Uber started in 2009. It incurred losses every year until 2023 except for a profit in 2019 which was due to selling subsidiaries in various countries. Numbers before the IPO are difficult to obtain, but it lost 31.5 billion from 2016 to 2022. Let’s assume a loss of equal to funding during the pre-IPO period, […]
economics
Precis som i övriga världen handlar dagens svenska inflation delvis om att en del företag och kapitalägare vill passa på och öka sina vinstmarginaler utan att det i någon egentlig mening föreligger reala kostnadsökningar som ‘berättigar’ detta. Den typen av i ‘smyg’ höjda priser blir allt lättare att genomföra i takt med att inflationsförväntningar stiger. […]
Yesterday we talked about AI: how business has been adopting it wholesale even though so far most of the evidence is that it performs worse than humans on almost all tasks. They do this because bosses don’t want to deal with employees: they want drones that just do what they’re told, and hope that AI […]
Most people have a very personal view of the nature of debt. We know that high levels of debt and deficit spending at the household level are not sustainable. At some point, household debt has to be paid back. If a household is unable to do so, its debt will have to be renegotiated. It […]
Economic models are not expected to be even approximately true, and Hausman’s idea that even the ceteris paribus laws in economics are vague as to what exactly has to be equal makes it clear that economic laws must be abstract rather than idealized. This leads us to the question: What are the criteria of, if […]
The object of our analysis is, not to provide a machine, or method of blind manipulation, which will furnish an infallible answer, but to provide ourselves with an organized and orderly method of thinking out particular problems; and, after we have reached a provisional conclusion by isolating the complicating factors one by one, we then […]
The rational expectations hypothesis assumes—primarily for reasons of internal consistency—that agents possess complete knowledge of all relevant probability distribution functions. When attempts are made to incorporate learning into these models, often in response to longstanding criticism, it is invariably a highly constrained form of learning. This type of learning excludes the truly unexpected or surprising. […]
Die Koalition gefährdet mit ihrem Haushalt die finanzielle Stabilität, sagt der Wirtschaftsprofessor Lars Feld, der Christian Lindner beraten hat. Jens Südekum, der Berater von Lars Klingbeil, entgegnet: Deutschland muss ins Risiko gehen. ZEIT: Das Institut für Weltwirtschaft in Kiel hat errechnet, dass die Schuldenquote bis zum Jahr 2040 auf bis zu 118 Prozent des Brutto-inlandsprodukts […]
Mill provides a good illustration of the tension between fallibilism and anti-foundationalism. Mill’s first principles are supposed to be empirical and not necessary truths, but for economics to be an empirical subject at all, they have to be beyond genuine doubt, since they provide the only empirical element in an otherwise deductive system. The certainty […]