Extra Money or Extra Trouble

Do you have a car and extra time? If yes, monetise it through UBER

Do you have a house, an extra room, and little extra time to take care of host? If yes, monetise it through AirBNB

Do you have any skill (or willingness to work) and extra time? If yes, monetise by becoming a taskmaster or what they call becoming a Rabbit through TaskRabbit 

Okay, neither you have any assets like a car or house or tools to lend for rent nor you have any specific skills, well you might have some extra time and definitely have a smart phone. You can still monetise your time by helping online markets to categorise products.

But what if you do not have EXTRA TIME, then I would say you are LUCKY.

Lucky that you have a regular job, lucky that you are pursuing something important, lucky that you are not running for your next customer, lucky that you are not having breakfast with a stranger, lucky that your skill is used for some productive work, lucky that you have earned more than $1.53 an hour instead of categorising things and absolutely lucky that you do not need to worry about your Insurance or Pension or Social Security Fund because your employer is taking care of it.

Rightly guessed!!!! I am talking about Sharing Economy, the new norm of earning money through temporary employment and becoming an entrepreneur, rather than doing 9 to 5 job and working for others.

In the book ‘RAW DEAL: HOW THE 'UBER ECONOMY' AND RUNAWAY CAPITALISM ARE SCREWING AMERICAN WORKERS’, Steven Hill describes the perils of the Sharing Economy with few benefits and highlights the possible solutions. Once we get used to the new technology it is very difficult to go back. I do not think I can live without Googling things or can reach anywhere without Google Maps directions. The Sharing Economy has not only become the new norm but have become a part of society which we have got used to and have also become a part of our vocabulary GOOGLE IT, TAKE A UBER, AirBNBED ROOM, CALL A RABBIT……

In the first few chapters I was petrified, horrified, terrified, calcified, and intimidated by ‘1099 Economy’. 1099 Economy is about the workers, the gig-preneurs/micro-entrepreneurs, who are not employed by any company but use sharing economy platforms like UBER to find customers and their income is classified under 1099 form rather than the W-2 form for regular employees. With this income classification the gig-preneurs get away with less taxes and the platforms get away with taking care of employee’s pension, social security and taxes too. It is approximately 30 per cent cheaper for the companies to hire employees under contract rather than offering full employment.

The working conditions for these contract employees is very substandard and they are not guaranteed future employment or health care benefits if they meet with an accident during work. It is choice between unemployment and some income for employees, and for companies it is cost effective and may be compromising on quality. So ‘1099 Economy’ is mostly loss-win situation or loss-loss situation or it is Capitalism in its purest form.

In the following chapters Steven Hill gives a critical account of the emerging entrepreneurs like Travis Kalanick CEO of UBER, Brian Chesky CEO of AirBNB, and Leah Busque CEO of TaskRabbit and their business, who despite appreciating the benefits of Sharing Economy, encouraging people to participate, and expanding their business are aware of the fact that they are causing more harm than benefits let alone the n number of lawsuits and oppositions these companies are facing. Most of the gig-preneurs are making less than minimum wage with no future security or benefits.

Like any traditional business these businesses are here in the market to make profit, where they are going wrong is the non-traditional way of earning income by just providing platform to connect buyers and sellers, not producing any products or services, and employing, but not technically employing, the employees by taking no responsibility if some unfortunate accident happens. Keeping up with the latest news UBER has suspended its operations in Hungary after the new law is passed by the Prime Minister Viktor Orban to block internet access to “illegal dispatch of services”. The company has not been is good books of the local governments as the governments think that UBER is getting away with following rules and regulations.

Steven Hill also appreciates few aspects of Sharing Economy like environmental benefits by reusing the unused goods  and connecting people for mutual benefits. After reading more about the booming Sharing Economy/Collaborative Economy in Europe continent and the platforms like Eat With, Time Bank, Clothes library and Bla Bla Car, it looked to me like we are going back to Barter System trade where we will no longer be using the currency/medium of exchange but will be exchanging goods/services against goods/services. But then how would I calculate Gross Domestic Product, the total value of goods and services produced within a country, if there are no goods/services produced but only exchanged (It would be an interesting time to become an Economist :) ). But then I recalled that going back would be difficult or next to impossible especially when we understand buying goods/services is paying money and not exchanging goods/services.

The author also provides solutions for the EXTRA TROUBLE for EXTRA INCOME or to deal with the RAW DEAL. The solutions such as multiemployer plan, vocational training, health care would mostly require the collaborative efforts of government, sharing economy entrepreneurs and gig-preneurs. It will take a long long time to pass many many legislations which Steven Hill would like to call Maria Fernandes Matters Act, but till then I wish the Sharing Economy remains only about sharing and benefiting.

Demystifying Economic Growth

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1971 was awarded to Simon Kuznets, for his empirically founded interpretation of economic growth which has led to new and deepened insight into the economic and social structure and process of development. 

I always used to wonder how can one determine the economic growth, I used to think how will government know how much I am earning, how much I am spending and how much I am saving. The thing which was even more perplexing for me was how would the statisticians or the government agencies would arrive at per capita income. There are just more than a billion individual living in India, and it is just impossible to ask each individual about their income. Well, actually we can, we can get a good approximation of total spending in an economy, total savings in an economy, and we can figure out how much an average citizen in an economy earns.

Like most of the economist Simon Kuznets loved data. He worked with lot of macroeconomic data and found out how to best use these data. His Nobel Prize was dedicated for establishing the means and the format for collecting the empirical data necessary to complete and make usable macroeconomic models.

Simon Kuznet was born to a Jewish family in Kharkov, the second largest city in Ukraine since the country’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.  Kuznets migrated to United States after the World War I, and resumed his studies at Columbia University. He was very influence by Joseph Schumpeter and his theory of innovation and business cycle. His doctoral thesis was published as book “Secular Movements in Production and Prices” in 1930. He joined National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in 1927, and then as apart-time professor at University of Pennsylvania. Kuznet joined Johns Hopkins University in 1954 as Professor of Political Economy and then from 1961 till his retirement he was a Professor at Harvard University.

I did got a chance to resolve my confusion and could learn how the economic growth and per capita is calculated. It is not very easy to calculate and work with data, but quite interesting to know how it is calculated.

Calculation of per capita income or disposable income

Simon Kuznet was one of the pioneer who contributed to the construction of national income accounts that represents the total economic data about a nation’s total production, consumption and about macroeconomic factors like interest rates, level of unemployment, inflation etc. The national income accounts have four components: investment, government spending, consumption, and net exports as defined in Keynesian theory. The total spending in all of these categories is called Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The GDP is the sum of  value of final goods and services produced in a country in a particular year. The GDP can be further divided or categorised into Nominal GDP and Real GDP. The Nominal GDP values from a time period to a different time period captures the differences or changes in the quantities produced, while Real GDP captures the changes in prices i.e. they are adjusted for inflation. In 2014, as per the data by World Bank, the GDP of United States was $17.4 trillion, GDP of India was $2 trillion, and lowest GDP is of Tuvalu $38 million.

Essentially, GDP is the production of new wealth in a country. But not every investment in an economy contributes towards generation of new wealth. For example if a manufacturer of goods replaces worn out machinery then it will not be generating more goods, such investments can be considered for depreciation and can be deducted form GDP to arrive at Net Domestic Product (NDP).

Whenever a consumer buys a good at its final value, not all the amount goes to the producer. The producer have to pay a certain percentage of money to local, state or central government in the form of taxes. These taxes are known as indirect taxes, which a consumer pay on buying goods and not on their incomes. The revenue which is left with businesses after paying tax is what we called National Income and it is the income earned by factors of production: land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship.

Before the businesses distribute the revenue to the factors of production, there are some amounts to be deducted from the National Income for transfer payments such as Social Security Contribution, Corporate Income taxes. These payments differ from country to country. After making all these subtractions and addition from GDP, it would yield Personal Income.

We are almost there to calculate disposable income. The Personal Income which we calculated is not ready to be spend by the factors of production. The last step is to deduct personal income taxes or what we call as direct taxes from the personal income and what we will have is called Disposable Income. The Disposable Income divided by the total population of a country will yield Per Capita Income. It looks more simple when we work with actual data, and sometime numbers helps us to tell more than what we want to know or we want to learn.

References:

Kuznets S. (1959), Six Lectures on Economic Growth, The free press of glencoe, Illinois.

McCarty M. H. (2001),  The Nobel Laureates, How the world’s greatest economic minds shaped modern thought, McGraw-Hill publication. 

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1971/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Kuznets

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?order=wbapi_data_value_2014+wbapi_data_value+wbapi_data_value-last&sort=asc

Second Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (1970)

The Father of Modern Economics 

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1970 was awarded to Paul Anthony Samuelson, for the scientific work  through which he has developed static and dynamic economic theory and actively contributed to raising the level of analysis in economic science.

It was the second Nobel prize and the first Nobel prize to an American Economist. The contribution of Paul Samuelson in the field of economics is invaluable. He very delicately knitted Mathematics Analysis and Economics Analysis into Mathematical Economics. The concepts like calculus, matrices used to be esoteric before Samuelson strongly proposed them. His work in economic theory ranges from modern welfare economics, linear programming, Keynesian economics, economic dynamics, international trade theory, logic choice to maximisation. 

Paul Samuelson was born in Gary, Indiana, in 1915. He was born to a family of upwardly mobile Polish immigrants. His childhood memories were filled with the recession of 1919-21  and other major economics changes happing in the society. But in his memoir published in 2009 he wrote “I was reborn, born as an economist, at 8:00 AM on January 2nd 1932, in the University of Chicago classroom.” He got his bachelor’s degree from University of Chicago at an early age of 20, and then he joined graduate program of Harvard University. He was an outstanding student and earned Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows, with the freedom to pursue his own research he wrote pathbreaking papers in the field of theory of consumer choice, inter temporal structure of prices and interest rates and many other areas, including his prize winning dissertation in 1941, which was later published as the landmark book Foundations of Economic Analysis in 1947.

He was appointed as an instructor at Harvard in Fall 1940, and within a month he joined as an assistant professor at MIT. He became Institute Professor in 1966, a department started as Industrial Economics to teach economics to engineers claimed the work ranking soon under the leadership of Paul Samuelson. He relentlessly contributed to the field of economics and also taught/guided economists like George Akerlof, Robert Engle, Lawrence Klein, Paul Krugman, Franco Modigliani, Robert Merton and Joseph Stiglitz who also became Nobel Laureates.

There is a lot more to say about Paul Samuelson, a lot more to say about his work, a lot more to say about his analytical skill, a lot more to say about his contribution to Mathematical Economics and a lot more to say about a person who was so complete and managed his personal life too with six kids. But I would like let others who he has influenced and who have worked with him to say about him.

George Akerlof, Nobel Prize winner, MIT PhD, Berkeley professor:

When I was at MIT in the 1960′s Paul Samuelson was far and away the leading economist in the country. He was the leading adviser to the Kennedy administration, the leading economic theorist and also the author of the leading elementary textbook.  Yet he also found time to be tremendously involved in the MIT economics PhD program.  He always kept his door open and attended such events as the department picnic.

Samuelson was also incredibly efficient, and, as students, we used to receive pink slips, which were pink memos, with some thought of his in our mailboxes.  When I wrote about his participation in the program and his interaction with all the students in a commemorative volume for him some years later, I received one of his pink slips, which said, “Thank you for the comments. I had never thought of myself as Mr. Chips.”  He may not have thought of himself that way, but of course he was.

I also remember taking a course from him where he discussed, in the spring of 1964, a long time before (Milton) Friedman and (Edmund) Phelps became famous for it, the natural rate (of employment) hypothesis.  Samuelson thought that there might be some truth to it, but thought that if it were not true that believing it would do great harm.  Governments would then keep employment low because of unfounded fears of accelerating inflation. Samuelson was way ahead of his time, not just in considering the natural rate (of employment) hypothesis, but also in appreciating that it might not be true.

Robert Lucas, Nobel Prize winner, University of Chicago Professor. (Excerpted from his memoir):

“Samuelson was the Julia Child of economics, somehow teaching you the basics and giving you the feeling of becoming an insider in a complex culture all at the same time. I loved the Foundations. Like so many others in my cohort, I internalized its view that if I couldn’t formulate a problem in economic theory mathematically, I didn’t know what I was doing. I came to the position that mathematical analysis is not one of many ways of doing economic theory: It is the only way. Economic theory is mathematical analysis. Everything else is just pictures and talk.”

Avinash Dixit, Princeton Professor, MIT PhD:

“It is indeed sad, and it is difficult to imagine the profession without him. In every decade since the 1930s he made pathbreaking contributions, any one of which would have been the pride of someone else’s whole career.

“For me it is a special bereavement. My whole style of research, and the techniques that support almost all of my own papers, derive from his foundational articles. The whole idea of modeling full equilibrium of a specific applied context lies behind my work with Joe Stiglitz on monopolistic competition and with Victor Norman on international trade. As to the techniques I learned from him and used: comparative statics of constrained optimization, the correspondence principle and the envelope theorem, factor price equalization in international trade, valuation of real options, the list could go on.”

Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve Chairman, MIT PhD:

“Paul Samuelson was both a path-breaking and prolific economic theorist and one of the greatest teachers that economics has ever known.  I join with many other former students and colleagues of Paul’s in mourning the passing of a titan of economics.”

References:

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1970/samuelson-bio.html

http://www.economist.com/node/15127616

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2009/12/13/remembering-paul-samuelson/

Dixit A. (2012), Paul Samuelson’s Legacy, Annual Reviews of Economics, Vol 4

First Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (1969)

“Deep in the human nature, there is an almost irresistible tendency to concentrate physical and mental energy on attempts at solving problems that seem to be unsolvable. Indeed, for some kinds of active people, only the seemingly unsolvable problems can arouse their interest.” - Ragnar Frisch

It was in the year 1969 when The Sveriges Riksbank decided to commemorate Economists for their contribution in Economics science with a Noble Prize. The Economics science was increasingly influenced by mathematics and statistics which helped to substantiate the ideas and theories of Economist. The economic theories represented in the form of mathematical equations helped a layman to understand the complex economic processes such as cyclical fluctuations, economic growth, and reallocations of economic resources.

It was the success of statistical analysis of time series, which helped to quantify the economic problem, that motivated the Bank of Sweden to award Prize in Economic Science dedicated to the memory of Alfred Nobel to the pioneers of ECONOMETRICS field, Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen. The major contribution of these two economist was the construction of theories for stabilisation of policies and long-term economic planning.

Ragnar Frisch:

Ragnar Frisch was born in Oslo, March 3, 1895 to a gold and silversmith Anton Frisch. He was destined to follow gold and silver family tradition, but it was his mother who motivated him to take up university study. He went ahead and got a university degree in Economics in Oslo in 1919. Ragnar traveled abroad to study Economics and Mathematics for a year and later completed his Ph.D in Mathematical Statistical subject in Oslo University in 1926. He was subsequently appointed as full Professor in Oslo in 1931 and there after he was Director of Research of the newly-established Economic Institute in the Oslo University.

Ragnar’s major contribution is in the field of Econometrics. His pioneer work in the early thirties involved a dynamic formulation of the theory of economic cycles. He demonstrated how a dynamic system with difference and differential equations for investments and consumption expenditure, with certain monetary restrictions, produced a damped wave moment with wavelengths of 4 and 8 years. By exposing the system to random disruptions, he also demonstrated how these wave movements became permanent and uneven in a rather realistic manner.

Ragnar Frisch is also credited for founding Econometrica Journal. In Rangar’s very first paper in economics in 1926 the term “Econometrics” (in French) was introduced for the first time. In the same passage he formulated the first epigraph for econometrics as a science:

“Intermediate between mathematics, statistics, and economics, we find a new discipline which for lack of a better name, may be called Econometrics. Econometrics has as its aim to subject abstract laws of theoretical political economy or ‘pure’ economics to experimental and numerical verification, and thus to turn pure economics, as far as possible, into a science in the strict sense of the word”

Jan Tinbergen:

Jan Tinbergen was born in The Hague, The Netherlands, in 1903, as the first of five children to Dirk Tinbergen, a schoolmaster teaching Dutch language and Jeannette who was also a teacher. His brother Nikolaas Tinbergen, an ethologist, in Physiology and Medicine also won a Noble Prize in 1973. He studied at the University of Leiden, where he earned a doctoral degree in physics. In 1929 he joined the Central Bureau of Statistics, the economic planning unit of Dutch government, where he was a business-cycle research expert for the League of Nations. Jan later joined as a professor at the Netherlands School of Economics, Rotterdam, and pursued academic career for the rest of his life.

Jan gained acclamation with his pioneering efforts to build mathematical models of how whole economies work, more specifically, how shocks like harvest failures or stock market crashes rebound through an economy to influence output, inflation and employment. His greatest work was to study cyclical fluctuations in United States. Jan built up an econometric system involving some 50 equations, and determined reaction coefficients and “leads and lags” with the help of statistical analysis. 

References:

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1969/press.html

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1969/frisch-facts.html

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1969/frisch-bio.html

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1969/tinbergen-facts.html

http://www.tinbergen.nl/professor-jan-tinbergen/

http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Jan_Tinbergen.aspx

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2171799?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

No more totalitarianism

Is history repeating itself?

“A new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn; for in man's heart, if not in fact, the day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree.” said George H. W. Bush in his presidential inaugural speech in 1989. This was an era during which the majority of the world was grappling with democracy, an era in which people were proud of their freedom. The president spoke about the end of the Vietnam War, which lasted for more than 19 years, emphasizing the end of communism and autocracy.

Francis Fukuyama, an American political scientist, announced the “end of history” and inevitable triumph of liberal capitalist democracy. His argument was simple: Democracy would win out over all other forms of government because the natural desire for peace and well-being set nations on a path to progress from which it was impossible to divert. If a state—even a Communist one—wished to enjoy the greatest prosperity possible, it would have to embrace some measure of capitalism. World peace seemed to be a reality.

Today, after a quarter of a century, world peace has become whimsical. Israel and Palestine are in conflict since 2006, Russia and Ukraine are fighting for Crimea, and the Arab world is under turmoil with the raise of war for soul of Islam between Shittes and Sunnies. The cause of concern is that these wars or conflicts are not for freedom, but for power or for totalitarianism.

In Nineteen Eighty Four (1984), George Orwell creates a dystopian world to describe the political situation during the mid-twentieth century. The author astutely describes the ravenousness for freedom through the protagonist Winston Smith, and oppressive rule by Big Brother and the party. Orwell supported war because he believed it is a choice of evil. For example, he would support USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) against Germany because of his view that the USSR cannot altogether escape its past and retain enough of the original ideas of revolution to make it a more hopeful phenomenon than Nazi Germany.

Are the current wars a lesser evil? The total military spending across the world has reached its cold war level, with a few nations, such as, the United States, actually retainin  their spending. As reported by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the global spending on military was around $1.7 trillion in 2013. These military supports are enough to destroy the world. What we saw in the Gaza massacre and Malaysia Airline MH17 plane crash at Ukraine-Russia border can be said to be a lesser evil or a trailer of a big picture.

Scotland, a part of United Kingdom since last 307 years, is struggling for independence. Scotland has based its grounds for separation on culture, ideology, politics, and economics. It is not only Scotland who is seeking to withdraw national boundaries. There are independence movements in many parts of the world; 39 new states have joined the United Nations since 1980s. Many more aspirants are waiting in the wings for independence.

So, is history is repeating itself? We would say that there is lot more to see. We don’t know when these wars will end, and how many more are at an edge of upsurge. All we can say is that it’s still not the end of history.

Stepping back, and looking forward

“If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic” – Ursula Guin

In 1962-63, Hanna-Barbera (producers) aired The Jetsons, an American Comic Science Fiction sitcom. The Jetsons lived in the year 2062, in a futuristic utopia of elaborate robotic contraptions, aliens, holograms, and whimsical inventions. The  technology reflected in The Jetsons - belt conveyors, sliding doors, LCD televisions, vending machines, food robots, and video calling - has become a reality less than five decades later.

Progressively, writers and scientists are prophesying science fiction converting into reality. Since the1950s,  proponents of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have maintained that machines thinking like people lie just a couple of decades in the future. We are approaching an age in which computers or machines will be more powerful than the human brain. A machine will be able to do complex calculations within seconds, for which a human will take hours.

The question is what skills humans need to develop in order to deal with technological advancement. As we have seen in the past, with the advent of new technologies the demand for labor decreases, leading to a fall in wages and increase in unemployment. During the industrial revolution, between 1811 and 1817, a group of English textile workers opposed the automation of looms, as machines had become a threat to their employment. This movement progressed under the leadership of Ned Ludd, who went as far as attacking mills and machinery before being subjugated by the British government.

That was how the term “Luddite movement” came about, describing the situation in which large-scale automation affects people’s wages and employment. Economists and other scholars predicts such Luddite movement with the progress of technology. The Chauffeur project led by Google engineer Sebastian Thrun has been successful in driving a car through the roads of San Francisco without a human driver. Soon we will see such cars more often on the roads, thereby replacing the human drivers

In “The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies”, Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee warn future generations about the speed of technological developments, and suggest that humans should learn to work with these technologies rather than compete with them. The authors describe the Industrial revolution as the ‘First Machine Age’, during which the graph of Human Development Index and Population took a ninety-degree turn. The authors are skeptical about the direction in which this graph will tilt in the ‘Second Machine Age’ of computers and other digital advances.

Companies such as IBM and Honda are trying to develop robots that can interact with humans through AI. IBM’s supercomputer Watson, designed specially to play the television game show Jeopardy! (Knowledge game), has been successful in defeating Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter,  the long standing winners of the game. Honda’s ASIMO (a humanoid robot), after failing in the 2006 demo presentation, is still grapping to replicate human movements. These examples show that machines are able to do intelligent calculations and play games like chess, but are not yet physically flexible like humans.

As the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker puts it, “The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. . . . As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.”

To conclude, we cannot hinder the development of technologies, but we should learn how to adjust with the change in the economic environment due to technological progress. And we should learn to work with robots to get the better of two worlds (metal ability and physical ability).

So, if in the future one falls in love with an operating system, the way Theodore Twombly did in the movie ‘HER’ by Spike Jonze, don’t be surprised. Computers are and will be an indispensible part of our society.