The Links:
In a move reminiscent of political think-tank land, the economics profession is seeing the emergence of new statistical and measurement bodies which are linked to specific economic theories. In other words, the political people need to invent their own numbers to support their theories. I feel like economics, like many other disciplines, ought to stick to the data and not the narrative.
Here's a pair of stories from the New York Times. The first is a technology piece about the "sharing economy." There's some basic math about how much money people are really making and it's far from the panacea promised by Silicon Valley. It also reminds me a bit of the payday loans that end up getting people into more debt once they're done. Let's say that I want to be a driver straight out of high school. Step 1: buy a car and car insurance. Step 2: buy a smartphone with data plan so I can Uber. Step 3: be able to earn enough money driving people to pay for steps 1 &2 while also renting an apartment and feeding and clothing myself. Suddenly, that one $28 trip to the airport (minus gas) isn't looking so profitable. As I wrote the other day, the sharing economy has more resemblance to sharecropping than sharing.
“These are not jobs, jobs that have any future, jobs that have the possibility of upgrading; this is contingent, arbitrary work,” says Stanley Aronowitz,director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “It might as well be called wage slavery in which all the cards are held, mediated by technology, by the employer, whether it is the intermediary company or the customer.”Second, is a related article from the Times Sunday Review: Working Anything but 9 to 5. It's a profile of scheduling technology used by many companies, including Starbucks. The major premise is that this technology cares only for the company's bottom line and makes life hard for workers.
Along with virtually every major retail and restaurant chain, Starbucks relies on software that choreographs workers in precise, intricate ballets, using sales patterns and other data to determine which of its 130,000 baristas are needed in its thousands of locations and exactly when. Big-box retailers or mall clothing chains are now capable of bringing in more hands in anticipation of a delivery truck pulling in or the weather changing, and sending workers home when real-time analyses show sales are slowing.But, you know, they can totally just work more hours to make ends meet, those lazy takers.
Pivoting off a recent New York Times Magazine article about debt collection, Credit Slips examines the idea of a national debt registry. Ah, I can see it now: Citizen, you've been spotted running a red light. $273.82 has been added to your life-debt.
Another NY Times link: Medicare is going to begin paying doctors who coordinate chronically ill patients' medical care. You might be thinking, hey, doesn't this already happen? No, not really.
So, story time, part of my job in the ER is making sure I document patient history. That means getting all of their medications and various surgical procedures and all the names of all their doctors from the triage nurse or off the computer. That's easy when the patient is someone like me with little going on health-wise but, when the patient walks in with a grocery bag full of pill bottles, documentation gets a little more tricky. These are people on literally dozens of medications from five or more doctors, often getting prescriptions filled form multiple pharmacies because there are frequent medication shortages. (Fun side story, the whole town ran out of ibuprofen once. You know, Advil, Motrin, or those higher dose prescription versions? All gone. For like 3 days!) As the ER doc starts doing tests and what not, she has to make decisions too. That's a half dozen physicians treating different aspects of a patient's illnesses with different medications and different treatment goals. Yes, coordination is necessary.
More on Rick Perry's indictment from VICE.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: The Coming Race War Won't be About Race. Well, if it's a class war, the rich win. So I'd make it about race.
Ferguson Unrest Shows the Growth of Suburban Poverty. Yup. It's a changed world.
For example, Fayette County, Ga., where my parent live and I attended high school, is seeing two major demographic changes: Millenials and Boomers are leaving in droves. The article notes that, in general, the young are moving to high-income, high-employment cities and the old are moving to Florida.
Some teens from Parkview High School in Georgia have created an app to rate your interactions with Police. It also helps you find nearby police stations and contact emergency services.
Of course the police will probably arrest and beat you if you're filming them because they don't like accountability.
Alex Tabarrok notes a recent study about race and jury composition.
What the authors discover is that all white juries are 16% more likely to convict black defendants than white defendants but the presence of just a single black person in the jury pool equalizes conviction rates by race. The effect is large and remarkably it occurs even when the black person is not picked for the jury. The latter may not seem possible but the authors develop an elegant model of voir dire that shows how using up a veto on a black member of the pool shifts the characteristics of remaining pool members from which the lawyers must pick; that is, a diverse jury pool can make for a more “ideologically” balanced jury even when the jury is not racially balanced.Over at Naked Capitalism, Lambert Strether thinks that robotics is looking far too utopian these days. It's not going in the labor-saving-lets-you-relax direction but the labor-replacing-means-you-starve direction. Also, some clever rewriting of Asimov's three laws to reflect a more capitalist view of robotics.
This is what happens when all the Russian oligarchs suddenly stop buying property in London.
The New Yorker looks at the economics of ebola. They state the obvious in the second paragraph but do read the whole thing.
When pharmaceutical companies are deciding where to direct their R. & D. money, they naturally assess the potential market for a drug candidate. That means that they have an incentive to target diseases that affect wealthier people (above all, people in the developed world), who can afford to pay a lot. They have an incentive to make drugs that many people will take. And they have an incentive to make drugs that people will take regularly for a long time—drugs like statins.Richard Beck, writing at Experimental Theology, has a Christian take on psychology which is critical of the typical separation of soul, mind, and body that's existed for over two millennia. I find his discussion of mental illness especially useful given recent events and the propensity of many Christians to chalk everything up to personal responsibility or a lack of willpower or some such.
Venn Diagram fail:
And, a marxist critique of The Fellowship Of the Ring imagined as DVD commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. It's good throughout and will definitely be fun when you're looking to troll some LOTR fans. A taste:
Chomsky: We should examine carefully what’s being established here in the prologue. For one, the point is clearly made that the “master ring,” the so-called “one ring to rule them all,” is actually a rather elaborate justification for preemptive war on Mordor.
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