on Facebook $500bln value

Good video from Bloomberg. Very good insight of Gene Munster, in which he mentioned Google's market cap (closed to $200bln). To a certain extent, it's striking to think how Internet have been changing people's consumption and buying decisions, which are sourced for the growth of Google or FB.

Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy

Book I have to read.

Schumpeter's theory is that the success of capitalism will lead to a form of corporatism and a fostering of values hostile to capitalism, especially among intellectuals. The intellectual and social climate needed to allow entrepreneurship to thrive will not exist in advanced capitalism; it will be replaced by socialism in some form. There will not be a revolution, but merely a trend in parliaments to elect social democratic parties of one stripe or another. He argued that capitalism's collapse from within will come about as democratic majorities vote for the creation of a welfare state and place restrictions upon entrepreneurship that will burden and destroy the capitalist structure. Schumpeter emphasizes throughout this book that he is analyzing trends, not engaging in political advocacy. In his vision, the intellectual class will play an important role in capitalism's demise. The term "intellectuals" denotes a class of persons in a position to develop critiques of societal matters for which they are not directly responsible and able to stand up for the interests of strata to which they themselves do not belong. One of the great advantages of capitalism, he argues, is that as compared with pre-capitalist periods, when education was a privilege of the few, more and more people acquire (higher) education. The availability of fulfilling work is however limited and this, coupled with the experience of unemployment, produces discontent. The intellectual class is then able to organise protest and develop critical ideas.

In Schumpeter's view, socialism will ensure that the production of goods and services is directed towards meeting the authentic needs of people and will overcome some innate tendencies of capitalism such as conjecture fluctuation, unemployment and waning acceptance of the system.

(Wiki)

"It is part of the merging social science"

Nobel Prize 2009 for economics are for: Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson, one political scientist and one economist.
The challenge is to design institutions, mechanisms and incentives that move us in the right direction.


Economics is not really fundamentally about markets, but about resource allocation and distribution problems. Markets appear because they operate effectively to handle a subset of these resource allocation challenges.

And Andrew Lo, who proposes the adaptive market hypothesis says EMH is not incorrect, it's just a part of a puzzle.