Capitalism’s most grievous flaws are, at root, problems of property rights and must be addressed at that level.
By Peter Barnes – Capitalism as we know it has two egregious flaws: it relentlessly widens inequality and destroys nature. Its ‘invisible hand,’ which is supposed to transform individual self-seeking into widely shared well-being, too often doesn’t, and governments can’t keep up with the consequences. For billions of people around the world, the challenge of our era is to repair or replace capitalism before its cumulative harms become irreparable.
Among those who would repair capitalism, policy ideas abound. Typically, they involve more government regulations, taxes and spending. Few, if any, would fundamentally alter the dynamics of markets themselves. Among those who would replace capitalism, many would nationalize a good deal of private property and expand government’s role in regulating the rest.
This book explores the terrain midway between repairing and replacing capitalism. It envisions a transformed market economy in which private property and businesses are complemented by universal property and fiduciary trusts whose beneficiaries are future generations and all living persons equally.
Economists wrangle over monetary, fiscal and regulatory policies but pay little attention to property rights. Their models all assume that property rights remain just as they are forever. But this needn’t and shouldn’t be the case. My premise is that capitalism’s most grievous flaws are, at root, problems of property rights and must be addressed at that level.
Property rights in modern economies are grants by governments of permission to use, lease, sell or bequeath specific assets — and just as importantly, to exclude others from doing those things. The assets involved can be tangible, like land and machinery, or intangible, like shares of stock or songs. more>
By Corey S Powell – Are we alone in the Universe? And if not, should we be excited – or afraid? These questions are as immediate as the latest Netflix hit and as primal as the ancient myths that associated the planets with spirits and gods. In 1686, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, the long-term secretary to the French Academy of Sciences, put an Enlightenment stamp on speculations about alien life with his book Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds). In a series of spirited philosophical conversations, he declared that ‘it would be very strange for the Earth to be so well inhabited, and the other planets perfectly solitary’, and argued that alien beings might attempt to communicate with us or even visit us using some advanced form of flight.
By John Blyler – Scientific laws describe observed phenomena, like Newton’s Law of Gravity. Engineering “laws” tend to focus on design or manufacturing processes, such as Moore’s Law. Although this most famous of engineering laws is really a corollary to a more comprehensive principle (as we’ll see shortly), it is nevertheless so well known that non-semiconductor experts refer to it often in their predictions. For example, several technology advocates have lamented the lack of a Moore’s Law equivalent in the automotive battery space.
By Adrienne LaFrance – Before i tell you what happened at exactly 2:28 p.m. on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, at the White House—and how it elicited a very specific reaction, some 2,400 miles away, in Menlo Park, California—you need to remember the mayhem of that day, the exuberance of the mob as it gave itself over to violence, and how several things seemed to happen all at once.
By Valerie Insinna – On Friday, Oct. 26, 2001, executives and employees from the nation’s two biggest defense primes gathered in boardrooms and sprawling production facilities to watch a Pentagon press conference. At stake: the
By Jeff Cockrell – In late August, five members of the US House of Representatives issued a 
By Ben Geman – A Mississippi utility is installing what’s being billed as “the world’s first large flexible transformer” — an Energy Department-backed project aimed at boosting grid resilience and smoothing integration of renewables.
By Akvile Jaseviciute and Bhuvam Patel – The OECD’s proposals to harmonize international tax regimes were generally welcomed by governments without considering potential benefits of tax competitiveness. Blinded by their wish to stop multinational corporations from moving their business to jurisdictions with more favorable tax regimes, few considered the practical implications of OECD’s plans. Currently, OECD countries have divergent tax regimes – the 2021 edition of the International Tax Competition Index produced by the Tax Foundation ranked countries regarding tax competitiveness. Estonia earned the top spot in the ranking because of its relatively low corporate tax rate, while Italy and France fared poorly due to features like punitive wealth and financial transaction taxes. We hence question, why countries with favorable tax systems should be held back by a harmonized but uncompetitive tax regime?
Equinix – Volume 5 of the Global Interconnection Index (GXI) confirms that the pandemic triggered a tectonic shift in increased demand for digital services and accelerated the need to digitize business models by several years. For digital leaders, experiencing years of growth in a matter of months increased their advantage as many implemented their digital-first strategies. For organizations taking a follower approach, where digital transformation was still mostly bound to physical limitations and fixed dependencies, and followers found themselves losing control over business throughput, supply chain, customer engagement and potentially their position in the market.
By Alessio Botta, Philip Bruno and Jeff Galvin – Last October, when we published McKinsey’s 2020 Global Payments Report, it was already clear that the pandemic’s economic impact would lead to the first decline in global payments revenues in 11 years.
