wealth creators

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

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

Along with this fundamental shift in the idea of value, a different narrative has taken hold. Focused on wealth creators, risk taking and entrepreneurship, this narrative has seeped into political and public discourse. It is now so rampant that even ‘progressives' critiquing the system sometimes unintentionally espouse it. When the UK Labour Party lost the 2015 election, leaders of the party claimed they had lost because they had not embraced the ‘wealth creators'.1 And who did they think the wealth creators were? Businesses and the entrepreneurs leading them. Feeding the idea that value is created in the private sector and redistributed by the public sector.

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These new actors, from Google to Uber to Airbnb, are often described as the ‘wealth creators'. Yet this seductive story of value creation leads to questionable broader tax policies by policymakers: for example, the ‘patent box' policy that reduces tax on any products whose inputs are patented, supposedly to incentivize innovation by rewarding the generation of intellectual property. It's a policy that makes little sense, as patents are already monopolies which should normally earn high returns. Policymakers' objectives should not be to increase the profits from monopolies, but to favour investments in areas like research. Many of the so-called wealth creators in the tech industry, like the cofounder of Pay Pal, Peter Thiel, often lambast government as a pure impediment to wealth creation.9 Thiel went so far as to set up a ‘secessionist movement' in California so that the wealth creators could be as independent as possible from the heavy hand of government.

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Many of the so-called wealth creators in the tech industry, like the cofounder of Pay Pal, Peter Thiel, often lambast government as a pure impediment to wealth creation.9 Thiel went so far as to set up a ‘secessionist movement' in California so that the wealth creators could be as independent as possible from the heavy hand of government. When Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, was quizzed about the way companies control our personal data, he replied with what he assumed was a rhetorical question: ‘Would you prefer government to have it?' His reply fed a modern-day banality: entrepreneurs good, government bad. Yet in presenting themselves as modern-day heroes, Apple and other companies conveniently ignore the pioneering role of government in new technologies.

All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, book value, call centre, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency peg, David Brooks, Donald Trump, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, George Gilder, high net worth, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Maui Hawaii, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Norman Mailer, PageRank, Peter Singer: altruism, pez dispenser, popular electronics, Quicken Loans, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, school vouchers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech baron, tech billionaire, Teledyne, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning, wealth creators, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

As winner of the 2005 World Entrepreneur Award4 and informal king of the conference, Huizenga was invited to deliver the keynote speech, “An Entrepreneurial Journey: The Story of Wayne Huizenga.” Even for Monte Carlo, the glitz level was high. In the audience was a pantheon of the world’s biggest wealth creators, more than one hundred entrepreneurs from nearly forty countries. It was all the more impressive, then, that Huizenga, a college dropout who started his business with one used garbage truck, was the man standing in front of them. Think of Forbes 400 members5 and what comes to mind are tycoons such as computer titan Michael Dell, America Online’s Steve Case, eBay’s Pierre Omidyar, and Qualcomm’s Irwin Jacobs—all former winners of Ernst & Young awards, all high-tech billionaires who made fortunes on flashy, brainy businesses.

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* * * 1995 from the pages of Forbes Paul Mellon, the banker and scion of the Mellon family, donated half of the philosopher John Locke’s library to Oxford. (1995 net worth: $1.1 billion) Michael Dell of Dell Computers has no chair in his office: “I’ve discovered that I think faster on my feet.” (1995 net worth: $740 million) James LeVoy Sorenson, inventor and producer of cutting-edge medical devices, including the computerized heart monitor, believes that sign language will become a global second language. (1995 net worth: $1.2 billion) LBO king and Revlon boss Ronald Perelman smokes five cigars a day. (1995 net worth: $4.2 billion) * * * As wealth creators, both Murdoch and Redstone sit atop gangly empires of mostly old media and entertainment (Murdoch in newspapers, TV, movies, and book publishing; Redstone in TV, radio, publishing, and movies) and new media such as cable, with just a smattering of Internet assets. Murdoch’s News Corporation50 recently spent more for Internet portals and businesses such as MySpace ($580 million) than any entertainment conglomerate before it, as Murdoch declared that the explosion of video sharing, social networking, blogging, and downloading music and movies around the world is creating a historic watershed.

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You will have people with very little money who will squander their money, and you will have people with a little family business who will be ruined. The money just magnifies what is already there. If you are good, you can look really good; and if you are bad, you can look really bad.” Todd Millay claims it’s even more complicated for future generations. While the wealth creator became a success through a combination of luck, timing, skill, and perseverance, inheritors need all those qualities and more: “Sustaining wealth takes as much effort and perseverance and tough decisions as building it. But you have to have a totally different mind-set. You have to think about diversification and about managing risk and about protecting against the downside.”

How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature by George Monbiot

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, bank run, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Attenborough, dematerialisation, demographic transition, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, first-past-the-post, full employment, Gini coefficient, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, land bank, land reform, land value tax, Leo Hollis, market fundamentalism, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, peak oil, place-making, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, urban sprawl, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, World Values Survey

The rest of us are invited, by governments and by fawning interviews in the press, to subscribe to their myth of election: the belief that they are the chosen ones, possessed of superhuman talents. The very rich are often described as wealth creators. But they have preyed upon the Earth’s natural wealth and their workers’ labour and creativity, impoverishing both people and planet. Now they have almost bankrupted us. The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen. What has happened over the past thirty years is the capture of the world’s common treasury by a handful of people, assisted by neoliberal policies which were first imposed on rich nations by Thatcher and Reagan.

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The more costs and corners they cut, the more profitable their business will be. In other words, the less they care, the better they will do. The perfect chief executive, from the point of view of the shareholders, is a fully fledged sociopath. Such people will soon become very rich. They will be praised by the government as wealth creators.3 If they donate enough money to party funds, they have a high chance of becoming peers of the realm.4 Gushing profiles in the press will commend their entrepreneurial chutzpah and flair. They’ll acquire a wide investment portfolio, perhaps including a few properties, so that – even if they cease to do anything resembling work – they can continue living off the labour of people like Carole, as she struggles to pay extortionate rents.

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It is through the newspapers and television channels that the socially destructive ideas of a small group of extremists have come to look like common sense. The corporations’ tame thinkers sell the project by reframing our political language.7 Nowadays I hear even my progressive friends using terms like wealth creators, tax relief, big government, consumer democracy, red tape, compensation culture, job seekers and benefit cheats. These terms, all deliberately invented or promoted by neoliberals, have become so commonplace that they now seem almost neutral. Neoliberalism, if unchecked, will catalyse crisis after crisis, all of which can be solved only by the means it forbids: greater intervention on the part of the state.

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

While Karl Marx had focused on tensions between workers and factory owners, Veblen concentrated on a different but related struggle: between wealth creators and wealth extractors. Makers versus takers; producers versus predators. Imagine a group of old men in top hats, manipulating a Heath-Robinson-like contraption of spindly pipework perched on top of the economy, hoovering up coins and notes and IOUs from the pockets of the workers and consumers toiling away underneath.4 Generations of economic thinkers had known about this distinction, at least as far back as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in 1776.5 The main problem, though, was that people disagreed about who the wealth creators were. A conservative tradition holds that they are the rich, the owners of money and capital, who build the factories, then get taxed by government, which redistributes their wealth to the poor and to the recipients of handouts.

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He liked to picture the lives of his workers: where they lived, what they ate, their children at school, happy faces around the dinner table – the self-image of the billionaire as wealth creator, job creator. ‘Brazilians have always admired the American dream,’ he said. ‘What is happening in Brazil is the Brazilian dream, and I am the example.’ He peppered his rant with the word ‘honest’ – a counter to the widespread suspicion in Brazil that the super-wealthy are all malandros, who get rich through unfair or dirty or criminal means. The heroic, honest, wealth-creator meme that Veblen gave such short shrift to is indispensable for such people. It implies that whatever improves the fortunes of the business or the billionaire – including favourable tax treatment or smashing workers’ rights – ultimately advances the fortunes of the nation as a whole in some sort of great global race.

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And it is a good starting point for understanding the scale of the finance curse. By now, a new question emerges: why have we put up with an overgrown sector that is making us worse off? A large part of the reason lies in a narrative we’re fed by politicians and by the many players in the City of London: that the City is indispensable, full of brilliant wealth creators, and must be pampered. This narrative is underpinned by the ubiquitous idea of ‘national competitiveness’ which has emerged in a particular and malign form in Britain and in many other countries: a form I call the Competitiveness Agenda. This narrative has pervaded all aspects of British political and economic life for decades.

Start It Up: Why Running Your Own Business Is Easier Than You Think by Luke Johnson

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, false flag, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Grace Hopper, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, James Dyson, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Kickstarter, mass immigration, mittelstand, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, patent troll, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Silicon Valley, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traveling salesman, tulip mania, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators

He really was evil; I imagine that perhaps Beelzebub himself reached out from the watery depths, plucked Maxwell from the deck of his yacht Lady Ghislaine and spirited him off to hell. For Captain Bob had surely sold his soul to the devil many years before. But the Bouncing Czech is not typical of the breed. Most wealth creators retain at least a veneer of civilized behaviour. Nevertheless, when cornered or roused to fury, they can be ruthless. In 1853, the shipping and railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt wrote to two former business associates, Morgan and Garrison: ‘You have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow.

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I have rarely opted for the easy path if the alternative offered the possibility of something with more fireworks. To me, achieving something novel and bold is meaningful, and practising meditation isn’t. The economist Richard Layard, who puts himself forward as an authority on happiness, says public policy should demotivate wealth creators with higher taxation, because they exacerbate the race for status. But he also says we must eliminate high unemployment. And I suspect that these two objectives are intrinsically incompatible. Entrepreneurs, for all their rivalry and dissent, are the principal engines that can create jobs. Discouraging them will only make the problem of unemployment worse.

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I think the game also identifies the ever-present dividing line between those who ply their trade in the private sector and those who work in the public or non-profit world. For the entrepreneur, money will be first or second; for those in the state sector it will surely be last. This reveals the materialism at the heart of every wealth-creator. But is that worse than the urge to control that so stimulates those who run the police, universities, hospitals, schools, government and army? At a recent dinner party I sat next to a fairly senior politician. I asked him the power/money/recognition question, and he unhesitatingly put ‘power’ in first place.

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

Of course, this brief summary leaves out many qualifications, not to mention the actual argument and evidence. Some readers may agree straightaway, some may have a few objections, but others may respond with incredulity, perhaps outrage, for to claim that we can’t afford the rich is to imply that they are a cost to the rest of us, a burden. Aren’t the rich wealth creators, job creators, entrepreneurs, investors – indeed, just the kind of people we need? Don’t entrepreneurs like Bill Gates deserve their wealth for having introduced products that benefit millions? Aren’t the rich entitled to spend what they have earned how they like? What right has anyone to say their consumption is excessive?

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• The wealth of the richest 1% in the world amounts to $110 trillion. That’s 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population. • Seven out of ten people live in countries where economic inequality has increased in the last 30 years. Have the rich got richer because those at the top have become more enterprising, dynamic wealth creators? Are today’s capitalists – or entrepreneurs, as they like to call themselves – so much better at leading economic development than their more moderately paid predecessors of the post-war boom? The economic data suggests the opposite. Growth rates have been slower than in the post-war boom. The rich are clearly not taking the same share of faster growth, but an increasing share of slower growth.

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And let’s remember that it’s not uncommon for employees who come up with inventions to find that they are effectively stolen from them by their employers, who then get the benefit.152 So, at best, two cheers for innovative working capitalists. ‘They’ll just go to another country and take their money with them …’ ‘… if we tax them too much, or otherwise restrict their power.’ This point is frequently wheeled out, as if the rich were major wealth creators, possessing rare powers, and therefore people whom we must do all we can to attract. British Conservative politician John Redwood’s defence of this belief is a common one: ‘The problem is the rich do not have to hang around if you seek to make them too poor. They have the best lawyers and accountants.

Are Chief Executives Overpaid? by Deborah Hargreaves

banking crisis, benefit corporation, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bonus culture, business climate, corporate governance, Donald Trump, G4S, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, loadsamoney, long term incentive plan, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, performance metric, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Snapchat, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, wealth creators

How the numbers add up Upwards ever upwards Changing climate ticks up top pay How companies work Principal–agent problem Money-making becomes sexy Recovering economy pushes up shares Time men of the year Business at the heart of government Rewarding top talent Who sets top pay Notes 2 Just Deserts? Wealth creators deserve rewards What goes up, should come down What constitutes an executive pay packet? Payment in shares Performing relatively well Rewards for failure More money for posh macs How much effect do chief executives have? Luck is important Remuneration consultants The ratchet effect Superstar executives Notes 3 Why Top Pay Matters Performance-related pay is anything but Short-term consequences of performance pay Share buybacks What chief executives really want It’s not all about money How top pay keeps down productivity Pay disparities damage morale and business reputation Trust in business plumbs the depths Notes 4 Corporate Governance Fights a Losing Battle Attempts to rein in pay New Companies Act Say on pay Shareholder Spring Shareholders are not the only ones German lessons Another attempt at change: 2013 reforms Investors look at reform Notes 5 What Can Be Done?

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The problem here is that many executives who run large corporations are actually performing a bureaucratic rather than an entrepreneurial task, but they are being rewarded like those who build companies from scratch. In this chapter, we will look at this issue of performance-related pay. Do these incentives really make executives work harder as Mr Fairburn has argued? Would they achieve the same rate of success without the offer of ever-increasing riches? Wealth creators deserve rewards In defending his £63 million bonus award in 2016, Sir Martin Sorrell, head of the international marketing firm WPP, said the company’s market capitalization had increased by £10 billion over the past four years and the share price had more than doubled. ‘Most of my wealth, if not all of it, is and has been for the last 31 years tied up in the success of WPP.

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

He turned the image of the rapacious tax avoider on its head by comparing his clients to harmless but sensible squirrels: Social democracy is creating too big demands on the wealth creators. That must be obvious to you in academia. You can’t get voted in now unless you support massive entitlement programs, because too many people receive them. With the result that governments now need an ever-increasing share of GDP from the producers to fulfill their promises. So naturally the wealth creators, like squirrels collecting their nuts, are scaling back; they’re saying to themselves that they don’t want to collect as many nuts next year, because the government just takes them away.… It’s nature, people don’t like the fruits of their labors taken away so arbitrarily.

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The squirrel says, “You know what, I did pretty well last year and stashed all my nuts in that tree, but the government knows where I live and took them all away. So I’m going to bury them in the woods where no one will find them and go occasionally when no one is looking to collect them.” This leads wealth creators to engage in the shadow economy, and so forth. In other words, from Louis’ perspective, the world’s wealthiest people aren’t benefiting from the exploitation of legal loopholes or free-riding on honest taxpayers. On the contrary, as he sees it, the wealthy are the ones being exploited. Louis and some of his colleagues see themselves as acting to mitigate this injustice.

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To many wealth management practitioners, this gives the OECD and other institutions seeking to crack down on tax avoidance the air of hypocrisy. Louis, one of the London-based wealth managers, remarked that “on the one hand, they are pro–free trade in Brussels, but they are desperate to stop it. Governments were used to pulling the strings, but now they’re bankrupt and they are dependent upon the wealth creators. That really is the crux of the matter. And you’ve got people in Brussels desperate that there is tax leakage all over the place—that they can’t control people’s mobility in an era of increasingly easy jet travel, lack of border controls, et cetera.” This conflict has been particularly heated in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent euro zone banking crisis, both of which have left governments scrambling for tax revenue and eager to crack down on tax avoidance.

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

Interest rates are sometimes used in order to try to create just the right amount of money, with the Fed looking at prices—consumer prices and producer prices—as a surrogate for the price level. Prices are everything. Even though lower costs of computers and cell phones and LCD TVs is a positive for the economy and a wealth creator as the productive uses of technology always create wealth, it is often interpreted as deflationary, or at least disinflationary, and perhaps as our techno-toys get cheaper, interest rates are cut to “stimulate” the economy. Sometimes, when too much money is created, it doesn’t show up in consumer or producer prices, but flows into the stock market, or housing, and it appears to everyone as new wealth.

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You’ll be rewarded with wealth . . . and the personal satisfaction that what you did mattered, even if no one else sees it that way. It’s more important now than ever. There are government deficits as far as the eye can see, a sea of red ink. Debt is being laid on to distribute to Have-nots today. We need more Makes, more Hackers, more wealth creators. I know, you know, we all know that much of that productive wealth is going to be redistributed, but don’t let that discourage you. Redistribution takes many forms. Taxes and deficit spending are only the most blatant. Regulations favor the status quo and the political entrepreneur who has his hands in everyone’s pockets.

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See Virtual pipe Piracy, of digital products Pirate Bay Political entrepreneurs becoming examples of failure of media moguls as operation of Sponges created by Prague Stock Exchange Prediction markets Prevailing wage laws Price, and horizontal integration Procter & Gamble Productivity defined jobs, eliminating with technology wealth accumulation with. See Productivity and wealth Productivity and wealth Creators of economic principles and efficiency and exceptionalism guaranteed profits and horizontal integration jobs, hierarchy of jobs, replacing with technology and money supply non-productive workers, types of workweek over time Profit as business driver. See also Productivity and wealth; Wealth defined and dropping costs and greed issue Project Natal Prosperity, negative effects of Qualcomm Raduchel, Bill Railroad workers, retired, as disability recipients Ramsey, Dave Reddit Retail industry, profits, rise of Retail Link Returns, highest, and sources of capital Ricardo, David Robber barons Rockefeller, John D.

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

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

I don’t want an alternative Wealth creators See ‘job creators’. The rich Armed with this phrasebook, we can see that when a politician says: Given the profligate way our predecessors ran the country and the enormous levels of debt we are consequently saddled with, it is vital that we manage responsibly to restore growth and stability to our economy. We will not shrink from tough decisions. We are resolutely pro-business, pro-families and pro-hard work. For too long hard-working families have been paying for scroungers and shirkers – from now on the rewards will go to the wealth creators. Even if they are well-intentioned and believe every word of what they say, the practical impact of their plans is much closer to the paragraph below: Given that there was a Global Financial Crisis caused by ineffective regulation of the banking and shadow banking sectors, we have decided to respond irresponsibly even though this will damage the growth and stability of our economy.

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In considering US mass impoverishment, what happens in China is a red herring. REVERSAL OF ROLES In recent years, an increasingly common rhetorical tactic appears to be inverting the roles of exploiter and exploited. In the United States, there has been talk of ‘makers and takers’, the makers being the wealth-creators and the job-creators (see below) whose hard work is exploited by the takers, who pay far less tax and may even receive tax credits. In the United Kingdom, the same concept is denoted by the phrase ‘workers and shirkers’. As we saw in Chapter 3, in the US, the ‘makers’ have taken more than 100 per cent of the benefit of the country’s economic growth for the last thirty-five years, leaving the ‘takers’ poorer than their parents were a generation ago.

The Trouble With Billionaires by Linda McQuaig

"World Economic Forum" Davos, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, carried interest, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John Bogle, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, lateral thinking, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, very high income, wealth creators, women in the workforce

In an interview with the Sunday Times in November 2009, Blankfein steadfastly defended his company and himself, explaining that he was just ‌a banker ‘doing God’s work’.1 The tax hike that raised the top income tax rate to 50 per cent earlier that year had led to similar threats of departure from members of the UK elite. Theatre impresario Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber had appealed to the public to reject what he characterized as a tax increase on those who create wealth: ‘The last thing we need is a Somali pirate-style raid on the few wealth creators who still dare to navigate Britain’s gale-force waters.’ Film star Sir Michael Caine echoed the outrage, threatening to leave Britain if taxes at the upper end went ‌even 1 percentage point higher.2 In a sympathetic Telegraph article about Michael Caine’s tax complaints, journalist Iain Martin noted that Micahel Caine, the son of a charlady and a Billingsgate fish market porter, personified the rags-to-riches success that the government should be trying to encourage.

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The rising wealth and power of the corporate elite has allowed it to reshape public discourse, and to influence popular attitudes about the economy and government. Through its well-funded think-tanks and media empires as well as its increasing influence within universities, the elite has managed to establish the ideology of neoliberalism as the dominant paradigm. This has led to the celebration of the rich as ‘wealth creators’ whose goodwill must be constantly cultivated, lest they be discouraged from investing. The central theme of this ideology has been the need to free up (so-called) market forces from the controlling hand of government. This has boiled down to a simple notion – government bad, private sector good – that has become the mantra of our times, and the guiding force in reshaping public policy.

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Altogether, Posner suggests that the relationship between the CEO, the members of the board of directors and the firm’s auditors typically involves a ‌great deal of ‘mutual back-scratching’.9 Of course, the cosy nature of corporate boards is nothing new. But in the early postwar years, social disapproval of excessive greed acted as something of a restraint. With that disapproval largely set aside in recent decades – indeed replaced with a culture that reveres ‘wealth creators’ – there’s been nothing to discourage corporate boards from indulging themselves. The problem has been compounded by the tendency of corporate boards to match what other corporate boards are doing. ‘We pay our executives not on the basis of performance, but on the basis of peer group,’ notes John C.

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

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

It involves policies that are designed to favor business, entrepreneurship, and the individual; to reduce the role of the state; to cut public spending; to increase the individual’s possibilities and responsibilities, both for success and for failure; to promote free trade, and accordingly to eliminate protectionist barriers and tariffs; to reduce the roles of unions and collective bargaining; to minimize taxes; to pursue policies that encourage wealth creators and to trust in the process whereby that wealth trickles down to other sectors of the economy; to move enterprises from public to private ownership. In the background of these specific policies are philosophical positions that are concerned, in the final analysis, with the role and importance of the individual.

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It follows from this that the individual’s potential is central to how the society, and following on from that an economy, should be structured. The economy should be arranged to allow individuals to maximize their potential. The practical promise made is that if you get government out of the way of wealth creators, the wealth they create will ultimately benefit everybody: the rich pay a lot more tax than the poor, for a start, and they spend a lot more money than the poor too, and both taxes and the money spent benefit the whole society. So it’s like a magic trick: you benefit the collective good by allowing people to selfishly maximize their own gains.

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Just for reference, across the 500 biggest companies in America, the current multiple is that CEOs are paid 204 times more than their average employee.88 In the cheap seats, we’re often told that though people are increasingly furious about rising inequality, the most important thing is not to scare the “wealth creators,” because if we do, they’ll all move to places like London and Switzerland. But hang on: London and Switzerland are starting to have the same sorts of conversations that are happening in the USA. So where then would they go? The answer, I suspect, is that most of them wouldn’t go anywhere. A few bankers might head off to places like Singapore and Hong Kong, but that certainly wouldn’t be the end of life as we know it.

Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate Manipulation of Community Values by Sharon Beder

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, battle of ideas, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, junk bonds, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Powell Memorandum, price mechanism, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, shareholder value, spread of share-ownership, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Torches of Freedom, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, young professional

This deprives them of the ability to protect and fight for their self-interest. NOTES 1 National Council on Economic Education, ‘Economic Literacy’, Business Week Special Advertising Section, 1999, www.businessweek.com/adsections/education/ econlit/econhome.htm. 2 Michael J. Caslin, ‘Where Will Our Next Generation of Entrepreneurs, Our Next Generation of National Wealth Creators and Manufacturers Come From? A Call to Action for the Development of an Entrepreneurial Culture for All Americans’, New York, National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), 2 June 2004, p13. 3 National Council on Economic Education, ‘About NCEE: Campaign for Economic Literacy’, National Council on Economic Education, www.ncee.net/cel/ accessed 25 July 2004. 4 Ibid.; National Council on Economic Education, ‘National Council on Economic Education’, www.nationalcouncil.org/ accessed 1 June 1998; National Council on Economic Education, ‘About NCEE’. 5 National Council on Economic Education, ‘About NCEE’; National Council on Economic Education, ‘Affiliated Councils & Centers’, National Council on Economic Education, www.ncee.net/network/network.php accessed 25 July 2004; Economics America, ‘Economics America’, www.economicsamerica.org/schools.html accessed 1 June 1998. 6 National Council on Economic Education, ‘Economics International’, National Council on Economic Education, www.ncee.net/ei/ accessed 25 July 2004; National Council on Economic Education, ‘National Council on Economic Education’. 7 NFTE UK, ‘Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship’, NFTE UK, www.nfte.co.uk/ accessed 25 September 2005. 8 Junior Achievement, ‘Junior Achievement International’, Junior Achievement, www. jaintl.org/home.asp accessed 25 July 2004. 9 Junior Achievement, ‘Who We Are: Our Mission’, Junior Achievement, www.ja.org/ about/about_who.shtml accessed 25 July 2004. 10 Junior Achievement, ‘Contributors: Who Contributes?’

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Junior Achievement, www. ja.org/involved/involved_contrib_who.shtml accessed 25 July 2004. 11 Junior Achievement, ‘JA Programs’, Junior Achievement, www.ja.org/programs/ programs.shtml accessed 25 July 2004. 12 Young Achievement Australia, ‘YAA: Young Achievement Australia’, Young Achievement Australia, www.yaa.org.au accessed 25 July 2004. 13 Young Enterprise, ‘Young Enterprise, United Kingdom’, Young Enterprise, www. young-enterprise.org.uk/ accessed 26 September 2005; Young Enterprise, ‘Primary Programme’, Young Enterprise, United Kingdom, www.young-enterprise.org.uk/ programmes/primary.asp accessed 26 September 2005. 226 FREE MARKET MISSIONARIES 14 Young Enterprise, ‘Project Business’, Young Enterprise, United Kingdom, www. young-enterprise.org.uk/programmes/pb.asp accessed 26 September 2005. 15 NFTE, ‘NFTE – Teaching Entrepreneurship to Youth’, National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship, www.nfte.com/ accessed 25 September 2005. 16 Ibid.; NFTE UK, ‘Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship’. 17 Caslin, ‘Where Will Our Next Generation of Entrepreneurs, Our Next Generation of National Wealth Creators and Manufacturers Come From? A Call to Action for the Development of an Entrepreneurial Culture for All Americans’, p22. 18 ABW, ABW News, Spring, 2002, www.abw.org.au/pdf/newsletter/2002_Spring. pdf; ABW, ‘ABW Enterprise Education’, Australian Business Week, www.abw.org.au accessed 24 September 2005. 19 ABW, ‘ABW Enterprise Education’. 20 Ibid. 21 Jim Cumming, ‘National Education Agenda 1997–8’, Australian Principals Association’s Professional Development Council, August, 1997, ww3.beecoswebengine.org/ servlet/Web?

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Manne (eds) Shutdown: The Failure of Economic Rationalism and How to Rescue Australia, The Text Publishing Company, Melbourne, pp7–26 Carter, H. T. (1991) ‘The Myth of Shareholder Democracy’, Management Accounting, vol 72, no 11, p20 Caslin, M. J. (2004) ‘Where Will Our Next Generation of Entrepreneurs, Our Next Generation of National Wealth Creators and Manufacturers Come From? A Call to Action for the Development of an Entrepreneurial Culture for All Americans’, National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), New York, 2 June, www.nfte. com/downloads/publicpolicy_06022004.pdf Castles, F. G., Gerritsen, R. and Vowles, J. (eds) (1996) The Great Experiment: Labour Parties and Public Policy Transformation in Australia and New Zealand, Allen & Unwin, Sydney Catley, B. (1996) Globalising Australian Capitalism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Cellier, F.

Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019) by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, anti-work, antiwork, artificial general intelligence, asset light, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, business cycle, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data is the new oil, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disintermediation, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, job polarisation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off grid, pattern recognition, post-work, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, wealth creators, working poor

Historically, it’s important to remember that the labour theory of value was almost universally accepted by popular classes in the nineteenth century, particularly in America; there was this incredible outpouring of hatred towards corporate capitalists—“robber barons” as they called them at the time—when they first appeared; and this was followed by an explicit intellectual counteroffensive from the side of the robber barons themselves; starting in America with people like Andrew Carnegie. It took explicit aim at the idea that workers create wealth, or that one’s work should be one’s primary means of expression, self-realization, or the basis of one’s feelings of self-worth. This was startlingly effective. After all, if you said “wealth creator” in 1850, everyone would assume you were referring to workers; if you say “wealth creator” now, they’ll assume you mean bosses. This was accompanied by the idea that people should think of themselves as valuable according to what they consumed instead. The obvious problem here is: how do you validate labour in a situation like 166 D. Graeber that?

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

It is reminiscent of the ‘night-watchman state’, a term coined by the nineteenth-century German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle to describe the vision of his own laissez-faire contemporaries: a state with the most limited of functions. Despite shades of moderation and radicalism, the British Establishment’s governing ideology is consistent. The state is a bad thing, and gets in the way of entrepreneurial flair. Free markets are responsible for growth and progress. Businesspeople are the real wealth creators. It is a sentiment echoed by elite politicians of all stripes. When Nick Clegg became leader of the Liberal Democrats in 2007, months before the financial crash, he pledged to ‘define a liberal alternative to the discredited politics of big government’. Elsewhere, he assailed ‘nationalised education, nationalised health, and nationalised welfare: run by inflexible, centralised monopolies’.

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Support for the great privatization crusade may be received wisdom among Establishment politicians, journalists and think tanks – but it has never won the hearts and minds of the British people. Big business is more than happy to take from the vast wealth and resources of the state, but it is far more reluctant to give. The Establishment ideology that the state is somehow illegitimate, an obstacle to the entrepreneurial flair of the ‘wealth creators’, justifies not providing it with the revenue it needs to function. Even at a time of austerity shredding through services and livelihoods, large swathes of Britain’s wealthy elite have effectively ceased to pay their taxes. It is a practice that exposes just who the British state serves. s 6 Tycoons and Tax-Dodgers If modern British capitalism wanted a public ambassador, Steve Varley would be a pretty good bet.

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‘A Savage and Pointless Attack on Middle England’ ran a headline in the Daily Telegraph, which was odd given the median British salary was £21,000, or over seven times lower than the threshold for the 50p tax. The Daily Mail damned a return to ‘the politics of envy’, while the Sun damned the tax as ‘an assault on wealth creators’. It is an argument also based on the assumption that those who make it into the wealthy elite have got there simply through skill and determination – so why should they be penalized for being gifted and for grafting? Some entrepreneurs are honest about how much they rely on other people, and on chance.

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

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

There are at least 19 specific steps we can take to these ends. Education 1. Invest in education. Start by simply paying teachers more so that more of the best and the brightest sign up for this profession, as they do in many other nations. American teachers make 40% less than the average college graduate. Teachers are some of America’s most important wealth creators. Increasing the quantity and quality of skilled labor provides a double win by boosting economic growth and reducing income inequality. 2. Hold teachers accountable for performance by, for example, eliminating tenure. This should be part of the bargain for higher pay. 3. Separate student instruction from testing and certification.

Walk Away by Douglas E. French

Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, business cycle, Elliott wave, forensic accounting, full employment, Home mortgage interest deduction, loss aversion, low interest rates, McMansion, mental accounting, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Journalism, Own Your Own Home, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, Tax Reform Act of 1986, the market place, transaction costs, unbiased observer, wealth creators

The authors of Untapped Riches: Never Pay Off Your Mortgage—and Other Surprising Secrets for Building Wealth, Susan and Anthony Cutaia with Robert Slater claimed in their 2007 book that the fixed-rate mortgage was the worst mortgage in history. The Cutaias claimed certain types of mortgages were wealth creators. Mortgages like Option ARMs, Cash Flow ARMS, and negative amortization loans were best because these loans were “smart debt” which freed up cash so borrowers could leverage their homes to create wealth. They also advocated interest-only loans. To their credit, the husband and wife team cautioned readers not to fritter away their cash on boats and vacations.

Conscious Capitalism, With a New Preface by the Authors: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business by John Mackey, Rajendra Sisodia, Bill George

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, do well by doing good, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, Flynn Effect, income per capita, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, John Elkington, lone genius, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, shareholder value, six sigma, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

As a committed capitalist, I worry a great deal to see how capitalism has gone off the rails the past quarter century and acquired such a bad name, much of it deserved. In this book, John Mackey and Raj Sisodia return capitalism to its roots. They make a compelling case for capitalism as the greatest wealth creator the world has ever known. In these pages, they call their version conscious capitalism. I consider it just capitalism, as it is the only authentic form of capitalism. Other forms of doing business, including “crony capitalism,” are simply inauthentic versions of the real thing. As we witnessed during the global economic meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed, these false versions of capitalism cannot be sustained and are doomed to fail over the long term.

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Educator Candace Allen, wife of economics Nobel laureate Vernon Smith, writes movingly about the need for entrepreneurial heroes in society and the great impact they have on our lives: “Ultimately, the hero is the representative of the new—the founder of a new age, a new religion, a new city, the founder of a new way of life or a new way of protecting the village against harm; the founder of processes or products that make people in their communities and the world better off. What I will contend here is that in our modern world, the wealth creators—the entrepreneurs—actually travel the heroic path and are every bit as bold and daring as the heroes who fought dragons or overcame evil.”12 Why Capitalism Is Under Attack Despite enabling widespread prosperity, free-enterprise capitalism has earned little respect from intellectuals and almost no affection from the masses.

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

While it may seem to have nothing to do with mainstream opinion in the twenty-first century, elements of this Paretian worldview persist today in the idea that there are some exceptionally talented people in the world who deserve to keep the overwhelming majority of the wealth they create. Trying to resist this tendency towards the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few supreme wealth creators, so the argument goes, is likely to be futile, and attempts to do so will usually be harmful to wider society. Another reason why inequality becomes barely worth talking about. In the modern version, the conclusion is essentially the same: rising inequality is natural and inevitable. But it is justified by an economic argument around globalization and new technology.

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Although politicians can ignore this truth for a while, it suggests that widespread opposition to higher taxes on the rich is ultimately based on reasons beyond economics. When the top UK income tax rate was raised to 50 per cent in 2009 (until Osborne cut it to 45 per cent four years later) the musicals composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, one of Britain’s wealthiest people, responded bluntly: ‘the last thing we need is a Somali pirate-style raid on the few wealth creators who still dare to navigate Britain’s gale-force waters’.38 In the US Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of private equity firm Blackstone, likened proposals to remove a specialized tax exemption (from which he greatly benefited) to the German invasion of Poland.39 While we may scoff at these whines from the super-rich, most people unthinkingly accept the fundamental idea behind them: that income tax is a kind of theft, taking income which is rightfully owned by the person who earned it.

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

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

To correct these persistent problems, we recommended sweeping management changes—not just new people dropped into old slots but new institutions designed to manage co-owned wealth responsibly.2 The big, rarely asked question about our current economy is who gets the benefits of co-owned wealth? No one disputes that private wealth creators are entitled to the wealth they create, but who is entitled to the wealth we share is an entirely different question. My contention is that the rich are rich not so much because they create wealth but because they capture a much larger share of co-owned wealth than they’re entitled to. Another way to say this is that the rich are as rich as they are—and the rest of us are poorer than we should be—because extracted rent far exceeds recycled rent.

Philanthrocapitalism by Matthew Bishop, Michael Green, Bill Clinton

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, business process outsourcing, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital divide, do well by doing good, don't be evil, family office, financial innovation, full employment, global pandemic, global village, Global Witness, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Dyson, John Elkington, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, lone genius, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market bubble, mass affluent, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Singer: altruism, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working poor, World Values Survey, X Prize

Top of the agenda was how they could encourage more giving by Preface others—their fellow tycoons and the general public. (Making future meetings public, rather than trying to keep them secret, would surely help inspire others to give.) This book is about the renaissance of giving and philanthropy, led by the world’s most successful wealth creators. Philanthrocapitalism describes how they give, by applying business techniques and ways of thinking to their philanthropy. It also describes the growing recognition by the leaders of capitalism that giving back much of their fortune to improve society is as much a part of the system as making the money in the first place.

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No one wants to be remembered as the family member who squandered centuries of hard-earned cash or sold the family seat. This is not true of every inheritor, of course; for example, British supermarket heir David Sainsbury has long been one of his country’s leading philanthropists and has pledged to give away £1 billion during his lifetime. But generally, an original wealth creator feels less constrained than an inheritor: he made the money, and so can do with it as he pleases. Indeed, having no family may actually be associated with higher levels of philanthropy. Many of history’s greatest philanthropists, like Tudor-era donor William Lambe and Sir Thomas Guy in the eighteenth century, were childless.

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

If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the right-wing economists are chewing on something cold and rubbery. The blind worship of strong private property rights has allowed many abuses. Broadly, it is an excuse for the rich and powerful to steal public assets and then claim they are the "wealth creators." It has been the plank for many a coup, invasion, and even genocide on grounds to stop "socialist" regimes and their "mad" policies. It blessed the "greed is good" mantra that eviscerated business ethics in the last decades. It protects the patent system from scrutiny and gives it space to grow.

…

In fact, an efficient free market absolutely depends on public assets. If you privatize the playing field, the owner will tilt it in his favor. All law is an answer to a set of problems. Stronger private property law is a brilliant, rational answer to the wrong problem: how to encourage individual investment and how to allow the wealth creators to escape the shackles of a parasitic society. The actual problem is: how to protect real investments from cheats (both the skinny beggars and the fat bandits). As I showed in the story of sub-Saharan Africa, endemic poverty comes from distant, fragmented, and unfair markets. No stronger property laws will open more ports, move Africa closer to Europe, or break the grip of the criminal elites and their foreign allies.

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook by Extinction Rebellion

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, banks create money, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, Colonization of Mars, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, drug harm reduction, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, feminist movement, full employment, Gail Bradbrook, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, mass immigration, negative emissions, Peter Thiel, place-making, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, rewilding, Sam Altman, smart grid, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, the scientific method, union organizing, urban sprawl, wealth creators

I prefer to call it, simply, democracy – real democracy. This is doable. Act, don’t ask. Learn by doing. Get on with it. Time is short. AFTERWORD ROWAN WILLIAMS It just might work. It is just possible that sustained pressure will bring about a modest change of heart among decision-makers and ‘wealth creators’ and some serious adjustments might be made. I can hear the sound of people not holding their breath. It isn’t only inertia that we have to contend with, unfortunately. It’s vested interests, passionate commitment to the goods and privileges we enjoy because of the way in which we – the collectively wealthy of the world – have chosen to use the material that lies around us.

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

The city as a whole is a wonderful technological invention that concentrates the flow of energy and minds into computer chip-like density. In a relatively small footprint, a city not only provides living quarters and occupations in a minimum of space, but it also generates a maximum of ideas and inventions. Stewart Brand notes in the “City Planet” chapter of his book Whole Earth Discipline, “Cities are wealth creators; they have always been.” He quotes urban theorist Richard Florida, who claims that forty of the largest megacities in the world, home to 18 percent of the world’s population, “produce two-thirds of global economic output and nearly 9 in 10 new patented innovations.” A Canadian demographer calculated that “80 to 90 percent of GNP growth occurs in cities.”

…

New York: HarperCollins, p. 34. 83 slum at its peak in the 1880s: Robert Neuwirth. (2006) Shadow Cities. New York: Routledge. 83 “this serves all the purposes of the family”: Ibid., p. 177. 83 “bona fide legal title to their land”: Ibid., p. 198. 83 “half a dozen tents or shanties”: Ibid., p. 197. 84 “Cities are wealth creators”: Stewart Brand. (2009) Whole Earth Discipline. New York: Viking, p. 25. 84 “nearly 9 in 10 new patented innovations”: Ibid., p. 32. 84 “GNP growth occurs in cities”: Ibid., p. 31. 84 “in the city at least six years”: Mike Davis. (2006) Planet of Slums. London: Verso, p. 36. 85 but 94 percent of their kids were literate: Stewart Brand. (2009) Whole Earth Discipline.

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

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

In these countries individual initiative and free enterprise continued to drive progress. Millions of people are 4 Britannia Unchained being pulled out of poverty across the world by the simple processes of capitalism. Britannia Unchained is unembarrassed about its support for business, the profit motive and the individual drive of the wealth creator. The term ‘globalisation’ is a cliché. However, it is certain that, for the first time in centuries, the world economy is being driven by what happens outside Europe and North America. At the same time, many parts of the old world are fighting back. Germany has embarked on a programme of welfare reform.

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

Concern about minoritarian misbehavior, the tyranny of a minority or of narrow interest groups, has been a constant in American politics, from George Mason’s contempt for stock-jobbers, to the fulminations of nineteenth-century populists such as Andrew Jackson and William Jennings Bryan. In the next century, William Z. Ripley, an economist (and racist), wrote of an economic struggle between wealth creators on Main Street and a smaller group of parasitical Wall Street speculators.16 We saw the same clash again in the 2008–9 bank bailout, which was said to have rescued our financial system but led to a jobless economic recovery. Those who defend the bailout tell us it saved the U.S. economy and prevented the Great Recession from turning into another Great Depression.

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

Hence the snobbery of the successful towards the views of the less successful is seen as being justified by merit and talent. This has coincided with a two-tier economy created by the decline of skilled manufacturing and the growth of graduate jobs. Deindustrialisation created a social and economic blight that impacted several generations and is still being felt today. ‘Wealth creators’ have become lionised; professional careers have been defined as the only reasonable option; and superstar CEOs have grown used to seeing their views venerated in a cult-like way. At the other end of the social scale, many jobs have been robbed of dignity and respect and workers have found their voices ignored.

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business intelligence, central bank independence, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-oil, pre–internet, public intellectual, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sexual politics, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce

Plato believed that any objective study of the human species revealed that human beings are naturally divided into three types on the basis of their natural abilities: men of gold, men of bronze and men of silver. The men of gold are the rightful guardians of the Republic: the people who, thanks to a combination of natural ability and careful training, have the ability to think more deeply, see more clearly and, as a result, rule more justly than anyone else. The men of silver are the wealth creators, the impresarios of the productive process. The men of bronze are the horny-handed sons of toil who take care of the necessities of life. But men of gold are not necessarily born to parents of gold, just as men of bronze are not necessarily born to parents of bronze: hence the explosive idea of equality of opportunity.

…

The artificial noble shrinks into a dwarf before the noble of nature …’9 William Cobbett (1763–1835), a labourer’s son who became the most influential journalist of his generation, was equally withering about ‘the thing’, as he dubbed the British establishment. The establishment existed to support ‘tax eaters’ at the expense of wealth-creators, and office-holders at the expense of ordinary people: it was thus ‘all-corrupting and all-degrading’. The Corn Laws kept the price of food high in order to make life easy for aristocrats. The system of patronage stuffed the administration with bloodsuckers. Cobbett drew up plans to write a play with the memorable title of ‘Bastards in High Places’ but unfortunately died before he could put pen to paper.

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

Source: Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, 2013 Figure 4.3 Households with children in private renting, percentage in England 1984–2012 The most vulnerable families in Britain – those with five or more vulnerabilities – stand to lose £3,000 a year in income by 2015, although subsequent events mean it will be more in real terms.67 It is also projected that, because of the cuts being driven by the interests of the 1 per cent, there will be many more families falling into the vulnerable group in the near future. Some 100,000 more workless families will be created as the ‘wealth creators’ fail to be ‘job creators’.68 If you are trying to imagine how the proportion of children living in homes owned by a landlord can rise even further, consider this trend. Note: The most vulnerable families score five or more vulnerabilities. Source: Howard Reed, 2012 Figure 4.4 Tax and Benefit changes by vulnerability in the UK, impact, 2010 to 2015 Just as key members of the richest 1 per cent, when in power, work so hard to cut benefits for the poorest groups, their supporters also work hard to influence public opinion by suggesting that these are benefits we simply cannot afford.

China's Disruptors: How Alibaba, Xiaomi, Tencent, and Other Companies Are Changing the Rules of Business by Edward Tse

3D printing, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, bilateral investment treaty, business process, capital controls, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, experimental economics, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, middle-income trap, money market fund, offshore financial centre, Pearl River Delta, reshoring, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trade route, wealth creators, working-age population

Unsurprisingly, with examples like this before them, most entrepreneurs avoid any explicit involvement in politics. Liu Chuanzhi, the honorary chairman and former CEO of Lenovo, and another prominent member of the CEF, has long maintained a public stance of “no politics.” But like Victor Wang, he also suggests that China needs to support and protect the country’s main wealth creators, which in turn will require more than just economic changes. Speaking at a China Entrepreneurs Forum meeting in 2013, he told CNBC, “My view is that the Chinese government should adopt a more systematic and comprehensive approach when it comes to reform. For example, how to establish a better rule of law in this country so as to increase the creditworthiness of the government, so that the public will have more confidence and ensure a culture of mutual trust and honesty can be established. . . .

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever by Alex Kantrowitz

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, anti-bias training, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer vision, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, fulfillment center, gigafactory, Google Chrome, growth hacking, hive mind, income inequality, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Jony Ive, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, work culture , zero-sum game

And if we were going to study leadership, management, and the state of work, we needed to begin there. In retrospect, it wasn’t a bad idea. It’s easy to forget how young our modern workplace is. Less than one hundred years ago, the factory drove our economy. It was our biggest employer and most important wealth creator. At the time, managing was not an art. It was a task carried out through threats and fear. Show up late to a shift and you’d get fired. Lag behind and you’d get fired. Talk fresh to a manager and, well, you’d get fired. Workers were hired for their labor, not their ideas. So companies could replace them overnight and hardly tell the difference.

The Knowledge Economy by Roberto Mangabeira Unger

additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, balance sheet recession, business cycle, collective bargaining, commoditize, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, first-past-the-post, full employment, global value chain, information asymmetry, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, means of production, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, post-Fordism, radical decentralization, savings glut, secular stagnation, side project, tacit knowledge, total factor productivity, transaction costs, union organizing, wealth creators

The sixth idea is that there exists an especially potent and promising subset of the circumstances represented by the fifth idea: this subset breaches the constraints on both supply and demand by broadening access to the most advanced practice of production. On the supply side, such initiatives increase the number of those who can share in the work of the most productive parts of the economy. On the demand side, they put people in a position to claim, as wealth creators, not simply as beneficiaries of retrospective and compensatory redistribution, a share in the wealth that they have helped produce. If this most advanced practice of production is the knowledge economy, the potential for the expansion of both supply and demand is especially great. The knowledge economy offers admission to a form of productive activity that tends to make innovation perpetual and that promises to relax or reverse the rule of diminishing marginal returns to an increasing input in the process of production.

GDP: The World’s Most Powerful Formula and Why It Must Now Change by Ehsan Masood

Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, biodiversity loss, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, energy security, European colonialism, financial engineering, government statistician, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mahbub ul Haq, mass immigration, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mohammed Bouazizi, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, zoonotic diseases

Nearly a decade earlier Gustav Papanek had calculated that some twenty-four families controlled half of all industrial assets.24 Some years later the economist Lawrence White expanded the list to forty-three family groups.25 But few argued with Haq’s basic point: that countries do not become more prosperous if government policies focus on stopping all but a small number of wealth creators from becoming ever richer. Mahbub ul Haq was not alone in discovering firsthand the damage that could be done by managing an economy through a narrow focus on GDP. Five thousand miles west of Karachi, another Cambridge alumnus had come to the same conclusion. This was Dudley Seers, inspirational statistician, founder of the Institute of Development Studies based at the University of Sussex, and an adviser to the then British Labour government of Harold Wilson and especially Wilson’s minister for overseas development, the formidable Barbara Castle.

The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees by Ben Mezrich

4chan, Asperger Syndrome, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Carl Icahn, contact tracing, data science, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, gamification, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Hyperloop, meme stock, Menlo Park, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, security theater, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Two Sigma, value at risk, wealth creators

“We dreamed of making investing more accessible, especially for people without a lot of money.” Vlad’s words throbbed with the passion of a BELIEVER, and it didn’t matter whether his sermon was reaching just the fifty-odd lawmakers who were gathered at the mount, or the millions upon millions who were watching in their homes. “The stock market is a powerful wealth creator,” he continued, “but almost half of US households—” And when the first interruption came, from the chair herself, it seemed such a surprise that Vlad’s stunned look was obvious to anyone who was watching. “Mr. Tenev. I would like you to use your limited time to talk directly to what happened January 28, and your involvement in it.”

More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded) by Michael J. Mauboussin

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, complexity theory, corporate governance, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fixed income, framing effect, functional fixedness, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Kenneth Arrow, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Menlo Park, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, Murray Gell-Mann, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, statistical model, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Stuart Kauffman, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Given the winner-take-most characteristics of many growth markets, there’s little reason to anticipate a more normal wealth-creation distribution in the future. In addition, the data show that the distribution of economic return on investment is wider in corporate America today than it was in the past.12 So the spoils awaiting the wealth creators, given their outsized returns, are greater than ever before. As in the St. Petersburg game, the majority of the payoffs from future deals are likely to be modest, but some will be huge. What’s the expected value? What should you be willing to pay to play? Integrating the Outliers The St.

How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present by Thomas J. Dilorenzo

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, British Empire, business cycle, California energy crisis, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, electricity market, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Hernando de Soto, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

The authors use economic theory and evidence to show that the Microsoft Corporation has always been a boon for competitiveness, contrary to the claims by the company’s sour-grapes competitors and résumé-building government antitrust attorneys. Locke, Edwin A. The Prime Movers: Traits of the Great Wealth Creators. New York: AMACOM, 2000. Locke catalogues the personal and business-practice traits of those who have been pioneers of industry and wealth creation in America. Manne, Henry G. The Modern Corporation and Social Responsibility. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1972. One of the founders of the “law and economics” movement explains how businesses can best be “socially responsible” by steadfastly concentrating on profit maximization.

A Little History of Economics by Niall Kishtainy

Alvin Roth, behavioural economics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dr. Strangelove, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, first-price auction, floating exchange rates, follow your passion, full employment, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, market design, means of production, Minsky moment, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

Thorstein Veblen had seen Vanderbilt and his type as throwbacks to ancient societies of violent barbarians, ‘robber barons’ whose aggression made them rich but didn’t benefit society as a whole. But Schumpeter said that it was because they’d channelled their excess energy into industry instead of battle that they’d become society’s wealth creators. It’s entrepreneurs who, through daring and determination, make the innovations necessary for economic advancement and so help raise living standards over the long run, thought Schumpeter. They create new products using inventions (light bulbs that make use of the new discovery of electricity), or use new technologies to produce goods more easily (cheaper coal as a result of mechanical digging machines).

The New Economics: A Bigger Picture by David Boyle, Andrew Simms

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Crossrail, delayed gratification, deskilling, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, financial deregulation, financial exclusion, financial innovation, full employment, garden city movement, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, light touch regulation, loss aversion, mega-rich, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working-age population

The economist Paul Krugman, in his book Peddling Prosperity, estimates that as much as 70 per cent of the extraordinary economic growth of the 1980s in the USA was delivered to the richest 1 per cent of the population.6 There were 13 billionaires in the US in 1982, and by 1999 there were 268 – and that was before the dot.com boom.7 We have already seen how Bill Clinton won the 1992 presidential election with the help of the slogan ‘Trickle down doesn’t work’. Despite this definitive statement, most economic policy is based on this flawed old economic dictum that helping the wealth-creators will automatically help everybody else. If that wealth is not productive, or if the bargain driven with the producers is manifestly unfair, then the wealth will not trickle. Even so, the complete failure of so-called ‘trickle down economics’ seems to require some other explanations. Why, despite the apparent success of recent decades, has that not benefited the poorest?

Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself by Peter Fleming

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, anti-work, antiwork, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon tax, clockwatching, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, David Graeber, death from overwork, Etonian, future of work, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Kitchen Debate, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, neoliberal agenda, Parkinson's law, post-industrial society, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Results Only Work Environment, scientific management, shareholder value, social intelligence, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, transaction costs, wealth creators, working poor

This is because the power gulf between the winners and the massively expanding class of losers has become so obvious and thus risks inciting insurrection. For instance, neoliberal society requires a very intrusive, micro-managing and punitive state apparatus which is expensive to run. This enables it to protect and disconnect a highly concentrated ruling class from the majority, who are the real wealth creators in capitalist society. We also see this pattern unfolding in the workplace. As soon as it arrives in any organization, managerialism’s first tendency is to swiftly expand its own ranks and replicate itself over and over again. In his extremely insightful study Fat and Mean (1996), Gordon dispels the myth that the neoliberal enterprise is lean and mean.

How Much Is Enough?: Money and the Good Life by Robert Skidelsky, Edward Skidelsky

banking crisis, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, carbon credits, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, Dr. Strangelove, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Meghnad Desai, Paul Samuelson, Philippa Foot, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, Robert Solow, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, union organizing, University of East Anglia, Veblen good, wage slave, wealth creators, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

The way to faster growth lay not through planning, but freeing up markets from red tape, improving incentives through lighter taxes, reducing the power of trade unions, and extending markets through privatization and deregulation. These steps in combination would make the allocation of capital more efficient. The Thatcher–Reagan dispensation also viewed the growth of income inequality as acceptable insofar as it improved the incentives of the “wealth creators”: there would be a “trickle down” from rich to poor. This set of ideas became what Adair Turner calls the dominant “instrumental conventional wisdom” across the political world over the following thirty years.2 In retrospect, it was the shift to a market-based philosophy of growth rather than to a growth-based philosophy as such that inflamed the insatiability of wants we identified in Chapter 1.

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial independence, fixed income, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, housing justice, hustle culture, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, minimum wage unemployment, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Also, according to the Patriotic Millionaires and their ilk, adequate estate taxes need to be implemented. When Collins first started making this case, multimillionaires and billionaires asked him, “‘Why do I have to pay this tax?’ They said, ‘I didn’t get any government help.’ They said, ‘Why are you punishing successful people? Why are you burdening the wealth creators with taxes?’” After Trump was elected, less than 0.1 percent of estates in the United States pay the tax: the limit for what estates were taxed at increased from $5.49 million per person in 2017 to $11.18 million in 2018, so only 1,900 estates are now taxed under federal tax law. The fact that even large estates are not taxed means that dollars do not flow to those who need them.

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality by Don Watkins, Yaron Brook

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, profit motive, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Uber for X, urban renewal, War on Poverty, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Thinkers, of every level of ability, with the most credit going to the men and women of extraordinary ability. One of the most disturbing features of the debate over inequality is the almost deafening silence on the issue of human ability. More often than not, those who condemn inequality don’t discuss ability. And when they do, it is usually to accuse the greatest wealth creators of being greedy exploiters. But the men and women of extraordinary ability aren’t exploiters—they are the great benefactors of anyone who is willing to produce wealth. The Harmony of Interests among Producers When someone pursues unearned wealth, he can do so only at the expense of other people’s interests.

No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy by Linsey McGoey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, American Legislative Exchange Council, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, cashless society, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, effective altruism, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, germ theory of disease, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Leo Hollis, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school choice, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators

In 2012, a millionaire entrepreneur and tech investor named Nick Hanauer – he made a windfall as an early Amazon investor – gave a TED presentation that expressed a starkly different view from Fries. His TED talk called for more progressive tax measures. He also lambasted the notion that entrepreneurs are society’s primary ‘wealth creators’. In his words, ‘Anyone who’s ever run a business knows that hiring more people is a capitalist’s course of last resort, something we do only when increasing customer demand requires it. In this sense, calling ourselves job creators isn’t just inaccurate, it’s disingenuous’. TED, which operates with the tagline ‘ideas worth spreading’, refused to air the video of his talk online.

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

That trick is the merchant class’s ability to create an erroneous impression of shared public interest. Here’s where the story really gets interesting, because there’s a deep irony – even something of a two-century-long academic hoax – at the heart of Smith’s romanticized legacy. The irony is that so-called ‘wealth-creators’ are still getting away with the exact trick that Smith first warned governments to watch out for. To understand this trick, it’s helpful to understand the way that Smith categorized different economic classes in his day. He saw society as divided into three different classes, or ‘orders’ as he sometimes called them: the landowning class, the merchant class and the labourer class.

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, Benchmark Capital, business climate, classic study, creative destruction, data acquisition, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, high net worth, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, PalmPilot, pre–internet, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, tech worker, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, wealth creators, Y2K

The metaphor that Romer used to describe the economy to noneconomists was of a well-stocked kitchen waiting for a brilliant chef to exploit it. Everyone in the kitchen starts with more or less the same ingredients, the metaphor ran, but not everyone produces good food. And only a very few people who wander into the kitchen find entirely new ways to combine old ingredients into delightfully tasty recipes. These people were the wealth creators. Their recipes were wealth. Electricity. The transistor. The microprocessor. The personal computer. The Internet. It followed from the theory that any society that wanted to become richer would encourage the traits, however bizarre, that led people to create new recipes. "A certain tolerance for nonconformism is really critical to the process," as Romer put it.

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

But politicians will argue that it is electorally impossible to introduce progressive policies that upset supposedly crucial, but completely misconstrued, 'Middle Britain' swing voters. It even became fashionable among many politicians and commentators to celebrate inequality. Inequality is good because itpromotes competition, goes the theory, and it shows that the people at the top are generating wealth. The corollary of this is the idolization of the rich as 'wealth creators' and entrepreneurs, who have achieved success purely through their own hard work and talent. The class politics of the wealthy has proved extraordinarily effective at demolishing its opponents. Itloudly asserts-c-as Margaret Thatcher famously put it-that 'There Is No Alternative'. Policies that promote the interests of the wealthiest are presented as necessary for the wellbeing of society as a whole.

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

In this view, the goal of efficient government would be to make investors as happy as possible, and watch the wealth and contentment pile up. But the economy is inherently political. It works, insofar as it does, through a tacit compromise between owners and wage-earners. Despite the hallelujahs and hosannahs for ‘wealth creators’ that politicians of centre-Right and centre-Left are inclined to engage in, businesses only bother to generate prosperity if the circumstances are acceptably profitable to them.24 Employees, meanwhile, have to at least implicitly agree to the conditions that are necessary for profit-making. Stable governments are those which are able to secure a compromise between classes on the conditions of future growth.

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

This is how a machine learns. Because of such predictions, a customer can order a video-game player on Amazon and receive it eight minutes later. It’s almost as if Amazon’s software knows what customers will order before they order it. Eerie. Those who understand and can execute such systems will be the big wealth creators of the future. Bezos has applied—at an unprecedented scale—big data and AI to push his flywheel, and by doing so, he has created a new turbocharged way of thinking that will change the way successful businesses are run in the twenty-first century. He is applying or will apply this turbocharged flywheel not just to retailing but to a long list of industries on Amazon’s radar: media, health care, banking, shipping, and more.

The Unusual Billionaires by Saurabh Mukherjea

Albert Einstein, asset light, Atul Gawande, backtesting, barriers to entry, Black-Scholes formula, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, buy and hold, call centre, Checklist Manifesto, commoditize, compound rate of return, corporate governance, dematerialisation, disintermediation, diversification, equity risk premium, financial innovation, forensic accounting, full employment, inventory management, low cost airline, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Peter Thiel, QR code, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, work culture

Similarly, in India, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is India’s largest company by market cap. TCS’s market capitalization went up to Rs 4.8 lakh crore in 2015 from Rs 0.6 lakh crore in 2004, implying a growth rate of 20 per cent per annum. This was much higher than the Sensex’s growth rate of 13.3 per cent per annum over the same period, making TCS an enormous wealth creator for its investors. Surely, this achievement suggests that TCS is a great company. Whilst there is no disputing TCS’s or Apple’s stature, measures of a company’s greatness based on stock price tend to be short-sighted. Stock prices change every day, whereas greatness is meant to be an enduring quality.

Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis by David Boyle

anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Goodhart's law, housing crisis, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mega-rich, Money creation, mortgage debt, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Ocado, Occupy movement, off grid, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pensions crisis, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, precariat, quantitative easing, school choice, scientific management, Slavoj Žižek, social intelligence, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, work culture , working poor

It is not happening in the same way in most continental economies, so it must be the result of political decisions, yet no political party could possibly be elected on that kind of promise. The financial elite — the One Per Cent — are more embattled, but so far they still have the political elite on their side, still convinced that these are somehow wealth creators, despite mounting evidence that the financial sector has evolved into something which siphons wealth away from the middle classes and into the hands of the Masters of the Universe. This is what Paul Woolley calls a ‘perfect storm of wealth destruction’.[32] It is a system that has been created, perhaps unintentionally, to extract wealth, loading down the real economy with debt, adding to the cost of living with speculative bubbles and the constant fees and deductions on every transaction, while governments find themselves forced to underwrite loans to productive business.

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

J. (2017) The robot that takes your job should pay taxes, says Bill Gates, Quartz, February 17, https:/​/​qz.​com/​911968/​bill-gates-the-robot-that-takes-your-job-should-pay-taxes. 6 Walker, J. (2017) Robot Tax – A Summary of Arguments ‘For’ and ‘Against,’ Techemergence, October 24, 2017, https:/​/​www.​techemergence.​com/​robot-tax-summary-arguments/​. 7 Isaac, A. and Wallace, T. (2017) Return of the Luddites: why a robot tax could never work, The Daily Telegraph, September 27, 2017, https:/​/​www.​telegraph.​co.​uk/​business/​2017/​09/​27/​return-luddites-robot-tax-could-never-work/​. 8 Walker, J. (2017), op. cit. 9 Ibid. 10 Reuters (2017) European Parliament calls for robot law, rejects robot tax, February 16, https:/​/​www.​reuters.​com/​article/​us-europe-robots-lawmaking/​european-parliament-calls-for-robot-law-rejects-robot-tax-idUSKBN15V2KM 11 See Abbott, R. and Bogenschneider, B. (2017) Should Robots Pay Taxes? Tax Policy in the Age of Automation, Harvard Law & Policy Review, Vol. 12, p. 150. 12 L. Summers (2017) Robots are wealth creators and taxing them is illogical, Financial Times, March 5. 13 R. J. Shiller (2017) “Robotization without Taxation?,” Project Syndicate, http:/​/​prosyn.​org/​Rebz6Jw. 14 Tegmark, M. (2017) Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, London: Allen Lane., p. 273. 15 Dvorsky, G. (2017) Hackers have already started to weaponize artificial intelligence, Gizmodo, November 9, https:/​/​gizmodo.​com/​hackers-have-already-started-to-weaponize-artificial-in-1797688425. 16 Ibid. 17 House of Lords Committee Report, session 2017-19, HL Paper 100, April 16, 2018, p. 95. 18 Quoted in (2016) Robotics and Artificial Intelligence, House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, Fifth Report of Session 2016-17, HC 145, London: House of Commons. 19 Ibid., p. 18. 20 For an analysis of these issues, see (2017) Data Management and Use: Governance in the Twenty-first Century, London: British Academy and the Royal Society, https:/​/​royalsociety.​org/​~/​media/​policy/​projects/​data-governance/​data-management-governance.​pdf. 21 Globe editorial (2018) When tech companies collect data, bad things can happen, January 30, https:/​/​www.​theglobeandmail.​com/​opinion/​editorials/​globe-editorial-when-tech-companies-collect-data-bad-things-can-happen/​article37798038/​ 22 Baker, P. (2018) Reining In Data-Crazed Tech Companies, April 16, https:/​/​www.​ecommercetimes.​com/​story/​85278.​html 23 Solon, O. (2018) Facebook says Cambridge Analytica may have gained 37m more users data, The Guardian, April 4, https:/​/​www.​theguardian.​com/​technology/​2018/​apr/​04/​facebook-cambridge-analytica-user-data-latest-more-than-thought 24 Frischmann, B. (2018) Here’s why tech companies abuse our data: because we let them, The Guardian, April 10, https:/​/​www.​theguardian.​com/​commentisfree/​2018/​apr/​10/​tech-companies-data-online-transactions-friction 25 Stucke, M.

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

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

That same Machinists Union remains in action today, striking a deal with Uber that provides its New York drivers with a spread of benefits, for example. Leslie Hook, “Uber Strikes Deal with Machinists Union for New York Drivers,” Financial Times, 10 May 2016. 17.  Lawrence Summers, “Robots Are Wealth Creators and Taxing Them Is Illogical,” Financial Times, 5 March 2017. 18.  Both where the traditional capital is saved (the “stock”) and the income that streams to those who own it (the “flow”). Piketty similarly called for a global tax on capital; see Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. 19.  

Austerity Britain: 1945-51 by David Kynaston

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, Arthur Marwick, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, continuous integration, deindustrialization, deskilling, Etonian, full employment, garden city movement, hiring and firing, industrial cluster, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, light touch regulation, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, occupational segregation, price mechanism, public intellectual, rent control, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stakhanovite, strikebreaker, the market place, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional

All in all, in Britain’s unexpectedly harsh post-war circumstances, these 20 Labour politicians ‘found themselves in a plight to which a lifetime’s assumptions were quite inappropriate, for instead of redistributing wealth they were faced with the urgent and immensely more difficult task of creating it’. The Barnett version carries a powerful charge, and certainly it is difficult to see the first Chancellor, Hugh Dalton, for all his being the author of an often reprinted textbook entitled Principles of Public Finance, as one of nature’s wealth-creators. ‘Stop talking details, Nicholas! Stick to principles!’ he would boom whenever his friend Nicholas Davenport, City economist and writer, tried to explain the workings of capitalism’s citadel. But his successor Stafford Cripps was a significantly different economic animal. The diary of Raymond Streat, who first got to know Cripps when he was still President of the Board of Trade, reveals an initial deep scepticism eventually giving way to outright admiration for his grasp of detail, superb brain and unmistakable sincerity of purpose.

…

‘Four years after starting work at Pilkingtons, he conceived the idea that molten glass could be formed into a continuous ribbon by pouring it into a bath of tin and “floating” it while it cooled.’14Such was the revolutionary float-glass process, eventually to become world-famous. It had been a triumph of not-quite-nepotistic recruitment. For every wealth-creator, unfortunately, there was at least one Lord Portal of Hungerford. An ace fighter pilot in one world war, Chief of the Air Staff in another, his first big peacetime job (1946–51) was as Controller of Atomic Energy. ‘I cannot remember that he ever did anything that helped us,’ the very able Christopher Hinton, responsible for the production of fissile material, unsentimentally recalled.

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

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

It drew in and consumed . . . . . . and gave back the dung from its pens, and the soot from its chimneys, and steel, and saucepans, and all the tools by which its food was made. And also clothes, and fashions, and ideas, and interesting vices, songs, and knowledge, and something which, if looked at in the right light, was called civilization. That was what civilization meant. It meant the city. —Terry Pratchett, Night Watch Cities are wealth creators; they always have been. They are population sinks, and always have been. Just as agriculture raised the world’s carrying capacity for humans, so did cities. The death rate from “constant battles” declined with urbanization, LeBlanc says, because “as the city folk make tools and improve the technologies that make the farming more efficient, more people can live in the city instead of farming, and the cities grow.

The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime by Mj Demarco

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, back-to-the-land, Bernie Madoff, bounce rate, business logic, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, cloud computing, commoditize, dark matter, delayed gratification, demand response, do what you love, Donald Trump, drop ship, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, housing crisis, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, multilevel marketing, passive income, passive investing, payday loans, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, Ronald Reagan, subscription business, upwardly mobile, wealth creators, white picket fence, World Values Survey, zero day

As violations accrue, the road degrades in its wealth potential, and with it, your ability to get near Effection also degrades. While it's possible to violate one or more commandments and still create wealth quickly, you should aim for a road that satisfies all five commandments. Potent roads are potent wealth creators. Sadly, most business opportunities fail the commandments, and, if they fail, they don't deserve your respect or attention. Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions Not all businesses are the right road. Few roads move at, through, or near the Law of Effection. The best roads and the purest Fastlanes satisfy the Five Fastlane Commandments: Need, Entry, Control, Scale, and Time

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

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

.), Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations (Oxford: Blackwell). Perry, R., (1844), Facts and Observations on the Sanitary State of Glasgow, Shewing the Connections Existing Between Poverty, Disease, and Crime (Glasgow: Gartnaval Press). Peters, C. M. (1990), Glasgow’s Tobacco Lords: An Examination of Wealth Creators in the Eighteenth Century, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow. Potter, A. and Watts, H. D. (2012), ‘Revisiting Marshall’s Agglomeration Economies: Technological Relatedness and the Evolution of the Sheffield Metals Cluster’, Regional Studies, May. Pulteney, W. A. (1844), Observations on the Epidemic Fever of MDCCCXLIII in Scotland and Its Connection with the Destitute Condition of the Poor (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons).

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Reconfiguring the Corporation as the Engine of Capitalism With the rise of a global peer-to-peer platform for identity, trust, reputation, and transactions, we will finally be able to re-architect the deep structures of the firm for innovation, shared-value creation, and perhaps even prosperity for the many, rather than just wealth for the few. This doesn’t mean smaller firms in terms of revenue or impact. To the contrary, we’re talking about building twenty-first-century companies, some that may be massive wealth creators and powerful in their respective markets. We do think enterprises will look more like networks rather than the vertically integrated hierarchies of the industrial age. As such there is an opportunity to distribute (not redistribute) wealth more democratically. We’ll also take you on a stroll through the mind-boggling world of smart contracts, new autonomous economic agents, and what we call distributed autonomous enterprises where intelligent software takes over the management and organization of many resources and capabilities, perhaps displacing corporations.

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

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who themselves were entitled to honours when they left office but didn’t take them, used the system in a way that was open to accusations of cronyism. There were plenty of people given honours by New Labour: Fred Goodwin, Philip Green and Alan Sugar to name a few, who would not have been thought of as natural recipients of honours from a Labour government. This hero worship for ‘wealth creators’ and ‘people who get things done’ took on a much more insidious form when it came to party finance. The desire to raise money led to the first problem, when it was revealed in January 1997 that Bernie Ecclestone, then chief executive of the Formula One Group, had made a £1 million donation to Labour before the election.

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

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

As we demonstrated in the chapters above, many still incorrectly extrapolate Darwinian ideas and use them to argue that the world is a place of rampant competition in which Britain has to fight to survive, that it will either sink or swim, and that this is entirely the natural way of things. They suggest that to deny that is to deny reality,17 implying that the poverty created in Britain (by not properly taxing accumulators, also known as ‘wealth creators’) is unavoidable. In Britain, the poor, they say, will always be with us, casualties of a law of nature. While not naming names, Brown’s comments above might have been referring to Lord Ashcroft, who supported voting to leave the EU and wrote a short book giving his views on why Leave happened.18 Earlier, when writing about himself, Lord Ashcroft explained, ‘When my parents first learned that they were going to British Honduras, they had to study an atlas to discover its precise location in Central America.’19 Ashcroft’s father was an ‘administrator in the Colonial Service’, a British civil servant who worked for the empire.

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

The most obvious thing is the idea that business is more efficient than government. Margaret Thatcher never tried to hide her belief that civil servants were simpering do-gooders who went into public service because they were too unimaginative or left wing to go into business. Tony Blair loved mixing with “wealth creators” such as Virgin’s Richard Branson and BP’s John Browne. Even Gordon Brown, who was much more emotionally committed to the public sector than Blair, and who poured money into the public sector when he became prime minister, was unhappy with Whitehall’s mandarin elite. He repeatedly talked about reinventing government and “transforming” the civil service, and relied heavily on outside advisors from management consulting and business.

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

“By taxation, by inflation, by the remorseless flood of regulations and legislation, by controls and by the constant and arbitrary interventions of authority, successive governments since the war have cumulatively taken away both the pleasure and the rewards that once made risk-taking worthwhile,” Sir Keith Joseph, the primary intellectual architect of Thatcherism, said in 1976. “By this attitude we have driven out some wealth-creators; discouraged others; shrivelled the impulse to expand and throttled enterprise.” Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan both got elected on promises to restore incentives to work and invest. They were viewed as economic radicals, but much of what they said was common sense. Beyond a certain level—what it is can be debated—taxes discourage effort and encourage evasion.

The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain by Brett Christophers

Alan Greenspan, book value, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Corn Laws, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, Diane Coyle, estate planning, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, ghettoisation, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, late capitalism, market clearing, Martin Wolf, New Journalism, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Right to Buy, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, wealth creators

Just six of the top 100 made their money from industry, and seven from retail. Finance and investment have 10 entries apiece.’1 Such, one might say, is the personification of rentier capitalism. ‘Let’s talk about the real money’, George Monbiot wrote in 2014. ‘The Westminster government claims to champion an entrepreneurial society, of wealth creators and hard-working families, but the real rewards and incentives are for rent.’1 In privatizing public land, successive neoliberal British governments have merely redoubled those rewards and incentives, and thus actively reinforced rentier dynamics. The country is reaping the consequences. Social dislocation Alongside Adam Smith, another influential figure whose understanding of land commodification and its implications I discussed in Chapter 1 was Karl Polanyi.

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives by Danny Dorling, Kirsten McClure

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, clean water, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Greta Thunberg, Henri Poincaré, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, rent control, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, School Strike for Climate, Scramble for Africa, sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, Tim Cook: Apple, time dilation, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, very high income, wealth creators, wikimedia commons, working poor

This has been, and will be, a very long process, but the overall arc is bending toward rising equality. In 1883 the phrase labour-giver, meaning one who provides work, was derided in the preface to the third edition of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.11 Today we are still having to explain how stupid the term wealth creator is to describe those who simply happen to be so rich that they can invest. Every large profitable investment ultimately derives from the debts or poverty of the many, and increasingly brings about diminishing returns for the investors compared to the returns they used to reap when population and markets were growing so fast.

The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community by David C. Korten

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, banks create money, big-box store, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, death of newspapers, declining real wages, different worldview, digital divide, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, peak oil, planetary scale, plutocrats, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, shared worldview, social intelligence, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, trade route, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, World Values Survey

The guiding mantra is create beneficial local options, take only what you need, and accept responsibility for the whole. The rules favor absentee owners, monopoly-scale enterprises, financial speculators, rights of property, and central planning by global corporations. The rules favor participating owners, human-scale enterprises, wealth creators, rights of people, and self-organization by people and communities. Denying any responsibility for public interests, proponents seek to secure impermeable boundaries around the exclusive private interests of corporations and their wealthiest owners, while demanding that communities eliminate any borders protective of public interests.

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

As the lead attorney in the economic liberty project at the Pacific Legal Foundation, I have had a unique opportunity to observe up close the unfair and oftenludicrous restrictions imposed on America’s hardest-working citizens. Dozens of the cases described in this book are ones in which I participated either by representing entrepreneurs or by filing friendof-the-court briefs in defense of important economic freedoms. The opportunity to work with America’s wealth creators, by defending their moral and constitutional right to earn a living, has been among the great experiences of my life. The pages that follow cover a variety of issues relating in different ways to the right to earn a living, proceeding in a roughly chronological fashion. Beginning with the common-law tradition of legal protections for economic liberty, we will see how 17th- and 18th-century judges came to recognize the individual right to earn a living as part of their attack on royal monopolies.

The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid by C. K. Prahalad

"World Economic Forum" Davos, barriers to entry, business cycle, business process, call centre, cashless society, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, do well by doing good, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, financial intermediation, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, information asymmetry, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, market fragmentation, microcredit, new economy, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, shareholder value, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, time value of money, transaction costs, vertical integration, wealth creators, working poor

How does this transform the basis for commercial transactions within a developing economy? Learning the Sanctity of Contracts Underpinning this ecosystem is education across all levels. The individual entrepreneur in the village—the Shakti Amma, for example—is being educated to be a responsible entrepreneur. She is a wealth creator in her village. She learns about products, prices, returns, and being an advisor and helper to her customers in the village. When I interviewed one Shakti Amma, who had been an entrepreneur for less than six months, the impact of being part of the ecosystem became obvious. The conversation went something like this: Q: If you could have any wish you want granted, what would your top three wishes be?

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

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

The British have never taken competition seriously: the left has preferred to think of alternatives to capitalism rather than try to improve it; the right has never seen the merit of a robust regime in which incumbent and powerful firms are challenged, curbed or even dismantled. Companies are self-professed ‘wealth creators’ because they are in the private rather than the public sector. (They also give generously to the Conservative Party.) Why regulate them with competition inquiries? Yet an aggressive competition policy is an indispensable support to small firms, innovation and entrepreneurship. It keeps markets open, affords opportunity and makes it harder for incumbent firms to defend their franchises unfairly.

When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain by Robert Chesshyre

Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, British Empire, corporate raider, deskilling, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, housing crisis, manufacturing employment, Mars Society, mass immigration, means of production, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, oil rush, plutocrats, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, the market place, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wealth creators, young professional

There were Mercedes, BMWs, Audis outside many homes (most of them are company perks); it was hard to park at night; neighbourhood car pools swept children away to fee-paying academies; quite modest homes changed hands for sums that a decade earlier would have made someone very rich. Such wealth seemed unreal: what was being done to justify it? Had Britain become overnight a nation of risk-takers and wealth creators? Was I surrounded by entrepreneurs? It seemed unlikely. They did not seem men of the stamp I had known in the States: this had to be some form of North Sea Bubble. There had been a lack of financial reality about Washington DC, with lobbyists and lawyers creaming millions of dollars off the federal government and off their clients, but in 1981, when we went there, at least the country was rich and productive enough to afford them.

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

The latter typically subtracts from it, for in the process of taking it away, wealth gets destroyed. A monopolist who overcharges for his product takes money from those whom he is overcharging and at the same time destroys value. To get his monopoly price, he has to restrict production. Unfortunately, even genuine wealth creators often are not satisfied with the wealth that their innovation or entrepreneurship has reaped. Some eventually turn to abusive practices like monopoly pricing or other forms of rent extraction to garner even more riches. To take just one example, the railroad barons of the nineteenth century provided an important service in constructing the railroads, but much of their wealth was the result of their political influence—getting large government land grants on either side of the railway.

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

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

Murthy, 2014, “Top 10 Job Titles That Didn’t Exist 5 Years Ago (Infographic),” LinkedIn Talent Blog, January 6, https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/2014/01/top-10-job-titles-that-didnt-exist-5-years-ago-infographic. 16. M. Berg, 1976, “The Machinery Question,” PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2. 17. L. Summers, 2017, “Robots Are Wealth Creators and Taxing Them Is Illogical,” Financial Times, March 5. 18. C. Goldin and L. Katz, 2008, The Race between Technology and Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 1–2. 19. G. J. Duncan and R. J. Murnane, eds., 2011. Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances (New York: Russell Sage Foundation). 20.

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

Brett Christophers First published by Verso 2020 © Brett Christophers 2020 All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-972-6 ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-973-3 (UK EBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-974-0 (US EBK) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY The current transformation of capitalism is characterised by a full-fledged comeback and proliferation of forms of rent. Carlo Vercellone, 2008 Let’s talk about the real money. The Westminster government claims to champion an entrepreneurial society, of wealth creators and hard-working families, but the real rewards and incentives are for rent. George Monbiot, 2014 Contents List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgements Abbreviations Preface Introduction 1. The Functionless Investor Financial Rents 2. Carbon Neoliberalism Natural-Resource Rents 3.

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Source: Arun Kumar, The Eighty Twenty Investor (blog), October 11, 2019, used by permission of the author. TABLE 26.2 Largest drawdowns in the U.S. equity markets (S&P 500), 1929–present Did all this interim stock price volatility make even a slight dent in the long-term business performance of any of the many big wealth creators? No. During the usual periodic sharp corrections and the occasional recessions, keep Paul Harvey’s words in mind: “In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these.” Be a Keen Student of Financial History There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

These days, Sequoia realized, startup founders could be very young; this Zuckerberg was only twenty. In the new era of software ventures, entrepreneurs just needed a mastery of code, an idea for a product, and a maniacal focus. The meeting was set for 8:00 a.m. At 8:05 a.m., Zuckerberg had not shown up. Such were the hazards that VCs faced when wealth creators were practically adolescents. Botha got on the phone to check that the guest of honor was still coming. Presently, Zuckerberg and his buddy Andrew McCollum appeared at the Sequoia headquarters. They were not merely late. They were dressed in pajama bottoms and T-shirts. Don Valentine, by now retired, had come into the office that day and spied the boys in the lobby.

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History by David Edgerton

active measures, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, Donald Davies, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, full employment, gentrification, imperial preference, James Dyson, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land reform, land value tax, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, packet switching, Philip Mirowski, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, post-truth, post-war consensus, public intellectual, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, technological determinism, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, trade liberalization, union organizing, very high income, wages for housework, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor

‘These have been fourteen years of waste, years of neglect, years of decline. Fourteen years of casino economics – a speculators’ paradise – have plunged British industry into two record-breaking recessions.’ He noted, accurately, that economic growth was ‘lower than in the 1960s and the 1970s; investment in manufacturing – the vital wealth creator of our economy – lower than in 1979’. There were huge deficits in public finance and trade, and still 3 million out of work. He called these and others the ‘facts that mock the Tory hype and propaganda … that explode their so-called economic miracle: the so-called Thatcher revolution’.24 John Smith died suddenly, and with him this renewed Labour critique.

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

access to a mobile phone, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, clean water, Columbian Exchange, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Isaac Newton, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, yield management, Yom Kippur War

The loss of manpower in Bengal devastated local productivity. As revenues collapsed, costs suddenly rose sharply causing panic that the golden goose had laid its last egg. This prompted a run on the shares of the EIC and pushed the Company to the brink of bankruptcy.60 Far from its directors being superhuman administrators and wealth-creators, it turned out that the practices and culture of the Company had brought the intercontinental financial system to its knees. * * * After desperate consultation, the government in London concluded that the EIC was too big to fail and agreed a bail-out. To fund this, however, cash had to be raised.