There exists a humongous book edited by Hall and Rosenberg that shares title with this post, counting 1256 pages. I've recently read it, and here I'll provide a summary of it. I will include mostly things that I considered interesting, shocking or illustrative. There is no other way to cover a work that large in a blog post. There are also two more considerations I'm making to ease my work: Concentrating on empirical results (No discussion of modeling here), and avoiding reporting results that are mixed, un…

There's this article going around the net in many versions. In all of them there is a question about Googles and Europe. An example here , here, or here A big question for the past 20 years has been: where are the European Googles? Why are all the funky, creative, dynamic, innovative companies like Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook coming out of the US and not out of Europe? The answer you will often hear is: Europe has lots of culture, good food and fashion, but it is not ‘entrepreneurial enough’, not en…

I've spent a couple of posts criticising the book mentioned in the title. I think criticising is more important than agreeing. Agreeing just takes an 'Okay', criticising needs more work: you need to explain where the chain of reasoning breaks off. But still, it may be of some use to make explicit the points that Mazzucato makes in her book that I endorse. Firstly, we have an explanation and rejection of the linear model of innovation. This is the idea that advances in technology and science go from basic sc…

Sometimes I encounters with the word 'holistic' around, and most, if not all, of those times, the quality of the work the word is being used in is usually poor. Holistic explanations also abound: they talk about interconectedness, the importance of the relation between parts above and beyond them, and so on. In more serious work, holistic-like explanations can be found in reference to 'emergence' or 'spontaneous behaviour'. The problem with the attitude of refusing to analyse the parts of a particular syste…

As the linguist Noam Chomsky has pointed out, when we strive to build a machine that moves underwater, we don’t require it to “swim” – and a submarine is no less of an achievement for its inability to do the backstroke. Smithsonian Magazine The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim; (Edsger W. Dijkstra) These kind of remarks are used to say that the Turing test is enough, and that further debate about what the apparatus is really doing is baseless. W…

This post will cover chapters 8 and 9 of the Entrepreneurial State. The first point the chapters make is that there is a disconnection between risk and return, contrary to what one would expect in a market. The chapter also rails against companies making huge profits, inequality, that disconnecting rewards from risk generates inequality, Apple not generating enough jobs, Apple generating not good enough jobs, and Apple's executies earning too much relative to Asian workers who manufacture the iPhones, corpo…