Tag: economics

Moore’s Law for Everything

what a permanent stimulus could look like, to ease us into UBI:

We should focus on taxing capital rather than labor, and we should use these taxes as an opportunity to directly distribute ownership and wealth to citizens. The best way to improve capitalism is to enable everyone to benefit from it directly as an equity owner. The 2 dominant sources of wealth will be 1) companies, particularly ones that make use of AI, and 2) land, which has a fixed supply.

The amount of wealth available to capitalize the American Equity Fund would be significant. There is about $50t worth of value in US companies alone. This will at least double over the next 10 years.

There is also $30t of privately-held land in the US. Assume that this value will double, too, over the next 10 years. If we increase the tax burden on holding land, its value will diminish relative to other investment assets, which is a good thing for society because it makes a fundamental resource more accessible and encourages investment instead of speculation. The value of companies will diminish in the short-term, too, though they will continue to perform quite well over time.

Under the above set of assumptions (current values, future growth, and the reduction in value from the new tax), 10 years from now each of the 250m adults in America would get about $13k every year. That dividend could be much higher if AI accelerates growth, but even if it’s not, $13k will have much greater purchasing power than it does now because technology will have greatly reduced the cost of goods and services. And that effective purchasing power will go up dramatically every year.

All futurism is Afrofuturism

The fact that Africa has some productive manufacturers and the fact it has managed to shift more people into factory work are both good signs. And though Asia’s growth boom is still going strong, it can’t last forever, and Africa’s day as the workshop of the world may come soon.

But economists, leaders, policymakers, businesspeople, and international organizations need to be focusing on this challenge more than they are. The fate of humanity in the 21st century and beyond hinges on whether African countries can figure out the riddle of industrialization.

China Slackers

Buy a large thermos bottle, and fill it with either Chinese herbal tea or whiskey, as a desk-side companion. Set a reminder on your phone to drink 8 glasses of water every day, and leave your workstation every 50 minutes to get that water. Start doing 15 minutes of stretches, or planking, in the office pantry. Set the goal of becoming the person who uses the most toilet paper in the company.

These are some of the tips for how to slack off at work provided by Massage Bear. Her philosophy of “touching fish” (mō yú), synonymous with lazing around at work, has resonated with many Chinese, increasingly exhausted by society’s ever more intense rat race.

as China becomes more prosperous, bullshit jobs are growing, just like in other advanced economies. Makes me wonder whether the transition to UBI will happen faster in China if these trends accelerate, as they likely will.

COVID-19 bifurcation

The result is that the amount of cash households have in the bank has absolutely exploded. I don’t even know if that word does justice. American households have $1 trillion more in checking accounts today than they did 1 year ago. For perspective, they held $800B in checking accounts a year ago. So it’s more than doubled. In 1 year. in many ways the American consumer is in the best financial shape in modern history, with minimal debt burdens and eager to spend their record savings.

Metaverse value chain

It’s possible to imagine a world in which a whole economy of creators make patterns and new materials for DIGITALAX’s digital fashion, and get paid every time a new skin using their work is sold. Or that by truly owning their own data, people can get paid to view ads, to submit their data to medical studies, and more. One of the features of Web3 companies is that there are often mechanisms to turn users into owners; people may be able to generate real wealth just by using products they’re excited about.

If done correctly, the Metaverse becomes more than the escape from a bleak reality that it is in Ready Player One, but a new way to earn a middle class income while pursuing your passions with ever-growing and more profitable niches of your people, around the globe.

Libertarians in a Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic had barely taken hold in the United States when principled libertarianism was reported to be among the early fatalities. “There are no libertarians in a pandemic,” Atlantic writer Derek Thompson quipped on Twitter on March 3. But that doesn’t mean libertarians haven’t made valuable contributions to the discourse surrounding COVID.

Paul Romer argued early on that government investment in massively expanded testing would be a bargain compared to the costs of letting the pandemic rage unabated. And this is one subsidy that many libertarian public voices eagerly endorsed. Yet the government is doing worse than nothing about these tests. Not only has the government neglected to subsidize them, it has put up obstacles so citizens can’t pay for them. Regulations are actively denying individuals access to valuable information about their own bodies that would help them avoid unknowingly spreading the disease.

More than 800 regulations were waived in response to COVID. While some of these will eventually come back into force, the pandemic has revealed how we’re better off without them.

Is there anything specifically libertarian about different dosing strategies? Not inherently. But the ideas owe much of their currency to the advocacy of George Mason economist Alex Tabarrok, and the debate centers on whether the bureaucratic decision-making processes of the FDA are adequate for responding to the current crisis. FDA procedures are designed for drug development and the certainty provided by time-consuming randomized control trials. As with early advice on masks and current restrictions on at-home testing, these standards may not serve us well in a rapidly progressing pandemic.

Monkey ransom

Shrewd macaques prefer to target items that humans are most likely to exchange for food, such as electronics, rather than objects that tourists care less about, such as hairpins or empty camera bags. Bargaining between a monkey robber, tourist and a temple staff member quite often lasted several minutes. The longest wait before an item was returned was 25 minutes, including 17 minutes of negotiation. For lower-valued items, the monkeys were more likely to conclude successful bartering sessions by accepting a lesser reward.

COVID-19 not over

The new issue is the potential for a really massive spike in Covid cases, where medical systems break down completely. So much of the economic/political status quo seemed to depend on the (largely irrational) optimism that followed the initial vaccine approval. If this gets replaced by a universal “OMG we are so fucked” the damage could be catastrophic–stock market, many industries that have been hanging on the edge, rage at media, doctors, politicians–any “voice of authority”. Even if (rationally) it turns out to be a 2-month issue that the vaccines could have reversed.

Obviously Biden won’t be up for this challenge but no other current or recent politician would have either. I don’t think events will fit any current narratives, and MSM attempts to spin them will fail. The general public won’t specifically blame either Biden or Trump. But if another 10M people are suddenly out of work, no one will understand why it suddenly happened, and no one will trust anyone’s ideas about what to do next.