Tag: economics
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keep domestic wages low + sell to rich countries = profit!
If you do not buy your domestic products and instead export them to richer countries, you can underpay your workers and generate a surplus. This means you don’t need to optimize employee pay and production. Your employees stay poorer, and are thus more desperate and less feisty, and have little buying power, but they are…
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From ChatGPT based on “Pyramid of Capitalist System,” Nedeljkovich, Brashich, & Kuharich, Industrial Workers of the World, 1911. Of course, for America at least, what you’d like to visualize is that every layer actually plays a part on “shareholder,” just a small part. Maybe there’s some stock certificates and cash that trickle down in pneumatic…
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Macro-economic headwinds vs “The Terrace-in-April”
I feel like there’s an unspoken set of assumptions and a slightly hidden “operating system” for how societies run. This comes out a lot when I read dense macro-economic analysis like this one. Let’s see what Opus 4.7’s angle is on my question: If I look at this piece, it seems to be saying Europe…
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“Greedy work” refers to jobs in which earnings are convex in hours – meaning that working longer, more continuous, and less flexible hours is rewarded disproportionately rather than proportionally. {Summarized by the robot.} And, from Claudia Goldin: Greedy work can be defined as a job that pays disproportionately more on a per-hour basis when someone…
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Relevant to your interests, Wednesday
RIP the metaverse – It’s fine to use your mountains of spare cash (and voting control) to try out new things. We’re all about innovation and expect it; you have to embrace lots of failure, giant failure. // The actual problem is then discarding all the people you hired to help you. It shucks the…
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🤖 Summary of “Economist Tyler Cowen on the positive side of AI negativity” podcast
The below is a summary of the original transcript from ChatGPT 5.2. Conclusion: Cowen’s core claim is simple and sharp: in the US, most people won’t lose jobs to AI, they’ll lose them to other people who use AI better. The real bottleneck isn’t models or GPUs – it’s institutions, habits, status hierarchies, and people’s…
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“Labor is valuable only insofar as it occupies a constraint the firm hasn’t yet automated.”
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“Oracle’s predicament is more acute than the hyperscalers’. Its business is smaller, its pockets shallower and its lot hitched more tightly to the fate of a single customer, OpenAI, which accounts for over half its $500bn in pledged revenue.” 🔗 Oracle and the hard truths about software
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“These estimates suggest that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating gradually over time. We estimate that investment was reduced by between 12% and 18%, employment by 3% to 4% and productivity by 3% to 4%.” 🔗 The Economic Impact of Brexit
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The charts say things are OK
It’s astonishing that the richest country in world history could convince itself that it was plundered by immigrants and trade. 🔗 One-Third of US Families Earn Over $150,000
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”Trente Glorieuses” Trente Glorieuses
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Americans move less than they used to/stay where the grew-up
Figure 1 shows a steady decline in interstate migration rates between 1996 and 2024 across all age groups. The figure also shows that moving rates are consistently higher for younger adults (25-34) than for older age groups and that mobility has declined within every age group. Thus, the overall decline in the mobility rate (age…
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The failures of ambition that keep the world running
“It’s also a part of a broader inversion of values. In America, we now treat the jobs that keep the world running like teachers, sanitation workers, nurses, delivery drivers as failures of ambition, while the real prestige lies in moving capital or manufacturing hype.” // Yowch. 🔗 How Bible Sales and Chipotle Explain the Economy
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Apple’s inflation adjusted revenue
Applying inflation to Apples’s revenue makes it more flat. // The same would apply to other companies. 🔗 The problem with dollars
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“Creating a real-time digital representation of an enterprise build on harmonized data & a system of intelligence (SoI) that is governed and autodidactic will create software-like marginal economics for companies that apply this to their business.” // Contender for Best Enterprise Cant of FY2016.
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🤖 Tyler Cowen’s characteristic phrases and intellectual frameworks
I’m fascinated with Tyler Cowen. Here is Claude Sonnet 4.5’s deep research on his Tylerisms, I asked: Tyler Cowen has many maxims, principles, and aphorisms. One is “Context is that which is scarce” another is “all food is ethnic food” (from his ethnic food website). Sometimes his blog posts bring with “those new service sector…
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“Doughnut Economics is based around an important insight: _Diagrams are powerful marketing tools_.”
“Doughnut Economics is based around an important insight: Diagrams are powerful marketing tools.” And, from the book reviewed: Visual frames, it gradually dawned on me, matter just as much as verbal ones…[N]ow is the time to uncover the economic graffiti that lingers in all of our minds and, if you don’t like what you find,…
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Thirty Years On, the Californian Ideology is Alive and Well – The cycle of tech loosing its democratic morals in favor of tech innovation, and, of course, making money.
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The Business of ChatGPT – Revenue and such numbers circa. August, 2025.
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The Cost Reality Check: Eliminating Public Cloud Waste Through Strategic Planning – “49% of organizations estimate that over 25% of their public cloud spend is wasted. 31% believe the waste exceeds 50%. That’s a level of inefficiency that few leaders can tolerate.”
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