"Nowhere is this [innovation by petit bourgeoisie] more evident than in the modern software industry, where virtually all the novel ideas have been created by individuals or small partnerships"
"The competitive advantage of large firms lies largely in their capitalization, marketing muscle, lobbying power, and vertical integration, not in their original ideas and innovation."
Is there any downside to taking say the 99.5th percentile of wealth, and requiring anyone over that value to sell say 5% of their holdings of each stock or fund they own and pay the proceeds as tax?
Let me be very clear: private companies will always fail because none of them has a clear & complete picture of the market. (Which is an impossibility, but I digress...)
Misallocation of resources by the private & public sector is therefore the norm & not the exception.
The difference is that a governmental organization does not have to maximize profits, unlike the private sector, and can therefore better manage sparse resources in the public interest.
Also: the public sector can tolerate losses a lot better than the private sector, precisely because it can more easily borrow money, draw on its foreign reserves, raise additional taxes and even print money at will (or all 4 at the same time!).
None of these are, of course, good long-term solutions but they can reduce the impact of bad decisions.
The question then is the management quality of the public sector, which has been abysmal in most western countries.
You'll be unsurprised to see that the UK's standard of living has improved (on average) less than many developed countries (exceptions being we're doing better than France, Greece & Spain).... so while over the period 2007-2019 living standards have risen (just) other countries have done better.
And real (average) earnings were only 3.5% higher than 2009 in 2023.
More evidence of the lack of economic rewards the country has gained from voting in a Tory Govt.
So the script didn’t exist so I changed to a for eachline() and reduced the argument passed to the Bernoulli (sampling right? i know his name from fluid dynamics; not familiar with any stats work on his part) because the returned file size was 1 or 2 samples from the 360k file on your given script.
i thunk another thought, if a household can be tracked in time, is there value using the data to help matching populations? also, is there something to be said of the kinds of households occupy them and if that changes over time?
The Office for National Statistics has been having some trouble with its key reports (such as the Labour Force Survey) & aside from dealing with budget cuts, it has also confronted (under-reported) strike action on the removal of flexible working for staff as well as a (linked?) growing exodus of staff (many in high-expertise middle level positions have left for the private sector); less than half as many people joined the ONS as left in 2023.
♲ @mlansbury@despora.de:> ## Opinion: The West should launch a new economic Cold War against Russia
Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to revive the Soviet Union, but two can play this game. To complete the Kremlin’s grotesque historical reenactment, the West should launch a new economic Cold War in response.
In addition to the war of aggression waged against the civilians and cities of Ukraine, Russia has also waged an asymmetrical economic war against the global economy and the international trade system that underpins it.
Russia’s #weaponization of trade, particularly of energy supplies, has caused massive disruptions in international markets and triggered a cascade of economic setbacks globally.
The (centrist) Social Market Foundation asked a group of economists to look at the Labour Party's economic policies & see what theorising lies behind them (if anything).
They concluded that pragmatism & small scale/focussed policy interventions seemed to be the driving logic(s) rather than any more general economic theory or position (in this sense they lack the coherence of Biden's policy approach).
@ChrisMayLA6@KimSJ I wonder how knowable some of Labour's planned policies are. There is electorally no benefit to nailing their colours to the mast before the election as that can only damage their appeal with some voter group or another.
I think their biggest challenge will be making their voters feel that something has radically changed for the better in the first 100 days. Only some of that can be achieved with economic policy.
An inflationary spiral based on expectations. It is a very different one from a deflationary one.
In the case of supply chain disruption (think floods and drought) it's a supply shock and at best businesses have to scramble to adapt (invest etc) to get around the problem. But hammering COL demand is perverse.
In all cases, messing around with interest rates is largely an exercise in futility.
It takes years to go from concept to reality for a new apartment building. But we have been increasing construction, and a number of new units have been coming online this year.
As Rachel Reeves stresses the link between international relations & economics... for those of us who've been (in my case) or still are International Political Economists, this is all very much what we've been talking about for decades.
So, for those of you wondering how that might work, one great book that brings a lot of the things Reeves is talking about together is:
If you think consumer sentiment (confidence) is a good indicator of the general state of the economy, you'll (perhaps) be unsurprised that across the EU and in UK & USA, such sentiment has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels.
Given the continuing cost of living crises, high(er) interest rates & a range of issues from conflicts to climate change, its perhaps more surprising sentiment has not declined more.
But, if capitalism is a system built on confidence about the future....
"The Great Retrofit is a near-future version of the city of Messina, in Sicily. Its science fictional element is the rise, and success beyond expectations, of a new type of economic agent, a form of for-benefit company that follows a quintuple bottom line approach, having the objective to improve its own performance across five dimensions: surplus (rather than profit), people, planet, beauty and truth, or knowledge sharing."
@pluralistic@ChrisMayLA6 I’m wearing a very basic plain colour T-shirt from M&S. some bright spark decided to print branding direct on the fabric where a neck label would usually go. It’s obviously the save money. The trouble is that after one wash at 40 degrees the white printed lettering printed itself as a whitish smear on the outside of the fabric at bust level, meaning that after one wash it couldn’t be used as smart wear. That’s a new low in enshitification.
A thing I think he doesn't give enough attention to is the role the Fed DOES play. The Fed indirectly controls bank lending rate through a couple mechanisms. The first is whatever rules it has for declaring a bank solvent. They've eliminated reserve requirements but now it's something like a stress test or whatever. A bank can't keep lending
Indefinitely because it needs to remain legally solvent. So if it experiences a bunch of outbound payments it may need to borrow reserves or sell assets. If it has some borrowers go bankrupt then it may need to cover things from its investment assets, etc. The Fed basically determines the market price of Bonds held by the bank and hence whether the bank is more or less solvent. If it raises interest rates bonds held by the banks go down in value
So it's an indirect effect for sure. And if The Fed steps in and says "haha psych we'll buy bonds at par value!" like they did around SVB failure... then it's kinda all bets off.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell
I think what happens is the equity of the bank declines. This means it can't lend as much, and it can't pay out as much dividends into its investors deposit account. But the deposits created by you spending $900k don't disappear. Since banks collect interest, there needs to be new deficit spend always to keep the money supply growing. Bankruptcy would seem to reduce the required deficit spend since the interest disappeared. @economics@a.gup.pe
The payout seems the victim here, but banks can lend to businesses freely. It’s just balance sheet management. They can’t be in the red at the end of a business day and even so, there’s always the discount window.
So yeh, that seems solid. Banks come away with interest (less expenses) from the transaction, always.
"Modern #economics does not distinguish between renewable and non-renewable materials, as its very method is to equalise and quantify everything by means of a money price. Thus, taking various alternative fuels, like coal, oil, wood, or waterpower: the only difference between them recognised by modern economics is relative cost per equivalent unit. The cheapest is automatically the one to be preferred, as to do otherwise would be irrational and ‘uneconomic’."
