timharford.com
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Author of "Messy", "The Undercover Economist" and other books. Financial Times columnist; presenter of More or Less, Radio 4
An alternative approach, set out this week by the UK’s Digital Competition Expert Panel, is to regulate the behaviour of the big digital groups rather than to change their structure. Another alternative is to look at the most valuable 20 companies in the US economy, and the most valuable four in each of 60 or so different sectors, whether or not they are digital and whether or not they are highly productive. This perspective casts doubt on the very idea that the superstars of the US economy are particularly large or productive by postwar standards. Any large group contributes to the productivity of the economy as a whole in two ways: directly, by producing output, and indirectly, by drawing in resources from less productive players.
That Made The Modern Economy Season Two I’m delighted to announce that Season Two of “Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy” is up and running. That Made The Modern Economy while in the US, it’s Fifty Inventions And if you want to delve deeper, try Bee Wilson’s book The Hive or the magisterial Brick: A World History – or my history of technology reading list.
Nearly seven decades ago, the noted psychologist Solomon Asch gave a simple task to 123 experimental subjects: to pick which one of three quite different lines was the same length as a “reference” line. If Asch had conducted all-women experiments, he would have discovered that women tend to conform to the group more often than men. Invisible Women (US) (UK) a new book by Caroline Criado Perez, explores countless cases in which everything from the height of the top shelf to the functionality of an iPhone is predicated on the assumption that the user will be male. That measurably increased spending on women’s and children’s clothes relative to men’s.
Why happiness is easy to venerate, hard to generate In 1972, the teenage king of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, declared that “gross national happiness is more important than gross domestic product”. Even setting aside this enormity, it’s hard to see that Bhutan paid much more than lip service to gross national happiness. Consider some of the issues that are notoriously bypassed by GDP, the most common measure of economic activity: digital services are hard to value, while by design GDP omits any consideration of inequality or environmental damage. What is not useful is the sense that measuring GDP is the problem, and measuring gross national happiness is the solution.