Posts Tagged ‘Elizabeth Magie’
“The malady of commercial crisis is not, in essence, a matter of the purse but of the mind”*…
Still, those crises do take tangible form…
Q3 is a traditional peak season in the world of shipping, but not this year. Global inflation, weakened consumer demand and excess cargo carrying capacity are pushing the market down…
With a gloomy economic outlook and vague alarms from central banks, it seems recession could be just around the corner.
Are there any indications from the shipping market when global recession is on its way? This is a question not only of interest to the commercial and technical players in the maritime industry, but also to financiers and policy makers.
The last recession triggered by economic factors was the Great Recession from December 2007 to June 2009. Goods loaded worldwide for seaborne trade fell by nearly five percent in 2009 compared to 2008, from about 8.23 billion tons to 7.82, according to UNCTAD’s Handbook of Statistics 2021.
Is a depressed shipping market a contributor to global recession, or does global recession lead the shipping market down? It is a chicken and egg question. But can the Great Recession’s impact to shipping market provide some useful reference to the current situation? Shipping indexes may shed some light.
…
How is the shipping market now? In May 2022, bulker earnings started to drop. Tankers were at a short break in an upward rise. Container freight rates were flat and just about to begin sliding. As of September 2022, only tankers’ earnings are still climbing.
The bulk shipping market’s underperformance will probably continue and will not turn before Christmas, unless there are significant changes – for example, if an easing of COVID restrictions in China pushes up its industrial demand (particularly for iron ore). Demand for oil and gas from the West will help send tanker rates continue soaring. Container shipping is expected to decline in the short term.
During the past months, a black cloud has appeared on the global shipping market’s horizon. The downward trend of shipping indexes brings a sense of foreboding. As to the question, “is a global recession imminent?” Most likely, say signals from these two shipping indexes…
“Do Shipping Indexes Hint at Global Recession?,” from @Mar_Ex. (TotH to friend PH.)
See also: “China lockdowns accelerate supply chain diversion and box shipping review,” and more generally, “An often-overlooked economic measure is signaling serious trouble ahead” and “Three Harbingers Point to a U.S. Recession.”
* John Stuart Mill
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As we batten the hatches, we might we might spare a thought for Henry George; he died on this date in 1897. A writer, politician and political economist, George is best remembered for Progress and Poverty, published in 1879, which treats inequality and the cyclic nature of industrialized economies, and proposes the use of a land value tax (AKA a “single tax” on real estate) as a remedy– an economic philosophy known as Georgism, the main tenet of which is that, while individuals should own what they create, everything found in nature, most importantly the value of land, belongs equally to all mankind.
George’s ideas were widely-discussed in his time and into the early 20th century, and admired by thinkers like Alfred Russel Wallace, Jose Marti, and William Jennings Bryan; Franklin D. Roosevelt sang his praises, as did George Bernard Shaw. But with the rise of neoclassical economics, George’s star began to recede. Still, more modern thinkers like Albert Einstein and martin Luther King were fans.
In a sequence that mimicked George’s arc of influence, it was George’s work that inspired Elizabeth Magie to create The Landlord’s Game in 1904 to demonstrate his theories; ironically, it was Magie’s board game that became in the 1930s (as recently noted here and here) the basis for Monopoly.
In 1977, Joseph Stiglitz showed that under certain conditions, spending by the government on public goods will increase aggregate land rents/returns by the same amount. Stiglitz’s findings were dubbed “the Henry George Theorem,” as they illustrate a situation in which Henry George’s “single tax” is not only efficient, it is the only tax necessary to finance public expenditures.
“if we’re measuring the wrong thing, we’re going to do the wrong thing”*…
Money and markets have been around for thousands of years. Yet as central as currency has been to so many civilizations, people in societies as different as ancient Greece, imperial China, medieval Europe, and colonial America did not measure residents’ well-being in terms of monetary earnings or economic output.
In the mid-19th century, the United States—and to a lesser extent other industrializing nations such as England and Germany—departed from this historical pattern. It was then that American businesspeople and policymakers started to measure progress in dollar amounts, tabulating social welfare based on people’s capacity to generate income. This fundamental shift, in time, transformed the way Americans appraised not only investments and businesses but also their communities, their environment, and even themselves.
Today, well-being may seem hard to quantify in a nonmonetary way, but indeed other metrics—from incarceration rates to life expectancy—have held sway in the course of the country’s history. The turn away from these statistics, and toward financial ones, means that rather than considering how economic developments could meet Americans’ needs, the default stance—in policy, business, and everyday life—is to assess whether individuals are meeting the exigencies of the economy…
Eli Cook explains how America pioneered a way of thinking that puts human well-being in economic terms: “How Money Became the Measure of Everything.”
* “GDP is not a good measure of economic performance; it’s not a good measure of well-being. What we measure informs what we do. And if we’re measuring the wrong thing, we’re going to do the wrong thing.” – Joseph Stiglitz
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As we muse on metrics, we might spare a thought for Henry George; he died on this date in 1897. A writer, politician and political economist, George is best remembered for Progress and Poverty, published in 1879, which treats inequality and the cyclic nature of industrialized economies, and proposes the use of a land value tax (AKA a “single tax” on real estate) as a remedy– an economic philosophy known as Georgism, the main tenet of which is that, while individuals should own what they create, everything found in nature, most importantly the value of land, belongs equally to all mankind.
George’s ideas were widely-discussed in his time and into the early 20th century, and admired by thinkers like Alfred Russel Wallace, Jose Marti, and William Jennings Bryan; Franklin D. Roosevelt sang his praises, as did George Bernard Shaw. But with the rise of neoclassical economics, George’s star began to recede. Still, more modern thinkers like Albert Einstein and martin Luther King were fans.
In a sequence that mimicked George’s arc of influence, it was George’s work that inspired Elizabeth Magie to create The Landlord’s Game in 1904 to demonstrate his theories; ironically, it was Magie’s board game that became in the 1930s (as recently noted here and here) the basis for Monopoly.
In 1977, Joseph Stiglitz showed that under certain conditions, spending by the government on public goods will increase aggregate land rents/returns by the same amount. Stiglitz’s findings were dubbed “the Henry George Theorem,” as they illustrate a situation in which Henry George’s “single tax” is not only efficient, it is the only tax necessary to finance public expenditures.
Henry George
“Our people are good people; our people are kind people. Pray God some day kind people won’t all be poor”*…
For a singular image of the Great Depression and the roughness of those years, it’s hard to do much better than Dorothea Lange’s 1936 photograph of Florence Owens Thompson, two of her children tucking their faces over her shoulders, a baby in her lap.
Where that image comes from, there are many, many more: around 175,000 surviving portraits of America between 1935 and 1945 taken by the photographers of the government’s Farm Security Administration. The Library of Congress, which houses the collection, has, remarkably, digitized all the negatives and tagged the records with loads of data, such as who took the picture and where it was taken.
Now, thanks to a new project known as Photogrammar from Yale University, viewers will have a much easier time exploring the photographs. There’s a map that displays the images by county and another that shows where each picture was taken and by which photographer. There’s also an interactive that allows viewers to sort the photos by theme (e.g. “war” or “religion”) and then browse from there. Other tools are still in the works…
Agricultural workers bound for upstate New York in time for the harvest
More at “Seeing the Great Depression.”
* John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
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As we go West, we might recall that it was on this date in 1935 that Parker Brothers purchased the patent for “The Landlord’s Game” from Elizabeth Magie, a Quaker political activist who had used the theories of the economist Henry George to create the game to illustrate the way in which monopolies impoverish (“bankrupt”) the many while concentrating extraordinary wealth in one or few. Parker Brothers had released a copy– Charles Darrow’s “Monopoly”– which was (to put it politely) closely modeled on “The Landlord’s Game”; when Darrow’s version became a hit in 1933, Parker Brothers bought “The Landlord’s Game” as insurance against a intellectual property suit– and subsequently paid Ms. Magie $500 for her patent to avoid a (completely justified) claim from her that “Monopoly” was, in effect, stolen. It is estimated that over a billion people have played “Monopoly” over the years.
“The Landlord’s Game” board, from Magie’s original patent application
Tilt!…
From Popular Mechanics, “11 Things You Didn’t Know About Pinball History,” e.g.:
7. Pinball Has a Surprise Best-Seller
The best-selling pinball machine of all time is still “The Addams Family,” which came out in 1991.
and…
11. Just One Company Still Makes Pinball Machines
And it does it in the U.S. Every new pinball machine comes from a single Stern Pinball factory in the Chicago suburbs, where factory workers assemble several thousand parts, largely by hand.
Readers will find the other nine nuggets at “11 Things You Didn’t Know About Pinball History.”
As we limber up our flipper fingers, we might recall that it was on this date in 1935 that Parker Brothers purchased the patent for “The Landlord’s Game” from Elizabeth Magie, a Quaker political activist who had created the game to illustrate the way in which monopolies impoverish (“bankrupt”) the many while concentrating extraordinary wealth in one or few. Charles Darrow’s “Monopoly” was (to put it politely) closely modeled on “The Landlord’s Game”; when it became a hit in 1933, Parker Brothers bought it– and subsequently paid Ms. Magie $500 for her predecessor patent to avoid a (completely justified) claim from her that “Monopoly” was, in effect, stolen. It is estimated that over a billion people have played “Monopoly” over the years.
“The Landlord’s Game” board, from Magie’s original patent application (source)
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