4/6/15 Today's Inquiries

Lovely weather today. Also, I want muffins. I'll have to get right on that.


The Links:

In order to destroy your ability to spend free time productively, please read Elite: Dangerous is the best damn spaceship game I've ever played. Now available on Steam!

it doesn’t matter that the game still isn’t fully baked, because I am flying my own spaceship.

Your March employment report from the BLS. Not too good: 126,000 jobs, 5.5% unemployment.

A great report from The Economist about the ways we use, and tax, land. I liked this part:

The Santa Clara town of Mountain View, for instance, is home to some of the world’s leading technology firms. Yet nearly half of the city’s homes are single-family buildings; the population density is just over 2,300 per square kilometre, three times lower than in none-too-densely populated San Francisco... 

Or they could heed the advice of Henry George, an American follower of Ricardo who in the 1880s made the case for a land-value tax. It has many theoretical virtues. Most taxes dampen, distort or displace economic activity by changing incentives on the margins. But a land tax cannot reduce the supply of land, and it would stimulate economic activity by penalising those whose land is unproductive. And your tax base is always right there—a city lot cannot be whisked off to Luxembourg.

Should Germany keep running a trade surplus?

In a slow-growing world that is short aggregate demand, Germany’s trade surplus is a problem. Several other members of the euro zone are in deep recession, with high unemployment and with no “fiscal space” (meaning that their fiscal situations don’t allow them to raise spending or cut taxes as a way of stimulating domestic demand). Despite signs of recovery in the United States, growth is also generally slow outside the euro zone. The fact that Germany is selling so much more than it is buying redirects demand from its neighbors (as well as from other countries around the world), reducing output and employment outside Germany at a time at which monetary policy in many countries is reaching its limits.

There are several Tyler Cowen related bits to post today. I recommend reading them all.
First: Cowen argues that social mobility is more important than income inequality.
Second: Beat the Press thinks he's playing a bit of 3-card monty.
Third: Tyler interviews Peter Thiel. Video:


Anti-cheating software run amok. I really liked the part about using Big Data to determine which kids are likely to pass a course. So, obviously, the poor black kid who works hard is going to be under more scrutiny because his data says she should most likely fail. Racism and discrimination is a feature, not a bug.

And at Utah Valley University in Orem, the school developed its own early warning system, called Stoplight, which uses academic and demographic details about students to predict their likelihood of passing specific courses; as part of the program, professors receive class lists that color-code each student as green, yellow or red.

A rising insurrection against Obama. I think this is actually more important for a Hillary presidency than the last years of Obama's.

It’s a scary thought, but here it is: If some red states were to openly defy the authority of President Obama in the exercise of his constitutional duties, would today’s Republican Congress side with him? Or would they honor the insurrection?

And this: