I want to see what some other commentators who are more knowledgeable about the field say. This is a pretty striking attack against a central theory in... Scientific American? Without citing a wealth of evidence with detailed citations? I find the logic of the argument appealing, finding no inborn bias towards gain nor loss outside of what could be derived by reason would be a very nice thing to say about the future of humanity.
I read D. Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow a number of years back and it did present some pretty clear looking graphs demonstrating loss aversion of 2:1 iirc. I've since lost my copy due to a friend's "borrowing". ;) Certain other elements of his book have come into question, including priming. I'm eagerly waiting to see how the cookie crumbles here.
I agree here. The article mentions ideological complacency, but complacency isn't enough to award 2 Nobel prizes. Loss aversion is, to my layman understanding, a well enough established principle that an article like this without some indication of widespread shift in expert opinion isn't going to change my view of it.
The positive way to think about this is that it appears humanity's moral universe is expanding. I could name a long list of things that we do all day that we are going to be judged extremely harshly for, but it would derail the conversation.
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Why do we bother celebrating any of them? Mortals are mortal, they deserve to be evaluated based on what they do. I'm not sure what purpose, other than propagandistic, is served by looking at them through rose tinted glasses.
In any case, it's not entirely clear that other than the (wonderful) Bill of Rights, the American Revolution was anything other than the elites over here wanting more control. 3/5 compromise, male property owning voters, indirect election of senators, it really sounds like the new aristocracy, with an Enlightenment tinged bent, was taking control. After all, the UK was being run mainly by Parliament, not by the King.
Only popular struggle has made the US more democratic, direct election of senators, freeing the slaves, universal suffrage, but we see even that is being rolled back in the modern era with voter suppression, dark money, and the dark legacy of US foreign policy.
I had just read this essay which advocated for the FANG + Microsoft to be nationalized and taken out of the profit system like the post office. It really resonated with me. If anything, the removal of profits would return the things we like about these companies and remove the things we despise while giving their customers more of a say in how they do buisness.
Google attracts the top engineers in the world because it can pay them the most money in the world through its profits. Take away profits, take away the engineers that made google valuable in the first place...
The USPS is the only federal institution required to fully fund its retirement. It's also expected to act like an efficient, private business, but it's unable to set its prices.
The USPS is intentionally hamstrung so that conservatives can point to it as an example of how inefficient government is, and subsequently line their pockets thought privatization.
I'm not sure I believe that S&P 500 chart proves his point that we are living in historically similar times to the 1960s. S&P looks at the top of part of the distribution, not the whole distribution. If for some reason, there were more or fewer companies, it would mean something different. I will note that we did in fact break up Bell Telephone and standard oil. If we act quickly, maybe we'll never get to 1T.
Ah bloomberg news, understanding that a new economic slowdown is in the cards wants to reassure the public that the economists have learned something. What they've learned is that they are ever more desperate to attempt to coax additional growth out of a slowing machine that increasingly just fails and takes ordinary people with it. Without new markets, the economy will continue to slow and monopolization will continue to increase.
They still escaped it. Competition was the driving force for companies to become big and monopolistic. The "intended" effect of the market resulted in the opposite.
Copyrights, patents, and lawyers weakening or blocking competition helps. Then have buildings near top colleges to pull their talent. Then, throw in some labor and price fixing plus other cartel behavior in some sectors for the win. :)
There's a lot more to it. These just get ignored by the media and studies the most. The corporate media is doing similar stuff. No surprise they'd downplay it. Author covered talent snatching but misses most of the rest. Even the too hard to clone requirement comes from IP law (trade secrets). And a lot gets cloned anyway.
I read D. Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow a number of years back and it did present some pretty clear looking graphs demonstrating loss aversion of 2:1 iirc. I've since lost my copy due to a friend's "borrowing". ;) Certain other elements of his book have come into question, including priming. I'm eagerly waiting to see how the cookie crumbles here.