{"id":43967,"date":"2018-06-30T05:00:19","date_gmt":"2018-06-30T09:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=43967"},"modified":"2018-06-29T17:54:55","modified_gmt":"2018-06-29T21:54:55","slug":"enriching-the-public-in-ways-that-do-not-show-up-in-the-gdp-calculations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/06\/30\/enriching-the-public-in-ways-that-do-not-show-up-in-the-gdp-calculations\/","title":{"rendered":"Enriching the public in ways that do not show up in the GDP calculations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.continentaltelegraph.com\/uncategorized\/the-nobel-laureate-on-tech-company-monopoly-and-regulation\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Tim Worstall<\/a> looks at the calls to regulate the big tech firms and points out that we already get a very good deal on &#8220;free stuff&#8221; that isn&#8217;t reflected in standard economic statistics:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It won\u2019t have escaped your attention that rather large numbers of people are calling for the regulation of the tech companies. The Amazon, Google, Facebook (Apple and Microsoft often added, just because they\u2019re large) nexus have lots of power over markets and thus therefore \u2013 well, therefore something. My own prejudice here is that certain people just cannot look at centres of power and or money without insisting that they, the complainers, should be the ones exercising that power and determining the disposition of that money. Thus much of the drive for \u201cdemocratic\u201d regulation of the economy more generally, the self proclaimed democrats being the ones who would end up with the power. The advantage of this analysis being that it does describe reality, the same people do end up making the same arguments about different companies over time. Mere prominence brings the demand for control.<\/p>\n<p>The economist on this subject is Jean Tirole. His Nobel was for exploring this very subject, tech companies and the two sided market. Google, for example, sells the search engine to us and us to the advertisers. The tech here is different, obviously, but the underlying economics is the same as that of the free newspaper.<\/p>\n<p>Tirole\u2019s a new book out and there are a number of interesting points to be had <a href=\"https:\/\/qz.com\/1310266\/nobel-winning-economist-jean-tirole-on-how-to-regulate-tech-monopolies\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">from it<\/a>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>Yes, on the whole consumers tend to get a good deal, because we use wonderful services \u2014 like Google\u2019s search engine, Gmail, YouTube, and Waze \u2014 for free. To be certain, we are not paid for the valuable data we provide to the platforms, as for example Eric Posner and Glen Weyl remind us in their recent book <strong>Radical Markets<\/strong>. But on the whole, our living standards have substantially improved thanks to the digital revolution.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>From which we can extract a few points. We\u2019re richer, we really are. Substantially richer and yet in a manner that normal economic statistics entirely fail to capture. As Hal Varian has pointed out, GDP doesn\u2019t deal well with free. Near all of those benefits of the digital revolution are coming to us for free and so aren\u2019t recorded in that GDP. So, we\u2019re richer yet the numbers say we\u2019re not. In that is much of the explanation of slow economic growth these days, even of slow real wage growth. We\u2019re just not counting what is happening to our living standards.<\/p>\n<p>But we can and should go further than that. If the above is true then we\u2019re very much less unequal than we\u2019re recording. Stuff that\u2019s free is, obviously enough, distributed rather more evenly among the population than extant monetary incomes. You, me and Bill Gates all have access to exactly the same amount of Facebook at the same price. We\u2019re entirely equal in that sense. Bill\u2019s actually poorer concerning search engines, stuck for emotional reasons with Bing as he is while we get to use Google or DuckDuckGo. Our standard measures of inequality are wrong both because of the undermeasurement of new wealth and also the extremely equitable pattern of the distribution of that new wealth.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tim Worstall looks at the calls to regulate the big tech firms and points out that we already get a very good deal on &#8220;free stuff&#8221; that isn&#8217;t reflected in standard economic statistics: It won\u2019t have escaped your attention that rather large numbers of people are calling for the regulation of the tech companies. The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,25,28,15],"tags":[391,1094,328,661,290],"class_list":["post-43967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-economics","category-media","category-technology","tag-facebook","tag-gdp","tag-google","tag-regulation","tag-statistics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-br9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43967"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43968,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43967\/revisions\/43968"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}