Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember: First: Structural change is much more likely to be win-win and much more likely to take place rapidly when it takes place in a time of short supply as opposed to a time of short demand...
Forbes should add still another criterion: Berkeley educates far more students every year than Harvard does (a point made here on several occasions). Not only is Berkeley doing a better job on the percentages of lower income students, it's doing so with much larger nominal admissions.
Structural change at the level of labour allocation isn't going to work if you can't obtain and maintain the robots.
Present circumstances strongly implies that the only way to do that involves shortening the supply chains, which in turn means creating local communities of practice. Which would be tough enough without capital return optimization insisting that you don't do that, the return is higher if the supply chain is long and the communities of practice for any one thing few.
Headline on twitter that the chip shortage is costing the auto industry a couple hundred billion dollars. Aside from desperately not needing this auto industry, that's pretty obviously not enough disruption to cause any market-driven supply-chain shortening. If that's not, well, it's because the market can't. It takes policy and the exercise of the civil power.
The Evergrande thing is rather telling. The US dealt with its housing crisis by bailing out the financial firms and letting millions of people lose their houses. China seems to be dealing with it by letting the financial firms collapse and making sure that people get their new homes. I guess this shows the wretched immorality of Communism in placing people's need for a place to live about the financial sector's need to show rising profits. The horror, the horror.
I've long been saying that the reason we don't see robots raising productivity is that labor is too cheap. There's too big a labor pool to make robots worthwhile. I figured that when the Baby Boomers started retiring we might see more productive robots, but COVID has accelerated this. (It has also accelerated Baby Boomer retirements. I'd love to see if there has been a boom in Social Security retirements.
Forbes should add still another criterion: Berkeley educates far more students every year than Harvard does (a point made here on several occasions). Not only is Berkeley doing a better job on the percentages of lower income students, it's doing so with much larger nominal admissions.
Structural change at the level of labour allocation isn't going to work if you can't obtain and maintain the robots.
Present circumstances strongly implies that the only way to do that involves shortening the supply chains, which in turn means creating local communities of practice. Which would be tough enough without capital return optimization insisting that you don't do that, the return is higher if the supply chain is long and the communities of practice for any one thing few.
Headline on twitter that the chip shortage is costing the auto industry a couple hundred billion dollars. Aside from desperately not needing this auto industry, that's pretty obviously not enough disruption to cause any market-driven supply-chain shortening. If that's not, well, it's because the market can't. It takes policy and the exercise of the civil power.
The Evergrande thing is rather telling. The US dealt with its housing crisis by bailing out the financial firms and letting millions of people lose their houses. China seems to be dealing with it by letting the financial firms collapse and making sure that people get their new homes. I guess this shows the wretched immorality of Communism in placing people's need for a place to live about the financial sector's need to show rising profits. The horror, the horror.
I've long been saying that the reason we don't see robots raising productivity is that labor is too cheap. There's too big a labor pool to make robots worthwhile. I figured that when the Baby Boomers started retiring we might see more productive robots, but COVID has accelerated this. (It has also accelerated Baby Boomer retirements. I'd love to see if there has been a boom in Social Security retirements.