I was very happy with how this turned out, here is the audio and transcript. Here is how the CWTeam summarized it: Michael Pollan has long been fascinated by nature and the ways we connect and clash with it, with decades of writing covering food, farming, cooking, and architectu … | Continue reading
From Tino: Sweden is viewed as an egalitarian utopia by outsiders, but reality is complex. In some ways Sweden has less social equality than the United States. While the American upper class is largely meritocratic, the upper class in Sweden are still mostly defined by birth. His … | Continue reading
A four-story building built in four days with apartments that include closets, a kitchenette, a sofa that converts to a queen-size bed, and a flat-screen TV? We are used to seeing that kind of thing in China but this development was in, of all places, Berkeley. Berkeleyside: This … | Continue reading
Where are most airplanes fixed? In foreign countries where the price of skilled labor is lower than in the United States. US Airways and Southwest fly planes to a maintenance facility in El Salvador. Delta sends planes to Mexico. United uses a shop in China. American still does m … | Continue reading
These are originally derived from written notes, a basis for comments by somebody else, from a closed session on tech. I have added my own edits: Most tech leaders aren’t especially personable. Instead, they’re quirky introverts. Or worse. Most tech leaders don’t care much about … | Continue reading
John Horton has written a novel paper that uses an experiment and a policy change in an online job market to understand the effects of the minimum wage. The job market in question is something like the Upwork platform where firms can post jobs and workers from anywhere in the wor … | Continue reading
From Julia Belluz at Vox: …Americans are loud A final point about why restaurants are so loud. This has nothing to do with restaurateurs or designers or acoustic engineers. It has to do with Americans — who I believe are a slightly louder people, on average. As a Canadian working … | Continue reading
When Facebook moves into its new offices in Mountain View this fall, a signature Silicon Valley perk will be missing — there won’t be a corporate cafeteria with free food for about 2,000 employees. In an unusual move, the city barred companies from fully subsidizing meals inside … | Continue reading
In normal times and places house prices are kept fairly close to construction costs by the ordinary processes of supply and demand. Average house prices didn’t rise much over the entire 20th century, for example. Even today, house prices are kept close to construction costs in mo … | Continue reading
Wealthier countries allocate a greater proportion of their workers to science and engineering, fields which produce ideas that often benefit everyone. This is one reason why we all gain when other countries become rich. It’s not just the number of scientists and engineers that ma … | Continue reading
When people evaluate two or more goods separately versus jointly it’s common to see “preference reversals”. In a random survey, for example, people were asked to value the following dictionaries: Dictionary A: 20,000 entries, torn cover but otherwise like new Dictionary B: 10,000 … | Continue reading
From Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica at NBER: The results overall refute the hypothesis of growing cultural divides. With few exceptions, the extent of cultural distance has been broadly constant over time. The data also show that: 1. From to 1995, the time use behavior of w … | Continue reading
The idea that concepts depend on their reference class isn’t new. A short basketball player is tall and a poor American is rich. One might have thought, however, that a blue dot is a blue dot. Blue can be defined by wavelength so unlike a relative concept like short or rich there … | Continue reading
When Americans buy a car from Mexico, half of what they buy was earlier imported from the United States (74% of foreign imports in the car are from US, foreign imports and labor account for 2/3 of value, .74*.66=48.44–corrected from earlier version). The firms exporting vehicles … | Continue reading
A committee of MEPs has voted to accept major changes to European copyright law, which experts say could change the nature of the internet. They voted to approve the controversial Article 13, which critics warn could put an end to memes, remixes and other user-generated content. … | Continue reading
Edited, produced, and partly written by Elad Gil, the book is also a series of interviews with Marc Andreessen, Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Reid Hoffman, Keith Rabois, Naval Ravikant, and others. Marc Andreessen says: If you don’t start layering in HR once you’ve passed 50 peop … | Continue reading
Here is another question I didn’t get to answer from last night: Your blog talks about making small marginal improvements, but if you could redesign one system entirely from scratch, which one would it be, and how would it look compared to what is currently in place? One answer w … | Continue reading
Here is basic NYT coverage of the case: University officials did concede that its 2013 internal review found that if Harvard considered only academic achievement, the Asian-American share of the class would rise to 43 percent from the actual 19 percent. Here is the plaintiff’s br … | Continue reading
The authors are Primavera De Filipp and Aaron Wright, and the subtitle is The Rule of Code and it is published by Harvard University Press. I am sent many books on crypto and blockchains, but this is the one I feel is useful to an educated readership. It’s not for specialists, … | Continue reading
Adam Ozimek asks me: Bleg for @tylercowen, don’t think I asked this before but maybe I did…. advice for economists and other social scientists planning on writing a book (I’m not planning, just curious for the future) Let me pull out those social scientists whose disciplines expe … | Continue reading
Siphoning carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere could be more than an expensive last-ditch strategy for averting climate catastrophe. A detailed economic analysis published on 7 June suggests that the geoengineering technology is inching closer to commercial viability. The stu … | Continue reading
At the NYTimes David Leonhardt breaks families down into six income classes from the poor to the very affluent, defined as follows: Using a tuition calculator he then estimates tuition (including room and board) by income class at 32 colleges and universities (see below–the darke … | Continue reading
There are many economics papers on bootstrap equilibria, for instance if agents in an economy expect it will do well, maybe that translates into actual results through the mechanisms of confidence, investment, and so on. Right now we have a huge and unprecedented laboratory for t … | Continue reading
Tyler asks which goods and services are most likely to be bought and sold on a blockchain that is paid for with token issuance and appreciation? The services with high mark-ups? Low mark-ups? Big consumer bases? Well informed and well coordinated consumer bases? “Influencer” cons … | Continue reading
I saw a few people asking this on Twitter lately, but my views don’t quite fit into a tweet. Ten to fifteen years ago, I remember the joys of just finding things, clicking links through to other links, and in general meandering through a thick, messy, exhilarating garden. Today … | Continue reading
In a very surprising paper Steven Piantadosi shows that a simple function of one parameter (θ) can fit any collection of ordered pairs {Xi,Yi} to arbitrary precision. In other words, the same simple function can fit any scatter plot exactly, just by choosing the right θ. The intu … | Continue reading
Last week Consumer Reports refused to recommend Tesla’s Model 3 because it discovered lengthy braking distances. This week Consumer Reports changed their review to recommend after Tesla improved braking distance by nearly 20 feet with an over the air software update! Last week, a … | Continue reading
You know this old debate: why are we still reading Plato? Haven’t they figured out free will yet? Will they ever? Don’t the philosophers obsess too much over very old texts? My opinion is that there is significant and ongoing progress in philosophy, we just don’t always name i … | Continue reading
Bryan Caplan is on fire in this excellent podcast with Robert Wiblin of 80,000 hours: Bryan Caplan: In the U.S. I’ve heard so many times – I learned Latin and it really improved my score on the SAT because of all the Latin roots of the English vocabulary words. How about you lear … | Continue reading
Before it descends into utter madness, Leslie Forde’s Slate article on Nanny pay opens with a good story: “I’m sorry … but I can’t,” she told me over the phone. My heart sank. I was confident she’d take the job. Quickly, I went into negotiation mode, “But wait, can we talk about … | Continue reading
The Economist: For years [Barzin Bahardoust] has been trying to pay Canadians for their blood plasma—the viscous straw-coloured liquid in blood that has remarkable therapeutic powers. When his firm, Canadian Plasma Resources (CPR), tried to open clinics in Ontario in 2014, a camp … | Continue reading
It’s long been known that the Chinese government hires people to support the government with fabricated posts on social media. In China these people are known as the “50c party”, so called because the posters were rumored to be paid 50 cents (5 jiao or about $.08) to write the po … | Continue reading
Tall commercial buildings dominate city skylines. Nevertheless, despite decades of research on commercial real estate and horizontal patterns of urban development, vertical patterns have been largely ignored. We document that high productivity companies locate higher up, with les … | Continue reading
That is the new and entertaining book by David Graeber, probably you already have heard of it. Here is a brief summary. Coming from academia, I am sympathetic to the view that not everyone is productive, or has a productive job. And my ongoing series “Those new service sector jo … | Continue reading
In this paper we merge individual income data, firm-level data, patenting data, and IQ data in Finland over the period 1988–2012 to analyze the returns to invention for inventors and their coworkers or stakeholders within the same firm. We find that: (i) inventors collect only 8 … | Continue reading
Noted UC Berkeley energy economist Severein Borenstein writes against the proposal to make solar required on all new residential construction: Dear Commissioner Weisenmiller: I just became aware in the last few days of the proposal in the new building energy efficiency standards … | Continue reading
Google: Today, we’re announcing a new policy to prohibit ads that promote bail bond services from our platforms. Studies show that for-profit bail bond providers make most of their revenue from communities of color and low income neighborhoods when they are at their most vulnerab … | Continue reading
Google: Today, we’re announcing a new policy to prohibit ads that promote bail bond services from our platforms. Studies show that for-profit bail bond providers make most of their revenue from communities of color and low income neighborhoods when they are at their most vulnerab … | Continue reading
High skilled workers gain from face to face interactions. If the skilled can move at higher speeds, then knowledge diffusion and idea spillovers are likely to reach greater distances. This paper uses the construction of China’s high speed rail (HSR) network as a natural experimen … | Continue reading
A slew of research shows that direct instruction produces superior results compared to other instructional methods. A new study in the Journal of Labor Economics by Eric Taylor provides more information on how and why. Using a randomized controlled trial, Taylor compares a weak f … | Continue reading