, or turning on a camera or switching a phone call, was perfected years ago. It’s not about technology anymore. It’s about programming content, not computers, to attract viewers. With a few decent exceptions, it has been a race to the bottom. Will a horizontal online world create a race to the top? More like higher highs and lower lows. At the edge, people pick what to do and watch according to their taste. And there is no accounting for taste. Or as Jay McInerney wrote, “taste is just a matter of taste.” But now getting packets through that bumper car of an Internet to create a virtual pipe actually takes someone writing code and designing easy-to-use services.


pages: 317 words: 71,776

Inequality and the 1% by Danny Dorling

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, David Attenborough, David Graeber, delayed gratification, Dominic Cummings, double helix, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, family office, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, land value tax, Leo Hollis, Londongrad, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, mega-rich, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Russell Brand, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor

The job might be to clean a garage, paint an apartment or buy groceries. The firm that matches up these temporary servants and their not-too-fussy masters, and carries out criminal record checks on them, is called Taskrabbit.com. Rabbits receive star ratings based on what previous masters thought of them.88 Task rabbits are frontrunners in a race to the bottom. If task rabbits are an extreme case, ‘temps’ are the new normal. Temps range from casual day labourers to university teaching assistants hired for ten months, or ten days. Many of the 1 per cent revel in a world in which the increasingly fragmented 99 per cent have ever-decreasing bargaining power.


pages: 244 words: 66,977

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It by Tien Tzuo, Gabe Weisert

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, connected car, data science, death of newspapers, digital nomad, digital rights, digital twin, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fiat currency, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lean Startup, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, megaproject, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear winter, pets.com, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart meter, social graph, software as a service, spice trade, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, transport as a service, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WeWork, Y2K, Zipcar

A bunch of the publications are going to die or be forced to find another way to fund themselves.” And, of course, this entire Hunger Games scenario can also quickly implode once the advertising market turns south after a recession. Finally, ads have all sorts of other insidious effects, like turning content providers into clickbait factories. Ads fund the race to the bottom. Ex–Politico president Jim VandeHei calls it the “crap trap.” As Jessica Lessin of The Information says: “I still believe it’s much safer to build a business that doesn’t need any advertising to survive. Doing so forces you to focus 100% on your value to your readers. It’s the only way to make sure that what the news publishers deliver to readers in the future is smarter, more informed and more relevant than in the past.”


pages: 233 words: 71,775

The Joy of Tax by Richard Murphy

banking crisis, banks create money, carbon tax, carried interest, correlation does not imply causation, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, full employment, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, green new deal, high net worth, Jeremy Corbyn, land value tax, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, offshore financial centre, price elasticity of demand, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, savings glut, seigniorage, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing

However, as the discussion of tax competition in Chapter 6 made clear, without care and without appropriately designed delegated authority there is a real risk that those granted the power to tax might be persuaded to use it to promote a form of competition that is, at the very least, unhealthy and even counterproductive. A race to the bottom in tax that can (and may be intended to) deny government the right to withdraw revenues from the economy, can mean that the scale of services supplied must be cut. There is enormous potential for conflict here that has to be avoided. There are obvious ways to overcome this risk by good design that correctly matches policy and tax objectives.


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 Gulf Cooperation Council enables six Arab states to develop an effective common market for goods and services. But none of these organizations has eroded the sovereign power of its member states. 7 The best recent reports on China’s system of censorship include Rebecca MacKinnon, “China’s Censorship 2.0: How Companies Censor Bloggers,” First Monday blog, vol. 14, no. 2-2 Feb. 2009; Race to the Bottom: Corporate Complicity in Chinese Internet Censorship, Human Rights Watch, Aug. 2006; and Journey to the Heart of Internet Censorship, Reporters Without Borders, Oct. 2007. 8 Naomi Klein, No Logo (Toronto: Knopf, 1999), xxiii. 9 Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh, The Top 200: The Rise of Corporate Global Power (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, Dec. 2000), based on statistics from Forbes magazine. 10 Frances Maguire, “The New Masters of the Universe,” Banker, Jan. 2, 2006. 11 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), World Investment Report 2008: Transnational Corporations and the Infrastructure Challenge (New York/Geneva). 12 These critics had plenty of vivid stories to make their charges stick: Union Carbide’s chemical plant in Bhopal, India, which accidentally released tons of toxic gas in December 1984, killing several thousand people over a period of several years; the Exxon Valdez oil spill that badly damaged Alaska’s Prince William Sound in March 1989; the reported use of poorly paid and treated workers, and even child labor, in footwear factories producing shoes for Nike, Puma, Reebok, and Adidas in countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Vietnam; Philip Morris’s allegedly aggressive marketing of carcinogenic cigarettes in developing countries; and the refusal of big pharmaceutical companies to allow patented HIV/AIDS drugs to be reproduced cheaply in the African countries that arguably needed them most.


pages: 237 words: 66,545

The Money Tree: A Story About Finding the Fortune in Your Own Backyard by Chris Guillebeau

Bernie Madoff, drop ship, Ethereum, fail fast, financial independence, global village, hiring and firing, housing crisis, independent contractor, messenger bag, passive income, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, Steve Jobs, telemarketer

“You mean besides the guy with the giant panda? . . . Okay, good question. Well, I probably wouldn’t want to be one of the people selling sodas and pretzels. It doesn’t seem like they could make much money, especially since anyone else could do the same thing.” “Right. Selling a commodity is almost never a good idea. It’s a race to the bottom in terms of pricing, and like you said, there’s nothing unique about any particular seller.” Jake thought for a moment. “It also seems like it’s really important to know your market. One of the guys I saw kept trying to sell me a case of diapers. I suppose he had nothing to lose by trying, but that’s not something I plan to need for a long time.”


pages: 241 words: 70,307

Leadership by Algorithm: Who Leads and Who Follows in the AI Era? by David de Cremer

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, bitcoin, blockchain, business climate, business process, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, future of work, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, race to the bottom, robotic process automation, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, Turing test, work culture , workplace surveillance , zero-sum game

One speaker responded loudly with the comment that AI should definitely tackle humanity’s problems (e.g. climate change, population size, food scarcity and so forth), but its development should not be slowed down by anticipatory thoughts on how it would impact humanity itself. As you can imagine, the debate became suddenly much more heated. Two camps formed relatively quickly. One camp advocated a focus on a race to the bottom to maximize AI abilities as fast as possible (and thus discounting long-term consequences for humanity), whereas the other camp advocated the necessity of social responsibility in favor of maximizing technology employment. Who is right? In my view, both perspectives make sense. On the one hand, we do want to have the best technology and maximize its effectiveness.


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

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

Shifting big players out would give start-ups and smaller firms more room to expand while simultaneously seeding new cities with the stockpiles of skilled workers and rich technology executives who could launch future start-up clusters. The guiding principle should be to learn the lesson of HQ2—major corporate location decisions are never apolitical, but America’s current approach leads inevitably to a race to the bottom for subsidies and a marked tendency for new jobs to cluster in the places that least need them. The federal government ought to lean against these trends, adopting rules that curtail local subsidies, identifying national target priority areas for relocation, and authorizing tax abatement for moves only to the target cities.


pages: 215 words: 69,370

Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism by Rick Wartzman

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, basic income, Bernie Sanders, call centre, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Marc Benioff, old-boy network, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, shareholder value, supply-chain management, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

Whereas General Motors was widely perceived as having used its perch atop the list of America’s biggest companies to help build the middle class after World War II, with union agreements that bestowed good pay and generous benefits and job security for generations of blue-collar workers, Walmart, now the largest corporation of them all, had come to symbolize something very different: a race-to-the-bottom brand of capitalism that was leaving legions of people struggling to get by. “Low prices are great,” BusinessWeek asserted in a 2003 article. “But Walmart’s dominance creates problems—for suppliers, workers, communities, and even American culture.” In fairness, much of the condemnation leveled at the company was too broad-brush.


pages: 593 words: 189,857

Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises by Timothy F. Geithner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Buckminster Fuller, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Brooks, Doomsday Book, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, implied volatility, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, Northern Rock, obamacare, paradox of thrift, pets.com, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tobin tax, too big to fail, working poor

We had a dizzying array of regulators, and a political climate in which some of them could pose for official photos with regulation-slashing chain saws. We also had all sorts of regulatory gaps, with nobody responsible for the entire system. And Wall Street, as President Bush later said, had gotten drunk. Financial firms were chasing higher returns through increasingly leveraged and risky trades even though they knew they were racing to the bottom; as Citigroup CEO Charles Prince memorably explained, “as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.” When a top Morgan Stanley executive named Vikram Pandit left the firm in 2005, we had lunch and he passed along the not-so-novel wisdom that the shift from private partnerships to public companies had poisoned the culture of Wall Street, encouraging executives to focus on quarterly profits and the exorbitant stock options that came with them.

We just had to focus on what approach was most likely to work, and hope the public would judge us on the results rather than the optics. AT THE start of April, President Obama and I went to London for his first G-20 conference, a high-profile test of the international community’s ability to work together to attack the crisis. During the Depression, nations had turned inward, erecting new trade barriers in a damaging race to the bottom, embracing austerity while global demand withered. We were determined not to repeat those mistakes. Our fortunes were closely tied up with the rest of the world, and it would be tough to turn the U.S. economy around if the global economy continued to contract. Some G-20 nations, particularly Germany and France, wanted the meetings to focus primarily on long-term international regulatory reforms that could help mitigate the next crisis.


pages: 254 words: 76,064

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

As Hill puts it, “Conversations, communities, relationships, and strong emotional bonds are formed through a social form of iterated prisoner’s dilemma.19 When a participant in iterative prisoner’s dilemma has no identity or feels free from the responsibility of his or her actions in social interactions, communities quickly degenerate into a race to the bottom.”20 It is difficult, maybe impossible, to understand the diligently private (read: paranoid), persnickety (read: misanthropic) world from which Bitcoin has emerged without some understanding of a much older milieu—the cloak-and-dagger realm of cryptography. In western Asia and Europe, literacy, and even much of our mathematical knowledge, have been inextricable linked with cryptography since their earliest incarnations.


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

Social Accountability International (SAI), a multi-stakeholder nonprofit, has certified facilities in fifty-seven countries across seventy industries and funds itself through contracts with businesses looking for ways to improve labor conditions. SAI’s certification and codes of conduct do far more for labor rights than empty appeals from the ILO. Rather than “racing to the bottom”—always seeking the cheapest labor—more and more foreign companies are driving the “race to the top,” spreading good management practices, training workers with new skills, and offering better salaries than what is offered domestically. Exporting good businesses is among the smartest diplomatic strategies the West can pursue to create tangible change worldwide.


pages: 268 words: 74,724

Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber, and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank by John Tamny

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, business logic, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Michael Milken, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, NetJets, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, War on Poverty, yield curve

Thanks to this highly profitable movie franchise, Downey is the world’s highest paid actor, with earnings of $75 million per year.13 As one media account put it, Downey “is a walking, talking multi-billion-dollar business.”14 What might surprise readers it that 2015’s highest paid actor couldn’t even get a movie made when the twenty-first century began. Downey’s addiction to drugs and alcohol led to jail time, rehab, fights in prison, and even a 911 call from a neighbor who found an out-of-sorts Downey asleep in her eleven-year-old child’s bed. Amid his self-inflicted race to the bottom, Downey couldn’t make movies because the costs involved were too steep. Movies are expensive to make and difficult to finance even for the top producers, and Downey’s habits rendered him wholly unreliable. No sane insurance company would write a policy for a production that had him attached.


pages: 255 words: 75,172

Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America by Tamara Draut

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, always be closing, American ideology, antiwork, battle of ideas, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, ending welfare as we know it, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, payday loans, pink-collar, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit motive, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

The first Operation Dixie was a failed campaign by the Congress of Industrial Unions to organize workers in the South in the postwar years. It failed largely because of the hardened racial lines of Jim Crow and the prohibitions on strikes set in place under Taft-Hartley. The defeat of Operation Dixie resounds powerfully today, both in terms of the emaciation of the unionized workforce and the race to the bottom engendered by the South’s long-standing animus to anything that smacks of cross-race solidarity. In February 2014, after months of intense organizing and even active support from the company, the United Auto Workers lost the election to unionize Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee.


pages: 256 words: 79,075

Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain by James Bloodworth

Airbnb, algorithmic management, Berlin Wall, call centre, clockwatching, collective bargaining, congestion charging, credit crunch, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, Greyball, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, low skilled workers, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, post-truth, post-work, profit motive, race to the bottom, reshoring, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, working poor, working-age population

On the completion of each home visit she – for 80 per cent of adult social care workers are female – will charge out of the house, down the drive and into her car, racing off to the next house and the next appointment.14 The company she works for will usually be the one that can do all of this for the local authority at the lowest price. Therefore the most cost-effective company invariably empties the most catheters and changes the most medical pads. Competition between care providers for a slice of the shrinking social care budget has resulted in a race to the bottom: care staff are often paid peanuts and employed on precarious zero-hours contracts, while in domiciliary care, lightning-fast home visits are increasingly the norm. A substandard level of care has been exacerbated by cuts to local authority budgets. This has had a knock-on effect on the employment conditions of care staff and, inevitably, on the vulnerable people they are charged with looking after.


pages: 232 words: 76,830

Dreams of Leaving and Remaining by James Meek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, bank run, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Etonian, full employment, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, working-age population

We needed to hand them down to our children and our children’s children.’ Nicholls said he’d been able to retire at fifty-seven and live comfortably, without working, on his Cadbury’s pension. He has a caravan in Dorset; he goes fishing; he visits National Trust properties. Shareholder capitalism’s race to the bottom means that the generations of non-graduates who come after him – ‘there’s nothing wrong with someone who hasn’t got the ability to be a thinker’ – face precarious decades of low-wage warehouse work, followed by poverty on the state pension. Nicholls started out as a trainee chef; now his son is one.


pages: 280 words: 74,559

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

The ‘spatial fix’ is what underpins contemporary globalisation, characterised by the global distribution and relocation of production. This was one of the solutions the bourgeoisie adopted to counter rising worker militancy in Europe and North America after the late 1960s, and is the background for contemporary discourses of ‘competitive’ labour markets in a world ‘racing to the bottom’. It is also why more cars are produced in Mexico, Thailand and Brazil than nations which previously dominated the industry such as France, Italy and the United Kingdom. The spatial fix is always only temporary, of course, and has recently re-emerged in the context of rising wages in China.


pages: 283 words: 73,093

Social Democratic America by Lane Kenworthy

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, business cycle, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Brooks, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, full employment, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, manufacturing employment, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, school choice, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Steve Jobs, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, working poor, zero day

Suppose we need, as I suggest in chapter 3, an additional 10 percent of GDP to fund new social programs, expansion of existing ones, and demography-imposed increases in the cost of Social Security and Medicare. Is that feasible? If so, what’s the best way to do it? Let’s begin with feasibility. Is heavy taxation still possible in a world where firms, institutions, and wealthy individuals can move their money anywhere they like? The answer, at least so far, is yes. Globalization has not induced a race to the bottom in taxation. Many rich nations have reduced their top statutory rates, but they’ve offset this by reducing tax exemptions and deductions. Effective tax rates have therefore changed little, and taxes as a share of GDP have not fallen.1 Indeed, the rich nations with big governments are no more likely than others to have large public deficits and debt.


pages: 366 words: 76,476

Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking) by Christian Rudder

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data science, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, Frank Gehry, Howard Zinn, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Snow's cholera map, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, p-value, power law, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, race to the bottom, retail therapy, Salesforce, selection bias, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Twitter Arab Spring, two and twenty

The Washington Post captures the shortfall of public interest in just the first word of their coverage: “Hundreds of protesters …” In his Scientific American piece, Lanier proposes that we be compensated for our personal data and let market forces rebalance the privacy/value equation. He proposes that data collectors issue micropayments to users whenever their data is sold. But that expense, like a tax, either will be passed directly back to the consumer or will bring on a race to the bottom, where websites have to find margin wherever they can get it, the way commercial airlines do now. Either way, there’s no net value in it for us. And that’s not to mention the impracticality of making it happen. Pentland’s approach is much more feasible: he calls it his “New Deal on Data.” Ironically enough, it harkens back to Old English Common Law for its principles.


pages: 238 words: 73,824

Makers by Chris Anderson

3D printing, Airbnb, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, business process, carbon tax, commoditize, company town, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deal flow, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, DIY culture, drop ship, Elon Musk, factory automation, Firefox, Ford Model T, future of work, global supply chain, global village, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, IKEA effect, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, planned obsolescence, private spaceflight, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, spinning jenny, Startup school, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Y Combinator

To be sure, many of these smaller manufacturers lost on their merits: their products were no better than imported goods and their costs uncompetitive. But others failed because they lost their distribution channels to the few consumers who still wanted their specialized goods (or just wanted to buy American). The grinding race to the bottom of price competition at the big-box retailers made it increasingly hard to find niche goods. Fast-forward a half century, and two things have changed. First, thanks to desktop fabrication and easy access to manufacturing capacity, anyone with an idea can start a business making real things.


pages: 206 words: 9,776

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey

Alan Greenspan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, creative destruction, David Graeber, deindustrialization, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Murray Bookchin, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, precariat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, special economic zone, the built environment, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, urban planning, We are the 99%, William Langewiesche, Works Progress Administration

Some of it can b e understood in conventional terms as a search on the p art of mobile capitals (with financial, commercial, and pro duction capital having diffe rent capacities in this regard) to gain a dvantages in the production and appropriation of surplus values by moving around. Trends can indeed be identifi ed that fi t with simple models of a "race to the bottom" in which the cheapest and most easily exploited labor­ power becomes the guiding beacon for capital mobility and investment decisions. But there is plenty of counterva iling evidence to suggest that this is a gross oversimplification when projected as a monocausal expla­ n ation of the dynamics of uneven geographical development.


pages: 257 words: 76,785

Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less Here's How by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

8-hour work day, airport security, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Brexit referendum, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, death from overwork, disruptive innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, game design, gig economy, Henri Poincaré, IKEA effect, iterative process, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Johannes Kepler, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, neurotypical, PalmPilot, performance metric, race to the bottom, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, zero-sum game

By early 2016, they had grown to fifty people and added a variety of perks to keep them: gym classes, free breakfast, a wellness coach and personal trainer, even a company-wide vacation to Tenerife during the depths of the Scottish winter. But the slow economic recovery in the United Kingdom, and the uncertainty generated by Brexit and the Scottish referendum, were starting to squeeze the company. If they responded by cutting costs, Pursuit would risk turning into just another call center racing to the bottom. That would lower employee loyalty and create an opening for competitors to start poaching their highest performers. That was becoming a huge concern. “Some larger IT vendors had moved into Glasgow, and because they were new to the city they were offering big salaries to attract talent,” Lorraine says.


pages: 265 words: 76,875

Exoplanets by Donald Goldsmith

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, dark matter, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, megastructure, Pluto: dwarf planet, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, time dilation

The growing list of KELT stars pays tribute to the work 109 EXOPLANETS of Latham and many ­others, whose studies have added a new class of stars to ­those known to possess planets. Gaudi likes to describe the other approaches, which seek to mea­sure ever-­smaller changes in radial velocities, as “a race to the bottom.”20 In 2017, the KELT team announced that one of the hot Jupiters on their short list qualifies as one of the hottest exoplanets now known, with a surface temperature greater than t­hose at which one might naively think that a planet could exist. The star KELT-9, also known as HD 195689, has nearly twice the sun’s surface temperature and 50 times its luminosity.


pages: 265 words: 75,202

The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism by Hubert Joly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, big-box store, Blue Ocean Strategy, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Brooks, do well by doing good, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), fear of failure, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, imposter syndrome, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, lockdown, long term incentive plan, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, old-boy network, pension reform, performance metric, popular capitalism, pre–internet, race to the bottom, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, risk/return, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, young professional, zero-sum game

—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities Here is a typical scenario: company struggles; company announces job cuts, layoffs, restructuring; Wall Street applauds; share price goes up as thousands of employees go out the door. We have seen this movie before and heard its soundtrack of fear, anger, and disbelief. Plus, this movie often has sequels, with multiple rounds of restructuring. Turnarounds have come to be viewed as a kind of blood sport, a race to the bottom, a vicious slashing of headcount, spending, and customer service. How can this make any sense? In my view, putting purpose and people at the heart of business, and the practical implications of that model outlined in the previous chapters, are not luxuries reserved for thriving businesses.


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

First, they need to increase high-skill employment opportunities in the area, either by making it easier to start a new business or by offering incentives such as tax breaks for existing businesses to establish local operations. The latter should be treated with caution, given the potential for a race to the bottom between cities that ends up benefiting only shareholders. A better strategy is to selectively target a few businesses to serve as anchors for the local economy. Second, cities need to bring in the skilled workers that employers are seeking. Investing in universities is a good start, but is often not enough to keep workers around.


pages: 229 words: 75,606

Two and Twenty: How the Masters of Private Equity Always Win by Sachin Khajuria

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, bank run, barriers to entry, Big Tech, blockchain, business cycle, buy and hold, carried interest, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, disintermediation, diversification, East Village, financial engineering, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, hiring and firing, impact investing, index fund, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, mass affluent, moral hazard, passive investing, race to the bottom, random walk, risk/return, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, two and twenty, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

Most credit investors reluctantly accept this imbalance of power because they are thirsty for yield in a macro environment where central banks have kept interest rates low to support the economy. When credit investors compete with each other to buy this debt the Firm is raising for its private equity investments, it’s often a race to the bottom on terms—an auction to the highest bidder who is willing to take the most risk. In contrast, when financing competitors’ deals, the exact opposite is true. Here, the Firm will insist on the strongest package of protections possible as well as other terms, such as an option to be part of the equity ownership in some manner, in some cases.


pages: 305 words: 79,303

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

Today, on the homepage of hm.com one can find a long-sleeved ribbed mock turtleneck dress for just $9.99. For the same price you can also grab a men’s textured fine-knit sweater. That’s cheap, not only in today’s dollars, but in 1962 dollars—a staggering achievement and a testament to a cut-throat race to the bottom. As the shackles came off, the more-for-less big-box monsters created hundreds of billions in wealth. The next thirty years saw what was then the most valuable company and the world’s wealthiest man, Sam Walton, emerge from this format, not to mention our collective view that the consumer now reigned supreme.


pages: 318 words: 85,824

A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey

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

Individual security is therefore a matter of individual choice tied to the affordability of financial products embedded in risky financial markets. The second prong of attack entails transformations in the spatial and temporal co-ordinates of the labour market. While too much can be made of the ‘race to the bottom’ to find the cheapest and most docile labour supplies, the geographical mobility of capital permits it to dominate a global labour force whose own geographical mobility is constrained. Captive labour forces abound because immigration is restricted. These barriers can be evaded only by illegal immigration (which creates an easily exploitable labour force) or through short-term contracts that permit, for example, Mexican labourers to work in Californian agribusiness only to be shamelessly shipped back to Mexico when they get sick and even die from the pesticides to which they are exposed.


pages: 261 words: 78,884

$2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America by Kathryn Edin, H. Luke Shaefer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, business cycle, clean water, ending welfare as we know it, future of work, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, impulse control, indoor plumbing, informal economy, low-wage service sector, machine readable, mass incarceration, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, The Future of Employment, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Only an employer who is guaranteed a steady stream of desperate job applicants could require a worker to be on call, ready to come in if needed, with no promise of hours. Labor practices such as work loading and on-call shifts are important tools for service sector employers, especially retail chains trying to offer the lowest prices. Simply put, in the face of this race to the bottom, it’s hard for those employers who want to do right by their workers to stay in the game. Recent research has found that when a new Walmart opens in a community, it causes an overall loss in jobs in that community because other stores—including some that might pay better or offer stable hours—can’t compete.


pages: 272 words: 83,378

Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto by Mark Helprin

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, computer age, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, Easter island, hive mind, independent contractor, invention of writing, Jacquard loom, lateral thinking, plutocrats, race to the bottom, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, the scientific method, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Or, you can make it sensational, appealing to whatever it is that for obvious reasons will immediately turn our attentions from just about anything to violence, threat, insanity, or sex. That is why television’s mainstays are dead bodies, teasingly exposed bosoms, and exploding cars. And so, in “blogging,” as in much else, begins the mad race to the bottom. Blogging’s anonymity makes it the intellectual twin of road rage. But unlike road rage it is not and cannot be subject to law. The only defense against its lowliness is to know it for what it is and call it thus. In the great scheme of things, the reaction to my article is, of course, as unimportant as the article itself.


pages: 299 words: 83,854

Shortchanged: Life and Debt in the Fringe Economy by Howard Karger

Alan Greenspan, big-box store, blue-collar work, book value, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, delayed gratification, financial deregulation, fixed income, illegal immigration, independent contractor, labor-force participation, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, low skilled workers, microcredit, mortgage debt, negative equity, New Journalism, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, payday loans, predatory finance, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, underbanked, working poor

Lenders with rent-a-bank partnerships often charge higher interest rates, make larger loans, or make repeat loans that violate state laws. Despite warnings from federal bank regulators, FDIC-insured bank involvement in fringe lending may be continuing. In turn, consumer groups have criticized the FDIC for being too lax in ending rent-a-bank arrangements.36 A RACE TO THE BOTTOM A key reason why consumers use payday lenders is to avoid bounced-check fees. In 2003 banks charged $30 billion in ATM, bounced-check, and overdraft fees, accounting for 30% of their operating profit.37 Federal law allows banks to process checks in any order they choose, and some maximize their NSF profits by using a big-to-small processing system.38 For example, if a bank customer writes four checks in one day, many banks will clear the largest check first, even if it was written last.


pages: 316 words: 87,486

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Organized labor was the great force of the Roosevelt years, but it is atomized labor, cheered for and pushed by Democrats like Plouffe and Lehane, that will forever shape American memories of the Obama years. Of the companies that are poised to profit on this coming war of all against all, Uber is the most famous; as I have mentioned, it invites each of us to spend our spare time as hacks for hire. But with the magic of innovation, virtually any field can join the race to the bottom. There’s LawTrades, a sort of Uber for lawyers, and HouseCall, an Uber for “home service professionals.” Everyone’s favorite is something called TaskRabbit, which allows people to farm out odd jobs to random day laborers, whom the app encourages you to imagine as cute, harmless bunnies. “Crowdworking” is the most startling variation on the theme, a scheme that allows anyone, anywhere to perform tiny digital tasks in exchange for extremely low pay.


pages: 324 words: 86,056

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality by Bhaskar Sunkara

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, inventory management, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, land reform, land value tax, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Occupy movement, postindustrial economy, precariat, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%

(For all sectors, legislation dictates the required workweek cannot exceed thirty-five hours.)13 There is still market competition, and firms still fail, but the grow-or-die imperative doesn’t apply when your enterprise’s goal is no longer to maximize total profits but rather to maximize profit-per-worker. And instead of a race to the bottom, there’s pressure to make sure janitorial and other “dirty jobs” are well compensated. In time, many of these tasks will be automated. People used to fear that machines would bring about mass unemployment, but now you and most others look forward to the social impact of technological innovations.14 AT THIS POINT, you’ve been bottling sauce for twenty years; you’ve seen the firm adapt to new consumer preferences and maintain a steady market share for much of that time.


pages: 309 words: 81,975

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, DevOps, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gender pay gap, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Goodhart's law, Google X / Alphabet X, hiring and firing, hive mind, holacracy, impact investing, income inequality, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loose coupling, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, mirror neurons, new economy, Paul Graham, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, remote working, Richard Thaler, Rochdale Principles, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, six sigma, smart contracts, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, source of truth, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The future is already here, the High Line, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, universal basic income, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

STRATEGY How we plan and prioritize; the process of identifying critical factors or challenges and the means to overcome them. Ev Williams thinks the internet is broken. Twitter, the site he cofounded, is a clubhouse for the cognoscenti but also teeming with trolls, misogyny, and mindless regurgitation. Facebook is awash in clickbait, memes, and falsehoods. And digital media has become a race to the bottom, where brainless and sensationalist content earns the lion’s share of attention. Williams’s answer to all this is Medium, a social publishing platform he founded to save us from ourselves. When it launched in 2012, he pulled no punches explaining why it mattered. “The current system causes increasing amounts of misinformation . . . and pressure to put out more content more cheaply—depth, originality, or quality be damned.


pages: 241 words: 83,523

A Swamp Full of Dollars: Pipelines and Paramilitaries at Nigeria's Oil Frontier by Michael Peel

banking crisis, blood diamond, British Empire, colonial rule, energy security, Golden arches theory, informal economy, Kickstarter, megacity, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, trade route, UNCLOS, wage slave

It all brings to mind the comment a journalist colleague of mine made to me after discovering that one of the collapsed US energy company Enron’s many alleged misdeeds was to fake a sale of power plants mounted on barges off Nigeria’s coast. Enron and Nigeria, he noted, seemed two particularly well-matched business partners. Not many anti-corruption campaigners think the arrival of the world’s new economic powers in the Gulf of Guinea will help improve behaviour. Instead, activists talk gloomily of their fears of a ‘race to the bottom’, as the Western multinationals and their new challengers compete ever more aggressively for business. When Nigeria auctioned off 25 exploration blocks in 2006 – many to companies from Asian countries keen to expand their energy resources – the Financial Times reported widespread allegations of ‘political favouritism and back-room dealing’.


pages: 262 words: 83,548

The End of Growth by Jeff Rubin

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, decarbonisation, deglobalization, Easter island, energy security, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, flex fuel, Ford Model T, full employment, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Hans Island, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, low interest rates, McMansion, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

As I mentioned earlier, by flooding the system with cash, the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing program is also working to devalue the US dollar. A cheaper dollar is both good for US manufacturing, making goods cheaper at home and abroad, and punitive to foreign producers trying to crack the US market. In a job-hungry world, even free market–loving America is becoming more protectionist. Globalization’s so-called race to the bottom to capitalize on the lowest wage rate anywhere in the world is about to hit some big roadblocks in the static economy just ahead. The contours of our economy are already changing, at least in North America. The lost manufacturing jobs of yesteryear are coming home. Over the next decade, manufacturing will account for a larger share of employment and a larger percentage of GDP.


pages: 247 words: 81,135

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small by Steve Sammartino

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, helicopter parent, hype cycle, illegal immigration, index fund, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, lifelogging, market design, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe's law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, Rubik’s Cube, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, The Home Computer Revolution, the long tail, too big to fail, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, web application, zero-sum game

Retail was once one of the most simple business models — find a geography, buy a product, sell at margin — while it’s now one of the most complex. What was once a mum-and-pop business possibility is quickly becoming a sophisticated, technology-driven, multi-channel mind warp. It’s hardest for the retailers selling what everyone else sells. Selling well-known, widely-distributed products online is simply a race to the bottom, a price war that can only be won by the most efficient operator. It’s quickly turning into a game of logistics more than it is about customer engagement. The world of today is an infinite store, where everything is available at the best price possible to anyone, anywhere. The retail revolution Retail is going through a revolution, but unlike many of the other industries being impacted by fragmented technology, it’s not the first one retail has been through.


pages: 322 words: 84,580

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

That risks holding back long-term productivity growth and making adjustment harder when it finally cannot be postponed anymore—which always happens in the end since the cost disadvantage of obsolete productive structures increases over time. If subsidies are partially financed by local governments, they can sometimes have an even worse effect than doing nothing. When local governments compete for investment from large companies, it can lead to a race to the bottom that aggravates the extraction of value from the local community to company owners situated elsewhere, and shrink the funds available for local public goods, including those that offer the greatest promise for increasing productivity in the area.15 The scramble for the privilege to host a new Amazon headquarters was a case in point: 238 cities competed for the dubious honour, often promising the company big subsidies.16 The race made some of the world’s top economists so worried that they signed a petition calling for a “non-aggression pact” between the competing towns.17 Finally, the reversal strategy also goes squarely against the principle of protecting workers rather than jobs and easing the job-to-job mobility that is instrumental in creating higher-productivity and ultimately better-paid employment (as discussed in chapter 6).18 * * * 2.


pages: 273 words: 83,802

Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats by Maya Goodfellow

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

This book is essential to understanding the reactionary political upheavals which have swept the West’ Owen Jones, author of Chavs ‘This is an essential study into the toxic discussion around immigration in the UK. It is as brilliant as it is necessary’ Nish Kumar ‘A book to cut through the noise of toxic politics, the race to the bottom to demonise immigrants, and the ahistoric idea that a hostile environment is anything new. This book reveals the nuts and bolts of Britain’s real immigration problem – the counter-productivity of its policies and the failure of its leaders. So important’ Afua Hirsch, author of Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging ‘This book is a must-read if you are thinking of going into politics.


pages: 263 words: 80,594

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

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

These dynamics might not be so obvious when there is plenty to go around, but during times of crisis and scarcity, the Darwinian nature of capitalist competition becomes obvious. When the options are compete or die, nothing is too valuable to be sacrificed on the altar of private profit, not even the planet. Firms will undermine regulations, lobby governments for special treatment, or leave one jurisdiction for another, setting off a global race to the bottom on wages, tax, and regulation, and destroying the planet in the process. Today, in the absence of the pre-2008 debt bubble, economic and political transactions have become a zero-sum game. Inequality may have risen during the 1980s, but the majority of people were also getting better off too — mainly through the expansion of access to credit.


pages: 277 words: 85,191

Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China by Desmond Shum

Asian financial crisis, call centre, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, family office, glass ceiling, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, high-speed rail, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, pirate software, plutocrats, race to the bottom, rolodex, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, South China Sea, special economic zone, walking around money, WikiLeaks

At a partially completed power plant, government officials drank so much with us that one participant tumbled facedown into a ditch. Whitney was keen to invest, figuring that her roots in Shandong would ensure success. But I noted that lots of places were developing container ports and power plants. Competition was cutthroat and margins were slim; I figured it would be a race to the bottom, so I convinced her to hold off. Back in Beijing we’d been trying to secure a piece of land to build high-end housing. In 2001, Whitney had started cultivating a man named Sun Zhengcai, who was then Party secretary of the Shunyi District in the northeast corner of the capital. Like Whitney, Sun hailed from the Shandong countryside.


pages: 279 words: 85,552

Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen by Peter Apps

banking crisis, Boris Johnson, call centre, COVID-19, forensic accounting, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, the built environment, University of East Anglia, value engineering

It also said the firm would be ‘challenging the norms that are associated with non-combustible’.20 The government, meanwhile, hired an independent expert Dame Judith Hackitt, to review building regulations and make recommendations for change. But her review, published in spring 2018, was remarkably kind to the government. While she said there had been ‘a race to the bottom’ in the construction industry, she adopted without question the official position that combustible cladding was effectively already banned by the official guidance and that the only reason it was on buildings was non-compliance. As a result she did not recommend substantive changes to the rules, and instead said new processes should be introduced to more effectively share information between the teams involved in a construction job, and determine more clearly at each stage who was responsible for safety.


pages: 801 words: 209,348

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

The deflationary economy of 1893 and onward saw major industries buckle under the tremendous pressure of their debts. A large percentage of the railroad mileage in the United States found itself in receivership. Operators in commodity businesses dealt with one another with endless price competition—a cutthroat race to the bottom. Gentlemen’s agreements, otherwise known as price fixing, did not hold up under the pressures and risks of insolvency. In addition, the Sherman Antitrust Act prohibited competitors from most types of cooperative behavior that would have maintained pricing power. The act was passed weeks before the McKinley tariff bill in 1890.

Andrew Carnegie, unperturbed by Federal Steel, remarked that his new rival’s specialty was “manufacturing stock certificates” rather than expertise in the actual production of steel. By 1901 J. P. Morgan had come to his own conclusion. Unlike Morgan or anyone else, Carnegie knew the economics of steel intimately, even if he was physically absent. He had the full force of conviction that in any pricing race to the bottom, Carnegie Steel would be victorious. With over $100 million structured by Morgan for the Federal Steel consolidation, the risk of having Carnegie operating independently was significant. It would be impossible to control pricing or production with the largest producer out of the fold. To compound matters, Carnegie was an enigmatic financial force with few boundaries.


Americana by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

The deflationary economy of 1893 and onward saw major industries buckle under the tremendous pressure of their debts. A large percentage of the railroad mileage in the United States found itself in receivership. Operators in commodity businesses dealt with one another with endless price competition—a cutthroat race to the bottom. Gentlemen’s agreements, otherwise known as price fixing, did not hold up under the pressures and risks of insolvency. In addition, the Sherman Antitrust Act prohibited competitors from most types of cooperative behavior that would have maintained pricing power. The act was passed weeks before the McKinley tariff bill in 1890.

Andrew Carnegie, unperturbed by Federal Steel, remarked that his new rival’s specialty was “manufacturing stock certificates” rather than expertise in the actual production of steel. By 1901 J. P. Morgan had come to his own conclusion. Unlike Morgan or anyone else, Carnegie knew the economics of steel intimately, even if he was physically absent. He had the full force of conviction that in any pricing race to the bottom, Carnegie Steel would be victorious. With over $100 million structured by Morgan for the Federal Steel consolidation, the risk of having Carnegie operating independently was significant. It would be impossible to control pricing or production with the largest producer out of the fold. To compound matters, Carnegie was an enigmatic financial force with few boundaries.


pages: 366 words: 94,209

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, gamification, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Google bus, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, medical bankruptcy, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, power law, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software patent, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Future of Employment, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transportation-network company, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Managing a fixed supply of minerals is different from managing a replenishing supply of timber. Finally, size and place matter. It’s easier for a town to manage its water supply than for the planet to establish water-sharing rules.78 In short, a commons must be bound by people, place, and rules. Contrary to prevailing wisdom, it’s not an anything-goes race to the bottom. It is simply a recognition of boundaries and limits. It’s pooled, multifaceted investment in pursuit of sustainable production. It is also an affront to the limitless expansion sought by pure capital. If anything, the notion of a commons’ becoming “enclosed” by privatization is a misnomer: privatizing a commons breaks the boundaries that protected its land and labor from pure market forces.


pages: 354 words: 92,470

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

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

Being competitive globally threatens domestic labour standards, particularly in a world in which mobile capital hopes to seek out the cheapest pools of labour (ironically, TPP included an attempt to provide common labour standards). Bailing out banks for their far-flung misadventures leads only to austerity at home. Attempts to attract global capital can result in national tax authorities indulging in a corporation tax ‘race to the bottom’: indeed, corporate tax rates have plunged since the early 1980s.6 Accepting the strictures of the World Trade Organization may only preserve a decidedly skewed playing field, preventing today’s poor countries from using techniques employed by others in the past to foster economic progress.


pages: 363 words: 92,422

A Fine Mess by T. R. Reid

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, game design, Gini coefficient, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial robot, land value tax, loss aversion, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, Tesla Model S, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

But then Switzerland, with its 8.5% rate, would still be a lure for chief financial officers looking to reduce the tax bill—not to mention Bermuda, New Zealand, and other countries where the corporate income tax rate is zero. And if the United States did agree to a large cut in the rate, other countries might well cut their tax rates even more sharply. This is a race to the bottom that nobody can really win. How low does the tax rate have to go to stop corporations from devising intricate mechanisms to avoid paying? Great Britain, which reduced its corporate tax rate half a dozen times in the twenty-first century, now taxes profits at 20%. But that didn’t stop Starbucks from creating an intricate multinational network to avoid tax in Britain.


pages: 363 words: 94,139

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney

Apple II, banking crisis, British Empire, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Computer Numeric Control, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Dynabook, Ford Model T, General Magic , global supply chain, interchangeable parts, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, PalmPilot, race to the bottom, RFID, Savings and loan crisis, side project, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, the built environment, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, work culture

Jobs aimed at making innovative products again, but he didn’t want to compete in the broader market for personal computers, which was dominated by companies making generic machines for Microsoft’s Windows operating system. These companies competed on price, not features or ease of use. Jobs figured theirs was a race to the bottom. Instead, he argued, there was no reason that well-designed, well-made computers couldn’t command the same market share and margins as a luxury automobile. A BMW might get you to where you are going in the same way as a Chevy that costs half the price, but there will always be those who will pay for the better ride in the sexier car.


pages: 400 words: 88,647

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Computer Numeric Control, connected car, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, financial exclusion, financial innovation, gamification, global supply chain, IKEA effect, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, megacity, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, reshoring, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, value engineering, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture , X Prize, yield management, Zipcar

Rather, we invest in innovative technologies like Water<Less and processes like Wellthread that can be applied across multiple product lines, making sustainability a core design principle for all our products. We want to gradually build a rich design-for-sustainability toolkit that we would share with our suppliers, and even our competitors. The hypercompetitive apparel sector is known for its race to the bottom. We want to initiate a race to the top by uplifting the sustainability standards of the entire industry. As well as saving on production costs, Levi Strauss’s sustainably designed products are generating greater customer goodwill and boosting employee morale. Employees in its stores – especially those in their 20s and 30s – rave about the Water<Less, Waste<Less and Wellthread products, which they find cool.


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

There was reluctance to suspend production to avoid losses. But the fundamental causes are more complex. In a globalized world, businesses seek out competitively priced raw materials, labor, and locations, to lower costs, enhance profitability, and offer reduced prices to consumers. Production migrates to emerging markets. There is a race to the bottom in costs and working conditions, as manufacturers compete for the business of foreign purchasers. Lower costs come primarily from lower wages. In Bangladesh, the minimum wage is US$38 a month, with typical take-home pay of around US$65, among the lowest in the world. Benefits such as leave, retirement, or healthcare are minimal, if they exist at all.


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

American rates have not gone up; others have come down. Germany, for example, long a staunch believer in its high-taxation system, cut its rates (starting in 2008) in response to moves by countries to its east, like Slovakia and Austria. This kind of competition among industrialized countries is now widespread. It is not a race to the bottom—Scandinavian countries have high taxes, good services, and strong growth—but a quest for growth. American regulations used to be more flexible and market friendly than all others. That’s no longer true. London’s financial system was overhauled in 2001, with a single entity replacing a confusing mishmash of regulators, one reason that London’s financial sector now beats out New York’s on some measures.


The End of Accounting and the Path Forward for Investors and Managers (Wiley Finance) by Feng Gu

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, carbon tax, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, geopolitical risk, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, moral hazard, new economy, obamacare, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, shareholder value, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Great Moderation, value at risk

This, along with our first proposal to avoid the valuation in financial reports of nontraded assets/liabilities, will go a long way to restore the reliability of financial information.30 And now for our third and last proposal. III. MITIGATE ACCOUNTING COMPLEXITY Here is the Lev-Gu law of the dynamics of regulation: Regulatory systems strive to be even more complex than the structures or institutions they were charged to regulate. A race to the bottom, so to speak. If you doubt the universality of our law, think of the 1,990 pages of the original 2009 Affordable Health Care Act (Obamacare), ballooning to about 20,000 pages four years later,31 or the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, originally at 848 pages, and mushrooming to 13,789 pages as of July 2013 (and still going strong—the length, we mean).32 And not only in America: No regulatory agency rivals the European Union in scope, intrusion, and complexity of regulation.


Industry 4.0: The Industrial Internet of Things by Alasdair Gilchrist

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air gap, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, business intelligence, business logic, business process, chief data officer, cloud computing, connected car, cyber-physical system, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, DevOps, digital twin, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, global value chain, Google Glasses, hiring and firing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, microservices, millennium bug, OSI model, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, platform as a service, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RFID, Salesforce, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, smart transportation, software as a service, stealth mode startup, supply-chain management, The future is already here, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, web application, WebRTC, Y2K

However, these strategies rarely worked for long, as the competitor having a low barrier to entry simply followed successful differentiation tactics. For example, competitors could match quantity and up their lot size to match or do better. Worse, if the price was the differentiator, the competitor could lower their prices, which results in what is termed a race to the bottom. Selling Light, Not Light Bulbs What the customer ultimately wants the goods for is to provide a service (provide air transportation in the previous example), but it could also be to produce light in the case of a light bulb. This got manufacturers looking at the problem from a different perspective; what if instead of selling light bulbs, you sold light?


pages: 326 words: 91,559

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

Some of the big, older co-ops have even started displaying their cooperative identity again, as something to be claimed rather than hidden. Whether they admit it or not, they’ve each turned to democracy out of need. Economist Brent Hueth finds that cooperatives arise most often when there are “missing markets,” when the reigning businesses fail to serve an unmet demand or utilize latent supply.13 While coffee companies ran a race to the bottom in environmental and labor practices, co-ops engineered a fair-trade movement that went the other way, from the worker-owned roaster Equal Exchange to consumer-owned grocery stores and countless grower co-ops around the world. When competing banks needed to collaborate with each other more reliably, they formed Visa and the SWIFT network as cooperatives.


pages: 291 words: 92,688

Who Is Rich? by Matthew Klam

carried interest, dark matter, Dr. Strangelove, liberation theology, Mason jar, mass incarceration, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, TED Talk

Then she told me about some old men who ran the company, who she’d bumped into in the halls, who’d grabbed and hugged her and asked where she’d been all these years. The channel those guys started in the mid-eighties had been a place for beautiful nature documentaries, flora and fauna, with a stress on cinematography, shows about world history and anthropology. For years now, the channel had been in a race to the bottom. Then she gloated about her lunch meeting with Karen Crickstein, and all the old friends she’d heard about, former staff EPs and VPs who’d screwed up, aged out, or got fired, or who’d put out their own shingle and were hanging on, hoping for the big comeback. I listened to them eat. Everything would go back to the way it was, only worse, because I’d given up.


pages: 348 words: 99,383

The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism Is the World Economy's Only Hope by John A. Allison

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, disintermediation, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Greenspan put, high net worth, housing crisis, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, life extension, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, negative equity, obamacare, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk/return, Robert Shiller, subprime mortgage crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, yield curve, zero-sum game

As Freddie and Fannie moved up the risk scale, however, they loosened their underwriting standards to meet the affordable-housing (that is, subprime) goals established by Congress. The whole origination market relaxed its standards to compete with Freddie and Fannie. Driven by Freddie and Fannie, the private originators created a competitive race to the bottom as the bubble continued (funded by the Federal Reserve) and it appeared that no matter how low the standards, home loans would not default. Of course, Standard & Poor’s (S&P), Moody’s, and Fitch played a major role in this process. They dramatically overrated bonds backed by high-risk mortgages.


pages: 336 words: 93,672

The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists by Gary Marcus, Jeremy Freeman

23andMe, Albert Einstein, backpropagation, bioinformatics, bitcoin, brain emulation, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, Drosophila, epigenetics, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, Google Glasses, ITER tokamak, iterative process, language acquisition, linked data, mouse model, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, speech recognition, stem cell, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, twin studies, web application

This is not the case for our motes: both electrodes are on board the tiny device and are placed very close together. This makes it very hard to measure the tiny electrical changes that arise across these electrodes. To some extent, the tiny electronics can be made more sensitive by pumping in more power. This creates a race to the bottom: smaller motes capture less power but need more power to record the tiny signals. Somewhere around a 50 µm diameter, our calculations show you cannot deliver enough power to power the sensor electronics. The second challenge involves simultaneous gathering and distinguishing information from multiple sensing sites.


pages: 309 words: 96,434

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty First Century City by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, call centre, crack epidemic, credit crunch, deindustrialization, East Village, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, race to the bottom, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban renewal, white flight, white picket fence, World Values Survey, young professional

As the amount of social housing continues to shrink, the property companies entrench their hold over the area. In a policy paper by Shelter published in 2008 called ‘Private Renting for Public Good’, the housing charity describes the impact of introducing the market into housing for the poorest in society. ‘As demand grows there is a race to the bottom,’ writes Adam Sampson, director of Shelter, describing how those who suffer most are those least able to compete financially, who are ‘in no position to exercise choice in the market, which leaves them open to exploitation and to living in the worst conditions’.3 In Edinburgh I heard what this meant when a support worker at the West Pilton Child and Families Centre told me that some landlords fail to provide even basic furniture like beds.


The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World by Linsey McGoey

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, antiwork, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Clive Stafford Smith, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, Frances Oldham Kelsey, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, income inequality, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Leeson, p-value, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, public intellectual, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, wealth creators

But an important aspect of Mandeville’s work is ignored today: his insistence that private enterprise is only beneficial ‘When it’s by Justice lopt and bound.’26 From the 1960s on, Hayek, Stigler and other economists’ disdain for government regulation has won the ideological battle in mainstream economics theory, helping to entrench the bizarre prevalence across the political spectrum today of regulators who disdain the very idea of regulation, and who have lobbied to gut important watchdog agencies of much-needed public funding.27 As one economist put it, in ‘deliberately creating a regulatory race to the bottom Stigler and the neoclassical economists created a self-fulfilling prophecy of regulatory failure.’28 The following chapters provide dispiriting glimpses of what happens when regulations are undermined – but also hopeful portraits too of regulatory heroes who are trying to construct new dams, who are trying to halt an anti-government deluge from entirely sweeping away democratic checks and balances achieved in the past.


pages: 300 words: 94,628

Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions by Michael Moss

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", big-box store, Donald Davies, Drosophila, epigenetics, hydroponic farming, Internet Archive, means of production, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Upton Sinclair, Wayback Machine

Something else, and something pretty extraordinary, had to be behind all that. * * * — I came to the question of food and addiction inadvertently with the 2013 publication of my book Salt Sugar Fat. In it, I argued that grocery manufacturers were competing with fast-food chains in a race to the bottom that rewarded profits over health. Over the past four decades, salt, sugar, and fat had enabled the industries to engineer products that were immensely alluring. Brilliant marketing campaigns pushed the emotional buttons that convinced us to eat when we weren’t even hungry. Yet the book tried to end on a hopeful note.


pages: 318 words: 91,957

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 737 MAX, call centre, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, disinformation, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fulfillment center, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, inventory management, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operational security, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, remote working, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Ballmer, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, WeWork, women in the workforce

When outsourcing didn’t accomplish his goals, Welch turned to offshoring. He memorably said that “ideally, you’d have every plant you own on a barge to move with currencies and changes in the economy.” That way, Welch imagined, GE factories could move around the world, chasing favorable exchange rates, tax breaks, incentives, and low wages in a seaborne race to the bottom. This was the Platonic ideal of a free market enterprise to Welch—stateless, beholden to no community, and able to hire labor in a completely opportunistic way. For the Golden Age CEOs who cared so much about their communities, it would have been a dystopian nightmare. To Welch, it was something to strive for.


Engineering Security by Peter Gutmann

active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business process, call centre, card file, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, combinatorial explosion, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, domain-specific language, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, false flag, fault tolerance, Firefox, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Hacker News, information security, iterative process, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, linear programming, litecoin, load shedding, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, nocebo, operational security, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, post-materialism, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, random walk, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolling blackouts, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, semantic web, seminal paper, Skype, slashdot, smart meter, social intelligence, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain attack, telemarketer, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, Therac-25, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wayback Machine, web application, web of trust, x509 certificate, Y2K, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

There have even been proposals for a kind of slidingwindow approach to certificate value in which, as the inevitable race to the bottom cheapens the effective value of established classes of certificates, they’re regarded as less and less effective by the software that uses them (for example browsers would no longer display a padlock for them), and the sliding window advances to the next generation of certificates until eventually the cycle repeats. Figure 37: EV certificate issued to RFC 1918 address The starting shots for a repeat of the original CAs’ race to the bottom for EV certificates have already been fired, with EV certificates issued to phantom organisations represented by nothing more than a bought-on-the-spot business license, or, as Figure 37 shows, to RFC 1918 private addresses in violation of the CA’s EV-certificate issuing policy [529].

Markatos, Proceedings of the 11th International Information Security Conference (ISC’08), Springer-Verlag LNCS No.5222, September 2008, p.146. [516] “Latest Facebook Ad Quiz Scam Will Cost You $20 A Week”, Nick O’Neill, 28 May 2009, http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/05/facebook-quizscam/. [517] “Phishing Social Networking Sites”, ‘RSnake’, 8 May 2007, http://ha.ckers.org/blog/20070508/phishing-social-networkingsites/. [518] “Cybercriminals Now Using Public Social Networks to Give Command and Control Orders to Banking Trojans”, RSA FraudAction Research Lab, 19 July 2010, http://rsa.com/blog/blog_entry.aspx?id=1684. [519] “Facebook Developers And Ad Networks Participating In Race To The Bottom”, Nick O’Neill, 5 June 2009, http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/06/facebook-developers-and-ad-networks-participating-inrace-to-the-bottom/. [520] “Information Revelation and Privacy in Online Social Networks (The Facebook case)”, Ralph Gross and Alessandro Acquisti, Proceedings of the workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society, November 2005, p.71. [521] “Strategies and Struggles with Privacy in an Online Social Networking Community”, Katherine Strater and Heather Richter Lipford, Proceedings of the 22nd British HCI Group Annual Conference on People and Computers: Culture, Creativity, Interaction (BCS-HCI’08), September 2008, p.111. 230 Psychology [522] “Friendster and Publicly Articulated Social Networks”, Danah Boyd, Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’04), April 2004, p.1279. [523] “Friends Only: Examining a Privacy-Enhancing Behavior in Facebook”, Fred Stutzman and Jacob Kramer-Duffield, Proceedings of the 28th Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’10), April 2010, p.1553. [524] “Changes in Use and Perception of Facebook”, Cliff Lampe, Nicole Ellison and Charles Steinfield, Proceedings of the 20th Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW’08), November 2008, p.721. [525] “Security Issues Challenging Facebook”, S.Leitch and M.Warren, Proceedings of the 7th Australian Information Security Management Conference (AISM’09), December 2009, p.137. [526] “The Latest Facebook Application Developer Trick: Unapproved Notifications”, Nick O’Neill, 4 June 2009, http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/06/the-latest-facebook-application-developer-trickunapproved-notifications/

Beyond the trusted computing approach there are all manner of cat-and-mouse games that developers are willing to play to try and outrun the malware authors, including things like graphical data-entry mechanism (the malware takes a screenshot and/or records mouse actions), trying to hook the system at a lower level than the rootkit is (the malware engages the application in a race to the bottom of the driver chain, with the malware invariably winning), and so on. Figure 105: External trusted computing device Another approach to the problem is to accept the fact that you can never really trust anything that’s done on a PC and treat it purely as a router, forwarding appropriately encrypted and authenticated content from a remote server to an attached selfcontained device via a USB or Bluetooth link.


pages: 360 words: 101,038

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax

Airbnb, barriers to entry, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, creative destruction, death of newspapers, declining real wages, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, gentrification, hype cycle, hypertext link, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

When I ask what they can pay, the answer is usually some variation of “We can’t afford to pay writers at this time, but you will get great exposure.” I always tell them that I have all the exposure I need right now. What I’d really like is money. “Digital pennies versus print pounds,” a writer in London said, characterizing this race to the bottom. One of the big differences between print and digital publishing is the ability to charge for the product at hand. Most print publications cost a few dollars to purchase, while digital ones are free. This might seem great in terms of capturing as many readers as possible for advertisers, but what it actually does is drive down the value of those readers.


pages: 358 words: 104,664

Capital Without Borders by Brooke Harrington

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, diversified portfolio, emotional labour, equity risk premium, estate planning, eurozone crisis, family office, financial innovation, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, information asymmetry, Joan Didion, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, liberal capitalism, mega-rich, mobile money, offshore financial centre, prudent man rule, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, wealth creators, web of trust, Westphalian system, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

But the aims of the parasite are totally different: rather than offering governance and public services to the populace at large, the parasitic system offers zones of state-sanctioned lawlessness that benefit only international elites. What this is doing to the Westphalian host system is similar in some respects to what e-commerce has done to bricks-and-mortar business, destroying it in a race to the bottom. The key difference is that while the benefits of e-commerce (both for business owners and consumers) are open to anyone with an Internet connection, the benefits of the parasitic state system are offered only to the world’s wealthiest people. The coordinated extraction of capital from the host states and the undermining of their legitimacy makes life consistently worse for the vast majority of people while benefiting a tiny few.


pages: 404 words: 95,163

Amazon: How the World’s Most Relentless Retailer Will Continue to Revolutionize Commerce by Natalie Berg, Miya Knights

3D printing, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, asset light, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business intelligence, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, computer vision, connected car, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, driverless car, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), Elon Musk, fulfillment center, gig economy, independent contractor, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kiva Systems, market fragmentation, new economy, Ocado, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, QR code, race to the bottom, random stow, recommendation engine, remote working, Salesforce, sensor fusion, sharing economy, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, underbanked, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, white picket fence, work culture

The so-called fast fashion chain Zara can take a coat from design stage to the sales floor in 25 days.45 Off-price retailers meanwhile offer prices up to 70 per cent lower than traditional department stores.46 The rise of these bricks and mortar disruptors means that department stores are no longer the cheapest, nor are they the most fashionable or the most convenient. And we all know that in retail the middle ground is a very dangerous place to position yourself. The initial knee-jerk reaction to these new competitive threats was a period of seemingly perpetual discounting; however, this race to the bottom simply eroded margins, devalued brand perception and trained shoppers to only buy on promotion. Now department stores are opting for a more sustainable ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’ approach by ramping up their own off-price presence. In fact, at the time of writing in 2018 a growing number of traditional department store chains have more outlet and off-price stores than full-price shops.47 Despite the risk of cannibalizing existing stores, this format is far more relevant for today’s modern shopper.


pages: 369 words: 98,776

The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans by Mark Lynas

Airbus A320, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Easter island, Eyjafjallajökull, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Negawatt, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, special drawing rights, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Tragedy of the Commons, two and twenty, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, We are as Gods

THE PRICE OF PANDAS The current crisis in biodiversity tells us loud and clear that conventional approaches to conservation have failed. “Paper parks”—named but barely protected—in developing countries are routinely violated by poachers and loggers. What areas are set aside for nature reserves are too small and too fragmented. At sea fishermen compete with each other in a global race to the bottom, knowing that if they do not catch the last bluefin tuna, someone else will. No wonder the 2010 Global Biodiversity Outlook report is full of ominous words and phrases like “serious declines,” “extensive fragmentation and degradation,” “overexploitation,” and “dangerous impacts.” To meet the planetary boundary, we need to make urgent changes in policy.


pages: 391 words: 97,018

Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy by Daniel Gross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset-backed security, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, congestion pricing, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, demand response, Donald Trump, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, index fund, intangible asset, intermodal, inventory management, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, LNG terminal, low interest rates, low skilled workers, man camp, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk tolerance, risk/return, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Wall-E, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zipcar

And there’s room for much more. Rising wealth around the world means greater demand for services. Developing countries build exports—goods or services—by taking the low road: set up a factory to make cheap lightbulbs or build a low-wage call center, and you’re off. But it’s not all about a race to the bottom. The United States exports a lot of very expensive services—money management, education, health care, tourism—that have previously been unaffordable for the vast majority of humanity and that are getting more affordable. Like the Collinses of Wallquest before 2008, most American businesses were content to sell to their friends and neighbors and never gave much thought to selling overseas.


pages: 414 words: 101,285

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

Although new information technologies provided the tools for financial services to spread across the world, the rapid expansion of the sector was aided by a political culture that favored deregulation at the national level, along with resolute noncommittal to international regulation. Due to international competition among the various financial hubs around the globe, a race to the bottom led to the reduction in already weak regulatory standards. In the short term this provided more financial activity, higher revenues, more taxes, and more growth and explains why so many policy makers argued that their domestic financial system had to become “more competitive,” which they took to mean bound by less regulation.


pages: 362 words: 99,063

The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late by Michael Ellsberg

affirmative action, Black Swan, Burning Man, corporate governance, creative destruction, do what you love, financial engineering, financial independence, follow your passion, future of work, hiring and firing, independent contractor, job automation, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, mega-rich, meta-analysis, new economy, Norman Mailer, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social intelligence, solopreneur, Steve Ballmer, survivorship bias, telemarketer, Tony Hsieh

Anyone can walk in this place, look around, get it, and leave. The souvenir part—the experience part, the owning-the-table-for-two-hours part—that’s what they make money from. “McDonald’s fooled us into believing that the purpose of industry was to churn out standardized quantity at low cost. This place reminds us that, no, there’s an alternative to racing to the bottom. And that is, racing to the top.” Are you ready to race toward the top and combine money with meaning? Keep reading—the remaining stories and skills in this book show you how. ■ PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG FUCKUP: HOW I WENT FROM BROKE, MISERABLE WANNABE SUPERSTAR TO FINANCIALLY SECURE, CREATIVELY ENGAGED PROFESSIONAL AUTHOR I told you I wouldn’t recommend anything to you that I hadn’t applied in my own life.


pages: 390 words: 96,624

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom by Rebecca MacKinnon

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business cycle, business intelligence, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital Maoism, don't be evil, Eben Moglen, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Global Witness, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, online collectivism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pre–internet, race to the bottom, real-name policy, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

CHAPTER 9: DO NO EVIL 131 In April 2011, Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO of Research in Motion (RIM), maker of BlackBerry, sat down for an interview with the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones: Full video of the exchange is at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/9456798.stm (accessed June 27, 2011). 133 Shi Tao: For a detailed account and list of sources related to the Shi Tao case and Yahoo, see Human Rights Watch, Race to the Bottom: Corporate Complicity in Chinese Internet Censorship, 2006, www.hrw.org/reports/2006/china0806; and Rebecca MacKinnon, “Shi Tao, Yahoo!, and the Lessons for Corporate Social Responsibility,” working paper, December 27, 2007, http://rconversation.blogs.com/YahooShiTaoLessons.pdf. 136 the year Microsoft launched MSN Spaces in China, 2005, was also the year the Chinese blogosphere exploded: For a detailed account of the evolution of the Chinese blogosphere and government controls, see Rebecca MacKinnon, “Flatter World and Thicker Walls?


pages: 309 words: 100,573

Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel: Questions, Answers, and Reflections by Patrick Smith

Airbus A320, airline deregulation, airport security, Atul Gawande, Boeing 747, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, collective bargaining, crew resource management, D. B. Cooper, high-speed rail, inflight wifi, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, legacy carrier, low cost airline, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, pattern recognition, race to the bottom, Skype, Tenerife airport disaster, US Airways Flight 1549, zero-sum game

How we got to such a shameful position is the subject of debate. Is it a fiscal thing? A cultural thing? A little of both? It has been a long, hard slide, and most folks agree that it began at or around the moment president Jimmy Carter attached his signature to the Airline Deregulation Act of 1979. From that moment on it was a race to the bottom, with competitive chaos inspiring a battle so fierce that, from the airlines’ perspectives, undercutting the competition became more important than pleasing customers. By 2001, the few remaining extravagances were curtailed in the battening-down that began after September 11. In my opinion, there’s something systemic at hand that transcends the bottom line.


pages: 357 words: 99,684

Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions by Paul Mason

anti-globalists, back-to-the-land, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, Chekhov's gun, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, disinformation, do-ocracy, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, informal economy, land tenure, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, Occupy movement, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rising living standards, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, union organizing, We are the 99%, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, young professional

Now however, the realization is dawning that the generation who started work in 2010, and who will retire in 2050, will have been poor through much of their working lives; they will be ‘asset poor’—unless the house-price bubble can be pumped up again—and dependent on a generation being born today to join the ‘race to the bottom’ in terms of wages and lifestyles. 10. This evaporation of a promise is compounded in the more repressive societies and emerging markets because—even where you get rapid economic growth—it cannot absorb the demographic bulge of young people fast enough to deliver rising living standards for enough of them. 11.


pages: 416 words: 100,130

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Initially, Uber could rely on the support and energy of its drivers. But, as Fast Company’s Sarah Kessler observed, taxi drivers and Uber drivers began to recognize their common interests in the fight for better pay and conditions. Uber’s sudden rate cut in 2016 led taxi drivers and Uber drivers in the United States to form joint protests to avoid a “race to the bottom.” Kessler quotes Abe Husein, a former Uber driver who led strikes in Kansas City and elsewhere: “When I first started driving, taxis hated Uber drivers, and Uber drivers hated taxis…Now everybody hates Uber. Times have changed.” Uber’s move-fast-and-break-shit government relations strategy and its growing notoriety have also made it a hugely popular target for regulators.


Lectures on Urban Economics by Jan K. Brueckner

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, company town, congestion charging, Edward Glaeser, invisible hand, market clearing, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Economic Geography, profit maximization, race to the bottom, rent control, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, urban sprawl

Urban Growth Models with Durable Housing: An Overview. In Economics of Cities, ed. J.-F. Thisse and J.-M. Huriot. Cambridge University Press. Brueckner, Jan K. 2000b. Urban Sprawl: Diagnosis and Remedies. International Regional Science Review 23: 160–171. Brueckner, Jan K. 2000c. Welfare Reform and the Race to the Bottom: Theory and Evidence. Southern Economic Journal 66: 505–525. Brueckner, Jan K. 2002. Internalization of Airport Congestion. Journal of Air Transport Management 8: 141–147. Brueckner, Jan K. 2004. Fiscal Decentralization with Distortionary Taxation: Tiebout vs. Tax Competition. International Tax and Public Finance 11: 133–153.


Corbyn by Richard Seymour

anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, first-past-the-post, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, land value tax, liberal world order, mass immigration, means of production, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pension reform, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, Snapchat, stakhanovite, systematic bias, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, Wolfgang Streeck, working-age population, éminence grise

Typical of this was Polly Toynbee, who faulted Corbyn for defending ‘free migration on the eve of a poll where Labour was haemorrhaging support for precisely those metropolitan views’, before adding, ‘if Labour wants to get its voters back, it can’t block its ears as Corbyn, the party’s leader, does.’ Likewise, Andy Burnham insisted that the Brexit vote was ‘against free movement’ and that Labour must now find a new ‘balance’. He added the gloss, shared by UKIP, of blaming free movement for ‘a race to the bottom’ in living standards.3 The Left indeed looked weaker and more isolated as a result of the Brexit vote; Labour seemed aimless and adrift, and having recovered some of its lost core vote in the year before the decision, it began losing more seats than it won. The loss of the by-election in Copeland and the just-about-victory in Stoke, precipitated by two right-wing Labour MPs resigning, appeared to have seriously weakened the leadership.


pages: 346 words: 97,330

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, blue-collar work, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, hiring and firing, ImageNet competition, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine translation, market friction, Mars Rover, natural language processing, new economy, operational security, passive income, pattern recognition, post-materialism, post-work, power law, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Second Machine Age, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, union organizing, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

MTurk set a minimum fee for work at one cent per task and, from there, requesters decide how much to offer MTurk workers for each assignment. On average, requesters price tasks to offer the equivalent of $11 an hour, but low-paying requesters flood the market with minimum-fee work, which drags down the overall earning potential of workers, who must wade through lists of poor-paying tasks to find decent work. “It’s a constant race to the bottom,” says Joan. By some estimates, the total revenue of the requesters on MTurk and similar sites like CrowdFlower adds up to $120 million per year.19 Workers keep what requesters pay out, but Amazon charges the requesters 20 percent of what MTurk calls “the reward”—a worker’s paycheck, including any bonus amount (the equivalent of a tip)—as its fee for operating the platform.


pages: 332 words: 100,245

Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives by Michael A. Heller, James Salzman

23andMe, Airbnb, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, endowment effect, estate planning, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, Hernando de Soto, Internet of things, land tenure, Mason jar, Neil Armstrong, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, planetary scale, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, you are the product, Zipcar

Threatened by this competition from Alaska, South Dakota raised its game. Janklow created a task force to ask the wealthiest families, What more can we possibly give you? A South Dakota version of the self-settled asset protection trust soon followed, but with even more generous provisions for the donor. Nevada then upped the ante. This back-and-forth sparked a “race to the bottom” of ever more extravagant giveaways to the rich. South Dakota lets you add a spendthrift trust provision, under which trustees can choose when and where they pay beneficiaries. Creditors cannot intercept these payments ahead of time and find it nearly impossible to track the money later on.


pages: 309 words: 96,168

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs by Reid Hoffman, June Cohen, Deron Triff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, call centre, chief data officer, clean water, collaborative consumption, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, financial independence, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, global macro, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, knowledge economy, late fees, Lean Startup, lone genius, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, polynesian navigation, race to the bottom, remote working, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, work culture , Y Combinator, zero day, Zipcar

There was one particular area Stacy zeroed in on: the freewheeling bidding system that connected the two sides in the marketplace of taskers (those bidding for the jobs) and clients (those looking to hire) that drove TaskRabbit. Under the current system, taskers had to go through a bidding process for every task, which meant that many found themselves in a race-to-the-bottom to offer their services for the cheapest price. Meanwhile, for clients it often took too much time to sort through all those bids and choose a winner. This open-ended “anything goes” framework seemed to work about half the time; some taskers and clients thrived in the bidding wars.


pages: 349 words: 99,230

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice by Jamie K. McCallum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, occupational segregation, post-work, QR code, race to the bottom, remote working, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, single-payer health, social distancing, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, The Great Resignation, the strength of weak ties, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

You can think of it as guaranteeing plausible deniability for worker rights. Employers that fissure their workplaces also spread risk through a spillover effect—low wages and a lack of labor protections at some employers in a particular industry drag standards down at other employers in the same industry, a race to the bottom where workers always lose. The pandemic was workplace fissuring on steroids. In May 2020, NTT’s Global Managed Services Report, which analyzes trends in outsourcing, found that 45 percent of global corporations planned “to outsource more of their IT than they insource” within eighteen months—a percentage nearly double the current amount.33 Within the United States, institutions such as colleges, law firms, and medical practices were eager to use the crisis as an opportunity to outsource jobs.34 Even employers who received generous federal assistance, such as Boeing and United Airlines, didn’t hesitate to contract out IT staff and catering operations.35 And employers didn’t just spread risk through fissuring and spillovers—they tried to enshrine it in law.


pages: 329 words: 99,504

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud by Ben McKenzie, Jacob Silverman

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Ben McKenzie, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, capital controls, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, data science, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, housing crisis, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Jacob Silverman, Jane Street, low interest rates, Lyft, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, offshore financial centre, operational security, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, prediction markets, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uber lyft, underbanked, vertical integration, zero-sum game

In late May 2022, after the spring collapse was already underway, she complained: “We’re not allowing innovation to develop and experimentation to happen in a healthy way, and there are long-term consequences of that failure.”) The concern from a consumer protection standpoint was that the competition between SEC and CFTC could create a race to the bottom, in which both agencies were incentivized to stake out as much regulatory authority as possible, but then tread lightly when it comes to actual enforcement. There was a parallel turf war going on inside the halls of Congress. The SEC is overseen by the Financial Services Committee in the House and the Banking Committee in the Senate.


pages: 318 words: 99,524

Why Aren't They Shouting?: A Banker’s Tale of Change, Computers and Perpetual Crisis by Kevin Rodgers

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, capital asset pricing model, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, currency risk, diversification, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John Meriwether, latency arbitrage, law of one price, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Minsky moment, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Northern Rock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Ponzi scheme, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, technology bubble, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, value at risk, vertical integration, Y2K, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

In the US–UK context, and to an extent in the EU–UK context, PBR is intimately embroiled in a competition between regulators (and their governments) for business. There is no doubt that, at least at the rhetorical level, PBR is a weapon in the fierce battle for business between London and New York.’1 In other words, in terms of regulation, it was an ‘arms race to the bottom’. The concept of ‘regulatory capture’ is often invoked to explain this. The idea is that regulators, dazzled by banks’ brilliance or hoping for lucrative rewards in the industry after they are all done with regulating, skew things in banks’ favour. There might be some truth to this, although I have to say that I never got the impression that I had ‘captured’ the dozens of unsmiling visitors from the BaFin.


pages: 1,000 words: 247,974

Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert

agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, Corn Laws, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, European colonialism, flying shuttle, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, imperial preference, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, race to the bottom, restrictive zoning, scientific management, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture

After all, as of 1910, Chinese wages were just 10.8 percent of those in Great Britain and 6.1 percent of those prevalent in the United States, while Chinese workers also labored nearly twice as many hours as their New England counterparts—5,302 hours versus 3,000 hours. Such low-wage competition was found in even more places and it mattered. By the 1920s, for example, competition from Czech and Russian producers proved to be a threat to the German cotton industry. In the long run, cotton manufacturing became a “race to the bottom.”22 Manufacturers tried to respond to such pressures by using their access to ever more powerful governments to insulate their respective national industries from global competition. Germany’s cotton industry depended on an intricate tariff regime catering to the very specific needs of very specific sectors of its cotton industry.

For the last several decades, Walmart and other retail giants have continually moved their production from one poor country to a slightly poorer one, lured by the promise of workers even more eager and even more inexpensive. Even Chinese production is now threatened by lower-wage producers.18 The empire of cotton has continued to facilitate a giant race to the bottom, limited only by the spatial constraints of the planet. The constant reshuffling of the empire of cotton, ranging from its geography to its systems of labor, points toward an essential element of capitalism: its ability to constantly adapt. Again and again, a seemingly insurmountable crisis in one part of the empire generated a response elsewhere; capitalism both demands and creates a state of permanent revolution.


The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Bruce Katz, Jennifer Bradley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion pricing, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Shoup, double entry bookkeeping, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, global supply chain, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight, Yochai Benkler

“Making Governance Networks Effective and Democratic through Metagovernance.” Public Administration 87, no. 2 (2009): 234–58. Sorkin, Andrew Ross. Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis—and Themselves. New York: Viking, 2009. Sthanumoorthy, R. “Rate War, Race to the Bottom, and Uniform State VAT Rates: An Empirical Foundation for a Difficult Policy Issue.” Economic and Political Weekly 41, no. 24 (2006): 2460–69. Stiglitz, Joseph E. The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012. ———. “The Theory of Local Public Goods Twenty-Five Years after Tiebout: A Perspective.”


pages: 378 words: 110,518

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

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

For now, however, let’s look at how capitalism might evolve to meet these economic challenges. WHAT WOULD INFO-CAPITALISM LOOK LIKE? The rise of free information and free machines is new. But the cheapening of inputs through productivity is as old as capitalism itself. What stops capitalism from becoming a systemic race to the bottom is the creation of new markets, new needs, and raising the amount of socially necessary labour time used to meet these needs (fashion instead of rags, TVs instead of magazines); this in turn raises the amount of labour time embodied in each machine, product or service. If this inbuilt reflex could work properly, faced with the information revolution, what we’d get is a fully fledged info-capitalism.


pages: 372 words: 109,536

The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money by Frederik Obermaier

air gap, banking crisis, blood diamond, book value, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, family office, Global Witness, high net worth, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, mega-rich, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, out of africa, race to the bottom, vertical integration, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

In our globalized world it seems there is hardly a single law that cannot be circumvented or have its impact lessened with the help of a few shell companies. The British author Nicholas Shaxson sums this up rather neatly: ‘Offshore is not only a place, an idea, a way of doing things, and a weapon of the financial industry. It is also a process: a race to the bottom to where the rules, laws and outward signs of democracy are worn away little by little.’1 Used systematically, offshore offers an opportunity for an almost complete abdication of responsibility. It is very nearly impossible, we keep hearing in background discussions, for authorities to establish a chain of proof that holds up in court if the investigators come up against a network of shell companies strung out across five, ten or thirty tax havens.


pages: 385 words: 103,561

Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Our World by Greg Milner

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, British Empire, creative destruction, data acquisition, data science, Dava Sobel, different worldview, digital map, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, Eyjafjallajökull, Flash crash, friendly fire, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Ian Bogost, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kwajalein Atoll, land tenure, lone genius, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mercator projection, place-making, polynesian navigation, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, skunkworks, smart grid, systems thinking, the map is not the territory, vertical integration

In Memphis, Federal Express can add nine flight operations per hour, with annual savings of almost $22 million. Residents of Louisville, Kentucky, can breathe easier, knowing that arrivals at United Parcel Service’s central processing facility are burning 7,761 fewer gallons of fuel. In a world of low margins, scarce resources, and race-to-the-bottom competition, GPS is a powerful means to chip away at costs. When Alaska Airlines began to use GPS in 1996, it was a watershed moment for the aviation industry and also for GPS, heralding its integration into what governments and security specialists call the critical infrastructure—an inclusive term that refers to the systems, installations, and industries that make modern life possible.


pages: 477 words: 106,069

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker

butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, Douglas Hofstadter, feminist movement, functional fixedness, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, index card, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, language acquisition, lolcat, McMansion, meta-analysis, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, profit maximization, quantitative easing, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, short selling, Steven Pinker, the market place, theory of mind, Turing machine

The Usage Panel is intended to be a sample of the virtual community for whom careful writers write. When it comes to best practices in usage, there is no higher authority. The powerlessness of dictionaries to enforce the prescriptivists’ dream of preventing linguistic change does not mean that the dictionaries are doomed to preside over a race to the bottom. Macdonald titled his 1962 review of Webster’s Third “The String Untuned,” an allusion to the calamitous violation of the natural order that Ulysses foresaw in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: “The bounded waters should lift their bosoms higher than the shores and make a sop of all this solid globe.


pages: 382 words: 105,819

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

With 2.2 billion people clicking, sharing, and commenting every month—1.47 billion every day—Facebook’s AI knows more about users than they can imagine. All that data in one place would be a target for bad actors, even if it were well-protected. But Facebook’s business model is to give the opportunity to exploit that data to just about anyone who is willing to pay for the privilege. Tristan makes the case that platforms compete in a race to the bottom of the brain stem—where the AIs present content that appeals to the low-level emotions of the lizard brain, things like immediate rewards, outrage, and fear. Short videos perform better than longer ones. Animated GIFs work better than static photos. Sensational headlines work better than calm descriptions of events.


pages: 417 words: 109,367

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century by Ronald Bailey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Climatic Research Unit, commodity super cycle, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic transition, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, energy security, failed state, financial independence, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Neolithic agricultural revolution, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, phenotype, planetary scale, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, rewilding, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, systematic bias, Tesla Model S, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, two and twenty, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, yield curve

The classic examples are fisheries. Frequently they are an open-access resource that is being overexploited. If a fisher leaves a fish in the water to spawn, the next guy will catch it and sell it. Thus no individual fisher has the incentive to protect the health and productivity of the fishery. It’s a race to the bottom, with both fish and fishers losing out. Similarly, pollutants are pumped into rivers and into the air and tropical forests are chopped down because all too often anyone can use those resources without paying for the costs of the harm they cause. One such commons problem I considered in my 1992 book was the “ozone hole” over Antarctica that was produced by chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) refrigerants floating up into the stratosphere.


pages: 440 words: 108,137

The Meritocracy Myth by Stephen J. McNamee

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, antiwork, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, failed state, fixed income, food desert, Gary Kildall, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, joint-stock company, junk bonds, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, occupational segregation, old-boy network, pink-collar, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, prediction markets, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Scientific racism, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, white flight, young professional

Bernhardt et al. found that 90 percent of white male workers in the most recent cohort are doing worse now than their counterparts at corresponding ages from the earlier cohort. Median wage growth has fallen by 21 percent, and the distributions of remaining gains have become more unequal. While a small core of the most recent cohort is holding its own, for the most part the net wage decline is a “race to the bottom” (Bernhardt et al. 2001, 174). The growth of income inequality in recent decades is not associated with individuals surging ahead but rather with a few holding on while most have lost ground. The small core of workers holding their own are mostly college graduates. But even here, nearly two-thirds of all college graduates in the more recent cohort fared worse than college graduates in the previous cohort.


pages: 430 words: 109,064

13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown by Simon Johnson, James Kwak

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business cycle, business logic, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency risk, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, yield curve

And while each regulator nominally had its own sphere of jurisdiction—bank holding companies for the Fed, national banks for the OCC, and so on—financial institutions that fell under multiple regulatory agencies were allowed to select their primary regulator. As a result, regulatory agencies had to compete for funding by convincing financial institutions to accept their regulation, which created the incentives for a “race to the bottom,” in which agencies attract “customers” by offering relatively lax regulatory enforcement. The OTS stood out in this competition. According to William Black, a law professor and former official at the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, “The reputation of the Office of Thrift Supervision was that it was the weakest, and the laxest, and it was indeed outright friendly to the worst of the non-prime lending.”22 American International Group (AIG), a massive insurance company with one of the largest derivatives trading operations in the world, opened a savings and loan—and then chose the OTS as its primary regulator, even though the agency, with its focus on mortgage lending, had no chance of monitoring the risks taken on by AIG’s infamous Financial Products division.


pages: 387 words: 110,820

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bread and circuses, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, fear of failure, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, market design, means of production, mental accounting, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, side project, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, washing machines reduced drudgery, working poor, yield management, zero-sum game

“But consolidation has meant that when the large agribusiness interests decide to change course abruptly and, say, invest in biofuels, that can lead to severe disruptions in food markets in the short run.” The United States is the world’s largest exporter of food and as such dominates world food policy. But in recent years we have become increasingly dependent on imports in a frantic effort to keep food prices low. Left to their own devices, global food markets pretty much follow the same “race to the bottom” model followed by other unfettered markets. Subsidies and economies of scale have made grain and everything it is made of—including the animals that eat it—increasingly cheap. In hard times all but the poorest Americans tend not to cut back on food consumption but, rather, gravitate toward getting what we perceive to be “more for less.”


pages: 385 words: 101,761

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

“Profit arises out of the inherent, absolute unpredictability of things, out of the sheer, brute fact that the results of human activity cannot be anticipated and then only in so far as even a probability calculation in regard to them is impossible and meaningless.” Knight did not believe in the efficiency of markets, arguing instead that when companies operate for efficiency, and compete on price, profits tend to fall—and sometimes fall to zero. Put another way, efficiency drives a race to the bottom. Creativity, on the other hand, generates products and services that, because of their originality and utility, can have big profit margins and bigger profits. For Knight, social uncertainty and chance were sources of new knowledge, opportunity, and profits. He was also keenly aware that focusing on “wants” alone was insufficient.


pages: 379 words: 109,223

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, corporate raider, crossover SUV, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, NetJets, Network effects, pattern recognition, pets.com, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, éminence grise

Thinking that agencies were too focused on mass—like TV and full-page newspaper ads—and not focused enough on “solving the business problems of companies,” she started a marketing company that grew to 150 employees. IBM iX acquired her company and together she said they set out “to rethink the agency world.” The “hole in the market” they saw was that data was not being used to zero in on what individuals wanted or needed and to solve large corporate problems. “Agencies are in a race to the bottom. They are losing talent, and the reason is that they have commoditized their creativity.” Their corporate bosses at the holding companies, she believes, dwell too much on finances, including selling more thirty- and sixty-second ads. “The people that will win the race in the end will be the people who can fundamentally refine and make new products out of data.”


pages: 380 words: 109,724

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Stiglitz, who heads up the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation, a group of academics and policy makers pushing for global tax reform. “Firms like this can use financial engineering to play all sorts of games,” says Stiglitz, who favors a global flat tax on such firms to avoid a zero-sum race to the bottom to the lowest-cost tax havens.9 How would this actually work in practice? A key idea found in many of the proposals from tax reform advocates is to tax revenues at the point of sale, rather than profits, which would reduce the sort of financial engineering that allows IP- and data-rich companies like Apple and Google to offshore profits in tax havens like Ireland and the Netherlands.


pages: 453 words: 111,010

Licence to be Bad by Jonathan Aldred

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

It elegantly expresses the conflict between private and collective interest in thousands of real-world contexts. Firms producing similar products – OPEC oil producers or Coke versus Pepsi – cut prices to gain market share, but because their rivals do the same all firms suffer a fall in profit. The Prisoner’s Dilemma describes this and many other ‘races to the bottom’. Likewise, the so-called Tragedy of the Commons describes a Prisoner’s Dilemma: given free access to a common resource, everyone will consume it regardless of what others do, leading to damage or destruction of the resource and making everyone worse off. The challenge posed by climate change is, too, widely agreed to be a Prisoner’s Dilemma: everyone is better off if global carbon emissions are reduced, but every country is reluctant to reduce emissions, regardless of what other countries do.


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

Freelancers who work in other industries, such as communication, IT, or creative design, would do well to form professional interest groups and push for better protections as well. The fact that the market for such e-work is often virtual and/or international should not mean that labor standards must be an unstoppable race to the bottom. It should be possible, for example, to require that contract work in specific states or countries respects the same minimum hourly pay, whether for “online” or “offline” workers. And when virtual contracts are performed across borders, new bilateral or multilateral agreements could be made, with governments establishing under which conditions it is possible to virtually commute between them.


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

Freelancers who work in other industries, such as communication, IT, or creative design, would do well to form professional interest groups and push for better protections as well. The fact that the market for such e-work is often virtual and/or international should not mean that labor standards must be an unstoppable race to the bottom. It should be possible, for example, to require that contract work in specific states or countries respects the same minimum hourly pay, whether for “online” or “offline” workers. And when virtual contracts are performed across borders, new bilateral or multilateral agreements could be made, with governments establishing under which conditions it is possible to virtually commute between them.


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

One country’s surplus is another country’s trade deficit, so by definition not everyone can win in that way at once. But it doesn’t follow that the deficit country has to sustain real economic loss if it gets its policy matrix right. The Trumpian approach to trade creates strife and a zero-sum race to the bottom over too few globally available jobs. Already, President Trump’s tariffs have failed to revive American manufacturing, raised prices for US consumers, invited retaliation from China, and contributed to a slowdown in the global economy. All in subservience to the trade deficit myth. Instead, we must recognize that the US government can supply all the dollars our domestic private sector needs to reach full employment, and it can supply all the dollars the rest of the world needs to build up their reserves and protect their trade flows.


pages: 446 words: 109,157

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Black Lives Matter, centre right, classic study, Climategate, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, framing effect, hive mind, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, Jon Ronson, Louis Pasteur, market bubble, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, post-truth, profit motive, QAnon, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Russian election interference, social software, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

We need our information systems to steer us away from error and bias, which was what the institutions and standards of modern science and journalism were set up to do. Digital media’s built-in business model of treating all information like advertisements pretty much guaranteed an attention-seeking race to the bottom. That would have been challenging enough; but the digital information ecology compounded the problem by developing characteristics which were not just blind to misinformation but amplified it. Outrage Addiction First, it hacked our brains. In 2013 a young public relations executive posted a tasteless racial joke on Twitter, intending, she later said, to satirize racism and white privilege.


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

Together, the two resolved to resurrect domestic mask manufacturing, which had been offshored due to globalization and cheaper labor and production costs in China and Mexico. Hospitals and their market-dominant buying groups wanted to pay the lowest price possible, and big companies including 3M, Honeywell, Cardinal Health, and Medline looked to foreign materials and production in a race to the bottom. Bowen believed that the company could buck the trend and attract dedicated American customers with a simple and—so he thought—unassailable argument: Domestic mask production is vital to national security. It was idealistic, if not altogether naive. And the years since had not been kind. On January 22, 2020, in the dim and empty wing that was once the accounting department, Bowen arrived at his office and dropped his backpack on a large oak desk, where reports and old letters and surgical masks and trinkets coalesced into entropy, a reflection of the memories, anger, and concerns bopping around his head.


pages: 356 words: 106,161

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

Success in international trade is judged by exporting more; and especially, having large trade balances in your favor. Weaker currencies are seen as preferable to stronger ones, given that this makes your exchange rates competitive abroad. Low wages and tax breaks are used to lure in multinationals in order to boost exports even further, resulting in a race to the bottom that developing countries (especially) cannot afford to lose given the lack of domestic capital and know-how to compete on their own. That all nations could pursue these goals is, of course, as impossible as all of Lake Wobegon’s children in Chapter Two being above average: a country’s exports will always be someone else’s imports since world trade at any point in time is zero-sum.


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

By the magic of independent probabilities, the worse the quality of the debt that entered into the tranching and pooling process, the more dramatic the effect. Substantial portions of undocumented, low-rated, high-yield debt emerged as AAA. In any boom, irresponsible, near criminal or outright fraudulent behavior is to be expected. But the mortgage securitization mechanism systematically produced this race to the bottom in mortgage lending quality. It was the difference between the high yield of the underlying securities included in the collateral pool and the low interest that was paid to the investors who bought the AAA-rated asset-backed securities that generated the profit. From 2004, fully half the subprime mortgages being fed into the system had incomplete or zero documentation, and 30 percent were interest-only loans to people who had no prospect of making basic repayment.52 The ratings agencies would subsequently face penetrating questions about their complicity in this process.

The original impetus was to create zones of financial activity that were lightly regulated in offshore centers like London. But by the early 1970s at the latest it was clear that this transatlantic financial system had the potential for dangerous instability.37 Furthermore, the competitive race for profit and market share among the banks in turn unleashed a regulatory race to the bottom. In 1984 Fed chair Paul Volcker proposed new rules to set minimum standards for bank capital, hoping thereby to prevent undercutting of relatively robust banks by less well-capitalized competitors, notably from Japan. For the resilience of a bank in the face of losses on its loan book, capital is the crucial criterion.


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

At the same time, the recent rise of tax competition in a world of free-flowing capital has led many governments to exempt capital income from the progressive income tax. This is particularly true in Europe, whose relatively small states have thus far proved incapable of achieving a coordinated tax policy. The result is an endless race to the bottom, leading, for example, to cuts in corporate tax rates and to the exemption of interest, dividends, and other financial revenues from the taxes to which labor incomes are subject. One consequence of this is that in most countries taxes have (or will soon) become regressive at the top of the income hierarchy.

The minor disparities between national social models are of secondary importance in view of the challenges to the very survival of the common European model.35 Another point to bear in mind is that without such a European political union, it is highly likely that tax competition will continue to wreak havoc. The race to the bottom continues in regard to corporate taxes, as recently proposed “allowances for corporate equity” show.36 It is important to realize that tax competition regularly leads to a reliance on consumption taxes, that is, to the kind of tax system that existed in the nineteenth century, where no progressivity is possible.


pages: 399 words: 116,828

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

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

Paper presented at the Chicago Urban Poverty and Family Life Conference, October 10–12, Chicago. Peeples, Faith, and Rolf Loeber. 1994. “Do Individual Factors and Neigh-borhood Context Explain Ethnic Differences in Juvenile Delinquency?” Journal of Quantitative Criminology 10:141–57. Petersen, Paul E. 1995. “State Responses to Welfare Reform: A Race to the Bottom.” In Welfare Reform: An Analysis of Issues, edited by Isabel V. Sawhill, pp. 7–11. Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press. Plotnick, Robert D. 1990. “Determinants of Teenage Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing.” Journal of Marriage and the Family 52:735–46. Price, Hugh. 1994. Keynote address. National Urban League Annual Conference, Indianapolis, July 24.


pages: 437 words: 115,594

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World by Steven Radelet

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, colonial rule, creative destruction, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, export processing zone, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off grid, oil shock, out of africa, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

Economists Rachel Heath of the University of Washington and Mushfiq Mobarak of Yale University estimate that around 15 percent of Bangladeshi women between the ages of sixteen and thirty are employed in the garment industry. They find compelling evidence that women’s employment in the garment industry has had a significant positive effect on reducing fertility rates, delaying marriage, and increasing girls’ educational attainment.14 Although some fear that global integration creates a “race to the bottom” with falling wages, the increase in investment and economic activity more typically has led to rising wages—fairly significant rises. The wage increases are largest in “tradable” sectors: firms that have integrated into world markets by exporting or competing with imports. According to the World Bank, wages in traded goods and services for both unskilled workers (such as sewing machine operators) and skilled workers (chemical engineers) have risen by 60 percent in real terms since the mid-1990s.


pages: 414 words: 119,116

The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World by Michael Marmot

active measures, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, cakes and ale, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Doha Development Round, epigenetics, financial independence, future of work, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, illegal immigration, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Kenneth Rogoff, Kibera, labour market flexibility, longitudinal study, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, New Urbanism, obamacare, paradox of thrift, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, structural adjustment programs, the built environment, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, twin studies, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working poor

Solutions to improving working conditions should be applied globally, but examples of local action show how working life can be transformed – witness the scavengers of India or the young unemployed of Wales. A worrying trend is that work will increasingly be stratified into well-paid empowering work for people with education and skills and the reverse for those without. Global competition can lead to a race to the bottom. Worse working conditions and cheaper labour costs make a country more attractive for transnational corporations. Highlighting the problem is a step towards addressing it. I said in Chapter 5 that education was central because it provided the key connection between early life and the grown-up world of work.


pages: 373 words: 112,822

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Boris Johnson, Burning Man, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collaborative consumption, data science, Didi Chuxing, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, East Village, fake it until you make it, fixed income, gentrification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, inflight wifi, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Necker cube, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, race to the bottom, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

A few months later, on February 1, 2016, a few hundred Uber drivers gathered in front of the company’s offices in Long Island City to protest the latest round of UberX fare cuts. Uber had recently reduced its fares by 15 percent in many cities, part of its annual effort to stimulate demand during the winter slowdown and increase the frequency of rides (and, no doubt, to apply further financial pressure to its domestic rival Lyft). NO ONE WINS THE RACE TO THE BOTTOM! read one sign. GIVE US THE RATE BACK. SHAME ON UBER! read another. The drivers that day in Queens were angry about what now seemed like a sub-minimum wage, about Uber’s ever-increasing commission, and about the need to work longer hours to eke out a living. Uber promised to pay drivers a minimum hourly rate if their earnings fell below a certain level, but the drivers said that the company found a myriad of ways to disqualify them from the guaranteed wage.


pages: 374 words: 114,600

The Quants by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, automated trading system, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, index fund, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, job automation, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kickstarter, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Mercer, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, yield curve, éminence grise

AQR also made misplaced bets on the direction of interest rates, currencies, commercial real estate, and convertible bonds—pretty much everything under the sun. As the losses piled up, investors were getting antsy. AQR was supposed to hold up in market downturns, just as it had in 2001 and 2002 during the dot-com blowup. Instead, AQR was racing to the bottom along with the rest of the market. In October and November Asness went on a long road trip, visiting nearly every investor in his fund, traveling in a private jet to locations as far afield as Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Sydney, Australia. For the rare down moments, he pulled out his Kindle, Amazon.com’s wireless reading device, which was loaded with books ranging from How Math Explains the World to Anna Karenina to When Markets Collide by Mohamad El-Erian, a financial guru at bond giant Pimco.


pages: 389 words: 119,487

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

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

And if the resulting developments confer on China some crucial economic or military advantage, the USA will be tempted to break its own ban. Particularly in a xenophobic dog-eat-dog world, if even a single country chooses to pursue a high-risk, high-gain technological path, other countries will be forced to do the same, because nobody can afford to remain behind. In order to avoid such a race to the bottom, humankind will probably need some kind of global identity and loyalty. Moreover, whereas nuclear war and climate change threaten only the physical survival of humankind, disruptive technologies might change the very nature of humanity, and are therefore entangled with humans’ deepest ethical and religious beliefs.


pages: 356 words: 112,271

Brexit and Ireland: The Dangers, the Opportunities, and the Inside Story of the Irish Response by Tony Connelly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, centre right, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, land bank, LNG terminal, low skilled workers, non-tariff barriers, open borders, personalized medicine, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, tech worker, éminence grise

Already the Irish Congress of Trade Unions has warned that EU employment rights and rules governing equality, health and safety, part-time workers, agency workers, working time and product standards will all be at risk. Its October 2016 Brexit report warns that ‘changes to employment rights in the UK could place downward pressure on employment protections across the island [of Ireland]. This in turn could endanger job security, threaten key industries and effectively lead to a “race to the bottom” across the island.’ One big focus will be on the extent to which the UK maintains its standards across a range of areas currently governed by EU regulatory systems. There are over 50 EU agencies that cover a multitude of realms where directives and regulations have an impact, from the Community Plant Variety Office, which governs intellectual property rights for those who breed plants that are sold across the single market, to the European Maritime Safety Agency, which covers things like pollution alerts, hazardous shipments and accident investigations at sea, to the European Chemical Agency (ECHA).


pages: 379 words: 114,807

The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth by Fred Pearce

activist lawyer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blood diamond, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Cape to Cairo, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, corporate raider, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, Garrett Hardin, Global Witness, index fund, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, megacity, megaproject, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, out of africa, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, smart cities, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

Land leases cost as little as two dollars per acre per year, he said. Water was free, and taxes virtually nonexistent. There were “no restrictions of foreign exchange; no limits on expat employees; full repatriation of profits, dividends and royalties and 100 percent foreign ownership permitted.” Competitors in the “race to the bottom” to play host for palm oil will find Sierra Leone already there. The huge areas of forestland in the DRC, along with its good soils and year-round rains, make it another potential honey pot, as it was in the days of Lever Brothers. Elwyn Blattner, the New Jersey inheritor of the Blattner Group’s land assets, is as friendly with the country’s new rulers as he was with Mobutu, and still operates a rubber plantation and thousands of acres of oil palm across the country.


pages: 489 words: 111,305

How the World Works by Noam Chomsky, Arthur Naiman, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, capital controls, clean water, corporate governance, deindustrialization, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, glass ceiling, heat death of the universe, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, land reform, liberation theology, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, single-payer health, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, transfer pricing, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

Until the late 19th century, corporations were limited to functions explicitly determined by the state charters. That requirement effectively disappeared when New Jersey offered to drop it. Corporations began incorporating in New Jersey instead of New York, thus forcing New York to also drop the requirement and setting off a “race to the bottom.” The result was a substantial increase in the power of private tyrannies, providing them with new weapons to undermine liberty and human rights, and to administer markets in their own interest. The logic is the same when GM decides to invest in Poland, or when Daimler-Benz transfers production from Germany, where labor is highly paid, to Alabama, where it isn’t.


pages: 349 words: 114,038

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution by Pieter Hintjens

4chan, Aaron Swartz, airport security, AltaVista, anti-communist, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, bread and circuses, business climate, business intelligence, business process, Chelsea Manning, clean water, commoditize, congestion charging, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Debian, decentralized internet, disinformation, Edward Snowden, failed state, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, gamification, German hyperinflation, global village, GnuPG, Google Chrome, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, M-Pesa, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, no silver bullet, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, packet switching, patent troll, peak oil, power law, pre–internet, private military company, race to the bottom, real-name policy, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, selection bias, Skype, slashdot, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, transaction costs, twin studies, union organizing, wealth creators, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, Zipf's Law

. -- 1stworld, on Slashdot The economic impact of seven billion citizens joining digital society is vast and only just starting to be understood. Where this will take us is not clear. We can however already see the trends: All markets have more participants. In any given area of activity, the number of people who participate and compete has greatly increased. Rather than creating a race to the bottom, we see increasing specialization and diversity of suppliers, and lucrative new businesses constantly emerge. All markets are more equal. The tools available to even the smallest players give them real power within their markets. Smaller players are more educated and informed. The cost of getting information has fallen to near zero and today the size of larger players actively works against them.


pages: 404 words: 115,108

They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy by Lawrence Lessig

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Columbine, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joi Ito, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Upton Sinclair, Yochai Benkler

Once one state did it, others followed pretty quickly, and for a pretty obvious reason: if your state, allocating electors by district, is dividing its electors between two candidates, but your neighboring state is giving all of its electors to just one candidate, then your neighbor could matter more to the candidates than do you. This created a race to the bottom, as each state shifted to WTA to ensure that it mattered as much as the next. It is difficult for us to see today exactly what the framers imagined the states would do in 1789. That’s in part because the framers had no real clue. But it’s also because the very idea of the presidency changed pretty radically pretty quickly.


pages: 1,172 words: 114,305

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

We may want our doctors to access such information, but we need not let banks, employers, or others use it. There is more to life—and public policy—than consenting transactions among borrowers and fintechs to ensure “financial inclusion” (the industry’s go-to rationale for deregulation). Without proper guardrails, there will be a race to the bottom in both data sharing and behavior shaping as more individuals compete for better deals. That would result in a boom in predatory inclusion (which harms more than it helps), creepy inclusion (which gives corporate entities a voyeuristically intimate look at our lives), and subordinating inclusion (which entrenches inequality by forcing persons to maintain the same patterns of life that resulted in their desperation in the first place).


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

The Polish government’s willingness in early 2016 to countenance reductions in benefits for their nationals in Britain in return for British support for permanent NATO bases in the east to deter Russia has showed that a deal is possible.31 The United Kingdom will also have to coordinate her economic and environmental policies with the single eurozone state in order to avoid a competitive ‘race to the bottom’ in trade with dictatorships, particularly the ‘People’s Republic of China’. All this needs to be embedded in a new grand settlement for Europe, achieved in one fell swoop over a relatively short and intense period, rather than through the current agony of perpetual referendum and renegotiation.


System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

The long-run erosion of worker power and union organizations has meant that corporate executives are largely free to set priorities, cut costs, and invest in new technologies without due consideration of the potential impacts on their workforces. And in an environment in which more open international trade creates a race to the bottom on standards and worker protections, those who are most susceptible to job loss are even more isolated. Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, which has made tackling inequality its highest priority, lamented, “Too often, discussions about the future of work center on technology rather than on the people who will be affected by it.”


pages: 388 words: 125,472

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

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

But there are good reasons to believe that the head of G4S, David Taylor-Smith, was right when in June 2012 he suggested private companies would be in control of large swathes of the police within five years. The rationale of Britain’s police force from the beginning was ‘policing by consent’. Now, Britain faces the prospect of police forces policing by consent of their shareholders rather than their communities. The logical end result of the Establishment mantra is a race to the bottom in the quality of service and the rights of workers. After all, companies slicing off chunks of the public sector are driven by one thing: profit. And there are few better methods of boosting their profit streams than slashing workers’ wages and undermining their terms and conditions. Like other current working contractors, Terry Williams cannot give his real name when talking about his job, because if he does so he risks losing it.


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

Economists reckon that many kinds of pollution rise as a country gets richer (when every family buys a motorcycle) and then fall in the later stages of development (when we ban leaded gasoline and require more efficient engines). Critics of trade have alleged that allowing individual countries to make their own environmental decisions will lead to a “race to the bottom” in which poor countries compete for business by despoiling their environments. It hasn’t happened. The World Bank recently concluded after six years of study, “Pollution havens—developing countries that provide a permanent home to dirty industries—have failed to materialize. Instead, poorer nations and communities are acting to reduce pollution because they have decided that the benefits of abatement outweigh the costs.”21 Climate change is a trickier case, in that carbon emissions are a zero-sum situation, at least in developing countries in the near term.


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 British government had to nationalize RBS in 2008 and spent billions to cover its loses; RBC in 2012 was one of the top twenty banks in the world, with a market capitalization of $74 billion.) A Canadian finance executive who spent the 1990s in Toronto, then moved to Asia, and now lives in London sheepishly recalls thinking: “Come on, guys, get in the game! The world’s changing.” — The regulatory race to the bottom between New York and London—and the plutocracy’s eager and misguided complicity in that contest—is an important cause of the 2008 financial crisis. But it is also a crucial episode in another story: the rise of the super-elite. Much of the story of the rise of the 1 percent, and especially of the 0.1 percent, is the story of the rise of finance.


pages: 320 words: 87,853

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

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

Like runaway “grade inflation” that cheapens straight A report cards, rating inflation has eroded the meaning (if not the value) of AAA ratings. There were plenty of convenient rationales at hand: the U.S. economy was remarkably strong, population rise meant housing prices could only go up, computer-driven productivity would lift all incomes.42 The credit raters were soon in a race to the bottom in laxity. As sociologist Will Davies observes, those “tasked with representing, measuring and judging capitalist activity are also seeking to profit from” it, and there is little to connect probity in the former activities to prospering in the present.43 110 THE BLACK BOX SOCIETY Their crudity eventually captured media attention, as various “gotcha” statements emerged.


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

Sweden and Switzerland (and to a much more specifically technological degree, Israel) are good examples of countries that have created the cultural, financial, and human capital conditions allowing medium-sized enterprises to thrive. If Ireland can do this, it will have less need to be concerned about a global race to the bottom in corporation taxes. Overall, Brexit is unleashing a range of powerful dynamics and opportunities across the United Kingdom and Ireland. One reality is that the small-economy model will become more relevant in that part of the world. Another is that Britain’s interaction with the Commonwealth will change in the same way that England’s relationship with Scotland and Ireland will change.


pages: 677 words: 121,255

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

Martin’s Press), and The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt (2018, Penguin), the Oppression Olympics are well past their opening ceremonies in colleges, corporations, and Congress, tearing institutions asunder as conflicting cohorts vie for who has suffered the most historical inequities. It is also known as “competitive victimhood,” and it has resulted in a race to the bottom through what Lukianoff and Haidt call “The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.” They write, “As a result of our long evolution for tribal competition, the human mind readily does dichotomous, us-versus-them thinking. If we want to create welcoming, inclusive communities, we should be doing everything we can to turn down the tribalism and turn up the sense of common humanity.”


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

-China trade and economic engagement—given the extraordinary interdependence of many U.S. and Chinese economies—but it would seek to ensure that important American supply chains, particularly for vital technology components, are free of Beijing’s control. For its part, China is already hastening to free itself from its reliance on American semiconductor technology, investing nearly $30 billion in 2019 to develop a homegrown industry.45 A race to the bottom is rarely welcome, but the reality of the current situation is that technological decoupling is some ways a race. If China decouples from the U.S. before the U.S. decouples from China, the former will enjoy an enormous degree of geopolitical leverage over the latter—this outcome should be avoided at all costs.


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

When trade unionism, the Bismarckian welfare state, Progressivism, and socialism arrived, they corresponded with the big rise in real wages, and gave the impression of causing it—when it was in fact caused by rising productivity from trade-tested betterment. To this day progressives believe that without minimum wages and trade unions our wages would fall to $2 an hour. Their bit of anti-economic illogic is that without state-enforced minimums there would occur “a race to the bottom.” The argument ignores the competition among bosses that yields wages equal to what employees produce at the margin. Real wages in Britain rose as shown in table 6. The problem was that the sharp payoff was at first delayed—note the acceleration only during 1850–1880, then a slowdown, and then the greater accelerations in the twentieth century.

Wright: geniuses, 474; sociological imagination, 575 Milton, John: censorship, 684n12; egalitarianism, 363; Greteman on network of, 393; “honest,” 238; ideal society, 636 Mincer, Jacob: returns to human capital, 662n7 Mingardi, Alberto: acknowledged, 651n1, 667n13 minimum wage, 33, 144, 407; earned income credit and, 178; eugenic origins of, 605; race to the bottom and, 595; in South Africa, 606; spread to global south, 625. See also job protection Mirabeau, Comte de: on happiness, 683n5 Mirowski, Philip: neoliberalism, 660n1 Mises, Ludwig von: Austrian economics, 360; entangling, 55; ideological change, 417; and Schumpeter, 646; trade and the poor, 697n3 Mishra, Pankaj: Great Enrichment, 55; imperialism, 88 Mitch, David: acknowledged, xxxviii Mitchell, Douglas: acknowledged, xli; and Richard McKeon, 646 Mithen, Steven: early trade, 106, 655n20 Moav, Omer: farmer victims, 656n21 Moberg, Vilhelm: Swedish poverty, 9 Moby Dick (Melville): bourgeoisie, 591 Modi, Narendra: liberalization, 76; toilet policy, 27 Mokyr, Joel: acknowledged, xxxviii, xxxix, 652n18; on Allen, 652n26; anesthesia in GDP, 77; Baconianism, 506; betterment by lower classes, 434; British human capital, 473; causes of betterment, 105; critique of McCloskey, 409; Dutch performance in eighteenth century, 408; elite, 525; elite as cause, xxviii–xxix; fragmentation vs. vested interests, 396; gentleman, 226; Gujin Tushu Jicheng (Chinese encyclopedia), 388; ideational approach to economic history, 94, 511; ideological change, 231, 232, 471; Industrial Enlightenment, 422; institutions, 115; on Irish famine, 655n8; Jews and betterment, 427, 428; neo-institutionalism, 122; patents during Industrial Revolution, 133; potatoes in Ireland, 16, 652n29; predictability of technology, 107; pronunciation of name, 651n3; psychology vs. sociology, 473; Republic of letters, from liberalism, xv, 392; rule of law, 112; science and economy, 462, 505, 506, 517; some force of institutions, 664n7; technical elite as cause, xxvii, xxviii; timing of Great Enrichment, 534; usefulness, 95, 285, 286; usefulness, Chinese, 440; why betterment continues, 536 Mondragón: cooperative, 568 monopoly: bourgeoisie seeks, 174, 460, 585, 599; Chinese state’s on overseas trade, 399; Edison, 175; guilds as, 462; of ideas, Venetian, 460; Indiana blue laws as, 464; natural, 143; by patent, Watt, 175; state as guardian against, 175; state as source of, 175; unions and, 56; Watt’s patent, 418.


No Slack: The Financial Lives of Low-Income Americans by Michael S. Barr

active measures, asset allocation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, conceptual framework, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, information asymmetry, it's over 9,000, labor-force participation, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, low interest rates, machine readable, market friction, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, p-value, payday loans, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, search costs, subprime mortgage crisis, the payments system, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked

These funds will build on the local Bank On movement, made up of local coalitions dedicated to promoting access to mainstream financial products. Consumer Financial Protection While education and access are critical, so too is consumer protection. In an environment of weak and ineffective regulations, the tendency of some consumer financial markets to end up in “races to the bottom”—as we saw in the housing market—is not likely to be overcome solely by consumer education and access. The CARD Act, which President Obama championed and signed into law in May 2009, is an example of regulation written for a market and product in which the provider has a strong incentive to usher consumers to suboptimal choices— to rack up lots of late fees and to make only the minimum payment each month.


pages: 505 words: 142,118

A Man for All Markets by Edward O. Thorp

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3Com Palm IPO, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carried interest, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Edward Thorp, Erdős number, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, High speed trading, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, Mason jar, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Murray Gell-Mann, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical arbitrage, stem cell, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, tail risk, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, Works Progress Administration

To the optimists I mention the obvious: endless deficits, massive wastage of lives and wealth in wars, political subsidies (pork, bailouts, corporate welfare, paying the able-bodied not to work), and destructive partisanship in all three branches of government. Meanwhile, the rise of China is transforming the geopolitical and economic landscape. One of the most ominous and underappreciated threats to our future is in education and technology. My own state of California is a leader in the race to the bottom. The anti-tax movement has starved the state of revenue, especially the educational system. The ten campuses of the University of California, once among the finest public systems of higher education in the world, raised tuition to $12,000 a year by 2015. When I was a student in 1949 it was $70, which is like $700 today, adjusting for inflation.


pages: 503 words: 131,064

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together by Bruce Schneier

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, corporate governance, crack epidemic, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, desegregation, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunbar number, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, hydraulic fracturing, impulse control, income inequality, information security, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, iterative process, Jean Tirole, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Julian Assange, language acquisition, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, microcredit, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nick Leeson, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, patent troll, phenotype, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, security theater, shareholder value, slashdot, statistical model, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, technological singularity, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, UNCLOS, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

But by keeping their prices high, each of them runs the risk of their competitors acting in their self-interest and undercutting them. And since they can't trust the others not to do that, they all preemptively lower their prices and all end up selling sandwiches at $5 each. In economics this is known as the “race to the bottom.” Societal Dilemma: Setting prices. Society: All the merchants. Group interest: Make the most money as a group. Competing interest: Make the most money individually, and in the short term. Group norm: Keep prices high. Corresponding defection: Undercut the competition. To encourage people to act in the group interest, the society implements a variety of societal pressures.


pages: 454 words: 139,350

Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy by Benjamin Barber

airport security, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, computer age, Corn Laws, Corrections Corporation of America, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, global village, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Norbert Wiener, North Sea oil, off-the-grid, pirate software, Plato's cave, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, undersea cable, vertical integration, young professional, zero-sum game

McWorld seeks to overcome sovereignty and make its impact global. Jihad too makes war on sovereignty, using the interdependence of transportation, communication, and other modern technological systems to render borders porous and sovereign oversight irrelevant. Just as jobs defy borders, hemorrhaging from one country to another in a wage race to the bottom, and just as safety, health, and environmental standards lack an international benchmark against which states and regions might organize their employment, so too anarchistic terrorists loyal to no state and accountability to no people range freely across the world, knowing that no borders can detain them, no united global opinion can isolate them, no international police or juridical institutions can interdict them.


pages: 444 words: 130,646

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, British Empire, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, context collapse, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, gentrification, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of writing, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, loose coupling, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Streisand effect, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

The most seasoned protesters (some of whom I knew, and some of whom I met later) had been involved in the antiglobalization protests, although most protesters would use the term “anti–corporate globalization.” Many were avid travelers, immigrants, or migrants, not opposed to the knitting together of a global society, but pitted against corporations that were taking advantage of globalization to create a race to the bottom among workers around the world. Workers were mostly not allowed to travel freely while capital hopped from jurisdiction to jurisdiction at will. That was corporate globalization. This movement came to broader attention through a large-scale disruption in 1999 of the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle.


pages: 496 words: 131,938

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

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

Asians are racing to connect Africa, not to divide it, building modern infrastructures that both Western multilateral agencies and African governments have been neglecting for decades. Afro-Asian linkages date back many centuries but have never been stronger. Aggressive courting of developing countries by major powers is often assumed to be a “race to the bottom,” but as African countries’ economies grow and their leaders become more pragmatic, shrewd diplomacy among various suitors can drive a race to the top where the winners accrue the most benefits from foreign interests. After all, Asians are buying African resources at a high price, not plundering them, providing revenues that governments can use to invest in economic diversification.


pages: 458 words: 136,405

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

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

He also had the unenviable job of evolving Labour’s position in face of the scepticism of Jeremy Corbyn, LOTO and John McDonnell on one side, and Remainers such as Chuka Umunna and Andrew Adonis on the other. In March 2017, he laid out Labour’s six tests. They included a deal having ‘the exact same benefits’ as under a customs union; protections on the future relationship with the EU with respect to migration, national security, regional policy; and preventing ‘a race to the bottom.’ They were to become the security blanket of Labour’s Brexit strategy until 2019. When in doubt, voice the six tests that allowed a broad level of obfuscation through 2017 and most of 2018. When the general election was called in April 2017 the official Labour position was spelled out in its manifesto as a party committed to leave the EU.


pages: 545 words: 137,789

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, different worldview, diversification, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, incomplete markets, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

It was also relatively easy for the major banks to play the agencies off one another because of the opacity of the structured transactions and the high potential fees earned by the winning agency. Originators of structured securities typically chose the agency with the lowest standards, engendering a race to the bottom in terms of rating quality. While the methods used to rate structured securities have rightly come under fire, in my opinion, the business model prevented analysts from putting investor interests first. While all this was happening, the nation’s top financial cop, the chairman of the Fed, was averting his eyes.


pages: 448 words: 142,946

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate raider, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, disintermediation, diversification, do well by doing good, fiat currency, financial independence, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global supply chain, God and Mammon, happiness index / gross national happiness, hydraulic fracturing, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, land value tax, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, low interest rates, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, multilevel marketing, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, special drawing rights, spinning jenny, technoutopianism, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons

ECONOMIC AND MONETARY LOCALIZATION Motivation: As community has disintegrated around the world, people yearn for a return to local economies where we know personally the people we depend on. We want to be connected to people and places, not adrift in an anonymous global monoculture. Moreover, global commodity production puts localities into competition with each other, fomenting a “race to the bottom” in wages and environmental regulations. Moreover, when production and economic exchange are local, the social and environmental effects of our actions are much more obvious, reinforcing our innate compassion. Transition and policy: The trend toward local economy has already started. Spiking energy costs and ecological awareness prompt businesses to source more supplies locally, and millions of consumers are awakening to the health benefits of locally grown, fresh food.


pages: 501 words: 134,867

A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice by Tony Weis, Joshua Kahn Russell

addicted to oil, Bakken shale, bilateral investment treaty, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, decarbonisation, Deep Water Horizon, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, failed state, gentrification, global village, green new deal, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, liberal capitalism, LNG terminal, market fundamentalism, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, profit maximization, public intellectual, race to the bottom, smart grid, special economic zone, WikiLeaks, working poor

Generally, they are opposed to migrant worker programs and have done commendable, extensive work to highlight the deplorable working conditions. But recently, in at least two high-profile incidents,5 they also spoke out against the “displacement” of Canadian workers by migrant workers in the tar sands. This approach needs to be challenged, because it signals a “race to the bottom”: laying off union workers to bring in precarious labour is a way for the government and big business to dismantle workers’ rights across the board. If we don’t recognize the economic and social conditions that make migrant workers vulnerable in the first place, we further marginalize and isolate them with divisive rhetoric, which is also, frankly, quite entitled and racist.


A Paradise Built in Hell: Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, centre right, Community Supported Agriculture, David Graeber, different worldview, dumpster diving, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, illegal immigration, Loma Prieta earthquake, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, San Francisco homelessness, South of Market, San Francisco, Thomas Malthus, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

So they were also going through these crash courses in basic leadership and literacy.” They were for a time “the moral center” of the earthquake, or rather of the society galvanized by that earthquake. Support came from all over. As time went on, outside pressures—including the globalized garment industry’s “race to the bottom” in search of the lowest wages on earth—undermined the union. But the women were forever changed. Many became homeowners through the movements they got involved with, and many gained a sense of their own rights and power they had lacked before. Hernandez now says, “At the beginning before we organized, I thought that Mexico, our nation, was all sweetness, that we didn’t have problems, that everything was equitable, and after I am very clear that that is not true.


Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth by Stuart Ritchie

Albert Einstein, anesthesia awareness, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, Black Lives Matter, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citation needed, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, hype cycle, Kenneth Rogoff, l'esprit de l'escalier, Large Hadron Collider, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, mouse model, New Journalism, ocean acidification, p-value, phenotype, placebo effect, profit motive, publication bias, publish or perish, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine

Maybe writing easy-to-digest treatments of scientific findings, even if they’re a little on the simplified side, is beneficial overall, since it promotes science and makes it relevant to people’s lives. And wouldn’t we rather that such books were being written by people who at least nod at the evidence? There’s some merit in this kind of argument, but it’s bad news in the long run. Letting the facts slide in favour of a good story risks a race to the bottom, with science books getting published that are ever more inaccurate and ever more divorced from the data. When these books are inevitably debunked, or the lifestyle changes they recommend fail to live up to the hype, damage is done to the reputation of science more generally. The books we’ve just discussed were by professors at Stanford, Yale and Berkeley, respectively.


pages: 473 words: 140,480

Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town by Beth Macy

8-hour work day, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apollo 13, belly landing, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, call centre, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, desegregation, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, Joseph Schumpeter, new economy, old-boy network, one-China policy, race to the bottom, reshoring, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, supply-chain management, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, value engineering, work culture

It was the same sophistry preached by Walmart founder Sam Walton, who claimed he could raise the standard of living by lowering the costs of retail goods. It was ironic, given that the only jobs many of the displaced workers in the small towns hollowed out by Walmart-championed offshoring could find were part-time, and sans benefits, in Walmart stores. Prices were lower, sure, but wages were in a race to the bottom too. Kincaid remembers thinking, I’m glad my father isn’t alive to see this. In August 2003, John invited his industry colleagues to gather again—this time in a banquet room in a Greensboro hotel—to discuss another full-frontal attack. He needed lawyer money, a million and a half, at least.


pages: 642 words: 141,888

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

“It was as close to a Ponzi scheme as I will ever get in my life,” recalled one MCN executive. “We were just aggregating other people’s work and channels, telling them that we were going to help them make more money. A few of them did. Most didn’t.” At one point Dan Weinstein convened a gathering to call a truce on the network race to the bottom. He invited four other top MCNs—“the five families,” he called them, a nod to the industry’s mafioso feel. The group met several times around Los Angeles, attempting to settle on a workable commission and competition model. One never stuck. Too many of the networks, Weinstein realized, were primed on investor capital and looking for exits, acquisitions that could pay investors back


pages: 601 words: 135,202

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis by Jeanna Smialek

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, meme stock, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, short squeeze, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, working-age population, yield curve

“Markets are always ahead of the regulators, and frankly that’s how it should be. It’s analogous to the advice that my father provided me that if you don’t miss at least two or three planes a year, you’re spending too much time in airports,” Quarles said, even as he called for better integration of global regulation instead of a race to the bottom in financial oversight.[17] Yet the downfalls of letting financial innovation get ahead of the government’s ability to police it had soon become evident as American mortgage markets began to show cracks. In 2006, Quarles acknowledged that officials were looking into requiring greater transparency in nontraditional mortgages and that he and other officials at the Treasury were “doing everything in our power to make our financial system even more resilient in the future,”[18] but he also seemed to play down risks building in the housing market.


India's Long Road by Vijay Joshi

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, blue-collar work, book value, Bretton Woods, business climate, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, congestion charging, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, financial intermediation, financial repression, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Induced demand, inflation targeting, invisible hand, land reform, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, obamacare, Pareto efficiency, price elasticity of demand, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, school choice, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban sprawl, vertical integration, working-age population

(Half of India’s states show complete or near-​complete dominance of chief ministers.)54 More untied revenue may simply increase their capacity to indulge in populist giveaways. There are large variations in the quality of governance in different states. It is possible that differences in state performance will be exacerbated by the movement of resources to the better-​performing states. A competitive ‘race to the bottom’ in giving concessions to attract investment is another danger. It seems obvious, therefore, that ‘competitive federalism’ needs to be balanced by ‘cooperative federalism’ to coordinate the policies of the states, and see to it that they do not act at cross-​purposes. (Radical programmes, such as the ‘deep fiscal adjustment’ that I have advocated, would require centre-​states cooperation of a high order.)


pages: 523 words: 143,139

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths

4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, cognitive load, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, constrained optimization, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Sedaris, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, double helix, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, exponential backoff, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, first-price auction, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google Chrome, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Lao Tzu, Leonard Kleinrock, level 1 cache, linear programming, martingale, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, NP-complete, P = NP, packet switching, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert X Cringely, Sam Altman, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, sorting algorithm, spectrum auction, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, traveling salesman, Turing machine, urban planning, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Everyone looks to the others for a baseline, and will take just slightly less than that. The Nash equilibrium of this game is zero. As the CEO of software company Travis CI, Mathias Meyer, writes, “People will hesitate to take a vacation as they don’t want to seem like that person who’s taking the most vacation days. It’s a race to the bottom.” This is the tragedy of the commons in full effect. And it’s just as bad between firms as within them. Imagine two shopkeepers in a small town. Each of them can choose either to stay open seven days a week or to be open only six days a week, taking Sunday off to relax with their friends and family.


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

And to deal with vast nonperforming assets resulting from years of reckless lending, it allows major foreign banks to buy ever-larger stakes—and thus share the risk while using their expertise to clean up the mess.23 China benefits from foreign know-how, and the first world sweats to keep up. In the past foreign firms subcontracted only low-wage component assembly to China, but the “race to the bottom” is over: China now competes with first-world Singapore and Taiwan for electronics assembly and modular manufacturing. Germans workers now put in overtime to compete with the very Chinese workers they once trained—that is, if their entire design and manufacturing units have not already been moved to China.


pages: 532 words: 155,470

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility by Zack Furness, Zachary Mooradian Furness

active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critique of consumerism, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Enrique Peñalosa, European colonialism, feminist movement, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, Golden Gate Park, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, intermodal, Internet Archive, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, means of production, messenger bag, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, place-making, post scarcity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , working poor, Yom Kippur War

For example, Schwinn not only supported the same companies that eventually became its primary competition (notably Giant) and missed out on the opportunity to become a major player in both BMX and mountain bike production—its management apparently referred to the mountain bike as a fad—it also made a number of shrewd moves to avoid reinvesting in either its Chicago production plant or its experienced workforce.43 When Chicago Schwinn workers unionized under the UaW and went on strike in 1980, the company responded frostily and went on to close the plant in 1983, moving its equipment and engineers to the Giant Bicycle Company factory in Taichung, Taiwan.44 Schwinn proceeded to open a new manufacturing plant in Greenville, Mississippi, where it hired inexperienced bike makers for lower pay, in a facility located seventy-five miles from the nearest interstate highway.45 The plant lost more than $30 million and was closed in 1991, just one year prior to the company’s bankruptcy declaration.46 While Schwinn is now widely seen as a textbook case for how not to run a company in the so-called postindustrial era, its story is rarely used to highlight the negative impacts of globalization on the environment, on the U.S. workers who lose their jobs and trade unions, and on the multitudes of Mexican and asian workers who are subsequently and systematically exploited. rather, we are meant to see the company’s missed opportunities, lack of innovation, and brand deterioration as the hallmarks of its failure, as opposed to seeing the entire bicycle industry as a symbol of everything wrong with globalization and the corporate race to the bottom. indeed, one of the most symbolic events to highlight the negative effects of globalization on american workers took place at another bike factory in July 1998, when Huffy Bicycle Corporation, then largest in the United States, closed down its Celina, Ohio factory and fired the entire staff of nearly a thousand workers despite high overall sales that year (previous years were financially tumultuous).


pages: 688 words: 147,571

Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence by Jacob Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Basel III, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial exclusion, financial innovation, friendly fire, future of work, hallucination problem, hive mind, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, medical malpractice, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nudge unit, obamacare, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Philippa Foot, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge

There have been various—largely unsuccessful—initiatives to harmonise tax laws across the world in order to diminish the opportunities for this practice.105 Part of the reason why it is so difficult to do so successfully is that countries have strong incentives to cut their taxes in order to attract businesses to register there, leading to a “race to the bottom”. Similarly, there may be an economic advantage for some countries to seek to incentivise less scrupulous AI developers to establish in their jurisdiction by adopting minimal regulations. When operating a technology as powerful and potentially dangerous as AI, this would be a worrisome trend.


pages: 527 words: 147,690

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

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

Oct. 3, 2012. sfweekly.com/2012-10-03/news/bleacher-report-sports-journalism-internet-espn-news-technology/full. 126 “don’t expect to find any original reporting”: ibid. 126 aggregate . . . search engine optimization: ibid. 127 “hyperbolic headlines”: ibid. 127 “Here’s a labor force”: Ryan Chittum. “Bleacher Report and the Race to the Bottom.” Columbia Journalism Review. Oct. 5, 2012. cjr.org/the_audit/sf_weekly_on_what_bleacher_rep.php. 128 $200 million: Eskenazi. “Top 5 Ways Bleacher Report Rules the World!” 129 “emerging culture of surveillance”: David Lyon. “The Culture of Surveillance: Who’s Watching Whom, Now?” Lecture, University of Sydney.


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

London was clearly far more than the financial equivalent of George Orwell’s ‘Airstrip One’. But seeing the City as essentially a part of Wall Street is a useful way of looking at the boom and the bust. It did seem as if London was where Wall Street did its dry-cleaning. There can be no doubt that the UK FSA started the race to the bottom on lenient treatment of derivative exposures. It boasted about the business won through this approach. Wall Street regulators tried hard to keep up. David Cameron himself, in a speech to the City after the crisis began in March 2008, fully endorsed the strategy of outcompeting Wall Street on deregulation.


pages: 475 words: 149,310

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, David Graeber, Defenestration of Prague, deskilling, disinformation, emotional labour, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global village, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, land tenure, late capitalism, liberation theology, means of production, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-Fordism, post-work, private military company, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Richard Stallman, Slavoj Žižek, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

Many labor unions, particularly in the dominant countries, protest the fact that the mere threat of the mobility of capital—the threat, for example, of moving production and jobs to another country where state regulations and/or labor costs are lower and more favorable—can convince states to abandon or temper their own regulatory powers. States conform to and even anticipate the needs of capital for fear of being subordinated in the global economic system. This creates a sort of race to the bottom among nation-states in which the interests of labor and society as a whole take a backseat to those of capital. Neoliberalism is generally the name given to this form of state economic policy. Neoliberalism, as we claimed in part 2, is not really a regime of unregulated capital but rather a form of state regulation that best facilitates the global movements and profit of capital.


pages: 462 words: 150,129

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

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

If Europeans find their shoes made cheaply in Vietnam, then they have more to spend on getting their hair done and there are more nice jobs for Europeans in hair salons and fewer dull ones in shoe factories. Sure, manufacturers will and do seek out countries that tolerate lower wages and lower standards – though, prodded by Western activists, in practice their main effect is then to raise the wages and standards in such places, where they most need raising. It is less of a race to the bottom, more of a race to raise the bottom. Nike’s sweatshops in Vietnam, for example, pay wages three times as high as local state owned factories and have far better facilities. That drives up wages and standards. During the period of most rapid expansion of trade and out-sourcing, child labour has halved since 1980: if that is driving down standards, let there be more of it.


pages: 598 words: 134,339

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, Airbnb, airport security, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, congestion charging, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, drone strike, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, failed state, fault tolerance, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, national security letter, Network effects, Occupy movement, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, RFID, Ross Ulbricht, satellite internet, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, South China Sea, sparse data, stealth mode startup, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, unit 8200, urban planning, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero day

Empeopled LLC (24 Oct 2013), “Brief of amicus curiae,” United States of America v. Under Seal 1; Under Seal 2 [Lavabit], Case Nos. 13-4625, 13-4626, United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, http://justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/empeopled-lavabit-amicus.pdf. On four occasions in the early 2000s: Rebecca MacKinnon (2006), “‘Race to the bottom’: Corporate complicity in Chinese Internet censorship,” Human Rights Watch, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2006/china0806/5.htm. lobbying for legislative restrictions: Thomas Lee (25 May 2014), “Mind your business: Slow flex of tech’s lobbying muscle,” San Francisco Chronicle, http://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/Mind-Your-Business-Slow-flex-of-tech-s-lobbying-5504172.php.


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

They cannot be tamed by trial-and-error learning when the potential for catastrophic losses means that the first error will also be the last trial. Regulation creates the market. If financial products had been regulated like drugs – so they were tested before being introduced on the market – banks would have engaged less in a race to the bottom introducing ever more worthless financial instruments. The crash need not have been so severe. Credit-rating agencies, whose task was to provide the crucial gold standard of trustworthiness, failed. Regulators therefore have a role to play in the financial sector, sometimes expressing consumer preferences that are unrepresented in the current array of goods and services but are expressed through, say, elections.


pages: 513 words: 152,381

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, availability heuristic, biodiversity loss, Columbian Exchange, computer vision, cosmological constant, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, defense in depth, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, OpenAI, p-value, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, social discount rate, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, survivorship bias, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, William MacAskill

It is easy to see how such an outcome could be dystopian, but not immediately obvious how we could arrive at it, or lock it in, if most (or all) people do not want it.120 The answer lies in the various population-level forces that can shape global outcomes. Well-known examples include market forces creating a race to the bottom, Malthusian population dynamics pushing down the average quality of life, or evolution optimizing us toward the spreading of our genes, regardless of the effects on what we value. These are all dynamics that push humanity toward a new equilibrium, where these forces are finally in balance. But there is no guarantee this equilibrium will be good.


The Cigarette: A Political History by Sarah Milov

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist lawyer, affirmative action, airline deregulation, American Legislative Exchange Council, barriers to entry, British Empire, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, deindustrialization, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, G4S, global supply chain, Herbert Marcuse, imperial preference, Indoor air pollution, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, land tenure, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Journalism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, scientific management, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, Torches of Freedom, trade route, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

The NIRA and the Agricultural Adjustment Act were philosophically conjoined as well, reflecting a belief that “ruinous competition” was a root pathology of American capitalism. Too much competition for consumers caused senseless price wars and predatory business practices. It caused workers to compete with each other too vigorously in the sale of their labor, immiserating them in a race to the bottom of wages. It caused farmers to overproduce, driving down commodity prices. For drafters of New Deal recovery legislation, the problems faced by farmers and laborers, producers and consumers, were connected, a seamless whole of surplus in the face of want.6 The New Dealers hoped that what Wallace described as “economic indigestion” could be remedied through economic planning.


pages: 665 words: 146,542

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

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

For if individuals seek to enter into exchange in full knowledge of what their preferences are, no prices exist to communicate these preferences to others. Since these individuals do not know each other or speak to one another, they are forced to speculate on what others are thinking. But this is not enough, for it is also necessary to speculate on what others think each person is thinking. The result is an infinite race to the bottom. No equilibrium price can come about through this infinite game of mirrors that reflect one another to infinity. The most effective way to break open this indeterminacy is with the hypothesis of price fixity. But how can each person take prices as being fixed, and thus external to their free will?


The Mission: A True Story by David W. Brown

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Columbine, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, transcontinental railway, urban planning, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

Roca, Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) Between the California Institute of Technology, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and the Johns Hopkins University, Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), September 15, 2006. 274.T. Magner, telephone interview by author, December 21, 2018. 275.A. Lawler, “Space Science: A Space Race to the Bottom Line,” Science 311, no. 5767 (2006): 1540–43, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.311.5767.1540. 276.NASA, President’s FY2007 Budget Request (Washington, DC: NASA, 2006), https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/142458main_FY07_budget_full.pdf. 277.W. Huntress Jr. and L. Friedman, “Commentary: NASA’s 2007 Budget Proposal: No Real Vision,” Space.com, last modified February 14, 2006, https://www.space.com/2048-commentary-nasas-2007-budget-proposal-real-vision.html. 278.F.


pages: 450 words: 144,939

Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy by Jamie Raskin

2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, defund the police, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, George Floyd, hindsight bias, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lyft, mandatory minimum, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Bannon, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem

“I got you,” I said, everything having been clarified by the Speaker in her inimitably insightful way. “He was saying, ‘How dare you give someone else the award for Sycophant of the Year when that’s my job, Mr. President’?” “Yeah, but these other people were willing to kill for him,” she said. “It’s a race to the bottom. McCarthy is not our guy,” I said. “After all, it may take a racist fanatic to kill for Trump but any old Trump sycophant will lie for him.” “Right. He’s not your witness,” the Speaker said. “Stick with Herrera Beutler.” We went to the Senate floor with that strategy. We would call one witness, Congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington State, and I introduced my motion to subpoena witnesses with Sen.


pages: 595 words: 143,394

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections by Mollie Hemingway

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, critical race theory, defund the police, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, inventory management, lab leak, lockdown, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, obamacare, Oculus Rift, Paris climate accords, Ponzi scheme, power law, QR code, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, statistical model, tech billionaire, TikTok

During the summer of violence, however, iconoclastic mobs did just that, moving on from toppling Confederate statues to defacing, damaging, and destroying statues of and memorials to Admiral David Farragut, abolitionist Matthias Baldwin, American Revolutionary War general Philip Schuyler, a Texas ranger, president and commanding general of the Union Army Ulysses S. Grant, Frances Scott Key, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson.42 Not only was the slippery slope real, it was a race to the bottom. The iconic Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt located on public parkland at New York’s Museum of Natural History was removed by the city in 2020, citing concerns that the statue was racist. In June 2020, the speaker of the New York City Council and other council members called for the removal of a Thomas Jefferson statue from city hall.


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

In March 2010, the Irish government had to issue a promissory note of €30.6 billion to fund the bailout of the Anglo-Irish Bank and the Irish Nationwide Building Society, a move that pushed up the debt and the financing needs of the Irish government. At one point in the discussion, France insisted (unsuccessfully) that Ireland increase the very low rate of corporate taxation (12.5%), which it saw as a race to the bottom. As the bank guarantee was set to expire in 2010, interest rates in Ireland started to spike and diverge from the euro-area average rate. Ireland and its banks soon lost market access. The Irish bank problems then forced the ECB to step in significantly: its liquidity provisions (including ELAs) amounted to €90 billion in January 2010 and €140 billion in November 2010—85 percent of the Irish GDP at that time and a quarter of the total ECB lending.27 This represented at that time the largest exposure to a single country the ECB had ever taken.


pages: 540 words: 168,921

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Caution seems to abound; many of the WTO’s accords for cutting tariffs won’t go into effect for another twenty years. Within the European Union and the United States there are plenty of critics of the World Trade Organization as well. Organized labor resists heartily having to compete with low-wage labor around the world. The race to the bottom by international corporations has prompted a vigorous campaign to include labor standards in future WTO accords. Opponents to this campaign say that the WTO can’t take up every good cause supported by Westerners. Considering that labor is central to all production, its concerns hardly seem peripheral.


pages: 579 words: 164,339

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman

air freight, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, degrowth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Jenner, El Camino Real, epigenetics, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land reform, liberation theology, load shedding, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Money creation, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI addressed this convergence of poverty and population in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth). In it he denounced the global market economy for squeezing salaries, social security, and workers’ rights to maximize profits, locking poor countries into competing in a race to the bottom of wages and benefits for factory jobs that bring more misery than actual development. He condemned consumer temptations that undermine people’s values and their planet. During his papacy, the first of the new millennium, Benedict XVI became known as the “green Pope” for installing thousands of photovoltaic cells atop the Vatican auditorium, and for his open disgust at the failure of the 2009 climate talks in Copenhagen.


Lonely Planet Nicaragua (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Alex Egerton, Greg Benchwick

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Day of the Dead, land reform, liberation theology, Multics, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, traveling salesman

These factories provide much-needed work (Nicaragua’s underemployment rate runs at around 46%), but critics say the maquilladoras are no real solution – they set up in Free Trade Zones (Nicaragua has four), which aren’t bound by Nicaraguan law, so they don’t pay minimum wage or respect workers’ rights. When exported, goods don’t incur export duty, so Nicaragua ends up earning very little. It’s a process that workers’ rights and environmental activist Ralph Nader calls ‘the race to the bottom,’ where poor countries end up competing to see who can offer the most favorable deal to investor nations. Population With 6.1 million people spread across 130,000 sq km, Nicaragua is the second-least densely populated country in Central America after Belize. The CIA World Factbook estimates that 69% of the population is mestizo (of mixed ancestry, usually Spanish and indigenous people), 17% white, 9% black and 5% indigenous.


pages: 662 words: 180,546

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

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

If their optimal stupidity rendered them easy marks, it was their own fault for insufficient investment in human capital. Of course, the rival critical narrative detects a concerted effort to render the information as deceptive and corrupt as possible, to entrap all those newbie risk-takers: Experts often describe the run-up to the financial crisis as a “race to the bottom.” In reality it was a veritable track-and-field meet of such contests: some of them played out in the marketplace, others inside the government. Out in the financial marketplace, in the 2000s, opaquely marketed subprime products pioneered by unregulated, fly-by-night, nonbank mortgage lenders began to take off in the mainstream.


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

The new wealth of the 1990s gave the central governments the leeway to drive structural changes in policy, issuing more transparent guidelines for grants and loans to states and making states more secure about letting go of indirect taxes. The rise of markets were also changing how state governments looked at taxes—the competition between states for private investment through the 1990s had forced them into a race to the bottom in corporate tax sops. It was not a surprise, then, that they were giving the idea of a national tax system a second look. The big fear for the states about moving toward VAT was that it would reduce their independence, and the center would appropriate their revenue and tax collecting powers.


Lonely Planet Colombia (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Alex Egerton, Tom Masters, Kevin Raub

airport security, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, Downton Abbey, El Camino Real, Francisco Pizarro, friendly fire, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute couture, land reform, low cost airline, off-the-grid, race to the bottom, sustainable-tourism, urban sprawl

There are now four main agencies, based in Santa Marta and Taganga, guiding groups of travelers on the four- to six-day hike to the ancient ruins. You cannot do the trip on your own or hire an independent guide. If you're not sure about the legitimacy of your guide or agency, be sure to ask for the OPT (Operación de Programas Turísticos) certificate, the essential document needed by any guide. Once the market opened in 2008, the race to the bottom began, and prices and quality fell. The government intervened by regulating prices and service, and the official price of the tour is now set at COP$700,000 – pay any less and the money will be taken from your guide's fees, health insurance or life insurance. The price includes transportation, food, accommodations (normally mattresses with mosquito nets, though some agencies still use hammocks on one night), porters for your food, non-English-speaking guides and all necessary permits.


Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society by Nicholas A. Christakis

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, classic study, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, different worldview, disruptive innovation, domesticated silver fox, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Garrett Hardin, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, iterative process, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, joint-stock company, land tenure, language acquisition, Laplace demon, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, microbiome, out of africa, overview effect, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, ultimatum game, zero-sum game

As we saw in chapter 1, children as young as two will prefer other children randomly assigned to the same T-shirt color. In-group bias is so widespread that, when it attracted the attention of experimental psychologists in the twentieth century, they began to wonder how easily this sentiment could be evoked and just how tiny the differences between “us” and “them” had to be. In a kind of race to the bottom to understand the limits of human degeneracy, a new line of experiments emerged involving what came to be known as the minimal-group paradigm, initiated by psychologist Henri Tajfel in the 1970s.59 With barely any coaxing at all, it turns out, human subjects treated others who were assigned to artificially and arbitrarily created groups differently.


pages: 651 words: 186,130

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

A few years ago, I dismissed these words as alarmist, irresponsible even. Too many used “FUD” to pitch snake oil. The cybersecurity industry pushed so many world-ending scenarios on us, with such frequency, that we became jaded. But after a decade immersed in digital threats, I fear these words have never been truer. We are in a shortsighted race to the bottom and it is now in our urgent national interest to pause and begin to dig our way out. They say the first step in solving a problem is recognizing there is one. This book is my own “left of boom” effort. It is the story of our vast digital vulnerability, of how and why it exists, of the governments that have exploited and enabled it and the rising stakes for us all.


pages: 775 words: 208,604

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, confounding variable, corporate governance, cosmological principle, CRISPR, crony capitalism, dark matter, declining real wages, democratizing finance, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, John Markoff, knowledge worker, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, means of production, mega-rich, Network effects, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, very high income, working-age population, zero-sum game

Moreover, we have to allow for the possibility that to the extent that political unraveling interfered with predatory surplus extraction, commoners may even on occasion have experienced an improvement in their living standards. In that case, leveling would not merely have been the result of a race to the bottom conducted at different speeds but might also have been reinforced by gains among the working population. However, owing to the nature of the evidence, it is generally easier—or at least somewhat less desperately difficult—to document the decline of elites than to identify concurrent improvements among poorer groups.


Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age by Lizabeth Cohen

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, benefit corporation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, charter city, deindustrialization, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Lewis Mumford, megastructure, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent control, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

Admirable as these tactics are, they do not come close to meeting the enormous demand for affordable housing nor creating socially balanced neighborhoods. Moreover, the necessity for cities to fend for themselves to solve their problems encourages them to use tax forgiveness and other financial incentives to lure investors promising needed resources. These baits often set off races to the bottom among cities, which all ultimately lose, as winning cities encounter new costs while their tax revenue is reduced and inequality among cities is accentuated.30 The history of urban redevelopment since the end of World War II, as told through Logue’s career, yields many insights. The overarching message of Logue’s “Tale of a City Builder,” as he considered titling his never-completed book, is that urban renewal was not one undifferentiated mistake from the Housing Act of 1949 to President Richard Nixon’s moratorium on federal spending for housing in 1973.


pages: 767 words: 208,933

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist by Alex Zevin

"there is no alternative" (TINA), activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, Columbine, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, desegregation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, imperial preference, income inequality, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, post-war consensus, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

The third point is the most striking, for unlike the first two, it seems to have been the common assumption of all participants including Beveridge.37 The main ‘international implications of full employment’ for Britain in the post-war world were that the country must work to prevent any repetition of the rising tariffs, currency devaluations and other moves to autarky of the inter-war period. Full employment in one country was impossible. For if others allowed their trade cycles to continue, leading to a crash and mass unemployment, they would again try to export their way out of trouble at the expense of trading partners, precipitating a global race to the bottom. In contemplating one international obstacle, however, the participants in the conference tellingly all but ignored another, arguably more salient one – that of finance capital, the free movement of which had repeatedly imperilled progressive social legislation in Britain, in a pattern that was set to recur: cries of capital flight and lost confidence in protest at the People’s Budget in 1909, collapse of the second Labour government amidst a run on the pound in 1931.38 The war represented the finest hour for the extreme centre, giving its advocates a voice inside the state, while demonstrating that ‘vested interests’ still operated there to frustrate its boldest initiatives.


pages: 788 words: 223,004

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts by Jill Abramson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alexander Shulgin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death of newspapers, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Snowden, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, haute couture, hive mind, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Khyber Pass, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Paris climate accords, performance metric, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pre–internet, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social intelligence, social web, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, vertical integration, WeWork, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

The newsrooms, meanwhile, moved just as quickly and dispassionately toward that same goal, using the same tool. As I watched everyone line up behind the desk of Ian Fisher, the Times editor in charge of the homepage, who was one of the few with access to Chartbeat, I worried that we too had joined the race to the bottom. Interestingly Haile himself came to have second thoughts about the popularity machine he had created and left Chartbeat in 2016 to launch a company, Scroll, that would devote itself to helping publishers monetize their more substantive stories, the ones Chartbeat had all but incentivized against.


pages: 736 words: 233,366

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

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

But three general problems were plainly visible even in the boom years. The first arose from hugely intensified economic competitiveness. This led to great pressure to lower wages, sustain high rates of employment, keep inflation down (helped by the low costs of imported goods from China’s booming economy), and reduce the tax burden. It was often dubbed a ‘race to the bottom’. The ease of international capital transfers meant that high tax regimes and forms of protectionism that had worked in the past were unsustainable. Governments had to exploit globalization while finding ways at the national level of combating its harmful side effects. How to balance these problems with maintaining social cohesion, upholding the civilized values that Europe’s democracies saw as their very essence, and sustaining high levels of social welfare in the face of increased expectations and an ageing population, was a major challenge to all governments.


pages: 829 words: 229,566

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Each new blast of statistics about how a tiny band of global oligarchs controls half the world’s wealth exposes the policies of privatization and deregulation for the thinly veiled license to steal that they always were. Each new report of factory fires in Bangladesh, soaring pollution in China, and water cut-offs in Detroit reminds us that free trade was exactly the race to the bottom that so many warned it would be. And each news story about an Italian or Greek pensioner who took his or her own life rather than try to survive under another round of austerity is a reminder of how many lives continue to be sacrificed for the few. The failure of deregulated capitalism to deliver on its promises is why, since 2009, public squares around the world have turned into rotating semipermanent encampments of the angry and dispossessed.


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

By making the holding company device generally available, New Jersey transformed the corporation into a recursive building block that could legally merge and proliferate indefinitely, clearing the way for the building of modern business empires.106 For liberating private corporate power to such a degree, effectively tearing up the other states’ corporate restrictions in a ‘race to the bottom’, New Jersey became known as the ‘Mother of the Trusts’ and was branded the ‘Traitor State’.107 (In everyday language the word ‘trust’ came to refer to any market-dominating big business, even after the trust itself was superseded as the typical legal device for business combination.) When action was taken under the Sherman Act against a sugar monopoly, the corporate defence lawyers were able to run rings around plaintiffs and even federal prosecutors.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

America was building what economist Samir Amin came to call the Empire of Chaos.58 War Capitalism could put on a blindfold and run into a maze of horrific, absurd plans with confidence because it had class-power echolocation for a guide: As long as the rich strengthened and the working class weakened, then things had to be going in the right direction. It didn’t matter that capitalists were investing in finance sugar highs, monopoly superprofits, and an international manufacturing race to the bottom rather than strong jobs and an expanded industrial base. The twenty-first century was going to be all about software anyway, baby. The robots will figure it out. Silicon Valley leaders sat on top of this world system like a cherry on a sundae, insulated from the melting foundation by a rich tower of cream.


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

A small market with little volume may therefore obtain order flow by offering a small minimum price increment. Although larger markets may want to protect limit order traders, they cannot do so: To remain competitive, they must lower their minimum price increments to equal the smallest minimum increment offered by any market. * * * ▶ The Race to the Bottom Reduction of the minimum price increment in U.S. equities markets started in the 1990s and culminated in the full decimalization of the markets in 2001. As the above analysis suggests, the first markets to offer smaller minimum price increments were weaker markets like the American Stock Exchange and the ECNs.


pages: 1,073 words: 314,528

Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, business process, butterfly effect, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, defense in depth, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, escalation ladder, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lateral thinking, linear programming, loose coupling, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mental accounting, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, social contagion, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, unemployed young men, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Businesses should expect costs to decline systematically and predictably as a result of their superior productive experience. While the methodology encouraged companies to look at their total costs and recognize economies of scale, it could also be seriously misleading. In a mature industry the experience curve would flatten out. It could also encourage a race to the bottom, as prices were cut in the expectation of higher volumes which might not materialize, and then leave little scope for investment. As Ford’s Model T experience demonstrated, even the master of a product with costs kept down to a minimum can still be caught out by a better product. BCG’s second powerful oversimplification was the growth-share matrix.


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

It is perhaps the finest portrayal of the vulnerability of the human moral sense to competing convictions, most of which are morally wrong. REASON Reason appears to have fallen on hard times. Popular culture is plumbing new depths of dumbth, and American political discourse has become a race to the bottom.206 We are living in an era of scientific creationism, New Age flimflam, 9/11 conspiracy theories, psychic hotlines, and resurgent religious fundamentalism. As if the proliferation of unreason weren’t bad enough, many commentators have been mustering their powers of reason to argue that reason is overrated.