Rick

“Ormerod examined the performance of democratic governments on those issues that perennially engaged their ambitions: what I have called their claims to competence. Take unemployment as an obvious example. Every contemporary government has claimed the ability to reduce unemployment. The architects of the stimulus bill passed in 2009 claimed that it would save or create 3.5 million jobs and significantly lower the unemployment rate. It would do so by spending a lot of money. Of necessity, that has been the chosen economic tool of government. Since World War II, Ormerod notes, governments have absorbed a much larger chunk of the national output in pursuit of worthy goals such as full employment. In Britain, where excellent statistics have been kept from the Victorian era onward, the size of the public sector as a proportion of the economy has doubled since 1946, compared to the period 1870–1938. Yet the difference in the average unemployment rate before and after the expansion of government was statistically negligible. A”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“Strong network effects are at the core of every platform business today. In fact, in a recent three-year study by NFX, network effects accounted for 70 percent of the value in technology companies over the last twenty-three years.”
― Jeff Booth, The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future

“The world order, largely intact since the end of the World War II, seems to be breaking down. Capitalism, and its relentless march towards progress, allowed many to win. Although no system is perfect, the rules by which capitalism operated were well regarded and understood. You could expect that if you made a big bet and were wrong, you would be wiped out—but if you were right, your hard work, ingenuity, or risk taking would be rewarded. In game theory, we could call this a dominant cooperative strategy, and it dominated for the better part of the twentieth century. The rise of fiat currencies that could be manipulated domestically and the bailout in 2008 changed that strategy to one where the players whose bad bets caused the crisis, instead of being wiped out, were rewarded handsomely. Capitalism’s long-dominant cooperative strategy was replaced by a non-dominant strategy, crony capitalism, where the cheaters won.”
― Jeff Booth, The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future

“In 2015, Bill Gross gave a great TED Talk in Vancouver (viewed more than two million times) where he discussed his research on the differences between companies that succeeded or failed. The findings surprised even Bill when he determined that timing stood out above all in determining success rates of startups. In fact, 42 percent of the success could be attributed to timing. Rounding out the top five things in determining success were the team/execution at 32 percent, the idea at 28 percent, the business model at 24 percent, and funding at 14 percent.”
― Jeff Booth, The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future