This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Intangibles = Monopoly — John Quiggin at Crooked Timber: The value of companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft is made up primarily of “intangibles”. That term can cover all sorts of things, and is often taken to refer to some special aspect of the firm in question, such as accumulated R&D, tacit knowledge or ‘goodwill’ associated with brands. R&D is at most a small part of the story. The leading tech companies spend $10 – 20 billion a year each on R&D https://spendmenot.com/top-rd-spenders/, a tiny fraction of market valuations of $1 trillion or more. And feelings towards most of these companies are the opposite of goodwill – more like resentful dependence in most cases. A simpler explanation is that the main intangible asset held by these companies is monopoly power, arising from network effects, intellectual property, control over natural resources and good old-fashioned predatory conduct. In this context, the crucial point about intangibles isn’t that they aren’t physical, it’s that they can’t be reproduced by anyone else.
• It’s Going to Be a Long and Harsh Recession: NYT Warns of Skills Gap — Dean Baker at CEPR: When the unemployment rate goes up, a standard theme in the media is that workers don’t have the right skills. We saw that yesterday in the New York Times when an article told us “The Pandemic Has Accelerated Demands for a More Skilled Workforce.” It tells us how the growth of telecommuting in response to the pandemic has led to more demand for skilled labor and less demand for less-skilled workers. The key point in this sort of argument is that the problem is the workers, who don’t have the right skills, not an economy that doesn’t create enough demand for labor. Of course, we get this skills shortage argument every time the unemployment rate soars. In the summer of 2010, when the Great Recession was still near its trough, the NYT ran a piece telling us about the skills shortage in manufacturing. Over the next nine and a half years the sector added almost 1.3 million jobs (11.3 percent), without any notable improvement in the skills of the U.S. workforce. The overall unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent, again without any major gains in skills in the U.S. workforce.
• Becky's First Swear — Phil Are Go!:
  
• On Facebook Banning Pages Associated with Anarchism — CrimethInc. and It’s Going Down: The defining of violence is not neutral. The way Facebook currently defines violence, it is legitimate for police to kill a thousand people per year while evicting, kidnapping, and imprisoning millions—it is legitimate to drop bombs on civilians, so long as the aggressor represents an official government—but it is “violence” to prevent a white supremacist from assaulting a crowd or return a smoking tear gas canister to the police who shot it. Suppressing the voices of those who seek to protect their communities from institutional and white supremacist violence is an intentional decision to normalize violence as long as the ones employing it hold institutional power. Lumping anarchists and anti-fascists together with far-right militias who explicitly support the current administration is a strategic move to muddy the issue.
• On Facebook, health-misinformation 'superspreaders' rack up billions of views: report — Elizabeth Culliford at Reuters: Misleading health content has racked up an estimated 3.8 billion views on Facebook Inc (FB.O) over the past year, peaking during the COVID-19 pandemic, advocacy group Avaaz said in a new report here on Wednesday. The report found that content from 10 “superspreader” sites sharing health misinformation had almost four times as many Facebook views in April 2020 as equivalent content from the sites of 10 leading health institutions, such as the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. […] “Facebook’s algorithm is a major threat to public health. Mark Zuckerberg promised to provide reliable information during the pandemic, but his algorithm is sabotaging those efforts by driving many of Facebook’s 2.7 billion users to health misinformation-spreading networks,” said Fadi Quran, campaign director at Avaaz.