Showing posts with label amazon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label amazon. Show all posts

Monday, 30 September 2013

MMT Primer

 

      Ref New Economic Perspecitives


Blogger Ref Link  http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics



The posts from the MMT Primer series have been collected and organized into Randy’s latest book, Modern Money Theory. It makes for a much more coherent read and is highly recommended for anyone seriously interested in the MMT perspective. (Available from Amazon.com)

Each Monday we will post a relatively short piece, gradually building toward a comprehensive theory of the way that money “works” in sovereign countries. We will then collect comments through Wednesday night, and will post a response to the comments on Thursday. The comments should be directly related to that week’s blog. Since we are trying to develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), we especially encourage commentators to let us know where we have been unclear. Since we will be presenting the Primer over the course of the coming year, we will sometimes have to beg for patience—obviously we cannot present the entire theory all at once.
These blogs begin with the basics; no previous knowledge of MMT—or even of economics—is required. The blogs are sequential; each subsequent blog builds on previous blogs. The blogs will be at the level of theory, with only limited reference to specific cases, histories, and policies. That is intentional. A Primer should provide a general overview that can be adapted to specific national situations. The regular pages of NEP will continue to discuss current real world policy issues. The Primer will remain on a different plane.
  1. MODERN MONETARY THEORY: A PRIMER ON MACROECONOMICS FOR SOVEREIGN MONETARY SYSTEMS
  2. THE BASICS OF MACRO ACCOUNTING
  3. RECENT USA SECTORAL BALANCES: GOLDILOCKS, THE GLOBAL CRASH, AND THE PERFECT FISCAL STORM
  4. MMT, SECTORAL BALANCES AND BEHAVIOR
  5. GOVERNMENT BUDGET DEFICITS ARE LARGELY NONDISCRETIONARY: THE CASE OF THE GREAT RECESSION OF 2007
  6. WHAT IS A SOVEREIGN CURRENCY?
  7. WHAT BACKS UP CURRENCY, AND WHY WOULD ANYONE ACCEPT IT?
  8. TAXES DRIVE MONEY
  9. WHAT IF THE POPULATION REFUSES TO ACCEPT THE DOMESTIC CURRENCY?
  10. KEEPING TRACK OF STOCKS AND FLOWS: THE MONEY OF ACCOUNT
  11. MODERN MONETARY THEORY AND ALTERNATIVE EXCHANGE RATE REGIMES
  12. COMMODITY MONEY COINS? METALISM VS. NOMINALISM, PART ONE
  13. COMMODITY MONEY COINS? METALISM VS. NOMINALISM, PART TWO
  14. IOUs Denominated in the National Currency: Government and Private
  15. Clearing and the Pyramid of Liabilities
  16. The Unusual Case of Euroland
  17. Accounting for Real vs Financial (Nominal)
  18. Fiscal and Monetary Policy Operations in a Sovereign Nation
  19. The Effects of Sovereign Budget Deficits on Saving, Reserves and Interest Rates
  20. The Effects of Sovereign Budget Deficits on Saving, Reserves and Interest Rates, (continued)
  21. Government Budget Deficits and the “Two-Step” Process of Saving
  22. Reserves, Government Bond Sales, and Savings
  23. The Debate About Debt Limits (US Case)
  24. What if Foreigners Hold Government Bonds?
  25. Currency Solvency and the Special Case of the US
  26. Sovereign Currency and Government Policy in the Open Economy
  27. What About a Country that Adopts a Foreign Currency? Part One
  28. Government Spending with Self-Imposed Constraints
  29. What About a Country that Adopts a Foreign Currency? Part Two
MMT: A Doubly Retrospective Analysis
  1. What is Modern Monetary Theory?
  2. Functional Finance: Monetary and Fiscal Policy for Sovereign Currencies
  3. Milton’s Friedman’s Version of Functional Finance: A Proposal for Integration of Fiscal and Monetary Policy
  4. Functional Finance and Long Term Growth
  5. Functional Finance and Exchange Rate Regimes: The Twin Deficits Debate
  6. Functional Finance: A Conclusion
  7. What Government Ought to Do: An Introduction
  8. The Public Purpose
  9. MMT for Austrians
  10. MMT for Austrians II: Disagreements Among Reasonable People
  11. MMT for Austrians III: How Do YOU Propose We Deal With the Elderly, Disabled, and their Depts?
  12. MMT for Austrians IV: Is Description Without Theory, Ideology or Policy Desirable? Is it Even Possible?
  13. Introduction to the Job Guarantee or Employer of Last Resort
  14. Job Guarantee Basics: Design and Advantages
  15. Job Guarantee and Macro Stability
  16. The JG and Affordability Issues with Special Considerations for Developing Nations
  17. The Job Guarantee: Program Manageability
  18. The JG / ELR and Real World Experience
  19. Is the Job Guarantee Necessary?
  20. Should Growth Drive Jobs, or Jobs Drive Growth?
  21. MMT Without the JG? Conclusion
  22. The Efficiency Fairy and Inflation Goblins
  23. Conclusion: The Nature of Money
on No comments:
Labels: , , ,

Friday, 28 June 2013

Digital Capitalism

          

From P2P Foundation


Jump to: navigation, search



Discussion

By John Naughton:
'Need a crash course in digital capitalism? Easy: you just need to understand four concepts – margins, volume, inequality and employment. And if you need more detail, just add the following adjectives: thin, vast, huge and poor.
First, margins. Once upon a time, there was a great company called Kodak. It dominated its industry, which happened to be chemistry-based photography. And in its dominance, it enjoyed very fat profit margins – up to 70% in some cases. But somewhere in the depths of Kodak's R&D labs, a few researchers invented digital photography. When they put it to their bosses, the conversation went something like this. Boss: "What are the margins likely to be on this stuff?" Engineers: "Well, it's digital technology so maybe 5% at best." Boss: "Thank you and goodbye."
Actually, it turned out to be goodbye Kodak: those fat margins on an obsolete technology blindsided the company's leaders. Kodak's engineers were right, of course. Anything that involves computers and mass production is destined to be commoditised. My first mobile phone (purchased in the 1980s) cost nearly £1,000. I've just seen a handset for sale in Tesco for £9.95. (And, yes, I know that Apple currently earns fat margins on its hardware, but that's because it's usually ahead of the competition and it won't last. What's happening in the much bigger Android market is a better guide.) And, if anything, the trend towards thin margins in non-hardware businesses is even more pronounced because online markets are relatively frictionless. Just ask anyone who's trying to compete with Amazon.
Then there's volume, which in the online world is astronomical. For example: 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute; more than 100bn photographs have been uploaded to Facebook; during the Christmas period, Amazon.co.uk dispatched a truck filled with parcels every three minutes; to date, more than 40bn apps have been downloaded from Apple's iTunes store. And so on. Margins may be thin, but when you multiply them by these kinds of numbers you get staggering amounts of revenue.
These vast revenues, however, are not being widely shared. Instead, they are mostly enriching the founders and shareholders of Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook et al. Of course, those who work at the heart of these organisations – the engineers, developers and the executives who manage them, for example – are richly rewarded in salaries, stock options and lavish perks. But these gilded employees constitute only a minority of the workforces of the big tech companies and most of their colleagues have decidedly more mundane terms of employment – and remuneration.
Take Apple, for example. It makes grandiose claims about the number of jobs that it "directly or indirectly" creates or supports. But about two-thirds of the company's 50,000 American employees work in the US Apple stores, where many of them were earning about $25,000 a year in 2012 – when the mean annual personal income in the US was $38,337 (2010 figure).
Then there's the question of employment, a topic on which the big technology companies seem exceedingly sensitive. Facebook, for example, is given to engaging fancy consultants to produce preposterous claims about the number of jobs it creates. One such "report" claimed that the company, which at the time had a global workforce of about 3,000, indirectly helped create 232,000 jobs in Europe in 2011 and enabled more than $32bn in revenues. And Apple, stung by criticism about all the work it has outsourced to Foxconn in China, is now driven to claiming it has "created or supported" nearly 600,000 jobs in the US.
The really tough question that none of these companies really wants to answer is: what kinds of jobs exactly? Anyone seeking an insight into this would do well to consult a terrific report by Sarah O'Connor, the Financial Times's economics correspondent. She visited Amazon's vast distribution centre at Rugeley in Staffordshire and her account of what she found there makes sobering reading.
She saw hundreds of people in orange vests pushing trolleys around a space the size of nine football pitches, glancing down at the screens of their handheld satnav computers for directions on where to walk next and what to pick up when they get there. They do not dawdle because "the devices in their hands are also measuring their productivity in real time". They walk between seven and 15 miles a day and everything they do is determined by Amazon's software. "You're sort of like a robot, but in human form," one manager told Ms O'Connor. "It's human automation, if you like."
Still, it's a job. Until it's replaced by a robot." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/feb/17/digital-capitalism-low-pay?)

Retrieved from "?title=Digital_Capitalism&oldid=70116"

on No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)