Allowing employees to hold company equity is also associated with increased productivity and less turnover, and a 2004 Rutgers University study found companies offering employee ownership stakes of at least 5% have a higher likelihood of survival than those without the benefit, which researchers attributed to greater employment security.

“When you align everyone’s incentives with a common goal, everyone will work harder to achieve that goal,” Ethan Rouen, a Harvard Business School professor of business administration, said in an interview for the college about Harvard’s research. “When you have an equity stake, all of a sudden you have a claim on the upside, and so that incentivizes you to work harder to increase that upside. It is something that has the potential to grow the pie and create wealth for everyone involved.”

There are many excuses for failing to tax the ultra-wealthy. The truth is that governments don’t tackle the problem because they don’t want to, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

The Harvard professor provides a ceaseless flow of startling details in this exhaustively researched, 1000-year account

A repeat of the disaster that ended the 1930s is not inevitable. But just as then, capitalists and intellectuals can’t thrash out how to adapt their favored economic model in a way that voters will accept. Capitalism is still the least terrible way to run an economy, but it will have to change profoundly if the future really is a world where most people’s labor isn’t needed.

The United States is one of the world’s richest, most powerful and technologically innovative countries; but neither its wealth nor its power nor its technology is being harnessed to address the situation in which 40 million people continue to live in poverty.

""
It isn’t actual artificial intelligence akin to C-3PO, it’s a sophisticated pattern-matching tool.

Rather than seeing exponential improvements in the quality of AI performance (a la Moore’s Law), we’re instead seeing exponential increases in the cost to improve AI systems — supervised ML seems to follow an S-Curve.

our heavy investment into safety didn’t translate for investors.

It took me way too long to realize that VCs would rather a $1b business with a 90% margin than a $5b business with a 50% margin, even if capital requirements and growth were the same.

Investors were impressed. It didn’t matter that that jump from “sometimes working” to statistically reliable was 10–1000x more work.
""