Economics Bookmarks
Related to Economics.
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Here’s something that goes beyond the Climate catastrophe, by Tom Murphy.
… Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. … And this statement is independent of technology. Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase. – Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist
Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist
Also a free ebook:
Where is humanity going? How realistic is a future of fusion and space colonies? What constraints are imposed by physics, by resource availability, and by human psychology? Are default expectations grounded in reality? – Energy Ambitions Collection
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Die ökonomische Orthodoxie hat das akademische Tarnkleid ihrer ideologischen Prägung mit einem genialen methodischen Trick gewoben: Sie gibt ihre normativen Vorentscheidungen als Inbegriff ökonomischer Rationalität aus. Es ist die Rationalität des berühmt-berüchtigten homo oeconomicus, der strikt und rücksichtslos, ohne jede Empathie für andere Personen und «frei» von jedem Gemeinsinn, seinen wirtschaftlichen Eigennutzen maximiert. Jegliche Aspekte des guten Lebens und des gerechten Zusammenlebens in der Gesellschaft sind diesem akademischen Homunkulus fremd. – Raus aus der Teufelskreis-Ökonomie, von Peter Ulrich und Werner Vontobel, für Republik
Because, in a world where Creation and Communication are heavily commercialized, the act of Creating a Thing or building a community that doesn’t enrich our corporate overlords is a radical act. – The small things Manifesto
Raus aus der Teufelskreis-Ökonomie
News sources.
Ökonomenstimme ist ein Angebot der KOF Konjunkturforschungsstelle der ETH Zürich – Ökonomenstimme
The influence of capital
… the link between equity appreciation and economic growth has been weakened in two areas. First, labor’s declining share of profits means that corporations can grow earnings even in a “decelerating” economy. Second, changes in valuation multiples can have a large impact on equity returns independent of any changes in earnings or overall economic growth. … changes in valuations go beyond interest rates and are often inversely correlated with overall growth. – The Value of Nothing: Capital versus Growth, by Julius Krein, in the American Affairs Journal
As technological advance increases, the rare confluence will come to an end. New opportunities to throw values under the bus for increased competitiveness will arise. New ways of copying agents to increase the population will soak up our excess resources and resurrect Malthus’ unquiet spirit. Capitalism and democracy, previously our protectors, will figure out ways to route around their inconvenient dependence on human values. And our coordination power will not be nearly up to the task, assuming somthing much more powerful than all of us combined doesn’t show up and crush our combined efforts with a wave of its paw. – Meditations On Moloch
The Value of Nothing: Capital versus Growth, by Julius Krein, in the American Affairs Journal
Home office, return to office:
When more tech workers opted to earn their tech company salaries while living in cheaper cost-of-living houses, less tech worker money circulated to big city businesses.
This outflow of money does hurt the local economies of said cities, including the ones that big tech companies are headquartered in. In some cases, this pain has jeopardized a lot of the tax incentives that said companies enjoy.
That’s why we keep hearing about politicians praising the draconian way that the return-to-office policies are being enforced.
– Return to Office Is Bullshit And Everyone Knows It
Return to Office Is Bullshit And Everyone Knows It
Platforms like Google, Amazon and others:
This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle. –
Pluralistic: Tiktok's enshittification (21 Jan 2023), by Cory Doctorow
Pluralistic: Tiktok's enshittification (21 Jan 2023)
Dunning-Kruger effect:
The problem with the Dunning-Kruger chart is that it violates a fundamental principle in statistics. If you’re going to correlate two sets of data, they must be measured independently. In the Dunning-Kruger chart, this principle gets violated. The chart mixes test score into both axes, giving rise to autocorrelation. – The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation
Degrowth:
This means scaling down destructive sectors such as fossil fuels, mass-produced meat and dairy, fast fashion, advertising, cars and aviation, including private jets. At the same time, there is a need to end the planned obsolescence of products, lengthen their lifespans and reduce the purchasing power of the rich. – Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help
Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help
Business men vs engineers:
When Boeing made money, it was run by engineers. It made good product, and customers knew they could trust the brand. Now that Boeing’s run by businessmen, all it ever does is take more human lives than terrorism does. What good does any businessman offer? All they do is mismanage companies chasing after the perverse incentives. They’ve lost the plot. – the biggest threat facing your team, whether you’re a game developer or a tech founder or a CEO, is not what you think, by Doc Burford
Stop the enshittification. This talk is very good.
It's time to go on the offensive. To restore competition, regulation, interop and tech worker power so that we can create the new, good internet we’ll need to fight fascism, the climate emergency, and genocide. – "Disenshittify or Die", by @pluralistic@mamot.fr
Unionize and plan for a general strike:
In 2023, the UAW held its first honest elections for generations, and radicals, led by Shawn Fain, swept the board. How did workers win their union back? They unionized more workers! … Fain led the UAW to an historic strike: the UAW took on *all three* of the Big Three automakers, and cleaned their clocks. UAW workers walked away with three new contracts, all set to expire in 2028. Fain then called upon *every* union to bargain for contracts that run out in 2028, because if every union contract expires in 2028, we've got the makings of a *general strike*. – General Strike 2028, by @pluralistic@mamot.fr
Return to office (RTO) mandates:
By tracking over 3 million tech and finance workers’ employment histories reported on LinkedIn,
we analyze the effect of S&P 500 firms’ return-to-office (RTO) mandates on employee turnover
and hiring. We find that these firms experience abnormally high employee turnover following
RTO mandates. The increase in turnover rates is more pronounced for female employees, more
senior employees, and more skilled employees. Further, it takes significantly longer time for these
firms to fill their job vacancies after the mandates, and their overall hire rates also significantly
decrease. These results are consistent with firms losing their best talent, particularly among female
employees, and facing greater difficulties attracting talent after RTO mandates. Our study
highlights brain drain as a significant cost of RTO mandates, even for the largest firms in the world. – Return-to-Office Mandates and Brain Drain, by Yuye Ding, Zhao Jin, Mark (Shuai) Ma, Betty (Bin) Xing, Yucheng (John) Yang
Return-to-Office Mandates and Brain Drain
Nothing works:
More generally, in many markets, consumers are uninformed and it's fairly difficult to figure out which products are even half decent, let alone good. When people happen to choose a product or service that's right for them, it's often for the wrong reasons. … But, when people are mostly making decisions off of marketing and PR and don't have access to good information, there's no particular reason to think that a product being generally better or even strictly superior will result in that winning and the worse product losing. -- Why is it so hard to buy things that work well?, by Dan Luu
Why is it so hard to buy things that work well?
@landley@mstdn.jp writes:
In 2007, Warren Buffett eloquently asked congress to tax oligarchs.
Obama had 8 years to do so, and did not. Biden had 4 years and did not. 84 year old Pelosi just blocked AOC yet again.
This is after geriatric democrats blacklisted progressives.
Vote blue no matter who doesn't help when the problem is gerontocracy in service of plutocracy. Turnout decides elections and Harris’ outreach to Republicans was a losing strategy.
Warren Buffett eloquently asked congress to tax oligarchs
geriatric democrats blacklisted progressives
Harris’ outreach to Republicans
Tech workers and enshittification, by @pluralistic@mamot.fr:
So for many years, tech workers were the fourth and final constraint, holding the line after the constraints of competition, regulation and interop slipped away. But then came the mass tech layoffs. 260,000 in 2023; 150,000 in 2024; tens of thousands this year, with Facebook planning a 5% headcount massacre while doubling its executive bonuses. -- Pluralistic: With Great Power Came No Responsibility, by Cory Doctorow
Pluralistic: With Great Power Came No Responsibility
Validation via economic upturn:
The last few months have been a moral catastrophe. At least there’s no economic upside. — It’s a Shame We Have to Betray Our Allies, Starve the Poor, Halt Scientific Progress, Destroy the Environment, and Eliminate the Freedoms Enshrined in the Bill of Rights, but at Least My Investment Portfolio Is Also Tanking, by Talia Argondezzi, for McSweeny’s
About those tariffs the USA is imposing:
The White House said adjustments had been made to account for red tape and currency manipulation. A closer look at the, at-first, complicated looking equation revealed it was simply a measure of the size of that country's goods trade surplus with the US. They took the size of the trade deficit and divided it by the imports. -- Trump has turned his back on the foundation of US economic might - the fallout will be messy
Trump has turned his back on the foundation of US economic might - the fallout will be messy
It corrupts the soul.
Every action you take has consequences not just for the world but for your psyche; you cannot avoid being affected by your decisions, any more than you can avoid the third law of motion when you punch a wall. You cannot make people work for you and hoard all the profits while they are stuck with fixed salaries, without in the process developing strong feelings on why you're entitled to do that and how they deserve it actually. -- Deep in Mordor where the shadows lie: Dystopian stories of my time as a Googler, by ellila
Deep in Mordor where the shadows lie: Dystopian stories of my time as a Googler
Business idiots, return to office, generative artificial Intelligence, cowards in journalism, and much, much more:
Rot Economy
The incentives behind effectively everything we do have been broken by decades of neoliberal thinking, where the idea of a company — an entity created to do a thing in exchange for money —has been drained of all meaning beyond the continued domination and extraction of everything around it, focusing heavily on short-term gains and growth at all costs. In doing so, the definition of a “good business” has changed from one that makes good products at a fair price to a sustainable and loyal market, to one that can display the most stock price growth from quarter to quarter. This is the Rot Economy, which is a useful description for how tech companies have voluntarily degraded their core products in order to placate shareholders, transforming useful — and sometimes beloved — services into a hollow shell of their former selves as a means of expressing growth. … This problem, I believe, has poisoned the fabric of almost every part of modern business, elevating people that don't do work to oversee companies that make things they don't understand, creating substrates of management that do not do anything but create further distance from actually doing a job. … The power structures of modern society are run by *business idiots* — people that have learned enough to impress the people above them, because the business idiots have had power for decades. They have bred out true meritocracy or achievement or value-creation in favor of symbolic growth and superficial intelligence, because *real work is hard, and there are so many of them in power they’ve all found a way to work together.* … Why would companies push generative AI in seemingly every part of their service, even though customers don't like it and it doesn't really work? It's simple: they neither know nor care what the customer wants, barely know how their businesses function, barely know what their products do, and barely understand what their workers are doing, meaning that generative AI feels magical, because it does an impression of somebody doing a job, which is an accurate way of describing how most executives and middle managers operate. … Artificial intelligence is the ultimate panacea for the Business Idiot — a tool that gives an impression of productivity with far more production than the Business Idiot themselves. … Remote work terrifies the Business Idiot, because it removes the performative layer that allowed them to stomp around and feel important, reducing their work to, well...work. … Look at how willingly reporters will accept narratives not based on practical experience or *what the technology can do*, but what the powerful (and the popular) are suddenly interested in. … In some ways, Sam Altman is the Business Idiot's antichrist, taking advantage of a society where the powerful rarely know much other than what they want to control or dominate. ChatGPT and other AI tools are, for the most part, sold based on what they might do in the future to people that will never really use them … ChatGPT's popularity is the ultimate Business Idiot success story — the "fastest growing product in Silicon Valley history" that didn't grow because it was useful, or good, or able to do anything in particular, but because a media controlled by Business Idiots decided it was "the next big thing" and started talking about it nonstop since November 2022, guaranteeing that everybody would try it, even if even **to this day** the company can't really explain *what it is you’re meant to use it for*. … It just needs to make the right sounds at the right times to impress people that barely care what it does other than make them feel futuristic. – The Era Of The Business Idiot, by Ed Zitron
@deshipu@fosstodon.org writes about automation and warns of myopia:
Consider the ox-driven plough. On the face of it, it’s a huge improvement about the humble hoe that it replaced. Yes, the farmer still has to be present to drive the plough, and it still requires a lot of strength, but a large amount of that strength is now provided by the animal, and the whole work goes much faster. So it’s a definitely a huge saving, at least as long as you only look at this short time when the ploughing is actually happening.
But the ox has to eat too. And it needs a place to stay, and it needs to be taken care of. And when it gets old or sick, it has to be replaced. So for this to work in the long run you need a steady supply of oxen. (And I’m not even saying anything about the effort of the ox.) So a tiny plot of land that acted as the former’s garden and was enough to feed their family now has to become a considerably sized field, enough to grow food for a herd of oxen and the people needed to take care of them. And since the oxen need to eat the entire year, you have to store your crops somehow, and preserve them. What used to be a simple shack with a small garden, where some hoe-ing would happen a few times a year, turns into a small village with several huts, a barn, an enclosure, and people working around the clock to maintain all that. And don’t even get me started about fresh water and the smell of ox everywhere. And of course because you are not storing considerable caches of food, your little village is now vulnerable to raids and looting (or the more civilized version of it, taxation), so you need defensive walls, soldiers (or at least militia), weapons, and so on. – The Subtle Art of Automation, by Radomir Dopieralski
I don’t have UK Bookmarks. So here goes. Poverty in the UK.
Many rightwing commentators see a nation brought down by uncontrolled immigration, soaring crime rates and unacceptable demographic change. … And yet, Britain is broken, though not in the way most commentators perceive it. This is a nation in which … unemployment benefits are the least generous among OECD countries, with the exception of Australia and the US, and lower, in comparative terms, than 50 years ago. It is a nation in which employees work the longest hours in Europe and in which there is a higher proportion of low-paid workers than in any other OECD country. In which the growth of “flexible” labour markets has entrenched job insecurity and low wages, driving increasing numbers to labour in multiple jobs. In which more than 7 million people live in “food insecure” households. … In which scandals … show not just a failing state but one that often works against the interests of ordinary people and in which few with power are ever held to account. – Britain’s social fabric has been torn but it’s just easier to blame immigration, by Kenan Malik, for The Observer
Britain’s social fabric has been torn but it’s just easier to blame immigration
The cost of participating in the US workforce:
But everything changed between 1963 and 2024. Housing costs exploded. Healthcare became the largest household expense for many families. Employer coverage shrank while deductibles grew. Childcare became a market, and that market became ruinously expensive. College went from affordable to crippling. Transportation costs rose as cities sprawled and public transit withered under government neglect. The labor model shifted. A second income became mandatory to maintain the standard of living that one income formerly provided. But a second income meant childcare became mandatory, which meant two cars became mandatory. … The composition of household spending transformed completely. In 2024, food-at-home is no longer 33% of household spending. For most families, it’s 5 to 7 percent. Housing now consumes 35 to 45 percent. Healthcare takes 15 to 25 percent. Childcare, for families with young children, can eat 20 to 40 percent. … Which means if you measured income inadequacy today … the threshold … would be somewhere between $130,000 and $150,000. -- Part 1: My Life Is a Lie, by Michael W. Green
On the COVID-19 pandemic, same author:
In April 2020, the US personal savings rate hit a historic 33%. Economists attributed this to stimulus checks. But the math tells a different story. … Childcare ($32k): Suspended. Kids were home. … Commuting ($15k): Suspended. … Work Lunches/Clothes ($5k): Suspended. For a median family, the “Cost of Participation” in the economy is roughly $50,000 a year. When the economy stopped, that tax was repealed. Families earning $80,000 suddenly felt rich—not because they earned more, but because the leak in the bucket was plugged. For many, income actually rose thanks to the $600/week unemployment boost. But even for those whose income stayed flat, they felt rich because many costs were avoided. -- Part 1: My Life Is a Lie, by Michael W. Green
USA and AI:
The US’s bet on AI is now so gigantic that every Maga voter’s pension is bound to the bubble’s precarious survival. AI investment now rivals consumer spending as the primary creator of American economic growth. It accounted for virtually all (92%) GDP growth in the first half of this year. Without it, US GDP grew only 0.1%. Despite Donald Trump’s posturing, he is on shaky economic ground. – This is Europe’s secret weapon against Trump: it could burst his AI bubble, by Johnny Ryan, for The Gurdian
This is Europe’s secret weapon against Trump: it could burst his AI bubble
@revogt@mastodontech.de schreibt über die verschleppte digitale Souveränität in der Schweiz:
Die Abhängigkeit von einzelnen Anbietern ist kein Schicksal, sondern eine Entscheidung. Eine Entscheidung, die man täglich neu trifft. Mit jedem Vertrag, den man unterschreibt, mit jedem Rechenzentrum, das man bejubelt, mit jedem Jahr, das man zuwartet. … Denn was nützt ein günstiger Preis heute, wenn man morgen gefangen ist? Wenn der Wechsel um ein Vielfaches mehr kostet und man deshalb beim bisherigen Anbieter bleibt? Der "Vendor Lock-in" ist der eigentliche Preis. Nur ist der bei heutigen Beschaffungen nicht einkalkuliert. -- Im Jahr 2025: Das Oder-Prinzip, von Reto Vogt, für Inside-IT
Im Jahr 2025: Das Oder-Prinzip
The coming crash:
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York (NYFed), acting like a financial Santa Claus to recklessly naughty bankers, delivered $17 billion in cash to an unknown bank or banks at 8 AM the morning after Christmas. … The sudden demands for cash to cover shortfalls began on Halloween. That day the NYFed injected more than $50 Billion into one or more unnamed banks. Since then, it has injected tens of billions into banks 14 times, delivering greenbacks galore roughly every third business day. – Big Banks Enjoy Stealth Bailouts – A DCReport Exclusive, by David Cay Johnston, for DCReport
Big Banks Enjoy Stealth Bailouts – A DCReport Exclusive
@adamgreenfield@social.coop reviewing a flashlight:
the obvious consequence of rapidly-iterative design and manufacture so closely coupled to desire is more things, in more forms, for more microniches … it makes any conscious, purposive process of degrowth very, very difficult to achieve consensually and democratically – Dispatch for the week ending 11 January, 2026., by Adam Greenfield, on Patreon
Dispatch for the week ending 11 January, 2026.
Is this about the degenerating practice of programming, the lousy software we are forced to use in a corporate context or the terrible corrupting power of capitalism: How Microsoft Vaporized a Trillion Dollars, by Axel Rietschin. “Inside the complacency and decisions that eroded trust in Azure—from a former Azure Core engineer.”