links.lmorchard.com - #economy

Endowment effect - Wikipedia

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 01:47:26 +0000

In psychology and behavioral economics, the endowment effect, also known as divestiture aversion, is the finding that people are more likely to retain an object they own than acquire that same object when they do not own it.[1][2][3][4] The endowment theory can be defined as "an application of prospect theory positing that loss aversion associated with ownership explains observed exchange asymmetries."[5]

Tags: #economy #psychology

Durable Consumables - Travers Nisbet

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 18:22:21 +0000

The frontier keeps moving. Progress keeps accelerating. The rational response is shorter time horizons, faster replacement cycles, less investment in permanence. I understand the logic. I just wonder what we lose when fewer objects around us are built with the assumption that they'll still be here, still working, still ours, decades from now.

Tags: #design #economy #future #tech

AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is - Fast Company

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 21:26:03 +0000

We have been following the slow growth in revenues for generative AI over the last few years, and the revenues are neither big enough to support the number of layoffs attributed to AI, nor to justify the capital expenditures on AI cloud infrastructure. Those expenditures may be approaching $1 trillion for 2025, while AI revenue—which would be used to pay for the use of AI infrastructure to run the software—will not exceed $30 billion this year. Are we to believe that such a small amount of revenue is driving economy-wide layoffs?

Tags: #ai #economy #layoffs #llms #tech

Everyone's wondering if, and when, the AI bubble will pop. Here's what went down 25 years ago that ultimately burst the dot-com boom | Fortune

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 19:49:43 +0000

The question facing investors today isn’t whether AI will transform the economy—most experts agree it will. The question is whether current valuations and infrastructure investments can be justified by near-term returns, or whether, like the fiber-optic cables of the 1990s, much of today’s AI infrastructure will sit unused while the market awaits demand to catch up with supply. As history shows, even transformative technologies can’t escape the gravitational pull of economics—so while the internet did change the world, it didn’t happen as quickly as some of its early champions promised, and several of those people who got ahead of themselves were humbled in the process.

Tags: #ai #bubbles #dotcom #economy #history #llms

Elizabeth Warren: "There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own" - CBS News

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 19:52:25 +0000

Warren rejects the concept that it is possible for Americans to become wealthy in isolation. "You built a factory out there? Good for you," she says. "But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did." She continues: "Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."

Tags: #america #capitalism #economy #politics #warren

Dead Labor, Dead Speech - by Nicholas Carr

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 19:15:48 +0000

If, as Marx argued, capital is dead labor, then the products of large language models might best be understood as dead speech. Just as factory workers produce, with their “living labor,” machines and other forms of physical capital that are then used, as “dead labor,” to produce more physical commodities, so human expressions of thought and creativity—“living speech” in the forms of writing, art, photography, and music—become raw materials used to produce “dead speech” in those same forms. LLMs, to continue with Marx’s horror-story metaphor, feed “vampire-like” on human culture. Without our words and pictures and songs, they would cease to function. They would become as silent as a corpse in a casket.

Tags: #ai #creativity #economy #genai #llm #ml #writing

Before You Can Have Smalltalk, You Must First Defeat Capitalism. — Matthew Gaudet

Tue, 29 Oct 2024 06:09:51 +0000

The title of this blog post is at least a little sarcastic, but I think is an honest to goodness truth: If you want to build a future that involves beautiful systems like Smalltalk, you must first rebuild the economic environment wherein it could be built. Wherein it could succeed! These systems idealized in lamentations at SPLASH all seem to me to be products of economic surplus combined with the right people. We need an economy that has surpluses around for people to do explorations.

Tags: #compsci #economy #programming #smalltalk

How the internet is making us poor – Quartz

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 18:04:46 +0000

Barring a civilization-ending event, technology is not going to move backward. More and more of our world will be controlled by software. It’s already become so ubiquitous that, argues one of my colleagues, it’s now ridiculous to call some firms as “tech” companies when all companies depend on it so much.

Tags: #automation #economy #future #imported:pinboard #jobs #software #technology #to:fb #work

How the internet is making us poor – Quartz

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 18:04:46 +0000

Tags: #automation #economy #future #jobs #software #technology #to:fb #work

Daily Kos: Elizabeth Warren: 'Why aren’t we rebuilding America?'

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 23:30:05 +0000

It really is that simple. The nation's roads, bridges, electrical grid, water systems, national parks—the whole infrastructure—is crumbling. At the same time unemployment remains persistently high. Put people to work fixing the stuff that's broken. It's not rocket science. It would be that simple, except for a Republican Party that won't do what's best for the country, won't attempt to fix these things because fixing these things might help reelect President Obama and Democrats in Congress. Furthermore, making the country work proves that government works, and Republicans want none of that.

Tags: #economy #imported:pinboard #jobs #politics #to:fb #warren

Unemployment Rate Without Government Cuts: 7.1% - Real Time Economics - WSJ

Wed, 09 May 2012 23:33:24 +0000

One reason the unemployment rate may have remained persistently high: The sharp cuts in state and local government spending in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and the layoffs those cuts wrought.

Tags: #duh #economy #imported:pinboard #politics #to:fb

Unemployment Rate Without Government Cuts: 7.1% - Real Time Economics - WSJ

Wed, 09 May 2012 23:33:24 +0000

Tags: #duh #economy #politics #to:fb

Nobody Understands Debt - NYTimes.com

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:42:32 +0000

So yes, debt matters. But right now, other things matter more. We need more, not less, government spending to get us out of our unemployment trap. And the wrongheaded, ill-informed obsession with debt is standing in the way.

Tags: #debt #economy #money #politics

Daily Kos: John McCain is worried House Republicans are making the entire Republican Party look bad

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 20:25:40 +0000

But whether John McCain or House Republicans have done or are doing more damage to the Republican Party isn't something that most people care about. What they care about is making sure that Congress doesn't raise their taxes while the economy is still in recovery. And if Republicans cared more about that, we wouldn't be facing this stalemate now. The American public would be better off, and so would the GOP.

Tags: #economy #politics #republicans

Walmart Heirs Worth Same Amount As Bottom 30 Percent Of Americans In 2007: Analysis

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 13:43:39 +0000

The six children of Walmart's founders, Sam and James "Bud" Walton, had the same net worth in 2007 as the entire bottom 30 percent of American earners, according to an analysis from Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist at University of California-Berkeley's Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics.

Tags: #economy #politics #walmart #wealthinequality #wtf