the authors of this paper[0] were able to use AI to figure out if a block of text was written by AI, so hopefully this becomes a tool available to educators very soon.
I mean that is obvious right? It was self-promotion, one of the few things Trump is really good at. That doesn't mean it was in his economic agenda to pass trillions in debt funded covid relief or that he was even responsible for it.
Well, it wasn't biden that posted record profits was it? It was the grocery stores.
> And the record profits Professor Weber mentions? Groundwork Collaborative recently found that corporate profits accounted for 53% of 2023 inflation. EPI likewise concluded that over 51% of the drastically higher inflationary pressures of 2020 and 2021 were also direct results of profits. The Kansas City Federal Reserve even pegged this around 40%, indicating that sellers’ inflation is now a pretty mainstream idea.
I'll never understand this "corporate greed" theory of inflation. Are corporations not usually trying to maximize profits? Are prices not normally as high as the market will bear? The interesting question is not "did they?" but "why were they able to?". What's different now, that nothing kept it in check?
I think you're getting at it with that last chart (though, note: It's top 0.1%, not 0.01%). The last few years has been a story of the haves (with wealth in the stock market) who got richer and the have nots who got decimated by inflation. In other words, corporations were able to raise prices because a lot of people got richer and had more money to spend.
I'm a data scientist, and my impression is that the growth of data science as a profession over the last ~decade has enabled companies to price more efficiently than they used to. That in turn was enabled by technical improvements like cheaper storage and compute and commoditized data infrastructure. I don't have a strong opinion on how much of the inflation this explains, but directionally I'm very confident that companies have gotten significantly more efficient at pricing over that time period, and pretty confident that that would lead to price increases for a lot of businesses.
Supply chain and price shocks during COVID probably accelerated this trend quite a bit - McDonald's would have eventually figured out that the profit-maximizing price of a burger is closer to $4 than $1, but COVID shocks gave it license to raise prices much faster. The good news is that I think of this largely as a one-time shock: once companies have perfectly set profit-maximizing prices, there's no room for more price-optimization-driven inflation, except to the extent that consumers get richer or less price-sensitive over time.
Quoting Matt Levine, "a good unified theory of modern society’s anxieties might be 'everything is too efficient and it’s exhausting.'"
if you aren't considering the fact that your data is what enabled these companies to become such massive giants in the first place, you may be living outside of the EU.
our current economic model kind of depends on the idea that we can always disrupt the status quo with american free market ingenuity once it begins to stagnate but maybe we have reached the limits of what friedman's system can do or accounted for.
[0] https://arxiv.org/html/2410.16107v1