Evonomics

It's weird how few people seem to be aware of this but the whole field of economics seems to be undergoing some pretty big transformations. One of the best sources for keeping up with this shift has been Evonomics: https://evonomics.com/

It's not really the same thing as the Economist in terms of news coverage, but: https://evonomics.com/ Bills itself as the next evolution of Economics and "Changes in economic thinking can change the world, for the better. That’s the core belief that inspires Evonomics" Here's a story by Tim O'Reilly about Elon Musk: Why Elon Musk Isn’t Superman : The Betting Economy vs. The Operating Economy https://evonomics.com/why-elon-musk-isnt-superman/

> FB’s board has a legal obligation (fiduciary responsibility) to make money for shareholders. Capitalism may suck, but it’s the law. This is often repeated but is (generally) incorrect. There's a lot of writing out there about how this is bs, e.g. [0]. People certainly think and act like this is the case, so the end result is often the same, but this is not good-natured corporate governors being helpless before the law, it's profit-motivated people being ruthless. [0] https://evonomics.com/maximizing-shareholder-value-dumbest-idea/

Nordhaus's Nobel is a fraud. Steve Keen's done some excellent debinking. Starting point: https://evonomics.com/steve-keen-nordhaus-climate-change-economics/ TL;DR: Asssumming one can translate different lattitudes' GDPs to that of a planet undergone global climate disruption is ... an exceedingly dubious proposition.

Marx based a lot of his theories on classical economics. Ibn Khaldun was arguably the founder of modern economic theory. One of his observations of late stage societies is that they are riddled with large government expenditure and high taxation stifling the economic activity of society. https://qz.com/1008371/an-arab-thinker-invented-economic-theory-400-ye… https://evonomics.com/amazing-north-african-scholar-beat-adam-smith-ha… Ronald Reagan quoting Ibn Khaldun on his views on tax rates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KETIOgYu5uc

> Not everyone can contribute directly to the production of our most basic needs; those who don't must convince the productive members that they have a good worth spending money on. I think it's actually much worth because it's the other way around. Productive members usually have to convince unproductive to spend money. http://evonomics.com/why-garbage-men-should-earn-more-than-bankers/

One thought is that we can value a wide range of social and environmental qualities using quantitative monetary models. It's imperfect, but our system doesn't even go as far as explicitly attempting to do that on a systematic basis. There are a lot of people doing work in this area under all sorts of different terms, but trying to tie in those missing qualities. Terms that might yield interesting reading are: loop economy, circular economy, doughnut economics, sustainable economics (though that seems to be slowly fading as a term..) https://evonomics.com/ is not a bad place to read to at least start getting some introductions to some of the people trying to push a rebuilding of our basic economic suppositions.

I have a hard time finding news sources I can stand; basically all the major outlets just turn me off with their bias and verbose irrelevant analysis. Over the part year I've collected a few lesser known options you may find valuable too: https://theintercept.com - mostly anti-propaganda efforts https://phys.org - an aggregator often linking to primary sources https://www.currentaffairs.org - political opinions that generally seem thought out http://www.realclear(politics|world|*).com - a network of aggregators with a good balance http://evonomics.com - economic perspectives I also don't mind reading. I would really love to find more options - especially something in a debate format so I can judge arguments from multiple sides on an issue.

> they have a fiduciary duty towards shareholders to reduce the cost (and if needed the quality) to the point of maximising profit. This is the Friedman doctrine: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine It has been popular since the 1970s, but there is plenty of legal precedence that says otherwise: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeholder_theory Including recent SCOTUS rulings: > While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come readily to mind. So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits. If for-profit corporations may pursue such worthy objectives, there is no apparent reason why they may not further religious objectives as well. * https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court/13-354.html * https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/573/13-354/case.pdf *…

David Graeber (from Bullshit Jobs fame) talked about this at some length [1]: "Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true." "But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones." "These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”" and goes on to come to the following conclusion: "Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a…

I think each one of us has a different idea what a "bullshit job" is. My favorite definition is this: > When it comes to garbage collectors, though, it’s different. Any way you look at it, they do a job we can’t do without. And the harsh truth is that an increasing number of people do jobs that we can do just fine without. Were they to suddenly stop working the world wouldn’t get any poorer, uglier, or in any way worse. Take the slick Wall Street traders who line their pockets at the expense of another retirement fund. Take the shrewd lawyers who can draw a corporate lawsuit out until the end of days. Or take the brilliant ad writer who pens the slogan of the year and puts the competition right out of business. > Instead of creating wealth, these jobs mostly just shift it around. (the article itself[0] tells about how banks in Ireland went on strike for 6 months, but the strike was shrugged off as there was no impact) [0]: https://evonomics.com/why-garbage-men-should-earn-more-than-bankers/

Agreed. re: power. But perhaps I'm seeing that power relationship differently. I'm feeling very strong parallels with economist Eleanor Ostrom's view on governing natural commonses [1]. Basically, she spent 4 decades disproving the "tragedy of the commons" in a whole set of defined cases, showing that a group of people DON'T selfishly destroy a commons when looking after it. She codified the requirements for a group of people properly governing a shared place/resource. Two of the 8 key requirements were 1) Local autonomy; 2) Appropriate relations with other tiers of rule-making authority (polycentric governance). aka, powers must not be pulled too far from the place in which they are executed. to the extent that we need to seek efficiencies, system should offer through support from above to operate more efficiently (e.g., offer services and "kits" to self-manage). DO NOT CENTRALIZE OR CONSOLIDATE POWER. Of course, the above recommendations can be discarded, but then collective governance fails, and keeping commonses alive and vibrant requires more and more central support systems to prevent its failure. Her rules are who you'd follow if you wanted decentralized and resilient governance structures and patterns. [1]: https://evonomics.com/tragedy-of-the-commons-elinor-ostrom/

> War Before Civilization: the Myth of the Peaceful Savage (Oxford University Press, 1996) is a book by Lawrence H. Keeley, a professor of archaeology at the University of Illinois at Chicago who specializes in prehistoric Europe. The book deals with warfare conducted throughout human history by societies with little technology. In the book, Keeley aims to stop the apparent trend in seeing civilization as bad, by setting out to prove that prehistoric societies were violent and frequently engaged in warfare. ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization > How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth > The puzzling question is then how a world dominated by ultra social human cooperation can also frequently succumb to large scale war and conflict? > Turchin’s answer, and one of the big ideas in the book, is that war between social groups is the mechanism by which cooperative behaviour develops “within groups”. It is a fundamental evolutionary process happening between societies at a large scale. He elevates war as a selection mechanism for cooperation, and values it above many of the technological factors like domestication of plants and the advent of agriculture. http://evonomics.com/how-10000-years-of-war-made-humans-the-greatest-c…

The share of U.S. economic output that's paid out in wages in at the lowest point since the government started keeping track of it. In 1964 AT&T was worth $267 billion in today's dollars and employed 758,611 people. Google is worth $370 billion but has only about 55,000 employees -- less than a tenth the size of AT&T's workforce in its heyday. We're going to get self-driving cars in our lifetimes and the number one job in most states is "truck driver". My job as a software developer is to eliminate jobs (or simply prevent new ones from being required). I'm personally responsible for the loss of more jobs that I have. > As veterans came home from WW II and 'mustered out' we provided the GI bill to train them in skills other than soldering. This provided an economy that transitioned a standard army to one tenth its previous size. Of course, they transitioned into a world where all the other major countries had their manufacturing industries destroyed by war. Again, extrapolating from the past has it's issues; you cannot simply say "training" was the only, or even the most significant, factor. If you had a functional body, you could get a good job. > using tax payer money to provide the education and training to anyone who needs it to take a job that could use them. I think right now we have an absolute glut of educated people; no time in history have you needed to be as educated as you are right now to get an entry level position. People are literally taking jobs…

Now on the HN front page: Great Problems: An Epidemic of Rent-Seeking https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153047 > obtain enough passive income to be independently wealthy "Passive income" does not make you "independently wealthy". You avoid "being forced to sell [your] time" because you extract wealth from those who do. Rent seeking does not, by definition, involve "creating value": In economics and in public-choice theory, rent-seeking involves seeking to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking results in reduced economic efficiency through poor allocation of resources, reduced actual wealth creation, lost government revenue, increased income inequality, and (potentially) national decline. - Wikipedia From Taking Back Adam Smith and “Classic Liberalism”: Many conservative economists claim to be staunch followers of Adam Smith. They shout slogans such as “Supply and Demand!” “Capitalism”! “ “Let the markets work!” However, for anyone who actually read Adam Smith, you would note that the “invisible hand” was not his only observation of the inner workings of capitalism. Adam Smith recognized that many in the economy were making gobs of money, but weren’t contributing anything. He was referring to what was eventually called “economic rent”. Smith observed that all production required 3 things. Land, Capital, and Labor. A very simple example would be a brick factory. The building and oven needed to create the bricks…

This is a good time to share this article again: Isn’t it Time to Stop Calling it “The National Debt”? - https://evonomics.com/isnt-time-stop-calling-national-debt/

I am not sure, but probably related: https://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-david-grae…

Well-known, as in everyone has heard of it, but: it isn’t the fact so many assume. Cf, e.g., https://evonomics.com/the-only-woman-to-win-the-nobel-prize-economics-…

Racist twaddle - * The Tragedy Of The Tragedy Of The Commons - https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-tragedy-of-the-tragedy… * The Truth About The Tragedy Of The Commons - https://evonomics.com/the-only-woman-to-win-the-nobel-prize-economics-… * The Tragedy Of The Commons Is A Dangerous Myth - https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false-and-dange… The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common, But turns the bigger robber loose Who steals the common from off the goose.

Yes, I know about Milton Friedman's quote that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. He was oh so very wrong about most things: https://evonomics.com/the-truth-about-inflation-why-milton-friedman-wa…

Relevant article about Sears: https://evonomics.com/the-ceo-of-sears-jon-haidt/ There is a popular narrative being reproduced that Walmart is a bigger planned economy than the Soviet Union ever was, and that they tried an internal market and that it was a disaster. Meanwhile the narrative says Sears was run into the ground by over-zealous capitalist idealism and blind fate in the free market. Don't shoot the messenger!!

Thanks for all the nice resources and good question. I think a good place to look is also at Elinor Ostrom 8 design principles to deal with the tragedy of the common and David Sloan Wilson's multilevel selection theory [1]. They call is polycentric governance but it has a lot of related ideas. [1]: https://evonomics.com/tragedy-of-the-commons-elinor-ostrom [1]: https://evonomics.com/tragedy-of-the-commons-elinor-ostrom/?utm_source…

The Hertz story reminded me of another article explaining corporate predatory behaviour from 2018. https://evonomics.com/hedge-fund-activists-prey-companies/

> But to me that doesn't make much sense. What if I am a billionaire and the other person is very poor? It could very well be that the other person values the coffee a lot more than I do, but because I have so much more disposable income than they do I am willing to pay more for it. To me, the assumption should be something like the amount of money as a percentage of my total wealth that I'm willing to pay is equal to the utility of the good. You're right, it doesn't make sense and it's even worse than you think, because even a given individual doesn't give the same value to something depending on whether they have it (and are asked a price to sell), or not (price to buy).[1] [1]: https://evonomics.com/resolve-fights-reclining-airplane-seats-use-beha…

Hubris and an unshakable belief in Ayn Rand... http://evonomics.com/the-ceo-of-sears-jon-haidt/

I appreciate your response but respectfully disagree. Companies like Amazon are notorious for hiding their profits for these reasons. http://evonomics.com/amazon-accounting-corporate-profits-rich-peoples-…

So employees are engaging in "rent-seeking behavior" against their companies, extracting value without contributing. The chickens have come home to roost. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2015/12/03/labor-unions-decline-since… http://evonomics.com/corporate-mergers-strangle-economy-jordan-brennan…

It is a little counter intuitive, but it's real. Check this article out: http://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-david-graeb…

That would require real effort instead of storytelling during work hours. Whoch is harsh, but that’s the point. You are going to get far more insight from real customers than you are from one relatively homogenous sub-department’s imaginary beliefs about who your customers might be. IMO the latter is pretty much the definition of one of David Graeber’s bullshit jobs. http://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-david-graeb…

Relevant?: http://evonomics.com/amazon-accounting-corporate-profits-rich-peoples-…