In a given geographical territory, half as many people will not support half as many such enterprises spaced at twice the distance. When distance inconvenience sets in, the small, the various and the personal wither away.
Baumol's cost disease (or the Baumol effect) is the rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no or low increase of labor productivity, in response to rising salaries in other jobs that have experienced higher labor productivity growth.
The rise of wages in jobs without productivity gains derives from the requirement to compete for employees with jobs that have experienced gains and so can naturally pay higher salaries, just as classical economics predicts. For instance, if the retail sector pays its managers 19th-century-style salaries, the managers may decide to quit to get a job at an automobile factory, where salaries are higher because of high labor productivity. Thus, managers' salaries are increased not by labor productivity increases in the retail sector but by productivity and corresponding wage increases in other industries.
I refer to small money-earning business that consist of the work of a visible individual, or have evolved from a personal hobby or skill, as "small economies". We can include in this category newer forms of at-home work—side businesses, telecommuting and the like. The amount of income is unimportant; meager profits are compensated for by the motivation of the owner. A small economy may or may not be someone's main form of livelihood, but it is always a spontaneously conceived and continuing activity.
But the economic value of old buildings is irreplaceable at will. It is created by time. This economic requisite for diversity is a requisite that vital city neighborhoods can only inherit, and then sustain over the years.
When we enter the world of refuse and waste, we cross over into a mirror-image economy. In the "normal" world, we pay to acquire things; on the other side of the looking glass, we pay to get rid of them. Junk isn't merely worthless; it has negative value.
A chemical engineer once told me about a recent improvement in a manufacturing process; by fine-tuning a chemical synthesis he had increased the yield of a certain commodity from 98 percent to 99 percent. I congratulated him, but I couldn't help remarking that this seemed like a rather paltry improvement. "Ah, you miss the important point," he said. "The amount of waste goes from 2 percent down to 1 percent. It's cut in half. We save tremendously on disposal costs."
The only law of economics that I believe in is Hamming’s law: “You cannot consume what is not produced.” There is not another single reliable law in all of economics I know of which is not either a tautology in mathematics or else sometimes false.
To understand the case of America today, one must understand the economic trends and the selling mechanics of a capitalist world in which the mass production and the mass sale of goods has become The Fetish of human life, the pivot both of work and of leisure.
Existing commodities must be worn out more quickly for as the market is saturated, the economy becomes increasingly dependent upon what is called replacement. It is then that obsolescence comes to be planned and the economic cycle deliberately shortened.
In the past, GDP and resources use have always been tightly correlated. But this is just drawing a line through some data — it’s not based on any deep theory. And in fact, these correlations can change very quickly. Just as one example, here’s energy use versus GDP since 1949.
If you were sitting in 1970, you could look at this curve and claim, very confidently, that economic growth requires concomitant increases in energy use. And you’d be wrong. Because the trend is your friend til the bend at the end.
The Internet is changing the economics of creative work – or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture – and it’s doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices. Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it’s created by amateurs rather than professionals, it’s free. And free trumps quality all the time.
Different from the typical website whose URLs act as persistent indexes to a page and its contents, Tokenize This destroys each work right after its creation. While the unique digital object remains viewable by the original visitor for as long as they leave their browser tab open, any subsequent attempt to copy, share, or view that URL in another tab, browser, or system, leads to a “404 Not Found” error. In other words, Tokenize This generates countless digital artifacts that can only be viewed or accessed once.
There’s a movement called the circular economy which is about designing services that don’t include throwing things away. There is no “away.”
A non-extractive economy is going to look very different to today’s economy. These points feel opposed somehow but they are part of the same movement:
With CupClub, it’s all about infrastructure.
With the battery-free Game Boy, it’s untethered from infrastructure: once manufactured, no nationwide electricity grid is required to play.
We’ll need better tools to track and measure. There will be new patterns for new types of services. New technologies to build new products. New language. So it’s fascinating seeing the pieces gradually come together.
Besides being unlikely to work for you even if someone is able to describe what makes their writing tick, most advice is written by people who don't understand how their writing works. This may be difficult to see for writing if you haven't spent a lot of time analyzing writing, but it's easy to see this is true if you've taken a bunch of dance classes or had sports instruction that isn't from a very good coach. If you watch, for example, the median dance instructor and listen to their instructions, you'll see that their instructions are quite different from what they actually do. People who listen and follow instructions instead of attempting to copy what the instructor is doing will end up doing the thing completely wrong. Most writing advice similarly fails to capture what's important.
What keeps me busy in my classes is trying to help my students learn how to think. They say, "Rob holds his hands like this...," and they don't know that the reason I hold my hands like this is not to make myself look that way. The end result is not to hold the gun that way; holding the gun that way is the end result of doing something else.
…The more general issue is that a person who doesn't understand the thing they're trying to copy will end up copying unimportant superficial aspects of what somebody else is doing and miss the fundamentals that drive the superficial aspects. This even happens when there are very detailed instructions. Although watching what other people do can accelerate learning, especially for beginners who have no idea what to do, there isn't a shortcut to understanding something deeply enough to facilitate doing it well that can be summed up in simple rules, like "omit needless words".
Swearing or saying that something "is cancer" or "is the Vietnam of X" or some other highly emotionally loaded phrase seems to be particularly effective
Talk-up prestige/accomplishments/titles
Use an authoritative tone and/or style
Write things with an angry tone or that are designed to induce anger
Write frequently
Get endorsements from people
Write about hot, current, topics
Provide takes on recent events
Use deliberately outrageous / controversial framings on topics