Money Talks

This week's Money Talks consisted of interviews with 2 of the 3 nobel laureates in Economics. The gist of their achievement was some work explaining the question of why and how the industrial revolution sparked such as a massive increase in productivity. The answer seems sort of self-evident, but the argument is that humans had seen many many advances over the centuries, the printing press being one relatively trivial example, and none of them sparked the kind of sustained increase in standard of living that started with the IR (more or less).

Their answer is that the IR coincided with an explosion in the willingness of our species to share information, in many ways - for example, industrial competition is a form of information-sharing, along with more obvious systems such as the way academics generally publish for the benefit of all.

They prattled on quite a bit about the importance of "schumpeterianism", which is the idea of "creative destruction", where competition forces companies to either improve or be replaced by those who can. This all seems pretty obvious to anyone who has spent more than 5 minutes studying Economist values; I'm not sure why they went on for so long about it.

They also pointed out how since Trump 2.0, the world is moving in the opposite direction - to the almost certain detriment of the US, and probably the world given that, in spite of everything, you'd probably rather have the US running the show than China or Russia. The awarding of this prize was probably Sweden's (Norway's?) subtle nod to the problems in the US.

(TBH I am ever less sure about this - China I mean - it seems like they do an awful lot of things right, much as does the US, and maybe we focus too much on the negative - first and foremost being - I agree completely with Sister A on this - their enthusiasm for the death penalty. In any case, I'd bet a ton of money that 50 years from now, China will be more or less where the US was after WW2, and the US will be more or less where the UK is today. And Canada, by extension).

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