Don Marti

Sun 05 Aug 2012 05:38:12 PM PDT

Economics links: subsidies, inequality, startups...

Jerry Brito explains How copyright is like Solyndra, a government subsidy program.

Steve Randy Waldman: Trade-offs between inequality, productivity, and employment. How much of our accumulated wealth do we use in a zero-sum struggle against each other? Can we ever get enough?

It's illegal to discriminate by race or national origin, but what about favorite stores or music? Alistair Croll: Big Data is our generation’s civil rights issue, and we don’t know it.

Paul Craig Roberts: Escape From Economics. "[T]he problem is that the discipline both lags an ever-changing world and got some things wrong at the beginning. Consequently, learning economics places one inside a box where some of the tools and understanding provided are outdated and incorrect."

Economist Yanis Varoufakis looks at one company with radically bottom-up organization: Why Valve? Or, what do we need corporations for and how does Valve’s management structure fit into today’s corporate world? Sort of like the "peer production" model in Coase's Penguin by Yochai Benkler, only within a single firm.

Aaron Swartz asks, "What do startup founders want?" and rules out money, fame, and power right away.