The latest proposal from the fertile minds on the left of the American political spectrum is that since Facebook makes money out of us we should go steal that money. Well, what do we expect from people on the left?
There being the occasional problem with the analysis of course:
For a general sense of the value of people’s personal data to these companies, we started with digital advertising revenue. In 2018, Facebook earned an average of roughly $110 in ad revenue per American user.
Another entry in our register of reasons to doubt the expansion of the universities. Look at the level of logic that has gone into this piece of research. There’s a gender pay gap in British universities and sure, there is. Not as large as they say as they’re glossing over full and part time, career breaks curbing rises to the top and all that. But, still, there is a pay gap.
As they identify there’s a digital skills gap too.…
See MoreThe number of advantages that Uber provides grows as people study their data more and more. The only downside is that it seems to annoy the incumbents, taxi drivers, and that is a shame.
How digital platforms reduce moral hazard: Uber vs Taxis
Meng Liu, Erik Brynjolfsson, Jason Dowlatabadi 12 October 2018
Most of us have taken a taxi that increased the fare by taking the long route. The column compares matched pairs of taxi and Uber journeys in New York City to investigate how often drivers took unnecessary detours.…
See MoreThere’s a good argument that instead of trying to ban digital child pornography we should be subsidising it instead. But such is the quality of the Great and the Good who rule us that it would simply never become law. The point is that porn reduces the acting out of sexual desires. No, not in every single case but the balance over the population is that this is so. Thus more porn means less of the actual crime itself that we’re trying to get away from.…
See MoreThe usual, and sensible, disclaimer here is that I as a mere scribbler tread on dangerous ground when I try to take issue with a Nobel Laureate on his own grounds of expertise. But in the hopes of illuminating my own thoughts if nothing else, here goes. We can solve Krugman’s puzzle over wage growth rather easily, simply by assuming that real wages are in fact growing.
That’s actually pretty obvious for the puzzle is that we’re not observing wage growth.…
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