winner-take-all economy

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The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us by Robert H. Frank, Philip J. Cook

accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alvin Roth, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, business cycle, compensation consultant, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Garrett Hardin, global village, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, junk bonds, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Network effects, positional goods, prisoner's dilemma, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Shoshana Zuboff, Stephen Hawking, stock buybacks, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, winner-take-all economy

I S If the least talented contestants were to drop out and become engi­ neers, teachers, or production workers, the performance levels of the top performers in winner-take-all markets would not fall by much, if at all. In return, we would get additional output of much greater value. In short, private market incentives lead too many contestants to enter winner-take-all markets, often at high cost in terms of forgone output in other markets. A More Realistic Economy Our hypothetical winner-take-all economy is obviously a stick-figure caricature. Its simplicity is useful, however, insofar as it enables us to see more clearly the forces that give rise to overcrowding in winner­ take-all markets. With this picture in mind, we can now flesh out the example to see how career decisions might play out under conditions more like the ones that exist in complex modern economies.

The invisible-hand theory says that we get socially optimal career choices when people make well-informed, self-serving decisions on the basis of market incentives. But it also says, by implication at least, that if people generally overestimate their prospects in winner-take-all markets, the resulting career choices will not be socially (or even indi­ vidually ) optimal. W hatever its ultimate source, the Lake Wobegon ef­ fect describes just such a bias, for it makes participation in winner-take-all markets seem misleadingly attractive. 106 The Winner-Take-All Society A Simple Winner-Take-All Economy Free marketeers will not be surprised that we get inefficient outcomes when people make career choices on the basis of inaccurate informa­ tion.

We will call markets of this type "mass" winner­ take-all markets. Large prizes in many other winner-take-all markets result from a small number of buyers who are intensely interested in the winner's performance. Examples in this category, which we call "deep-pocket" winner-take-all markets, include the markets for top painters and sculptors, for attorneys who are effective at keeping organized crime figures out of jail, and for geologists who are unusually good at find­ ing oil. As we will see in chapter 3, the scope of mass winner-take-all mar­ kets has grown over time relative to that of deep-pocket winner-take­ all markets. But as our analysis in chapter 6 will make clear, the distributional and efficiency issues posed by these two market types are essentially the same.


pages: 416 words: 112,159

Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess by Robert H. Frank

Alan Greenspan, business cycle, clean water, company town, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, full employment, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, global village, haute couture, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, income inequality, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, market clearing, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Pareto efficiency, Post-Keynesian economics, RAND corporation, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, telemarketer, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, working poor

Occupational Choice in a Winner-Take-All Economy A third way in which higher tax rates at the top would actually stimulate the economy stems from a relationship largely ignored by trickle-down theorists—namely, the effect of tax policy on occupational choice. Economic orthodoxy asserts that free-market incentives allocate talent across different occupations in socially beneficial ways. This assertion rests on the assumption that an individual’s reward in any occupation depends on absolute performance. As discussed in chapter 3, however, the modern economy is increasingly permeated by winner-take-all markets, in which small differences in relative performance translate into large differences in reward.

And if any one thing is certain, it is that growing income inequality has not resulted from any weakening of market forces. On the contrary, global and domestic competition has never been more intense than now. THE SPREAD OF WINNER-TAKE-ALL MARKETS In our recent book, Philip Cook and I argued that the recent surge in earnings inequality stems, in large part, from the growing importance of what we call “winner-take-all markets”—markets in which small differences in performance often give rise to enormous differences in economic reward.20 Long familiar in entertainment, sports, and the arts, these markets have increasingly permeated accounting, law, journalism, consulting, medicine, investment banking, corporate management, publishing, design, fashion, and a host of other professions.

THE SPREAD OF WINNER-TAKE-ALL MARKETS In our recent book, Philip Cook and I argued that the recent surge in earnings inequality stems, in large part, from the growing importance of what we call “winner-take-all markets”—markets in which small differences in performance often give rise to enormous differences in economic reward.20 Long familiar in entertainment, sports, and the arts, these markets have increasingly permeated accounting, law, journalism, consulting, medicine, investment banking, corporate management, publishing, design, fashion, and a host of other professions. To understand the recent surge in earnings inequality, and hence to predict future income and consumption patterns, it is helpful to look briefly at the forces that give rise to winner-take-all markets. (The material that follows is developed in much more detail in The Winner-Take-All Society, whose readers may wish to skip this chapter and move directly to chapter 4.) Winner-take-all markets have proliferated in part because technology has greatly extended the power and reach of the planet’s most gifted performers. At the turn of the century, when the state of Iowa alone had more than 1,300 opera houses, thousands of tenors earned adequate, if modest, livings performing before live audiences.21 Now that most music we listen to is prerecorded, however, the world’s best tenor can be literally everywhere at once.


pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

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

“What seems clear is that Amazon is using its market power,” a June 2014 New York Times editorial notes about Amazon’s decision to unstock Hachette’s books, “to get the best deal for itself while it squeezes publishers, annoys its customers and hurts authors by limiting their sales.”56 “Amazon’s Power Play” is how the New York Times summarized this bullying behavior. This is an accurate summary not only of the Internet’s winner-take-all economy, but also of Amazon’s dominant place in it. So much for those “decentralizing, globalizing, harmonizing and empowering” qualities that Nicholas Negroponte promised would be a “force of nature” of the digital age. Jeff Bezos would, of course, disagree, arguing, no doubt, that such a generalization is a narrative fallacy. But he’d be wrong. The real force of nature in the digital age is a winner-take-all economy that is creating increasingly monopolistic companies like Amazon and multibillionaire plutocrats like Bezos himself.

Rather than producing more jobs or prosperity, the Internet is dominated by winner-take-all companies like Amazon and Google that are now monopolizing vast swaths of our information economy. But why has this happened? How has a network designed to have neither a heart, a hierarchy, nor a central dot created such a top-down, winner-take-all economy run by a plutocracy of new lords and masters? Monetization In The Everything Store, his definitive 2013 biography of Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, Brad Stone recounts a conversation he had with Bezos about the writing of his book. “How do you plan to handle the narrative fallacy?” the Internet entrepreneur asked, leaning forward on his elbows and staring in his bug-eyed way at Stone.9 There was a nervous silence as Stone looked at Bezos blankly.

“It’s the obvious destination for the work-hard-play-hard set.”13 Like an express suddenly roaring past a freight train, the second version of the Internet replaced the first with remarkable speed. What is particularly striking is how few people successfully jumped from one train to the other. But one person who did make the leap was Marc Andreessen. Indeed, more than any other single individual, Andreessen was responsible for transforming the nonprofit Internet into a winner-take-all economy. Andreessen had become familiar with the World Wide Web in the early nineties as a computer science student at the University of Illinois, where he was also earning $6.85 an hour working as a programmer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), a National Science Foundation–funded research center attached to the university.


pages: 339 words: 88,732

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

Suddenly the top-quality provider can capture the whole market. The next-best provider might be almost as good, but it will not matter. Each time a market becomes more digital, these winner-take-all economics become a little more compelling. Winner-take-all markets were just coming to the fore in the 1990s, when Frank and Cook wrote their remarkably prescient book. They compared these winner-take-all markets, where the compensation was mainly determined by relative performance, to traditional markets, where revenues more closely tracked absolute performance. To understand the distinction, suppose the best, hardest-working construction worker could lay one thousand bricks in a day while the tenth-best laid nine hundred bricks per day.

A superstar or long-tail economy with low barriers to entry is still one with far more inequality. The Power Curve Nation An economy dominated by winner-take-all markets has very different dynamics than the industrial economy to which we are accustomed. As we discussed at the beginning of the chapter, the earnings of bricklayers will vary a lot less than the winner-take-all earnings of app developers, but that’s not the only difference. Instead of stable market shares, where revenues and income correspond proportionally to differences in talent and effort, competition in winner-take-all markets will be much more unstable and asymmetrical. The great economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote of “creative destruction,” where each innovation not only created value for consumers but also wiped out the previous incumbent.

Demographic and Health Surveys Dershowitz, Alan developing world: effect of automation on productivity improvement in technology in Diamond, Peter digitization: beneficial effects of of books bounty created by challenges of competitive effects of constraints in economic consequences of; see also bounty; goods, digital, economics of; spread economic data made available by economic properties of in education executive pay linked to as general purpose technology innovation debate about labor complements to labor market effects of; see also “winner-take-all” markets logarithmic scaling of market domination due to; see also “winner-take-all” markets metrics of network effects in niche services created by physical goods’ improvement and and Pigovian taxes rapid progress in; see also technological progress recombinant innovation and scientific benefits of ubiquity of wealth associated with; see also superstars see also global digital network; second machine age Doerr, John Donner, Jan Hein Dorn, David Double, telepresence provided by Double Robotics Drive (Pink) driving: digitization of see also Google driverless car Dropbox Dyer, Jeffrey Dyson, Freeman Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) Eastman, George Eastman Kodak economic growth: acceleration of debates concerning effects of employment linked to government role in limitations on recombinant innovation and and tax rates see also gross domestic product (GDP); productivity economic rents economics, common ground in Economics: An Introductory Analysis (Samuelson) Economist Edison, Thomas education college feedback in inequality and teacher salaries and accountability in technology in Einstein, Albert Eisenhower, Dwight electrical power Electronics El-Ouazzane, Remi e-mail empires employment: benefits of of college graduates and entrepreneurship globalization and historical data on productivity decoupled from searching for technological implications for see also labor Encyclopaedia Britannica energy: demand elasticity for falling prices in Engadget engineering entrepreneurship Europe, productivity improvement in European Union exponential growth eyes: digital see also vision, computer-aided Facebook factor price equalization Fairlie, Robert FDA fiber-optic cable Field, Alexander Final Jeopardy!


pages: 452 words: 110,488

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead by David Callahan

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, business cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, East Village, eat what you kill, fixed income, forensic accounting, full employment, game design, greed is good, high batting average, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, job satisfaction, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, PalmPilot, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent stabilization, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

No chief financial officer wants to cook earnings reports, and no accountant wants to rubber-stamp these reports. No journalist wants to make up her sources. But when you look at the effects of inequality in our society, you can understand why respectable people consistently do all of these things. The winner-take-all economy has loaded up the rewards for those who make it into the Winning Class, and left everyone else with little security and lots of anxiety. Inequality has also pulled us apart, weakening our faith that others follow the same rules that we do. Unfortunately it gets worse. Two decades of change in American economic life—and a steady string of victories for laissez-faire ideologues—hasn't just shifted the financial incentives for individuals or the operating strategies of business organizations.

In the same year, Tufts University rejected one in three valedictorians who applied, as well as a number of applicants with perfect 1600 scores on the SAT.14 College admissions directors at the best schools talk about the immense challenge of winnowing down large applicant pools filled with one perfect candidate after the other. Many people scoff at the importance attached to name-brand schools, and it's easy to condemn the less savory motives of parents who want a Harvard kid. But the reality is that in a winner-take-all economy, and a society increasingly obsessed with "branding," a degree from a prestigious college matters more than ever. For example, many recruiters for America's best companies focus their search for entry-level professionals exclusively on the top schools in the nation, and for good reason. As any headhunter will explain, hiring personnel is extremely time consuming and fraught with risk.

He will meet a lot of guys from humble backgrounds similar to his own who are under intense pressure to perform at a very high level and keep their toehold in the Winning Class. Danny will also enter a world so rife with cheating that his own past sins will seem laughable in comparison. Consider the San Francisco Giants as one example of the winner-take-all market in sports. On opening day in spring 2002, the Giants paid its starting roster of twenty-six players a total team salary of $78.3 million. Almost a fifth of this pie went to one player: left fielder Barry Bonds, who took home $15 million during the season. Over half of the total team salary in 2002 went to five of the Giants' top players.


pages: 283 words: 85,824

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

Networked technologies do not resolve the contradictions between art and commerce, but rather make commercialism less visible and more pervasive. The Internet does not close the distance between hits and flops, stars and the rest of us, but rather magnifies the gap, eroding the middle space between the very popular and virtually unknown. And there is no guarantee that the lucky few who find success in the winner-take-all economy online are more diverse, authentic, or compelling than those who succeeded under the old system. Despite the exciting opportunities the Internet offers, we are witnessing not a leveling of the cultural playing field, but a rearrangement, with new winners and losers. In the place of Hollywood moguls, for example, we now have Silicon Valley tycoons (or, more precisely, we have Hollywood moguls and Silicon Valley tycoons).

Off-line, local radio stations have been absorbed by Clear Channel and the major labels control more of the music market than they did before the Internet emerged. And online Gates has to position herself and her work on a monopolists’ platform or risk total invisibility. Monopolies, contrary to early expectations, prosper online, where winner-take-all markets emerge partly as a consequence of Metcalfe’s law, which says that the value of a network increases exponentially by the number of connections or users: the more people have telephones or have social media profiles or use a search engine, the more valuable those services become. (Counterintuitively, given his outspoken libertarian views, PayPal founder and first Facebook investor Peter Thiel has declared competition overrated and praised monopolies for improving margins.30) What’s more, many of the emerging info-monopolies now dabble in hardware, software, and content, building their businesses at every possible level, vertically integrating as in the analog era.

You can become big fast, and that favors the domination of strong people.” Preferential attachment, network effects, and the power laws they produce matter, in part, because they intensify and epitomize the old inequities we hoped the Internet would overthrow, from the star system to the hit-driven manufacturing of movies, music, and books. Winner-take-all markets promote certain types of culture at the expense of others, can make it harder for niche cultures and late bloomers to flourish, and contribute to broader income inequality.26 More specifically, where cultural production is concerned, the persistence of power laws refutes the myth of independent creators competing on even ground.


pages: 602 words: 120,848

Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer-And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Paul Pierson, Jacob S. Hacker

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business climate, business cycle, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, desegregation, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, invisible hand, John Bogle, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, moral hazard, Nate Silver, new economy, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

HN89.S6H33 2010 306.3'42097309045—dc22 2010014515 ISBN 978-1-4165-8869-6 ISBN 978-1-4165-9384-3 (ebook) To our children—Ava and Owen, Sidra and Seth— inheritors of a hopefully stronger America Contents Introduction: The Thirty-Year War Part I: The Puzzling Politics of Winner-Take-All 1 The Winner-Take-All Economy 2 How the Winner-Take-All Economy Was Made 3 A Brief History of Democratic Capitalism Part II: The Rise of Winner-Take-All Politics 4 The Unseen Revolution of the 1970s 5 The Politics of Organized Combat 6 The Middle Goes Missing Part III: Winner-Take-All Politics 7 A Tale of Two Parties 8 Building a Bridge to the Nineteenth Century 9 Democrats Climb Aboard 10 Battle Royale Conclusion: Beating Winner-Take-All Acknowledgments Notes Index About the Authors Introduction The Thirty-Year War For those working on Wall Street, 2009 was a very good year.

Our current crisis certainly bears emphasis, in part because it so clearly reveals the sources and costs of the winner-take-all economy. And by the end of our investigation, the roots and realities of contemporary discontents will indeed be apparent. But, as will become clear, our current crisis is merely the latest in a long struggle rooted in the interplay of American democracy and American capitalism. This struggle has not unfolded overnight. Nor is it a simple linear tale of sweeping, inevitable change. The advancing tide of the winner-take-all economy sometimes feels like a force of nature. (Certainly, it is convenient for its beneficiaries to describe it that way.)

Nor have many been as rhapsodic as Republican Senator Phil Gramm, who described Wall Street as a “holy place.” But, for reasons we shall explain and with consequences we will unveil, all of America’s political class have felt the increasing pull of the winner-take-all economy. Our story unfolds in three parts. Part 1 delves into the mystery of the winner-take-all economy. We come face-to-face with what has really happened in the American marketplace over the last generation: who’s won and who’s lost in the thirty-year war, and how government has played an integral role in creating these new economic realities.


pages: 269 words: 70,543

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional

Tencent is also hunting in the region and has invested in fast-growth ride-hailing and e-commerce leaders in India and Indonesia plus startups in Vietnam and Thailand. China’s BAT Push Outward Despite the growing frictions and challenges on the US-China trade and tech fronts, China tech companies are ambitiously pushing to go global in a winner-takes-all economy. The three Chinese high-tech titans are each pursuing investments beyond national borders and original business sectors. Let’s look at the strategies of each of these titans, in order of their place in the BAT league. Buffing Up Baidu Baidu is betting its future squarely on diversifying beyond search and into artificial intelligence technologies for self-driving, smart transport and voice-assisted smart home devices.

And now, Apple is copying Xiaomi by integrating more revenue-producing, subscription-based entertainment and news content into iPhones—something that China’s Xiaomi phones have had since day one. The Chinese market demands hyperspeed and precise execution—and an eye on superfast growth before profitability. It can be a winner-takes-all market. A few other Chinese companies have emerged in this league besides Xiaomi with its cool smartphones. They include AI-powered news and video apps Toutiao and TikTok, superapp Meituan, and ride-hailing service Didi. This group, the TMD or Toutiao, Meituan, and Didi, echoes China’s BAT companies.


pages: 305 words: 75,697

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

Economists have become experts at answering narrow policy questions with ever-better empirical approaches and bigger data sets; applied microeconomics is in fine fettle. But there are few persuasive approaches to pressing political questions such as how to tackle the increasing gaps between prosperous cities and poor towns, how to keep a winner-take-all economy innovative and competitive, how to ensure the gains from economic growth are more fairly shared. Economists need to start providing policy-makers with guidance for an increasing returns economy. But—to return to the socialist calculation debate with which this chapter started—a bias toward government solutions is no answer.

The political dynamics are clear—the political economy cycle is responding to increased market power and the consequent political influence of big companies by making regulatory interventions and tougher competition policy inevitable. However, the economic analysis of digital markets is a work in progress. Even taking the consumer welfare standard as the right approach, there is no settled view about how to assess consumer welfare in these winner-take-all markets with many losers, tipping points, and complex ecosystems. As it happens—because of the scale of their domestic markets—the big digital companies are all American or Chinese. So geopolitics is intruding. This means the return of a debate about whether these foreign corporations can be allowed to operate freely in each other’s territories, or whether Europe needs its own national digital champions, long after the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions seemed to have buried state economic activism.


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Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn by Chris Hughes

"World Economic Forum" Davos, basic income, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, end world poverty, full employment, future of journalism, gig economy, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, new economy, oil rush, payday loans, Peter Singer: altruism, Potemkin village, precariat, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future. Basic Books, 2016. Frank, Robert H., and Philip J. Cook. The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More than the Rest of Us. Free Press, 1995. Freeland, Chrystia. “The Rise of the Winner-Take-All Economy.” Reuters, June 20, 2013. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-column-freeland/column-the-rise-of-the-winner-take-all-economy-idUSBRE95J0WL20130620. Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. The University of Chicago Press, 1962. Furman, Jason. “Is This Time Different? The Opportunities and Challenges of Artificial Intelligence.” July 7, 2016. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/page/files/20160707_cea_ai_furman.pdf.

Facebook would not exist, at least in the form it is today, without major advances in technology, globalized markets that made smartphones possible, or venture capital. Alan Krueger, the former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers and an award-winning economist at Princeton, uses the term “winner-take-all” economy to describe the state we live in today. “Over recent decades, technological change, globalization and an erosion of the institutions and practices that support shared prosperity in the U.S. have put the middle class under increasing stress,” Krueger argued in a 2013 speech. “The lucky and the talented—and it is often hard to tell the difference—have been doing better and better, while the vast majority has struggled to keep up.”

Of having parents who didn’t disinherit me but instead sighed and said “do it if you must”? Of having had that sense of must kindled inside me by a professor of art history at Princeton? Of having been let into Princeton in the first place? Saying people get lucky is not a denial that they work hard and deserve positive outcomes. It is a way of acknowledging that in a winner-take-all economy, small, chance encounters—like who you sit next to at a dinner party or who your college roommate is—have a more significant impact than they have ever had before. In some cases, the collections of these small differences can add up to create immense fortunes. Last spring, Mark Zuckerberg returned to our old stomping grounds to give a commencement speech of his own.


Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life by Alan B. Krueger

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, bank run, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, butterfly effect, buy and hold, congestion pricing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, gig economy, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral hazard, Multics, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, power law, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, random walk, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Closing Time In his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” John Maynard Keynes posited that a hundred years hence, the main economic problem confronting people will be what to do with our leisure time: Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.17 Most people are not nearly as free of pressing economic concerns as Keynes had envisioned, partly because of the rise in inequality in our increasingly winner-take-all economy, and that situation is unlikely to change in the next decade when we reach Keynes’s one-hundred-year marker. Still, Keynes’s forecast has merit. As Daniel Hamermesh has observed, “Our ability to purchase and enjoy goods and services has risen much more rapidly than the amount of time available for us to enjoy them.”18 Keynes anticipated that “it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.”

Research has shown that the labor market consequences of graduating from college in a year when the economy is weak are large, negative, and persistent.22 Another study of MBA students found that graduating from business school in a weak year for stocks reduces the chances of getting a high-paying Wall Street job, while graduating in a bull market boosts the chances of landing a high-paying career in investment banking.23 The study concluded that “investment bankers are largely ‘made’ by circumstance rather than ‘born’ to work on Wall Street.” And, as in the music industry, the effect of luck is amplified in a winner-take-all market in the general economy. Consider CEOs. The pay of top executives relative to their workers has soared since the 1980s. In 1978 the average CEO earned about 18 times as much as the average worker; today the average CEO earns more than 250 times as much.24 As in Alfred Marshall’s time, successful executives can now undertake initiatives and new ventures on a much vaster scale, which has undoubtedly played a role in their outsized compensation.


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

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

Treasury, crunched the numbers for 2005, they found that even among the top 0.01 percent—true plutocrats who earn at least $10 million a year—wages are far more important than rents. Salary income and business income accounted for 80 percent of their income excluding capital gains and 64 percent including capital gains. And, as with the 1 percent, the shift toward wages has coincided with the emergence of the winner-take-all economy. These figures were a quarter lower in 1979: 61 percent and 46 percent. You can see that change in the life stories of today’s plutocrats. Pete Peterson, for example, is the son of a Greek immigrant who arrived in America at age seventeen and worked his way up to owning a diner in Nebraska; his Blackstone cofounder, Steve Schwarzman, is the son of a Philadelphia-area retailer.

As another economist, Thomas Lemieux, concluded in a 2006 study of the subject, “Most of the increase in wage inequality between 1973 and 2005 is due to a dramatic increase in the return to post-secondary education.” Moreover, broad measures of the return on education understate the rise of the super-smart in one crucial respect. Just as the winner-take-all economy rewards those at the very top much more richly than those one rung beneath them, a super-elite education has outsize rewards. Any middle-class parent living in a city that is home to a significant community of the 0.1 percent—and that means not just the obvious centers of New York, San Francisco, and London, but also emerging metropolises like Mumbai, Moscow, and Shanghai—knows that the perceived high value of an elite education has prompted a Darwinian pedagogical struggle that begins in nursery school.

But the reality is more disturbing. In a recent essay, University of Queensland economist John Quiggin calculated that the total first-year class of the Ivy League universities—around twenty-seven thousand—is just under 1 percent of the U.S. college-age population of around three million. And in our education-driven, winner-take-all economy, that 1 percent of eighteen-year-olds has a huge edge in forming the 1 percent as adults. “With those numbers in mind,” Quiggin writes, “the ferocity of the admissions race for elite institutions is unsurprising. Even with the steadily increasing tuition fees, parents and students correctly judge that admission to one of the ‘right’ colleges is a make-or-break life event, far more than a generation ago.”


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Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

While Google and Facebook use their market power to extract monopoly rents from advertisers that are often 20 percent higher than market price, Amazon uses its monopsony (a market structure in which only one buyer interacts with many would-be sellers) to force authors, publishers, and booksellers to lower their prices, putting many of them out of business. This was not the decentralization that the founders of the Internet imagined, but ironically it was the very design of the Internet, with a set of global standards that allowed for massive scale, that led to the winner-takes-all economy of the Internet age. In another time, Google, Facebook, and Amazon would have been subject to government strictures and might be half the size they are now because much of their growth has been through acquisition, which would have been prevented by strict antitrust-law enforcement. Running for president in 1912, Woodrow Wilson said, “If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of the government.

In 2015, in the music business, 80 percent of the revenue came from 1 percent of the products. So Jay Z, Taylor Swift, and a few others got really rich, and most musicians made little or no money from their recordings. It could be that the very nature of search engines, which push the most popular items to the top of the search results, is reinforcing this winner-takes-all economy. Is a tiny percentage of constantly circulating material the rich diversity the Internet has brought us? There is a deeper problem as music moves to an all-streaming format. Because services such as Spotify and YouTube spew out terabytes of data that record companies can analyze, the whole business is becoming ever more data-driven.


The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good by Robert H. Frank

Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, deliberate practice, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gary Kildall, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, smart grid, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy

It’s a matter of simple logic that when people overestimate their chances of winning, too many forsake productive occupations in traditional markets to compete in winner-take-all markets. The Tragedy of the Commons Potential contestants in winner-take-all markets also confront a problem called the tragedy of the commons, an incentive structure that was first invoked to explain overfishing in ocean waters.7 The cod, once abundant in the North Atlantic, saw its population decline by more than 95 percent from overharvesting. The incentives that led to this decline were similar to those that produce excessive entry into many winner-take-all markets. The tragedy of the commons provides a vivid illustration of Darwin’s insight that individual and group interests often diverge sharply.

One contestant’s good fortune in landing a position in a leading hedge fund is thus largely offset by her rival’s failure to land that same position. So here, too, private incentives result in wasteful overcrowding.8 The tendency to attract excessive contestants is by no means confined to the financial sector. It’s a feature found to some degree in almost every winner-take-all market. As a practical matter, moreover, almost all markets that generate society’s highest incomes are winner-take-all markets. There are typically a few highly leveraged positions atop each profession—Grammywinning recording artists, all-star shortstops, best-selling novelists, Fortune 500 CEOs, major network news anchors, Academy Award–winning actors, popular radio talk show hosts, leading plaintiffs attorneys, and so on.

So if half the people who are currently jockeying for positions in hedge funds and private equity firms were to leave the financial industry tomorrow, there would still be no shortage of extremely qualified candidates to fill those positions. The resulting gains from having more and better engineers, medical researchers, teachers, and family physicians would more than compensate for any lost value from having fewer contestants in winner-take-all markets. If after-tax incomes in winner-take-all markets were lower, fewer THE GREAT TRADE-OFF? 167 contestants would compete for positions in them. So the desired employment shifts could be encouraged simply by raising tax rates on top earners. Referring to proposals to eliminate preferential tax treatment for hedge fund and private equity managers, a finance professor at Columbia Business School objected that “Private equity is a very important part of our economy,” adding that higher taxes will discourage it.9 Others have characterized the proposals as envy-driven class warfare.


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Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy by Robert H. Frank

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, attribution theory, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, experimental subject, framing effect, full employment, Gary Kildall, high-speed rail, hindsight bias, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, income inequality, invisible hand, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, low interest rates, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Thaler, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, selection bias, side project, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, ultimatum game, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, winner-take-all economy

Although the absolute quality of Graf’s play didn’t change much during Seles’s absence, her relative quality improved substantially. A second important feature of winner-take-all markets is that rewards tend to be highly concentrated in the hands of a few top performers. That can occur for many reasons, but most often it’s a consequence of production technologies that extend a given performer’s reach. That’s true, for example, in the music industry, which exhibits both features of winner-take-all markets. As the economist Sherwin Rosen wrote, The market for classical music has never been larger than it is now, yet the number of full-time soloists on any given instrument is on the order of only a few hundred (and much smaller for instruments other than voice, violin, and piano).

Shame to have ousted your betters thus, Taking ark while the others remained outside! Better for all of us, froward Homunculus, If you’d quietly died! —ALDOUS HUXLEY (1920) CONTENTS Preface xi Acknowledgments xix 1 Write What You Know 1 2 Why Seemingly Trivial Random Events Matter 21 3 How Winner-Take-All Markets Magnify Luck’s Role 40 4 Why the Biggest Winners Are Almost Always Lucky 56 5 Why False Beliefs about Luck and Talent Persist 69 6 The Burden of False Beliefs 86 7 We’re in Luck: A Golden Opportunity 109 8 Being Grateful 128 Appendix 1: Detailed Simulation Results for Chapter 4 151 Appendix 2: Frequently Asked Questions about the Progressive Consumption Tax 158 Notes 173 Index 183 PREFACE How important is luck?

I’ll also describe several individual case histories illustrating how even the most spectacular success stories could easily have unfolded very diferently. Chance events have always mattered, of course, but in some respects they’ve grown more important in recent decades. One reason for that has been the spread and intensification of what the economist Philip Cook and I have called winner-take-all markets.7 These markets often arise when technology enables the most gifted performers in an arena to extend their reach. Tax advice, for example, was once a quintessentially local undertaking. The best accountants in a town served the biggest clients, the next-best served the next biggest, and so on.


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

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

What kind of data do these customers provide? How seamlessly and quickly does it improve the user experience, like auto-populate your destination on Uber, or suggest songs you’ll like on Spotify? Over the last five years, only thirteen in the S&P 500 have outperformed the index each year—evidence of our winner-take-all economy.17 What do most of these firms have in common? They use the peanut-butter-and-chocolate combination of receptors (users) and intelligence (algorithms that track usage to improve the offering). This is tantamount to a car that becomes more valuable with mileage. We now have a Benjamin Button class of products that age in reverse.

We don’t care how big and dominant Google has become, because our experience of it is small, intimate, and personal. And if it turns those pennies into tens of billions of revenue, and hundreds of billions in shareholder value, we aren’t resentful—as long as it gives us answers and makes our brains seem smarter. It is the winner, and its shareholder benefit stems from the brain’s winner-take-all economy. Google gives the consumer the best answer, for less, more quickly than any organization in history. The brain can’t help but love Google. If Google represents the brain, Amazon is a link between the brain and our acquisitive fingers—our hunter-gatherer instinct to acquire more stuff.


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Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy by Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, disintermediation, driverless car, fake it until you make it, future of work, gig economy, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, patent troll, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, platform as a service, power law, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, the medium is the message, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

As platforms become more common and disrupt more and more industries, platform dominance will mean that many nonplatform businesses will be left fighting for a smaller and smaller piece of the market. A nonplatform business still can succeed by capturing a slice of another platform’s ecosystem (think Samsung with Android), but controlling the platform is the most sustainable—and most lucrative—way to go. 4 Modern Monopolies Platform Capitalism and the Winner-Take-All Economy Exchange achieves what the medieval alchemists couldn’t: it creates something from nothing. It serves the proverbial free lunch. Swapping goods among people creates value. —David S. Evans, author of Invisible Engines and professor at the Law School at the University of Chicago Because platforms’ margins increase as their networks grow, only one or two platforms will dominate an industry as the market matures.

Contents Title Page Dedication Prologue: The Burning Platform 1: Platforms Are Eating the World 2: Hayek versus the Machine, or Why Everything You Think You Know about the Twentieth Century Is Wrong 3: The Zero-Marginal-Cost Company 4: Modern Monopolies: Platform Capitalism and the Winner-Take-All Economy 5: Designing a Billion-Dollar Company: How the Core Transaction Explains Tinder’s Success 6: The Visible Hand: The Four Functions of a Platform 7: Let the Network Do the Work 8: Why Platforms Fail, and How to Avoid It Conclusion: How to Spot the Next Big Thing A Word from the Authors Glossary of Platform Terms Acknowledgments Notes Index About Applico About the Authors Copyright MODERN MONOPOLIES.


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Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

Users won’t buy JOS because applications don’t work with it. But developers won’t adapt their applications to work with JOS because users won’t buy it. Microsoft has won the corporate market and there is no room for runners-up. Operating systems are produced and sold in what the economists Robert Frank and Philip Cook call a Winner Take All market. In a Winner Take All market, competitors vie with one another not simply for a market share, but for the entire market. The winner gets it all, and the rest get nothing, or at least much less than the winner. In the endorsement market, for example, the Olympic gold medalist and the Heisman Trophy winner appear on the cereal box and get the big paycheck, not the silver medalist or the clutch offensive lineman.

Microsoft can charge monopolistic prices, and engage in other anti- competitive practices, because it knows that most users are locked into its product. Frank and Cook argued that Winner Take All markets exacerbate inequalities. When only a few winners get the lion’s share, the rest fight over the scraps. It is worth noting that of the ten richest people in the world, six are tech billionaires, and two (Bill Gates and Larry Ellison) are founders of operating system companies (Microsoft and Oracle), with a combined wealth of $250 billion. Winner Take All markets for technology exhibit other pathologies. Because they tend to be sticky and non-ergodic, the technologies that win may not be the best-performing ones.

Windows is the choice of mainstream corporate users and gamers, whereas MacOS caters more to designers, academics, and video editors. Nor does Microsoft control the web server market, which is dominated by Linux. Nevertheless, Windows dominates the market for desktop computing with a 75 percent customer base (vs. 14 percent for MacOS and 2 percent for Linux). Winner Take Most is more precise, but less catchy. Not all Winner Take All markets are alike. The market for operating systems has two special properties. First, the market is “non-ergodic.” A contest is non-ergodic when small differences at the beginning have large impacts later on. Microsoft secured its dominant position because it got to market first. It recognized and capitalized on the personal computer revolution, which triggered a beneficial cycle of adoption and adaptation.


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So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport

adjacent possible, Apple II, bounce rate, business cycle, Byte Shop, Cal Newport, capital controls, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, deal flow, deliberate practice, do what you love, financial independence, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge worker, Mason jar, medical residency, new economy, passive income, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, renewable energy credits, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Bolles, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, web application, winner-take-all economy

When you are acquiring career capital in a field, you can imagine that you are acquiring this capital in a specific type of career capital market. There are two types of these markets: winner-take-all and auction. In a winner-take-all market, there is only one type of career capital available, and lots of different people competing for it. Television writing is a winner-take-all market because all that matters is your ability to write good scripts. That is, the only capital type is your script-writing capability. An auction market, by contrast, is less structured: There are many different types of career capital, and each person might generate a unique collection.

career capital markets (introduced in Rule #2): When acquiring career capital in a field, you can envision that you’re acquiring this capital in a specific type of career capital market. There are two types of these markets: winner-take-all and auction. In a winner-take-all market, there is only one type of career capital available and lots of different people competing for it. An auction market, by contrast, is less structured: There are many different types of career capital, and each person might generate their own unique collection of this capital. Different markets require different career capital acquisition strategies. In a winner-take-all market, for example, you need to first “crack the code” on how people master the one skill that matters. In an auction market, by contrast, you might simply emphasize rareness in the skill combinations that you create.

His latest gig was on the stop-motion comedy Glenn Martin, DDS, which he had cocreated with Michael Eisner and had run for two seasons. In other words, there’s no doubt that Alex is an established writer in an industry that allows few through its gates. The question is, how did he do it? How Alex Berger Broke into Hollywood What makes television a hard industry to crack is the fact that it’s a winner-take-all market. There’s only one type of career capital here, the quality of your writing, and there are thousands of hopefuls trying to gain enough of this capital to impress a very small group of buyers. In this respect, however, Alex had an advantage. At Dartmouth College he had been a debater, and a damn good one at that: In 2002 his two-man team arrived at the National Debate Tournament with the country’s highest rank; Alex then went on to win the Best Speaker prize at the tournament.


Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy by Andrew Yang

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, blue-collar work, call centre, centre right, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data is the new oil, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, fake news, forensic accounting, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pez dispenser, QAnon, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, surveillance capitalism, systematic bias, tech billionaire, TED Talk, The Day the Music Died, the long tail, TikTok, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

But the majority of the real income growth has been experienced by the top sliver of American society. Indeed, more than half of the real income growth in America accrued to just the top 1 percent of Americans since 2009. The bottom 80 percent of Americans own only 8 percent of stock market wealth, and the bottom 48 percent own zero. We are in the midst of the most extreme winner-take-all economy in the history of the world. This disparity might be more tolerable for the average American if costs were stable even as their income and buying power stagnate. However, costs have ballooned for the foundations of American life—education, health-care, and housing costs have gone up and up, even as buying power hasn’t kept pace.

I learned so much. Thank you.” The most visible figures command enough of an audience to make the industry seem healthy, even while the rank and file disappear. Top journalists continue to make good money; there will just be a lot fewer of them, with others looking up at them. The winner-take-all economy is subsuming the field as it is so many others. If you ask a journalist about the secular disruption, you’re likely to get a response like “Don’t worry, journalism will continue to reinvent itself via a combination of Substack and podcasting”—the kind of response that is the epitome of constructive institutionalism.


pages: 421 words: 110,406

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar

This made Airbnb far easier to use and enabled the platform to rapidly outgrow the erstwhile category leader. WHEN ADVANTAGE IS SUSTAINABLE: WINNER-TAKE-ALL MARKETS In business, no victory is permanent—but on occasion, a particular firm is capable of enjoying a dominant position within its industry for a decade or longer. When this happens, we can say that the company has maintained a sustained advantage. This happens most often in a winner-take-all market. This is a market in which specific forces conspire to encourage users to gravitate toward one platform and to abandon others. The four forces that most often characterize winner-take-all markets are supply economies of scale, strong network effects, high multihoming or switching costs, and lack of niche specialization.

Among the methods that platforms use to compete with one another are preventing multihoming by limiting platform access; fostering innovation, then capturing its value; leveraging the value of information; nurturing partnerships rather than pursuing mergers and acquisitions; platform envelopment; and enhanced platform design. Winner-take-all markets exist in certain platform markets. They are driven by four main factors: supply economies of scale, network effects, multihoming and switching costs, and the lack of niche specialization. In winner-take-all markets, competition is apt to be particularly fierce. 11 POLICY How Platforms Should (and Should Not) Be Regulated In the fall of 2014, the New York City subways were suddenly filled with ads for a business many city residents were just beginning to learn about—Airbnb.

Virality can attract people to a network, but network effects keep them there. Virality is about stimulating growth among people off-platform, while network effects are about increasing value among people on-platform. Winner-take-all market. A market in which specific forces conspire to encourage users to gravitate toward one platform and to abandon others. The four forces that most often characterize winner-take-all markets are supply economies of scale, strong network effects, high multihoming or switching costs, and lack of niche specialization. NOTES CHAPTER 1: TODAY 1. Bill Gurley, “A Rake Too Far: Optimal Platform Pricing Strategy,” Above the Crowd, April 18, 2013, http://abovethecrowd.com/2013/04/18/a-rake-too-far-optimal-platformpricing-strategy/. 2.


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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

This is a crucial point. We know that people have different capacities and drives. Some are smarter than others, and some work harder. But those different abilities don’t explain the far greater differences in rewards. Rather, extreme reward differences are driven by the compounding effects of our winner-take-all economy. If extreme inequality is a built-in property of our present economic system, we’ve got some deep thinking to do. For this means that even if we educated our children till the cows came home, inspired or cajoled them to work harder, and got them all jobs, we wouldn’t sustain a large middle class over time.


Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge by Cass R. Sunstein

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, c2.com, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, framing effect, Free Software Foundation, hindsight bias, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, market bubble, market design, minimum wage unemployment, prediction markets, profit motive, rent control, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, slashdot, stem cell, systematic bias, Ted Sorensen, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Wisdom of Crowds, winner-take-all economy

Traders have been able to bet on the market capitalization that Google will achieve in its initial public offering, the price of Microsoft stock at a future date, and Federal Reserve monetary policy, in addition to the outcomes of a range of U.S. elections.12 For presidential elections—still the most popular markets that IEM operate—traders have recently been permitted to choose from two types of markets. In the “winner-take-all” market, traders win $1 for each “future” in the winning candidate that they own; they receive nothing for shares of the losing candidate. In a “vote-share” market, traders in “candidate futures” win $1 multiplied by the proportion of the popular vote that the candidate receives. Thus, in a winner-take-all market, a “Dukakis future” was worth nothing after the election, whereas in a vote-share market, each Dukakis future paid $0.456. In a winner-take-all market, the market price reflects traders’ perceptions of the likelihood that each candidate will win the election.

On the day of the vote, dramatic news of pro-Kerry exit polls produced not only a huge switch in the conventional wisdom in the media and on blogs, but also a great deal of volatility in election Money, Prices, and Prediction Markets / 141 markets, with a wild swing in the direction of Senator Kerry at the expense of President Bush. “Suddenly, Kerry’s stock in the Winner Take All market shot up to 70 cents and Bush stock was in the cellar.”79 The rumors affected investors, not just onlookers. Large-scale errors are always possible when apparently relevant news leads numerous investors to buy or sell. Indeed, election day in 2004 may well have been a cascade, with investors responding to one another’s judgments, even though they were based on misleading information.


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

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

Why disadvantage our child by having her apply to only two or three universities, based on some ethical principle? And why settle for the local state university? Of course, we know our child can do quite well there. But won’t she have a better chance of withstanding the blows of automation and uncertainty in this winner-take-all economy if she goes to a top-ranked school? In any race to the bottom, we might expect those at the forefront of this frenzy to be the people with the most to fear. So, in the college rankings frenzy, is it the parents in the Appalachian trailer homes who are seeking to push their children up the economic ladder by sending them to Harvard?

Well-to-do parents are also likely to be well-informed enough to know about the empirical studies that cast considerable doubt on the economic advantage of attending some of these aspirational schools—as we’ll discuss at the end of this chapter. But the primordial need to ensure their children’s survival in a winner-take-all economy triumphs. For the upper-middle class and wealthy, the race begins not in senior year, but much earlier. To increase the odds of admittance to a top college, parents now compete for entry into elite private and magnet public high schools with the understanding that attendance at these schools gives students a competitive edge at securing placement at the top-ranked national universities and liberal arts colleges.


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Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Put most simply, business activity that used to be dispersed across hundreds of companies large and small, whether in media or retail or finance, was increasingly dominated by a handful of giant firms. As a result, profits and growth opportunities once spread across the country were increasingly flowing to the places where those dominant companies were based. With a winner-take-all economy came winner-take-all places. To the extent that regional inequality and economic concentration were being written about, it was often on their own terms, without relation to one another. In fact, they were intertwined. And as I began to think about this intertwining, it became clear that one of the most natural ways to tell this story was through Amazon, a company that was playing an outsized role in this zero-sum sorting.

Countless people in town had seen their normal-seeming house soar in value in recent years, and had come to guard that asset fiercely against perceived threats, whether it was a tent encampment or simply an affordable housing development down the street. Seattle had become proof that extreme regional inequality was unhealthy not only for places that were losing out in the winner-take-all economy, but also for those who were the runaway victors. Hyper-prosperity was not only creating the side effects of unaffordability, congestion, and homelessness, but injecting a political poison into the winner cities. The cranes kept going up—there were fifty-nine in the air in April 2019, still the most in the nation.


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Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

In his celebrated speech about inequality at Osawatomie, Kansas, President Obama said that “a higher education is the surest route to the middle class.” Left Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren go even further and demand “college for all.” Not everyone can be a winner, however you design the game. In some fields such as law, medicine, technology, and some corners of business, “winner-takes-all” markets have provided exceptional rewards to exceptional people—people like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk—who have both high cognitive skills and practical knowledge of something that gives them a big first-mover advantage in new digital markets. Below them is a wider group of highly educated—and highly credentialized—people from top universities who have the intelligence and personality attributes to propel them into the top layer of jobs.

First, the extent of the privileging of key cognitive employees that has been emerging in big multinational companies. Second, the extent of the spread of graduate-only jobs in recent years. Higher returns on qualification have also been reinforced by other developments in modern economies, such as the so-called war for talent and winner-takes-all markets. Both are the product of technology and global openness. The war for talent was a phrase coined by Steven M. Hankin of the management consultancy McKinsey in 1997 to describe more intense competition among top companies for recruiting and retaining key knowledge workers. The prediction that the modern market economy combined with certain new technologies would generate a new layer of superstars was made a few years ago by two American academics, Robert H.

But hanging over this potentially benign evolution is the specter of inequality. The knowledge economy will lose many of its rank-and-file soldiers but it will still have an officer corps of highly skilled individuals, both those managing the machines of the fourth industrial revolution and the superstar professionals of the winner-takes-all markets. Soaring corporate pay packages in recent decades have already led to chief executives of the top 500 US companies earning on average 379 times more than their average employee; the figure is 149 times for the top 100 companies in the United Kingdom. 44 Some very sober, mainstream commentators, like Adair Turner, former chairman of the Financial Services Authority in London, worry a great deal about the further deep inequality they see built into the economic trends.


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Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

I’ll take you from the economy and work, through the geopolitics of trade and conflict, to the broader relationship between citizens and society. First, we’ll explore what exponential technologies do to businesses. During the Exponential Age, technology-driven companies tend to become bigger than was previously thought possible – and traditional companies get left behind. This leads to winner-takes-all markets, in which a few ‘superstar’ companies dominate – with their rivals spiralling into inconsequentiality. An exponential gap emerges – between our existing rules around market power, monopoly, competition and tax, and the newly enormous companies that dominate markets. I’ll also show how the prospects of employees are changing thanks to the emergence of these companies.

In 1994, Microsoft even targeted the market with its own offering, Microsoft Network. But Berners-Lee’s web became not just dominant but the sole viable information network on the internet, because of network externalities – once a lot of people were there, everyone else had to congregate there too. Wherever there are network effects, there is the chance of a winner-takes-all market. Once a company has established itself as the market leader, it becomes extremely difficult to challenge it. And this effect is being driven by the consumers themselves. It is in the consumers’ own interest to join the biggest network – it is there, after all, that they will get the most value.

Exponential Age companies are all too aware of the dynamics of this new economy. These firms have come of age in a peculiar environment: in each sector, one company dominates and everybody else gets left behind. As a result, these companies have developed a winner-takes-all mindset that reflects a winner-takes-all market. Consider the management structure of many new superstar companies. The economist W. Brian Arthur was among the first to spot that a shift in organisation design was underway. In 1996, after studying the success of Microsoft and its operating system platforms, he realised that businesses based on network effects operated differently to traditional firms.


pages: 209 words: 53,236

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

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

Importing the Marxian-Malthusian theories of Piketty, Democrats see inequality as stemming from an oppressive and conspiratorial accumulation of wealth. The cause of poverty, the Left tells us, is wealth! Building up faster than wages in accordance with inexorable capitalist logic, the yield of investment exceeds the rate of economic growth. The harvest is an increasingly top-heavy, winner-take-all economy, smothering middle- and lower-class opportunities. President Obama’s friend and counselor Ta-Nehisi Coates, from his perch atop the bestseller lists and at the pinnacle of power in America, denounces the American Dream, in terms that echo Obama’s previous spiritual guide, Pastor Wright in Chicago, as a “genocidal weight of whiteness.”5 Evidence grows that in the United States upward mobility and even geographical mobility are being choked off.


pages: 196 words: 54,339

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, clockwork universe, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, digital capitalism, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, gig economy, Google bus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, invisible hand, iterative process, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, new economy, patient HM, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, theory of mind, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

The pastures of medieval England were treated as a commons. It wasn’t a free-for-all, but a carefully negotiated and enforced system. People brought their flocks to graze in mutually agreed-upon schedules. Violation of the rules was punished, either with penalties or exclusion. The commons is not a winner-takes-all economy, but an all-take-the-winnings economy. Shared ownership encourages shared responsibility, which in turn engenders a longer-term perspective on business practices. Nothing can be externalized to some “other” player, because everyone is part of the same trust, drinking from the same well. If one’s business activities hurt any other market participant, they undermine the integrity of the marketplace itself.


pages: 288 words: 64,771

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

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

We do not dispute the accuracy of the conventional, market-based narrative of rising inequality—as far as it goes. The progress of information technology (IT) has indeed raised relative demand for highly skilled workers while steadily eliminating jobs in the middle of the skill spectrum. IT, combined with globalization, has given rise to winner-take-all markets with huge windfalls for economic superstars. Rising economic opportunities have created more wage dispersion among women, who have then tended to marry those of similar economic status, further exaggerating income differences between the highly skilled and everybody else. Declining employment in traditionally unionized industries has reduced the degree to which workers are able to demand a share of corporate profits.

Mass immigration expands the ranks of low-skill workers even as demand for them has flagged. People increasingly marry within their social class, reducing the marital pathway to social mobility. The factors contributing to outsized gains at the very top are similarly diverse. They include the rise of “winner-take-all” markets produced by information technology’s network effects as well as globalization’s expansion of relevant market size; a huge run-up in stock prices; continuing growth in the size of big corporations (which has helped to fuel rising CEO pay); and a big drop in the top income tax rate (which has facilitated the use of high compensation as a strategy for attracting top managers, professionals, and executives).

Drug makers (through patent protection) and healthcare professionals (through occupational licensing) have exaggerated their gains from this rising demand by using the political process to constrict supply. In the rapidly growing information technology sector, the presence of strong network effects in information technology guarantees that some industries will feature “winner take all” markets with high levels of concentration. Lobbyists for strong copyright and patent protection for software have further amplified this dynamic by fortifying the winners’ market power with additional barriers to entry. Meanwhile, network effects have also led to geographic concentration, as highly skilled knowledge workers are increasingly congregating together in “human capital hubs.”


pages: 265 words: 69,310

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

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

It’s an issue that other industries face, such as construction, and the root cause is always the same: classification as an independent contractor relieves the hiring company (Uber in this case) from having to pay employment insurance premiums, sick leave, and from having to abide by employment standards. The risk is pushed entirely onto the subcontractor. If cities decide to put taxi regulations to one side for ridesharing companies, many important decisions are handed over to the company. As shown in Chapter 7, technology industries are often a winner-take-all market, where the winner has significant market power, so it matters what kind of company Uber is. It’s a company that has experienced a lot of controversy. Among the most high profile events was a dinner in which Uber executive Emil Michael told journalist Ben Smith that he had considered investigating the private life of Sarah Lacy, a journalist who had criticized Uber.

As a result, he catches a key aspect of the comparison that Anderson misses: variety in a world subject to “the tyranny of geography” was always supplied by a variety of institutions, each capable of working at different scales. In the world of books, variety was supplied by a combination of chain stores, specialist bookstores who focused on one genre or another (especially in big cities), independent stores, and second-hand stores, whereas in the digital world winner-take-all market structures are more common. By looking only at the big chains and missing these smaller institutions, Anderson guaranteed that his comparisons would show the digital world to be more diverse and full of variety. OPEN DATA Other movements and businesses have been built around digital openness and sharing, such as open access publishing for research journals, open source hardware, and open education (including massively open online courses or “MOOCs”).

It is more profitable for TV stations in smaller markets to broadcast cheap American shows than it is to broadcast more expensive home-grown material, even in cases where the latter would draw a bigger audience, because cultural producers seek to cover their costs in their home market and typically sell at discounted rates elsewhere.53 To maintain cultural diversity in the face of winner-take-all markets, governments in smaller countries have designed a toolbox of interventions. The contents include production subsidies, broadcast quotas, spending rules, national ownership, and competition policy. In general, such measures have received support from those with a left-leaning outlook. Unfortunately, the open data movement demands that data be provided without borders and in a uniform way: machine processable, available to anyone, and license-free.


pages: 555 words: 80,635

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

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

For example, technological change is an important factor; automation and the rise of computerization and the internet have changed workers lives dramatically. Many other factors are also at work, including evolving social norms, changes in tax policy, the larger role of companies with market power, and the role of “superstars” in winner-take-all markets. Thus, not only are trade and migration barriers likely to generate harmful side effects, but they are also likely to be ineffective in addressing workers’ economic problems. In this fourth part of Open, I put forward a positive policy agenda for responding to the economic stagnation of the middle class and the recent dramatic increases in income inequality.

Foremost, the benefits of the global economy and technological change have reached too few in the United States. Technological change and global markets do not lead to one uniform destiny; countries can respond to these challenges in a variety of ways. And, as Chapter 2 described, there is more than technology and trade at the root of our problems: market power, winner-take-all markets, tax policy, social norms, and reductions in labor bargaining power all play important roles. The suggestions of Chapters 9 to 11 respond to middle-class economic concerns in ways that go directly to the problems at hand, modernizing economic policy to make it compatible with a twenty-first century economy.

These changes in our economy make it impossible to go back to the labor market of the 1960s and 1970s. And many more factors are at work in shaping labor outcomes, including evolving social norms, changes in tax policy, a larger role of companies with market power, and the role of “superstars” in winner-take-all markets. This book puts forward a positive policy agenda for responding to the economic stagnation of the middle class and the recent dramatic increases in income inequality. These are not small problems; they require big responses. The agenda outlined in Chapters 9, 10, and 11 is not Democratic or Republican, but brings together pragmatic ideas that are pro-growth, pro-jobs, and pro–middle class.


pages: 286 words: 87,401

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

Dropping below even 40 percent annual growth is a warning sign for investors. This mindset can be difficult for people to understand. “Why should I risk it all and potentially blow up what is a successful, growing business?” they might rightfully ask. The answer is that blitzscaling businesses tend to play in winner-take-most or winner-take-all markets. The greater risk for a successful, growing business is to move too slowly and allow its competitors to win market leadership and first-scaler advantage. Nokia is a great example of the cost of caution. In 2007, Nokia was the world’s largest and most successful maker of mobile phones, with a market capitalization of just under $99 billion.

Unlike in the past, when companies needed to offer goods in retail stores or broadcast advertising in order to be visible to customers, today buyers can find whatever they’re looking for on Amazon or other online marketplaces like Alibaba, in app stores, or, when all else fails, by Googling. Because products and services that are already popular will almost always come up first in search results, companies with a competitive advantage can quickly grow to the point where the increasing returns of network effects produce a winner-take-most or winner-take-all market. This also explains why the growth factor of distribution is as or more important to company success as the product itself—without distribution, it is difficult to reach the tipping point. After network effects take hold, the efficiencies enabled by the Networked Age make it easier to sustain the pace of rapid growth.

The downside, of course, is that the cost of failure is much higher than if you proceeded with deliberate caution and waited for proof before making commitments. But this additional cost can be dwarfed by the potential benefits of achieving first-scaler advantage in a valuable winner-take-most or winner-take-all market. At the Village (hundreds of employees) and City (thousands of employees) stages, the speeds of competing organizations become much more varied. Some will be content with focusing on optimizing for efficiency (scale-up growth), while others will focus on speed (fastscaling) or speed in the face of uncertainty (blitzscaling).


pages: 336 words: 90,749

How to Fix Copyright by William Patry

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, barriers to entry, big-box store, borderless world, bread and circuses, business cycle, business intelligence, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lone genius, means of production, moral panic, new economy, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, search costs, semantic web, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

At the same time, proponents of ever-expanding rights have greatly over-promised what copyright laws can accomplish, and 12 HOW TO FIX COPYRIGHT hide how copyright inflation adversely affects consumers and other sectors of the economy. My conclusions are that copyright laws successfully support investments in winner-take-all markets dominated by superstars, but do not help the majority of authors and artists in making a living. I also conclude that copyright laws have failed to keep up with fundamental changes in markets and technologies: Revenues for the core copyright industries, studied granularly, show a fundamental shift away from the selling of physical objects as possessions—CDs, DVDs and other hard copies—toward a world in which we listen and watch temporary streams of music and movies, and increasingly read books stored elsewhere.

Pareles observed, the purpose of subjecting yourself to such hardships is to be noticed, and to be noticed among everyone else who is vying to be noticed too. There has always been an overabundance of those who wish to make their livelihood from creative endeavors, relative to the opportunities to do so. As Robert Frank and Philip Cook wrote in their book The Winner-Take-All Society: Winner-take-all markets attract too many contestants in part because of a common human frailty with respect to gambling—namely our tendency to overestimate our chances of winning. Becoming a contestant in a winnertakes-all market entails a decision to pit one’s own skills against a large field of adversaries. An intelligent decision obviously requires a well-informed estimate of the odds of winning.Yet people’s assessments of these odds are notoriously inaccurate.13 We ignore the odds not only because the potential payout is so big but also because of the “optimism bias”: the systematic tendency to overestimate the likelihood of positive outcomes and to 82 HOW TO FIX COPYRIGHT downplay the likelihood of negative events, especially failure.14 The market for creative works, like all markets, is structured to take advantage of this phenomenon.

It is a zero sum game, where the more people vie for the top, the fewer make it, but the rewards are disproportionately greater.36 Since rare talent must, by definition, be uncommon, there can only be a few who succeed. Those who succeed take it all: superstars get all the product endorsements, the clothing and perfume lines, the magazine covers, the television appearances, and most of our money. The winner-take-all market dominated by superstars also plays out in the argument that superstars need protection from those WHAT ARE COPYRIGHT LAWS SUPPOSED TO DO? 89 imitators who would, by copying from them, try to pull themselves up by pulling the lone geniuses down. If we permit others to copy from lone geniuses, the argument goes that we will have fewer of them.


Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage by Roger L. Martin

algorithmic management, Apple Newton, asset allocation, autism spectrum disorder, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Frank Gehry, global supply chain, high net worth, Innovator's Dilemma, Isaac Newton, mobile money, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, six sigma, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Wall-E, winner-take-all economy

As Target was growing across the Midwest, Walmart was aggressively expanding into the region and beyond. In those days, Ulrich must have grown increasingly weary of hearing about the singular brilliance of Walmart. Walmart was so much bigger and more valuable than its rivals that discount retailing became known as a stereotypical “winner take all” market, where one firm is so strong that it slowly crushes every rival. In other words, Walmart was considered a category killer. Walmart chose, then and now, to worship at the altar of reliability. It is all about the algorithm, from the look and feel of the stores, to the mechanics of the distribution system, to the approach of the buyers and merchandisers, to the strategy for expansion.

It’s a hell of a competition, but ours is more dependent on innovation, on design, and on quality.” 7 The new heuristic has served Target well. By 2004, Walmart was beginning to bump up against the limits of reliability, and Target for the first time experienced higher same-store sales growth and higher sales per square foot than Walmart. Discount retailing was not, after all, a winner-take-all market. Two giants were duking it out, while two giants of an earlier time—Sears and Kmart, which contributed so much to discount retailing’s dreary image—withered away. Target stayed in the fight through continuous innovation, even as it grew to the scale necessary to become a worthy and meaningful competitor to Walmart.


pages: 374 words: 111,284

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

The straightforward bit is the continuing economization on the demand for labor, most recently thanks mainly to computers and associated developments. The twist is that the communications revolution has caused the proliferation of so-called “winner-takes-all” markets. In traditional markets remuneration tends to be tied to absolute performance, but in “winner-takes-all” markets it is all about relative performance. One of the key factors that limited the extent of winner-takes-all markets has been distance. This has enabled a second- or even third-rate, or worse, provider of a service to stay in business and even prosper. But now, provided that the service in question can be digitized, then distance is no longer a barrier.


pages: 300 words: 76,638

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future by Andrew Yang

3D printing, Airbnb, assortative mating, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, call centre, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, global reserve currency, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, Narrative Science, new economy, passive income, performance metric, post-work, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, supercomputer in your pocket, tech worker, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

They also show stagnant median wages, high corporate profitability, low returns on labor, and high inequality, all of which one would expect if technology and automation were already transforming the economy in fundamental ways. As MIT professor Eryk Brynjolfsson puts it: “People are falling behind because technology is advancing so fast and our skills and our organizations aren’t keeping up.” The winner-take-all economy has set us up for what’s coming. But rather than recognize the extent to which economic value is diverging more and more from human time and labor, we essentially keep pretending it’s the 1970s. We’ve been able to get away with this pretense for a few decades by loading up on debt and cheap money and putting off future obligations.


pages: 252 words: 73,131

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

It might help explain why, in the year 2000, nineteen internet start-ups spent millions buying advertising time during the Super Bowl. It’s also telling that eight of the nineteen—including, famously, Pets.com, with its sock puppet mascot—no longer exist. Ironically, their efforts to signal they had the deep pockets and quality offerings that would allow them to be one of the survivors in the internet’s winner-take-all economy may have helped to drive these big spenders into bankruptcy.10 You might think that such a failure rate would discourage a repeat, but the trend is back: during the 2015 Super Bowl, start-ups, including Wix.com (a company that helps users build websites), and Loctite (a glue maker) spent $4.5 million for each thirty-second spot.11 Whether this all has the desired effect on someone in the market for a new truck or soft drink is another matter.


pages: 300 words: 78,475

Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream by Arianna Huffington

Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 13, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, call centre, carried interest, citizen journalism, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, do what you love, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, invisible hand, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, post-work, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, smart grid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Indeed, the double standard was famously ridiculed by Warren Buffett in 2007 when he noted that his receptionist paid 30 percent of her income in taxes, while he paid only 17.7 percent on his taxable income of $46 million.49 HOMER SIMPSON HAS IT TOO GOOD: SNAPSHOTS FROM THE MIDDLE-CLASS BATTLEFIELD The numbers don’t lie: We increasingly live in a “winner take all” economy. Indeed, we’ve arrived at a point where even Homer Simpson—created as a classic American Everyman character—is now living a middle-class fantasy. After all, how many American middle-class families do you know where the family’s sole breadwinner, a safety inspector at a nuclear power plant, can still comfortably support a family of five on a single income?


pages: 236 words: 77,546

The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice by Fredrik Deboer

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, Flynn Effect, full employment, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, income inequality, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Own Your Own Home, phenotype, positional goods, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Florida, school choice, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, trade route, twin studies, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

Instead of applying to specific schools, you submit a single application in which you rank your preferred schools. You are then assigned a school through a weighted lottery system that takes into account your rankings of preference, geographic location, your professional interests, and the need to establish racial and gender diversity at each school. With no more competitive admissions and no more winner-take-all economy, the notion of “good” and “bad” schools, the idea of an elite college, crumbles and falls away. Today a college’s reputation is some strange amalgam of its age, how powerful its selection effects are (only letting in highly talented students is a great way to have successful alumni), its production of research, who is on its faculty, and the status of its graduate programs.


pages: 424 words: 115,035

How Will Capitalism End? by Wolfgang Streeck

"there is no alternative" (TINA), accounting loophole / creative accounting, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, billion-dollar mistake, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, haute cuisine, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, open borders, pension reform, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, post-industrial society, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Uber for X, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck

As pointed out in Chapter 1 of this book, and partly elaborated in the rest of this introduction, I anchor this condition in a variety of interrelated developments, such as declining growth intensifying distributional conflict; the rising inequality that results from this; vanishing macroeconomic manageability, as manifested in, among other things, steadily growing indebtedness, a pumped-up money supply, and the ever-present possibility of another economic breakdown;19 the suspension of post-war capitalism’s engine of social progress, democracy, and the associated rise of oligarchic rule; the dwindling capacity of governments and the systemic inability of governance to limit the commodification of labour, nature and money; the omnipresence of corruption of all sorts, in response to intensified competition in winner-take-all markets with unlimited opportunities for self-enrichment; the erosion of public infrastructures and collective benefits in the course of commodification and privatization; the failure after 1989 of capitalism’s host nation, the United States, to build and maintain a stable global order; etc., etc.

In major disciplines, including swimming and track and field, not to mention cycling, one can safely assume that top competitors routinely employ the services of expensive specialists providing them with illegal, performance-enhancing treatment. Doping among athletes competing for ever-increasing sums of prize money and even more lucrative advertising contracts in worldwide winner-take-all markets is accompanied by corruption among officials of international sports associations, some of whom are reported to have been paid huge sums by athletes and their management for suppressing the results of positive doping tests, and by corporations and governments for locating events in places they prefer.

This is, thirdly, where doping comes in. Doping helps with both coping and hoping, and it takes many forms. Where it involves substance use and abuse, one may distinguish two kinds, performance-enhancing and performance-replacing. Performance-enhancing drugs are taken whenever the rewards of success are high, obviously in the winner-take-all markets of today’s showbusiness, including sports. But they are also used far down the income scale in middle-class professional and occupational life where competitive pressures have been intensifying for decades, as well as in educational institutions where test results may decide a person’s future career and earnings prospects.


pages: 353 words: 81,436

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

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

Schwarz, ‘Tax Competition and Fiscal Democracy’, in Schäfer et al. (eds), Politics in the Age of Austerity. 34 Ganghof, Wer regiert in der Steuerpolitik?, esp. pp. 98–117. 35 Hacker and Pierson (Winner-Take-All Politics) examine in impressive detail the role that tax cuts played in shaping the American ‘winner takes all’ economy and the high public debt that came with it in the 1990s and early 2000s. 36 R. Kuttner, Revolt of the Haves: Tax Rebellions and Hard Times, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980; I. Martin, The Permanent Tax Revolt: How the Property Tax Transformed American Politics, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008; D.


pages: 308 words: 85,880

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

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

And if this twenty-first-century city is to be habitable, he said, then these platform owners need to take responsibility for the impact of their products on their users. Can the Internet Save the World? In The Internet Is Not the Answer, I argued that the digital revolution, combined with the network effect of a winner-take-all economy, has created a Big Tech concentration of power that dwarfs Big Banks, Big Oil, or Big Pharma in its size and significance. It’s a much more lavish meal than just Facebook swallowing journalism, I suggested. Corporations like Google and Facebook were once known, rather quaintly, as “internet” companies.


pages: 72 words: 21,361

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

Each city might have its own local stars, with a few top performers touring nationally, but even the best singer in the nation could reach only a relatively small fraction of the potential listening audience. Once music could be recorded and distributed at a very low marginal cost, however, a small number of top performers could capture the majority of revenues in every market, from classical music’s Yo-Yo Ma to pop’s Lady Gaga. Economists Robert Frank and Philip Cook documented how winner-take-all markets have proliferated as technology transformed not only recorded music but also software, drama, sports, and every other industry that can be transmitted as digital bits. This trend has accelerated as more of the economy is based on software, either implicitly or explicitly. As we discussed in our 2008 Harvard Business Review article, digital technologies make it possible to replicate not only bits but also processes.


pages: 292 words: 85,151

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

A good way of looking at this is that when you move from point A to point B, you can then see point C. But you can’t see point C from point A. Iteration/experimentation is the only way. As Eric Ries explains, “The modern rule of competition is whoever learns fastest, wins.” Most digital markets are winner-takes-all markets due to network effects. This makes a culture of continuous experimentation even more important. The Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship uses a Lean Startup process for corporate innovation that is similar to the one used at Adobe. It’s called the 5x5x5x5 method (54). Five corporate teams with five complementary team members compete for five weeks (one to two days a week), spending no more than $5,000 to produce one innovation.

In some countries, banks are getting into the travel business. We’re also seeing travel agents moving into insurance and retailers into media (Amazon, Netflix). As a result, whatever business you are in, chances are your competitors are not what they used to be. A final outcome of this trend is that we seem to be entering an era of “winner-takes-all” markets. There’s really only one search engine (Google), one auction site (eBay) and one e-commerce site (Amazon). Network effects and customer experience lock-in seem to be at the root of this fundamental change in the nature of competition. 2. Drive To Demonetization One of the most important—and least celebrated—achievements of the Internet during the last decade was that it cut the marginal cost of marketing and sales to nearly zero.


pages: 352 words: 90,622

Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security by Sarah Chayes

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Celtic Tiger, colonial rule, crony capitalism, drone strike, failed state, high-speed rail, income inequality, microcredit, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, structural adjustment programs, trade route, ultimatum game, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional

Nigeria’s manufacturing, like Egypt’s, has also largely died out—victim, say residents, of privatization to cronies under pressure from the IMF, and customs and tariff regimes designed for members of the kleptocratic networks to work around. The Kano State civil servant took me on a tour of shuttered factories and warehouses: Bata shoes, an electronics factory, despairingly empty.* The result of this oil “monoculture” is a winner-take-all economy, in which unemployment and penury rise steadily, while political office guarantees a space at the Nigerian version of Tunisia’s feeding-trough state. The official salary of a senator tops one million U.S. dollars per year. With such fabulous sums in play, Nigerian politics has become a blood sport.


words: 49,604

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

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

A global brand will make its manufacturer far, far more money than a very similar product that does not achieve the same recognition in the market place. That means that there are superstar product designers, engineers, advertising executives and so on — anybody with a proven record of success will become a celebrity in his or her own field. The authors write: ‘The winner-take-all markets ... have become an increasingly important feature of modern economic life. They have permeated law, journalism, consulting, medicine, investment banking, corporate management, publishing, design, fashion, even the hallowed halls of academe.’ (The two professors modestly omit to mention that they fall into this last category following the success of their book.)

Here I part company sharply with Professors Frank and Cook who go on to argue that this is inefficient in economic terms. They make a series of The Weightless World 116 arguments. First, superstar economies generate income inequality, which is a social bad. True, but not necessarily an economic inefficiency. Secondly, winner-takes-all markets cause effort to be mis-allocated. For everybody wants to be a superstar and therefore too many people pile into professions where the winner-takes-all conditions apply. They write: ‘In increasing numbers our best and brightest graduates pursue top positions in law, finance, consulting and other over-crowded arenas, in the process forsaking careers in engineering, manufacturing, civil service, teaching and other occupations in which an infusion of additional talent would yield greater benefit to society’.


pages: 209 words: 89,619

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing

8-hour work day, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bread and circuses, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, death from overwork, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, export processing zone, fear of failure, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, it's over 9,000, job polarisation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, mini-job, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, nudge unit, old age dependency ratio, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, placebo effect, post-industrial society, precariat, presumed consent, quantitative easing, remote working, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, transaction costs, universal basic income, unpaid internship, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, young professional

At present, the average lifetime monetary gain from going to a college or university is substantial – £200,000 for men in the United Kingdom (Browne, 2010). Imposing high fees may thus seem fair. But fees risk marginalising university subjects that offer no financial return and ignore the fact that the return is a mean average. In a market society, winner-takes-all markets proliferate, which is why income differentials have grown way beyond what would be justifiable on productivity grounds. A shrinking number of students gain the high income returns that produce the mean average. More will gain jobs paying well below the mean. 68 THE PRECARIAT Now factor in what is happening in the labour market.

Scott McNealy, chairman of Sun Microsystems and an investor in the Western Governors University, which delivers degrees online, argued that teachers should re-position themselves as ‘coaches, not content creators’, customising materials to students while piping in others’ superior teaching. This commodification and standardisation is cheapening education, denuding the profession of its integrity and eroding the passing on of informal knowledge. It is strengthening winner-takes-all markets and accelerating the dismantling of an occupational community. A market in human capital will increase emphasis on celebrity teachers and universities, and favour norms and conventional wisdom. The Philistines are not at the gates; they are inside them. International financial institutions such as the World Bank demand that ‘inappropriate curricula’ unrelated to the economy should be removed.


pages: 436 words: 98,538

The Upside of Inequality by Edward Conard

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

It is no surprise, then, to find that as the world’s population has grown, income inequality has grown around the world.11 A more prosperous world values and rewards innovations—a new song or movie, a new technology, or a new insight—more highly than a less prosperous world. That’s a good thing. The growing income of the 1 percent is the result of simple multiplication, not a deduction from the pockets of the less successful. Were it the case that the world was becoming a less competitive “winner take all” economy, as economist Robert Frank postulates, or an increasingly concentrated “superstar economy” with relatively fewer “box office” successes, as economist Sherwin Rosen contends, we would expect the success of the 1 percent to be growing even faster than the success of the most successful corporations.12 That hasn’t been the case.


pages: 351 words: 100,791

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction by Matthew B. Crawford

airport security, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital Maoism, Google Glasses, hive mind, index card, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, large denomination, new economy, new new economy, Norman Mailer, online collectivism, Plato's cave, plutocrats, precautionary principle, Richard Thaler, Rodney Brooks, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

What is demanded is an all-purpose intelligence, the kind one is certified to have by admission to an elite university, not anything in particular that you might have learned along the way. You have to be ready to reinvent yourself at any time, like a good democratic Übermensch. And while in Calvin’s time the threat of damnation might have been dismissed by some as a mere superstition, with our winner-take-all economy the risk of damnation has acquired real teeth. There is a real chance that you may get stuck at the bottom. MOBILITY AND THE DEMOCRATIC SOCIAL CONDITION When Tocqueville came to America in the 1830s, he was struck by our “democratic social condition,” in which “new families are constantly springing up, others are constantly falling away, and all that remain change their condition.”


pages: 372 words: 101,678

Lessons from the Titans: What Companies in the New Economy Can Learn from the Great Industrial Giants to Drive Sustainable Success by Scott Davis, Carter Copeland, Rob Wertheimer

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, airport security, asset light, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Boeing 747, business cycle, business process, clean water, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Elisha Otis, Elon Musk, factory automation, fail fast, financial engineering, Ford Model T, global pandemic, hydraulic fracturing, Internet of things, iterative process, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, low cost airline, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, Michael Milken, Network effects, new economy, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, software is eating the world, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, value engineering, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy

And now a recession has put many businesses on the brink of collapse, even businesses that were not all that long ago thought of as invincible. In the stock market, investors have spent much of the last decade bidding up technology giants to levels that make sense only if these firms face limited competition and amazing profitability for decades. Market share has become the primary goal in a winner-take-all economy. Far beyond Silicon Valley, companies have been spending heavily on growth and paying little attention to how they’ll actually make money once they get there. With all the talk about disruption and market dominance, you might think the laws of business had been repealed. It’s as if the hard-learned lessons from the 2008–2009 financial crisis have already been long forgotten, even as we encounter a new crisis that could have even deeper impacts.


pages: 331 words: 95,582

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty

Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, commoditize, death of newspapers, desegregation, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Trump, edge city, Edward Glaeser, El Camino Real, emotional labour, fixed income, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joan Didion, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, passive income, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Homelessness is increasing, eviction displaces about a million households a year, and about four million people spend at least three hours commuting to and from work. One need only look out an airplane window to see that this has nothing to do with a lack of space. It’s the concentration of opportunity and the rising cost of being near it. It says much about today’s winner-take-all economy that many of the cities with the most glaring epidemics of homelessness are growing technology and finance centers where good-paying jobs are plentiful and industries of the future are on the rise. California, home of the nation’s worst housing crisis, has the dubious distinction of having somehow managed to produce some of the highest wages in America as well as the highest state poverty rate once the cost of housing is figured in.


pages: 374 words: 97,288

The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy by Aaron Perzanowski, Jason Schultz

3D printing, Airbnb, anti-communist, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, cloud computing, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, general purpose technology, gentrification, George Akerlof, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Open Library, Paradox of Choice, peer-to-peer, price discrimination, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software as a service, software patent, software studies, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, winner-take-all economy

Amy Calhoun and James English, “Library Simplified” (presentation delivered at ALA 2015, San Francisco, CA, June 27, 2015), http://www.slideshare.net/jamesenglish/library-simplified-ala, accessed November 20, 2015. 19. Ava Seave, “Are Digital Libraries a ‘Winner-Takes-All’ Market? OverDrive Hopes So,” Forbes, November 18, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/avaseave/2013/11/18/are-digital-libraries-a-winner-takes-all-market-overdrive-hopes-so/, accessed August 6, 2015. 20. While there hasn’t been a documented case of a library patron having their ebook access cut off, similar situations have arisen for Amazon ebook purchasers. See, e.g., Mark King, “Amazon Wipes Customer’s Kindle and Deletes Account with No Explanation,” Guardian (UK), October 22, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/oct/22/amazon-wipes-customers-kindle-deletes-account, accessed August 6, 2015. 21.


pages: 454 words: 107,163

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

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

Like environmentalists in Brazil who advocate sustainable development in the forest while turning a blind eye to the favelas of São Paulo, environmental justice advocates, with the blessings of mainstream environmentalists, focus on diesel buses, oil refineries, and asthma in poor communities that are faced with much larger crises, from joblessness to poor schools to the lack of affordable health care. While there is little evidence of a conspiracy to poison nonwhite Americans with toxic pollutants, Americans living in low-income, predominantly nonwhite communities disproportionately suffer a variety of poor health outcomes. In a winner-take-all economy, such outcomes are almost inevitable. Poor Americans are more likely to live in polluted urban areas and in close proximity to polluting industrial facilities, highways, and bus and truck routes. They are also much more likely to lack adequate health care and housing, to work in industries with high occupational health hazards, and to suffer disproportionately from a variety of nonenvironmental health ills.


System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

Yet we must also remember that the distrust in democracy is partly a product of the rise of technologists. The recommendation systems and algorithmic curation of the private platforms that constitute the infrastructure of our digital public sphere have contributed to polarization and supercharged the spread of misinformation. And the tech industry has contributed to a winner-take-all economy, which has in turn widened wealth and income inequality, phenomena that social scientists have repeatedly demonstrated undermine confidence in democratic institutions. We believe that democracy must be defended. Democracies are committed, at least in principle, to the noble and enduring values of individual freedom and equality.


pages: 386 words: 112,064

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, basic income, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, confounding variable, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, Donald Trump, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, green new deal, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, impact investing, imposter syndrome, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, William MacAskill, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Perhaps because of my previously undiagnosed anxiety and longstanding overwork habits, I have had chronic neck and shoulder pain since college. I’ve needed to spend significant time in physical therapy, and I now complete a stretching and exercise regimen every morning, which has made the pain much more manageable; I also take short breaks throughout the day to help keep my muscles from tightening up. In America’s winner-take-all-economy, I’ve experienced how my physical ailments can sometimes be characterized as weaknesses and used to justify that I deserve less in a “survival of the fittest” culture. And as I went deeper into equity work, I initially minimized my chronic pain, thinking it was trivial in comparison to what marginalized populations endured and that it would seem entitled for me to request anything more for myself.


pages: 179 words: 43,441

The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

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

Today, a middle-class job no longer guarantees a middle-class lifestyle, and over the past 20 years, the four traditional attributes of middle-class status (education, health, pensions and house ownership) have performed worse than inflation. In the US and the UK, education is now priced as a luxury. A winner-takes-all market economy, to which the middle-class has increasingly limited access, may percolate into democratic malaise and dereliction which compound social challenges. 3.4.2 Community From a broad societal standpoint, one of the greatest (and most observable) effects of digitization is the emergence of the “me-centred” society – a process of individuation and emergence of new forms of belonging and community.


pages: 472 words: 117,093

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

These users will be “locked in,” as economists say. By definition, when network effects are important, larger networks are more attractive to new users than smaller networks, so whichever network is largest will have the easiest time attracting even more users, extending its advantage. In other words, there’s a tendency toward winner-take-all markets when network effects are strong. This phenomenon creates yet another incentive for lowering prices, at least initially, when building a networked business. All of these effects can interact, so it can be a delicate balancing act to provide just the right incentives for both sides of the market.

victory, 17 p53 kinase study, 116–17 recipes invented by, 118 Waze, 162, 218 Wealthfront, 91 wealth management, 91; See also financial services web, See World Wide Web Web 2.0, 242 Wiener, Norbert, 31 Werbos, Paul, 73 WhatsApp, 140–42, 213, 265–66 Whitehead, Alfred North, 69 “Why Fintech Won’t Kill Banks” (Economist article), 202 Wikipedia, 43, 234–35, 246–49, 260 Williams, Walter, 263 Williamson, Oliver E., 313 Wilson, Mark, 118n Wilson, Timothy DeCamp, 45 Windows Phone, 167–68 Windsor, Richard, 203 wine, 38–39 winner-take-all markets, 217 women, automated trading and, 269 World Wide Web and business process reengineering, 33 as crowd-generated library, 231–32 and enterprise systems, 34 expansion of Internet’s capabilities, 33–34 as platform, 138 Wright, Gavin, 21 Wright, Robert, 229–31, 271 writing, AI-generated, 121 Wu, D.


pages: 409 words: 125,611

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

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

But it is not an easy matter to assess how the time savings implied by online shopping, or the cost savings that might result from increased competition (owing to greater ease of price comparison online), affects our standard of living. Two things should be clear. First, the profitability of an innovation may not be a good measure of its net contribution to our standard of living. In our winner-takes-all economy, an innovator who develops a better Web site for online dog-food purchases and deliveries may attract everyone around the world who uses the Internet to order dog food, making enormous profits in the process. But without the delivery service, much of those profits simply would have gone to others.


pages: 494 words: 116,739

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

There is a growing population of writers, and publishing is being commoditized.5 On the other hand, the books that receive widespread attention and land on best seller lists are a dwindling proportion of the total. The first trend is sometimes called “the long tail”; the second represents a “winner-take-all” economy.6 Commentators tend to highlight one or the other of these phenomena, but both are happening at once. Together they cause the shrinking middle that is the hallmark of any industry – music, movies, manufacturing – whose product can be replicated and distributed cheaply. Indeed, in the book business it is widely acknowledged that fewer and fewer authors are able to make a living through writing.


pages: 170 words: 51,205

Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age by Cory Doctorow, Amanda Palmer, Neil Gaiman

Airbnb, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Brewster Kahle, cloud computing, Dean Kamen, Edward Snowden, game design, general purpose technology, Internet Archive, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, MITM: man-in-the-middle, optical character recognition, plutocrats, pre–internet, profit maximization, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Streisand effect, technological determinism, transfer pricing, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy

Every time you sold a ten-dollar book through Walmart, that would be ten dollars’ worth of investment in this Walmart ecosystem your readers would feel beholden to, even if you and all their other favorite authors were later offered a better deal at Barnes and Noble (meanwhile, you’d only get fifty cents of that ten dollars in royalties, if that!). It’s easy to understand why Walmart would love this—it creates a winner-takes-all market, where a small advantage quickly grows into an unbridgeable gap. The question is, why should authors or publishers want to have anything to do with a scheme like this? Digital locks are roach motels: copyrighted works check in, but they don’t check out. Creators and investors lose control of their business—they become commodity suppliers for a distribution channel that calls all the shots.


pages: 180 words: 55,805

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

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

A telephone system is a good example: if I am the only one with a phone, the service is useless because I cannot call anyone. With each additional user, the service becomes more valuable to all users, which in turn creates a positive feedback loop of value leading to exponential growth. Designing a platform to take advantage of strong network effects creates lock-in and winner-take-all markets. The Internet itself has one of the strongest network effects, and consequently so do many of the top companies built on it. Ironically, network effects, which were supposed to make the Internet the great equalizer as it redistributed power away from monopolies, have ended up concentrating even more power in the hands of very few.


pages: 486 words: 150,849

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

The 1960s had triggered that first nostalgia wave as a soothing counterreaction. A generation later the unpleasant economic changes of the 1980s and ’90s made us retreat even deeper into our havens of the recycled and reassuringly old as a kind of national cultural self-medication. The unavoidable newness disoriented many people—the brutal winners-take-all economy and PCs evolving to supercomputers in every pocket all connected to one another, the easily graspable Cold War replaced by the confusing rise of China and militant Islamism, the influx of immigrants—take your pick. Just as Americans who came of age from the 1960s and after tended to be Peter Pans, fearing or resisting adulthood like no previous generations, trying to stay forever young, we also started fearing the future and resisting the new in general.


pages: 237 words: 64,411

Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Jerry Kaplan

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, bank run, bitcoin, Bob Noyce, Brian Krebs, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, driverless car, drop ship, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flash crash, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, haute couture, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, information asymmetry, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, Satoshi Nakamoto, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, Turing test, Vitalik Buterin, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

A 2005 University of Pennsylvania research report discusses how grocery store loyalty card programs offer differently valued discount coupons at checkout depending on such factors as how brand-loyal you appear to be.5 In other words, if you were inclined to buy the item anyway, why almost literally give away the store? The problem here is that all this wonderful laissez-faire is a prelude to à prendre ou à laisser—take it or leave it.6 The free flow of information around the Internet creates winner-take-all markets, and online retailing is no exception.7 Before the Internet, there were two points of friction that enabled a retailing market vigorous enough to profitably accommodate multiple sellers of identical goods. The first was information. How much more difficult was it to comparison shop, when you had to drive to a competitor’s store or search for their ads in the local newspaper, hoping to find the same item?


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

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

This same trend holds for the growing number of fields where technology makes productive remote work possible—consulting, marketing, writing, design, and so on. Once the talent market is made universally accessible, those at the peak of the market thrive while the rest suffer. In a seminal 1981 paper, the economist Sherwin Rosen worked out the mathematics behind these “winner-take-all” markets. One of his key insights was to explicitly model talent—labeled, innocuously, with the variable q in his formulas—as a factor with “imperfect substitution,” which Rosen explains as follows: “Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance.” In other words, talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels: There’s a premium to being the best.


pages: 240 words: 73,209

The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment by Guy Spier

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, book value, Checklist Manifesto, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Exxon Valdez, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, NetJets, pattern recognition, pre–internet, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, two and twenty, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

I had done a lot of research into Nike and had looked at the impact of its sponsorship on tennis and soccer. Instead of telling Shai that I thought K-Swiss was an also-ran in the sneaker business, I suggested that he produce a list of the top 20 tennis players, see who sponsored them, then estimate which of those players attracted the most viewers in what is typically a winner-take-all market. In the process, he discovered that K-Swiss had only one player on the list, while Nike had six or seven—an indication that K-Swiss faced an all but insuperable challenge to win market share away from Nike. At no point did we discuss whether Shai already owned the stock or was thinking of buying it.


pages: 209 words: 80,086

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

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

Gary Becker, awarded a Nobel Prize for his work on human capital, has highlighted what he sees as the “upside of income inequality,” arguing that the earning gap has widened “because the demand for educated and other skilled persons is growing.”27 These inequalities, he argues, reflect the new realities of a global economy that offer exceptional rewards to those with scarce skills, knowledge, and talent at the same time as penalizing those with poor marketable skills or mediocre records of performance. In The Winner-Takes-All Society, Frank and Cook are less sanguine about widening income inequalities in America, as they 122 The Global Auction believe them to be unjust and a cause of economic inefficiency. They explain these inequalities in terms of winner-takes-all markets because they make “the most productive individuals more valuable, and at the same time have led to more open bidding for their services.”28 In line with Becker, they take for granted that the market value of the most talented is worth more due of their contribution to productivity. The problem with this approach is that it continues to peddle the view that those who receive huge salaries deserve them, and the only thing stopping other people from doing the same thing is their failure to invest in their employability or to up their game.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

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

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

And when the market gets excited, those people get paid in a currency that appreciates at a rate far in excess of anything possible in the real economy. The amount of supermoney created out of thin air simply by issuing new options to employees is staggering. In 2015, for instance, Google’s stock-based compensation was $5.2 billion. The ability to print supermoney is proportional to your size, further accelerating the winner-takes-all economy. For a company the size of Google, whose market capitalization at the end of that year was more than $500 billion, that $5.2 billion in stock compensation represented only a 1% dilution of existing shareholders. For a smaller company, like Salesforce, with a market capitalization closer to $50 billion, 1% would only be $500 million—so Salesforce can afford only a tenth as much to hire engineers even though it has a third as many employees as Google.


pages: 383 words: 81,118

Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms by David S. Evans, Richard Schmalensee

Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Andy Rubin, big-box store, business process, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disruptive innovation, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Lyft, M-Pesa, market friction, market microstructure, Max Levchin, mobile money, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy

Many writers on business strategy took this apparent lesson to heart and emphasized the importance of first-mover advantages in industries with network effects.5 They drew two conclusions. The first was that network effects meant that one firm, or standard, would control the market, since bigger was always better in the eyes of consumers. These were, therefore, winner-take-all markets. The second was that, if you wanted to be the winner who took all, you had better start first and keep your lead. Since direct network effects would magnify the effects of even the slightest of leads, there’s always a first-mover advantage. One can see the influence of this work from a Google Ngram that shows the frequency of these phrases in books published after 1950.


pages: 322 words: 84,580

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

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

Martin Sandbu, “How Blue-Collar Aristocracy Was Laid Low,” Financial Times, 19 November 2018, https://www.ft.com/content/b336e428-e8e5-11e8-a34c-663b3f553b35. 10. Krauss, “Texas Oil Fields.” 11. Martin Sandbu, “Place and Prosperity,” Financial Times, 16 December 2016, https://www.ft.com/content/63f71020-c21f-11e6-9bca-2b93a6856354. 12. Robert Frank and Philip Cook, “Winner-Take-All Markets,” Studies in Microeconomics 1, no. 2 (December 2013): 131–54, https://doi.org/10.1177/2321022213501254. 13. Jason Furman, “Forms and Sources of Inequality in the United States,” VoxEU, 17 March 2016, https://voxeu.org/article/forms-and-sources-inequality-united-states. 14. Ben Ansell and David Adler, “Brexit and the Politics of Housing in Britain,” Political Quarterly 90, no. 52 (April 2019): 105–16, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923X.12621. 15.


pages: 302 words: 87,776

Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter by Dr. Dan Ariely, Jeff Kreisler

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Burning Man, collateralized debt obligation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, endowment effect, experimental economics, hedonic treadmill, IKEA effect, impact investing, invisible hand, loss aversion, mental accounting, mobile money, PalmPilot, placebo effect, price anchoring, Richard Thaler, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, the payments system, Uber for X, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

I figure they’re more likely to learn their lesson that way, and moreover, I have to keep my reputation.” In Dan’s game/experiment/scam, the effect of sunk costs quickly turned his students’/subjects’/marks’ potential 95-euro gain (100 euro minus the 5-euro starting bid) into a 490-euro loss. This is just like a contest between two companies in a winner-takes-all market. In general, one company will get all the sales or at least the vast majority, and the other will get nothing. Every quarter, each company must decide whether to invest more in research and development and advertising or to give up the competitive project. At some point, it should be clear that if the two companies perpetually try to outbid each other, they’ll both end up losing lots of money.


pages: 332 words: 91,780

Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity by Currid

barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Donald Trump, income inequality, index card, industrial cluster, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, place-making, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, prediction markets, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, rolodex, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Fry, the long tail, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, winner-take-all economy

Galenson’s research shows that Richter is the number one artist whose artwork consistently sells for over $1 million. He does not, however, reach the auction price heights of Hirst or Koons. So while Richter will certainly be considered one of the greatest artists of his time, he is not a celebrity who reaps the rewards of the winner-takes-all market. Richter’s work is revered by those who know art, the way a Booker Prize winner is lauded by book readers while the masses read Katie Price’s latest biography. As Galenson remarks, “Richter has a massive influence on young artists, even if not a household name.” 20. “Postwar & Contemporary Art at Christie’s Totals $430.8 Million,” editorial, Antiques and the Arts, May 20, 2008, antiquesandthearts.com/Antiques/AuctionWatch/ 2008-05-20__13-38-28.html. 21.


pages: 297 words: 89,206

Social Class in the 21st Century by Mike Savage

Bullingdon Club, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clapham omnibus, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, deskilling, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, moral panic, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, old-boy network, precariat, psychological pricing, Sloane Ranger, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, very high income, winner-take-all economy, young professional

This is because when there is a highly competitive education system and labour market, it is those who can maximize every possible advantage and who start from the most advantaged positions who are best able to succeed within this meritocratic structure. We see this syndrome operating very actively in the search for ‘talent’ embarked upon by leading companies and organizations acting to ‘hothouse’ their star performers in ‘Winner takes all’ markets. Meritocracy is not a curb to escalating inequality; it is actually implicated within it. In this respect, conventional images of George Osborne and David Cameron in their Bullingdon Club Oxford days, with the implication that the closed, old-fashioned elite world continues to look after its own, are misleading.


pages: 324 words: 92,805

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification by Paul Roberts

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, business cycle, business process, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, double helix, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, impulse control, income inequality, inflation targeting, insecure affluence, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge worker, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, performance metric, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the long tail, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, value engineering, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

Nor can we any longer persuade ourselves that our market and political systems will somehow reform themselves: the system is so broken that we no longer have the luxury of denial and apathy. More and more of us recognize that the pessimistic story lines that make the Impulse Society seem so intractable—the entrenched political dysfunction, the permanently myopic winner-take-all market, the chronic self-absorption of individuals—are themselves part of the Impulse Society, a meta brand that has made real reform seem impossible. But more of us see through this brand and know that reform is possible. Now, even as technocrats and academics and a few reform-minded politicians and businesspeople grapple with the myopia of the political system and the business world, the rest of us need to put that knowledge into action and step into the fray.


pages: 299 words: 92,782

The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing by Michael J. Mauboussin

Amazon Mechanical Turk, Atul Gawande, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, commoditize, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Emanuel Derman, fundamental attribution error, Gary Kildall, Gini coefficient, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, income inequality, Innovator's Dilemma, John Bogle, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Menlo Park, mental accounting, moral hazard, Network effects, power law, prisoner's dilemma, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk-adjusted returns, shareholder value, Simon Singh, six sigma, Steven Pinker, transaction costs, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipf's Law

In the era before recording technology was developed, the singers would have earned a comparable sum from their concerts, with the superior singer perhaps earning a modest premium consistent with the difference in skill. But once recording technology was introduced, consumers would no longer have to settle for the lesser of the two and would buy the record of the better singer almost every time. So her earnings would soar relative to her rival. Despite the similarity of talent, this becomes a winner-take-all market. In their book The Winner-Take-All Society, Robert Frank and Philip Cook suggest that increased competition for talent is another factor that creates outsized pay for top performers. Frank offers the example of a board of directors that must select between two candidates to become the next CEO of a company that earns $10 billion a year in profits.


pages: 364 words: 102,528

An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies by Tyler Cowen

agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, big-box store, business climate, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cognitive bias, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, food miles, gentrification, guest worker program, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, informal economy, iterative process, mass immigration, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, price discrimination, refrigerator car, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Upton Sinclair, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

I don’t use the plastic bowl or that whisk or that CorningWare tray. I would throw them away, except that my wife does not like it when I throw things away. Second, most people have a few favorite items which they use again and again and again, until they wear them out and have to buy new ones. Most kitchens function as a “winner-take-all” market, where a few items receive all the use and most are neglected and left alone. For me, the winning items are a very-good-at-conducting-heat frying pan, a wok, a large blue casserole, a small pot for cooking rice, an all-purpose Cuisinart/spice grinder, a large boiling pot for pasta, and a baking tray.


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

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

Protests have mobilized enormous crowds; for example, the January 2018 women’s march on the anniversary of Trump’s inauguration drew an estimated 2.67 million people onto the streets across America.40 What matters for reversing effective action, however, is whether these energies can be transferred from the streets and Twitter feeds to the ballot box and elected office. Reducing Economic Inequality Western societies have increasingly become winner-take-all economies dominated by a small minority, while the overwhelming majority have precarious jobs. If left to market forces, this tendency will prevail. But government can be a countervailing force that reallocates resources for the benefit of society as a whole. In recent decades, neo-liberal policies of deregulation and austerity cuts in social welfare have mainly had the opposite effect, fueling growing insecurity.


pages: 401 words: 115,959

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

Frank and Philip Cook observe in their 1996 book, The Winner-Take-All Society, new technology, globalization, and market economics have changed the structure of many industries in such a way that their star performers now earn vastly more than the average performer. As they explain, these are markets where “the value of what gets produced in them often depends on the efforts of only a small number of top performers, who are paid accordingly.” A booming world economy combined with winner-take-all markets resulted in an increase in the number of billionaires that might have shocked even Carnegie. In 2009, even after the financial crisis, Forbes magazine’s annual survey of the richest people in the world listed 793 billionaires. When Forbes first entered the rich-list business in 1982 with an annual ranking of America’s 400 wealthiest families, the threshold for inclusion was a net worth of $90 million.


pages: 523 words: 111,615

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters by Diane Coyle

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, different worldview, disintermediation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Financial Instability Hypothesis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, megacity, Network effects, new economy, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, principal–agent problem, profit motive, purchasing power parity, railway mania, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, social contagion, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, web application, web of trust, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Demand to see the top rank feeds on itself. Modern technologies also amplify the potential reach of talented people—the best performers are in demand not only for live performance but for CDs and downloads too. Both technology and globalization increase hugely the potential demand for talent. These “winner take all” markets have spread superstar pay to many other sectors of the economy, outside sport and the performing arts where they were originally observed.35 Moreover, this trend means that the increase in inequality due to skills and technology has what is known as a “fractal” character, which means that it is occurring within categories as well as in the overall income distribution: top lawyers’ pay has risen relative to those on low incomes; but the top top lawyers have pulled further ahead of the average top lawyer too.36 So to sum up, structural changes in the economy driven by new technologies are the fundamental driver of greater inequality, in much the same way that the wave of innovation of early capitalism in the nineteenth century led to great inequality until the workforce as a whole developed the new skills that were needed.


pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Wired’s Anderson puts the matter succinctly: “Monopolies are actually even more likely in highly networked markets like the online world. The dark side of network effects is that rich nodes get richer. Metcalfe’s law, which states that the value of a network increases in proportion to the square of connections, creates winner-take-all markets, where the gap between the number one and number two players is typically large and growing.”12 Bob Metcalfe, inventor of the Ethernet protocol that wires computers together, regarded the network effect as so prevalent that he formulated the law that goes by his name: the usefulness of a network increases at an accelerating rate as you add each new person to it.13 Google search is an example; the quality of its algorithm improves with more users, leaving other search engines with a less effective and attractive product.


pages: 387 words: 119,409

Work Rules!: Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead by Laszlo Bock

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Black Swan, book scanning, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, citizen journalism, clean water, cognitive load, company town, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, helicopter parent, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Kevin Roose, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, nudge unit, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, power law, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, random walk, Richard Thaler, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tony Hsieh, Turing machine, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

* The same pattern holds for Oscars, Man Booker Prize nominations, Pulitzer Prize nominations, Rolling Stone Top 500 Songs, and thirty-six other awards. † The same pattern holds in US state and Canadian provincial legislatures, the parliaments of Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, and in the New Zealand legislature. lv Clear exceptions include Frank and Cook’s “winner-take-all markets,” where the differences between the very best people and the next best are more readily observable, like professional sports, music, or acting. In those markets you see top pay in the tens of millions. And it follows a power law distribution. The Screen Actors Guild (SAG), for example, hasn’t released member compensation statistics since 2008, but it’s possible to piece together the distribution from various articles.


pages: 550 words: 124,073

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

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

While still a hypothetical question, what would happen if the substitution effects of new technology affected a majority? This, and not whether globalization will undermine the power of the nation-state or suborn democracy, strikes us as the more salient political question to ask about the future. We first note that even if winner-take-all markets become more pervasive, this does not eliminate the need for a large-scale higher education system. As long as the productivity of workers in their thirties cannot be confidently predicted from observable traits when they are in their teens, the economy will continue to depend on educating large numbers of young people.


pages: 1,164 words: 309,327

Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners by Larry Harris

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

The more buyers and sellers who participate in the system, the more valuable it is to everyone who uses it. Network externalities can create tremendous barriers to entry. Usually, one trading system grows large, and no other system can become large enough, quickly enough, to be a viable economic competitor. Markets with network externalities are winner-take-all markets. Without government regulation, new entrants often cannot get a toehold. The U.S. government requires that all phone companies allow all other phone companies to access their networks. Without such linkages, new phone companies could not compete with existing companies. The cellular telephone, telephone-over-cable, and telephone-over-Internet industries would not exist today were it not for these open access regulations.

See volume-weighted average price Wall Street Journal, 587 warrant, 44 Warsaw Stock Exchange, 50 wash trade, 259 weak-form efficient market, 240 welfare economics, 203–5, 216 well-informed speculators, 5, 6 well-informed traders. See informed traders WFE. See World Federation of Exchanges wheat, 183–85, 215, 255, 335, 352 wholesalers, 282 wide spread, 280 width, 398, 399 Winans, Foster, 587 winner’s curse, 338, 340, 341–43 winner-take-all markets, 536 winning, 475, 476 wirehouses, 34, 329 wolf detectors, 328 wolves, 328 wolves in sheep’s clothing, 327 working orders, 71 World Federation of Exchanges (WFE), 48, 66 wrap accounts, 151 writers, 42, 75 Wunsch, R. Steven, 121 Yahoo.com, 99 yen-euro, 357 yield curve spread, 358 zero-coupon bonds, 40, 206 zero downtick, 81 zero net supply, 41, 44, 225, 354 zero-sum game, 6, 8, 176, 205, 206, 458, 479, 488 zero tick, 81 Zip drive, 568


pages: 455 words: 133,322

The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Benchmark Capital, billion-dollar mistake, Burning Man, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, global village, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Rheingold, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Network effects, Peter Thiel, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social software, social web, SoftBank, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, UUNET, Whole Earth Review, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Zuckerberg realized a long time ago that most users are not going to take the time to create multiple profiles for themselves on multiple social networks. He also knew from his endless bull sessions at Harvard and in Palo Alto about “network effects” that once consolidation begins on a communications platform it can accelerate and become a winner-take-all market. People will join and use the communications tool that the largest number of other people already use. He therefore made it a goal to create a tool not for the United States but for the world. The objective was to overwhelm all other social networks wherever they are—to win their users and become the de facto standard.


pages: 554 words: 149,489

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change by Bharat Anand

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Eyjafjallajökull, fulfillment center, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, managed futures, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Minecraft, multi-sided market, Network effects, post-work, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, two-sided market, ubercab, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

It bundled its services effectively—its chat service could be used within a game, and a gamer could import her avatars. And it transferred the strength of its network effect in one product to others—with the click of a button, a user could import her social graph from QQ into a Tencent game in order to play with her friends. Tencent was doing something many companies that compete in winner-take-all markets struggle with: It successfully created connections across different products—IM, games, microblogs—where each relied on connecting users. In effect, it shifted its strength from just one network to a portfolio of connected networks. To monetize these advantages, Tencent turned again to price discrimination.


pages: 524 words: 143,993

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

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

Indeed, it appears from work at the World Bank that the clear losers from the economic developments of the last three decades have been the lower and middle classes of the high-income countries, whose incomes fall between the 75th and 95th percentiles from the bottom of the global income distribution.59 The forces driving the rise in inequality are complex. Technology helped create ‘winner-takes-all markets’ in which the most successful and productive participants could reap the lion’s share of the gains. This became notably true in the high-tech sector and in finance, which emerged as the most dynamic industries in high-income economies. Technology also increased the relative demand for skilled workers and lowered the demand for less-skilled ones.


pages: 543 words: 153,550

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

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

For the upper end of the income distribution, the empirical evidence most strongly supports the models that rely on technological change.16 For over twenty years, the IRS has tracked the highest 400 incomes. Those at the top of the distribution come from technology, mass retail, and finance, three industries that can scale quickly. That high growth rate could stem from winner-take-all markets for search engines (Google) or social networking sites (Facebook). These models tell us little about the lower end of the income distribution. Nor do they say much about income mobility, or explain why CEO pay in the United States far exceeds that in other countries. To explain these other features of the data, we need the other models, such as the income mobility model, Durlauf’s persistent inequality model, and the spatial voting model.


pages: 614 words: 168,545

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

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

As I have argued, rentierism is anti-competitive by nature: rentiers are by definition those who generate income from scarce assets under conditions of limited or no competition. In other words, reduced competition is integral to, not contingent on, the rentier’s mode of being. As Martin Kenney and John Zysman put it in one of the best existing discussions of the rise of the digital ‘platform economy’, ‘many platforms by their very nature prove to be winner-take-all markets, in which only one or two companies survive’.43 In other words, monopolization is a feature, not a bug. Those, such as Europe Economics’ Lilico and Sinclair, who dispute this point, arguing that competition is in fact relatively healthy in the digital platform space, invariably point to one particular example to prove their point: the fate of MySpace, which was the largest social-media platform in the world in the latter half of the 2000s.


pages: 505 words: 161,581

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

He thought back on the “excruciating” process of raising money, during which he and the Confinity team had been turned down over one hundred times. If the market soured, raising capital would become even more excruciating. Given a teetering market and a take-no-prisoners competitor, Thiel and others in the company began considering an alternative course. “A lot of us came to the conclusion that this would be a winner-take-all market, and that this should be a single company,” Confinity cofounder Ken Howery said. “Or both of us would spend ourselves into oblivion.” The company’s X.com tactics shifted subtly. Vince Sollitto, Confinity’s communications director, had mastered his craft in the cut and thrust of politics.


pages: 918 words: 257,605

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

Economic historians describe the dedication to lawlessness among the Gilded Age “robber barons” for whom Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism played the same role that Hayek, Jensen, and even Ayn Rand play for today’s digital barons. In the same way that surveillance capitalists excuse their corporations’ unprecedented concentrations of information and wealth as the unavoidable result of “network effects” and “winner-take-all” markets, the Gilded Age industrialists cited Spencer’s specious, pseudoscientific “survival of the fittest” as proof of a divine plan intended to put society’s wealth in the hands of its most aggressively competitive individuals.29 The Gilded Age millionaires, like today’s surveillance capitalists, stood on the frontier of a vast discontinuity in the means of production with nothing but blank territory in which to invent a new industrial capitalism free from constraints on the use of labor, the nature of working conditions, the extent of environmental destruction, the sourcing of raw materials, or even the quality of their own products.