5/28/15 Today's Inquiries

Shh! I'm posting from work.


The Links:

Bernie Sanders throws bomb at Hillary Clinton:

"I'm not going to condemn Hillary and Bill Clinton because they've made a lot of money. [But] that type of wealth has the potential to isolate you from the reality of the world."

Rick Santorum comes tumbling out of the clown car.

More on the effects of Fox News on American politics. This time it's confirmation bias.

Based on when you were born, this handy chart will tell you how much of your life we've been at war. Didn't Foucalt say something about normalizing a state of war?

23 states saw unemployment rates decrease in April.

Are we seeing the start of a rebellion against longer and longer work hours?

a new paper, from two economists at Monash Business School, suggests that the tide may be turning. Using relatively recent data on workers in Australia's six states and two territories, it finds the opposite. As income inequality rose, it finds, Australians decided to work fewer hours. A 1% rise in the Gini coefficient, a measure of economic inequality, ends up resulting in a 0.2% decline in working hours.

Solar power is growing so fast that it is beginning to rival the shale gas boom.

Online courses at community colleges are not going well. It's almost as if they need structured personal interaction with an educator in order to succeed! Follow up here.

[H]ere’s an unusual case where scholarly research is producing a clear conclusion: online instruction at community colleges isn’t working. Yet policymakers are continuing to fund programs to expand online courses at these schools, which primarily serve low-income minority students, and community college administrators are planning to offer more and more of them.

Would graduating more people from college actually reduce inequality?

All of these phenomena suggest that the labor market isn’t working for most employees—problems that aren’t confined to those without a college education—and that suggests the problem isn’t that too few people have college degrees. Rather than focus on education attainment as the solution to inequality, it’s time for policy-makers to move on from the race between education and technology and focus on our stagnant labor market. As Summers said, “the core problem is that there aren’t enough jobs.” The key to reducing inequality is more jobs and a higher demand for labor. In the absence of more jobs, heroic assumptions about educational improvement are likely to deliver only modest economic benefits.

Is there finally real evidence about aid helping the global poor?

A vast randomized trial — the gold standard of evidence — involving 21,000 people in six countries suggests that a particular aid package called the graduation program (because it aims to graduate people from poverty) gives very poor families a significant boost that continues after the program ends. Indeed, it’s an investment. In India, the economic return was a remarkable 433 percent.

What should you study in college to stay ahead of computers?

Here's the impact of the "On Demand" economy.

The Geek Heretic. I need to read the book discussed here:

For twelve years I worked at Microsoft, where, like every other gizmo-happy technologist, I unconsciously embraced a peculiar paradox. It revealed itself in the most innocuous things that the company said. At corporate gatherings, executives would tell us, “You are our greatest asset!” But in their marketing, they would tell customers, “Our technology is your greatest asset!” In other words, what matters most to the company is capable people, but what should matter to the rest of the world is new technology. Somehow what was best for us and what was best for others were two different things.

I had a clutle column at WIRED and then I didn't. More from the front lines of women in tech and tech media. I thought this was especially incisive:

So as far as I can tell, they don’t cover the future. They produce a white male fantasy of the future.

The dehumanizing myth of meritocracy. Meritocracy dehumanizing? I'm surprised I never thought of it in that way before. Obviously we're reducing people down to a very specific set of traits, namely work and income, rather than valuing their humanity. This longform piece looks at the myth of meritocracy in open source coding.

Fertility rates are rising for educated women. I have seen it argued that having children is becoming something only wealthy white americans do.

John Nash passed away suddenly this past week. Here's a great, although long, discussion of his impact on Game Theory.

A chart of the death toll from Qatar's World Cup construction efforts.

How does Star Wars illuminate constitutional law?

I think this is merely evidence of New Jerseyians being more flammable than people from other states.  I mean, what else could it be?