Op-Ed. US Trade War with China: Desperate Move to Save Western Empire

by Andre Vltchek, International Daily News in China.  November 26th, 2018

Most of those who have had a chance to witness Chinese internationalist mega-projects, clearly understand that the West is near to collapsing; it will never be able to compete with tremendous enthusiasm and progressive spirit of the most populous country on earth, which on top of it, is built on socialist principles (with Chinese characteristics).

Comments invited here, with copies to both eric.britton@ecoplan.org and  robert.ayres@insead.edu please.

Editorial: Hmm, let’s see. Now that didn’t work, didn’t it? That at least is clear. But why? And what do we do now?

Editor’s Note. Paris, 25 May 2018.

Dear readers, friends and colleagues,

This ambitious collaborative web project “Ayres on Environment, Economy, Energy & Growth” has been in existence for close to four full years now.  And over this time despite the potential of tremendous content and burning issues, and considerable effort on our part, it has failed to take off.  At least to the degree that the subject merits.  What went wrong?  And where should we go from here?

Making a web platform like this work — highly technical content, including a fair dose of abstract  topics and analytic approaches which require a well prepared audience to be meaningful — is no easy task. And all the more so in this era of crushing information overload.  But that would be a poor excuse.

The main shortcoming thus far has been that we have simply failed to give it sufficient time, commitment, touch and content  — or regularity, — to win over the kind and size of audience which the work and findings of Ayres and his distinguished colleagues deserve in their own work in these complex inter-related spheres of, once again, Environment, Economy, Energy & Growth,..

Protected: Op-Ed: Joseph Stiglitz on America as afflicted by an ideology that doesn’t work

This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Op-Ed: Econ Majors Graduate With a Huge Knowledge Gap

What’s needed is a mandatory course on ethics and the limits of knowledge.

    Moral philosopher. 1723-1790

  – By Noah Smith.   Bloomberg View. April 13, 2018.   https://bloom.bg/2vue79V

Economics remains one of the most popular majors for college students. Most econ students, of course, don’t go on to become professional economists; instead, they fill the ranks of the U.S.’s vast pper-middle-class of business managers and professionals.

The models they learn in their college classes inform the way they think about the world, even if they don’t end up using them for quantitative purposes after final exams are over.

After the great repatriation: Where will the money go and what will it do?

– By Robert U. Ayres

               For several weeks, the guys and gals at CNBC and Bloomberg News, and their guests, have been talking about the coming tax reform (cut) legislation that the Republicans finally seem to have in their grasp. Well, maybe not exactly reform, maybe not revenue-neutral, but at least tax cuts for the corporations that give them campaign money. All the cheerleaders, both in Congress and the White House, assert confidently that faster growth will pay for the cost of the tax cut, even though virtually all economists (including me) say that it won’t.

A hint about the trouble with GE

 

The continued decline in GE share prices (now below $20 per share) have been a major topic in the financial press (and TV) during the past few weeks. Jeffrey Immelt (Jack Welch’s protegé) is gone, no doubt with a sizeable “golden parachute” to comfort his golden years. Yet in GE’s peak year, under Welch, in August 2000 (just before the “dot.com” crash) GE was worth more than $600 billion. Recently it fell to $190 billion.

Hmm. Let’s have a look.

Secular Stagnation (Or Corporate Suicide?)

Robert Ayres and Michael Olenick, INSEAD
INSEAD WORKING PAPER

 Abstract

We advanced the null hypothesis that stock buybacks will have a positive impact on the market value of a business over a five-year horizon. We find that there is a negligible chance for this to be true (with a two tail heteroscedastic p=.000023).

We find that the more capital a business invests in buying its own stock, expressed as a ratio of capital invested in buybacks to current market capitalization, the less likely that company is to experience long-term growth in overall market value.

Our findings, for US firms worth more than $100 million, suggest that long-term investors, such as pension funds, should be wary of investing businesses that have engaged in significant cumulative stock repurchases (i.e. 50% or more of current market cap.)

We find that excessive buybacks in the past decades are a significant cause of secular stagnation, inasmuch as they effectively reduce corporate R&D while contributing, instead, to an asset bubble that creates no value.

Urban agriculture: Another Win-Win for China?

 

Report from China: Robert Ayres

In my last post I explained why (private) investment the automobile industry was a huge win-win for the US in the early years of the 20^th century, for reasons that do not apply to 21^st century China. In fact, there are strong arguments that the overall impact of still more cars (and highways) in China will be more nearly a lose-lose proposition, the only winners being the foreign auto manufacturers.

However, I think there is another investment opportunity, still in its infancy, that – if pursued intelligently – can be a true “win-win”.

Op-Ed: Extreme Inequality not Driven by Merit, but by Rent-Seeking and Luck

From an article in Evonomics by Didier Jacobs,special advisor to the president at Oxfam America. Full text at http://evonomics.com/extreme-inequality-not-driven-merit-wealth/. Based on an interview by  Sam Pizzigati, veteran labor journalist and Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow

Defenders of our deeply unequal global economic order had to put in a bit of overtime last month. They had to explain away the latest evidence — from the global charity Oxfam — on how concentrated our world’s wealth has become. A challenging task.

Back in 2010, Oxfam’s new stats show, the world’s 62 richest billionaires collectively held $1.1 trillion in wealth, far less than the $2.6 trillion that then belonged to humanity’s least affluent half.

Now the numbers have reversed. The world’s top 62 billionaires last year held $1.76 trillion in wealth, the bottom half of the world only $1.75 trillion.

Jacobs: Put simply, economists define rent as the difference between what people are paid and what they would have to be paid to do the work anyway. In other words, a rent is excess income, income that does not generate any effort.  So if your farmland happens to be more fertile than surrounding farmland, you get more production out of it for the same effort, and that extra income you get is a rent. Rent-seeking entails getting hold of wealth produced by others. Lobbying government to obtain a subsidy is an example.

Weekend Op-Ed: To better understand climate complexity . . .

Everything you always wanted to know about global warming. But were afraid to ask.

On EROI: Commentary by Professor Charles Hall

See “On EROI, as a measure of what’s left in the barrel” at http://wp.me/p55vqx-95

Happy to see a website devoted to the (mostly) good ideas of Robert Ayres. As the originator of the term if not the concept of EROI I would like to clarify a few things from my own perspective. The energy invested is usually and appropriately considered the energy diverted from society to get energy to society. Thus natural gas used to pressurize an oil/gas field or energy used in society to make a drill bit or oil rig or fertilizer for corn-based ethanol would be considered part of the investment. Geological energy to make radioactive uranium or oil would not.

OP-EDS

Invited articles, reviews, challenges and longer comments by concerned readers and others with a strong interests in the subjects treated here.

An op-ed (originally short for “opposite the editorial page”, latterly “opinion editorial”) is a piece typically published by newspapers, magazines, and the like which expresses the opinions of a named author usually not affiliated with the publication’s editorial board.

The Op-eds that you find in these pages have been solicited or chosen to the extent that they help us look at our targeted issues from a variety of perspectives. We might have called them, mind food.

Op-ed: On the Productive Link between Energy and a Robust Economy

John A. “Skip” Laitner is the first guest contributor whom we are proud to welcome to the important Op-ed section of this site . This section is intended to serve as a tribune for readers and colleagues who are working to develop new ideas and perspectives on the important topics focused on here — Environment, Exergy, Economy and Growth  —  to share their work, ideas and challenges with our growing network of international readers. We welcome critical discussion and creative disagreement.