Hm, nice idea that. But somebody's already doing it less well We know there's massive amounts of invention going on. Innovations are popping up all over the place. And while this should be increasing economic growth, none of this invention and innovation is being reflected in our economies. My own diagnosis: when it comes to the "creative destruction" that capitalism is supposed to be good …
"A brief divergence into economics: we're not talking about macroeconomics here. That's the interest rates, unemployment, exchange rates stuff, all the things we see economists getting wildly wrong on the news. Rather, when we're talking about decades we have to be talking about microeconomics: prices, institutions, incentives, these sorts of things. Macro is the short term (thus Keynes' “In the long run we're all dead”) and micro is the underlying structure: if you've a long term problem then it will lie in micro."
Your criminal misunderstanding of micro vs macro should have your economics tutors spinning in their proverbial graves. What you're trying to say is you're talking about supply-side economics, not microeconomics. Microeconomics is effectively finance and market research.
"Microeconomics (from Greek prefix micro- "μικρό" meaning "small" + "economics"- "οικονομια") is a branch of economics that studies the behavior of individual households and firms in making decisions on the allocation of limited resources.[1] Typically, it applies to markets where goods or services are bought and sold. Microeconomics examines how these decisions and behaviors affect the supply and demand for goods and services, which determines prices, and how prices, in turn, determine the quantity supplied and quantity demanded of goods and services.[2][3]
This is in contrast to macroeconomics, which involves the "sum total of economic activity, dealing with the issues of growth, inflation, and unemployment."[2] Microeconomics also deals with the effects of national economic policies (such as changing taxation levels) on the aforementioned aspects of the economy"
I hadn't heard the phrase "regulatory capture" before, but its very well coined, and yes, there are tons of examples of it in action (the largest in potential value terms affected by this is probably online gambling in the US), and its probably having an impact. However...there are lots of examples where "creative destruction" IS busily doing its thing, but is actually creating genuine growth? The transformation of all the media industries for example, seems to be creating a new landscape, but not necessarily an economically more buoyant one. Yes there are individual winners (Google, Apple, Amazon etc.) but in what looks like a much less diverse economic landscape. Maybe the old economic certainties on growth simply don't apply anymore.
There's a parallel in biology.
" Disturbances act to disrupt stable ecosystems and clear species' habitat. As a result, disturbances lead to species movement into the newly cleared area[1]. Once an area is cleared there is a progressive increase in species richness and competition takes place again. "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate_Disturbance_Hypothesis
It strikes me that one of the problems with Taxi Cab regulation is decentralisation - another of the things the right likes to bang on about. If there was a single, central regulator then these companies would only have to fight the battle once per country. The balance might lie there, presuming fighting one federal regulator is cheaper than fighting 50 state-level regulators.
"If there was a single, central regulator then these companies would only have to fight the battle once per country."
Nice idea, but then the central body would spend years 'seeking the views of all parties affected', and the decision would be much delayed, perhaps permanently, certainly until the upstart had run out of cash.
What we see in the West is State Corporatism, major companies and government 'working' together to protect their common vested interests, and keep newcomers out of the market. The worst example being the EU, where money is applied much more to large corporates and charities than small ones, since the application for funding process is so bureaucratic. No doubt the US Federal government operates the same way.
Its a shame - a single market is a boon, a single, powerful bureaucracy is a nightmare.
the Central body vs various state bodies is a typically difficult subject to argue.
if you take your new idea to a central body and it is denied then you have ZERO business,
or you get ALL the business ... risky concept unless you are 100% sure of winning.
taking it to 50 separate bodies can be mroe expensive but you only need to set the precedent once and then your business model grows.
I think that argument has merit. (As a side question, why isn't there competition between regulators? It appears to have happened with UK exam boards so why not with Taxi regulators?)
But if you're right, then we have to accept the inefficiency as a cost of having 50 opportunities. Business, regulators, etc.. can span the spectrum from efficient (NHS) to abysmal (many endeavours in Soviet Russia). Plurality solves that by having lots of options. And, yes, some examples can become very efficient. But you have to accept that many won't be; the nature of plurality is to try all the ideas, many of which will be awful failures, so the average efficiency ends up poor. And in this case, we may be whining about the inefficient regulators when we should be accepting them as the cost of plurality.
I'm afraid I, for one, have no idea what you mean by that in this context. Are you suggesting that "The Right" wants decentralisation because they're Capitalist Pigdogs and believe in the small-state or that The Right are against decentralisations because they're Fascist Pigdogs and believe in a united Riech?
Perhaps you mean The Right like Stalin, or The Right like his friend Hitler? Or do you mean The Right like Bush with his fascistic anti-terror measures, or The Right like Obama with his fascistic policies forcing everyone to pay their money to health care or he'll send his jackbooted thugs to them?
The you perhaps missed the point of my post -- somewhat making my point even stronger.
Please stop with this left/right bollocks as it has no meaning outside of a specifically defined context which takes longer to explain than the point you're trying to make saying "Left" or "Right".
If you mean "Socialist" then say it, or if you mean "Capitalist" or "Liberal" then say them. Enough with the meaningless "Left" or "Right".
ROTFL. I think you have an obsession with "Pigdogs". I don't what they are, but I infer they come in "Capitalist" and "Fascist" flavours. I hope you enjoy them.
For the record, I am suggesting that some people (whom we might call trolls) like to criticise The Left (whom trolls sometimes call socialists or communists) for wanting to micromanage everything from the centre. And In my experience, there is truth in that criticism: the Left don't know when to stop.
Those same trolls - who are presumably "not on The Left" (for convenience we might call that The Right) then offer decentralisation as a solution.
And for the same record, I think we need a balance between centralisation and decentralisation. I don't mind paying taxes to avoid being killed in or by a taxi.
This echoes one of the major differences between Common and Roman law.
In Common law, everything is assumed to be legal, unless a law is made to curtail it. In Roman law, the opposite is true. This is a gross generalisation, but it points to an alternate solution.
Instead of the (politically 'left wing') response of centralizing control to fix a perceived issue, the solution could be framed by asking the question, why is there even a law about this in the first place?
This is what I take from the article, instead of tweaking the edges of the taxi (or whatever) monopoly, shouldn't we periodically question whether it should even exist at all?
Like every hacker, I default to an anti-authority, anti-regulation stance. But I don't want to have open the bonnet of a taxi, inspect the driver's licence and run a background check on them before I take a ride. I'm putting my life in someone else's hands; I want to make damn sure they and their vehicle are up to the job. This is exactly why I pay taxes: to ensure my safety. So taxi regulation stays. :-)
It seems to me that MBA's and stray dogs are quite incapable of comprehending the Ten Commandments when they are presented in the reverse order.
Capitalist Bastards, milkshakes for everyone* !
* Stray dogs know a PR Problem when they see one; there will be extras.
How about not regulating cars and drivers to give lifts to people.
Yes - I know - won't someone think of the children etc etc ad nauseam but
It seems to me that this is exactly the kind of market that could easily become self-regulating in a C21 western economy and would actually be a good use of crowd wisdom and other internet abilities.
I'm surprised that New York hail-and-ride taxis aren't allowed to take pre-bookings. They are in non-London English taxi authorites (London has different laws, don't ask!).
In England there are two licenses: Hackney where you can prowl for custom or take pre-bookings, and private hire, where you can only take pre-bookings. The problem we have is the opposite of NY: private hire drivers taking flag-down customers. The Uber system would be useful here as it would legally be a pre-booking system. Some private hire already do the equivalent of this by getting potential fares to contact them by phone to pre-book them a few seconds before they pick them up. The opposition would likely come from the taxi firms that operate a group phone booking system, as it would bypass them and go direct to the driver.
I used to be a member of a taxi licensing board, and we would try to persuade taxi representatives to come to us to discuss innovations so we could strighten things out and make sure things would work legally and safely. Unfortunately, they would still tend to ignore any pre-discussion and strike out alone and come a cropper.
"We're only going to take female passengers!" - that's illegal discrimination, come to us to discuss how to do it legally. "No, don't wanna!"
"It's a bicycle rickshaw, I'm not going to apply for a license!" - it's illegal to carry passengers without a license, come to us to discuss how to do it legally. "Argh! Anti-green interference, don't wanna!"
I'm sure that if the management where I work but as much effort into providing a better service for the customer and more effective business processes as they do on reorganisations, building changes and management innovations then things would be a damn sight more efficient...
Come out with a wizzy new cell phone, but get hit with slide to unlock?
If you are doing something in a new way there is a good chance some of the old patents still apply.
And there are trolls with patents that in effect science fiction. Once you make it work they show up.
We're at such an advanced stage there isn't really much left to do.
We're still coding proper software in C++. The main competition in IT is still Unix vs Windows.
In effect people in IT have decided that it is better to just copy, reuse and repackage than innovate. The prime example being Android which is just a re-hash of Linux, Java and the same old icon grid that's been with us since Apple Newton, Amstrad PenPad and Palm Pilot.
A firm I once worked for invented a phase-change re-recordable CD technology. As I heard later, JUST before rollout, the celebratory meeting imploded when they realized that the first disk ever written was.... blank.
Inventing is risky business. Several other innovations while I was there also failed, and in the end, they got completely out of designing, and even making, their own products.
FWIW: had they been more creative, they could have marketed the self erasing CD as copyright protection.
Ha!
Government bureaucracies are like lawns, cancers, and fetuses: they grow because they are designed to do nothing else, and any challenge to that growth is resisted vigorously.
I was 'fortunate" enough to work for a US government contractor in the winter of 95-96 when the US government shut down. My project was sufficiently funded and important enough to keep going, and in one month, we got eight months of work done because without bureaucrats to slow things down and avoid decisions, we just got things done.
A lot of things never got out to the real world (ie outside of the beltway) about that time. For one thing, 99% of HUD (Housing and Urban Development) was declared "not necessary for day-to-day operations" during the shutdown. Now, I know that not every job in a company, even the leanest and meanest company, is necessary for day-to-day operations. But 99%?!?!
Innovations all over the place, and older relatives benefiting from science-fiction medical treatments.
Stats can't measure quality of life.
And everyone seems to be more concerned about whether they are moving up or down the pecking order, so they cannot see the real improvements in life in front of their noses. Neither can the economists it seems.
"Stats can't measure quality of life."
Actually health economists (yes there are such things) can and do.
The term is something like "Qualies" IIRC the question is roughly will they get at least 5 years more reasonable life with this new treatment (as opposed to 5 years more being doublly incontinent in a bed).
But you're right. Not just the diagnosis and treatment but the underlying understanding of what's going on and why and what to avoid.
Humans appear to have a high pass filter. The process has been very gradual. It's only when someone observes 1/4 of everyone alive now in developed countries will live to 100 that something pretty amazing has happened (and can happen everywhere else).
The question is how to improve on that in 2013.
The legal / regulatory aspect is just one side of the non-acceptance issue. The other side is consumer trust (or: lack of it). Until recent years all innovation was tangible - stuff you could touch, put in a drawer and forget about, stuff you could turn off and be safe in the knowledge that it WAS off.
These days so much innovation happens outside the area of user control. Phones that track you (sure, you can turn them off; but then you can't make calls). Websites that know everything you've clicked on. Companies that "need" your personal information just to sell you a sausage roll.
The problem is that the ordinary people feel that all this new stuff is
a) outside their control
b) likely to steal all their money, publish naked photos of them, sue them, get them arrested and/or keep coming back no matter how hard you try to delete/remove/turn off or bury them.
And it's not just ordinary people that are having trouble. Even the people supposedly in charge are getting bitten in the bum by their technology: Gordon Brown and the live radio mike (bigot-gate) incident?
Now whether these problems are real or imaginary is immaterial. We keep hearing about problems: people getting their bank accounts emptied, etc. and the fear of a problem is usually the reason for lack of take-up of new gadgets and innovations - not the problem itself. The reason being the lack of trust and feeling of powerlessness in our relationship with these new-fangled, electronic gizmos.
Maybe when every new gadget comes with an "Ooops, I didn't mean to do that" button that simply undoes everything and can be TRUSTED to put everything to rights, then we'll start to see ordinary people feeling more positive about innovation - instead of feeling that they need a PhD in CompSci just to understand the manual.
In our wonderful capitalist economy, "progress" tends to be a way of taking money from one group of people and transferring it to a different group. Nothing much has changed since the arrival of railways resulted in a flood of litigation from canal owners, or since the Port of Bristol tried to keep Brunel's big ships out in the interests of their smaller customers. Well, the main change, at least in the US, is more lawyers per head of population, and more rapid new circulation, so the issues are more visible.
It always used to amuse me that Mrs. Thatcher thought that the US was a place where business freedom flourished. In fact much of it is very tightly regulated and protectionism is rampant. This comes to the fore whenever the US economy is struggling a bit and there is a lot of foreign competition. It has to be remembered, for instance, that in both WW1 and WW2 the US delayed entering the war partly because US business wanted to be on the winning side, and in WW2 because they saw an opportunity to let Germany destroy the British Empire and allow the US to pick up the pieces.
So my own view is that what is going on here is business as usual. Too much innovation is happening outside the US, so US business employs its lawyers to try to find ways to stop it.
My interpretation of the US and world wars is that in neither case was the US ready for the fight. Staying out allowed them time to organize the manpower and industrial resources.
In both 1914 and 1939, the US did not have either a sizeable body of men in uniform nor the equipment for them to use. The US Navy was smaller than the Royal Navy at the start of the Second piece of unpleasantness, their tanks were useless and there weren't many of them.
That said US industry (and Canada's) both benefitted from the large amounts of cash that the UK was prepared to hand over for war materiel. Canada's "billion dollar gift" part way through the war can be seen as an attempt to keep British orders with Canadian businesses rather than see them move them south of the border under Lend-Lease
We were not ready to fight because we did not want to fight. I know that is hard to believe at this point in time--post Iraq War, but it was so prior to WWII. Pearl Harbor forced us to change our minds on that topic. That event made us rather paranoid. Just as that paranoia was beginning to die down, Al Quaida inflicted the World Trade Center Atrocity on us.
I hate Osama bin Laden as much for causing us to beocme hyper-paranoid again as for the two beautiful buildings full of people he tore down with two of our beautiful airliners full of people. I find myself gritting my teeth every time I think about it. What if they had managed to smuggle in small nuclear weapons? What if they do manage to smuggle in small nuclear weapons? What then? It is not paranoia if they really are out to get you.
What if they had managed to smuggle in small nuclear weapons?
We wouldn't have had to bail out wall street and people would have felt some sympathy with the poor, overworked and underpaid bankers. Maybe they would have held a raffle for their families?
At least part of the problem is that Capitalism, despite it's serious flaws when allowed to run rampant, does offer a very good outlet for those people who are very driven by competitiveness, need for adventure/excitement, creative/inventive spirit, and/or the need for recognition. Those needs can be addressed in all sorts of ways, but the capitalist mentality certainly addresses all of them.
So, we may not 'need' all this [so called] 'progress', but we certainly need constructive outlets for human energy and enterprise.
So, we may not 'need' all this [so called] 'progress', but we certainly need constructive outlets for human energy and enterprise.
Well said! Given the reasons the Nobel Peace Prize was given to the EU, it can be argued that economic integration, driven by all this messy capitalism, has proven a much more effective road to peace than previously tried methods. If the alternative to a competitive marketplace is the battlefield, I choose the market.
Except, of course, the little problem that is never acknowledged: the European economies had begun making all of the changes necessary to bring about this new peaceful era in the aftermath of world war 2, before even the Coal and Steel union between France and Germany was put into place, never mind the EU, which wouldn't be implemented until the mid 90s. The EU was late to the party, claimed credit for something it had nothing to do with, and in the end spent most of its time fighting over which of its presidents would get to hold the prize certificate and who'd pocket the cash.
The EU and the EEC before it did nothing to create peace in Europe. They rode on the post-war economic boom that was brought about by rapid (and necessary) cooperation and integration between the nations of Europe, then claimed they were responsible for it, when in reality they've done the most to rein it in and crush it with their constant regulation.
And the nobel peace prize wasn't meant to be awarded to organisations anyway. It's right there in the charter for the damn thing.
Graham Dawson, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to organizations with some frequency, starting with the Institut de Droit International in 1904, a mere eight years after Nobel’s death. The Red Cross has won it on three different occasions. Other familiar organizational recipients include UNICEF, Amnesty International, the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, Médecins Sans Frontières, and the IAEA, as well as several others that are not so well known.
"In our wonderful capitalist economy, "progress" tends to be a way of taking money from one group of people and transferring it to a different group."
That happens in modern economies, but that's not capitalism, redistribution is a socialist concept.
No, that's capitalist lie number one.
The reality is that capitalism is only ever about the enclosure of resources and political power in ever-decreasing circles of self-interest.
The post-war technology booms only happened because the US and Europe had aggressive wealth redistribution programs that worked in the opposite direction, creating mass prosperity, widening access to education and promoting innovation. Financialistation was also strictly regulated to keep the banking system stable.
If you do things the other way you get wannabe aristos with gold-plated toilets in their yachts and a population of unhappy poor people who can't afford Christmas presents without credit card debt and whose talents are mostly wasted. Oh - and the banks implode with a regularity you can se your watch by, taking a decade or two of possible progress with them.
Empirical history, by the way.
Oh that would be why every country that's tried this redistributionism you seem so keen on turned out to be paradise on earth.
Oh wait, they're all poverty-ridden shitholes with all the wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority, and now we're on our way to that same fate thanks to braindead idiots like yourself who believe the propaganda about redistributing wealth to be "fair".
RE:This comes to the fore whenever the US economy is struggling a bit and there is a lot of foreign competition. It has to be remembered, for instance, that in both WW1 and WW2 the US delayed entering the war partly because US business wanted to be on the winning side, and in WW2 because they saw an opportunity to let Germany destroy the British Empire and allow the US to pick up the pieces.
And then the USA came along and resuced you all from your folly? Tired of hearing that one are you? You should remember that the United States is not solely made up of British expatriats. We have and had, German expatriates, Irish expatriates, Scottish expatriates and a great many Italian expatriates, French expatriates, not to mention millions of blacks who were, originally, displaced from their homelands by you Brits and the Europeans. We were reluctant to enter the World Wars, yes, but not for the reasons you have been led to believe. We, as a nation, were Eurosceptics before the word ''eurosceptic came into common useage.
We still are rather Eurosceptic, unless you count Albert Gore and Friends.
ribosome, it should be remembered that the unlike the UK and France, the US was neither a guarantor of Belgian territorial integrity prior to WWI. nor of Polish territorial integrity prior to WWII. The eventual US causae bellorum did not appear before 1917 and 1941 respectively; and it was Germany who declared war on the US first in 1941.
As far as US business wanting to be on the winning side, please read these excerpts of speeches given by Senators Norris and LaFolette prior to the US becoming an Associated Power in WWI.:
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/doc19.htm
It may be difficult to belive how thoroughly isolationist the vast majority of US citizens were in the first half of the 20th century, but nonetheless it was the case.
US business wanted to be on the most profitable side; winners and losers were not material to this goal. If the collective bottom line would have been best served by remaining neutral, then neutrality would have been maintained throughout both conflicts (at least vis-à-vis Germany).
Much as I hate to agree with such an overt "free marketeer", or to see anyone lose their jobs, the argument you are putting forward is similar to not wanting rid of the guy with the red warning flag in front of early cars.
While it might reduce the need for schedulers, by making taxis easier and possibly cheaper it might well bring more jobs driving and maintaining the cars. That is the nature (generally speaking) of Industrial era progress.
What I do question is the need for growth as such. More money per capita - where does the money come from? A lot of what we see as growth in increased consumption, and that is leading to problems of waste disposal and material scarcity (or ultimately the cost of recover it in usable amounts).
What the West needs is an economy that is less about buying cheap tat from the lowest priced off-shored supplier and about having a good standard of living (which is more than your tat count) without the underlying presumption of growing working population and consumption of materials.
"Cab companies are small businesses who hire dispatchers"
According to the article, part of the objections to the cab hailing app is that the yellow cabs are not licensed for pre-booked journeys. So, by definition, there are no dispatchers to sack.
I SAY! Let's add this...
Directly from Regime Uncertainty: Some Clarifications by Robert Higgs.
Private investment is the most important driver of economic progress. Entrepreneurs need new structures, equipment, and software to produce new products, to produce existing products at lower cost, and to make use of new technology that requires embodiment in machinery, plant layouts, and other aspects of the existing capital stock. When the rate of private investment declines, the rate of growth of real income per capita slackens, and if private investment drops quickly and substantially, a recession or depression occurs.
Such recession or depression is likely to persist until private investment makes a fairly full recovery. In US history, such recovery usually has occurred within a year or two after the trough. Only twice in the past century has a fairly prompt and full recovery of private investment failed to occur — during the Great Depression and during the past five years.
In a 1997 article in the Independent Review ("Regime Uncertainty: Why the Great Depression Lasted So Long and Why Prosperity Resumed After the War" PDF) I argued that a major reason for the incomplete recovery of private investment during the latter half of the 1930s was "regime uncertainty." By this, I mean a pervasive lack of confidence among investors in their ability to foresee the extent to which future government actions will alter their private-property rights. In the original article and in many follow-up articles, I documented that between 1935 and 1940, many investors feared that the government might transform the very nature of the existing economic order, replacing the primarily market-oriented economy with fascism, socialism, or some other government-controlled arrangement in which private-property rights would be greatly curtailed, if they survived at all. Given such fears, many investors regarded new investment projects as too risky to justify their current costs.
Regime uncertainty pertains to more than the government's laws, regulations, and administrative decisions. For one thing, as the saying goes, "personnel is policy." Two administrations may administer or enforce identical statutes and regulations quite differently. A business-hostile administration such as Franklin D. Roosevelt's or Barack Obama's will provoke more apprehension among investors than a business-friendlier administration such as Dwight D. Eisenhower's or Ronald Reagan's, even if the underlying "rules of the game" are identical on paper. Similar differences between judiciaries create uncertainties about how the courts will rule on contested laws and government actions.
I do think Higgs has part of it, yes. Have done for a long time. I don't think he's got all of it thought, in that I don't think regime uncertainty was the only thing that prolonged the recession.
But then I'm like that: I tend to think that no one economic idea or set of them explains everything. There's elements of truth in most explanations, but no single one is the unalloyed and perfect truth. Not as yet, the subject just isn't that developed as yet.
I think Higgs overplays the effect of poltical uncertainty to a degree - but a lot of it does comes back to that. US isolationist tendencies were not completely based on fear of the political instability of most of mainland Europe but they were certainly exacerbated by the perception that Europe's inability to deal with these questions was going to drag everyone into another "european war" as most americans would certainly have classified WW1 and likely saw WW2 even after Pearl Harbor.
Another main influence was the disastrous effect on the European economies of the treaty of Versailles which amounted to cutting of your nose to spite your face.
The Mississipi Valley drought (coming precisely when it did) was also an often underestimated kick in the pants for the US economy at exactly the wrong time.
All of these things contributed to the depression but there is little doubt that the shamefully unregulated explosion of unsustainable credit leading to the stock market bubble and crash, the subsequent failure of the banks and the destruction of confidence in the capitalist system at the very time that it was being challenged politically around the world was by far and away the leading cause of the depression.
Anyone in any doubt that it was naked greed which led to this should spend an hour or so reading the Great Crash 1929 by JK Galbraith.
Interesting point, DAM. I am often to be heard extolling regulations because they give the kind of certainty that developers need to know what "hoops they have to jump though" even at the same time as I condemn the kind of regulatory creep that leaves entrenched players in the market with altogether too much power (regulatory capture). I fear there is no simple answer, but being aware of both sides of the issue is valuable.
[I don't mean to say these two concepts are antithetical - only that in applying one, you can create problems affecting the other].
Agree with Tim or not, his articles do get people thinking - and provide some nice commentary as well.
For some strange reason, the seasonal intake of excess booze has led our household to discuss growth and consumerism (we know how to party). We came to two conclusions:
1) There hasn't been anything new on the market for a while that has made us go "ooh, must have the precious". Sure, plenty of incrementally improved stuff, but nothing worth coveting.
2) We've got enough stuff and don't see why we should go into debt to fuel a consumer led boom that may put some growth back into the economy. Sorry, I know we're being selfish, but whatever.
If more people start thinking the same way, we start to break our present model of consumer led capitalism which is dependent on constant growth - at least in the West.
Netflix has spent over a million dollars on lobbying in Washington, DC, some of which went to pushing through legislation that will allow its users to share their video watching habits on Facebook.
Is that really "allow users to share", or "allow us to share until users explicitly tell us to stop"? This whole argument just got dramatically less persuasive when it started painting giants like Netflix and Facebook as industries being stifled by regulation. Say, you don't suppose journalists can be "captured" too?
It's pretty obvious from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act that it's "allow us to share" as they've already gotten sued for broadcasting people's viewing habits.
Due to the law "Netflix changed its privacy rules so that it no longer retains records for people who have left the site" which IMHO is as it should be.
Granted this is wikipedia and YMMV, grain of salt, etc etc, but it does agree with my general memory of the situation.
Could the increased cost of energy extraction and waste disposal be consuming our growth?
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/story/2011-12-13/electric-bills/51840042/1
Without a significant decrease in energy costs any growth will be consumed by increased extraction costs. We've mined all the cheap and easy stuff and are digging deeper and farther out then ever. Solar, Wind, and other renewables are more expensive then their non-renewable counterparts and economies based on them will see a larger piece of their economic output used to support them. On the other side of the same coin we're globally *trying* to limit pollution, where once pollution costs were externalized (by dumping it where ever), now it's a cost of doing business.
I'm not sure that's the only reason. Inventing the washing machine must have been great for growth because it frees up lots of time to be productive with. But Twitter, Facebook, and on-line news sites with comments (erm...) suck up huge amounts of time that that might well have been used more productively if they didn't exist. So even though they are innovations they actually reduce economic activity.
And it's not like you didn't have major players (*cough* IBM *cough* Ma Bell/AT&T *cough*) sitting on innovation in the tech markets.
However, I have to agree that innovation often poses a threat to established bureaucratic and commercial interests, and those interests game the regulatory environment to hold on to their market position.
(no where's that damn money icon I keep asking for?)
The Marshall Plan helped Europeans a great deal more than it did the United States. Granted, had you folks taken full advantage of the Marshall Plan, you would have been light years ahead of us, but then you did not so we are now where we are. The United States is once again falling further and further behind while our socialist neighbors move on ahead. Why? For pretty much the same reasons Mister Worstall pointed out in this article.
If laws regarding regulation were easy to change or alter to reflect the every whim of the market then there would be little point in having them at all, at which point we simply abolish them all and go back to letting companies and business do what they want how they want. I am sure many would love this approach.
Government and regulation is too big, expensive and crap until it is something that you feel passionately about then all of a sudden you want more involvement of said beast.
"Government and regulation is too big, expensive and crap until it is something that you feel passionately about then all of a sudden you want more involvement of said beast."
So, basically, government for the sake of government. Self serving and self perpetuating bureaucracy - the worst kind (the only kind?).
I say No - something is either needed, or not. Feel free to apply your passions to something else - the privilege of paying more of my money in taxes to support a bigger government than is absolutely necessary does not instigate any passions in me (at least not the positive kind).
"A brief divergence into economics: we're not talking about macroeconomics here. That's the interest rates, unemployment, exchange rates stuff, all the things we see economists getting wildly wrong on the news. Rather, when we're talking about decades we have to be talking about microeconomics:"
No - that is a divergence into complete and utter economic ignorace.
Macroeconomics is short term, and micro is long term? Where on earth did you get that from?
Micro is small scale (a single industry, or company for example) macro is the entire economy. Micro analysis is inherently *short term* (5 years or less), macro is always considered in the context of comparatively long term trends (years and decades). Also, interest rates and exchange rate "stuff" also form a key part of microeconomic analysis.
As to your central argument, inventing things is not the primary driver of an economy. Not even close - China has grown at an enormous rate in recent years, and it has nothing to do with their inventions.
As an economist I'd strongly advise you to stick to tech - I actually thought this was a Spinal Tap-style spoof article!
Western Market Capitalism is perfect, it's your perception of economic stagnation and a tech sector litigating itself to death that's faulty.
My god yer right! WMC is perfect...what with governments bailing out major corporations that love to trumpet how bad government is for business. I also love how the corps bleat about the "free market model", which when it goes tits up then demand that the government bail them out...which is the exact opposite of the model they profess to support. Of course its all bollocks because the corps will cry that they are too big to fail...well...perhaps if you followed a different model, had proper compliancy controls in place, auditors who would be legally obligated to report corp malfeasance to regulators for example, corporate officers held responsible for illegal acts (prison time for you Mr Money Launderer/LIBOR fixer et al), MBA's who are taught to run a business....not monetize everything within an inch of its life. I happen to believe that capitalism is a great model only when it is going hand in hand with a good and decent policy of social responsibility. Otherwise its a monster that will eat all in its path....led by a handful of sociopathic bastards.
/rant
The litigation/patent troll thing is frankly totally out of hand and does no one any favours besides short sighted lawyer types and VP's who can't see more than a half move ahead.
Pint for us all surviving the "Mayan Apocalypse".
From TFA :- "Ten Ikea stores are planned [in India] .... as part of a bigger push to enter emerging markets. However, last month officials told Ikea it was only allowed to sell furniture products, and that selling food and drink would infringe on regulations."
Is that supposed to be an example of suppressing innovation? WTF has Ikea selling food got to do with innovation?
> WTF has Ikea selling food got to do with innovation?
I read somewhere that since the sub-prime product collapsed, the marketeers are heavily moving into commodities and food production, even buying land in the former Soviet republics. So, the only kind of innovation the consumers are likely to see is vastly increased food prices.
Wrote :- "Because low cost food will draw a crowd. While members of the crowd are eating, guess what else they are doing? They are looking at the furniture Ikea sells."
More likely it gets the shoppers to stay longer and not wander out when they get hungry. And you can't see any furniture from where you sit to eat, in the Bristol Ikea at least. But yes, I did get that idea, I'm not that slow - really. However the idea is commonplace and age-old - ever been to a leisure centre/funfare/bowling alley/Harrods/M&S/Casino ...........?
So, as I said - WTF has it got to do with innovation?
"But the truth is, we have run out of cheap energy"
Rubbish - energy is expensive because of all the green power being shoved down our throats.
Heard of shale gas? Its so abundant in the US the gas price has crashed because of the oversupply. In Australia there are hundreds of years of gas supplies using normal extraction methods, not to mention the absolute mountain of coal reserves - what was that about no cheap energy again????
Seriously, this club of Rome nonsense was debunked decades ago...
Yes, I am sure that most of us understand the arithmetic involved--but it is a case of lies, damned lies and statistics, isn't it? We are near or just past the peak oil according to that Malthusian's charts, are we not? But, look! We have discovered how to fracture shale to produce untold trillions of tonnes olf methane. Hallelujah! Once we get close to running out of that resource, guess what? We will almost certainly find a substitute. Meanwhile, our numbers are on the decrease. Virtually all of the population growht in the United States is from immigration. Italy is having a population crisis. They are not replacing their numbers, neither is Japan. This is true of almost every industrialized nation on Earth. By the time we start aiming for power satellites in high orbit, we will have a stable population world wide. That is if the Environmentalists don't push us off the edge with their water-headed policies. I would not bet against them succeeding.
The examples of this are endless. I once talked to a VC who pencilled in the combined inertia of competition, consumer education and regulation as requiring non-green field investments to show a 1-2 order of magnitude of improvement (combined out of better, faster , cheaper) in the lab. By the time the various hurdles had been inefficiently overcome it would still need to be at least twice as good to beat the incumbent advantages. I'd also factor in a decade or two as well.
There is another subtly I've noticed over the years that is even harder to pin down - the approach and attitude of regulators who are often interpreting the law to guide their actions. This can be good - the UK removed the prohibition on 'commercial' use of free spectrum like 2.4Ghz rather quickly because of basically a good ability to talk to non-obvious stakeholders. It can also be bad when new environments mean people don't expand beyond their existing network despite changing times. The early days of TV without Frontiers that became the AVMS directive comes to mind.
Oh, and Tim should have asked "Will the Americans be allowed to frak?" That issue is still very much in doubt. I am certian that the Canadians, the Aussies and everyone else that is able and has the appropriate geological formations under their lands will frak, but probably not us--not so long as President Obama is in office.
Bear in mind that I am not among those that fears global warming. I am more inclined to believe that Presidnt Obama dislikes the United States and the United Kingdom for being "colonial" powers. I have read that his mother inculcated this fact in him when he was learning to read. As he sees it, we have a great deal to answer for and must be made to answer for it, never mind that the people responsible for that misbehavior are long dead or powerless. Otherwise, why wouuld he go to a country like Brazil and encoruage them to drill for oil offshore during the ongoing crisis in the Gulf of Mexico? Whjy did he bow to the king of Saudi Arabia? Yes, I did vote for him. That should tell you what I thought of Mitt Romney.
@IT Hack,
You would have to ask President Obama that question to get the real truth. I know why George W. Bush did what he did--it was all about the Benjamins for him. The US dollar, in a roundabout way, has been backed by Saudi OIl since Tricky Dick took us off the gold standard. Despite the Bushbaby's fawning, that has stopped rather abruptly. The Chinese are using their numbers to supplant us in that part of the world. We have put our currency printers on overtime while the Chinese have been buying gold. Shameful, ain't it?
There does seem to be a serious lack of understanding within the general public (of course I'm not counting us commentards amongst the the hoi polloi) on some of the basic concepts of economics, with growth a particular issue.
I would take issues with a couple of things in the article though. One of the paras seems the paras seems to suggest that a lack of regulation is allowing developing economies to better make use of new inventions which has caused their fantastic rates of growth when in most cases it is the cost of established tech, like mobile phones, reducing significantly due to the maturity in developed economies - that and remarkably better education in places like Brazil and China over the last 20 or so years. Its pretty easy to get the rates of growth they have been having when you turn tens of millions of uneducated subsistence farmers in to skilled and semi skilled workers.
Also, as others have said, I'm not sure that I recognise your description of micro vs macro . it seems to be a bit confused compared to my economics modules at uni. I see what you're saying about individual structures typically classed as micro economics causing long term structural harm, but micro isn't just those things, as well as macro not just being medium and short term.
Oh, and quoting Keynes? Don't they expel you from the Adam Smith institute for that?
The whole idea of working or owning is all about a more prosperous future than if one did no work or owning. The whole idea of politics is to protect vested interests, starting with generally approved ones such as defending the nation and establishing a justice system, and moving down from there, all the way to Taxicab Regulations. This is fundamentally the same conflict as the Greeks saw in Democracy 2500 years ago: chances are that if people can vote themselves benefits obtained by force from others at no cost to themselves, they will.
They ought not to be allowed to do that. Constitutional government attempts to resolve this problem, and has done rather well at it, in certain places and for fairly long times in some of them.
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