14h"It’s good to be alone, for a few hours to be exempt from all the complicated bonds, all the conflicts, great and small, all the demands and expectations, wills and desires that build up between people."
↩︎ The Guardian
From "In the Air Tonight" to "Kiss" to, well, this week, the definitive sound of the '80s were gated-reverb drums. From Vox's Estelle Caswell, a history of the happy accident that begat the effect, all the wonderful ways it's been employed ever since, and a playlist of some of its most memorable appearances:
Some useful tools.
This tool shows where the closest Confederate monuments are to your location, and this tool shows you the closest Home Depot that offers rentals of mini-excavators and demolition equipment. Just saying.
Arrested 14 times while performing, "showtime" dancer Michael Brundage made it into an Intel video. While he put himself through a year of Brooklyn College on tips, he says gentrification is quashing artistry and erasing a viable job market. "We need to decriminalize it. Because while they are doing zoned performances people are still being arrested for performing on the train. And I think that’s wrong.”
In honor of the news that Chuck E. Cheese is phasing out its animatronic bands—a move that will spark outrage only among those too old (or therapied) to remember the terror of being in the same room with a giant robot rat—here's one of Showbiz Pizza's Rock-afire Explosion bands, salvaged and reprogrammed to play Usher's "Love in This Club." (For more on the second life of the Rock-afire Explosion, the documentary about its creator is a lot of fun.)
1d"When we were on trial for our freedom, as children, trying desperately to clear our names, he took it upon himself to poison public opinion, demanding the harshest punishment possible, even though he didn’t know, and couldn’t have known, the facts."
↩︎ The Washington Post
Profits are soaring, but firms spend less on workers: a macroeconomics detour.
The thesis of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century was that the share of profits that go to capital* will always increase faster than the share that go to labor—meaning that, the longer capitalism continues, the more unequal it will become. (At least without resets like debt forgiveness, endorsed by David Graeber.)
Automation has drawn significant concern as a driver of this imbalance, but spending on what economists call capital—the useful stuff that helps a firm make its product, like technology—has actually declined. What has increased is profits. Like, a lot.
A new paper draws attention to market power as the greedy sibling of labor and capital. Market power is basically anything that causes a market to diverge from perfect competition, the set of assumptions that underpin your basic high school-level economics; market power is the ability of an individual buyer or seller to influence a commodity's price. Its fullest expression is monopoly power.
Here are a couple of the key takeaways:
- Market power increases with market share; the big guys are more able than before to charge what they want.
- But the effect is most markedly seen in smaller industries.
- "On average, firms charged 67 percent over marginal cost in 2014, compared with 18 percent in 1980."
- As firms can charge more per product, they make a tradeoff with quantity. When they have to produce fewer goods, they need fewer laborers, or pay them less.
- As perfect competition disapperas, productivity gains are less likely to be passed onto other firms and more likely to be pocketed, which increases profits but drags the economy.
*Note that capital here includes both profits and "capital" in the sense used in the new paper, which is really colloquially more like "investments a firm makes in itself."