Time for the annual celebration of the value of the UK’s creative industries. “From Art to Architecture, Film to Fashion, British talent leads the world” “The UK’s Creative Industries, which includes the film, television and music industries, are now worth £76.9 billion per year to the UK economy.” Strange to mention the creative activities with…
Is a Universal Basic Income, the neoliberal alternative to unionization ? Some thoughts at interfluidity.
A consideration of the effects of Master and Servant laws at Flip Chart Fairy Tales: For most of the period since the middle ages […] labour law was firmly on the side of the employer. […] State intervention in the labour market is nothing new. The only aspect that is relatively new is its intervention…
Discussion of the role of entrepreneurial failure at the New York Times: Already-successful entrepreneurs were far more likely to succeed again: their success rate for later venture-backed companies was 34 percent. But entrepreneurs whose companies had been liquidated or gone bankrupt had almost the same follow-on success rate as the first-timers: 23 percent. In other…
When did ‘innovation’ stop being a dirty word? How does progress occur? The eighteenth century embraced the idea of progress; the nineteenth century had evolution; the twentieth century had growth and then innovation. Our era has disruption, which, despite its futurism, is atavistic. It’s a theory of history founded on a profound anxiety about financial…
Confidential internal Google and Apple memos […] clearly show that what began as a secret cartel agreement between Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt to illegally fix the labor market for hi-tech workers, expanded within a few years to include companies ranging from Dell, IBM, eBay and Microsoft, to Comcast, Clear Channel, Dreamworks, and London-based…
The voice of Poverty, in Aristophanes’ Plutus (408 BC): Look at the orators in our republics; as long as they are poor, both state and people can only praise their uprightness; but once they are fattened on the public funds, they conceive a hatred for justice, plan intrigues against the people and attack the democracy.…
How to measure the effect that price has on perceptions of pleasure? Although researchers have used fMRI scans in recent years to gauge brain activity, the study is one of the first to test subjects as they swallow liquid—in this case, wine—through a pump attached to their mouths More here. This research was supported with…
The Jubilee Debt Campaign offers an interactive view of global debt: When talking about a country’s ‘debt’, newspapers refer to just the debt owed by its government. But this includes debts which are owed to citizens of that country (not necessarily a problem). And it ignores the debt owed by private companies and banks (which…
At the Internet Archive, an 1828 ‘Stranger’s Guide’ written by ‘Two Citizens of the World’ advises on how to avoid being swindled in London: Swindling, when performed on a large scale, obtains the title of speculation. We need merely mention one word to remind our readers of the affinity between speculation and swindling – that…