Podcasts about Kuznets

Economics sometimes feels like a physics–so sturdy, so objective, and so immutable. Yet, behind every clean number or eye-popping graph, there is usually a rather messy story, a story shaped by values, interests, ideologies, and petty bureaucratic politics. In Cited Podcast's new mini-series, the Use and Abuse of Economic Expertise, we tell the hidden stories of the economic ideas that shape our world. For future episodes of our series, and a full list of credits, visit our series page. On episode one, we begin at the beginning: the invention of the modern economy, or at least the idea of the economy. It starts with one measure: the GDP, or gross domestic product. It's a measure that comes to define what we mean by ‘the economy.' Before GDP, we did not really speak in those terms. Cited producer Alec Opperman talks to sociologist Dan Hirshman, who brings the story of the man who pioneered the GDP, Simon Kuznets. Yet, the GDP was not the measure the Kuznets hoped it would be. It's a story that reveals the surprisingly contentious politics of counting things up. Plus, what about alternatives to GDP? The Genuine Progress Indicator, the Human Development Index, the Green GDP, and so on. These measures are said to be more progressive, as they often capture things we value (like, care work for instance), and subtracting out things we could use less off (like, environmental degradation). Scholars and policy wonks have been raging about these types of measures for decades, but they have not taken off. Why? Economic historian Dirk Philipsen, author of The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World and What to Do About It (Princeton UP, 2017), talks to Alec about why a good number alone is never enough to change the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Economics sometimes feels like a physics–so sturdy, so objective, and so immutable. Yet, behind every clean number or eye-popping graph, there is usually a rather messy story, a story shaped by values, interests, ideologies, and petty bureaucratic politics. In Cited Podcast's new mini-series, the Use and Abuse of Economic Expertise, we tell the hidden stories of the economic ideas that shape our world. For future episodes of our series, and a full list of credits, visit our series page. On episode one, we begin at the beginning: the invention of the modern economy, or at least the idea of the economy. It starts with one measure: the GDP, or gross domestic product. It's a measure that comes to define what we mean by ‘the economy.' Before GDP, we did not really speak in those terms. Cited producer Alec Opperman talks to sociologist Dan Hirshman, who brings the story of the man who pioneered the GDP, Simon Kuznets. Yet, the GDP was not the measure the Kuznets hoped it would be. It's a story that reveals the surprisingly contentious politics of counting things up. Plus, what about alternatives to GDP? The Genuine Progress Indicator, the Human Development Index, the Green GDP, and so on. These measures are said to be more progressive, as they often capture things we value (like, care work for instance), and subtracting out things we could use less off (like, environmental degradation). Scholars and policy wonks have been raging about these types of measures for decades, but they have not taken off. Why? Economic historian Dirk Philipsen, author of The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World and What to Do About It (Princeton UP, 2017), talks to Alec about why a good number alone is never enough to change the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Economics sometimes feels like a physics–so sturdy, so objective, and so immutable. Yet, behind every clean number or eye-popping graph, there is usually a rather messy story, a story shaped by values, interests, ideologies, and petty bureaucratic politics. In Cited Podcast's new mini-series, the Use and Abuse of Economic Expertise, we tell the hidden stories of the economic ideas that shape our world. For future episodes of our series, and a full list of credits, visit our series page. On episode one, we begin at the beginning: the invention of the modern economy, or at least the idea of the economy. It starts with one measure: the GDP, or gross domestic product. It's a measure that comes to define what we mean by ‘the economy.' Before GDP, we did not really speak in those terms. Cited producer Alec Opperman talks to sociologist Dan Hirshman, who brings the story of the man who pioneered the GDP, Simon Kuznets. Yet, the GDP was not the measure the Kuznets hoped it would be. It's a story that reveals the surprisingly contentious politics of counting things up. Plus, what about alternatives to GDP? The Genuine Progress Indicator, the Human Development Index, the Green GDP, and so on. These measures are said to be more progressive, as they often capture things we value (like, care work for instance), and subtracting out things we could use less off (like, environmental degradation). Scholars and policy wonks have been raging about these types of measures for decades, but they have not taken off. Why? Economic historian Dirk Philipsen, author of The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World and What to Do About It (Princeton UP, 2017), talks to Alec about why a good number alone is never enough to change the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Economics sometimes feels like a physics–so sturdy, so objective, and so immutable. Yet, behind every clean number or eye-popping graph, there is usually a rather messy story, a story shaped by values, interests, ideologies, and petty bureaucratic politics. In Cited Podcast's new mini-series, the Use and Abuse of Economic Expertise, we tell the hidden stories of the economic ideas that shape our world. For future episodes of our series, and a full list of credits, visit our series page. On episode one, we begin at the beginning: the invention of the modern economy, or at least the idea of the economy. It starts with one measure: the GDP, or gross domestic product. It's a measure that comes to define what we mean by ‘the economy.' Before GDP, we did not really speak in those terms. Cited producer Alec Opperman talks to sociologist Dan Hirshman, who brings the story of the man who pioneered the GDP, Simon Kuznets. Yet, the GDP was not the measure the Kuznets hoped it would be. It's a story that reveals the surprisingly contentious politics of counting things up. Plus, what about alternatives to GDP? The Genuine Progress Indicator, the Human Development Index, the Green GDP, and so on. These measures are said to be more progressive, as they often capture things we value (like, care work for instance), and subtracting out things we could use less off (like, environmental degradation). Scholars and policy wonks have been raging about these types of measures for decades, but they have not taken off. Why? Economic historian Dirk Philipsen, author of The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World and What to Do About It (Princeton UP, 2017), talks to Alec about why a good number alone is never enough to change the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Economics sometimes feels like a physics–so sturdy, so objective, and so immutable. Yet, behind every clean number or eye-popping graph, there is usually a rather messy story, a story shaped by values, interests, ideologies, and petty bureaucratic politics. In Cited Podcast's new mini-series, the Use and Abuse of Economic Expertise, we tell the hidden stories of the economic ideas that shape our world. For future episodes of our series, and a full list of credits, visit our series page. On episode one, we begin at the beginning: the invention of the modern economy, or at least the idea of the economy. It starts with one measure: the GDP, or gross domestic product. It's a measure that comes to define what we mean by ‘the economy.' Before GDP, we did not really speak in those terms. Cited producer Alec Opperman talks to sociologist Dan Hirshman, who brings the story of the man who pioneered the GDP, Simon Kuznets. Yet, the GDP was not the measure the Kuznets hoped it would be. It's a story that reveals the surprisingly contentious politics of counting things up. Plus, what about alternatives to GDP? The Genuine Progress Indicator, the Human Development Index, the Green GDP, and so on. These measures are said to be more progressive, as they often capture things we value (like, care work for instance), and subtracting out things we could use less off (like, environmental degradation). Scholars and policy wonks have been raging about these types of measures for decades, but they have not taken off. Why? Economic historian Dirk Philipsen, author of The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World and What to Do About It (Princeton UP, 2017), talks to Alec about why a good number alone is never enough to change the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Economics sometimes feels like a physics–so sturdy, so objective, and so immutable. Yet, behind every clean number or eye-popping graph, there is usually a rather messy story, a story shaped by values, interests, ideologies, and petty bureaucratic politics. In Cited Podcast's new mini-series, the Use and Abuse of Economic Expertise, we tell the hidden stories of the economic ideas that shape our world. For future episodes of our series, and a full list of credits, visit our series page. On episode one, we begin at the beginning: the invention of the modern economy, or at least the idea of the economy. It starts with one measure: the GDP, or gross domestic product. It's a measure that comes to define what we mean by ‘the economy.' Before GDP, we did not really speak in those terms. Cited producer Alec Opperman talks to sociologist Dan Hirshman, who brings the story of the man who pioneered the GDP, Simon Kuznets. Yet, the GDP was not the measure the Kuznets hoped it would be. It's a story that reveals the surprisingly contentious politics of counting things up. Plus, what about alternatives to GDP? The Genuine Progress Indicator, the Human Development Index, the Green GDP, and so on. These measures are said to be more progressive, as they often capture things we value (like, care work for instance), and subtracting out things we could use less off (like, environmental degradation). Scholars and policy wonks have been raging about these types of measures for decades, but they have not taken off. Why? Economic historian Dirk Philipsen, author of The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World and What to Do About It (Princeton UP, 2017), talks to Alec about why a good number alone is never enough to change the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Economics sometimes feels like a physics–so sturdy, so objective, and so immutable. Yet, behind every clean number or eye-popping graph, there is usually a rather messy story, a story shaped by values, interests, ideologies, and petty bureaucratic politics. In Cited Podcast's new mini-series, the Use and Abuse of Economic Expertise, we tell the hidden stories of the economic ideas that shape our world. For future episodes of our series, and a full list of credits, visit our series page. On episode one, we begin at the beginning: the invention of the modern economy, or at least the idea of the economy. It starts with one measure: the GDP, or gross domestic product. It's a measure that comes to define what we mean by ‘the economy.' Before GDP, we did not really speak in those terms. Cited producer Alec Opperman talks to sociologist Dan Hirshman, who brings the story of the man who pioneered the GDP, Simon Kuznets. Yet, the GDP was not the measure the Kuznets hoped it would be. It's a story that reveals the surprisingly contentious politics of counting things up. Plus, what about alternatives to GDP? The Genuine Progress Indicator, the Human Development Index, the Green GDP, and so on. These measures are said to be more progressive, as they often capture things we value (like, care work for instance), and subtracting out things we could use less off (like, environmental degradation). Scholars and policy wonks have been raging about these types of measures for decades, but they have not taken off. Why? Economic historian Dirk Philipsen, author of The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World and What to Do About It (Princeton UP, 2017), talks to Alec about why a good number alone is never enough to change the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Economics sometimes feels like a physics–so sturdy, so objective, and so immutable. Yet, behind every clean number or eye-popping graph, there is usually a rather messy story, a story shaped by values, interests, ideologies, and petty bureaucratic politics. In Cited Podcast's new mini-series, the Use and Abuse of Economic Expertise, we tell the hidden stories of the economic ideas that shape our world. For future episodes of our series, and a full list of credits, visit our series page. On episode one, we begin at the beginning: the invention of the modern economy, or at least the idea of the economy. It starts with one measure: the GDP, or gross domestic product. It's a measure that comes to define what we mean by ‘the economy.' Before GDP, we did not really speak in those terms. Cited producer Alec Opperman talks to sociologist Dan Hirshman, who brings the story of the man who pioneered the GDP, Simon Kuznets. Yet, the GDP was not the measure the Kuznets hoped it would be. It's a story that reveals the surprisingly contentious politics of counting things up. Plus, what about alternatives to GDP? The Genuine Progress Indicator, the Human Development Index, the Green GDP, and so on. These measures are said to be more progressive, as they often capture things we value (like, care work for instance), and subtracting out things we could use less off (like, environmental degradation). Scholars and policy wonks have been raging about these types of measures for decades, but they have not taken off. Why? Economic historian Dirk Philipsen, author of The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World and What to Do About It (Princeton UP, 2017), talks to Alec about why a good number alone is never enough to change the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Economics sometimes feels like a physics–so sturdy, so objective, and so immutable. Yet, behind every clean number or eye-popping graph, there is usually a rather messy story, a story shaped by values, interests, ideologies, and petty bureaucratic politics. In Cited Podcast's new mini-series, the Use and Abuse of Economic Expertise, we tell the hidden stories of the economic ideas that shape our world. For future episodes of our series, and a full list of credits, visit our series page. On episode one, we begin at the beginning: the invention of the modern economy, or at least the idea of the economy. It starts with one measure: the GDP, or gross domestic product. It's a measure that comes to define what we mean by ‘the economy.' Before GDP, we did not really speak in those terms. Cited producer Alec Opperman talks to sociologist Dan Hirshman, who brings the story of the man who pioneered the GDP, Simon Kuznets. Yet, the GDP was not the measure the Kuznets hoped it would be. It's a story that reveals the surprisingly contentious politics of counting things up. Plus, what about alternatives to GDP? The Genuine Progress Indicator, the Human Development Index, the Green GDP, and so on. These measures are said to be more progressive, as they often capture things we value (like, care work for instance), and subtracting out things we could use less off (like, environmental degradation). Scholars and policy wonks have been raging about these types of measures for decades, but they have not taken off. Why? Economic historian Dirk Philipsen, author of The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World and What to Do About It (Princeton UP, 2017), talks to Alec about why a good number alone is never enough to change the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Economics sometimes feels like a physics–so sturdy, so objective, and so immutable. Yet, behind every clean number or eye-popping graph, there is usually a rather messy story, a story shaped by values, interests, ideologies, and petty bureaucratic politics. In Cited Podcast's new mini-series, the Use and Abuse of Economic Expertise, we tell the hidden stories of the economic ideas that shape our world. For future episodes of our series, and a full list of credits, visit our series page. On episode one, we begin at the beginning: the invention of the modern economy, or at least the idea of the economy. It starts with one measure: the GDP, or gross domestic product. It's a measure that comes to define what we mean by ‘the economy.' Before GDP, we did not really speak in those terms. Cited producer Alec Opperman talks to sociologist Dan Hirshman, who brings the story of the man who pioneered the GDP, Simon Kuznets. Yet, the GDP was not the measure the Kuznets hoped it would be. It's a story that reveals the surprisingly contentious politics of counting things up. Plus, what about alternatives to GDP? The Genuine Progress Indicator, the Human Development Index, the Green GDP, and so on. These measures are said to be more progressive, as they often capture things we value (like, care work for instance), and subtracting out things we could use less off (like, environmental degradation). Scholars and policy wonks have been raging about these types of measures for decades, but they have not taken off. Why? Economic historian Dirk Philipsen, author of The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World and What to Do About It (Princeton UP, 2017), talks to Alec about why a good number alone is never enough to change the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Economics sometimes feels like a physics–so sturdy, so objective, and so immutable. Yet, behind every clean number or eye-popping graph, there is usually a rather messy story, a story shaped by values, interests, ideologies, and petty bureaucratic politics. In Cited Podcast's new mini-series, the Use and Abuse of Economic Expertise, we tell the hidden stories of the economic ideas that shape our world. For future episodes of our series, and a full list of credits, visit our series page. On episode one, we begin at the beginning: the invention of the modern economy, or at least the idea of the economy. It starts with one measure: the GDP, or gross domestic product. It's a measure that comes to define what we mean by ‘the economy.' Before GDP, we did not really speak in those terms. Cited producer Alec Opperman talks to sociologist Dan Hirshman, who brings the story of the man who pioneered the GDP, Simon Kuznets. Yet, the GDP was not the measure the Kuznets hoped it would be. It's a story that reveals the surprisingly contentious politics of counting things up. Plus, what about alternatives to GDP? The Genuine Progress Indicator, the Human Development Index, the Green GDP, and so on. These measures are said to be more progressive, as they often capture things we value (like, care work for instance), and subtracting out things we could use less off (like, environmental degradation). Scholars and policy wonks have been raging about these types of measures for decades, but they have not taken off. Why? Economic historian Dirk Philipsen, author of The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World and What to Do About It (Princeton UP, 2017), talks to Alec about why a good number alone is never enough to change the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Serbian-American economist Branko Milanovic is one of the world's leading authorities on inequality. In this KEEN ON America conversation, we talked about Milanovic's interpretation of the history of American economic inequality - from slavery to contemporary capitalism. Why has America become so much unequal over the last fifty years, I asked. And today, in what Milanovic sees as a post neo-liberal age, how does he imagine the future of economic inequality?Branko Milanovic obtained his Ph.D. in economics (1987) from the University of Belgrade with a dissertation on income inequality in Yugoslavia. He served as lead economist in the World Bank's Research Department for almost 20 years, leaving to write his book on global income inequality, Worlds Apart (2005). He was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington (2003-2005) and has held teaching appointments at the University of Maryland (2007-2013) and at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University (1997- 2007). He was a visiting scholar at All Souls College in Oxford, and Universidad Carlos III in Madrid (2010-11). Professor Milanovic's main area of work is income inequality, in individual countries and globally, including in preindustrial societies. He has published articles in Economic Journal, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Economic Literature, Journal of Development Economics, and Journal of Political Philosophy, among others. His book The Haves and the Have-nots (2011) was selected by The Globalist as the 2011 Book of the Year. Global Inequality (2016) was awarded the Bruno Kreisky Prize for the best political book of 2016 and the Hans Matthöfer Prize in 2018, and was translated into 16 languages. It addresses economic and political effects of globalization and introduces the concept of successive “Kuznets waves” of inequality. In March 2018, Milanovic was awarded (jointly with Mariana Mazzucato) the 2018 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Knowledge. His most recent books are Capitalism, Alone, published in 2019, and Visions of Inequality, published in 2023..Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Support Bionic Planet: https://www.patreon.com/bionicplanet  Guests: Jim Pittman (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamespittman/) Matt Orsagh (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-orsagh-a1b8417/) Steve Rocco (https://www.linkedin.com/in/steverocco/) Books Referenced: Ecological Economics (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77985.Ecological_Economics?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=ZDNVmbxl5B&rank=1) The Limits to Growth (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/705418.Limits_to_Growth?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=1uh5jgBt1O&rank=1) The Web of Life (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26155239-web-of-life) Thinking in Systems (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3828902-thinking-in-systems?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=Q81KDn3a1D&rank=1) Energy and Civilization (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31850765-energy-and-civilization?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=pCNkYwiE3S&rank=1) Sustainability is for Everyone (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19107270-sustainability-is-for-everyone?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=sX3sH8kdj5&rank=1) Less is More (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53328332-less-is-more?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_12) Donut Economics (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57410899-donut-economics?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_15) Technical Revolutions in Financial Capital (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60509.Technological_Revolutions_and_Financial_Capital?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=TcwHjED9BR&rank=1) The End of Nature (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199359.The_End_of_Nature?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_17) In Season 9, Episode 110 of Bionic Planet, titled "Ecological Economics, Systems Thinking, and the Limits to Growth," we delve into a thought-provoking discussion with ecological economists Jim Pittman, Matt Orsagh, and Steve Rocco. The episode explores the fundamental concepts of ecological economics, systems thinking, and the difference between overshoot and tipping points. The conversation begins with a reflection on the limitations of using GDP as a measure of a nation's health, as highlighted by economist Simon Kuznets, the inventor of GDP. The guests emphasize the importance of rethinking economic health and well-being, shifting from a focus on GDP growth to a more holistic approach that includes human and planetary health. The discussion then delves into the historical context of the environmental movement, referencing influential books like "The End of Nature" by Bill McKibben and "The Limits to Growth" published in 1972. The guests highlight the interconnectedness of human activities, climate change, biodiversity loss, and the urgent need to address these issues before reaching irreversible tipping points. The conversation also touches on the concept of degrowth, which proposes an equitable downscaling of production and consumption to enhance human well-being and ecological conditions. The guests emphasize the importance of transitioning from individual self-interest to collective optimization, drawing parallels with the behavior of slime molds in response to scarcity. The episode concludes with a call to action for reevaluating our current economic paradigm, shifting towards a more sustainable and equitable model that prioritizes health and well-being over GDP growth. The guests stress the urgency of addressing planetary boundaries, overshoot, and the impending tipping points that threaten the stability of our ecosystems. Overall, the episode provides a thought-provoking exploration of ecological economics, systems thinking, and the imperative need for transformative change to ensure a sustainable future for humanity and the planet. Timestamps Introduction to Ecological Economics and Systems Thinking Discussion on the Influence of Popular Books on Climate Change Awareness Evolution of Climate Change Discourse and Scientific Consensus Introduction to the Limits to Growth and Systems Modeling Discussion on the Flaws of GDP as an Indicator of Success Importance of Systems Thinking and Tipping Points Degrowth as a Response to Overshoot and Tipping Points Challenges and Opportunities in Transitioning to a Degrowth Paradigm The Role of Slime Molds in Understanding Resource Allocation The Urgency of Addressing Planetary Boundaries and Resource Scarcity The Need for Collective Action and Policy Changes in the Face of Environmental Challenges Reflections on the Evolution of Economic Thinking and the Path to Sustainable Development Quotes "Goals for more growth should specify of what and for what." - 00:00:23-00:00:34 "It's the difference between knowing that your two packs a day could very well give you cancer and hearing the doctor clear his throat and say, 'I've got something to tell you.'" - 00:01:06-00:01:17 "Degrowth is just the end result there. It's not like we want that. It's just like you need it because you've got to go on a diet." - 00:06:24-00:06:34 "We know that the enemy is carbon and we know it's ugly face. We should put a big fat price on it. And of course, add to that, drop the subsidies." - 00:07:16-00:07:26 "Earth Overshoot Day from the Global Footprint Network using the ecological footprint methodology." - 00:44:29-00:44:40 "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop. And of course, it will stop. It's unsustainable." - 00:45:01-00:45:11 "We're using Earth as though we had 1.6 Earths to use. That's the consumption and the rate of resource use we're using." - 00:44:51-00:45:01 "Most of all, when proposing GDP as an indicator, Kuznets did not intend for it to be used in the way that we're using it now." - 00:46:21-00:46:32

When I start to feel overwhelmed by the climate challenges we face, I turn to Hannah Ritchie, a researcher at Our World in Data. Her data-driven approach is an essential antidote to environmental doomsday-ism and provides some much-needed optimism about humanity's ability to tackle big problems. I recently sat down with Hannah to talk about her terrific new book Not the End of the World, why it's so hard to wrap our minds around human progress, what we would ask a time traveler about the future, and more. Not the End of the World: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/hannah-ritchie/not-the-end-of-the-world/9780316536752/ Hannah's TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl3VVrggKz4 Our World in Data: https://ourworldindata.org/ Environmental Kuznets curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve#Environmental_Kuznets_curve Prolific Machines: https://www.prolific-machines.com/ Life is Grand by Camper Van Beethoven: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0axoVpNadYM&ab_channel=indieitunes

Capitalism can cause massive economic inequalities. Indeed, a century after Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations, the richest 1% owned a record-breaking 70% of England's wealth. Not surprisingly, this era saw the rise of a very different economic theorist: Karl Marx. [You can see this and many other graphs here.] But does capitalism have to increase inequality? If so, why was the golden age of American capitalism an era of rapidly decreasing inequality? Was this “Great Levelling” a natural product of capitalist development, as theorised by Simon Kuznets? Or was it a historical anomaly resulting from the two world wars and political interventions, as argued by Thomas Piketty? Yet more questions emerge if we take a more global outlook. Was the Great Levelling within rich countries but a veil behind which they plundered the Global South, making capitalism an inherent engine of global inequality? If so, why has global inequality reduced during the recent era of globalised capitalism? There are very few people who can judge these questions with the same nuance and understanding as Branko Milanović. Milanović is a leading scholar of global inequality. But he is also a particularly sensitive commentator on capitalism. Born in communist Yugoslavia, Milanović has a rare ability to look at capitalism from an arms-length, without indoctrinated faith but also with a deep appreciation of the limits of its alternatives.  I hope you enjoy our conversation! VISUAL DATA We discuss a lot of numbers in this episode. You can find a lot of relevant graphs in my Substack post: https://onhumans.substack.com/p/the-evolution-of-inequality-under To follow Milanović's own work, and get a lot of more graphs, see his many books and his blog "Global Inequality" at https://branko2f7.substack.com/ SUPPORT I hope you enjoy the conversation. If you do, consider becoming a supporter of On Humans on ⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon.com/OnHumans⁠⁠⁠⁠.  MENTIONS Names: Karl Marx, Alexis de Tocqueville, Brad DeLong (see episode 18 & season 1 highlights), Simon Kuznets, Arthur Berns, Thomas Piketty,  Gabriel Zucman, Emmanuel Saez, Jason Hickel, François Quesnay, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Vilfredo Pareto Names: Gini coefficient, Kuznets-curve, Mondragon (a Spanish cooperative), homoploutia (when the rich both own capital and work for an income)  Books: Visions of Inequality (Milanovic), Capital (Marx), Capital in the 21st Century (Piketty), Global Inequality (Milanovic), Capitalism, Alone (Milanovic)

EPISODE 1823: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to Branko Milanovic, author of VISIONS OF INEQUALITY, about how different economists have made sense of economic inequality over the last 250 yearsBRANKO MILANOVIC is a Senior Scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality at the CUNY Graduate Center and the author of the forthcoming Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War. Branko's main area of work is income inequality, in individual countries and globally, including in pre-industrial societies. He has published articles in The Economic Journal, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Economic Literature, Economic History Review, and Journal of Political Philosophy, among others. His book, The Haves and the Have-nots (2011) was selected by The Globalist as the 2011 Book of the Year. His book Global Inequality (2016), was awarded the Bruno Kreisky Prize for the best political book of 2016, and Hans Matthöfer Prize in 2018, and was translated into sixteen languages. It addresses economic and political effects of globalization and introduces the concept of successive “Kuznets waves” of inequality. In March 2018, Branko was awarded (jointly with Mariana Mazzucato) the 2018 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Knowledge. His new book Capitalism, Alone was published in September 2019. He has contributed numerous op-eds and essays to Social Europe, VoxEU, The Guardian, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Vox, The Financial Times, Le Monde, El Pais, La Vanguardia, Le Monde Diplomatique and blogs ProMarket (U of Chicago), Global Policy (Durham University), Brave New Europe (Berlin). His blog posts are regularly translated into Spanish (Letras Libres), German (Makronom), Italian (Fata Turchina) and French (Atlanico).Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

"How do you see income distribution in your time, and how and why do you expect it to change?" That is the question Branko Milanovic imagines posing to six of history's most influential economists: François Quesnay, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Vilfredo Pareto, and Simon Kuznets. Probing their works in the context of their lives, he charts the evolution of thinking about inequality, showing just how much views have varied among ages and societies. Indeed, Milanovic argues, we cannot speak of "inequality" as a general concept: any analysis of it is inextricably linked to a particular time and place. Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War (Harvard UP, 2023) takes us from Quesnay and the physiocrats, for whom social classes were prescribed by law, through the classic nineteenth-century treatises of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, who saw class as a purely economic category driven by means of production. It shows how Pareto reconceived class as a matter of elites versus the rest of the population, while Kuznets saw inequality arising from the urban-rural divide. And it explains why inequality studies were eclipsed during the Cold War, before their remarkable resurgence as a central preoccupation in economics today. Meticulously extracting each author's view of income distribution from their often voluminous writings, Milanovic offers an invaluable genealogy of the discourse surrounding inequality. These intellectual portraits are infused not only with a deep understanding of economic theory but also with psychological nuance, reconstructing each thinker's outlook given what was unknowable to them within their historical contexts and methodologies. Branko Milanovic is Senior Scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality at the City University of New York and Visiting Professor at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

"How do you see income distribution in your time, and how and why do you expect it to change?" That is the question Branko Milanovic imagines posing to six of history's most influential economists: François Quesnay, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Vilfredo Pareto, and Simon Kuznets. Probing their works in the context of their lives, he charts the evolution of thinking about inequality, showing just how much views have varied among ages and societies. Indeed, Milanovic argues, we cannot speak of "inequality" as a general concept: any analysis of it is inextricably linked to a particular time and place. Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War (Harvard UP, 2023) takes us from Quesnay and the physiocrats, for whom social classes were prescribed by law, through the classic nineteenth-century treatises of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, who saw class as a purely economic category driven by means of production. It shows how Pareto reconceived class as a matter of elites versus the rest of the population, while Kuznets saw inequality arising from the urban-rural divide. And it explains why inequality studies were eclipsed during the Cold War, before their remarkable resurgence as a central preoccupation in economics today. Meticulously extracting each author's view of income distribution from their often voluminous writings, Milanovic offers an invaluable genealogy of the discourse surrounding inequality. These intellectual portraits are infused not only with a deep understanding of economic theory but also with psychological nuance, reconstructing each thinker's outlook given what was unknowable to them within their historical contexts and methodologies. Branko Milanovic is Senior Scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality at the City University of New York and Visiting Professor at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

"How do you see income distribution in your time, and how and why do you expect it to change?" That is the question Branko Milanovic imagines posing to six of history's most influential economists: François Quesnay, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Vilfredo Pareto, and Simon Kuznets. Probing their works in the context of their lives, he charts the evolution of thinking about inequality, showing just how much views have varied among ages and societies. Indeed, Milanovic argues, we cannot speak of "inequality" as a general concept: any analysis of it is inextricably linked to a particular time and place. Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War (Harvard UP, 2023) takes us from Quesnay and the physiocrats, for whom social classes were prescribed by law, through the classic nineteenth-century treatises of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, who saw class as a purely economic category driven by means of production. It shows how Pareto reconceived class as a matter of elites versus the rest of the population, while Kuznets saw inequality arising from the urban-rural divide. And it explains why inequality studies were eclipsed during the Cold War, before their remarkable resurgence as a central preoccupation in economics today. Meticulously extracting each author's view of income distribution from their often voluminous writings, Milanovic offers an invaluable genealogy of the discourse surrounding inequality. These intellectual portraits are infused not only with a deep understanding of economic theory but also with psychological nuance, reconstructing each thinker's outlook given what was unknowable to them within their historical contexts and methodologies. Branko Milanovic is Senior Scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality at the City University of New York and Visiting Professor at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

"How do you see income distribution in your time, and how and why do you expect it to change?" That is the question Branko Milanovic imagines posing to six of history's most influential economists: François Quesnay, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Vilfredo Pareto, and Simon Kuznets. Probing their works in the context of their lives, he charts the evolution of thinking about inequality, showing just how much views have varied among ages and societies. Indeed, Milanovic argues, we cannot speak of "inequality" as a general concept: any analysis of it is inextricably linked to a particular time and place. Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War (Harvard UP, 2023) takes us from Quesnay and the physiocrats, for whom social classes were prescribed by law, through the classic nineteenth-century treatises of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, who saw class as a purely economic category driven by means of production. It shows how Pareto reconceived class as a matter of elites versus the rest of the population, while Kuznets saw inequality arising from the urban-rural divide. And it explains why inequality studies were eclipsed during the Cold War, before their remarkable resurgence as a central preoccupation in economics today. Meticulously extracting each author's view of income distribution from their often voluminous writings, Milanovic offers an invaluable genealogy of the discourse surrounding inequality. These intellectual portraits are infused not only with a deep understanding of economic theory but also with psychological nuance, reconstructing each thinker's outlook given what was unknowable to them within their historical contexts and methodologies. Branko Milanovic is Senior Scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality at the City University of New York and Visiting Professor at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"How do you see income distribution in your time, and how and why do you expect it to change?" That is the question Branko Milanovic imagines posing to six of history's most influential economists: François Quesnay, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Vilfredo Pareto, and Simon Kuznets. Probing their works in the context of their lives, he charts the evolution of thinking about inequality, showing just how much views have varied among ages and societies. Indeed, Milanovic argues, we cannot speak of "inequality" as a general concept: any analysis of it is inextricably linked to a particular time and place. Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War (Harvard UP, 2023) takes us from Quesnay and the physiocrats, for whom social classes were prescribed by law, through the classic nineteenth-century treatises of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, who saw class as a purely economic category driven by means of production. It shows how Pareto reconceived class as a matter of elites versus the rest of the population, while Kuznets saw inequality arising from the urban-rural divide. And it explains why inequality studies were eclipsed during the Cold War, before their remarkable resurgence as a central preoccupation in economics today. Meticulously extracting each author's view of income distribution from their often voluminous writings, Milanovic offers an invaluable genealogy of the discourse surrounding inequality. These intellectual portraits are infused not only with a deep understanding of economic theory but also with psychological nuance, reconstructing each thinker's outlook given what was unknowable to them within their historical contexts and methodologies. Branko Milanovic is Senior Scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality at the City University of New York and Visiting Professor at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

"How do you see income distribution in your time, and how and why do you expect it to change?" That is the question Branko Milanovic imagines posing to six of history's most influential economists: François Quesnay, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Vilfredo Pareto, and Simon Kuznets. Probing their works in the context of their lives, he charts the evolution of thinking about inequality, showing just how much views have varied among ages and societies. Indeed, Milanovic argues, we cannot speak of "inequality" as a general concept: any analysis of it is inextricably linked to a particular time and place. Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War (Harvard UP, 2023) takes us from Quesnay and the physiocrats, for whom social classes were prescribed by law, through the classic nineteenth-century treatises of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, who saw class as a purely economic category driven by means of production. It shows how Pareto reconceived class as a matter of elites versus the rest of the population, while Kuznets saw inequality arising from the urban-rural divide. And it explains why inequality studies were eclipsed during the Cold War, before their remarkable resurgence as a central preoccupation in economics today. Meticulously extracting each author's view of income distribution from their often voluminous writings, Milanovic offers an invaluable genealogy of the discourse surrounding inequality. These intellectual portraits are infused not only with a deep understanding of economic theory but also with psychological nuance, reconstructing each thinker's outlook given what was unknowable to them within their historical contexts and methodologies. Branko Milanovic is Senior Scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality at the City University of New York and Visiting Professor at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"How do you see income distribution in your time, and how and why do you expect it to change?" That is the question Branko Milanovic imagines posing to six of history's most influential economists: François Quesnay, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Vilfredo Pareto, and Simon Kuznets. Probing their works in the context of their lives, he charts the evolution of thinking about inequality, showing just how much views have varied among ages and societies. Indeed, Milanovic argues, we cannot speak of "inequality" as a general concept: any analysis of it is inextricably linked to a particular time and place. Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War (Harvard UP, 2023) takes us from Quesnay and the physiocrats, for whom social classes were prescribed by law, through the classic nineteenth-century treatises of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, who saw class as a purely economic category driven by means of production. It shows how Pareto reconceived class as a matter of elites versus the rest of the population, while Kuznets saw inequality arising from the urban-rural divide. And it explains why inequality studies were eclipsed during the Cold War, before their remarkable resurgence as a central preoccupation in economics today. Meticulously extracting each author's view of income distribution from their often voluminous writings, Milanovic offers an invaluable genealogy of the discourse surrounding inequality. These intellectual portraits are infused not only with a deep understanding of economic theory but also with psychological nuance, reconstructing each thinker's outlook given what was unknowable to them within their historical contexts and methodologies. Branko Milanovic is Senior Scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality at the City University of New York and Visiting Professor at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

"How do you see income distribution in your time, and how and why do you expect it to change?" That is the question Branko Milanovic imagines posing to six of history's most influential economists: François Quesnay, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Vilfredo Pareto, and Simon Kuznets. Probing their works in the context of their lives, he charts the evolution of thinking about inequality, showing just how much views have varied among ages and societies. Indeed, Milanovic argues, we cannot speak of "inequality" as a general concept: any analysis of it is inextricably linked to a particular time and place. Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War (Harvard UP, 2023) takes us from Quesnay and the physiocrats, for whom social classes were prescribed by law, through the classic nineteenth-century treatises of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, who saw class as a purely economic category driven by means of production. It shows how Pareto reconceived class as a matter of elites versus the rest of the population, while Kuznets saw inequality arising from the urban-rural divide. And it explains why inequality studies were eclipsed during the Cold War, before their remarkable resurgence as a central preoccupation in economics today. Meticulously extracting each author's view of income distribution from their often voluminous writings, Milanovic offers an invaluable genealogy of the discourse surrounding inequality. These intellectual portraits are infused not only with a deep understanding of economic theory but also with psychological nuance, reconstructing each thinker's outlook given what was unknowable to them within their historical contexts and methodologies. Branko Milanovic is Senior Scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality at the City University of New York and Visiting Professor at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"How do you see income distribution in your time, and how and why do you expect it to change?" That is the question Branko Milanovic imagines posing to six of history's most influential economists: François Quesnay, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Vilfredo Pareto, and Simon Kuznets. Probing their works in the context of their lives, he charts the evolution of thinking about inequality, showing just how much views have varied among ages and societies. Indeed, Milanovic argues, we cannot speak of "inequality" as a general concept: any analysis of it is inextricably linked to a particular time and place. Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War (Harvard UP, 2023) takes us from Quesnay and the physiocrats, for whom social classes were prescribed by law, through the classic nineteenth-century treatises of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, who saw class as a purely economic category driven by means of production. It shows how Pareto reconceived class as a matter of elites versus the rest of the population, while Kuznets saw inequality arising from the urban-rural divide. And it explains why inequality studies were eclipsed during the Cold War, before their remarkable resurgence as a central preoccupation in economics today. Meticulously extracting each author's view of income distribution from their often voluminous writings, Milanovic offers an invaluable genealogy of the discourse surrounding inequality. These intellectual portraits are infused not only with a deep understanding of economic theory but also with psychological nuance, reconstructing each thinker's outlook given what was unknowable to them within their historical contexts and methodologies. Branko Milanovic is Senior Scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality at the City University of New York and Visiting Professor at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

An interview with Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, President of The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation about politically-concocted climate alarmism in contrast with climate realism, based on genuine scientific study. We also talk about destructive governmental emissions policy, and the environmental Kuznets curve. https://reformedlibertarians.com/010/  00:00 Start 00:32 Episode description https://www.cornwallalliance.org Dr. Beisner's dissertation: https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/handle/10023/2698 01:51 About Dr. Beisner How he became Reformed 06:34 Some of Dr. Beisner's past work Coalition On Revival: https://www.reformation.net/the-17-worldview-documents.html Hebert Schlossberg's book Idols for Destruction: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0891077383?tag=kerrybaldwin-20 Beisner's book Prosperity and Poverty: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1579108083?tag=kerrybaldwin-20 Beisner's book Prospects for Growth: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1592449832?tag=kerrybaldwin-20 09:08 How the Cornwall Alliance began The Cornwall Declaration: https://cornwallalliance.org/landmark-documents/the-cornwall-declaration-on-environmental-stewardship/ Highlights: https://cornwallalliance.org/about/our-history-in-highlights/ 10:05 Why the work of the Cornwall Alliance is important 2006 A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor - An Evangelical Response to Global Warming: https://cornwallalliance.org/landmark-documents/a-call-to-truth-prudence-and-protection-of-the-poor-an-evangelical-response-to-global-warming/ 2009 Declaration: https://cornwallalliance.org/2009/05/evangelical-declaration-on-global-warming/ 2014 Reiteration: https://cornwallalliance.org/landmark-documents/a-call-to-truth-prudence-and-protection-of-the-poor-2014-the-case-against-harmful-climate-policies-gets-stronger/ 16:23 Ways the Cornwall Alliance does its work Cornwall agenda: https://www.cornwallalliance.org/docs/cornwall-stewardship-agenda.pdf Blog: https://cornwallalliance.org/category/blog/ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@cornwallallianceforthestew1587 Created to Reign Podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1939979 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CornwallAlliance Twitter: https://twitter.com/CornwallSteward 19:19 How should we evaluate climate alarmist claims? Dr.s Beisner and Legates' book (Forthcoming April 2023) Climate and Energy: The Case For Realism https://www.regnery.com/9781684512676/climate-and-energy/ Hot Talk, Cold Science by Fred Singer: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1598133411?tag=kerrybaldwin-20 Why you shouldn't be alarmed: https://www.cornwallalliance.org/docs/global-warming-why-evangelicals-should-not-be-alarmed.pdf Feedback and climate: https://cornwallalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/sen.pdf Examination of policy: https://www.cornwallalliance.org/docs/an-examination-of-the-scientific-ethical-and-theological-implications-of-climate-change-policy.pdf Orlando 23-25 February 2023 Climate Conference:  https://climateconference.heartland.org 36:35 About so-called "net zero" emissions policy https://www.buzzsprout.com/1939979/12131215-brief-what-can-t-be-done-won-t-be-done 46:09 About the Kuznets curve https://cornwallalliance.org/2018/12/fighting-climate-change-make-the-world-cleaner/ Further resources: BONUS AUDIO: About the Founding and Formation of the Cornwall Alliance http://reformedlibertarians.com/010  Francis Schaeffer's (1970) Pollution and the Death of Man: The Christian View of Ecology https://www.amazon.com/dp/1433576953?tag=kerrybaldwin-20 Real Climate Science with Tony Heller https://realclimatescience.com/the-five-top-arguments-against-climate-alarmism/ Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change https://climatechangereconsidered.org Master Resource: Free-Market Energy Blog https://www.masterresource.org The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change, by Marc Morano https://www.amazon.com/dp/1621576760?tag=kerrybaldwin-20 The Reformed Libertarians Podcast is a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute: https://libertarianchristians.com and a member of the Christians for Liberty Network: https://christian...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: New blog: Some doubts about effective altruism, published by David Thorstad on December 20, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I'm a research fellow in philosophy at the Global Priorities Institute. There are many things I like about effective altruism. I've started a blog to discuss some views and practices in effective altruism that I don't like, in order to drive positive change both within and outside of the movement. About me I'm a research fellow in philosophy at the Global Priorities Institute, and a Junior Research Fellow at Kellogg College. Before coming to Oxford, I did a PhD in philosophy at Harvard under the incomparable Ned Hall, and BA in philosophy and mathematics at Haverford College. I held down a few jobs along the way, including a stint teaching high-school mathematics in Lawrence, Massachusetts and a summer gig as a librarian for the North Carolina National Guard. I'm quite fond of dogs. Who should read this blog? The aim of the blog is to feature (1) long-form, serial discussions of views and practices in and around effective altruism, (2) driven by academic research, and from a perspective that (3) shares a number of important views and methods with many effective altruists. This blog might be for you if: You would like to know why someone who shares many background views with effective altruists could nonetheless be worried about some existing views and practices. You are interested in learning more about the implications of academic research for views and practices in effective altruism. You think that empirically-grounded philosophical reflection is a good way to gain knowledge about the world. You have a moderate amount of time to devote to reading and discussion (20-30mins/post). You don't mind reading series of overlapping posts. This blog might not be for you if: You would like to know why someone who has little in common with effective altruists might be worried about the movement. You aren't keen on philosophy, even when empirically grounded. You have a short amount of time to devote to reading. You like standalone posts and hate series. Blog series The blog is primarily organized around series of posts, rather than individual posts. I've kicked off the blog with four series. Academic papers: This series summarizes cutting-edge academic research relevant to questions in and around the effective altruism movement. Existential risk pessimism and the time of perils: Part 1 introduces a tension between Existential Risk Pessimism (risk is high) and the Astronomical Value Thesis (it's very important to drive down risk). Part 2 looks at some failed solutions to the tension. Part 3 looks at a better solution: the Time of Perils Hypothesis. Part 4 looks at one argument for the Time of Perils Hypothesis, which appeals to space settlement. Part 5 looks at a second argument for the Time of Perils Hypothesis, which appeals to the concept of an existential risk Kuznets curve. Parts 6-8 (coming soon) round out the paper and draw implications. Academics review What we owe the future: This series looks at book reviews of MacAskill's What we owe the future by leading academics to draw out insights from those reviews. Part 1 looks at Kieran Setiya's review, focusing on population ethics. Part 2 (coming soon) looks at Richard Chappell's review. Part 3 (coming soon) looks at Regina Rini's review. Exaggerating the risks: I think that current levels of existential risk are substantially lower than many leading EAs take them to be. In this series, I say why I think that. Part 1 introduces the series. Part 2 looks at Ord's discussion of climate risk in The Precipice. Part 3 takes a first look at the Halstead report on climate risk. Parts 4-6 (coming soon) wrap up the discussion of climate risk and draw lessons. Billionaire philanthropy: What is the role of b...

« Chúng ta đã thua. Vấn đề còn lại chỉ là thời gian ». Lần đầu tiên kể từ khi phát động cuộc chiến, tổng thống Vladimir Putin đối mặt với những chỉ trích mạnh mẽ từ cả hai phía chống và ủng hộ chiến tranh. Nhưng sự giận dữ của phe diều hâu tại Nga còn làm nổi rõ vai trò của các « blogger » được điện Kremlin và quân đội Nga dung túng để cổ vũ cho luận điệu hiếu chiến chống Ukraina. Quân đội Nga và những khiếm khuyết Thứ Bảy 10/09/2022, trong buổi họp báo thường nhật có tên là « Điểm tình hình về những tiến triển của chiến dịch quân sự đặc biệt », phát ngôn viên bộ Quốc Phòng Nga đã phát biểu: « Để đạt được các mục tiêu được đặt ra cho chiến dịch quân sự đặc biệt để giải phóng Donbass, quyết định đưa ra là dồn các đội quân đóng tại vùng Izium về chi viện cho Donetsk. Để tránh các thiệt hại cho các đạo quân, một cuộc oanh kích dữ dội bằng tên lửa và đại pháo đã được giáng xuống kẻ thù. Trong vòng ba ngày, hơn hai ngàn lính Ukraina và nước ngoài, cũng như hơn 100 xe thiết giáp và đại bác đã bị tiêu diệt. » Phát biểu này được đưa ra trong bối cảnh những hình ảnh trên các mạng xã hội ở Nga phô bày một thực tế phũ phàng : Quân đội Nga tháo chạy, bỏ lại nhiều phương tiện, vũ khí, đạn dược cho kẻ thù. Theo giới quan sát tại Pháp, sự thất bại này đã làm lộ rõ các khiếm khuyết trong quân đội Nga : Tình báo yếu kém, tham nhũng, thiếu sự phối hợp giữa các lực lượng, thậm chí thiếu tinh thần chiến đấu … Pierre Servent, đại tá dự bị, chuyên gia về quốc phòng, lưu ý điều đó không có nghĩa là chiến tranh sẽ sớm chấm dứt, khả năng đánh phá của quân đội Nga vẫn còn đáng kể. Trên đài France Culture, ông nhắc lại : « Từ đầu cuộc chiến đến nay, mỗi lần ông Putin gặp thất bại quân sự, ông ấy cũng đã hứng lấy một vài đòn, thì ông ấy luôn có cùng một kiểu hành xử :  Trừng phạt bằng cách đánh sâu vào lãnh thổ Ukraina nhắm vào các mục tiêu dân sự và đe dọa dùng vũ khí hạt nhân. Trong vài ngày tới, ông ấy thế nào cũng đưa ra một loại tên lửa hạt nhân chiến lược mới, hay nâng mức báo động hạt nhân mới… » V. Putin đối mặt với cả « Bồ câu » lẫn « Diều hâu »  Tuy nhiên, giới quan sát phương Tây đặc biệt lưu ý đây là lần đầu tiên tổng thống Vladimir Putin bị một bộ phận chính giới Nga, từ tả đến hữu, chỉ trích mạnh mẽ là đã « tiến hành một chiến lược chiến tranh tồi tệ ». Phe chống chiến tranh kêu gọi phế truất tổng thống Putin vì tội « phản quốc », theo như một kiến nghị do nhóm tám dân biểu ở Saint – Petersbourg đề xướng. Họ cho rằng Vladimir Putin đã phản bội đất nước và phản bội dân tộc Nga. Đương nhiên, đòi hỏi này khó thể thực hiện, do việc đảng Nước Nga Thống Nhất của ông Putin vẫn chiếm đa số ở Quốc Hội. Nhà chính trị học Anna Colin Lebedev, chuyên gia về các xã hội hậu Xô Viết, ví lời kêu gọi đó can đảm chẳng khác gì như một hành động « kamikaze – tấn công tự sát », trong bối cảnh những tiếng nói chống chiến tranh, chống sự cai trị độc tài của ông Putin ngày càng ít. Điều thật sự gây ngạc nhiên đó là những lời chỉ trích gay gắt đến từ chính phe "diều hâu", những người ủng hộ điện Kremlin và cuộc chiến chống Ukraina. Theo tờ New York Times của Mỹ, sự giận dữ của phe diều hâu cho thấy, dù tổng thống Nga có bịt được miệng mọi phe đối lập ủng hộ tự do và dân chủ, thì ông vẫn bị sự bất bình từ cánh bảo thủ nhất đe dọa. Những người này chê trách tổng thống Nga quá mềm yếu, đòi hỏi phải có hành động triệt để hơn. Chuyên gia về Nga, bà Tatiana Kastouéva – Jean, Viện Quan Hệ Quốc Tế Pháp (IFRI), trả lời báo Les Echos nhận định vào lúc này có căng thẳng trên thượng tầng lãnh đạo ở Matxcơva. « Khó thể biết được ông Putin đang nghĩ gì, nhất là khi ông ấy bị đặt trước sự đã rồi. Hiện tại, như thường lệ, giới lãnh đạo đi theo đường hướng của điện Kremlin, theo một thói quen hay như bị cưỡng ép để hậu thuẫn tổng thống và những phát biểu của ông ấy. Thế nhưng, lịch sử đất nước nhắc rõ là mọi thay đổi chính trị sẽ không đến từ đường phố, mà là từ những tranh giành ảnh hưởng ở thượng tầng lãnh đạo. » Nhưng nhà chính trị học Anna Colin Lebedev lo rằng những phát ngôn cứng rắn từ phe « diều hâu » hiến chiến có nguy cơ dẫn đến leo thang quân sự. Trên đài phát thanh France Culture, chuyên gia Lebedev giải thích : « Phe diều hâu này đặt nghi vấn về chiến lược của Nga, cho rằng đã quân Nga đã không đánh mạnh, không tiến xa hơn, phá hủy chưa đủ. Chiến lược này đã không nhắm vào thường dân. Người ta còn nghe những kẻ cực kỳ bảo thủ này nói rằng chúng ta có thể dội bom Kiev … Đương nhiên những người nói như thế không hẳn là những người có quyền lực chính trị, nhưng ngược lại họ phát biểu nhân danh những người từ trong hậu trường ra các quyết định, họ cũng có thể sẽ là những người ra một số quyết định nào đó. Điều làm tôi lo ở đây là một thất bại quân sự rất có thể là điểm xuất phát cho một cuộc leo thang. » Blogger Nga : Cỗ máy tuyên truyền hay kẻ tố cáo ? Nhưng phải chăng Vladimir Putin cũng đang bị « gậy ông đập lưng ông » ? Bất chấp đạo luật do chính ông ban hành hồi đầu tháng 3/2022, nghiêm cấm và phạt tù nặng những ai tuyên truyền làm mất uy tín của quân đội, các hình ảnh trên mạng xã hội và Internet lại cho thấy thất bại của Nga quá hiển nhiên. Báo Mỹ New York Times lưu ý sự việc nhắc rõ vai trò quan trọng của các blogger Nga trên mạng Telegram khi phát tán các bài tường thuật trực tiếp về chiến tranh. Được hàng nghìn người theo dõi, nhiều người trong số các blogger hiếu chiến còn được tháp tùng theo binh sĩ Nga và phe thân Nga đến gần các đường chiến tuyến. Trang mạng kênh truyền hình quốc tế France 24, hồi đầu tháng 5/2022, đơn cử ví dụ kênh Telegram « War Gonzo », do blogger Semyon Pegov quản lý, được hơn 800 ngàn người theo dõi trên mạng Youtube và hơn một triệu người trên Telegram. Từng là phóng viên cho kênh truyền hình Nga Life News ở Donbass, Semyon Pegov đã đăng tải nhiều đoạn video cho thấy hình ảnh binh sĩ Nga ở Mariupol, cảnh (bị cho là dàn dựng) những quân nhân thân Nga được người dân đón tiếp ở ngõ vào Donetsk, hay hình ảnh Semyon Pegov đang ra hiệu cho một binh sĩ kích hoạt bệ phóng rốc-kết trước khi quay sang trả lời phỏng vấn trước camera…. France 24 cho biết « War Gonzo » không phải là trường hợp duy nhất, Vladlen Tatarsky, một cựu quân nhân Nga từng chiến đấu ở Donbass hồi năm 2014, cũng có một cộng đồng Youtube khá đông đảo nhờ đăng các mẩu video từ nhiều vùng chiến sự mà ông được tham gia. Cho dù những blogger này đôi khi hành động như một loa phóng thanh cho những luận điệu của điện Kremlin, xem người Ukraina như là « phát xít », không xứng đáng để đối xử như một con người, Jack Margolin – giám đốc dự án tại Trung tâm Nghiên cứu của Mỹ Center for advanced defence studies (C4ADS) – trả lời France 24 lưu ý thêm rằng « tuy đôi khi trình bày sai lệch về nhiều sự kiện, những người này cũng là khung cửa sổ hữu ích về cho thấy nhiều điều mà chúng ta không có cách nào khác thấy được. » Theo giải thích của Kuznets – cựu phóng viên chiến trường – với tờ New York Times, các sĩ quan Nga dường như dung thứ cho sự hiện diện của những bloggers này, cho dù các ý kiến của họ đôi khi mang tính chỉ trích, bởi vì những người này chia sẻ cùng khái niệm chủ nghĩa đế quốc và hiếu chiến. Hơn nữa, các blogger giữ một vai trò chủ yếu trong việc phổ biến tuyên truyền ủng hộ Nga trên các mạng xã hội mà cả người dân Nga lẫn Ukraina đều tìm hiểu. Chính họ là những người cung cấp nhiều thông tin còn chi tiết, rõ nét và có thể nói là đáng tin cậy hơn là nguồn tin từ bộ Quốc Phòng. Chính họ cũng là những người đầu tiên báo động khả năng Ukraina phản công ở đông bắc, và giờ đây, trước những thất bại quân sự liên tiếp của quân đội Nga tại Ukraina, cũng chính họ là những người đầu tiên giận dữ phản đối bộ Quốc Phòng Nga đã đánh giá thấp kẻ thù và che giấu các thông tin xấu với công luận, chỉ trích cả nhiều quân nhân Nga không buồn kháng cự trước đà tiến của quân Ukraina trong tuần này. Tổng động viên : Thế lưỡng nan của ông Putin Theo nhiều chuyên gia, sự giận dữ ở một mức độ chưa từng thấy từ các blogger Nga nói lên nhiều điều về quan điểm của một bộ phận tầng lớp trí thức Nga liên quan đến cuộc chiến này : Đó là một chiến dịch thể hiện sự thiếu năng lực, được tiến hành với một kinh phí thấp, và chỉ có thể giành được thắng lợi nếu ông Vladimir Putin ban hành lệnh tổng động viên. Sự việc giờ đây đặt tổng thống Nga trong thế khó xử. Hầu hết giới chuyên gia Nga và phương Tây đều cho rằng chủ nhân điện Kremlin dưới áp lực của phe diều hâu không còn cách nào khác ngoài việc tổng động viên, để bù đắp cho số thiệt hại 40 ngàn quân, theo ước tính từ bộ Quốc Phòng Mỹ. Nhưng đây cũng là một giải pháp nguy hiểm cho điện Kremlin. Trên đài RFI, nhà nghiên cứu Dimitri Minic, Viện Quan Hệ Quốc Tế Pháp (IFRI), giải thích : « Khi so sánh các con số lý thuyết về lính nghĩa vụ và lính nhập ngũ thật sự, nhất là trong năm nay, chúng ta có xu hướng nghĩ rằng tổng động viên không hẳn là một giải pháp, mà đúng hơn là một tác nhân thúc đẩy sự sụp đổ. Bởi vì người ta nhận thấy rằng thanh niên và người dân Nga trên thực tế tỏ ra miễn cưỡng tham gia trực tiếp vào cuộc xung đột này. Đó rất có thể là một sự phủ nhận đối với chính sách của ông Putin. Chúng ta cũng thấy điều đó trên truyền hình Nga, những cuộc tranh luận sau cuộc phản công chớp nhoáng của Ukraina. Chúng ta thấy là lời lẽ bắt đầu được tuôn ra, thậm chí chúng ta còn thấy là ý tưởng tổng động viên đang được tranh cãi. Trên thực tế đây là một vấn đề rắc rối, đối với họ, được ăn cả ngã về không. » Theo một thăm dò do cơ quan độc lập Levada thực hiện hồi tháng 8/2022, khoảng 48% số người Nga được hỏi cho biết ít quan tâm đến chiến sự tại Ukraina, thậm chí là hầu như không quan tâm. Đây quả thật không phải là giải pháp tốt cho ông Putin. Việc leo thang căng thẳng có nguy cơ gây nguy hiểm cho sự đồng thuận hời hợt về cuộc chiến trên bình diện đối nội. Mặt khác, những thất bại quân sự liên tiếp trên trận địa cũng có nguy cơ làm cho phe diều hâu, những kẻ hiếu chiến nhất, quay lưng lại với ông. Đó là những người đã tin theo luận điệu của điện Kremlin, theo đó Nga phải chiến đấu chống « quân phát xít » và cho chính sự tồn tại của nước Nga.

Learn about some of the most environmentally damaging practices, including the use of chemicals such as glyphosate and the historical context of chemical use. As well, consider the model of the Environmental Kuznets Curve and why it is no longer widely credited today.

Why do some countries experience growth, while others don't? The answer is that countries are not ordered in the same way, or as an economist would say; their institutional arrangements differ, and that leads to different outcomes. This in not just a theoretical point, it is in fact highly empirically observable. In today's episode we will meet three laurates that made just such observations; Simon Smith Kuznets who are not just famous for two curves, but also for spearheading the creation of essential empirical data, such a national income accounts. Theodore Schultz, an agricultural economist who showed why human capital matters, and finally Douglas North. The first historian to win the price, and a person that teaches us to take time seriously. References: Kuznets, S.S. (1971), Price Lecture, [lecture transcript]. Retrieved from:http://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1971/kuznets/lecture/ (www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1971/kuznets/lecture/)   Kuznets, S.S. (1971). Banquet speech [Speech transcript]. Retrieved from: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1971/kuznets/speech/ (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1971/kuznets/speech/) Schultz, T. (1979), Price Lecture, [lecture transcript]. Retrieved from:http://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1979/schultz/lecture/ (www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1979/schultz/lecture/) Schultz, T. (1979). Banquet speech [Speech transcript] Retrieved from: http://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1979/schultz/speech/ (www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1979/schultz/speech/) North, D.C. (1993), Price Lecture, [lecture transcript]. Retrieved from:http://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1993/north/lecture/ (www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1993/north/lecture/) North, D.C. (1993) Banquet speech [Speech transcript]. Retrieved from:http://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1993/north/speech/ (www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1993/north/speech/)    North D. (1991) Institutions; Journal of Economic Perspectives. https://www.jstor.org/stable/i333438 (Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter, 1991)), pp. 97-112.  North, D.C. (1993), Interview. Retrieved from: http://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1993/north/interview/ (www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1993/north/interview/)

welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio. this is: Existential Risk and Economic Growth, published by leopold on the effective altruism forum. Write a Review As a summer research fellow at FHI, I've been working on using economic theory to better understand the relationship between economic growth and existential risk. I've finished a preliminary draft; see below. I would be very interesting in hearing your thoughts and feedback! Draft: leopoldaschenbrenner.com/xriskandgrowth Abstract: Technological innovation can create or mitigate risks of catastrophes—such as nuclear war, extreme climate change, or powerful artificial intelligence run amok—that could imperil human civilization. What is the relationship between economic growth and these existential risks? In a model of endogenous and directed technical change, with moderate parameters, existential risk follows a Kuznets-style inverted U-shape. This suggests we could be living in a unique “time of perils,” having developed technologies advanced enough to threaten our permanent destruction, but not having grown wealthy enough yet to be willing to spend much on safety. Accelerating growth during this “time of perils” initially increases risk, but improves the chances of humanity's survival in the long run. Conversely, even short-term stagnation could substantially curtail the future of humanity. Nevertheless, if the scale effect of existential risk is large and the returns to research diminish rapidly, it may be impossible to avert an eventual existential catastrophe. thanks for listening. to help us out with the nonlinear library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

In this episode Ben convinces Vaden to become a degrower. We plan how to live out the rest of our lives on an organic tomato farm in Canada in December, sewing our own clothes and waxing our own candles. Step away from the thermostat Jimmy. We discuss: - The degrowth movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth) - The basics of economic growth, and why it's good for developing economies in particular - How growth enables resilience in the face of environmental disasters - Why the environment is in better shape than you think - Availability bias and our tendency to think everything is falling apart - The decoupling of economic growth and carbon emissions - Energy dense production and energy portfolios And we respond to some of your criticism of the previous episode, including: Apocalyptic environmental predictions been happening for a while? Really? Number of annual cold deaths exceed the number of annual heat deaths? Really? Your previous episode was very human-centric, and failed to address the damage humans are causing to the environment. What say you? Are we right wing crypto-fascists? (Answer: Maybe, successfully dodged the question) Social media everywhere Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani Check us out on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_4wZzQyoW4s4ZuE4FY9DQQ Come join our discord server! DM one of us on twitter, or send an email to incrementspodcast@gmail.com to get a link References Two natural experiments on curtailing economic growth. Energy Crunch (https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/energy-crunch-hits-global-recovery-as-winter-approaches-report-121102000021_1.html), and the effect of Covid-19 on developing countries (world bank) (https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/799701589552654684/pdf/Costs-and-Trade-Offs-in-the-Fight-Against-the-COVID-19-Pandemic-A-Developing-Country-Perspective.pdf) 10x more cold deaths than heat deaths. Original study (https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00081-4/fulltext&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1636434110138000&usg=AOvVaw0Uas83UjktfZhIqzNOyMTQ) in the Lancet. Chilling Effect (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/chilling-effects?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjozNDgwNTU5LCJwb3N0X2lkIjo0MjYwOTE3NCwiXyI6InVqQ3VpIiwiaWF0IjoxNjM0Nzg2MDY1LCJleHAiOjE2MzQ3ODk2NjUsImlzcyI6InB1Yi04OTEyMCIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.oIH0tvBYkHK5PfbmmqLdNVO0-U46kRy54CSjZlEC0ec) by Scott Alexander. Decoupling of economic growth and pollution (https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/absolute-decoupling-of-economic-growth-and-emissions-in-32-countries) by Zeke Hausfather of the Breakthrough institute. Air Pollution Trends data (EPA) (https://www.epa.gov/air-emissions-inventories/air-pollutant-emissions-trends-data) Number of deaths from natural disasters (https://ourworldindata.org/natural-disasters#number-of-deaths-from-natural-disasters) (Our World in Data). Original data taken from the EMDAT Natural Disasters database (https://www.emdat.be/). Increase in global canopy cover (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0411-9) 99 Good News Stories in 2018 you probably didn't hear about (https://medium.com/future-crunch/99-good-news-stories-you-probably-didnt-hear-about-in-2018-cc3c65f8ebd0) ...and 2019 (https://futurecrun.ch/99-good-news-2019) ...and 2020 (https://futurecrun.ch/99-good-news-2020) (also sign up for the FutureCrunch newsletter!) The Environmental Kuznets curves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve) Quotes On Degrowth This would be a way of life based on modest material and energy needs but nevertheless rich in other dimensions – a life of frugal abundance. It is about creating an economy based on sufficiency, knowing how much is enough to live well, and discovering that enough is plenty. In a degrowth society we would aspire to localise our economies as far and as appropriately as possible. This would assist with reducing carbon-intensive global trade, while also building resilience in the face of an uncertain and turbulent future. Wherever possible, we would grow our own organic food, water our gardens with water tanks, and turn our neighbourhoods into edible landscapes as the Cubans have done in Havana. As my friend Adam Grubb so delightfully declares, we should “eat the suburbs”, while supplementing urban agriculture with food from local farmers' markets. - Samuel Alexander, Life in a 'degrowth' economy, and why you might actually enjoy it (https://theconversation.com/life-in-a-degrowth-economy-and-why-you-might-actually-enjoy-it-32224) It would be nice to hear it straight for once. Global warming is real, it's here, and it's mind-bogglingly dangerous. How bad it gets—literally, the degree—depends on how quickly the most profligate countries rein in their emissions. Averting catastrophe will thus require places like the United States and Canada to make drastic cutbacks, bringing their consumption more closely in line with the planetary average. Such cuts can be made more or less fairly, and the richest really ought to pay the most, but the crucial thing is that they are made. Because, above all, stopping climate change means giving up on growth. That will be hard. Not only will our standards of living almost certainly drop, but it's likely that the very quality of our society—equality, safety, and trust—will decline, too. That's not something to be giddy about, but it's still a price that those of us living in affluent countries should prepare to pay. Because however difficult it is to slow down, flooding Bangladesh cannot be an option. In other words, we can and should act. It's just going to hurt. - Daniel Immerwahr, Growth vs the Climate (https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/growth-vs-the-climate) On Perennial Apocalypticism My offices were so cold I couldn't concentrate, and my staff were typing with gloves on. I pleaded with Jimmy to set the thermostats at 68 degrees, but it didn't do any good. - Paul Sabin, quoting Rosalynn Carter in The Bet (https://books.google.com/books?id=nVd_AAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false) Mostafa K. Tolba, executive director of the United Nations environmental program, told delegates that if the nations of the world continued their present policies, they would face by the turn of the century ''an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible, as any nuclear holocaust.'' - New York Times, 1982 (https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/11/world/un-ecology-parley-opens-amid-gloom.html) A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of "eco-refugees", threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP. He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control." - AP News, 1989 (https://web.archive.org/web/20201113001053/https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0) On Environmental Conservation It's not the case that humankind has failed to conserve habitat. By 2019, an area of Earth larger than the whole of Africa was protected, an area that is equivalent to 15 percent of Earth's land surface. The number of designated protected areas in the world has grown from 9,214 in 1962 to 102,102 in 2003 to 244,869 in 2020. - Michael Shellenburger, Apocalypse Never, p.75 Thanks to habitat protection and targeted conservation efforts, many beloved species have been pulled from the brink of extinction, including albatrosses, condors, manatees, oryxes, pandas, rhinoceroses, Tasmanian devils, and tigers; according to the ecologist Stuart Pimm, the overall rate of extinctions has been reduced by 75 percent. - Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now, p.160 On Environmental Optimism Following China's ban on ivory last year, 90% of Chinese support it, ivory demand has dropped by almost half, and poaching rates are falling (https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/conservation/china-has-banned-ivory-but-has-the-african-elephant-poaching-crisis-actually-been-stemmed/news-story/b086f6a0e61acfcc15abeed18f899136) in places like Kenya. WWF (https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/what-impact-chinas-ivory-ban) The population of wild tigers in Nepal was found to have nearly doubled in the last nine years, thanks to efforts by conservationists and increased funding for protected areas. Independent (https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/tigers-nepal-double-wwf-conservation-big-cats-wildlife-trade-a8551271.html) Deforestation in Indonesia fell by 60%, as a result of a ban on clearing peatlands, new educational campaigns and better law enforcement. Ecowatch (https://www.ecowatch.com/indonesia-deforestation-2595918463.html) See the remaining 294 good news stories here (https://medium.com/future-crunch/99-good-news-stories-you-probably-didnt-hear-about-in-2018-cc3c65f8ebd0), here (https://futurecrun.ch/99-good-news-2019), and here (https://futurecrun.ch/99-good-news-2020) Set your thermostats to 68, put those gloves on, and send an email over to incrementspodcast@gmail.com

To establish whether you are in good shape a doctor might take your pulse. In economics, Gross Domestic Product (aka GDP) is the go-to metric for determining economic health. Governments can be toppled off the back of disappointing GDP data - think recessions (or even worse the dreaded double-dip recession!). But who was the man behind the creation of this powerful if often misunderstood concept and what might he make of the latter-day uses and abuses of GDP today? In the first episode of our fifth season, your friendly neighbourhood economists, Pete and Gav, explore the life and ideas of Simon Kuznets. A man of mystery, they hunt down how he became such a hugely influential figure in the world of economics and how he ended up having at least two curves named after him, the ultimate if unspoken dream of every academic economist. Along the way, you can test your knowledge of Belarus, the birth place of Kuznets and hear us (!) eating some food related to his Jewish background. As always, technical support is provided by a very tired Nic and music comes from Jukedeck. You can create your own at Jukedeck.com.

The simple analytics of the environmental Kuznets curve, Energy Efficiency Standards Are More Regressive Than Energy Taxes: Theory and Evidence, and Who Values Future Energy Savings? Evidence from American Drivers Prof. Arik Levinson is a Professor of Economics at Georgetown University. He is known for his research in the fields of energy economics and environmental economics. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/scientificsense/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/scientificsense/support

If you want to be remembered in economics, get yourself a curve. There's the Lorenz curve, the Laffer curve, the Kuznets curve, and, probably most famous, the Phillips curve. Phillips was A.W. Phillips, an economist from New Zealand who worked in London. In 1958 he drew a curve connecting the dots between inflation and unemployment. When unemployment went down, inflation went up. The Phillips Curve took the economics profession by storm.

“…C'era una volta un mito.Le cose devono andare peggio prima di poter andare meglio. All'inizio degli anni novanta gli economisti Grossman e Krueger scoprirono che con la crescita del PIL l'inquinamento prima aumentava e poi diminuiva, con un andamento rappresentabile da un grafico a forma di U rovesciata detto curva ambientale di Kuznets…”

Uma discussão sobre como a modernização da economia, primeiro, aumenta e, depois, diminui a desigualdade; e por quê a redução da miséria anda de mãos dadas com o crescimento econômico.

Quando è nato il PIL? Da cosa aveva messo in guardia il suo stesso inventore?E come ha fatto a diventare l'indice che più di tutti gli altri vuole rappresentare il progresso?Conosciamo indici alternativi per misurare il benessere?E se li conosciamo, perchè non si diffondono?Un breve viaggio attraverso la nascita e l'evoluzione del singolo indice economico che guida le nostre economie da ormai quasi un secolo. Ma in che direzione?

Another wave of reflections for capitalism is now kindled by the Covid-19 crisis. Will the fiscal stimulus uplift the average Americans or end up exacerbating inequality? How is the crisis revealing fundamental fractures of the American and Western societies? The world as we have known it for the past decades has come to a stop, and the global socio-economic system might finally be shaken up as businesses remake their supply chains and governments re-envision their globalization goals... As people reflect on those important questions, we think it’s timely to re-introduce an earlier interview with Prof. Branko Milanovic on his book “Capitalism, Alone” and his insightful critique on the present and future of this political-economic system. “Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World” provides a detailed recount of the path through which Capitalism came to dominate our world; an overview of the different capitalistic systems now govern the world; a range of problems such as inequality that Capitalism has engendered and struggled to respond to; and a deep reflection on the urgent socio-economic challenges our societies now face and how we may address them. As the public today grows ever more concerned with inequality, one of the most noteworthy ideas in the book is how liberal meritocratic capitalism is a system with inherent characteristics that “enhance inequality.” Drawing from Thomas Piketty and a wide range of literature and data, Prof. Milanovic provides a refreshing view on how we may rethink radical solutions for our dire problems. Branko Milanović is a visiting presidential professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a senior scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-economic Inequality. He served as lead economist in the World Bank’s Research Department for almost 20 years, leaving to write his book on global income inequality, “Worlds Apart” (2005). His book “The Haves and the Have-nots” (2011) was selected by The Globalist as the 2011 Book of the Year. “Global Inequality” (2016) was awarded the Bruno Kreisky Prize for the best political book of 2016 and the Hans Matthöfer Prize in 2018, and was translated into 16 languages. It addresses economic and economic and political effects of globalization and introduces the concept of successive “Kuznets waves” of inequality. In March 2018, Milanovic was awarded (jointly with Mariana Mazzucato) the 2018 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Knowledge.

In today’s episode, we cover:● The Rebound Effect and the ironic implications of improving energy efficiency● Harry’s journey into Climate Change● How Harry earned the moniker, “The Godfather of Rebound”● Contention around rebound and its Climate implications● Factoring in the welfare of those in developing countries and the plight of “energy poverty”● The integral role of nuclear in any clean energy strategy● Ecomodernism and the focus on GDP-driven solutions to Climate ChangeLinks to topics discussed in this episode:● Decision Processes Incorporated: http://www.decisionprocessesinc.com/● Khazzoom–Brookes postulate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazzoom%E2%80%93Brookes_postulate● The Rebound Effect: https://blog.ucsusa.org/peter-oconnor/energy-efficiency-what-is-the-rebound-effect-946● Amory Lovins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amory_Lovins● Rocky Mountain Institute: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Mountain_Institute● Ecomodernist Manifesto: http://www.ecomodernism.org/● Environmental Kuznets Curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve#Environmental_Kuznets_curve

Mike Best (University of Massachusetts, Lowell) Launch of the Schumpeter Prize 2018-winning Book "How Growth Really Happens. The Making of Economic Miracles through Production, Governance, and Skills". Achieving economic growth is one of today's key challenges. In this groundbreaking book, Michael Best argues that to understand how successful growth happens we need an economic framework that focuses on production, governance, and skills. This production-centric framework is the culmination of three simultaneous journeys. The first has been Best's visits to hundreds of factories worldwide, starting early as the son of a labor organizer and continuing through his work as an academic and industrial consultant. The second is a survey of two hundred years of economic thought from Babbage to Krugman, with stops along the way for Marx, Marshall, Young, Penrose, Richardson, Schumpeter, Kuznets, Abramovitz, Keynes, and Jacobs. The third is a tour of historical episodes of successful and failed transformations, focusing sharply on three core elements—the production system, business organization, and skill formation—and their interconnections. Best makes the case that government should create the institutional infrastructures needed to support these elements and their interconnections rather than subsidize individual enterprises. The power of Best's alternative framework is illustrated by case studies of transformative experiences previously regarded as economic "miracles": America's World War II industrial buildup, Germany's postwar recovery, Greater Boston's innovation system, Ireland's tech-sector boom, and the rise of the Asian Tigers and China. Speaker biography: Michael H. Best is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, where he was codirector of the Center for Industrial Competitiveness. Today he lives in Oxford. He has held numerous academic fellowships and participated in development projects with the United Nations, the World Bank, and governments in more than twenty countries. He is the author of The New Competition: Institutions of Industrial Restructuring and The New Competitive Advantage: The Renewal of American Industry. Speakers: Mike Best (University of Massachusetts, Lowell) Released by: SOAS Economics Podcasts

I denne uge skulle Nobelprisen i litteratur have været uddelt. Men det blev den ikke – for Det Svenske Akademi, der uddeler prisen, er i dyb krise. Efter en uge, hvor balladens umiddelbare omdrejningspunkt, ’kulturprofilen’ Jean-Claude Arnault, fik to års fængsel for voldtægt, kommer litteraturredaktør Peter Nielsen i studiet og udruller sagen. Og så skal vi tale om handelskrigen mellem Kina og USA. Vores nye korrespondent i Asien, Lasse Karner, prøver at forstå begge parter. Vi skal også snakke om BNP. For det er altså ikke nyt, at det brugte mål for nationers velstand er under kritik. Faktisk advarede begrebets fader, den russisk-amerikanske økonom og nobelprismodtager Simon Kuznets om at bruge begrebet alene, allerede da han i 1930’erne introducerede det. Nikola Gøttsche fortæller om Kuznets og hans advarsel. Og Rune Lykkeberg har atter optur over ingen ringere end Lars Løkke Rasmussen – eller i hvert fald over hans gravlægning af benzinbilen i den tale, han holdt ved Folketingets åbning.  

Episode 21 - Veronica Kuznets by MwMPodcast --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/mimosaswithmichael/support

Knowledge is the only truly infinite resource, and its value multiplies by the number of people who put it to work. How can we put what we know about climate change to work and develop sustainable innovations that either reduce emissions or capture carbon from the atmosphere? And what role might Nori play in accelerating that innovation? Ramez Naam is a well-known author and computer scientist who spent 13 years at Microsoft, leading teams in web browsing, internet search and artificial intelligence. He is also the winner of the 2005 H.G. Wells Award for the non-fiction work More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement. Ramez’s award-winning science fiction series, the Nexus Trilogy, tackles the pros and cons of technological innovation. He speaks around the world on exponential technology, solving environmental challenges and disruptive energy technologies, and Ramez is an angel investor in several clean energy startups. Today, Ramez joins Ross, Christophe and Paul to explain how he ‘fell in love with the planet’ on a road trip to the Yucatan. They discuss the idea behind his book, The Infinite Resource, describing how innovation will allow us to use fewer resources to accomplish more. Ramez walks us through the biggest barriers to reversing climate change and addresses the challenge of pushing back against tribal thinking and the spread of misinformation. Listen in for Ramez’s insight around the top sustainable innovations coming to the market and learn how Nori supports the consumer’s preference for clean AND makes it easy to get paid for carbon sequestration.   Resources  Nexus by Ramez Naam The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planetby Ramez Naam Books by Ramez Naam Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright ESS Inc Carbon Engineering Brian Von Herzen on Reversing Climate Change EP034 New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson   Key Takeaways [3:30] The lessons Ramez learned from his failed startups Look for real need Add value to others, others will add value to you No technology is all good or all bad [6:17] Ramez’s environmental awakening Road trip to Mayan ruins in Yucatan Spent day at deserted beach, ‘fell in love with planet’ [8:41] The idea behind The Infinite Resource Huge innovative capabilities to solve problems Use fewer resources to accomplish more  [10:45] The greatest barriers to reversing climate change CO2invisible, impact delayed and non-local People get richer, less tolerant of pollution (environmental Kuznets curve) Chinese have appreciation for climate change due to smog [16:21] The pros and cons of shared knowledge People are tribal thinkers (beliefs based on others) Play to naturalistic fallacy, idealize past Accurate info wins out over time despite public fear [21:36] Why there is no fundamental conflict between genetic modification and the organic movement  GMOs reduce toxicity of pesticides applied Align incentives to reduce carbon in atmosphere [24:54] Ramez’s favorite sustainable innovations Solar and wind Batteries (lithium, all-iron flow batteries) EVs (electric + autonomous + ride sharing)  [29:15] Ramez’s take on Nori’s voluntary market Electricity and transport doing well Manufacturing and agriculture need incentive to reduce emissions Consumers better at coordinating behaviors (preference for clean) Make it easy to get paid for sequestration (method doesn’t matter)  [34:45] Ramez’s insight on the human ability to adapt to climate change Will be called upon this century to be ‘shepherds of Earth’ Worry most about tail risks of runaway feedback loops (e.g.: ice-free Arctic)

Con motivo de la publicación del libro "Spanish Economic Growth, 1850-2015", (Palgrave Macmillan 2017), de Leandro Prados de la Escosura, catedrático de Historia Económica de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, tuvo lugar el 9 de abril de 2018, en la Fundación Rafael del Pino, un diálogo entre el autor, Joaquín Almunia, ex vicepresidente de la Comisión Europea y ex comisario Europeo de Competencia, y Luis Garicano, catedrático de Economía y Estrategia y director del Centro de Economía Digital del IE Business School. El acto se inició con la intervención de Prados de la Escosura, que también es catedrático Rafael del Pino, quien destacó que, en la historia de España, el aumento del PIB se debió normalmente a que la población crecía, aunque los niveles de vida variaban poco. En los dos últimos siglos, sin embargo, el aumento del PIB se ha debido a que ha aumentado la cantidad de bienes y servicios producidos por persona. Si se observa el periodo anterior, hay algunas realidades diferentes a las que pensábamos. Antes del siglo XIX había crecimiento, pero era reversible. El PIB aumentaba, pero las crisis hacían que se redujera el nivel. Así, España alcanzó los niveles de renta per cápita más altos en el siglo XIV, antes de la peste, para reducirse después. En los doscientos últimos años, en cambio, el crecimiento ha sido sostenido, con algunos momentos de reversión, como la Guerra Civil o la Gran Recesión. Pero queda claro que los niveles de vida que tenemos hoy día son los más altos jamás alcanzados en la historia. Ahora bien, no es un crecimiento lineal, sino que tiene tres grandes fases: hasta 1950, cuando estuvo cayendo; entre 1950 y 1975, con un crecimiento muy fuerte; y desde entonces hasta 2007, cuando el crecimiento fue sostenido, pero con una velocidad menor. También señaló que el PIB ha crecido tanto porque ha aumentado el PIB por persona. Ello se debió a que se produjo un cambio del marco de incentivos a partir de las revoluciones liberales del siglo XIX. Son cambios del tipo de los ciudadanos son iguales ante la ley, la propiedad privada está protegida, los mercados están liberalizados, hay control sobre el Ejecutivo. Gracias a ello, aumenta la inversión, se transfieren recursos de la agricultura a los servicios y se cambia la inversión de vivienda a maquinaria. Además, el PIB per cápita crece porque trabajamos mejor, esto es, se produce más por hora trabajada. De hecho, la productividad ha aumentado 27 veces. Hasta 1975, el crecimiento del PIB per cápita estaba estrechamente vinculado al crecimiento del PIB por hora. A partir de entonces, sin embargo, la relación es inversa y cuando el PIB per cápita crece mucho, es porque hay más gente ocupada. Es lo que ocurre desde 1975. Esto se debe a que los nuevos sectores crean empleo, pero no atraen innovación. Producimos más por hora trabajada porque utilizamos más capital, pero también porque utilizamos más capital humano y más capital intangible. Esto es así hasta 1950. Desde entonces, la productividad aumenta porque somos más eficientes utilizando esos recursos. Por último, destacó que España es un país que antes de 1950 crecía, pero aun así las distancias con los países desarrollados aumentaban. A partir de entonces, acorta distancias excepto en los años de la Transición y la Gran Recesión. Joaquín Almunia, por su parte, señaló que la productividad aparente se estanca desde mediados de los 60. La economía española no ha combinado bien aumentos de empleo y de productividad. Cuando crece es porque se utiliza mejor el empleo, pero entonces la productividad se estanca o baja. Para crecer, dependemos de la capacidad para aumentar los niveles de empleo. Desde 1980, la productividad está prácticamente estancada, lo que nos debe llevar a la reflexión de cara al futuro. Hay margen para utilizar más empleo, como incorporar a más mujeres al mercado de trabajo, o como consecuencia del envejecimiento. Pero hay que pensar sobre cómo crecer aumentando la productividad, lo que implica que nos tenemos que ocupar de las enormes carencias en educación, capital humano, investigación y desarrollo, el funcionamiento de los mercados de bienes, servicios y trabajo, el exceso de corporativismo y la falta de competencia y de las diferencias de productividad entre las grandes empresas y las pequeñas. También tenemos una falta de ahorro interno, una tasa de inversión pública bajísima y unas necesidades de inversión privada que van a requerir enormes cantidades de ahorro privado. En su opinión, no convergemos con los países más avanzados por una mezcla de infrautilización de los recursos humanos, por los altos niveles de paro, por falta de ahorro, por tener unas tasas de endeudamiento grandes. Además, tenemos que transformar el entorno empresarial para que no sea minifundista. Y tenemos que resolver el problema de un entorno escasamente innovador con muchísimas barreras para innovar. Luis Garicano destacó que el “mal holandés”, esto es una subida de precios por entradas de riqueza, es una enfermedad que España ha sufrido tras el Siglo de Oro y que llevó a que nuestro país tuviera el 40% del empleo en el sector servicios ya hace doscientos años, debido al alto número que había de curas, monjas y sirvientes. El “mal holandés” provoca que la productividad deje de crecer y eso, según Garicano, es lo que le ha vuelto a suceder a España a finales del siglo XX y principios de este. Debido a la entrada en el euro, España bajó mucho los tipos de interés, vino dinero de Europa, la moneda se hizo muy fuerte, nos desindustrializamos y fuimos al sector servicios. Hemos tenido una versión diferente del “mal holandés” en la cual entran euros y nos lo gastamos en ladrillo. También añadió que otra hipótesis para explicar lo sucedido en los últimos años es que no ha funcionado bien la reasignación de recursos. Donde más regulación hay se crece menos, y crecen mucho las empresas menos productivas y con “contactos”. De ahí derivan los problemas de innovación y productividad. Prados de la Escosura volvió a tomar la palabra para referirse a la desigualdad. Según dijo, la evolución de la desigualdad en España desde hace doscientos años es como una V invertida: aumenta hasta la Primera Guerra Mundial, desde entonces se reduce hasta los años 70, con la excepción de la autarquía. Desde finales del franquismo se mantiene estable dentro de unos límites de fluctuación. Lo que ha ocurrido en la Gran Recesión es un movimiento de esos límites de estabilidad. La remuneración del capital, además, lleva subiendo desde los años 50, pero eso no quiere decir que haya subido la desigualdad. Lo que ha pasado es que la principal fuerza motriz es la dispersión de las rentas del trabajo, porque empiezan a haber personas cualificadas que ganan más, lo que aumenta las desigualdades. La redistribución progresiva corrige el aumento de la desigualdad. El aumento en los últimos años se debe al crecimiento del desempleo. En términos históricos España sigue la evolución de la curva de Kuznets en materia de desigualdad. En nuestro país hay crecimiento económico y desigualdad hasta los años 20, desde entonces aumenta la igualdad. Y es que, a medida que aumenta la libertad económica, disminuye la desigualdad, porque hay más competencia, que es enemiga de los grupos de interés y de la búsqueda de rentas. Además, la redistribución promovida por el Estado del Bienestar ha aumentado desde la década de los 90. Almunia matizó al respecto que, en términos de riqueza, España no está en los niveles más altos del mundo en igualdad, mientras que en desigualdad de rentas generada por el mercado estamos en la media, y muy mal después de la corrección pública. El mercado está tendiendo a generar cada vez más desigualdad, a causa de la globalización y, sobre todo, del cambio tecnológico. En el caso español, el 80% del aumento de la desigualdad se explica por el aumento del desempleo y por el paro de larga duración. Por tanto, hacen falta correcciones antes de que entren las políticas públicas de redistribución. Además, las políticas de redistribución son más pequeñas y menos eficaces que en muchos otros países europeos. En los años de la democracia, destacó, se está produciendo un aumento de las desigualdades provocadas por el mercado. El esfuerzo redistributivo que ha habido que hacer es mayor. Eso ha venido funcionando bien hasta la crisis. Durante la crisis ha aumentado la desigualdad. Además, la tolerancia de la opinión pública ante la desigualdad es mucho menor que en el pasado. Y el mundo académico la considera como un freno al crecimiento. Garicano advirtió de que el funcionamiento de nuestro Estado del bienestar es inusual. En países como Noruega, Holanda o Dinamarca, el 20% más rico recibe el 5-10% de esos beneficios; en España recibe casi el 30%. En cambio, en esos países el 20% más pobre recibe el 30% de los beneficios; en España solo el 10%. La redistribución se está haciendo hacia las clases medias, no hacia los pobres. El tema clave en España, agregó, es la desigualdad demográfica. Los mayores de 65 años han mejorado desde la crisis, los demás han bajado y perdido poder adquisitivo. El problema al que nos enfrentamos tiene difícil solución política porque los jóvenes son cada vez menos, mientras que los recursos irán destinándose cada vez más a los mayores. El cambio tecnológico puede hacer desaparecer los empleos rutinarios. Hay una desigualdad ahí que está anticipada. A la hora de compensar estos golpes, el Estado del Bienestar tiene un papel crucial a la hora de proteger a estas personas y facilitar su transición hacia los empleos del futuro. El Estado del Bienestar va a tener que afrontar esos dos grandes retos, demográfico y tecnológico, a la vez.

Con motivo de la publicación del libro "Spanish Economic Growth, 1850-2015", (Palgrave Macmillan 2017), de Leandro Prados de la Escosura, catedrático de Historia Económica de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, tuvo lugar el 9 de abril de 2018, en la Fundación Rafael del Pino, un diálogo entre el autor, Joaquín Almunia, ex vicepresidente de la Comisión Europea y ex comisario Europeo de Competencia, y Luis Garicano, catedrático de Economía y Estrategia y director del Centro de Economía Digital del IE Business School. El acto se inició con la intervención de Prados de la Escosura, que también es catedrático Rafael del Pino, quien destacó que, en la historia de España, el aumento del PIB se debió normalmente a que la población crecía, aunque los niveles de vida variaban poco. En los dos últimos siglos, sin embargo, el aumento del PIB se ha debido a que ha aumentado la cantidad de bienes y servicios producidos por persona. Si se observa el periodo anterior, hay algunas realidades diferentes a las que pensábamos. Antes del siglo XIX había crecimiento, pero era reversible. El PIB aumentaba, pero las crisis hacían que se redujera el nivel. Así, España alcanzó los niveles de renta per cápita más altos en el siglo XIV, antes de la peste, para reducirse después. En los doscientos últimos años, en cambio, el crecimiento ha sido sostenido, con algunos momentos de reversión, como la Guerra Civil o la Gran Recesión. Pero queda claro que los niveles de vida que tenemos hoy día son los más altos jamás alcanzados en la historia. Ahora bien, no es un crecimiento lineal, sino que tiene tres grandes fases: hasta 1950, cuando estuvo cayendo; entre 1950 y 1975, con un crecimiento muy fuerte; y desde entonces hasta 2007, cuando el crecimiento fue sostenido, pero con una velocidad menor. También señaló que el PIB ha crecido tanto porque ha aumentado el PIB por persona. Ello se debió a que se produjo un cambio del marco de incentivos a partir de las revoluciones liberales del siglo XIX. Son cambios del tipo de los ciudadanos son iguales ante la ley, la propiedad privada está protegida, los mercados están liberalizados, hay control sobre el Ejecutivo. Gracias a ello, aumenta la inversión, se transfieren recursos de la agricultura a los servicios y se cambia la inversión de vivienda a maquinaria. Además, el PIB per cápita crece porque trabajamos mejor, esto es, se produce más por hora trabajada. De hecho, la productividad ha aumentado 27 veces. Hasta 1975, el crecimiento del PIB per cápita estaba estrechamente vinculado al crecimiento del PIB por hora. A partir de entonces, sin embargo, la relación es inversa y cuando el PIB per cápita crece mucho, es porque hay más gente ocupada. Es lo que ocurre desde 1975. Esto se debe a que los nuevos sectores crean empleo, pero no atraen innovación. Producimos más por hora trabajada porque utilizamos más capital, pero también porque utilizamos más capital humano y más capital intangible. Esto es así hasta 1950. Desde entonces, la productividad aumenta porque somos más eficientes utilizando esos recursos. Por último, destacó que España es un país que antes de 1950 crecía, pero aun así las distancias con los países desarrollados aumentaban. A partir de entonces, acorta distancias excepto en los años de la Transición y la Gran Recesión. Joaquín Almunia, por su parte, señaló que la productividad aparente se estanca desde mediados de los 60. La economía española no ha combinado bien aumentos de empleo y de productividad. Cuando crece es porque se utiliza mejor el empleo, pero entonces la productividad se estanca o baja. Para crecer, dependemos de la capacidad para aumentar los niveles de empleo. Desde 1980, la productividad está prácticamente estancada, lo que nos debe llevar a la reflexión de cara al futuro. Hay margen para utilizar más empleo, como incorporar a más mujeres al mercado de trabajo, o como consecuencia del envejecimiento. Pero hay que pensar sobre cómo crecer aumentando la productividad, lo que implica que nos tenemos que ocupar de las enormes carencias en educación, capital humano, investigación y desarrollo, el funcionamiento de los mercados de bienes, servicios y trabajo, el exceso de corporativismo y la falta de competencia y de las diferencias de productividad entre las grandes empresas y las pequeñas. También tenemos una falta de ahorro interno, una tasa de inversión pública bajísima y unas necesidades de inversión privada que van a requerir enormes cantidades de ahorro privado. En su opinión, no convergemos con los países más avanzados por una mezcla de infrautilización de los recursos humanos, por los altos niveles de paro, por falta de ahorro, por tener unas tasas de endeudamiento grandes. Además, tenemos que transformar el entorno empresarial para que no sea minifundista. Y tenemos que resolver el problema de un entorno escasamente innovador con muchísimas barreras para innovar. Luis Garicano destacó que el “mal holandés”, esto es una subida de precios por entradas de riqueza, es una enfermedad que España ha sufrido tras el Siglo de Oro y que llevó a que nuestro país tuviera el 40% del empleo en el sector servicios ya hace doscientos años, debido al alto número que había de curas, monjas y sirvientes. El “mal holandés” provoca que la productividad deje de crecer y eso, según Garicano, es lo que le ha vuelto a suceder a España a finales del siglo XX y principios de este. Debido a la entrada en el euro, España bajó mucho los tipos de interés, vino dinero de Europa, la moneda se hizo muy fuerte, nos desindustrializamos y fuimos al sector servicios. Hemos tenido una versión diferente del “mal holandés” en la cual entran euros y nos lo gastamos en ladrillo. También añadió que otra hipótesis para explicar lo sucedido en los últimos años es que no ha funcionado bien la reasignación de recursos. Donde más regulación hay se crece menos, y crecen mucho las empresas menos productivas y con “contactos”. De ahí derivan los problemas de innovación y productividad. Prados de la Escosura volvió a tomar la palabra para referirse a la desigualdad. Según dijo, la evolución de la desigualdad en España desde hace doscientos años es como una V invertida: aumenta hasta la Primera Guerra Mundial, desde entonces se reduce hasta los años 70, con la excepción de la autarquía. Desde finales del franquismo se mantiene estable dentro de unos límites de fluctuación. Lo que ha ocurrido en la Gran Recesión es un movimiento de esos límites de estabilidad. La remuneración del capital, además, lleva subiendo desde los años 50, pero eso no quiere decir que haya subido la desigualdad. Lo que ha pasado es que la principal fuerza motriz es la dispersión de las rentas del trabajo, porque empiezan a haber personas cualificadas que ganan más, lo que aumenta las desigualdades. La redistribución progresiva corrige el aumento de la desigualdad. El aumento en los últimos años se debe al crecimiento del desempleo. En términos históricos España sigue la evolución de la curva de Kuznets en materia de desigualdad. En nuestro país hay crecimiento económico y desigualdad hasta los años 20, desde entonces aumenta la igualdad. Y es que, a medida que aumenta la libertad económica, disminuye la desigualdad, porque hay más competencia, que es enemiga de los grupos de interés y de la búsqueda de rentas. Además, la redistribución promovida por el Estado del Bienestar ha aumentado desde la década de los 90. Almunia matizó al respecto que, en términos de riqueza, España no está en los niveles más altos del mundo en igualdad, mientras que en desigualdad de rentas generada por el mercado estamos en la media, y muy mal después de la corrección pública. El mercado está tendiendo a generar cada vez más desigualdad, a causa de la globalización y, sobre todo, del cambio tecnológico. En el caso español, el 80% del aumento de la desigualdad se explica por el aumento del desempleo y por el paro de larga duración. Por tanto, hacen falta correcciones antes de que entren las políticas públicas de redistribución. Además, las políticas de redistribución son más pequeñas y menos eficaces que en muchos otros países europeos. En los años de la democracia, destacó, se está produciendo un aumento de las desigualdades provocadas por el mercado. El esfuerzo redistributivo que ha habido que hacer es mayor. Eso ha venido funcionando bien hasta la crisis. Durante la crisis ha aumentado la desigualdad. Además, la tolerancia de la opinión pública ante la desigualdad es mucho menor que en el pasado. Y el mundo académico la considera como un freno al crecimiento. Garicano advirtió de que el funcionamiento de nuestro Estado del bienestar es inusual. En países como Noruega, Holanda o Dinamarca, el 20% más rico recibe el 5-10% de esos beneficios; en España recibe casi el 30%. En cambio, en esos países el 20% más pobre recibe el 30% de los beneficios; en España solo el 10%. La redistribución se está haciendo hacia las clases medias, no hacia los pobres. El tema clave en España, agregó, es la desigualdad demográfica. Los mayores de 65 años han mejorado desde la crisis, los demás han bajado y perdido poder adquisitivo. El problema al que nos enfrentamos tiene difícil solución política porque los jóvenes son cada vez menos, mientras que los recursos irán destinándose cada vez más a los mayores. El cambio tecnológico puede hacer desaparecer los empleos rutinarios. Hay una desigualdad ahí que está anticipada. A la hora de compensar estos golpes, el Estado del Bienestar tiene un papel crucial a la hora de proteger a estas personas y facilitar su transición hacia los empleos del futuro. El Estado del Bienestar va a tener que afrontar esos dos grandes retos, demográfico y tecnológico, a la vez.

Rahoita podcastin tekoa Patreonissa. Pienikin tuki auttaa! https://www.patreon.com/vistbacka Videoversio: https://youtu.be/Hv975RrsY0I RSS: http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:358481639/sounds.rss Podcastin seitsemäntenä vieraana mm. energiaa, ympäristöä ja yhteiskuntaa liittyviä kysymyksiä käsittelevä Aalto-yliopiston tutkija ja tietokirjailija Janne M. Korhonen. Jakso taltioitiin 14.11.2017. Janne M. Korhonen tunnetaan mm. Rauli Partasen kanssa kirjoitetuista, ydinvoimaa käsittelevistä Uhkapeli ilmastolla ja Musta hevonen -kirjoistaan, joissa esitetään vahva näkemys siitä, että ydinvoimalla on merkittävä rooli ilmastonmuutoksen vastaisessa taistelussa. Hän on myös Suomen Ekomodernistien perustajajäsen. Jaksossa käsiteltyjä teemoja: • Resurssien tasaisempi jakaminen • Öljyhuippu • Yhteiskunnallisen romahduksen skenaariot • Teknologiaoptimismi • Talouskasvu • John Michael Greer, Oswald Spengler, Joseph Tainter • Ulkoishaitat • Kiina ja demokratia • Ekonomismi • E-Prime • Luksusavaruuskommunismi • Nollapäiväinen työviikko • Elon Musk • Outokumpu • Kompleksisten järjestelmien resilienssi • Yhteiskunnallisen epävarmuuden ja autoritaarisuuden yhteys • Lohkoketjuteknologiat Linkkejä keskustelun tiimoilta: • Uhkapeli ilmastolla -kirja: http://tiny.cc/hcompy • Musta hevonen -kirja: http://tiny.cc/mcompy • Jacobsonin ja Ten Hoeven artikkeli "Worldwide health effects of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident": http://tiny.cc/rvpmpy • John Michael Greerin katabolisen romahduksen teoria: http://tiny.cc/k8nmpy • Joseph Tainter: The Collapse of Complex Societies -kirja: http://tiny.cc/l9nmpy • Sinkohyökkäys rakenteilla olevaan ydinvoimalaan: http://tiny.cc/v9nmpy • Cradle to Cradle -kirja: http://tiny.cc/69nmpy • Black Mirror -tv-sarja: http://tiny.cc/daompy • Wiredin artikkeli Kiinan kansalaisten luottopisteytysjärjestelmästä: http://tiny.cc/jaompy • Ha-Joon Changin Taloustiede -kirja: http://tiny.cc/saompy • James Kwak: Economism -kirja: http://tiny.cc/yaompy • Alaska ja kollektivisoidut öljytuotot: http://tiny.cc/3aompy • Korhosen Äänekosken biotuotetehdasta käsittelevä kirjoitus "Kaikki työ ei ole tekemisen arvoista": http://tiny.cc/qbompy • Kuznets ja BKT: http://tiny.cc/vbompy • Korhosen ja Välikankaan artikkeli "Outokumpu: Constraints and ingenuity": http://tiny.cc/c9nmpy • Korhosen kirjoitus ydinjätteestä (ei käsitelty keskustelussa, mutta kiinnostanee monia): http://tiny.cc/0bompy • Korhosen englanninkielinen blogi: https://jmkorhonen.net/ • Korhosen suomenkielinen blogi: http://yyyy.puheenvuoro.uusisuomi.fi/ • Korhosen artikkelivinkki kapitalismin kriisistä: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures • Korhosen ja Partasen Uhkapeli ilmastolla -kirjan englanninkielinen versio: https://climategamble.net • Korhosen Facebook-sivu: https://www.facebook.com/jmkorhonen • Korhosen Twitter: https://twitter.com/jmkorhonen • Suomen Ekomodernistit ry: https://ekomodernismi.fi/ ----- Ihmisiä, siis eläimiä -podcast rakastaa ymmärrystä avartavia näkökulmia. Syvän tiedonjanon ajaman ohjelman visiona on luoda asioiden ytimeen pureutuvaa, hitaampaa mediaa. Podcastin keskeisiä teemoja ovat tiede ja taide, tavallinen ja erikoinen, yksilö ja yhteiskunta sekä ihminen ja muu luonto. Ohjelman vetäjä, ymmärrykseltään keskeneräinen mutta utelias Henry Vistbacka on sekatekijä, muusikko ja kirjoittaja. Podcastin yhteistyökumppanina toimii Helsingin Vallilassa päämajaansa pitävä, tiedettä raaka-aineenaan käyttävä taiteellinen tuotantoyhtiö Artlab. • Facebook: https://facebook.com/ihmisiis • Twitter: https://twitter.com/ihmisiis • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ihmisiis • Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/ihmisiis • Kieku: https://www.kieku.com/channel/Ihmisi%C3%A4%2C%20siis%20el%C3%A4imi%C3%A4 • Studio podcastin takana: https://artlab.fi

In the 1920s lead was added to petrol. It made cars more powerful and was, according to its advocates, a “gift”. But lead is a gift which poisons people; something figured out as long ago as Roman times. There’s some evidence that as countries get richer, they tend initially to get dirtier and later clean up. Economists call this the “environmental Kuznets curve”. It took the United States until the 1970s to tax lead in petrol, then finally ban it, as the country moved down the far side of the environmental Kuznets curve. But as Tim Harford explains in this astonishing story, the consequences of the Kuznets curve aren’t always only economic. Producer: Ben Crighton Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon (Image: Petrol Nozzle, Credit: Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images)

What follows is an edited transcript of my conversation with Vincent Geloso. Petersen: My guest today is Vincent Geloso of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University. Vincent, welcome to Economics Detective Radio. Geloso: It's a pleasure to be here. Petersen: So the paper we'll be discussing today is titled "A U-curve of Inequality? Measuring Inequality in the Interwar Period" which Vincent has co-authored with John Moore and Phillips Schlosser. The paper casts doubt on the claim from, most notably, Thomas Piketty and others that inequality fell from the 1920s to the 1960s and rose thereafter. So, Vincent let's start by discussing the inequality literature prior to this paper. What is this U-curve and where did it come from? Geloso: The U-curve is probably the most important stylized fact we have now in the debate over inequality and the idea is that, if you look at the twentieth century, there's a high point of inequality in the 1910s, 1920s and then from the 1930s onwards up to 1970s, it falls dramatically to very low levels and re-increases thereafter, returning to 1920s-like levels of inequality. So the U-curve is the story of inequality in the twentieth century. It's mostly a U.S. story because for other countries it looks less like the U-curve than an inverted J. So it's higher in the 1920s, it still falls like in the U.S. but really increases much more modestly than the United States in places like Sweden, or France, or Canada. But the general story is that there was a high level of inequality at the beginning of the century well up to the mid-second-half of the twentieth century and it re-increased in the latter years and then we have been on a surge since then. Petersen: So, a lot of this is coming from Thomas Piketty, who of course wrote the surprising bestseller "Capital in the Twenty-First Century." Could you talk a little bit about where his data came from? Geloso: Okay, by the way, this is where there's a failing on my part which I think I always find funny; an anecdote to tell about Piketty. I'm originally from Quebec, so I am a French-Canadian, I speak fluent French. His work started coming out in French first and I initially started to write elements of the paper we're discussing today back when it was only in French. And then I told myself, "There's no point, it's only a French book, nobody reads French. What's the point of writing a paper about a book that no one will read?" Biggest mistake of my career, I guess, not writing that paper before. But anyways, besides that, his entire argument is based largely on his most influential paper---which I think was published in 2003 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics---which was using tax data. So, the records, the fiscal statistics to create measurements of income inequality in the United States and the advantage of that is that since the income tax started in 1910s you've got a long, long period of measurement of income inequality with the same source. So it's a great advantage because a lot of the people before like Kuznets, like others had to use residual estimates, different sources, they were amalgamating different sources together and it was always a problem because you couldn't create one homogeneous time-series of inequality. You could get a rough idea and there's a few papers---for those who read economic history stuff---there was a paper by Lindert and Williamson in the 70s in research in economic history and you can see their first graph in that paper was a series of different measures of inequality. They were all pointing to the general similar shaped curve but they were all from massively different statistics, different sources. So one was the 50:10 ratio of earnings, another one was a measure of income, the other was wages and they are all different measures, they are not perfect. You can get a good idea, a rough idea but you cannot have a continuous time estimate which is what Piketty innovated by using the tax-wealth with Emmanuel Saez, recreating this long continuous trend in data from 1917 to the modern day. And they keep updating it regularly to include the new data on a yearly basis. Petersen: So tell me about tax avoidance. How does that affect things? Geloso: Okay, this is where the existing data that all the different sources had---Piketty made advancement. Rather than having variance across different sources, he was eliminating that variance. But there's still an issue of variance within a source. So it's not because you have used a homogenous source that the quality of the data contained within the source is consistent. There's actually quite a lot of variance in data quality because of the way the tax system was done. So a lot of the debate today for the data for today has been---has there been such a large increase in inequality as Piketty and Saez and Atkinson and others have been pointing out? And the reason for that was largely because, as Alan Reynolds, as Joel Slemrod, and a few others have pointed out, the tax changes of the 1980s were so large that people shifted the way they reported income. They changed the way they reported tax liability. What used to be classified as corporate income became classified as individual income, and so you get an artificial increase because of a way the tax system has changed. And this is why a lot of people say, as soon as you correct for the effect of changes in tax reporting behavior, you actually get a much more modest increase of inequality. But that's from 1980 to today with a massive tax change in the 1980s. If you go back further in time, to the interwar period the tax changes are much more dramatic. In 1913, the tax rate was 7%, went up to 15% in 1916 to 73% until 1921, went back down to 24% by 1929, went back up to 79% by 1939. Imagine, that's a lot of movements in the way taxes will affect behavior and it will affect reporting behavior. So, will you report, will you be as honest as you would be when you're filing taxes at 79%, as you are when you're filing taxes at 24%? So you're getting---because of these massive changes in tax regimes that are happening over very short periods of time---these massive changes affect the quality of the data set that Piketty is using for the left side of his U-curve. The left side of the U-curve is probably inaccurate to a very high level because of tax avoidance, and this is where the economists in general failed to talk to historians because there's a few papers out there that did measure---especially in the Journal of Economic History---that did measure changes in reporting. So changes in tax avoidance occur basically to a large level by the top incomes, as Gene Smiley argues in the Journal of Economic History, for example, which Piketty has never cited neither Saez, neither anyone in the debate. And he did corrections, so he checked: Okay, when a tax rate went down from 73% to 24%, did people change their reporting behavior? Did more rich people start to report incomes? And the answer is 'yes.' And as soon as he started doing corrections for that to control the "artificialness"---if that's a word---of the tax changes on affecting the level of inequality, he actually finds that the 1920s have a much lower level of inequality because of the reduction in tax rates and there was very little upward trend, especially when we're comparing with the Piketty, with the Mark Frank data, with the Kuznets data and it shows that as soon as you adjust for tax avoidance the left side of the U-curve flattens dramatically and it looks more like an L---an inverted L---or a J, but it doesn't look at all like a U-curve and that's just tax avoidance for the 1920s. The increases in the 1930s in tax rates would have had the opposite effect where people would have reported less income. So, the level of inequality in the 1920s is overestimated in Piketty and it's underestimated for the 1930s. So you're kind of flattening the entire interwar period as soon as you consider the one issue of tax avoidance. And there are estimates out there in the Essays in Economic and Business History by Gene Smiley and Richard Keehn. Smiley's article in the JEH, which has been ignored in the literature, but which did check that people at the top of the income distribution are generally very sensitive to changes in tax regime in the way they report their tax liability. Petersen: So, today they would do that by maybe registering---having their money in the Cayman Islands or Ireland or the Isle of Man, their tax shelters abroad. Was the avoidance different in the 1920s? I expect it would be harder to enforce taxes given that the income tax was so new and there were all these changes and they didn't have electronic records, or how did it work? Geloso: You're thinking of avoidance in a very negative term which is the illegal part, which is what has somewhat permeated the public debate and I have this reflex myself. I think of avoidance always in that way. But avoidance is sometimes just planning your taxes, your sources of income, differently. One example would be---and it's not really applicable to our case---parents can put their kids on company payroll because it's cheaper dollar for dollar relative to giving them an allowance from after-tax personal income. So, people can change their behavior in their way to get money, in the way they report their income. So you can pass corporate income as a personal income or personal income as corporate income. You can deduct expenses one way or another. And one way or another it comes to affecting the quality of the data set. And it does matter, because if you look at the 1980s when there was a rapid change in the income tax rate, which was much more important a change than the change in the corporate tax rate, it led people to change the type of incorporation they were in, so they became S corporations, so corporations that were not subjected necessarily to the corporate income tax. So, it affected the way people reported, classified their income and it appears artificially the income inequality statistics. The 1920s' equivalent was municipal bonds. Municipal bonds were assets that delivered incomes but they were not subjected to taxes so this was like a tax shelter that was completely legal and that rich people used in dramatic amount to reduce their tax liability. So, when people think of tax avoidance it's generally this idea that people just reorganized their classification of income to make sure they have the smallest liability possible and in a situation like that, what you get is a much different level and trend of inequality because of the changes in tax regimes that induce changes in tax reporting behavior. Petersen: So is Piketty not adjusting for this at all? He's just taking the tax data at face value? Geloso: He's trying some stuff but he gets a lot of the tax history quite wrong and what alerted us to this is that Gene Smiley's paper, which is not in an obscure journal, it's in the Journal of Economic History which is considered a top tier journal in the profession of economics---it's not AER, it's not QJE, but it is a very respectable journal. And Smiley's article is also very cited. There's a large number of citations of that paper and Piketty just ignores it. And you skim through his book and the discussion is always brushed aside and these effects of changes in tax regimes is always minimized as if it was not important. But tax avoidance is only like a fraction of the problem, because if you look, there's another issue that's much more dramatic than tax avoidance. Alone the issue of tax avoidance, if you take Smiley's stuff, changes the narrative dramatically but that's just our first shot in this debate with me, John, and Philip. It's our first shot, the second shot is that filing requirements were nowhere close to what they are like today. And actually this is something funny, the idea of Piketty is that you can create a series assuming tax compliance for a country that was founded on a tax revolt which is---for a historian---kind of a weird assumption built in the way he does his history part. And if you look at it, one of the example is that you look at the changes in wages of people---wages for unskilled workers, wages for mining workers, for agricultural workers---they do not evolve at all like his bottom 90% of income behaves, it behaves actually very differently. So, in our paper we show that the quality of what's at the bottom of the income distribution is dramatically different, so wages go up much faster than the income of the bottom 90%. And this is wages. So, you think what, maybe hours are going down? No they're not in the 1920s and 30s---well in the 30's they're going down---but in 1920s hours are actually staying stable and in some industries are actually slightly increasing. So you should not see what Piketty's data suggest, which is that there was stagnation in the income of the bottom 90%. There was declining unemployment, there was rising wages and hours remaining relatively stable. It's impossible to reconcile these facts with those of Piketty without considering that there might be problems in the way people filed their taxes. And this is where the entire thing breaks down and you look at, for example, the number of tax filers that were actually there. And you look at that as a percentage of the American population, up to the 1930s---so until the Second World War---there's never more than 6 or seven 7 percent of population that files in tax reports. Petersen: And you'd expect it to be the wealthier people too, who are filing right? Because you have people below a certain income, they don't file income tax, right? Geloso: Exactly. This wouldn't be a problem if your distribution of people behaved equal to the distribution of the general population and the movements were the same. It wouldn't be a problem. The thing is when you look at the number of adjusted tax returns which is what Piketty and other people like Estelle Sommeiller or Mark Frank do. They try to re-correct this issue of a very small number of tax reports that were actually filed in and they get an idea---and this is figured too, I think, in our paper. There's a steady upward trend in the number of adjusted tax units but when you look at the actual number of tax units it moves so much. It goes up and down and it doubles in the span of two years, then it reduces by half in the span of another two years and these are such large movements in the number of tax units that it's hard to see that this might be a representative sample of the American population. Differences in reports and such changes in our reporting---and the number of reports I should say---suggest that there is actually a problem in the quality of the data. And this is where we're saying that if you combine this with the observation that wages were increasing, unemployment was falling, and that hours were more or less stable, and that you add this fact of the massive changes in tax returns, you can easily question the quality of the data from the 1920s and the 1930s. This is where we're coming in and we're saying, no, the people who reported taxes were very volatile. They were rich people who reacted to changes in income taxes. Lower income individuals also were very much tax resisters. There's an entire story told by David Beito. I think it's with University North Carolina Press. He has a book on tax resistance in the United States during the 1920s and 30s and there's actually a large documentation of anti-tax leagues that have massive memberships of common individuals who are resisting filing taxes at that time. So it's quite plausible to say that, if there's such a difference in wages, in hours, in unemployment what they and these massive changes in the number of tax returns filed, it suggests that probably the poor people just didn't file in their taxes. So, any movement at the bottom of the distribution does not exist according to Piketty's data. But there were movements at the bottom. There were people who moved from poor Kansas to Illinois. They were still in the bottom 90% but by moving from farming Kansas to Chicago to work in a garment industry, they get a gain in income but that is not captured in Piketty's data because it's highly likely that poor individuals tended to file fewer tax returns and were probably more hostile to filing them, and the rich were just reacting to changes in tax regimes. So, the tax filing requirements would actually lower the level of inequality overall from the 1920s and 1930s. So, the tax avoidance issue would change the trend and the issue of tax filing requirements would drop the level because we're not capturing bottom incomes properly. So you're changing the U-curve progressively as each of our critiques is embedded in the argument you actually progressively bring down the left side of the U-curve and it looks more and more like a J, or an L, or a hockey stick. Petersen: I remember in 2012 Mitt Romney got in trouble for pointing out that 47% of the population doesn't pay income tax. So if Mitt Romney were running for president in the 1920s, I guess he would have said something like 94% of people are not filing and paying income taxes. Is that right? Geloso: Exactly. That would be a very accurate. Well it's 94% of people. The taxes were based on households, but still 6% and then later on after the Second World War it jumped above 40%. So there's a massive change not only in tax regimes in terms of rates, but filing requirement regimes, which will also change the tax behavior of individuals. And not only that, this is something that actually, it was buried in a footnote of Smiley's article which is---still I will point out not cited by Saez and Piketty---but it's so rigorous and it contains so many pieces of information that are crucial. Until 1938 public sector employees were not mandated to file in taxes. This is an unknown fact. Until 1938 they did not have to file in taxes. So this is actually a very very big factor. So in terms of wage earners, so not everyone, it excludes farmers, but all wage earners, 12% of them were government workers. This is a substantial share of the workforce and not only that, their earnings are slightly above the rest of the workforce and the increase in their earnings is above those of the other workers in the United States in that period. But they're just not considered in the tax distribution. So until the public salary Act of 1939---which was debated in the Senate in 1938-1939, the 1.2 million federal employees---this is a large number---were drawing large wages and they're just not included in the statistics based on tax data. This has a massive impact on the level of inequality. Public workers were not in the top 1%, they were not the richest, they were not poor and they were earning much more over time. I'm not trying to debate whether it was efficient government spending or if they were paid at actually providing public goods that people actually did want. But set that issue aside, they had higher wages than the average representative of a sizeable share of the workforce and their wages increased much more importantly than other ones. So you're affecting the trend. You're affecting the level and you add this other issue and then look again, imagine the U-curve in your head. Tax avoidance, it changed the trend. It made it less, it made it much lower in the 1920s than it was. It increased it relative to the Piketty data in the 1930s. The entire level then is reduced by adjusting for tax filing problems and then if you tried to adjust the issue of public sector employees who didn't have to file in their taxes you drop the level again, so it's looking less and less like a U-curve than what Piketty claims. So, we haven't made all these adjustments, we're just stating facts that should be known in the inequality debate. Our goal is later on to test each of our points. We're sending such a large number of criticisms that there's bound to be one that sticks in terms of the data quality. Because these are such huge data quality that it effects a major stylized fact about inequality: the U-curve. If today we believe that the U-curve---there's a debate over whether or not there's been such a large increase---everybody agrees that there's been an increase, but there's a massive debate over how big this increase is today. Imagine how crucial it would be to correctly debate the level of inequality and the trend of the left side of the U-curve. And if we're having all these debates with all the survey data, all the census data, all the private big data stuff that we have out there for the modern era and we still have high level of uncertainty, imagine anything with all the points I've mentioned for the interwar period, the left side of the U-curve. Everything seems to indicate that's probably much lower. I'm not saying there's not a U-curve, maybe it looks like a ball, a very modest ball, or there's a slight decrease, there's a slight increase, but it's not Piketty's U-curve, it's not the same stylized fact. And it changes the narrative we should have about inequality. Petersen: Yeah, I'll never forget one experience I had. It was the original Occupy movement and I went down to see the protests going on in Victoria B.C. where I was at the time and one guy just had a big sign where he had printed off a graph. You know, an inequality graph of the 1% versus the 99% from Piketty and Saez. I'm not sure if it went all the way back to the 1920s but really, that's sort of a very clear sign that these debates are expanding beyond academia and having a big effect on the public and their perception of the world we live in, the ideal policies that we should be pursuing. A big part of the U-curve narrative is to say look at how successful the policies in the 40s and 50s were at reducing inequality and of course if we do away with this U-curve then maybe those policies, all they did was bring more people into the data set. Geloso: Yes, and it changes who reports in the data set. I know Phil Magness, who is joining our team with me and John Moore and Bill Schlosser. Phil Magness has been working on showing that a lot of the changes in our tax regime actually just mimic the entire movement of the income share of the top 1%. It follows what share of taxes they're asked to pay and it leads to changes in reporting and basically it's a story of tax regimes and it changes the entire narrative. But what I find much more depressing---and this is a depressing fact---if just one of our criticisms lands and sticks, the U-curve doesn't look like a U. Let's say it looks like a J. So there's a mid-point in the 1920s and we've been increasing since then at a relatively high rate since the 1970s. So it fell from 1920 to 1970 and then it re-increased. If you look at what caused the leveling from 1920 to 1970, a lot of it has nothing to do with state intervention, with the efforts at redistribution. There's probably a sizable share of it that has to do with that. But there's also a sizable, and probably the larger share, that comes from poor regions catching up with rich regions. If you look at for example the history of inequality in the United States you would see that if you decompose the variance---so what caused the inequality---for most of American history a large share of inequality was caused by differences between states rather than differences between individuals. One way to see it, and I'm making a caricature here to get the point across, but you could have the same shape of distribution in income in Kansas and New York. But since the average in New York is much higher than in Kansas, you average the two in, you get a much higher level of inequality, so you can get like a Gini coefficient for the two of them of .4 but in each of them individually taken the level inequality is like .2. And this is what happens for most of US history. There are massive gaps between regions rather than gaps between skills, between levels, so Mississippi is poorer than New York for a long period of time. But in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s this gap basically volatilized, it began to disappear. One of the massive story of the twentieth century---some economists are aware---is this massiveness of convergence between regions. So the South gets richer. Poor black people move from poor states in the South where they're sharecroppers, they move to the North where they become wage earners in garment factories, in manufacturing and their earnings grow dramatically. So there's a massive convergence during that period. But, if you think about it for a second, it means that the gap between regions and the gap between races is actually a big driver in the leveling part of the U-curve, but that has nothing to do with tax redistribution. It has nothing to do with this. So, as soon as we integrate our criticism into the tax data, and we show that the U-curve looks less and less like a U, the left side of it makes it look less and less like a U. And you consider these two economic history facts that I've just mentioned, it's incredibly depressing to consider in the inequality narrative, to say well a lot of it is just stuff that would have happened anyways. There would have been a decline in inequality regardless of how much the state intervened to redistribute income because there was this convergence. And not only that, the leveling of inequality was not as great as we say it was. So it changes the entire story. We have inequality and how to address the issue and, not only that, I will point out that across the same period the one thing that goes up relatively steadily is government spending to GDP. If you were to account for all our criticism and then consider which part of inequality was reduced by government redistribution, it becomes more and more depressing because it seems like the effect is much smaller than people believe. This is where we're trying to disentangle all these elements to tell the correct story of inequality in the United States and it starts with getting the shape of inequality right. But look at the story I have just told you. As soon as we make this small change of properly assessing things, the entire narrative we have then changes. And this is why it's a dramatic fact to get right and which is why we're somewhat disappointed with Piketty's stuff because he's not making the right level of methodological discussion. Petersen: Right. Piketty uses his narrative to push for large-scale taxes and redistribution. Geloso: Yes. I'm not saying that what he does is bad. It was a massive improvement relative to what was there before. But his story has flaws, and these flaws tend to support his narrative. We point out the flaws that would support a different narrative, that point out that probably inequality is not as high as we say. It probably would have fallen up in the 1970s because of very natural forces and if you think about the fact that since the 1970s there's been a slight divergence---so, imagine the leveling of inequality between regions in the United States. The divergence fell until the 1970s, but it has increased modestly since then because of regulation on housing, things that limit mobility across states that the depress income growth in some areas. So you end up with a slight divergence since then and it is caused by states. It's not caused by anything that the government is doing. It's really an issue of very regionalized factors and each time you consider each of these nuances in, the narrative changes. And it changes dramatically against the story Piketty's telling and it shows that the flaws are biased in favor of the conclusion he supported. Petersen: Right. And I know Phil Magness has really criticized him on this, that he makes a lot of decisions where you could go one way or the other and they always seem to turn out his way. Which is maybe a coincidence, or maybe it's not really the best way to do social science. You point out that there were big price differentials between regions so how does that play into the regional inequality story? Geloso: So, we're basing our discussion on this part of a longer series of papers where each of the points we've discussed will basically be one paper in itself. Here we're just stating this entire case for skepticism, then we'll see how big the impact is. Regardless, even if they're all minor, they will all change the narrative. And prices, regional price differences are an issue in that. So, when you compare nominal income across a country you are getting an idea of inequality but---you will agree with me. So, you're in Vancouver. I'm originally from Montreal. If I give you a dollar income in Vancouver and I give myself a one-dollar income in Montreal you think that dollar will go as far in Vancouver as it does in Montreal? Petersen: I think it probably won't. Geloso: Exactly. So you would expect that regional price differences will affect the level of inequality. And there's actually a lot of people that do that. Each time you make controls for the level of price differences, you actually find that the level of inequality falls modestly. But it falls. But the thing is, the price differences that we have today between Vancouver to Montreal or between New York and the region of Mississippi are not at all what these gaps used to be in 1920 or in 1925. In 1925 the gaps would have been much, much, much larger and from 1925 to the 1940s there's been a convergence of prices across regions. So for the first 50 years, roughly, of the twentieth century you get a convergence of prices across regions. So if you just took nominal income without correcting for regional price differences, you would get a massive drop in inequality. However, if you were to correct for an increasingly smaller mistake because, if you think about it, if the wage gaps used to be on average 25% in 1890, let's say, and they used to be 5% in 1950, the error is decreasing over time. So you're getting the level off by a smaller and smaller quantity over time. So it means that the trend changes. The smaller your measurement error caused by regional price differences falls, the less pronounced the fall in inequality becomes. So you get a massive drop in inequality as measured by nominal income, which is not what it is when you correct the regional price differences, so you put this in real dollars adjusted for purchasing power parity. And not only that, the errors caused by regional prices actually also follow a U-curve. So the errors that would be caused by price level differences across regions declined up to 1950 but since then they've re-increased. So if before you're getting a lower and lower trend---a lower trend by a diminishing amount of error---that means the right side of the curve, that means the increasing disparity in prices across regions since 1950. It means that you're actually increasing nominal prices using nominal income across the country. You will underestimate the increase in inequality since then. So there are actually massive measurement errors caused by this issue of regional prices. When I say massive, I shouldn't say massive because it's dishonest but it affects both the level and the trends. So it affects the shape of the curve and remember we're making all these criticisms to the U-curve story piece by piece. Each one of them has a small prickly effect on the shape of the curve. As soon as one or more starts sticking---and they're all documented otherwise for other periods---not prior interwar period, not a sufficiently as we'd wish to, which is why we're doing this project of massive data collection. It changes the narrative, changes the story, changes the way the curve looks and it's not much of a U-curve anymore and the proper measurements get you a very different story of the evolution of inequality. And that different story forces you to change interpretations and solutions and the entire structure of the debate must change to reflect the higher level of precision that is required for that debate. Petersen: So. I'm trying to think of why these prices between regions might fall in the first half of the twentieth century and rise thereafter. I suppose a lot of it would be real estate, housing? Geloso: Exactly. So housing markets in the U.S. are more or less freer in the first half of the twentieth century than they are today. So most prices, if you can trade a good across borders it will arbitrage out price differences minus transport, right? So if goods are movable more or less as well, and you find it for food, for TVs, for durable goods, you tend to find that there's actually still convergence. But housing, you can't really move a house. There's actually movable houses but they're not a massive share of the market. So you'd expect less ability---and I'm saying this as a euphemism---but you'd expect less ability for arbitrage with housing. The only way you can do arbitrage for housing is by moving around. So I am in Mississippi and I see super high wages in New York. I move from Mississippi to New York. So in Mississippi there's one more housing unit available and in New York there's one less housing unit available. I've driven up housing prices in New York and I've got higher wages but housing is a little more expensive in New York and then it falls in the region where I left in terms of housing, so that real wages in that region converged. So there's a convergence in real wages by people moving around. The problem now is that, there is very, very, very little ability to move around in the United States because zoning restrictions actually make it harder for people to come and exploit the productivity of large cities like New York. So it prevents this convergence in real terms across regions. So a large part of the increase in inequality needs to be corrected for regional price differences, which is the argument about housing. And this is where it's probably that the soundest part of our argument is that the Rognlie papers that attack Piketty state that a large part of inequality was driven by rents towards housing, so the fact that income derives from housing is increasing importantly as a share of total income and has nothing to do with capital itself. It's really the artificial restrictions on housing. And this is largely the problem the inability of people to move to where wages are the most important. This changes the narrative. So that's why the story of regionally correcting price differences is crucial and it's rarely done over a long time series data set. But given the evolution of prices in the United States since 1900, it will affect the trend dramatically. It will affect the level, the shape, and this is not integrated in the argument. And this is why we're saying in this paper, each time you make a correction to get a higher level of precision, it's getting more and more plausible that the curve of inequality doesn't look like a U, it looks probably like an L, probably like a J, but not a U. So the early period of the twentieth century is not as high as people have claimed and there's probably been an increase since the 1970s. Not as much as some would claim, but the increase seems to have happened. The U-curve is probably just fictional. It is the result of poor controls or variations in equality of the taxes. Petersen: We've discussed the housing issue on other episodes of this podcast but it's sort of a one-two punch to inequality, where the people who, you know, maybe have bought a house in the San Francisco Bay area in the 1980s, have seen the value of that house skyrocket. And so of course that would contribute to the upper end of that wealth distribution. And the people who live in Mississippi and might like to move to the San Francisco Bay area and work for Google, can't afford to do it because of the extremely high price of rent there. So, that's reducing mobility and exacerbating these regional differences and also directly increasing the wealth of people who own homes who are, of course, already on the wealthier side. Geloso: Yes, in a static term, correcting for price differences across region. So if you were to take a picture of the economy right now and you make a picture of inequality based only on nominal incomes across the country---just using U.S. dollars---you'll get a higher level than if you correct for regional price differences. However, it's quite likely that if you were to make a movie of how inequality evolved, the housing restrictions---and this is a comment that's outside our paper and it's just something I think it's worth commenting on---if you make it so that it's impossible to move from low-income Mississippi to high-income California, you're going to make sure that inequality stays high and probably increases. If, let's say, there's a shock to international trade and Mississippi area tended to be manufacturing and people can't move from manufacturing to higher productivity jobs in San Francisco. So in dynamic terms, housing restrictions by preventing mobility prevent a strong equalizing source of income. So in static terms you get the level wrong, but in a dynamic term you're preventing the powerful force of mobility across the country---and this is something I like to point out---if you look for example, you bring someone from Italy to Canada in 1890, his income increased 300% as soon as he got to Canada. He was much richer the minute he set foot in Canada. You probably increased inequality in Canada---I don't know about if you decrease it or increase it in Italy---but when you move that guy away, you probably reduce global inequality. So by moving people to where the incomes are higher you level off inequality. In the United States it's the same narrative, you prevent this equalizing force from working through housing restrictions and making adjustments for---this is beyond the scope of our own research---but making adjustments for the increasing restrictiveness of housing that prevents mobility, you will probably get a large part of increasing inequality in the United States or even in England, which is also a situation like that, and in France, is not the result of terrible market forces responding to terrible government policies. Petersen: My guest today has been Vincent Geloso. Vincent thanks for being part of Economics Detective Radio. Geloso: It was a pleasure.