The collection and analysis of data is changing the way economies operate. Are these changes so fundamental that they can be said to have led to the emergence of a new form of capitalism – surveillance capitalism? If people’s behaviour is made increasingly transparent, do we become a society in which trust is no longer necessary? Are individuals a mere appendage to the digital machine, objects of new mechanisms which reward and punish according to the determinations of private capital? How is social cohesion affected when people become dispensable as a labour force, while their data continues to provide function as a source of value in lucrative new markets that trade in predictions of human behaviour? How should we understand the new quality of power that arises from these unprecedented conditions? What kind of society does it aim to create? And what ramifications will these developments have for the principles of liberal democracy? Will privacy law and anti-trust law be enough? How can we tame what we do not yet understand?
Spendere, ma per fare il bene pubblico. Creando valore, e non sottraendolo alla collettività. Guardando al lungo periodo, e non all’immediato: perché gli strumenti per ripensare l’economia sono gli stessi capaci di produrre inclusività, giustizia sociale, attenzione alla diversità. In altre parole, una società migliore.
By Steven Gorelick, managing programs director at Local Futures (International Society for Ecology and Culture). He is the author of Small Is Beautiful, Big Is Subsidized (pdf), co-author of Bringing the Food Economy Home, and co-director of the Economics of Happiness. His writings have been published in The Ecologist and Resurgence magazines.Originally published at the Economics of Happiness Blog
For all of its reach, Amazon, the company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1995 as an online bookstore, is still remarkably invisible. It makes it easy not to notice how powerful and wide-ranging it has become. But behind the packages on the doorstep and the inviting interface, Amazon has quietly positioned itself at the center of a growing share of our daily activities and transactions, extending its tentacles across our economy, and with it, our lives.
Can platform co-operativism generate better policy solutions? Co-ops have not played a transformational role in past decades. However, a new trend is emerging: often grassroots initiatives of young non-profit activists inventing new platform co-ops.
In that spirit, here are seven qualities that I consider essential to the identity of open source, contrasted with the diluted forms they commonly assume.
El pánico financiero y la austeridad que impone Alemania le reportan grandes beneficios y favorecen la apuesta de los grandes especuladores contra las deudas soberanas de los países del sur de Europa
Los de arriba pretenden que nos creamos que es normal que el 1% de la población posea el 43% de la riqueza mundial. Que asumamos que otro mundo no es posible. (por Olga Rodríguez)
The creators of Debtocracy, a documentary with two million views broadcasted from Japan to Latin America, analyze the shifting of state assets to private han...
Large banks’ trading advice to its well-heeled hedge-fund customers is a closely guarded secret on Wall Street. But a Goldman Sachs report sheds a rare light on this secretive world.
Contrary, to orthodox “win-win” theory, globalization is a highly asymmetrical phenomenon. Initially, it creates far more producers than consumers. It also results in extraordinary imbalances between nations with current account deficits and surpluses. And it has led to a widening disparity of the returns between labor and capital. Does this mean that globalization is inherently unsustainable? Probably not. But it does mean that the most destabilizing phase of this mega-trend could well be close at hand.
J. Cassidy. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, (2009)Book review in The Economist: JOHN CASSIDY'S new book is a sequel of sorts. In his previous work, “Dot.Con”, which came out in 2002, he chronicled the follies of the stockmarket bubble of the late 1990s. In “How Markets Fail”, Mr Cassidy, a British writer for the New Yorker, recounts the story of America's housing boom and its devastating bust. It is more than just an account of the failures of regulators and the self-deception of bankers and homebuyers, although these are well covered. For Mr Cassidy, the deeper roots of the crisis lie in the enduring appeal of an idea: that society is always best served when individuals are left to pursue their self-interest in free markets. He calls this “Utopian economics”. This approach turns much of the book into a very good history of economic thought. Mr Cassidy starts in 1776 with Adam Smith and his butchers, brewers and bakers, who supplied their wares as if guided by an unseen hand. Smith's analysis was made richer in the 1940s by Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian who saw market prices as signals of which goods were scarce and which were abundant. Hayek's idea of the free market as a machine for processing and transmitting information “was one of the great insights of the 20th century,” writes Mr Cassidy. The book gives a detailed account of how the formal “proof” of the efficiency of free markets evolved. The breakthrough was made in the early 1950s by Kenneth Arrow, an American economist, and Gérard Debreu, a French mathematician who died in 2004. Mr Cassidy admires the maths, but points out that their findings rely on some unrealistic assumptions, something the two theorists were quite open about. Arrow and Debreu's “general equilibrium theory” seemed to give the stamp of scientific approval to unfettered markets. And it may have made it harder to challenge the purist free-market views of Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman until 2006 whom Mr Cassidy partly blames for the dotcom and housing bubbles. Having set out the tenets of Utopian economics, the author then pokes holes in them. Individual self interest does not always benefit society, he argues, and draws on a deep pool of research (what he calls “reality-based economics”) to support his case. Markets fail if prices send the wrong signals. For instance, an increase in house prices ought to discourage new homebuyers. In practice, however, higher prices are a spur to buyers who hope to benefit from further rises. For would-be homeowners, the signal is that it is time to buy; for banks, that it is time to lend. Those who suspect a bubble face the same dilemma as textbook prisoners: it makes sense to act sensibly only if others do so too. Since that cannot be relied upon, it is safer to go with the herd. The result of such individually rational behaviour is a housing and credit boom, followed inevitably by a nasty bust. Markets also founder when there is hidden information—if sellers know more than buyers, for example—and when the prices paid by individuals do not fully reflect social costs, such as pollution. Such failures were evident in the build-up to the current crisis: dud mortgages were packaged as supposedly safe bonds to investors; banks did not factor in the wider costs of bad debt when making risky loans. Policymakers should have intervened to curb the excesses but were hamstrung by free-market ideology. “How Markets Fail” is an ambitious book, and one that mostly succeeds. Despite its title, it makes rather a good case for market economics; what it rails against is “free market idolatry”. Its call for a better balance between individual autonomy and state oversight might have seemed off-centre just a few years ago. Now its prescription is firmly in the mainstream..