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Economia i cobdícia

Lloguers
https://www.ara.cat/societat/XAVIER-SALA-MARTIN-Que-planificada_0_1984601566.html gràces a les dades i els algoritmes, potser l’economia planificada pot ser millor que la del mercat
https://www.ara.cat/economia/Lherencia-que-deixem-nostres-fills_0_2018198244.html Per mantenir els serveis sociasl ens estem endeutant i ho hauran de pagar els nostres fills
https://jalopnik.com/dominos-is-fixing-americas-crappy-roads-for-pizza-safet-1826736405 els sots als carrers que fan que arribin malament les pizzes són reparats per DOmino’s
https://inequality.org/facts/global-inequality/ site sobre la desigualtat econòmica
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/23/how-the-bbc-women-are-working-toward-equal-pay desigualtat de gènere, el cas de la BBC i antecedents històrics.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/23/can-economists-and-humanists-ever-be-friends Can Economists and Humanists Ever Be Friends? One discipline reduces behavior to elegantly simple rules; the other wallows in our full, complex particularity. What can they learn from each other?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/27/gospels-of-giving-for-the-new-gilded-age els donatiuis dels rics, desgraven impostos i ho fan anar on volen
reventen emprese, a quie s deuen, a rteballdors i clients? o als accionistes?
2019
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/1/30/18203911/davos-rutger-bregman-historian-taxes-philanthropy Els rics han de pagar impostos, i no fer-se immensament rics i després fer la filantropia que els doni la gana
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47169549 experiment de renda garantida a Finlàndia
ELS LLOGUERS
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/single-family-landlords-wall-street/582394/ Quan Wall street gestiona els lloguers guanyen els inversors i perden els llogaters. With help from the federal government, institutional investors became major players in the rental market. They promised to return profits to their investors and convenience to their tenants. Investors are happy. Tenants are not.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/2/28/18243690/child-poverty-expert-study-child-allowance-national-academy     The report estimates that child poverty costs us $800 billion to $1.1 trillion every year due to increased crime, worsened health, and lower earnings when poor kids become adults. There is no one approach to reducing it, the committee concludes, but it did outline four separate options policymakers could pursue — two of which would cut child poverty in half in the next decade.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/03/hospital-bills-medical-debt-bankruptcy/584998/ un sistema de salut basat en el negoci fa que les factures d’hospitals siguin el 60% de causa de fallida
Alan Krueger, Myth and measurement https://slate.com/business/2019/03/alan-krueger-obituary-economics-research.amp  la recerca permetia anar en contra del preestablert, per exemple, que pujar el salari mínim duia a perdre llcos de treball, o que els terroristes venien de classe baixa.
Economist 3/10:
This week our cover looks at how machines are taking control of financial markets—not just the humdrum buying and selling of securities, but also the commanding heights of monitoring the economy and allocating capital. Funds run by computers that follow rules set by humans account for 35% of America’s stockmarket, 60% of institutional equity assets and 60% of trading activity. New artificial-intelligence programs are also writing their own investing rules, in ways their human masters only partly understand. Industries from pizza-delivery to Hollywood are being changed by technology, but finance is unique because it can exert voting power over firms, redistribute wealth and cause mayhem in the economy.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mariana-mazzucato els grans avenços d’internet, aplle i altre empreses, no són resultat d’iniciativa priovada sinó d’inversions públiques en recerca. I moltes d’aquestes empreses, un cop han triomfat, no investiguen sinó que només miren d’obtenir beneficis per que els executiu juguin a golf.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/28/why-they-bulldozed-your-block  urbanisme, entre blocs de vivendes socials (Logue) o preservar l’antic Louise Jacobs.
The legendary urbanist Alain Bertaud has observed, in reference to housing policies, that, while the law of supply and demand may be as fixed as the law of gravity, we defy the law of gravity all the time. We build balloons and airplanes and elevators to counter it. What we can’t do is repeal the law of gravity—take an ordinary rug and declare that it’s a magic carpet.
[ l’economia dels països amb criteris que no beneficien la gent]
The one major exception to this pattern was the mid-twentieth century, what has come to be remembered as the Keynesian age. It was a period in which those running capitalist democracies, spooked by the Russian Revolution and the prospect of the mass rebellion of their own working classes, allowed unprecedented levels of redistribution—which, in turn, led to the most generalized material prosperity in human history. The story of the Keynesian revolution of the 1930s, and the neoclassical counterrevolution of the 1970s, has been told innumerable times, but Skidelsky gives the reader a fresh sense of the underlying conflict.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-online-shopping-makes-suckers-of-us-all els algoritmes maximitzen els preus en funció del nostre historial, ubicació … [és com un regateig]
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/06/the-ultra-wealthy-who-argue-that-they-should-be-paying-higher-taxes els rics com l’hereva Disney que creuen que cal apujar el salari mínim i els impostos als rics.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/no-one-wants-your-used-clothes-anymore el model de moda ràpida i barata fa que ja no sigui rendible recilcar; s’està creant un problema mediambiental.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-flaws-a-nobel-prize-winning-economist-wants-you-to-know-about-yourself Richard Thaler i com a vegades fem decision no racionals, per no erdre el que tenim, nudge pressió subtil per encarrilar-nos.
https://newrepublic.com/article/156202/silicon-valley-economy-here-its-nightmare sous baixos sense contracte, lloguers alts, les ciutats plenes de patinets elèctrics … un mal futur
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/13/the-equality-conundrum  com hem d’arribar a la igualtat? garantint les oportunitats? equilibrant?
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-way-we-work-is-killing-us l stress a la feina, treballar moltes hores, riscos de salut
n 1930, the English economist John Maynard Keynes took a break from writing about the problems of the interwar economy and indulged in a bit of futurology. In an essay entitled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” he speculated that by the year 2030 capital investment and technological progress would have raised living standards as much as eightfold, creating a society so rich that people would work as little as fifteen hours a week, devoting the rest of their time to leisure and other “non-economic purposes.” As striving for greater affluence faded, he predicted, “the love of money as a possession . . . will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity.”
“The faster we produce and consume goods, the more we damage the environment,” Giorgos Kallis, an ecological economist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, writes in his manifesto, “Degrowth.”
In “Good Economics for Hard Times,” two winners of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, point out that a larger G.D.P. doesn’t necessarily mean a rise in human well-being—especially if it isn’t distributed equitably—and the pursuit of it can sometimes be counterproductive. “Nothing in either our theory or the data proves the highest G.D.P. per capita is generally desirable,
If major industrialized economies were to cut back their consumption and reorganize along more communal lines, who would buy all the components and gadgets and clothes that developing countries like Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Vietnam produce? What would happen to the economies of African countries such as Ethiopia, Ghana, and Rwanda, which have seen rapid G.D.P. growth in recent years, as they, too, have started to join the world economy? Degrowthers have yet to provide a convincing answer to these questions.
Keynes, a Cambridge aesthete, believed that people whose basic economic needs had been satisfied would naturally gravitate to other, non-economic pursuits, perhaps embracing the arts and nature. A century of experience suggests that this was wishful thinking. As Raworth writes, “Reversing consumerism’s financial and cultural dominance in public and private life is set to be one of the twenty-first century’s most gripping psychological dramas.
apital and Ideology” opens with an arresting pronouncement: “Every human society must justify its inequalities: unless reasons for them are found, the whole political and social edifice stands in danger of collapse.” War, recession, religion—every facet of human existence has its roots in inequality, Piketty tells us. Indeed, he uses “society” and “inequality regime” almost interchangeably. If there are hazards in such a monocausal account, it may be a necessary simplification in the quest to anatomize social organization from the Middle Ages to modernity.
Adopting a theory of the French philologist Georges Dumézil, Piketty writes that early societies were “trifunctional”—in ways largely determined by birth, you were a member of the clergy, the warrior-nobility, or the peasantry. (Something similar, he notes, can be seen in “Planet of the Apes” and “Star Wars.”) During this period of limited mobility, inequality was justified by the notion that the castes were interdependent—like the limbs of the body. If someone gets to be the brains, then someone else has to be the feet. After the development of the central state and later disruptions like the French Revolution, inequality was taken to be a necessary feature of “ownership societies,” premised on individual liberty but also on the “sacralization of private property.”
Spenglerian in scope, Piketty’s critique reaches far back in history and across the globe: he explores the “inequality regimes” in Mughal India, slave colonies in the West Indies, and post-Soviet republics. It’s an admirable corrective to the usual Eurocentrism of Western economists, even if most readers will feel the impulse to skip ahead four hundred pages to the discussion of modern economies. Piketty has modified his thinking since his previous opus. Rather than imply that rising inequality is a problem inherent in capitalism, he now suggests that the levels of inequality we get are the ones we countenance—that they’re entirely a matter of political and ideological choices. His famous formula, r>g, has all but disappeared.
Since Congress passed its 2017 package of tax cuts—which Republican sponsors justified on global-competition grounds, and claimed would “pay for itself”—corporate-tax collections have fallen by a third. The U.S. is now running trillion-dollar deficits, during a period of long-lasting economic growth, no major military engagements, and no ramp-up in social spending.
Meanwhile, Piketty estimates, ten per cent of global financial assets are now stashed in tax havens. Ireland, a favorite haven for American companies, had to start publishing modified national economic statistics because of all the foreign assets it harbors. In theory, international taxation could be harmonized by treaties, in the way countries have come together to ban certain kinds of munitions or pollutants. So far, there hasn’t been the will.
This picture is discouraging. If it’s also familiar, that is a tribute, in part, to the success of Piketty’s previous work. The most interesting findings in the second “Capital” come from his forays into political science. He argues that the “Brahmin left”—the most educated citizens and the greatest beneficiaries of the knowledge economy and the supposed meritocracy—has captured the left-wing parties in Western democracies, distracting those parties from their mission of improving the lives of working people. Conservative parties, meanwhile, are under the sway of the “merchant right.” Such polarization makes debate over redistribution impossible, and so the lower classes debate immigration and borders instead.
Under Piketty’s preferred system of taxation, it would be exceedingly difficult to maintain fortunes greater than thirty-eight million dollars or so in the United States—that is, greater than a hundred times average private wealth. Jeff Bezos would receive a bill for a hundred and nine billion dollars in Year One.
But does it require as much as Piketty suggests? An implicit assumption in his writing is that, when the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. In the absence of economic growth, this zero-sum analysis would be correct. But when growth is positive, the proposition is harder to defend. In China, economic growth has both made the country more unequal and lifted nearly a billion citizens out of extreme poverty. Piketty repeatedly suggests that a more egalitarian society is always a more just one. Yet one can distinguish, as Case and Deaton do, between unfairness and inequality.
But complex social phenomena are rarely so clean-cut. Piketty’s own data in the book show that growth was high during the Gilded Age. In the modern era, economic growth and inequality rose in tandem in China and India, as they have in most emerging markets. The Gulf monarchies, which, Piketty demonstrates, are as unequal today as slave colonies were two centuries ago, look remarkably stable by most political metrics. The counterexamples don’t necessarily disprove the theory, but a thinker as careful and comprehensive as Piketty should take them on, rather than ignore them.
But if a candidate were to go the full Piketty—by proposing enormous taxes on the rich and taking steps toward surrendering sovereignty to a transnational socialistic union—do we really think that nativism and nationalism would retreat, rather than redouble? Would erstwhile supporters of Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump, and Geert Wilders evolve beyond their fears of Muslim migration and accept the new utopia?
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-wealth-detective-who-finds-the-hidden-money-of-the-super-rich Gabriel Zucman, baixar els impostos als rics no estimula l’economia només fa créixer la desigualtat.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/20/the-price-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic les conseqüències del covid i els eixerits que han fet diners en preveure què apssaria, comprant mascaretes i guants
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170114-the-125-year-old-network-that-keeps-mumbai-going una xarxa de ciclistes distribueix cada dia 200.000 racions a Mumbai, des de casa a on treballa la gent.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-bargain-with-the-devilbill-comes-due-for-overextended-airbnb-hosts-11588083336 els especuladors que lloguen residències per després subllogar-les a Airbnb estan tenint problemes amb les cancel·lacions per la crisi.
renda universal
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-promising-results-of-a-citywide-basic-income-experiment experiment OK, però suportat pe run donatiu d’un fundador de Facebook
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/economists-on-the-run Krugman admet haver-se equivocat sobre la globalització. Aquesta gent cobra molt i no tenen responsabilitats.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-54226107 FINCEN, documents que demostren que HSBC va ajudar a blanquejar diners
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-rise-and-fall-of-getting-things-done els mètodes Get things done i perquè no acaben de funcionar
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/30/how-venture-capitalists-are-deforming-capitalism el capital risc fa sobreviure les empreses que aconsegueixen capital, no les que funcionen; el cas de WeWork i Theranos.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/18/whats-wrong-with-the-way-we-work història del treball, com és que malgrat la tecnologia hem de fer tantes hores.  “One hour a day is a low estimate of the amount of time one has to spend ‘keeping’ oneself,” she wrote. “By foisting this off on others, man gains seven hours a week—one working day more to play with his mind and not his human needs.” More women joined the paid labor force. Men balked at joining the unpaid labor force, at home. “It is as if the 60 to 80 hour work week she puts in . . . were imaginary,” a Boston feminist observed. To protest, women proposed a labor action. “Oppressed Women: Don’t Cook Dinner Tonight!” read one sign at the Women’s Strike for Equality in 1970. “Housewives Are Unpaid Slave Laborers! Tell Him What to Do with the Broom!” Ms. offered, by way of illustration, a sample letter of resignation: This is to inform you that I am no longer running this household. The cupboards, the Lysol, the linoleum, the washer, the dryer, the marketing—they’re all yours. I HEREBY RESIGN. . . .      You can fend for yourselves. Best of luck.  Mom  // Feminists urged economists to count housework as work, calculating, in 1976, that housework constituted forty-four per cent of the G.N.P. Groups that included the New York Wages for Housework Committee, Black Women for Wages for Housework, and Wages Due Lesbians fought a “wages for housework” campaign, calling the exploitation of women’s domestic labor an international crime.  /// With the G.D.P. rising and wages flat or falling for so many Americans, where did all that wealth go? Much of it went to chief executives: in 1965, C.E.O. compensation was twenty times that of the average worker; by 2015, it was more than two hundred times that of the average worker. That year, Nigel Travis, the C.E.O. of Dunkin’ Brands, took in $5.4 million in compensation (down from $10.2 million the previous year) and called a proposed fifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum wage “absolutely outrageous.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-55932977 les entrevistes de recursos humans han estta substituides per tests que es fan online
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22557895/automation-robots-work-amazon-uber-lyft no és que els robots hagin pres el lloc de treball a les persones, és que els algoritmes que controlen les mètriques tornen les condicions inhumanes.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/how-to-achieve-sustainable-remote-work  Companies must move away from surveillance and visible busyness, and toward defined outcomes and trust. [ TOMA NÚRIA]
https://slate.com/business/2021/07/masters-degrees-debt-loans-worth-it.html l’estafa dels masters de les universitats de prestigi, que cobren molt i no serveixen per a res.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/akgy7a/we-all-quit-how-americas-workers-are-taking-back-their-power
treballadors mal pagats de fast-food o dollar-store estan deixant la feina
DARRERA DE TOTA GRAN FORTUNA HI HA UN GRAN CRIM
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/23/britains-idyllic-country-houses-reveal-a-darker-history A professor estimated that up to one in six British country houses were bought with the proceeds of imperialism—but the National Trust’s decision to publicly explore that connection has been met with hostility.
l’esclavatge del cotó
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57983174 reciclar els avions, un 80%
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58317555 els lloguers de renda limitada tampoc funcionen a Suècia
https://www.vox.com/recode/22673353/unemployment-job-search-linkedin-indeed-algorithm les empreses busquen treballadors però el sistema no funciona perquè el sistema només ofereix llocs mal pagats i precaris. Alhora, els treballadors tenen expectatives massa altes. [ segurament és el mateix que passa amb les parelles, tots busquem un “lloc” millor del que podríem esperar ]
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/04/the-supply-chain-mystery problemes de subministrament perquè alguns treballadors no volen tornar a la feina -sobretot als restaurants- perquè hi problemes amb el compliment de les normes.
Would it be better to persuade people to fill jobs by further cutting unemployment benefits, or by raising the federal minimum wage, which is still $7.25 an hour, or raising wages generally? What about adding support for child care, paid family leave, and public transportation—measures being debated in Congress now—or increasing immigration?
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58984813  l’evasió d’impostos costa als governs 141-000 milions entre 2000 i 2020
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-59101218 acord dels G20 per taxar les empreses un mínim d’un 15%
fent passar per orgànic blat de moro que no ho era.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59514464 a USA els creditors podran contactar els deutors no nomnés per correu i per telèfon (amb un límit de 7 trucades la setmana) sinó per xarxes socials.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-59457015 la majoria dels CEOs de silicon valley són indis
https://www.ara.cat/opinio/salvar-l-benestar_129_4228622.html no podrem mantenir l’estat del benestar si no treballem millro i cotitzem més
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/01/22/big-techs-supersized-ambitions en què inverteixen les grans companyies  By our calculations, five of America’s biggest firms, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft, together have invested $280bn in the past year, equivalent to 9% of American business investment, up from 4% five years ago. Big tech wants to find the next big opportunity, and our analysis of deals, patents, recruitment and other yardsticks shows that cash is flowing into everything from driverless cars to quantum computing. The shift reflects a fear that the lucrative fiefs of the 2010s are losing their relevance. In addition, tech’s titans are increasingly moving onto each other’s patches, with the share of sales that overlap having doubled, to 40%, since 2015. That explains why they are all looking to swoop into new territory. But will they succeed?
https://aeon.co/essays/economics-is-once-again-becoming-a-worldly-science el model oferta i demanda no ho explica tot. Deixant la blackboard economics i tornant a centrar-se en el real: Another indication that economists have at last moved to study the world as it is, the award of the 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences went to three empirical economists including David Card. Few people have been at the receiving end of the economic establishment’s ire as much as Card. When Card’s work was first published, one Nobel laureate declared it ‘equivalent to a denial that there is even minimal scientific content in economics’. Until the early 1990s, the accepted orthodoxy among liberal and  conservative economists was that the minimum wage killed jobs. It simply  had to, because the laws of supply and demand said the measure pushed  the price of labour above the so-called ‘equilibrium wage ‘or clearing  wage at which supply and demand were matched. Card and his colleague  Alan Krueger conducted studies that found, in a number of cases,  that meaningful increases in the minimum wage had not led to lower  employment in fast-food restaurants – the type of business commonly  affected by the measure. The research received a lot of publicity, and  near total rejection by some of the most eminent economists, for example  Gary Becker, Robert Barro and James Buchanan, who likened colleagues  who accepted Card’s work to ‘camp-following whores’.
History, however, has been on Card’s side. Study after study (140 in the UK alone) has found that even large increases in the minimum wage have failed to lift unemployment.  / Governments often find themselves in tight places – in the post-financial crash years, Spain and Italy faced surging unemployment and big budget deficits. One might seek to tackle unemployment with employer incentives, training programmes or by injecting demand into the economy through higher spending. Such policies cost money. So, when economists, including Miguel Ángel Fernández Ordóñez – a former governor of the Bank of Spain, the Spanish central bank – told the near-bankrupt Spanish and Italian governments they could tackle unemployment by reducing labour protections – a measure that cost nothing – the policy had a natural appeal. /  Neoclassical economics offers economists a palate of answers for  almost any problem, and many of those answers are naturally appealing to  political leaders and voters. The problem is they are often obviously  wrong. This presents economists with perverse incentives. And hence a  need to have a laser focus on truth.
Paul Romer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 2018,  has earned a name for himself as a troublemaker in recent years for  criticising the economics profession’s problem with truth. He has taken  the unusual action of accusing distinguished peers of being frauds and  of using mathematical abstractions and other obfuscations to  deliberately hide flaws in their research. Romer’s argument is that,  since economics wants to be seen as a science, it should act like one  and take a firmer line on falsehoods. ‘A little bit of bad intent can  manipulate the consensus. And this is why we should kick people out when  you find they are not reliable,’ Romer told me over a coffee in  Greenwich Village a couple of years ago.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/01/job-market-vacancies-hiring-desperate-no-workers-why.html les empreses busquen treballadors, però no els volen pagar el que toca
https://www.bbc.com/news/disability-59879753 un noi indi cec supera les dificulatts, acaba essent enginyer i funda una empresa d’embalatge de 48M
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-60148754 una mina de cripto moneda a Khazaksthan
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/03/older-workers-silicon-valley-business/623880/ les empreses de Silicon Valley governades per joves prometen massa i cometen errors que es podrien evitar si tinguessin gent amb més experiència, gent gran.
https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/how-much-do-things-really-cost intent de calcular l’autèntic cost de la carn i productes agrícoles si tenim en compte l’impacte ambiental i social.
https://www.ara.cat/economia/miquel-puig-diferencia-no-treballar-petita-immigracio-salaris_128_4145470.html l’esquerra no és sincera, la inmigració enfonsa les classes baixes [ igual que protegim els productes locals amb aranzels, hauríem de protegir la gent?]
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61549155 els milionaris que reclamen a Davos que els posin més impostos
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/06/when-shipping-containers-sink-in-the-drink
There are many reasons for this kind of container loss, but the most straightforward one is numerical. In today’s world, some six thousand container ships are out on the ocean at any given moment. The largest of these can carry more than twenty thousand shipping containers per voyage; collectively, they transport a quarter of a billion containers around the globe every year. Given the sheer scale of those numbers, plus the factors that have always bedevilled maritime travel—squalls, swells, hurricanes, rogue waves, shallow reefs, equipment failure, human error, the corrosive effects of salt water and wind—some of those containers are bound to end up in the water. The question, of interest to the inquisitive and important for economic and environmental reasons, is: What on earth is inside them?
The tale of that transformation was recounted a decade and a half ago by Marc Levinson in “The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger.” Before the rise of the container, moving cargo over water was an expensive, labor-intensive business.
To minimize the distance between products and the vessels that transported them, ports were crowded with factories and warehouses, as well as with the stevedores and longshoremen tasked with loading and unloading goods.
All of this changed in 1956, because of a man named Malcom McLean. He was not originally a shipping magnate; he was the ambitious owner of a trucking company who figured he would be able to outbid his competitors if he could sometimes transport goods by waterway rather than by highway. When his initial idea of simply driving his trucks onto cargo ships proved economically inefficient, he began tinkering with removable boxes that could be stacked atop one another, as well as easily swapped among trucks, trains, and ships. In pursuit of that vision, he bought and retrofitted a couple of Second World War tankers, and then recruited an engineer who had already been working on aluminum containers that could be lifted by crane from truck to ship. On April 26, 1956, one of the tankers, the SS Ideal-X, sailed from New Jersey to Texas carrying fifty-eight shipping containers. On hand to witness the event was a higher-up in the International Longshoremen’s Association who, when asked what he thought of the ship, supposedly replied, “I’d like to sink that son of a bitch.”
At the time the Ideal-X left port, it cost an average of $5.83 per ton to load a cargo ship. With the advent of the shipping container, that price dropped to an estimated sixteen cents—and cargo-related employment plummeted along with it. These days, a computer does the work of figuring out how to pack a ship, and a trolley-and-crane system removes an inbound container and replaces it with an outbound one roughly every ninety seconds, unloading and reloading the ship almost simultaneously. The resulting cost savings have made overseas shipping astonishingly cheap. To borrow Levinson’s example, you can get a twenty-five-ton container of coffeemakers from a factory in Malaysia to a warehouse in Ohio for less than the cost of one business-class plane ticket. “Transportation has become so efficient,” he writes, “that for many purposes, freight costs do not much affect economic decisions.”
In another sense, those costs, in their very insignificance, do affect economic decisions. They are the reason that manufacturers can circumvent wage, workplace, and environmental protections by moving their plants elsewhere, and the reason that all those elsewheres—small cities far from ports, in Vietnam or Thailand or the Chinese hinterlands—can use their cheap land and cheap labor to gain a foothold in the global economy. Thanks to McLean’s innovation, manufacturers can drastically lengthen the supply chain yet still come out on top financially. If you have ever wondered why a shirt you buy in Manhattan costs so much less if it came from a factory in Malacca than from a tailor in midtown, the answer, in large part, is the shipping container.
The crews of these ultra-large ships are, by comparison, ultra-tiny; a U.L.C.V. can travel from Hong Kong to California carrying twenty-three thousand containers and just twenty-five people. As a result, it is not unheard-of for a few of those containers to go overboard without anyone even noticing until the vessel arrives in port.
More recently, the steep rise in demand for goods during the Covid era has meant that ships that once travelled at partial capacity now set off fully loaded and crews are pressured to adhere to strict timetables, even if doing so requires ignoring problems on board or sailing through storms instead of around them. To make matters worse, shipping containers themselves are in short supply, both because of the increase in demand and because many of them are stuck in the wrong ports owing to earlier shutdowns, and so older containers with aging locking mechanisms have remained in or been returned to circulation.
A single shipping container can hold five thousand individual boxes, a single ship can offload nine thousand containers within hours, and the largest ports can process as many as a hundred thousand containers every day, all of which means it is essentially impossible to inspect more than a fraction of the world’s shipping containers—a boon to drug cartels, human traffickers, and terrorists, a nightmare for the rest of us.
It is true, of course, that some people do know the contents (or at least the declared contents) of any given shipping container transported by a legal vessel. Each of those containers has a bill of lading—an itemized list of what it is carrying, known to the shipowner, the sender, and the receiver. If any of those containers go overboard, at least two additional parties swiftly learn what was inside them: insurance agents and lawyers. If many of those containers go overboard, the whole incident can become the subject of what’s known as a general average adjustment—an arcane bit of maritime law according to which everyone with cargo aboard a ship that suffers a disaster must help pay for all related expenses, even if the individual’s cargo is intact. (This illogical-seeming arrangement was codified as early as 533 A.D., of logical necessity: if sailors had to jettison cargo from a vessel in distress, they couldn’t afford to waste time selecting the stuff that would cost them the fewest headaches and the least money.) In theory, if you were sufficiently curious and dogged, you could request the court filings for container losses that result in such legal action, then pore over them for information about the contents of the lost containers.
What else has started off on a container ship and wound up in the ocean? Among many, many other things: flat-screen TVs, fireworks, IKEA furniture, French perfume, gym mats, BMW motorbikes, hockey gloves, printer cartridges, lithium batteries, toilet seats, Christmas decorations, barrels of arsenic, bottled water, cannisters that explode to inflate air bags, an entire container’s worth of rice cakes, thousands of cans of chow mein, half a million cans of beer, cigarette lighters, fire extinguishers, liquid ethanol, packets of figs, sacks of chia seeds, knee pads, duvets, the complete household possessions of people moving overseas, flyswatters printed with the logos of college and professional sports teams, decorative grasses on their way to florists in New Zealand, My Little Pony toys, Garfield telephones, surgical masks, bar stools, pet accessories, and gazebos.
In 1990, when a container ship headed from Korea to the United States lost tens of thousands of Nike athletic shoes overboard, each one bearing a serial number, an oceanographer, Curtis Ebbesmeyer, asked beachcombers all over the world to report any that washed ashore. In the past three decades, he has studied everything from the Lego incident to a 1992 container loss involving almost twenty-nine thousand plastic bath toys sold under the name Friendly Floatees, from classic yellow duckies to green frogs, one of which took twenty-six years to wash ashore.
For an object that is fundamentally a box, designed to keep things inside it, the shipping container is a remarkable lesson in the uncontainable nature of modern life—the way our choices, like our goods, ramify around the world. The only thing those flat-screen TVs and Garfield telephones and all the other wildly variable contents of lost shipping containers have in common is that, collectively, they make plain the scale of our excess consumption. The real catastrophe is the vast glut of goods we manufacture and ship and purchase and throw away, but even the small fraction of those goods that go missing makes the consequences apparent. Six weeks after the Tokio Express got into trouble at Land’s End, another container ship ran aground sixteen nautical miles away, sending dozens of containers into the sea just off the coast of the Isles of Scilly. Afterward, among the shells and pebbles and dragons, residents and beachcombers kept coming across some of the cargo: a million plastic bags, headed for a supermarket chain in Ireland, bearing the words “Help protect the environment.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-61870699 els pioners de l’estadística a la índia.
https://khn.org/news/article/homeless-crisis-city-solutions-portland-oregon/ crisi de sense llar a Portland
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23152657/poverty-cash-graduation-ultra-poor-brac   com combatre lapobresa
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220707-the-digital-nomad-visas-luring-workers-overseas visats per treballar en remot a un país
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-62142208  BMW té coyxes amb calefacció instal3lada als seients però cal pagar 15L al mes per activar-la.
es perd menjar per no poder-lo refrigerar In 2018, Rwanda announced a National Cooling Strategy, the first in sub-Saharan Africa, and, in 2020, it launched a program known as the Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold Chain, or ACES.
In the developed world, the domestic refrigerator is only the final link in the “cold chain”—a series of thermally controlled spaces through which your food moves from farm to table. The cold chain is the invisible backbone of our food system, a perpetual mechanical winter that we have built for our food to live in. Artificial refrigeration was introduced in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, but the term “cold chain” gained currency only in the late nineteen-forties, when European bureaucrats rebuilding a continent shattered by war studied and copied American methods.
In March, 2021, a small, peculiar-looking truck began transporting fruit and vegetables from fields to markets in western Rwanda. From the front, the truck resembles a tank, wider and squatter than you’d expect, and oddly square. It looks the way you might imagine a truck from IKEA to look, and in a sense that’s what it is. The cab is made of lightweight wood-composite panels that can be shipped in flat packs and then assembled in a day, without any special tools. Named the OX, the truck was developed in England specifically for emerging markets. It’s about half the weight of a standard pickup but able to carry double the load. The windshield and the skid plate meet at a snub-nosed angle, which means that its tires hit steep slopes before the bumper does, and that it can ford streams that are up to thirty-five inches deep—both essential for negotiating Rwanda’s many severely rutted unpaved roads.
l els que van estafar 1b en cripto fet veure que eren molt llestos
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/09/07/how-federal-covid-relief-flows-to-the-criminal-justice-system els diners federals de Covid han anat a parar a cotxes i armes per la policia i presons.
https://www.ara.cat/opinio/mite-creixement-miquel-puig_129_4498198.html Puig, no es pot créixer indefinidament, no hi ha prou energia ni prou augment de població preparada.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-63113517 aplicacions per comprar, encarregar una reparacio, un taxi a Àsia, GRAB. Elon Misk la copiaria
https://www.ara.cat/opinio/limit-creixement-miquel-puig_129_4525160.html el món ha anat creixent, per la revolució del neolitic i després per la revolució industrial.
Dos fets porten a pensar que aquesta segona onada de creixement s’acabarà abans que ho faci el segle XXI. La primera, i la més important, és l’aturada del creixement demogràfic. No per falta d’aliments o de salut, sinó de ganes de tenir fills.
El segon fet que porta a pensar que el creixement s’està acabant és l’encariment de l’energia. No em refereixo a episodis com el que estem vivint, sinó a la quantitat d’energia disponible que podem obtenir a base d’invertir una unitat d’energia (tècnicament, l’EROI). En el cas del carbó i del gas natural, aquesta relació ve a ser 30, i en el cas del petroli convencional 16, però havia estat de 100 ara fa 100 anys, quan explotàvem jaciments superficials. Equivocadament, tendim a pensar que, com que el sol i el vent són gratis, també ho és l’electricitat renovable, però el problema és que, abans, cal haver construït els aerogeneradors i els plafons solars, i que, després, cal emmagatzemar l’electricitat perquè estigui disponible quan la necessitem. El resultat és que l’EROI d’aquesta electricitat ve a ser només de 5.
El món en què ja estem entrant serà un món de mà d’obra escassa i salaris alts, molta competència pels escassos immigrants qualificats, molta robotització, jubilació molt endarrerida i on serà més important que mai la competitivitat (perquè l’energia serà cara) i l’equitat (perquè el creixement deixarà d’anestesiar les desigualtats). Això sí, serà un món sostenible.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/24/what-weve-lost-playing-the-lottery
[la loteria acaba essent com uns impostos que paguen els pobres en lloc dels rics però suprimir-la seria impopular perquè impedeix sommiar]
How this came to be is the subject of an excellent new book, “For a Dollar and a Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America,” by the historian Jonathan D. Cohen. At the heart of Cohen’s book is a peculiar contradiction: on the one hand, the lottery is vastly less profitable than its proponents make it out to be, a deception that has come at the expense of public coffers and public services. On the other hand, it is so popular that it is both extremely lucrative for the private companies that make and sell tickets and financially crippling for its most dedicated players.
Lotteries are an ancient pastime. They were common in the Roman Empire—Nero was a fan of them; make of that what you will—and are attested to throughout the Bible, where the casting of lots is used for everything from selecting the next king of Israel to choosing who will get to keep Jesus’ garments after the Crucifixion. In many of these early instances, they were deployed either as a kind of party game—during Roman Saturnalias, tickets were distributed free to guests, some of whom won extravagant prizes—or as a means of divining God’s will. Often, though, lotteries were organized to raise money for public works. The earliest known version of keno dates to the Han dynasty and is said to have helped pay for the Great Wall of China. Two centuries later, Caesar Augustus started a lottery to subsidize repairs for the city of Rome.
By the fourteen-hundreds, the practice was common in the Low Countries, which relied on lotteries to build town fortifications and, later, to provide charity for the poor. Soon enough, the trend made its way to England, where, in 1567, Queen Elizabeth I chartered the nation’s first lottery, designating its profits for “reparation of the Havens and strength of the Realme.” Tickets cost ten shillings, a hefty sum back then, and, in addition to the potential prize value, each one served as a get-out-of-jail-free card, literally; every lottery participant was entitled to immunity from arrest, except for certain felonies such as piracy, murder, and treason.
This initial era of the American lottery was brought to an end by widespread concern about mismanagement and malfeasance. Between 1833 and 1880, every state but one banned the practice, leaving only the infamously corrupt Louisiana State Lottery Company in operation. Despite its name, the L.S.L.C. effectively operated across the country, sending advertisements and selling tickets by mail. So powerful was it that, as Cohen explains, it took the federal government to kill it off; in 1890, Congress passed a law prohibiting the interstate promotion or sale of lottery tickets, thereby devastating the Louisiana game and, for the time being, putting a stop to state lotteries in America.
Predictably, in the absence of legal lotteries, illegal ones flourished—above all, numbers games, which awarded daily prizes for correctly guessing a three-digit number. To avoid allegations that the game was fixed, each day’s winning number was based on a publicly available but constantly changing source, such as the amount of money traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Numbers games were enormously popular everywhere—in 1964, they raked in two hundred million dollars, about two billion in today’s money, in New York City alone—but especially so in Black communities, where they provided a much needed source of income. This was true mostly for their organizers and runners, whose ranks included Ella Fitzgerald and Malcolm X, but occasionally also for players who lucked into a windfall, such as Luther Theophilus Powell, who won ten thousand dollars on a twenty-five dollar bet in the nineteen-fifties and used it to buy a house in Queens for his wife, daughter, and young son, Colin Powell.
Eventually, numbers games proved so profitable that they were taken over by organized crime, sometimes with the aid of police officers who accepted bribes to shut down African American operators. Dutch Schultz and Vito Genovese both used the game to help bankroll their operations, and the Winter Hill Gang, Whitey Bulger’s crew, got its start partly by running numbers in Somerville, outside Boston. By the nineteen-fifties, increasing concern about the power and reach of the Mob culminated in a Senate investigation, the Kefauver committee, which judged profits from gambling to be the primary financial engine of crime syndicates in America. This declaration, and the torrent of news coverage it generated, had a paradoxical effect: it made lottery games seem so lucrative that, after decades of dismissing them as inappropriate for the honorable business of public service, state governments once again began to consider getting in on the take.
This started, he argues, when growing awareness about all the money to be made in the gambling business collided with a crisis in state funding. In the nineteen-sixties, under the burden of a swelling population, rising inflation, and the cost of the Vietnam War, America’s prosperity began to wane. For many states, especially those that provided a generous social safety net, balancing the budget became increasingly difficult without either raising taxes or cutting services. The difficulty was that both options were extremely unpopular with voters.
For politicians confronting this problem, the lottery appeared to be a perfect solution: a way to maintain existing services without hiking taxes—and therefore without getting punished at the polls. For them, Cohen writes, lotteries were essentially “budgetary miracles, the chance for states to make revenue appear seemingly out of thin air.” For instance, in New Jersey, which had no sales tax, no income tax, and no appetite for instituting either one, legislators claimed that a lottery would bring in hundreds of millions of dollars, thereby relieving them of the need to ever again contemplate the unpleasant subject of taxation.
Such critics hailed from both sides of the political aisle and all walks of life, but the most vociferous of them were devout Protestants, who regarded government-sanctioned lotteries as morally unconscionable. (Catholics, by contrast, were overwhelmingly pro-lottery, played it in huge numbers once it was legalized, and reliably flocked to other gambling games as well; Cohen cites the staggering fact that, in 1978, “bingo games hosted by Ohio Catholic high schools took in more money than the state’s lottery.”)
in the early nineteen-eighties, with Ronald Reagan in the White House, federal money flowing into state coffers declined. With more and more states casting around for solutions to their budgetary crises which would not enrage an increasingly anti-tax electorate, the appeal of the lottery spread south and west.
As Cohen relates in perhaps the most fascinating chapter of his book, those pro-lottery forces had a powerful ally in Scientific Games, Inc., a lottery-ticket manufacturer that first made a name for itself by pioneering scratch-off tickets.
That meant its lobbying investment paid off, spectacularly; in California, for instance, S.G.I. spent $2.4 million to pass a lottery initiative, then won the resulting forty-million-dollar contract. Wins like that soon turned Scientific Games into an unstoppable force within the lottery industry. By 1982, the company had printed its five-billionth ticket and was producing a million more every hour. At the same time, the lottery industry itself had become unstoppable, too—thanks to S.G.I. and the wave of legalizations, but also thanks to the introduction of a new version of a very old game of chance that, as Cohen writes, “fundamentally reshaped the place of lotteries in American society.”
Alexander Hamilton was right: to the average person, the difference between one-in-three-million odds and one-in-three-hundred-million odds didn’t matter, but the difference between a three-million-dollar jackpot and a three-hundred-million-dollar jackpot mattered enormously. Recognizing this, lottery commissioners began lifting prize caps and adding more numbers—say, six out of fifty instead of five out of thirty—thus making the likelihood of winning even smaller. The New York Lotto launched, in 1978, with one-in-3.8-million odds; today, the odds are one in forty-five million.
The years in which lotto reshaped the national gambling scene were the years of deregulation and Reaganomics, Donald J. Trump and Alex P. Keaton, the première of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” and a remake of “Brewster’s Millions.” Pastors were preaching the prosperity gospel; politicians were singing the praises of the unfettered free market. Suddenly, Cohen writes, “it was no longer taboo to collect a massive fortune; neither was it offensive to show it off. Wealth—not the prosperity of blue-collar workers but the fortunes of their bosses—became a means of reasserting the bounty of capitalism.”
The irony, as Cohen notes, is that this obsession with unimaginable wealth, including the dream of hitting a multimillion-dollar lottery jackpot, corresponded to a decline in financial security for most working people. Beginning in the nineteen-seventies and accelerating in the nineteen-eighties, the income gap between the rich and the poor widened, job security and pensions eroded, health-care costs and unemployment rose, and, for children born in those decades, our long-standing national promise—that education and hard work would render them better off than their parents—ceased to be true. Life, as it turned out, imitated the lottery: for most Americans, it was getting harder and harder to win.
In the end, Cohen writes, “the lottery supplanted, rather than supplemented, state spending on education.”
Today, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, lotteries bring in, on average, about one per cent of state revenue per year. Like all money, it matters, but whatever difference it makes is offset by two problems. The first is that lotteries have made it harder than ever to pass much needed tax increases, because, thanks to years of noisy campaigning followed by decades of heavy promotion, the public wrongly believes that schools and other vital services are lavishly supported by gambling funds. The second is that the money raised by lotteries comes largely from the people who can least afford to part with it.
but in reality it is responsive to economic fluctuation; as Cohen writes, “Lottery sales increase as incomes fall, unemployment grows, and poverty rates rise.” As with all commercial products, lottery sales also increase with exposure to advertising—and lottery products are most heavily promoted in neighborhoods that are disproportionately poor, Black, or Latino.
In the final pages of “For a Dollar and a Dream,” Cohen, a fair and meticulous collector of data, finally puts his thumb on the scale. Considering the regressive nature of state lotteries, their predatory practices, their role in fostering gambling addictions, the way they discourage normal taxation, and their relatively modest financial contributions, he concludes that they “should not exist in the modern United States.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/12/27/why-do-the-rich-get-richer-even-during-global en èpoques de crisi es prenen mesures per estimular l’economia en teoria, pero acaben beneficiant només als rics
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-64143602 la guerra de xips entre USA i Xina
The Netherlands’ ASML stands to lose about a quarter of the revenue it used to earn from China. It’s the only company that makes the most advanced lithographic machines – the tools that make “leading edge” chips.
https://pudding.cool/2022/12/yard-sale/ economia, un model matemàtic demosraria que l’economia normal du a que alguns s’enriqueixin molt i altres s’empobreixin.
https://www.curbed.com/article/walgreens-duane-reade-cvs-rite-aide-nyc-shoplifting-new-liberty-loans.html drogadictes roben a les botigues i venen a cases d’empenyorar o a través d’Amazon.
The economist,  Young people are always an enigma to their elders: Socrates surely wasn’t the first to grumble that the young are disrespectful, even tyrannical, towards adults. It’s no wonder, however, that today’s youth seem mysterious. Gen-Z are woke, broke and complicated. They have thin wallets and expensive tastes. They crave authenticity even as they are constantly immersed in an ersatz digital world. From brands they demand both instant gratification and a social conscience. They want different things from their employers, too: flexibility, more security—and more money. Their elders, meanwhile, argue over everything from how strictly to discipline children in school to how much time kids should spend on their phones. But if youngsters baffle the rest of the world, they also inspire it for their activism and ambition. They constitute a generation unlike any before. Whether, like Socrates, you are infuriated by the young or enthused by them, we have an article for you.
https://elmon.cat/toteconomia/empreses/inditex-pacta-salari-minim-mercats-tornen-enfonsant-borsa-13491/ això prova que els beneficis es basen en explotar els treballadors.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-66664323 el govern s’ha hagut de fer càrrec de línies de tren degut al deficient servei de les empreses privades.
https://time.com/6307359/government-ftc-walmart-prices/ Els grans forcen els proveïdors a baixar preus i aquests per compensar-ho, pugen els preus als petits que no poden competir, ni en cooperatives>>>>
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/28/elon-musks-shadow-rule té poder sobre la guerra d’Ucraïna amb la xarxa de satèl·lits, estacions de recàrrega per cotxes elèctrics al USA i enviament de missions a l’espai
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/women-hair-wigs-south-korea l’economia de Corea va créixer gràcies a l’exportació de cabells per fer perruques.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/16/i-dont-want-to-hear-whining-ballooning-ceo-pay-galvanizes-support-for-uaw-00116345
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/09/18/elon-musk-walter-isaacson-book-review?utm_source=pocket_mylist
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/see-how-humans-around-the-world-spend-the-24-hours-in-a-day1/?utm_source=pocket_mylist

2024

La cobdícia. Accidents als avions 737 de Boeing per presses en la seva construcció. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67906367

Boieng va començar a anar malament quan els enginyers van ser substituïts per gestors tipus Jack Welch que van subcontractar per reduir costos. VOX

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68573686 Boeing executius i cobdícia

https://prospect.org/api/content/fc3949f4-ec8b-11ee-a737-12163087a831/?utm_source=pocket_mylist Boeing i executius

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-america-waged-global-campaign-against-baby-formula-regulation-thailand?utm_source=pocket_mylist El govern dels USa va pressionar Tailàndia per que es vengués una llet perjudicial

https://www.noemamag.com/the-rise-of-the-bee-bandits?utm_source=pocket_mylist robatoris de ruscs d’abelles

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-68838219 Tot i que occident acusa Xina de fabricar massa coses que el ón no pot absorbir, molts treballadors s’han quedat sense feina.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68843985 estafes a través de FB que envien a webs fraudulentes

A Xina es formen grups online per ajudar-se els uns als altres a estalviar, deixant de gastar en coses innecessàries https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-68692375

Les celebracions de noces de la família més rica de la Índia. BBC

L’especulació del bitcoin necessita datacenters que gasten molta energia, fan servir ventiladors per refrigerar que fan emmalaltir la població propera. Time

a Nigèria els edificis cauen perquè les constructores volen guanyar més diners BBC

amenaça pel transport mundial, camions segrestats a Mèxic Hustle

Els francesos van fer servir productes cancerígens a les plantacions de banana dial

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg79y3rz1eo Xina inaugura un megaport a Perú