Why are [Americans] so rich?

Because "ordinary" people are allowed to pursue their dreams to get rich. For some perspective when you read the news (WSJ):

An American earns, on average, $130 a day, which puts the U.S. in the highest rank of the league table. China sits at $20 a day (in real, purchasing-power adjusted income) and India at $10, even after their emergence in recent decades from a crippling socialism of $1 a day. After a few more generations of economic betterment, tested in trade, they will be rich, too.

Actually, the “we” of comparative enrichment includes most countries nowadays, with sad exceptions. Two centuries ago, the average world income per human (in present-day prices) was about $3 a day. It had been so since we lived in caves. Now it is $33 a day—which is Brazil’s current level and the level of the U.S. in 1940. Over the past 200 years, the average real income per person—including even such present-day tragedies as Chad and North Korea—has grown by a factor of 10. It is stunning. In countries that adopted trade and economic betterment wholeheartedly, like Japan, Sweden and the U.S., it is more like a factor of 30—even more stunning. And these figures don’t take into account the radical improvement since 1800 in commonly available goods and services.

[...]Once we had the ideas for railroads or air conditioning or the modern research university, getting the wherewithal to do them was comparatively simple, because they were so obviously profitable.

If capital accumulation or the rule of law had been sufficient, the Great Enrichment would have happened in Mesopotamia in 2000 B.C., or Rome in A.D. 100 or Baghdad in 800. Until 1500, and in many ways until 1700, China was the most technologically advanced country. Hundreds of years before the West, the Chinese invented locks on canals to float up and down hills, and the canals themselves were much longer than any in Europe. China’s free-trade area and its rule of law were vastly more extensive than in Europe’s quarrelsome fragments, divided by tariffs and tyrannies. Yet it was not in China but in northwestern Europe that the Industrial Revolution and then the more consequential Great Enrichment first happened.

Read the whole thing.

The crazy potential of the Hyperloop

While most people are excited about travelling in the Hyperloop, it would be logistics and freight that pave the way for people travel that would come later (TechnologyReview):

[T]he upfront installation costs will be outrageously expensive, even compared with rail, and especially compared with Internet infrastructure, despite Hyperloop Tech’s favored analogy. “Laying optic fiber is not really pricey,” says Genevieve Giuliano, a transportation professor at the University of Southern California. “Laying Hyperloop tube is going to be pricey.” But she and the other economists and transportation experts I spoke to perked up when I explained Hyperloop Tech’s interest in freight. “The concept is right,” says Giuliano. Freight rail in the U.S. is already quite profitable and efficient (Warren Buffett invests heavily in it). But a high-speed freight backbone—broadband for goods—linking major population centers could make economic sense, she says.

Would you trade $1 billion for having to live 100 years ago?

The choice isn't nearly as easy as you might think. Economist Don Boudreaux's answer (CafeHayek via HumanProgress):

Honestly, I wouldn’t be remotely tempted to quit the 2016 me so that I could be a one-billion-dollar-richer me in 1916. This fact means that, by 1916 standards, I am today more than a billionaire. It means, at least given my preferences, I am today materially richer than was John D. Rockefeller in 1916. And if, as I think is true, my preferences here are not unusual, then nearly every middle-class American today is richer than was America’s richest man a mere 100 years ago.

What passes as a successful government intervention...

Marc Levinson critiques "The Smartest Places on Earth" (Amazon) at the WSJ:

Albany is now a hub of nanoscale science. But getting it off the ground was expensive: Every job created cost taxpayers nearly $1 million. [...] The authors seem unworried by the possibility that some brainbelts may prove as ineffectual as Massachusetts’ centers of excellence. Rather blithely, with no evidence whatsoever, they assert that “there are far more examples of successful government participation in helping innovation than there are of misfires.” That confidence is not reassuring to anyone who wonders whether the $1.2 billion of public funds used to build a semiconductor plant was well spent.

Why the Canadian government will fail at building the "next Silicon Valley"

From Reason.com:

Canada is not alone in their push to create the next great hub of genius. Dubai, London, Rwanda, and Shenzhen are just a few cities investing in the idea. But according to Eric Weiner, author of The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places, From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley, these attempts will inevitably fail. "I wish I could sit here and tell you that there was a formula and if you applied that formula you could create the next Silicon Valley," he explained during an interview with Reason TV earlier this year. "There is no formula."

The real minimum wage is zero

As California moves to increase the minimum wage to $15, and New York follows, it's like they're entirely oblivious to the possibility of automation as a viable alternative (AmericanInterest):

Brown’s minimum wage scheme will, of course, artificially raise the cost of hiring the most at-risk workers. Though the robots are not ready to take over quite yet, an onerous wage floor only incentivizes further research into automation. This whole situation is a bizarre illustration of the layered contradictions contained in the blue coalition: anti-inequality crusaders want a radical minimum wage hike, which will likely have the effect of raising unemployment (and welfare eligibility) among economically deprived blue constituencies. Meanwhile, those most likely to benefit down the line from these kinds of moves are the socially liberal Silicon Valley executives and venture capitalists, who bankroll the Democratic Party despite some of their dearly held libertarian beliefs.

On the other hand, maybe that's the goal - "[like other policies supposedly aimed at helping the poor, this] will have the opposite of its intended effect, favoring privileged insiders at the expense of those it is intended to help."

Remember peak oil?

Apparently no one else does either. Welcome to everlasting oil (FP) with oil so cheap, pirates don't even want it anymore (qz).

Bee-mageddon averted? U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high

Bee colonies are no longer on the decline, and according to the Washington Post's Wonkblog, that's (un)surprisingly thanks to free markets:

Beekeepers have been doing this sort of thing since the advent of commercial beekeeping. When CCD came along, it roughly doubled the usual annual rate of bee die-offs. But this doesn't mean that bees are going extinct, just that beekeepers need to work a little harder to keep production up.

The price of some of that extra work will get passed on to the consumer. The average retail price of honey has roughly doubled since 2006, for instance. And Kim Kaplan, a researcher with the USDA, points out that pollination fees -- the amount beekeepers charge to cart their bees around to farms and pollinate fruit and nut trees -- has approximately doubled over the same period.

"It's not the honey bees that are in danger of going extinct," Kaplan wrote in an email, "it is the beekeepers providing pollination services because of the growing economic and management pressures. The alternative is that pollination contracts per colony have to continue to climb to make it economically sustainable for beekeepers to stay in business and provide pollination to the country’s fruit, vegetable, nut and berry crops." We have also been importing more honey from overseas lately.

But rising prices for fruit and nuts hardly constitute the "beepocalypse" that we've all been worried about. Tucker and Thurman, the economists, call this a victory for the free market: "Not only was there not a failure of bee-related markets," they conclude in their paper, "but they adapted quickly and effectively to the changes induced by the appearance of Colony Collapse Disorder."

Free markets have also resulted in more and better services to make innovation easier. One of the top funded indiegogo campaigns ever? "Flow Hive: Honey on Tap Directly From Your Beehive"

What Russia really fears...

Frackers (Manhattan Institute). Which explains some of their "philanthropy" in the US (Daily Caller).

Science myths that just won't die

Nature: "False beliefs and wishful thinking about the human experience are common. They are hurting people — and holding back science."

Because making some customers less profitable...

Will make banks want to serve those customers more? I'd say that the economic literacy/idiocy is remarkable but sadly I don't think it is (NYT):

Some who advocate the use of the ID cards question whether the refusal to accept them has less to do with security concerns and more to do with protecting the bottom line. Regulations reining in fees have reduced the profits banks can make from low-income customers, putting the city’s immigrants among the least attractive sources of potential customers.

“If New Yorkers who rely on IDNYC were perceived to be highly profitable customers, the big banks would no doubt change their tune,” said Deyanira Del Río, a co-director of New Economy Project, which works with community groups in New York.

Can machines replace human intuition?

A study around one algorithm not only suggests yes, but the machines are faster as well (phys.org via Instapundit):

MIT researchers aim to take the human element out of big-data analysis, with a new system that not only searches for patterns but designs the feature set, too. To test the first prototype of their system, they enrolled it in three data science competitions, in which it competed against human teams to find predictive patterns in unfamiliar data sets. Of the 906 teams participating in the three competitions, the researchers' "Data Science Machine" finished ahead of 615.

In two of the three competitions, the predictions made by the Data Science Machine were 94 percent and 96 percent as accurate as the winning submissions. In the third, the figure was a more modest 87 percent. But where the teams of humans typically labored over their prediction algorithms for months, the Data Science Machine took somewhere between two and 12 hours to produce each of its entries.

Uber vs San Antonio

Moral of the story? The more consumers come directly in contact with markets/individual choice (enabled by technology) and governments, they choose markets and, er, choice (NationalReview via Instapundit):

We are at a very interesting historical tipping point. The willingness of states and political agencies to boss people and businesses around and to seize resources for the use of the political class has not abated, but their ability to do so is being challenged. San Antonio is a left-leaning city; its attitude toward business is far from Singaporean. The city authorities would love to be able to dictate terms to Uber — but they can’t. Nationally, we’re starting to figure out that you can’t really regulate marijuana; you can try to, and pretend to, but you can’t really do it. Trying to ban guns in an age when anybody with a 3-D printer can produce a dozen of them in his bedroom is absurd.

The end game for Lyft (and Uber?)

Jitneys on a mass scale (TechnologyReview). Fascinating read that includes a discussion of the efficient private network of buses in Zimbabwe (and much of Africa), the inefficiency of public transportation, and the coming promise of self-driving cars.

Will China end up leading the way on next generation nuclear?

An exciting nuclear race to watch that won't end with a mushroom cloud (TechnologyReview via Instapundit):

At Oak Ridge this week, Xu outlined a roadmap that shows that China is further along than any other advanced reactor R&D program in the world. China, which still gets nearly three-quarters of its electricity from burning coal, is racing to develop low-carbon energy sources, including both conventional nuclear plants and advanced systems such as molten-salt reactors. The largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, China aims to more than double its nuclear capacity by 2020, according to the World Nuclear Association.

Xu detailed a multi-stage plan to build demonstration reactors in the next five years and deploy them commercially beginning around 2030. The institute plans to build a 10-megawatt prototype reactor, using solid fuel, by 2020, along with a two-megawatt liquid-fuel machine that will demonstrate the thorium-uranium fuel cycle. (Thorium, which is not fissile, is converted inside a reactor into a fissile isotope of uranium that produces energy and sustains the nuclear reaction.)

In all, there are 700 nuclear engineers working on the molten-salt reactor at SINAP, Xu said, a number that dwarfs other advanced-reactor research programs around the world. The team has a preliminary design for a 10-megawatt thorium-based molten-salt reactor, and has mastered some of the technical challenges involved in building and running such reactors, such as the preparation of high-purity molten salts and the control of tritium, a dangerous isotope of hydrogen that can be used in the making of nuclear weapons. Limiting the production of tritium is a key research goal for the development of molten-salt reactors.

Theranos's science is questioned

I'm hoping they're wrong but WSJ has published a piece questioning the science at Theranos. The downside of producing science with little transparency...

Why the acquisition by EMC by Dell may just be delaying the inevitable

It's not really all that new, but it's finally having a significant impact with the recent blockbuster $67b acquisition of EMC by Dell (WSJ) - a look at some of the winners and losers (Wired):

The Cloud. The term has taken on so many meanings in recent years. But keep in mind: most of these meanings come from IBM, HP, EMC, Dell, Cisco, and other companies that don’t want to be fucked by it. The best way to think about The Cloud is this: It’s the way that the giants of the Internet—aka Amazon, Google, and Facebook—build their businesses.

These companies built Internet businesses so large—businesses that ran atop hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of computers—they eventually realized they couldn’t build them with hardware and software from established vendors. They couldn’t use traditional storage gear from EMC. They couldn’t use servers from Dell and HP and IBM. They couldn’t use networking gear from Cisco. They couldn’t use databases from Oracle. It was too expensive. And it couldn’t scale. That’s another buzzword. It means “helping an online operation achieve world domination.”

What's exciting is that this distribution of computing power means that computing power will only continue getting cheaper and become more widely/easily available without the significant upfront costs that were previously required.

Transatomic: rethinking and rebranding atomic energy

Funded by Peter Thiel's Founder's Fund, a startup to watch (Wired):

Transatomic’s technology is complicated. Most nuclear energy technology is complicated, if you’re not a nuclear physicist, but Massie and Dewan’s approach might be especially so. Most of the industry uses light water reactors to generate energy in nuclear plants; but Transatomic uses molten salt reactors, which use nuclear waste dissolved into salt. The concept was first tested in the 1950s at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Recently, a small group—including a group called Energy from Thorium—began campaigning to reintroduce the technology.

Technology vs government: a reminder of how government has evolved

Technology serve consumers, governments serve themselves (TechCrunch):

Fixed, a mobile app that fights parking tickets and other traffic citations on users’ behalf, has had its parking ticket operations blocked in three of its top cities, San Francisco, Oakland and L.A. after the cities increased the measures they were taking to block Fixed from accessing their parking ticket websites.

[...] Founder David Hegarty once noted that over half of tickets have an issue that would make them invalid, but the city didn’t tend to play by its own rules when arbitrating disputes. That made Fixed’ “win” rate only 20%-30% on tickets, as of earlier this year. (When the company won, it charged a success fee of 25% of the original fine – a reduction in what a customer would have otherwise paid.)

However, even when customers didn’t beat their ticket, the app could help automate the payment without having to use a city’s often outdated website. A more recent addition, “Ticket Guardian,” handled tickets for you automatically and alerted customers to new ones by monitoring government websites.

Of course, the cities haven’t been welcoming to an app that was aimed at helping locals not pay their tickets by automating the process of jumping through legal loopholes. When Fixed began faxing its submissions to SFMTA last year, the agency emailed the startup to stop using their fax machine. When Fixed pointed out that it was legal to do so, the agency simply shut off their fax.

Brutal.

More from Reason: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help (stop progress)

The future of work and the impact technology will have

Interviewing artificial intelligence researchers on "whether or not technological advancements inherently create more job market opportunities than they destroy": the answers, somewhat predictably, are mixed (TechCrunch).

More: How AI could change the workplace (TechCrunch)