10/20/14 Today's Inquiries

Iranian yogurt.


The links:

What kind of signal is the recent market turbulence sending? Well, assuming we don't get QE4, I'd say that many people and firms are reallocating positions to take advantage of a less artificially liquid market. The money on the sidelines is coming off the bench.

Do economies "reflate" if every country increases its exports?

The WSJ wants to know why the public is so skeptical of our public health institutions when they've been so supportive in the past. Let's see: Texas Presby hasn't exactly been doing a stellar job. The media loves a good failure/apocalypse story. Half of our political class has been actively undermining government for 40 years. What else am I missing?

Our recent Nobel Peace Prize winner doesn't fit neatly into the western media narrative. Let's take a look at what she really stands for.

Malala understands how poverty creates and perpetuates the very social and political ills against which she is fighting. She continuously stresses the importance of not just spreading education, but of directly combating poverty. Yet these calls fall on the selectively deaf ears of the Western media.

ISIS dates back to the Bush Administration. Yup, and is a direct result of American policy. At every stage of this conflict we've created our own enemies. We're a perpetual motion machine set to war.

What do the New Atheists get wrong about Islam and religion in general? This is a very important point:

People don’t derive their values from their religion — they bring their values to their religion. Which is why religions like Judaism, Hinduism, Christianity, [and] Islam, are experienced in such profound, wide diversity. Two individuals can look at the exact same text and come away with radically different interpretations. Those interpretations have nothing to do with the text, which is, after all, just words on a page, and everything to do with the cultural, nationalistic, ethnic, political prejudices and preconceived notions that the individual brings to the text. That is the most basic, logical idea that you could possibly imagine, and yet for some reason, it seems to get lost in the incredibly simplistic rhetoric around religion and the lived experience of religion.

An attempt to show that the "few bad apples" theory of gamergate is completely false.

The NY Times calls for a maximum rate cap on all consumer loans. I am agains this option. It's not that I don't understand predatory lending. Because I do. It's not that I think the burden should always fall on the borrower to understand the terms of a loan. Because I don't. Rather, I think we ought to be outlawing specific kinds of practices and predatory lending. Large scale rate limits would impact the ability of other kinds of loans (subprime home and auto loans, for example) to find an adequate clearing price. The interest rate is a key factor in understanding the risk of a loan and therefore the price of the debt. Better regulation and precise legal limits will minimize the distortions of policy more than the broad approach outlined here.

Poor kids who do everything right are still worse off than rich kids who do everything wrong. So just join a street gang and enjoy your short brutal life.

The racist housing policies that created Ferguson. TNC doing what, sadly, only TNC does.

But it bears constant repeating: The geography of America would be unrecognizable today without the racist social engineering of the mid-20th century. The policy included—but was not limited to—mortgage loans backed by the Federal Housing Authority and the Veteran's Administration

Single family housing is going out of style. Apparently we have millennial to thank for this. I think it's simple economic decision making. A world where everyone lives in homes on .5 acres and commutes into a city for work is terribly expensive in a variety of ways. The incentives are toward density.