skanderbm

See: https://imgur.com/a/kUxsV1M

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24480572

"ABSTRACT. The vast amount of product information available to consumers through online search renders most advertising obsolete as a tool for conveying product information. Advertising remains useful to firms only as a tool for persuading consumers to purchase advertised products. In the mid-twentieth century, courts applying the antitrust laws held that such persuasive advertising is anticompetitive and harmful to consumers, but the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was unable to pursue an antitrust campaign against persuasive advertising for fear of depriving consumers of advertising's information value. Now that the information function of most advertising is obsolete, the FTC should renew its campaign against persuasive advertising by treating all advertising beyond the minimum required to ensure that product information is available to online searchers as monopolization in violation of section 2 of the Sherman Act."

This makes the argument that the need to convey product information is now fully accomplished by search engines, and advertising only adds harm / manipulation.

It recounts several examples of internet self-righteous mobs lynching people for minor and larger offences.

In particular, one conclusion of the book is that aggressively not making amends for bad behaviour, even raising the bar for offensiveness, is the optimal survival strategy. See Trump ...

It focuses on observable social and economics consequences (failures of equality, opportunity and sustainability in particular), when introducing new economic concepts.

The goal is to avoid students being blinded by appealing, but simplistic, economics models.

Having been seduced by many an economic theory before, I for one welcome this perspective.

What is more routine/systematic than assembling IKEA furniture?

Not sure I would fully entrust a trained AI to control even an elevator door, where failure could result in bodily harm.

Also is the shift from mass broadcasting to targeted messaging. The degree of information available to exploit you, your weaknesses and biases is a new phenomenon.

The erosion of social loyalties and ties, which can be linked to one century of neoliberal policies, is also a change (although it happened in the past: see the Corruption and decline of Rome: http://www.historytoday.com/stephen-williams/corruption-and-...)

Please let me know your thoughts:

I agree that the concentration of wealth reflected in the charts shows that, at any point of time, the person at the 1st percentile owns an increasing fraction of the total wealth. However, this same person is very likely to be almost immediately spoliated by the subsequent transaction, and give all its wealth to someone (maybe the poorest person).

In summary, there is a lot of social mobility, as can be revealed by commenting out the following line in the code (essentially, we now track the financial path of specific individuals, rather than the wealth of various percentiles):

def record_percentiles(population, percentiles): #population = sorted(population, reverse=True) N = len(population) return [population[int(p*N/100.)] for p in percentiles]

So, it seems to me that, on average, everyone is equal over time, but each instant offers every participant dramatic ups and downs.

Not sure if I am missing something.