Rachel Money: “The definition I give students is that capitalism is an economic system where there is private ownership of the means of production. Depending on the class, we sometimes discuss Adam Smith and the idea of the “invisible hand” of the free market. With my economics students, they often want to know if the invisible hand works. I have some students who believe that, if economic conditions are negatively impacting citizens, the government should take action rather than wait for the economy to self-correct. Others prefer laissez-faire capitalism.”
N. Gregory Mankiw’s predictions for the U.S. economy 50 years from: “Thanks to advances in technology, the income of the average American, adjusted for inflation, will be about twice what it is today. Substantial inequality will persist, and populist agitators will continue to argue that the elites have rigged the economy. Partly as a response, the social safety net will become more robust, including a modest universal basic income. Taxes will be higher to fund the expanded safety net, and because people will have learned that government debt relative to GDP cannot rise forever. Like most of the world today, the U.S. will have a value-added tax. Workweeks will be shorter due to both the disincentive effect of higher taxes and the desire of most people to use their greater prosperity to enjoy more leisure. Manufacturing employment will have nearly disappeared, but manufacturing output will remain strong with robots doing most of the work.”
Kiran Desai on the characters in her new book “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny”: “I think there is a strong sense of the unseen in this book and of foreboding, while existing on two planes — one is the ordinary light of day, the clear light of day, and also a sense that there is a wickedly plotted darker undercurrent. I was thinking of family stories and sometimes these dark themes that run in families and keep popping up again and again; they don’t necessarily go away. It also happens in the life of a country; there are dark periods of its history that also don’t really go away. And then they recur… So, both characters have this sense in the political sphere but also in the personal sphere.”
From Matthew Dale translation of Weiying Zhang’s book: “How do enterprises create more surplus value? They rely on creativity. Market competition is not simply price competition. Instead, it is a competition to see who has the ability to produce new products, or uses new ways to produce products at a lower cost. It is a competition to see who can find new markets, discover new raw materials, and use new forms of organization to create higher value for the consumer. Whoever can do so will receive a larger market share.” [via CafeHayek]
