Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts

Saturday, October 21, 2023

The Coming Wave

[T]he entirety of the human world depends on either living systems or our intelligence. And yet both are now in an unprecedented moment of exponential innovation and upheaval, an unparalleled augmentation that will leave little unchanged. Starting to crash around us is a new wave of technology. This wave is unleashing the power to engineer these two universal foundations: a wave of nothing less than intelligence and life... defined by two core technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology. Together they will usher in a new dawn for humanity, creating wealth and surplus unlike anything ever seen. And yet their rapid proliferation also threatens to empower a diverse array of bad actors to unleash disruption, instability, and even catastrophe on an unimaginable scale. This wave creates an immense challenge that will define the twenty-first century: our future both depends on these technologies and is imperiled by them. From where we stand today, it appears that containing this wave — that is, controlling, curbing, or even stopping it is not possible.... Even as we worry about their risks, we need the incredible benefits of the technologies of the coming wave more than ever before. This is the core dilemma.

Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave

Sunday, July 09, 2023

Labor is one of the processes by which A acquires property for B.


Ambrose Bierce

 

Wednesday, December 14, 2022

Keynes on Money

The main tenet of liberal socialism is that the state should cut the cord between money and time by taking over as much as three quarters of a country’s capital, bringing the frantic activities of saving and investment that plague capitalist societies under public ownership and control. In tandem with low interest rates and prohibitions on individuals’ and firms’ taking their money out of the country, the state’s management of savings and investment would achieve four goals. First, it would create full employment, which Keynes believed a capitalist economy could not bring about. Second, by funding investments in housing, transportation, and energy, the state would meet social needs that had long been neglected because greater profits were to be had elsewhere. Third, the state would end the scarcity of capital. Keynes thought that the possessor of capital was a social parasite, a “functionless investor” who was able to make money simply because only he had it to lend, much like a feudal landlord in possession of land. The capitalist also had “cumulative oppressive power,” issuing verdicts of life and death to workers and dictating policy to states. Because scarcity was the source of the capitalist’s parasitic power, ending that scarcity would lead to the “euthanasia of the rentier.”

Last, the worthiness of the state’s investments would not be measured by their rate of return but by their contribution to social well-being. Though Keynes imagined a variety of public goods that the state would bring about through its investments, the most important of those goods, for him, was the Smithian virtue of social intercourse:

Why should we not set aside, let us say, £50 millions a year for the next twenty years to add in every substantial city of the realm the dignity of an ancient university or a European capital to our local schools and their surroundings, to our local government and its offices, and above all perhaps, to provide a local centre of refreshment and entertainment with an ample theatre, a concert hall, a dance hall, a gallery, a British restaurant, canteens, cafés and so forth.

Keynes has long been accused of waging a war of economism against politics, elevating the economist above the statesman and thinking that the moral and political disagreements of a democratic society could be sidestepped or overcome by economic technicians and technocratic solutions.

... Keynes conceded that planning of the sort he was proposing “should take place in a community in which as many people as possible, both leaders and followers, wholly share [the planner’s] own moral position.” Yet he knew that his moral vision of an economy of cultural greatness and aesthetic excellence was not widely shared. ... Perhaps that’s why he found himself ... retreating to a position long familiar to philosopher-kings, calling for planners whose power could be safely exercised because they were “rightly orientated in their own minds and hearts to the moral issue” and because citizens had been reeducated according to the principles of “right moral thinking.”

... Keynes set out a second path for the future, one that he hoped would diminish the importance not just of money but of economic concerns altogether, without making any assumptions about what people believed or wanted from life. It was a vision of abundance and plenty, a world beyond scarcity, which made the hard power and hard choices of liberal socialism, as well as the requirement of democratic agreement about ultimate ends, unnecessary.

Corey Robin, The Trouble with Money (The New York Review, December 22, 2022)

Wednesday, March 03, 2021

The market could only reward ideas that turned a profit. Nobody stood to profit from clean parks; they were just nicer to live with than dirty parks. But if nobody made the political judgment that clean parks were better, a society organized around profit incentives from production alone would almost automatically end up with dirty parks. The market was not an impartial guide to the beliefs of the public, and some of its verdicts were crazy…. When public goods fell into disorder or neglect, people found them unpleasant and satiated their desires with what the market had to offer…. The economic organization of society was devoted not to maximizing social comfort and harmony but to satisfying the consumer desires created by advertising and production itself. And that in turn was hampering society’s ability to grapple with poverty. 

Kenneth Galbraith, according to Zachary D.Carter in The Price of Peace

Tuesday, March 02, 2021

Though his American followers would pursue fine-tuned tax-and-spending plans to lift demand during recessions, Keynes instead called for the government to manage future stages of overall economic scarcity through direct investment spending…. the government should seek “to prevent large fluctuations” in employment by enacting “a stable long-term programme” that would spend money on things like infrastructure, factory equipment, and scientific research. 

Zachary D.Carter in The Price of Peace

Monday, March 01, 2021

Keynes had come to believe that the problem was really much simpler: Unemployment was a breeding ground for fascism. It created dangerous political instability and a source of anger that could easily be weaponized. The terms of trade might help or hurt efforts to establish international goodwill, but tariffs or no tariffs, the legitimacy of an international economic order depended entirely on whether it did, in fact, provide for mutual prosperity.

Zachary D.Carter in The Price of Peace

Saturday, February 27, 2021

According to Keynes

Uncertainty about the future—not irrationality or stupidity—makes crowds prone to calamity in both finance and politics, particularly under conditions of significant anxiety. Markets are no more self-correcting than a mob hailing a demagogue.


Zachary D.Carter in The Price of Peace

Friday, February 26, 2021

[Keynes argued that] money...was an inherently political tool. It was the state that determined what substance—gold, paper, whatever—actually counted as money—what “thing” people and the government would accept as valid payment. The state thus created money and had always regulated its value.... The very idea of capitalism required active state economic management—the regulation of money and debt.

Zachary D.Carter in The Price of Peace

Wednesday, February 24, 2021

It is not a correct deduction from the principles of economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest.

 
John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire, as quoted by Zachary D.Carter in The Price of Peace

Friday, November 27, 2020

Democracy or Globalization?

Global markets suffer from weak governance and are therefore prone to instability, inefficiency, and weak popular legitimacy…. If you want more and better markets, you have to have more (and better) governance.  Markets work best not where states are weakest, but where they are strong.... Even though it is possible to advance both democracy and globalization…this requires the creation of a global political community that is vastly more ambitious than anything we have seen to date or are likely to experience soon.  It would call for global rule making by democracy…. Democracies have the right to protect their social arrangements, and when this right clashes with the requirements of the global economy, it is the latter that should give way. 

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

Thursday, September 10, 2020

Everyone but an economist knows without asking why money shouldn’t buy some things.

Arthur Okun, (cited in in the New York Review)

Sunday, May 24, 2020

Life in the COVID-19 Age

The snare in which humanity has been caught is an economics—great industry and commerce in service to great markets, with ethical restraint and respect for the distinctiveness of cultures, including our own, having fallen away in eager deference to profitability....The prestige of what was until very lately the world economic order lingers on despite the fact that the system itself is now revealed as a tenuous set of arrangements that have been highly profitable for some people but gravely damaging to the world. 

Marilynne Robinson, What Kind of Country Do We Want? (NYRB)

Tuesday, January 28, 2020

“Debt, the private money that has fueled capitalism since its inception, is coded in law and ultimately relies on the state to back it up,” by way of the courts under normal circumstances and through bailouts if a debtor is too big to fail:  The history of debt finance can therefore be retold as a story about how claims to future pay have been coded in law to ensure their convertibility into state money on demand, without suffering serious loss…. By dressing private debt in the modules of the legal code of capital, it is possible to mask the liquidity risk for a while, but not forever. Whenever investors realize that, contrary to their expectations, they may not be able to convert their debt assets into cash, they head for the exit; and if many do so simultaneously, this will precipitate a financial crisis.

Adam Tooze (quoting Katharina Pistor), "How ‘Big Law’ Makes Big Money," NYRB Feb. 13, 2020

Sunday, September 15, 2019

Sunday, March 24, 2019

...You have to remember that there are seven and a half billion people on earth and only about fifteen hundred or so of them are billionaires.  There's a kind of penumbra of rich people—another few hundred thousand—and a twilight zone of merely affluent people whose standard of living and location is basically the extent of their wealth, a kind of geopolitical fortune rather than a bankable one, and then basically everyone else is as poor as hell.

Nick Harkaway, Gnomon

Friday, March 01, 2019

The populist wave coursing through the western world is only the visible part of a soft power emanating from the working classes that will force the elites to rejoin the real movement of society or else to disappear.


Christophe Guilluy, quoted by James McAuley in the New York Review (March 21, 2019)

Wednesday, October 10, 2018


The fruit of riches is in abundance; satiety declares abundance.

"Divinarum fructus est in copia; copiam declarat satietas." —Cicero,
as quoted by Michel de Montaigne