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orbemnews · 4 years ago

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Oil Prices Return to Pre-Pandemic Highs: Live Updates Here’s what you need to know: An oil tanker truck in the Permian Basin part of Texas. Futures for West Texas Intermediate crude have recovered from the price collapse last spring.Credit…Angus Mordant/Reuters U.S. markets Global stocks climbed on Monday and futures indicated U.S. markets would extend their record highs when Wall Street opens later. Optimism that the vaccine rollout and fiscal stimulus will pave the way for the economic recovery could also be seen in the commodities market. Oil prices have recovered from their pandemic-related declines. Over the weekend, Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary, pushed for the Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion spending plan. She said passing the stimulus package could allow the economy to reach full employment by next year, but doing too little could scar workers and the economy for years. Last week, the S&P 500 index gained more than 5 percent, its best week since early November during the presidential election. Traders haven’t been unnerved by news that South Africa has halted use of the AstraZeneca-Oxford coronavirus vaccine. The country found that the vaccine did not protect clinical-trial participants from mild or moderate illness caused by the more contagious virus variant that was first seen in South Africa. Oil West Texas Intermediate futures, the U.S. crude benchmark, rose 1.2 percent to $57.54 a barrel on Monday, above the high from early 2020. During the first few months of the pandemic, oil prices collapsed, with some futures briefly dipping into negative prices. Production cuts by OPEC countries and its allies have helped buoy oil prices. The recovery should benefit oil and gas companies, which recently reported steep declines in profit for 2020 because the pandemic sapped demand for oil. GameStop, Dogecoin and ‘meme’ trading GameStop shares rose 16 percent in premarket trading, extending a 19 percent rebound on Friday. In the past two weeks, shares in the video game retailer have been on a wild ride spurred on by retail traders hyping up the stock in a Reddit forum that has made fast winners and losers of amateur investors. The close on Friday was $63.77 a share. Dogecoin, a joke cryptocurrency, is rallying again as celebrities and billionaires including Elon Musk and Snoop Dogg post memes and plug the digital coin. In the past 24 hours, its price has risen 25 percent. Europe and Asia Stock indexes in Europe rose with Italy’s among the best performers as Mario Draghi, the former European Central Bank president, works to set up a new government and end the recent political impasse. The Stoxx Europe 600 gained 0.7 percent, led higher by bank stocks. Stocks in Asia ended the day higher. The Nikkei 225 in Japan jumped 2.1 percent, and the index was above 29,000 for the first time since 1990. The biggest contributor was SoftBank, which reported a quarterly profit of $11 billion because of a surge in value of some of its investments, including Uber and DoorDash. A DoorDash delivery person in Los Angeles last week. Softbank’s investments in DoorDash soared after the delivery company held an initial public offering in December.Credit…Mario Anzuoni/Reuters For many technology companies, the past 12 months have been a roller coaster, starting with a pandemic-driven market-wide sell-off in March and ending with one of the largest stock market run-ups in history. But for Japan’s SoftBank, which manages the world’s largest tech investment fund, it has been an especially wild ride. In an earnings report released on Monday, SoftBank notched more than $11 billion in profit for the three months that ended in December, driven by surging values for the company’s portfolio of holdings in companies like Uber and the food delivery app DoorDash, which have experienced whiplash changes in their share prices over the last year. The result was a far cry from SoftBank’s position at the same time last year. Then, the company found itself in the midst of an epic slide that ended with its declaring an annual operating loss of more than $12 billion following investment losses on companies hit hard by the pandemic. But what the market takes away, it can also give back. By the summer, SoftBank had already undergone a seemingly miraculous recovery thanks to the sale of tens of billions of dollars of assets and a hot stock market. Since then, the market has grown hotter still. In December, the value of SoftBank’s investments in DoorDash and the biotech company Seer, among others, skyrocketed as investors piled into the companies’ initial public offerings as part of a broader frenzy for new share sales. A market rally in shares of Uber was also a major profit driver for SoftBank this quarter, it said. In a triumphant earnings conference, SoftBank’s founder, Masayoshi Son, compared his company to the goose that laid the golden egg. In February of last year, the media was saying that the company was laying only “rotten eggs,” Mr. Son said. But this earnings report has proved the skeptics wrong, he argued. “We have a turbocharger strategy to turn white eggs into golden eggs,” he said, adding, “Those golden eggs are laid not by chance but by plan.” Investors so far seemed to agree. After a precipitous drop this summer, SoftBank’s share price has surged. The stock was trading at 9,485 yen, or about $90, per share in Tokyo by market close Monday, almost matching its highs in early 2000, just before the collapse of the first internet stock bubble. A nurse administering a coronavirus vaccine last Wednesday in Newark. States have each developed their own formulas to determine eligibility for the vaccine.Credit…Justin Lane/EPA, via Shutterstock Federal, state and local health authorities across the United States are using dozens of algorithms — some automated systems and others simple prioritization lists — to help determine where vaccines are sent and who can get them. The formulas generally follow guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to prioritize frontline health care workers, nursing home residents, senior citizens and those with major health risks — and yet public health agencies and medical centers at every level have developed different allocation formulas, based on a variety of ethical and political considerations. The result: Americans are experiencing wide disparities in vaccine access. Oregon, for instance, has prioritized teachers over the elderly for Covid shots, an approach that could help schools and businesses reopen. New Jersey has put smokers ahead of educators, which could save lives. Some prioritization formulas also conflict with one another or impose such prescriptive rules that they hinder immunizations, public health experts say. Ellen P. Goodman, a professor at Rutgers Law School who studies how governments use automated decision-making systems, said algorithms were needed to efficiently allocate the vaccines. But public agencies and health centers should be transparent about the prioritization formulas, she added. “We want to know who is using them, what they are trying to do, who owns the proprietary algorithms, whether they are audited,” she said. A multiagency federal effort — originally called Operation Warp Speed and created by the Trump administration — has managed nationwide vaccine distribution through Tiberius, an online portal developed by Palantir, the data-mining giant. Now the Biden administration, which has retired the program’s name, has taken over and is continuing the effort. To divvy up doses, federal administrators use a simple algorithm that divides the total amount of vaccine available each week among the 50 states — as well as U.S. territories and a few big cities like New York — based on the number of people over 18 in each place. Even so, states began warning last fall about Tiberius’s potential drawbacks. In interim vaccine plans filed with the C.D.C., some state health administrators complained that the platform seemed overly cumbersome and that the algorithm’s week-by-week allotments would make it difficult to plan monthslong vaccination campaigns. Indeed, some health officials and researchers have described the Tiberius algorithm as a black box. “Why can’t they make public the methods that they use to make these estimations?” said Dr. Rebecca Weintraub, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who was a co-author of a recent study on state vaccination plans. “Why are the states receiving a different number of doses than they expected per week?” Chen Feng built HNA from a small regional airline into a conglomerate.Credit…China Stringer Network/Reuters Pressure is mounting on companies whose behavior could pose a risk to China’s financial system. HNA Group, the vast Chinese conglomerate that threw tens of billions of dollars at trophy businesses around the world, is nearing the biggest corporate collapse in recent Chinese history, offering a glimpse of how Beijing treats its most powerful entrepreneurs. HNA’s insolvency is the largest China has seen since the country first began using its bankruptcy law in 2007, according to Michelle Luo, a bankruptcy lawyer at Hui Ye law firm. It will also test the law’s strength — just 76 companies have gone through bankruptcy proceedings in China, Alexandra Stevenson reports for The New York Times. Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, told a meeting of the country’s senior Communist Party officials late last month that the government must anticipate risks even as it pursues growth. He urged officials to make plans to deal with “gray rhinoceros” events, referring to large and evident problems in the economy that are ignored until they become urgent threats. Chinese media had often referred to HNA as a gray rhino before its decline. The party has strengthened its hand in private business in recent months and urged entrepreneurs to “identify politically, intellectually and emotionally” with its goals. It has also pledged to prevent what it called the “disorderly expansion of capital,” a reference to the type of lavish spending of borrowed money for which HNA had become known. Among the party’s recent prominent targets is the Chinese online shopping giant Alibaba Group. In December, the authorities opened an antitrust investigation into the company, which the Chinese billionaire Jack Ma helped found. One month earlier, days before a planned initial public offering of Mr. Ma’s finance giant, Ant Group, regulators stepped in to stop it. Hilario Saldívar, a cook and dishwasher, had his hours cut and struggles to pay the $2,600 monthly rent on a two-bedroom apartment that he shares with four others.Credit…Sarahbeth Maney for The New York Times Even before last year, one in four U.S. renters — about 11 million households — was living in a household that spent more than half its pretax income on housing, and overcrowding was on the rise. By one estimate, for every 100 very low-income households, only 36 affordable rentals are available. Now the pandemic is adding to the pressure, Conor Dougherty reports for The New York Times. Rents have fallen in many big cities, but vacancy rates for the cheapest buildings are essentially flat from last year, according to CoStar Group, a commercial property group. That is: Nothing about the pandemic has changed the fact that there is a longstanding shortage of affordable housing, so anyone who loses an affordable home will still have a hard time finding a new one. The pain in the U.S. housing market is most severe at the bottom. Surveys of large landlords whose units tend to be higher quality and more expensive have been remarkably resilient through the pandemic. Surveys of small landlords and low-income tenants show that late fees and debt are piling up. And in the same way that subprime mortgages were an early indicator of the mid-2000s housing crisis, today informal renters — roommates and sublessors who don’t have a proper lease — offer a look below the surface. One measure of relief came when President Biden extended by two months a federal eviction moratorium that was scheduled to expire at the end of January, as states and cities also moved to extend their own eviction moratoriums. In addition, $25 billion in federal rental aid approved in December is set to be distributed. But for every million or so households who are evicted in the United States each year, there are many more millions who move out before they miss a payment, who cut back on food and medicine to make rent, who take up informal housing arrangements that exist outside the traditional landlord-tenant relationship. Source link Orbem News #highs #Live #oil #prepandemic #Prices #return #Updates

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continuations · 7 years ago

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World After Capital: Getting Past Capital

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from my book World After Capital deals with how we have achieved the sufficiency of physical capital. This is capitalisms greatest accomplishment, but also means that we are now facing a new scarcity: attention.

Capital

The title of the book is World after Capital. One of my fundamental claims is that capital is no longer scarce. There is enough capital in the world to meet everyone's basic needs. That means meeting the individual needs of 7 billion or more people, the collective needs of the societies they live in and the collective needs of humanity at large. Using the language introduced earlier, capital is sufficient. And because population growth is decelerating, while technological progress is accelerating (due to digital technology), capital will no longer be the binding constraint for humanity going forward.

It is tempting to look at this in terms of financial capital, but that again would be succumbing to the veil of of money, as was the case with the definition of scarcity. Dollar bills don't feed people. Gold bars can't be used as smart phones. The capital that matters is productive physical capital, such as machines and buildings.

Financial capital is not irrelevant. It is generally required both for the initial construction of physical capital and to meet the ongoing working capital needs of the economy. If I want to build a factory or a school, I need to pay the construction workers, the suppliers of machines, etc. before I can start collecting money. And in many businesses I pay some ongoing expenses every month before collecting revenues from customers. Cash outflows preceding cash inflows means a financing mechanism is required. To get the proper accumulation of physical capital, we therefore need to have effective ways of accumulating and allocating financial capital.

In the history of financial capital there have been many important innovations, such as corporations with limited liability, debt and equity issuance and trading, bank lending and more recently market place lending. The allocation of financial capital to projects through markets has been enormously successful, compared to attempts at various forms of centralized planning. It is the very success of the market-based approach that has now given us a physical capital base in the world that is large enough to meet our basic needs.

Many recent innovations in finance, however, have not contributed meaningfully to the proper creation and allocation of physical capital. Quite the opposite. They have contributed to the “financialization” of the economy: a growth in financial sector activities that is decoupled from or even harms the formation of physical capital. For instance, many derivatives and structured securities have resulted in severe misallocations by shifting risk. One example is the housing bubble that resulted in part as mortgage backed securities and CDOs appeared to remove all risk from capital flooding into construction.

What is the role of “human capital” in all of this? Human capital is the subset of all knowledge that embodied in a group of humans. So the question is better asked differently: what is the role of knowledge? The answer is that advances in knowledge are essential for making capital more effective. Even more fundamentally, knowledge is necessary for having physical capital in the first place.

You can theoretically have physical capital without financial capital but you cannot have physical capital without knowledge. You cannot build a machine, say an MRI, without a lot of knowledge in physics and engineering. In a world where everyone's basic needs are taken care of it might, however, be possible to build the same MRI without the need for financial capital.

Interestingly, you can also have financial capital without physical capital and without meaningful knowledge accumulation. For instance, you can develop financial capital through trade or war or simply by convention as in the case of the island of Yap [40].

All of this is to say that we should never lose sight of the fact that financial capital ultimately serves no purpose in and of itself, other than possibly the gratification of ego. As great illustration of that imagine a Spanish Galleon full of raided gold sinking in a storm. The sailors aboard had ample access to financial capital, but what they really needed to survive was more knowledge and better physical capital.

So now we will go ahead and examine whether physical capital is still a binding constraint when it comes to meeting basic needs. The approach I am taking is split in two parts: here in the main text I am applying logic based on observations; the Appendix contains much more data and calculations to back up the arguments.

Individual Needs

My claim is that capital is no longer the binding constraint for meeting individual needs, not just for one individual but for everyone. This is especially true for the developed economies but increasingly true globally.

The primary strategies for meeting our power needs are breathing air, drinking water and eating farmed food.

There is plenty of air to breathe (one time reminder: please see the Appendix for backup on this and the following assertions), the key challenge today is having clean, breathable air. China and India are both struggling with that at the moment, but this is due to rapid development using outdated energy sources. The clean air achieved in industrialized countries shows that this is a temporary development stage.

Similarly there is plenty of water in the world for everyone to drink. There are distribution and access problems, including right here in the United States (e.g., the polluted water in Flint, Michigan). Again though, physical capital is not a binding constraint. We can even build new desalination plants in record time. [Example]

We have also made dramatic progress in farming. In fact, globally the amount of land required for farming has started to decline as a result of higher per acre productivity. We have made recent breakthroughs in vertical and automated farming. For instance, the world's largest vertical farm is currently under construction in Jersey City. The Japanese indoor farming company Spread is working on a fully automated facility that will be able to produce 30,000 heads of lettuce per day [155].

The discharge need is primarily addressed through modern sewage technology. Here too capital is no longer a binding constraint per se, but again there is a global distribution problem. To see how quickly this has the potential to change, consider the migration that has taken place in China from the country side into cities.

The Chinese construction boom also illustrates how quickly we can build shelter as a strategy to address the need for a controlled physical environment. In the U.S. too we had a prior construction boom which was powered by artificially cheap mortgage credit. While a lot of housing was built in the wrong places it powerfully demonstrated our construction capacity.

Clothing is another strategy for addressing this need. The price of clothing has been falling in the United States and in many other parts of the world. Capital is not a constraint here and we can clothe everyone in the world many times over.

Similarly we have become very good at providing light. There is a great study that shows how the hours of light one can earn with 60 hours of labor have exploded in the United States from about 10 in 1800 to over 100,000 by 1990 [CITATION?]. We have made further progress since with LED lighting. That progress has also come to other parts of the world, for instance in the form of off grid solar powered lamps.

Now we come to a more difficult need, the one for healing. We read all the time how expensive healthcare has become and how it consumes an ever larger fraction of the economy, at least here in the United States. We have to ask though whether capital really is a binding constraint here. Again in industrialized countries this does no longer appear to be the case. We have plenty of hospital space and doctor's offices. We have extensive diagnostic facilities and can produce large quantities of medicine. The binding constraint instead is one of insufficient knowledge. Our bodies are extremely complex and even seemingly basic issues, such as how diet relates to health, are poorly understood as a result.

In learning we are also no longer capital constrained. This is rapidly true not just in industrialized nations but also globally due to the buildout of wireless networks and the increasing affordability of smartphones. We are not far away from a point in time when we have enough capital for anyone in the world to learn anything. The binding constraint here is not capital but the availability of affordable content and the time to learn (and to teach).

The final individual need, the one for meaning, is not and has never been constrained by capital.

Collective Needs

At first it might seem difficult to see how capital even relates to our collective needs as defined in the earlier chapter. How could capital have anything to do with such abstract concepts as motivation and coordination? Was capital ever a binding constraint here?

Capital clearly was not a binding constraint for reproduction, which societies thankfully accomplished a long time ago or we would not be here today.

But when it comes to allocation, capital was the crucial binding constraint during the Industrial Age. Not only were we terribly bad at making stuff at first but we also lacked the communications and transportation infrastructure to easily get goods to where they were needed.

Motivation might historically appear not to to be capital constrained as we had many strategies for the motivation need, including rewards and punishments. The development of markets with prices, however, turned out to be a crucial strategy for meeting the motivation need. High prices provide an incentive for the allocation of capital (and other factors of production). For a long time capital in turn was the binding constraint on the scale of markets. Today, however, we can broadcast supply, demand, and prices in any market globally in near realtime at zero marginal cost.

Coordination, on the other hand, was quite obviously capital constrained for a long time due to limitations on communications. We can see this by considering that until fairly recently it was not possible to have a globally coordinated event. Today on the other hand we not only have a global nearly instantaneous communication network but also the ability to precisely position people or machines using GPS and other location services.

Finally, our collective need for knowledge was capital constrained for a long time. Making books for instance was expensive and time consuming. Copies of books had to be made by humans introducing errors. The spread of knowledge was constrained by the need to create and move physical copies. We have now left all of those capital constraints on knowledge behind.

Enablers

Our progress on enablers is another way to understand why capital is no longer the binding constraint. We have had massive breakthroughs on all four during the Industrial Age: energy, resources, transformation, and transportation.

The biggest breakthrough in energy was the development of electricity. It allowed us to apply energy in highly precise fashion. Our remaining challenges are all related to the production, storage and distribution of electricity. Further improvements in energy will let us solve needs in new ways, but we are not fundamentally energy constrained today. For instance, a relatively small percentage of surface coverage with solar (< 1% in the US) would cover all electricity needs at current efficiency rates [SOURCE?].

Resources were also completely transformed during the Industrial Age through mining, which in turn was enabled by progress with transportation (rail) and energy (steam power). People, especially those motivated by a concern for sustainability, like to point to scarcity of resources as the primary constraint. But resources are sufficient when we consider three sources that we can tap in the future: recycling, asteroid mining and transmutation. For instance, today a lot of electronics wind up in landfill instead of the materials being recycled. We achieved the first soft landing on an asteroid as far back as 2001. And while transmutation sounds like modern day alchemy, we now routinely make phosphorus out of silicon (albeit in small amounts).

Our ability to transform also improved radically during the Industrial Age. For instance, chemistry allowed us to make rubber synthetically which previously had to be harvested from trees. With machine tools, such as drills and lathes, we were able to rapidly transform wood and metals. Later we added transformation technologies such as injection molding and more recently various additive manufacturing technologies (often referred to as 3D printing).

Transportation went from human powered to machine powered dramatically changing our capabilities. We went from walking to traveling to space in rockets. We can fly across continents and oceans on commercial flights and reach any major city by air in just a day (or two at most). While some have complained about a lack of progress in flight, pointing to the lack of commercial supersonic options following the retirement of the Concorde, we had extraordinary progress in flight safety. More recently work has resumed on new options for commercial supersonic flight and we have made tremendous progress with reusable rockets and closer to earth with autonomous vehicles (for instance drones and warehouse robots).

The progress on these enablers has allowed us to produce more physical capital, do so more rapidly and cheaply, and transport it to anywhere in the world. One way to appreciate just how far we have come is to note that the first time smartphones became available was only in 2000. By 2017 over 8 billion smartphones had been produced and shipped and there are currently over 2 billion smartphone users in the world.

As an important reminder before moving on. I am not claiming that everyone's basic needs are being met today. Far from it. Nor am I arguing that governments should be using central planning or that they should be meeting people's basic needs through government run programs such as food stamps or subsidized housing (in fact quite the opposite, as I will argue later when writing about economic freedom).

The point of this chapter is simply to argue that physical capital is no longer the constraint in meeting everyone's basic needs. We are not dealing with a problem of capital scarcity—in the sense of technological scarcity introduced earlier—but with one of allocation and distribution.

Capital is no longer scarce but sufficient. We should consider that the great success of capitalism.

We now face a new scarcity, however, that of attention, and capitalism will not solve it for us without changes in regulation and in self-regulation. Before we can examine the scarcity of attention though we need to understand how digital technologies have the potential to change the role of labor.

#world after capital #capital

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fullspectrum-cbd-oil · 5 years ago

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Where U.S. Presidential Candidates Stand on Breaking up Big Tech

In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, America’s big tech companies are being challenged on many fronts from across the political spectrum, from antitrust concerns to their policies on political ads and ensuring election security.

Many of the Democratic presidential candidates have argued in favor of either breaking up or tightening regulation of firms such as Facebook Inc <FB.O>, Alphabet Inc’s Google <GOOGL.O> and Amazon.com Inc <AMZN.O>.

Republican President Donald Trump’s administration has also stepped up its scrutiny, announcing a wide-ranging investigation in July into whether major digital tech companies engaged in anti-competitive practices.

Trump’s Democratic challengers also criticize online platforms for allowing politicians to make false claims in advertising ahead of the election next November.

Social media platforms are under particular scrutiny after U.S. intelligence agencies said Russia used them to wage an influence operation to interfere with the 2016 election – a claim Moscow has denied.

Here are some of the candidates’ positions on Big Tech.

PRESIDENT TRUMP

Trump, whose social media use and digital advertising campaign helped propel him to the White House in 2016, in September attacked the “immense power” of social media giants in his address to the United Nations.

Trump has stopped short of calling for tech giants to be broken up, as Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have, but said “obviously there is something going on in terms of monopoly,” when asked about major tech companies in a June interview with CNBC.

Trump and other Republicans have also criticized social media companies, without evidence, for alleged political bias.

The president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. wrote an opinion piece for The Hill political website in September entitled “Free speech suppression online builds case to break up Big Tech.”

Silicon Valley firms have also been at odds with the Trump administration over policies such as its repeal of Obama-era net neutrality rules and the impact of the U.S.-China trade war on their supply chains.

JOE BIDEN

Biden, who was vice president in the Silicon Valley-friendly Obama administration, has taken a more moderate stance than his progressive rivals on the issue of big tech company break-ups.

In a May interview with the Associated Press, he said that splitting up companies such as Facebook was “something we should take a really hard look at” but that it was “premature” to make a final judgment.

The campaign told Reuters that, as president, Biden would aggressively use “all the tools available – including utilizing antitrust measures” to ensure corporations act responsibly.

He did not speak up during a discussion of the issue at the most recent Democratic debate in October.

Biden has criticized e-commerce giant Amazon’s $0 federal tax bill in 2018.

“I have nothing against Amazon, but no company pulling in billions of dollars of profits should pay a lower tax rate than firefighters and teachers. We need to reward work, not just wealth,” he said in a tweet in June.

His campaign also clashed with Facebook, Twitter and Google over their political ad policies after they refused to take down a Trump ad that the Biden team said contained false claims about his son Hunter’s dealings with Ukraine.

ELIZABETH WARREN

Warren is leading the charge to break up big tech companies on the grounds they hold outsized influence and stifle competition.

She has called for legislation to restrict large tech platforms – which she would designate as “platform utilities” -from owning and participating in a marketplace at the same time.

Under this law, Apple would not be allowed to both run the App Store and sell its own apps on it, for example.

She also said she would nominate regulators to unwind anti-competitive mergers such as Facebook’s deals for WhatsApp and Instagram, and Amazon’s deal for Whole Foods.

Warren in October challenged Facebook’s policy of exempting politicians’ ads from fact-checking by running ads containing the false claim that CEO Mark Zuckerberg was endorsing Trump’s re-election bid.

The senator from Massachusetts has also said that she would reject campaign donations over $200 from executives of big tech firms.

BERNIE SANDERS

Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont who frequently criticizes corporate influence, has also called for the break-up of big tech companies such as Facebook and Amazon.

His administration would “absolutely” try to split apart the companies, Sanders said at a Washington Post event in July.

He has said that he will have the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) review all mergers that have taken place during the Trump administration. His broad plan to reshape corporate America would also mandate all large companies to be owned partly by their workers.

Asked how he differentiates himself from Warren on major issues, Sanders told ABC in October: “Elizabeth considers herself – if I got the quote correctly – to be a capitalist to her bones. I don’t.”

Sanders has been vocal in his attacks on Amazon over issues such as its tax contributions and working conditions at its warehouses. In 2018, he introduced a ‘Stop BEZOS Act’ in the Senate, in a reference to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, which would make large corporations either pay their workers more or pay the government for public benefits that their workers receive.

PETE BUTTIGIEG

In general, Pete Buttigieg, who became Facebook’s 287th user shortly after it was launched in 2004 at Harvard University, where he was a student, has been more reluctant to slam the tech giants than some other candidates.

The mayor from South Bend, Indiana, said that the break-up of big tech companies is a “remedy that should be on the table,” but also said it was not a politician’s place to designate which companies should be broken up.

He has said that the FTC should be empowered to prevent and sometimes reverse mergers, but argued that large tech companies should be scrutinized for their actions rather than their size. He says concerns over monopolies and concerns over data security or privacy should not be conflated.

He is in favor of having legislation to protect individual data rights at a national level, including the right to be forgotten – which would give citizens the power to demand that online platforms delete data about them, as is the case in Europe.

KAMALA HARRIS

Senator Harris of California, the home of Silicon Valley, has said that Facebook has not been sufficiently regulated. She has not called outright for the break-up of big tech firms but said it should be “seriously” considered.

During the campaign, Harris touted her experience protecting consumers’ online privacy while she was state attorney general.

In Congress, Harris, along with fellow candidate Senator Amy Klobuchar, introduced the bipartisan ENOUGH Act in 2017 to protect against online exploitation of private images.

Harris recently called on Twitter <TWTR.O> to suspend Trump’s Twitter account, saying his tweets threaten violence. In response, the company said that Trump’s tweets did not violate its policies.

AMY KLOBUCHAR

The Minnesota senator has made oversight of big technology companies one of her major issues in Congress and argued for data privacy laws and net neutrality safeguards as priorities at her campaign launch in February.

Klobuchar has called for tighter regulation of tech giants and suggested that companies who profit from users’ data could be taxed.

She has not endorsed Warren’s plan for their break-up, saying that she would first want investigations. Her plan for her first 100 days in office includes an “aggressive retrospective review of mergers,” which she said she would pay for with an extra merger fee on “megamergers.”

She is also one of the authors of the bipartisan Honest Ads Act, which would require social media platforms to disclose the purchaser of a political ad, as is required for television and print ads.

ANDREW YANG

Yang, the former CEO of a start-up, has benefited from a surge of grassroots supporters on social media who style themselves as the #yanggang.

Although the technology entrepreneur said “we would be well served” if big tech companies were to break themselves up, he is more focused on dealing with the impact of automation on American jobs and on regulating artificial intelligence.

Yang has also emphasized the negative effects of tech on mental health and said he would create a Department of Attention Economy, ideally led by tech ethics advocate Tristan Harris, to look at how to responsibly design and use apps and devices.

He has also called for people to receive a share of the economic value generated from their data.

CORY BOOKER

New Jersey Senator Booker said that Warren’s call to break up the tech giants was “more like a Donald Trump thing to say” and has instead argued that stronger antitrust laws need to be enforced.

When questioned at the October Democratic debate on the issue, Booker advocated reforms to stop tech companies being used “to undermine our democracy” around elections.

He talked broadly about antitrust, “from pharma to farms,” but did not single out tech companies.

A Stanford University graduate who co-founded his own social media start-up WayWire, Booker has historically received donations from major Silicon Valley names such as Zuckerberg. The Facebook CEO also donated $100 million to Newark schools when Booker was mayor of the New Jersey city.

BETO O’ROURKE

O’Rourke, a former U.S. representative from Texas, wants to see Big Tech regulated rather than broken up. He has said he does not think it is the role of a president to designate which companies should be dismantled.

O’Rourke’s campaign told Reuters he would stand up for small business by preventing online platform owners from promoting their own content and products over that of competitors. He also plans to create a new digital markets regulator to create and enforce rules on issues such as privacy and data mobility.

O’Rourke, who as a teenager was part of an influential hacking group, has also said he thinks social media companies should be treated as publishers.

He wants to amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which generally provides immunity to online platforms for content posted by users, to make social media companies more accountable for the amplification of hate speech and domestic terrorism on their platforms.

His campaign recently urged Facebook, Twitter <TWTR.O> and Google to do more to combat online disinformation, after the campaign encountered the spread of a false claim about a gunman in a mass shooting.

JULIAN CASTRO

Castro, who was secretary of housing and urban development in the Obama administration, has said it is worth considering proposals to break up the big tech companies and said during the recent Democratic debate that the U.S. needs to take a stronger stance in cracking down on monopolistic trade practices.

In the October debate, the former mayor of San Antonio, Texas, also singled out Amazon by name for helping to “put small businesses out of business” and for “shortchanging a lot of its workers.”

TULSI GABBARD

Gabbard, a U.S. representative from Hawaii, has called for the break-up of big tech companies and praised Warren’s plan.

In July, she filed a $50 million lawsuit against Google accusing the company of discrimination when it temporarily suspended her ad account after the first Democratic debate. Google said the account had been automatically flagged for unusual activity, without specifying exactly what the issue was.

Gabbard said that Google’s actions reflected “how the increasing dominance of big tech companies over our public discourse threatens our core American values.”

TOM STEYER

California billionaire Steyer has said he is running for president to remove the influence of corporate money from politics. In the October debate, he said that monopolies either have to be dismantled or regulated, but that to win against Trump, Democrats would have to “show the American people that we don’t just know how to tax and have programs to break up companies.”

Instead, he said, Democrats must harness the innovation and competition of the private sector.

Steyer’s campaign has been noted for its massive ad spending which helped push him to the debate stage, including more than $6 million in Facebook ads, according to Democratic digital firm Bully Pulpit Interactive.

(Reporting by Elizabeth Culliford, Editing by Soyoung Kim and Sonya Hepinstall)

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touristguidebuzz · 8 years ago

Text

How an Economic Tourist Understands Africa’s Largest City

Street traffic in Lagos, Nigeria. satanoid / Flickr

Skift Take: We like the idea of "the GDP tourist," if for no other reason that it sincerely seeks to understand what it's really like to live like a local.

— Jason Clampet

I’m spending six days as a tourist in Lagos, Nigeria. A lot of people seem to think that’s pretty strange.

The place is not renowned for its food (one of my main interests), nor was there a special event or festival on, nor did I know anyone in Africa’s biggest metropolis. It’s commonly cited as one of the most crime-ridden, congested and hellish cities on the planet. That’s not a fair description (a topic for another column), but I didn’t know that before booking.

Nigeria’s Horrors and Hopes

People seemed surprised to see me and I did not encounter many other evident tourists. The Nigerian clerk at my (upscale) hotel expressed shock that a white person had arrived. Perhaps she thought I was a sex tourist, as she continued in full enthusiasm: “The room is solo? Don’t worry, Nigerian women just love men like you!” I believe she meant this as local hospitality, though under another reading it is a veiled critique. The truth, I admit, is indeed pretty strange. I like to go around and look at gross domestic product, and that simple fact explains much of my unusual behavior abroad.

Nigeria is now the country with the highest GDP in Africa, having surpassed South Africa, and it ranks globally at number 26. If Lagos state were a country, it would have the fifth largest GDP on the continent.

As an economist, I feel a moral pull, not to mention a personal curiosity, to see goods and services being produced. That means visiting Lagos’s renowned computer market and fabrics market as well as its fast-food shops, shopping malls, street food and ice cream parlors. I sought out its bridges, canals and electric generators, though not the oil areas — there are too many kidnappings there.

GDP

Making large-scale structures and trading goods and services are among the most human and noble of activities, so is it actually so strange to visit them, as one might enter a cathedral or make a pilgrimage to Gettysburg? For all the talk about human interactions being the key to a wonderful trip, those interactions usually require some sort of scaffolding and structure to one’s daily activities, and on that score a quest for GDP can help out. I’ve yet to go on a safari.

The commercial view in Lagos is of course a mixed one. Nigeria barely has its own automobile industry (only 2,600 jobs), and the manufacturing base is generally weak, but the country has demonstrated a tantalizing ability to mobilize its intellectual and entrepreneurial talents. That facility may define a new path for economic growth in an era when manufacturing jobs are disappearing across the globe due to automation. The result is a city full of smartphones, where my iPad connects more quickly than at home in Virginia, but there are also gut-wrenching traffic jams and millions of people living in shanties.

It’s an interesting question whether, to understand a city, you would rather read 10 books about it or visit for a day. I’ll take the visit, but if you can do both even a short trip makes the written word more vivid and context-laden. It still amazes me that I once had a professorial colleague from a top school who researched Africa and published papers on it, but had no interest in going.

Visitors should avoid the mistake of judging living standards through appearances alone, because that tends to overweight the value of infrastructure. Prague in the late 1980s looked pretty splendid, largely because of its historic buildings, but good consumption opportunities were hard to come by. South Korea impresses with its roads, bridges, ports and trains, but the widespread poverty of the country’s elderly is harder to see. As for Lagos, its infrastructure appears mediocre to Western eyes, and so we probably underrate its prosperity. But if you are arriving from the Nigerian countryside you might be impressed by the tall buildings and road network and thus overrate the wealth of the place.

My interest in GDP tourism dates back to my teenage years in the late 1970s. I grew up in northern New Jersey and enjoyed the industrial beauty outside of New York City on periodic drives, mostly centered around the Pulaski Skyway. At that time, U.S. manufacturing employment was in its heyday. These days, cruising around retail chains and dental offices doesn’t provide the same thrill. So I’ve gone to see the key regions of the world’s largest and most successful economies, whether it be the port of Rotterdam, the skyline of Singapore or Chinese tech hubs like Shenzhen. I started in the 1980s with a trip to the then still-vital West German Ruhr.

I don’t ever expect a GDP cruise or even a GDP tourist guide or agency, but perhaps a few Bloomberg readers won’t find this approach to travel so totally off the mark.

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg View columnist. He is a professor of economics at George Mason University and writes for the blog Marginal Revolution. His books include “Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation.”

This article was written by Tyler Cowen from Bloomberg and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

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