China and India were the biggest economies in the world for almost all of the past 2000 years.
Tag: economics
Robot Traders
The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren’t doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending 1000s of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there’s no way they’d ever be part of a trade. The bots sketch out odd patterns with their orders, leaving patterns in the data that are largely invisible to market participants.
just robot traders crossing in the night, or deliberate addition of noise?
Tencent
a portrait of dst, naspers and tencent. it is very interesting to see how internet empires outside of the us are being built.
The Lights In the Tunnel
argues that the masses made redundant by automation will find employment with non-profits and be paid via a consumption tax.
France Euro Threat
the loser countries of italy, spain and france making common cause. the beginning of european disintegration.
Thriving Among Pirates
nigeria, india and china produce 4x more films per year than hollywood, despite rampant privacy. how does this work?
My first surprise was the discovery that in each of these famously pirate-laden countries, piracy is not really rampant – at least not in the way it is usually portrayed by copyright police. Piracy of imported (i.e., Hollywood) films is rife, but locally produced films are pirated to a lesser degree. The reasons are complex and subtle.
Global Services
There are over 2B literate, mobile phone subscribers in the developing world, many living on less than $5 a day. Corporations pay people to accomplish millions of simple text-based tasks. txteagle enables these tasks to be completed via text message by ordinary people around the globe.
between harnessing slacker energy and txteagle, we have not even scratched the surface of outsourcing. if you are an anti-outsourcing douchetard, it is time to dig in your heels. you won’t like the future.
Free Education
The marginal cost of education is being driven toward 0 due to social media and innovative approaches to online learning like OpenCourseWare, Flat World Knowledge, and the University of the People. That’s because the nature of information is such that it can be created once at cost and distributed and consumed over and over again for free. “Knowledge is, as the economists say, a non-rival good. If I eat an apple, you cannot also eat that same apple; but if I learn something, there is no reason you cannot also learn that thing. Information goods lend themselves to being created, distributed and consumed on the web. It is not so different from music, or classified advertising, or news.” So in the future, the cost of education might be free, or nearly free, which could just level the playing field.
also, no more need for second or third rate teachers.
Saving capitalism
The perception of many is that financial markets are parasitic institutions that feed off the blood, sweat, and tears of the rest of us. The reality is far different. This book breaks free of traditional ideological arguments of the Right and Left and points to a new way of understanding and spreading the extraordinary wealth-generating capabilities of capitalism.
They suggest that the government should give green cards to all foreigners who come to America to study science, technology, engineering or maths. Some are more innovative. Exchange-traded investment funds, which have gone from nothing 10 years ago to a trillion-$ industry today, leave promising new companies vulnerable to the fickleness of high-frequency traders: so why not let them exclude themselves from such funds’ baskets of shares? SOX is reducing the supply of new companies in the name of protecting investors: so why not let smaller firms opt out of SOX so long as shareholders are duly warned? The authors also argue that university technology offices should lose their monopolies, giving professors more freedom to exploit their innovations.
Innovative Deflation
Those who are making money in the knowledge economy are making pennies per $ in the old markets that they’ve eliminated with their innovation. This isn’t because we haven’t found the right monetization scheme yet. It is because innovation is leading to efficiency and not growth and that is exerting deflationary pressure on bloated industries. Moreover, it is largely being done by us, the end-user, in our free time, because we want to create and share, not just consume.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 