Forms of Inquiry: 11/20/14 Today's Inquiries

BBQ Chicken

The Links:

Not that you actually want to watch it, but the big 3 networks aren't going to carry Obama's immigration speech tonight.

Uber behaving badly. (That's 3 links about the same problem.) Overview here.

Are we in for a stock market tumble if companies stop using profits for stock buybacks?

They’re poised to spend $914 billion on share buybacks and dividends this year, or about 95 percent of earnings, data compiled by Bloomberg and S&P Dow Jones Indices show.

Wall St. and China are buying farmland all over the world.

Our climate is totally fucked and there's nothing we can do about it.

So our best-case scenario, which was based on our most optimistic forecasts for renewable energy, would still result in severe climate change, with all its dire consequences: shifting climatic zones, freshwater shortages, eroding coasts, and ocean acidification, among others. Our reckoning showed that reversing the trend would require both radical technological advances in cheap zero-carbon energy, as well as a method of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering the carbon.

The skeptic's guide to institutions.

More guns = more crime.

Are progressives at war with suburbia? Possibly, but I also find it hard to argue against economic incentives tilting toward urban living: high fuel costs, mass transit, stable property markets, more jobs. Arnold Kling adds:

1. The distribution of income both within metro areas and across metro areas is much wider than it was in the 1970s. In the 1970s, Manhattan was not so much richer than State Island. New York was not so much richer than Detroit.

2. Some cities are now “colonial economies” in the sense that they are dominated by businesses owned elsewhere, with few local-owned businesses. He cited St. Louis as an example. When I grew up there, we had McDonnell-Douglas and Monsanto. Now even Anheuser-Busch is not locally owned.

3. So many venture capitalists are in San Francisco that it’s not clear that San Jose is still the capital of Silicon Valley.

4. Whatever happened to the death of distance? It seems that people will pay up to live in cities.

Long term unemployment and new hire wages.

Overall, there is little evidence in the cross-state data that the long-term unemployed exert less pressure on wages. This finding, as well as the differences between the labor market outcomes of long-term unemployed workers and nonparticipants, suggests that the long-term unemployed should not be dismissed when considering labor market slack. The results also mean that the unusually large gap between short-term and long-term unemployment rates that has existed since the Great Recession doesn’t reduce the ability of the overall unemployment rate to track the state of the economy’s labor market

Where have all the workers gone?

In summary, the number of middle-skill jobs declined substantially during the last recession, and that decline has been persistent—especially for full-time workers. Many of the workers leaving full-time, middle-skill jobs became unemployed, and some of that decline is the result of an increase in part-time employment. But others gained full-time work in other types of occupations. In particular, they are more likely than in the past to transition to higher-skill occupations. Further, the transition rate to high-skill occupations has gradually risen and doesn't appear directly tied to the last recession.

Child homelessness is on the rise. They should get jobs.

Time for fuel cells? Count me in. Eventually.

Meanwhile Britain is powering its buses with shit. Literally.