James Dale Davidson
Forfatter af The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age
Om forfatteren
James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg edit and publish Strategic Investment, one of the world's best-performing investment newsletters. They are coauthors of Blood in the Streets. Davidson is a principal of Strategic Advisors Corp. Lord Rees-Mogg is a financial advisor to some of the vis mere world's wealthiest investors. He was formerly editor of the Times of London and is vice-chairman of the BBC. vis mindre
Image credit: National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance
Værker af James Dale Davidson
Brazil Is the New America: How Brazil Offers Upward Mobility in a Collapsing World (2012) 22 eksemplarer
The Capitalist Manifesto: Why Bloated Welfare States Won't Survive the Information Age (1995) 18 eksemplarer
The Decline & Fall of the Welfare State 2 eksemplarer
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- 1947
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- male
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- USA
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investment writer - Organisationer
- National Taxpayers Union (founder)
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Reading this 1997 book in 2021, it's tempting to think that blockchain will change things - that *now* the internet will finally be decentralized, economic activity will be untaxable, and the state will collapse. Maybe this book wasn't wrong, just early? But that's like being a marxist who sees every financial crisis as *the* ultimate crisis of capitalism. The state has adapted to disruptive technologies before - even to encryption -, it might very well adapt to blockchain and to quantum computing and to whatever comes next.
Other predictions have materialized though. The part about "cybercash" is essentially about Bitcoin - except that it predates Bitcoin by eleven years. The authors talk about how "cybercash" will make it harder for states to tax through inflation, and it is precisely in countries that have seen inflation rise in the 2010s, like Argentina and Venezuela, that Bitcoin has been most popular.
It's also hard not to think of Estonia's e-residency program, created in 2014, when the authors predict small nations competing for citizens, and that such competition wouldn't necessarily involve immigration. And it's impossible not to think about Amazon Turk and Upwork when the authors talk about technology will accelerate the transition from jobs to project-specific work - a post-Coasean economy.
Also, the authors anticipate the hordes of humanities majors and journalists with no no marketable skills who have turned against technology and capitalism:
“The nationalist and Luddite reaction will be strongest, however, not among the very poor but among persons of middling skills, underachievers with credentials, who came of age during the industrial era and face downward mobility.”
Relatedly, the authors correctly predict the multiplication of self-declared (and more or less officially recognized) "oppressed" categories. And they offer a neat theory about it: "We see the growth of victimization as mainly an attempt to buy social peace by not only widening membership in the meritocracy as [Christopher] Lash argues, but also by reconstituting the rationalizations for income redistribution."
Fake news and echo chambers are also there: "you'll even be able to order a nightly news report that simulates the news you would like to hear. [...] You'll see any story you wish, true or false, unfold on your television/computer".
It's also great to be reminded of how absurd it is to consider "fair" that "different persons should pay wildly different amounts for the services of government". Why should someone with an income of US$ 2X pay twice as much tax than someone with an income of US$ X? If anything policing wealthier neighborhoods is *cheaper* than policing poorer neighborhoods. In fact the lower your income the more likely you will use up *more* state resources, so you should pay more taxes, not less.
Finally, every now and then it's good to be reminded that our faith in democracy is no less ludicrous than a medieval peasant's faith in the Church. The authors do a good job drawing parallels between the religious myths of 1000 years ago and the civic myths of today. The state is nothing more than the stationary bandit of Mancur Olson's "Power and Prosperity" - but the mythology around the state is strong and it's easy to forget that we're all serfs.… (mere)