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Yves here. This post takes a contrarian view of the preoccupation with home ownership and argues that single family homes increase inequality and the rate of climate change. Its authors contend that the idea that home ownership reduces inequality is largely a conservative myth.
I strongly encourage you to read it in full, with an eye to the notion that knee-jerk reactions against some of its arguments are likely to reflect a personal attachment to the notion of homeownership….which as this piece stresses, is a fairly recent cultural inculcation.
No less than the Economist magazine recently deemed the push for widespread homeownership as a massive policy failure, and also described how that demand for home-ownership was stoked by messaging and policies, such as tax breaks for developers and buyers.
Yves here. Finally, the officialdom is taking interest in excessive influence that Google and Facebook wield in advertising and as media players, even if the original impetus was RussiaRussia. But the whinging generally hasn’t produced much in the way of remedies. Here’s an exception.
By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website
Most people know that Google dominates the online search market, but did you know that the company has become the biggest player in the digital ad market? That’s a problem not only for consumers, but potentially for society as a whole, argues former digital advertising executive Dina Srinivasan.
Yves here. See, your intuition about artificial intelligence has been confirmed! But how could it not have been, at least by someone independent? First “artificial intelligence” means getting rid of humans. We live in a neoliberal system, after all! We’re seeing it already in knowledge businesses like the law, where a lot of what used to be yeoman work for young attorneys to learn their trade is now performed by software. Second, the people hyping its benefits have been Silicon Valley members or adjacent. Rather a big tell, don’t you think?
By Anton Korinek, Associate Professor of Economics, Darden School of Business of the University of Virginia and Joe Stiglitz, Professor of Economics, Columbia University. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website