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Archive for the ‘economics’ category: Page 128

Jul 16, 2018

Universal basic income touted as answer to automation

Posted by in categories: economics, employment, food, robotics/AI

My debate on #BasicIncome at the FreedomFest against Dr. Barbara Kolm, director at the Austrian Economic Center (debate moderated by syndicated columnist and scholar Veronique de Rugy) got a write-up in Nevada Current (article by journalist Jeniffer Solis). https://www.nevadacurrent.com/…/universal-basic-income-tou…/ #FFest18


Earlier this month, the Vdara Hotel & Spa added two relay robots that deliver snacks, sundries and spa products directly to guest suites. While charmingly decorated as a Golden Retriever and Dalmatian dog with Vdara-themed collars, the new robots — named Fetch and Jett — may be a sign of what’s next for Las Vegas.

In 20 years, about 65 percent of the city’s jobs could be automated, according to a study by the Institute for Spatial Economic Analysis. That projection may be an outlier – the Organization for Economic for Cooperation and Development, for instance, projects only 10 percent of U.S. jobs are vulnerable to automation.

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Jul 16, 2018

The tools – and weapons – China can use for tech supremacy

Posted by in categories: economics, innovation

Two weeks ago Abacus examined the extent to which China lags behind the world’s advanced economies in technological innovation, and looked at Beijing’s aim of closing the gap and taking the lead in key emerging technologies.


Some techniques Beijing will use are similar to past episodes of industrial planning. Others are newer, reflecting China’s recently acquired economic strength and confidence.

By Tom Holland

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Jul 15, 2018

What if people were paid for their data?

Posted by in categories: economics, finance, health, security

“DATA SLAVERY.” Jennifer Lyn Morone, an American artist, thinks this is the state in which most people now live. To get free online services, she laments, they hand over intimate information to technology firms. “Personal data are much more valuable than you think,” she says. To highlight this sorry state of affairs, Ms Morone has resorted to what she calls “extreme capitalism”: she registered herself as a company in Delaware in an effort to exploit her personal data for financial gain. She created dossiers containing different subsets of data, which she displayed in a London gallery in 2016 and offered for sale, starting at £100 ($135). The entire collection, including her health data and social-security number, can be had for £7,000.

Only a few buyers have taken her up on this offer and she finds “the whole thing really absurd”. Yet if the job of the artist is to anticipate the Zeitgeist, Ms Morone was dead on: this year the world has discovered that something is rotten in the data economy. Since it emerged in March that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy, had acquired data on 87m Facebook users in underhand ways, voices calling for a rethink of the handling of online personal data have only grown louder. Even Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, recently called for a price to be put on personal data, asking researchers to come up with solutions.

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Jul 13, 2018

Universal basic income would cost the US up to $3.8 trillion per year — Bridgewater estimate

Posted by in categories: economics, finance

Bridgewater Associates’ Ray Dalio, the founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, is analyzing the social and financial viability of a widely debated program aimed at reducing the wealth inequality.


Hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio is looking at whether universal basic income can help solve wealth inequality.

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Jul 10, 2018

Global quadrupling of cooling appliances to 14 billion by 2050

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, economics, food, sustainability

Soaring global need for cooling by 2050 could see world energy consumption for cooling increase five times as the number of cooling appliances quadruples to 14 billion—according to a new report by the University of Birmingham, UK.

This new sets out to provide, for the first time, an indication of the scale of the implications of ‘Cooling for All’.

Effective is essential to preserve food and medicine. It underpins industry and economic growth, is key to sustainable urbanisation as well as providing a ladder out of rural poverty. With significant areas of the world projected to experience temperature rises that place them beyond those which humans can survive, cooling will increasingly make much of the world bearable—or even safe—to live in. With populations increasing, expanding urbanisation and impacts leading to more frequent heatwaves and temperature rises, the demand for more cooling will increase in the decades ahead.

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Jul 7, 2018

Billionaire Ray Dalio: A.I. is widening the wealth gap, ‘national emergency should be declared’

Posted by in categories: economics, employment, government, information science, robotics/AI

It’s amusing that these people know where this is headed, but arent interested enough to stop it.


The co-chief investment officer and co-chairman of Bridgewater Associates shared his thoughts in a Facebook post on Thursday.

Dalio says he was responding to a question about whether machine intelligence would put enough people out of work that the government will have to pay people to live with a cash handout, a concept known as universal basic income.

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Jul 6, 2018

A trillion-dollar space industry will require new markets

Posted by in categories: economics, finance, space

RENTON, Wash. — Forecasts that predict the space industry to grow to a trillion dollars by the 2040s will require the development of new markets, even with the modest annual growth rates needed to achieve that goal.

A panel session June 26 at the Space Frontier Foundation’s NewSpace 2018 conference here noted that several reports in the last year by investment banks predicted that the global space economy, currently valued at about $350 billion, could grow to $1 trillion or more in the 2040s.

One report by Goldman Sachs predicted the industry would reach $1 trillion in the 2040s, noted Jeff Matthews, a consultant with Deloitte who moderated the panel discussion. A separate study by Morgan Stanley projected a “most likely outcome” of a $1.1 trillion space economy in the 2040s. A third study by Bank of America Merrill Lynch was the most optimistic, seeing the market growing to $2.7 trillion by the same timeframe.

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Jul 5, 2018

To thrive in tomorrow’s economy, workers need to boost lifelong cognitive abilities

Posted by in categories: economics, robotics/AI

As we develop robots with increasingly human-like capabilities, we should take a closer look at our own. Only by learning to overcome – or at least evade – our cognitive limitations can we have long and fruitful careers in the new global economy.”


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The Cognitive Limits of Lifelong Learning (Project Syndicate):

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Jul 5, 2018

Who Really Stands to Win from Universal Basic Income?

Posted by in categories: economics, policy

Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World” (Crown), by the economic journalist Annie Lowrey, is the latest book to argue that a program in this family is a sane solution to the era’s socioeconomic woes. Lowrey is a policy person. She is interested in working from the concept down. “The way things are is really the way we choose for them to be,” she writes. Her conscientiously reported book assesses the widespread effects that money and a bit of hope could buy.


It has enthusiasts on both the left and the right. Maybe that’s the giveaway, Nathan Heller writes.

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Jun 30, 2018

The Single Greatest Economic Myth

Posted by in categories: business, economics, employment, geopolitics, health

Recorded at “Contra Krugman: The Economic Myths of the 2016 Election”: the Mises Circle at Seattle’s historic Town Hall, on 21 May 2016.

Presidential candidates promise everything from living wages to free health care and college. Proposals about how to run whole segments of the economy are made with a straight face. The most tired and hackneyed ideas about income equality, corporate greed, creating jobs, and paying one’s fair share of taxes are trotted out. And millions of voters apparently believe it all, falling for the same promises of free stuff and prosperity from Washington.

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