Timothy Taylor, an economist and journal editor, writes short summaries of economics research on policy, markets, and labor.
HN commenters cite it for explanations of economic ideas, such as the brown M&Ms contract story, and for background on minimum wage research.
> I believe the user is referring to the iPhone here.
The author of the book in a 2016 interview:
> Q. As you note in your book, many of the inventions in the special century took as long as five decades to reach their full potential. Since the iPhone was introduced in 2007, isn't it too early to say that smartphones aren't transformative?
> A. I think the potential of smartphones has played out very rapidly. We're still at the dawn of payment systems based on the smartphone. We may 10 years from now look back and marvel at the fact that people had to pull credit cards out of their wallet.
> But remember, the entire decade of the rollout of the smartphone and all the applications have not caused productivity growth to budge. There are many people who think we're missing the benefits of the smartphone in our measures of productivity and GDP. But we've always missed the benefits of new inventions.
Economic growth has always been understated. But the degree of understatement was more important in the past, because the innovations were more transformative to every aspect of human life.
* https://phys.org/news/2016-02-smartphones-lagging.html
From a 2021 interview:
> […] In the last 15 years, we’ve had the invention of smartphones and social networks, and what they’ve done is bring enormous amounts of consumer surplus to everyday people of the world. This is not really counted in productivity, it hasn’t changed the way businesses conduct their day-to-day affairs all that…
Absolute vs relative improvements, vs cost of attainment, are two different questions. The largest overall reductions, and increases in life expectancy, come from very basic interventions.
The problem w/ efficiency measures generally is that there's progress to some theoretical maximum, and it comes with diminishing returns.
Breaking down life expectancy gains by demographics, the've moved more for men than women (since 1920, far more the reverse before), largely due to workplace risk, violence, and military service), and the poor/minorities rather than wealthy/majority (access, preventive care, environment, violence, stress).
The upper bound's moved little. Exceptional longevity is profoundly correlated geographically with poor recordkeeping.
See:
The difference in gains by age, here for England and Wales beginning 1700, through2013, w/ all ages from 1850: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/05/Life-expectancy-by-age-in-the-UK-1700-to-2013.png
Note that whilst at-birth increases (1850) from about 40 to 80, a 40 year old gains only 67 - 82 or so (15 years). It's early-life mortality that's changed most.
Similar US trends: https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/qtYQp1x-ZF9iXc-zVh7Kg2xJBXGZE3Uzb0l3wEKBiYqrKDU6tRCkZqdoz4lyiwoU5JUUDXyJc0wrsQexprLMzzhdA74rj_m1guuEHvzCnMai2Tn7gQqVn7vktQ
By gender/race, 1970-2010, US:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/images/databriefs/101-150/db125_fig1.png
An unusual presentation, showing mortality by age in 1950 vs. 2015. Note the double…
> Unions exist to benefit the median and bring up the floor, but it stifles competition among those who really do desire to be at the top. And in doing so while it brings up the floor, it also brings down the ceiling because people who would normally be motivated enough to move up would not have much incentive to do so anymore.
I think people tend to fixate on the worker-to-worker differences inside of unions. Yes, that is the most visible part of a union when in place, and at least in the US has valid arguments about meritocracy.
What is missed when limiting the scope to just that is the population-level abuses of workers that no amount of meritocracy will fix. When corporations engage in collusion against workers (now common and nearly unpunished in the US) the top-level wages are suppressed industry wide.
The whole pay band alignment that comes out of that undermines the meritocracy argument, and doesn't even begin to address the wage-fixing that has gone almost unchecked in tech for decades[1,2]. As a merited employee, you might have more options to where you can go, but it won't protect you from predatory hiring/layoff cycles and it certainly won't guarantee that you'll receive a truly competitive wage.
On paper, meritocracy sounds great. I have worked many places in tech and never once observed it, personally. Best case, if you have warmed a seat for enough years, then you advance that way. Worst, your employer knows they can just take advantage of you because…
The finance sector contributes only 7% of GDP, correct. One of the sources I had in mind [0] cites 31%, but that was revenue as a proportion of GDP, which doesn't really make sense. However, the financial sector takes about 30% of US profits [1].
With respect to trading only once a day, I don't think your ad absurdum counterarguments hold water.
The HK stock exchange used to trade 4.5 hours a day, from 10 to 12, and then after a generous 2 hour lunch break from 2 to 4:30. How is trading 8 or 12 hours a day better for pension funds?
Price discovery with a limit order book that's cleared once a day might work just as fine as when it's spread out over hours, maybe even better.
Think about some major event affecting a company happening on the weekend. Then everyone can put in buy/sell orders with adjusted prices, and they'll be cleared during the morning auction. How is that worse than if the event happens intraday, and only the most switched on automatic HFT will pick off people still quoting at the old price, then the professional traders in hedge funds will pick off people?
As I said, the difference would be that the gains of the fast movers would instead be distributed among those on the "wrong side" of the news. Why should price discovery be worse?
Finally, what makes you think that liquidity and bid-ask spread concentrated in a minute a day would be worse than spread out over many hours a day?
[0]…
> State capacity has collapsed across many government functions that are essential for a functioning economy. Critical network industries, including electricity, transport infrastructure and services, security, and water and sanitation have experienced major deteriorations over the last 15 years [1]
> While the racial composition of wealth at the top has changed, wealth concentration in South Africa has not and remains very high. [1]
> while the standard of living has increased for a minority of formerly disadvantaged South Africans and a small black middle class has emerged, there are still huge disparities in both material and subjective well-being [2]
> In 2010, the majority of citizens still hoped for basic necessities, income and employment, to enhance their quality of life. [2]
So no, there is no mean reversion caused by a broader sharing of (the same set of) resources - in fact the policies leading to worsening infrastructure and economic disproportionally negatively impact the poor, black population [3]
The examples I've given (blackouts, unemployment, etc.) are governance and capacity failures above and beyond any "regression to the mean" effect.
[1] https://conversableeconomist.com/2023/11/20/south-africas-economy-30-years-since-apartheid/ [2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11205-012-0120-y [3] https://qz.com/africa/1435910/blackouts-in-africa-affect-the-poor-more-than-the-rich
Copyright and patents are very different things. Lumping them under the disingenuous umbrella term "IP" only serves to muddle the waters and create FUD. They are not property rights.
It's best to criticize each precisely and surgically. Know the terms, know the rules, the exceptions, etc. Know the history, know the original purpose of these laws. That kind of broader knowledge in broader society is what can help. The big corps are interested in having a vague blurry idea around "IP" that just makes you scared and think "wouldn't download a car" and has a chilling effect of thinking that all "that stuff" is electrified and better not touch it, and that it's just natural that there's "intellectual property" and it's just minor details whether it's copyright or patents or trademarks or whatever else. Property rights are ancient. By associating copyright with that, they make it seem that it's also just as fundamental and civilization-grounding as private property, when most of intellectual history had no such concept. Derivative works, tweaking ideas, splicing them in new ways was just normal.
A related disingenuous propaganda term is "content consumption", again creating the association between e.g. reading a book or listening to a song on the one hand and eating food, or using up soap or fuel on the other.
See…