One of the factors that makes the Net Neutrality fight so urgent is how little competition there is in the telcoms sector; it — like the whole modern economy is dominated by a few giant, top-heavy firms that are gobbling one another at speed.

As we set ourselves to the task of dooming Facebook to the scrapheap of history, it's worth considering the many ways in which Facebook has anticipated and planned for this moment, enacting countermeasures to prevent the rise of a competitor focused on delivering things that help users (making it easy to find people to form interest groups with), rather than focused on "maximizing engagement" and spying on us.

As I've written, the demise of newsmedia can't be blamed on tech — rather, it was the combination of technology and deregulated, neoliberal capitalism, which saw media companies merged and acquired, vertically and horizontally integrated, with quality lowered, staff outsourced and assets stripped, leaving them vulnerable to technological shocks, after all their in-house experts were turned into contractors who drifted away, their physical plant sold and leased back, their war-chests drained by vulture capitalists who loaded them up with debt that acted like a millstone around their necks as they strove to maneuver their way out of their economic conundrum.

The US — allegedly a bastion of the "free market" — has one of the world's lowest levels of economic competition, thanks to the triumph of the Chicago School economists, who used shitty math to convince Ronald Reagan and his successors that the only time a monopoly is a problem is when it raises prices.

With the rise of white nationalist groups whose allies in government extend all the way to the President of the United States, tech companies are finding themselves in the uncomfortable position of deciding where tolerance begins and ends — where they have a duty to step in and silence certain kinds of speech.

In Labor Market Concentration, a new working paper from economists at U Penn, U Navarra and the Roosevelt Institute, researchers analyze a large US government data-set to determine how many workers live in markets where there is effective only one or two employers, a situation called "monoposony" (when a single buyer has a monopoly).

There was a time when monopolistic control over sectors of the US economy was vigorously checked through antitrust enforcement, but the neoliberal ideology of the Chicago economists (Milton Friedman et al) has eroded competition in America by convincing regulators that monopolies only need to be policed under very specific (and almost unheard-of) circumstances.

Joseph Stiglitz, winner of a Nobel prize in economics, describes the foolishness of enacting further tax cuts for the wealthy in America, and the structural impediments that stand in the way of Trump's pursuit of this foolish goal.

The Economist's feature on time-poverty is an absolute must-read, explaining the multi-factorial nature of the modern time crunch, which combines the equivalence of time and money (leading to leisure hours that are as crammed as possible in order to maximize their value), the precarity of the American workplace (meaning that affluent workers work longer hours), and the pace of electronically mediated communications (which makes any kind of refractory pause feel like a wasteful and dull eternity).

Joseph Stiglitz — former World Bank economist and Nobel economics laureate — has a suggestion for dealing with the Barclay's bank scandals and those that follow: put bankers in jail.

Laurence Lewis's Daily Kos editorial, "The cruel stupidity that is economic austerity," is a blazing indictment of austerity as a means of recovering from recession, and it cites experts and statistics showing that austerity programs (in Europe, particularly) are deepening the recession, destroying lives, and demolishing vital social institutions that are especially needed in economic downturns. — Read the rest

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Here's Harvard Professor Lawrence Lessig in Boston NYC: "If this movement can be identified as a fight against the corruption that our political system has become, then it has the potential to bridge left and right in a way that could become much more generative, much more important, because people on the left and people on the right look at the crony capitalism of this system and they look at the way in which money from Wall Street bought the regulatory infrastructure that led to the collapse of 2008. — Read the rest

Barry Ritholtz sez, "The NYTimes graphic department has your Sunday morning chart porn regarding the extension of tax cuts. Its an illustration fueled by data from the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan research organization.

The graphic shows how much Americans have gotten so far broken down by income groups. — Read the rest

Apropos last night's post about the new UK cost-cutting budget and its efficacy in reviving the sinking economy, this Information is Beautiful chart visualizing the cuts against the deficit (click the link for legible, full-sized version).

Budget 2010: Information is Beautiful live blogs George Osborne's speech

(Thanks, Barry! — Read the rest

The remarkable story about Zimbabwean hyperinflation:

The cumulative devaluation of the Zimbabwe dollar was such that a stack of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (26 zeros) two dollar bills (if they were printed) in the peak hyperinflation would have be needed to equal in value what a single original Zimbabwe two-dollar bill of 1978 had been worth.

There's a good discussion revving up in the comment thread of Mark Frauenfelder's entry, Documentary examines possibility of US dollar collapse. The first major salvo came from Cowicide, twenty comments in, responding to arguments that the problem isn't that serious:

Not sure Operation Three Trillion Dollar War is helping too much, either…
* Link to video, transcripts of video, audio, etc.

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winner in economics, says the Iraq war has cost $3 trillion so far. According to the Guardian, "three trillion could have fixed America's social security problem for half a century."

Some time in 2005, Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, who also served as an economic adviser under Clinton, noted that the official Congressional Budget Office estimate for the cost of the war so far was of the order of $500bn.

Buried at the end of an IHT article on French president Nicolas Sarkozy's plan to tax the Internet and raise levies on blank media is this doozy: abolishing gross domestic product in favor of a better metric of happiness, and defending the economy "sovereign wealth funds and other financial predators." — Read the rest

Joseph E. Stiglitz is a Nobel-laureate economist who has advised the US government on its copyright and patent trade policies and served as Senior VP of the World Bank. In a stirring editorial in the Pakistan Daily Times, Stiglitz talks about the economic irrationality that arises from overly broad copyright and patent regimes, and talks about the consequences for the developing world that arise from them:

The economic rationale for intellectual property is that faster innovation offsets the enormous costs of such inefficiencies.