In this essay, I will argue that the interaction of concentrated corporate power and politics it a threat to the functioning of the free market economy and to economic prosperity it can generate, and a threat to democracy as well. Towards a Political Theory of the Firm (PDF). Glad to see the Chicago School of Economics trying to resuscitate their image after the previous damage they’ve done.

Bill Gates In terms of revenue collection, you wouldn’t want to just focus on the ordinary income rate, because people who are wealthy have a rounding error of ordinary income. I would love to see the U.S. do away with categories of income (income, earned interest, capital gains, etc) and make it all just one bucket and tax that at a progressive rate.

I’ve said the Harvard MBA is the most second most damaging thing to happen to business in the last 40 years. I might have to clarify that to “the myth of the Harvard MBA is the second most damaging thing to happen to business in the last 40 years”. We found no statistically significant alphas — despite testing every possible school with a reasonable sample size. MBA programs simply do not produce CEOs who are better at running companies, if performance is measured by stock price return.

Look at poor Ken, so freaked out that everyone is talking about taxes. Obviously a firm believer in trickle-down economics, his entire screed boils down to: Don’t tax me, bro! I’m not done trickling on you! Ironically he refers to Bill Gates, who appears not to agree with Ken at all. To get the full context it’s useful to watch the video from the beginning where Historian Rutger Bregman schools Michael Dell on his ignorant comment about a top marginal tax rate of 70%:

The last time we had a 70% top marginal tax rate in the U.S. it generated very little revenue. That doesn’t mean it failed, that means it was doing it’s job, as explained in The opportunity cost of firm payouts.

The fundamental problem with Silicon Valley’s favorite growth strategy is great article by Tim O’Reilly on the fundamental harm Silicon Valley’s single-minded pursuit of unicorns does to the whole economy.

Facebook must be restructured. The FTC should take these nine steps now This was published back in March of 2018, but it’s still a good list of things that should be done.

Don’t you just love it when oligopolies collude? {:title=“Alaska Airlines giving preferential treatment to Facebook and Apple."} Imagine you were a small startup with a new idea for a chat application. How could you ever compete with this? Is there any wonder there’s a startup slump?

The Monopolization of America: On Monday, the Open Markets Institute — an anti-monopoly think tank — is releasing the first part of a data set showing the market share that the largest companies have in each industry. Nothing surprising there, unless you didn’t realize you lived in a corporatocracy/oligarchy and not a functioning democracy.

This Yale Law Journal Note from Lina M. Khan on Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox is an amazing read on several levels. First, the case it makes against Amazon is impressive, shining a light on quite a few unsavory things Amazon has done over the years. Second, she then expands that case to the rest of the tech giants. Third, for a Note in the Yale Law Journal, the entire thing is very readable.

When I first started working I told everyone I could that I thought that the single most damaging entity to the American economy was the Harvard Business School. Little did I know that the University of Chicago Economics Department was like, “Hold my beer.”

This SingularityHub post brings a good perspective on the economics of asteroid mining: Want Faster Data and a Cleaner Planet? Start Mining Asteroids Besides, the idea of our gateway to becoming a space faring civilization being bootstrapped from a space gas station is so much more Expanse level scifi that I can’t help but like it.

The rural areas of North Carolina are emptying out. .tooltip { position: absolute; width: 200px; height: 28px; pointer-events: none; } text { font-size: 15px; } North Carolina County Population vs Count Population Growth Rate (2010 - 2014).Click on the graph to toggle between population density and county population. North Carolina is not immune to Rural Flight, nor is it a special victim, as the phenomenon is happening world wide.

The article Will Tech-Driven Deflation Export Japan’s Economic Woes to the World?reminded me of this video, "Evolution of the Desk": The origin for the above video is http://bestreviews.com/electronics#evolution-of-the-desk. Each time an object gets digitized that's one less object to manufacture, one less object to ship, one less object consuming raw materials. It's actually more surprising that this hasn't had an even larger impact on the U.

As we head into the fourth week of Pat McCrory's failure to conceeed in the NC gubernatorial race, it's important to look at McCrory's infantile behavior in a larger context. While it would be tempting to try to psychoanalyze his continued intransigence as yet another man-child temper tantrum, there are larger forces at work, of which McCrory is just one sad symptom. The root of the problem stems from the ever widening wealth gap and subsequent elite overproduction.

You might think that as the U.S. moves from an industrial and manufacturing based economy to a knowledge based economy that we surely have weathered similar tranistions. For example, as we moved from an agricultural economy to a manufacturing based one. While we did indeed weather the same changes, the vital difference is the timescale over which those changes took place. As you can see from this data on agricultural employment, we did experience a loss of 6 million agricultural jobs over a 50 year period from 1910 to 1960.

Negative externalities are the bane of a market economy. Those wider costs to products and services that aren’t included in the actual cost of a item can wreak major havoc on society and almost always result in years of litigation, lawmaking, and acrimony between businesses and government. So what exactly is an negative externality? Let’s start with the definition of externality from Wikipedia: In economics, an externality (or transaction spillover) is a cost or benefit, not transmitted through prices[1], incurred by a party who did not agree to the action causing the cost or benefit.