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"

"Why you can't afford a home"

I suspect that this applies as much for Canada as it does for the US (New Geography):

The connection between growing inequality and rising property prices is fairly direct. Thomas Piketty, the French economist, recently described the extent to which inequality in 20 nations has ramped up in recent decades, erasing the hard-earned progress of previous years in the earlier part of the 20th century. After examining Piketty’s groundbreaking research, Matthew Rognlie of MIT concluded (PDF) that much of the observed inequality is from redistribution of housing wealth away from the middle class.

Rognlie concluded that much of this was due to land regulation, and suggested the need to expand the housing supply and reexamine the land-use regulation that he associates with the loss of middle-class wealth. Yet in much of the country, housing has become so expensive as to cap upward mobility, forcing many people to give up on buying a house and driving many—particularly young families—to leave high-priced coastal regions for less expensive, usually less regulated markets in the country’s interior.

Unfortunately, I think statists have been far better at communicating their message and arguing for policies that are just making things worse as millenials apparently have a higher opinion of socialism than capitalism (Washington Post). I think this image is worth distributing:

What Russia really fears...

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

When "investments" really aren't

China's ghost cities (Wired): a reminder that markets are far more efficient at capital allocation than governments.

Why most Germans rent

Surprise, surprise, incentives matter. Fascinating look at housing policy - particularly in Germany and how it has shaped whether people buy or rent. Also a look at well meaning interventions elsewhere that have ultimately failed most the people they were designed to "help" (qz):

There’s another pretty simple reason Germans are less likely to own houses. The government doesn’t encourage it. Unlike high-homeownership countries like Spain, Ireland and the US, Germany doesn’t let homeowners deduct mortgage-interest payments from their taxes. (There’s more on the structure of European tax systems here.) Without that deduction, the benefits of owning and renting are more evenly balanced. “Both homeowners and landlords in Germany are barely subsidized,” wrote Voightländer in a paper on low homeownership rates in Germany. Those regulations, a solid supply of rental housing, and the fact that German property prices historically rise very slowly —that’s a whole other story—mean German rents don’t rise very fast. And because one of the main reasons to buy a home is to hedge against rising rents, the tendency of German rents to rise slowly results in fewer homebuyers and a lower homeownership rate.

The things people get offended by...

High up on the list seems to be that outcomes are influenced by personal choices (CBC - yes, the our state sponsored broadcaster):

Not wanting to face a lifetime of debt, Cooper sacrificed three years of his life to pay down a $255,000 mortgage on a $425,000 Toronto home he bought in 2012.

He worked up to 100 hours a week at three jobs: pension analyst; financial writer; and supermarket clerk. Naturally, the bachelor's social life suffered. Cooper also lived like a pauper, maintaining a strict budget and residing in the basement so he could collect rent on the rest of his house.

His story generated more than 2,000 comments on CBC News sites.​

[...] Media across the globe have now jumped on the story and also taken sides. "Well done, big fella, congratulations, an inspirational guy," gushed host David Koch on the Australian breakfast television program, Sunrise.

But America's Slate magazine had a different take, stating Cooper's story implied our money troubles were entirely our own fault. The Slate article suggested cash-strapped people wanted real economic change rather than just "inspirational stories of sacrifice and pluck."

General rule of thumb: when you're offended by what someone else has done that isn't hurting anyone else, that probably says more about you than anyone else...

The real barrier to affordable housing?

According to Reason, regulations and bureaucrats:

In an alternate reality, the city government wouldn't be calling shots on what is legal and illegal in terms of apartments, rents, sub-contracting, you name it. That would fall on the shoulders of owners and renters rather than what is at best a capricious set of rules enforced by bureaucrats whose actions are subject to wide variation.

According to Lisa Sturtevant of the National Housing Conference, regulatory approvals (zoning, inspections, and more) add up to $50,000 to the cost of new single-family dwellings in urban areas. That's a lot of scratch that ends limiting housing supply and squeezing residents in all sorts of ways.

Michael Burry: After the financial crisis

Yep. Remarkably candid/good reporting from NYMag:

The major reform legislation, Dodd-Frank, was named after two guys bought and sold by special interests, and one of them should be shouldering a good amount of blame for the crisis. Banks were forced, by the government, to save some of the worst lenders in the housing bubble, then the government turned around and pilloried the banks for the crimes of the companies they were forced to acquire. [...] Whether it’s the one percent or hedge funds or Wall Street, I do not think society is well served by failing to encourage every last American to look within. This crisis truly took a village, and most of the villagers themselves are not without some personal responsibility for the circumstances in which they found themselves. We should be teaching our kids to be better citizens through personal responsibility, not by the example of blame.

But also, in response to the question "What, if anything, makes you hopeful about the future?":

Innovation, especially in America, is continuing at a breakneck pace, even in areas facing substantial political or regulatory headwinds. The advances in health care in particular are breathtaking — so many selfless souls are working to advance science, and this is heartening. Long-term, this is good for humans in general. Americans have so much natural entrepreneurial drive. The caveat is that it is technology that should be a tool making lives better in the real world, and in line with the American spirit of getting better and better at something, whether it’s curing cancer or creating a better taxi service. I am less impressed with the market values assigned to technology that enhances distraction. We don’t want Orwell’s world, but we don’t want Huxley’s world either.

2015: Best year to be alive, but also a year of absurdity

A juxtaposition - a pessimistic look of 2015 and the pain we, in the West, inflict on ourselves by George Will (Washington Post):

We learned that a dismal threshold has been passed. The value of property that police departments seized through civil asset forfeiture — usually without accusing, let alone convicting, the property owners of a crime — exceeded the value of property stolen by nongovernment burglars. [...]

The Internal Revenue Service persecutes conservative advocacy groups but does not prosecute IRS employees who are tax cheats: An audit revealed that over the past decade, the IRS fired only 400 of the 1,580 employees who deliberately violated tax laws, rather than the 100 percent required by law. [...]

A suburban Washington high school promoted self-esteem by naming 117 valedictorians out of a class of 457. Two Edina, Minn., elementary schools hired “recess consultants” to minimize “conflict” — children saying “Hey, you’re out!” rather than “Nice try!” The principal of a San Francisco middle school withheld the results of student elections that did not produce properly “diverse” results.

But a year of hope as well - from John Stossel looking at the world as a whole. While the US, along with much of the west, may be making incremental moves away from economic and personal liberty that has brought them prosperity, much of the rest of the world has been moving in the opposite direction with quantifiable, positive and predictable results (Fox):

Twenty-five years ago, 2 billion people lived in extreme poverty -- that meant surviving on about a dollar a day, often with little access to basic needs like water and food. “Experts” predicted that number would rise as the population grew. Happily, thanks to the power of free markets, they were wrong. In the space of a generation, half the people most in need in the world were rescued.

Ten percent of the world’s people still live in dire poverty, but the trend is clear: Where there is rule of law and individual freedom, humanity is better off. As Marian Tupy of HumanProgress.org puts it, “Away from the front pages of our newspapers and television, billions of people go about their lives unmolested, enjoying incremental improvements that make each year better than the last.”

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."

Saudi Arabia's finances hit by low oil prices

It couldn't happen to nicer people... (Reuters) other than Russia of course:

The government ran a deficit of 367 billion riyals ($97.9 billion) or 15 percent of gross domestic product in 2015, officials said. The 2016 budget plan aims to cut that to 326 billion riyals, reducing pressure on Riyadh to pay its bills by liquidating assets held abroad and issuing bonds.

Next year's budget projects spending of 840 billion riyals, down from 975 billion riyals actually spent this year. The ministry said it would review government projects to make them more efficient and ensure they were necessary and affordable.

Revenues next year are forecast at 514 billion riyals, down from 608 billion riyals in 2015, when oil revenues accounted for 73 percent of the total. The Brent oil price averaged about $54 a barrel this year but is now around $37.

China slows...

An overview from the WSJ:

China's Communist Party promised to transform people's lives after decades of chaos. Higher living standards underpin the party’s rule, making limits on personal freedoms worthwhile for many. As the economy slows, that social compact is fraying.

There's a certain amount of nervousness, fear but also optimism and hope as to what comes next.

Plus other challenges: Xinjiang seethes under Chinese crackdown (NYT via Instapundit)

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.

Branding is crucial...

But so is authenticity: How the Mast Brothers fooled the world into paying $10 a bar for crappy hipster chocolate (Quartz). We've been exploring ecommerce and the development of nascent brands lately so I've been thinking a lot about things like this... though it also speaks to the limitations of marketing (as I'm sure the Mast Brothers are about to learn).

Thomas Sowell: 'Poverty is the norm, wealth is the exception'

Well, yeah. Interview promoting his most recent book - Wealth, Poverty and Politics (Amazon via theArtsMechanical):

Corruption as symptom, not cause, of poverty

Interesting hypothesis being advanced by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson (WSJ):

Corruption doesn’t come from nowhere. It is a result of economic and political institutions that empower unrepresentative elites while shutting out the rest of the country. That empowerment lets politicians, bureaucrats and soldiers grab resources and get wealthy from bribes. What allows them to get away with it is the absence of democratic accountability and effective checks and balances, like the rule of law and press freedom. Without fundamental change in these institutions, anticorruption crusades aren’t likely to improve the economic lives of ordinary people. The greedy elites that dominate most poor countries will just find other ways to enrich themselves at public expense.

If corruption were the real problem, its absence would mean widespread prosperity, but we know that’s not the case. Take pre-1994 South Africa, where white-supremacist rule included a competent, professional bureaucracy and a somewhat independent judiciary. Uncorrupt though it might have been, this apartheid state ruthlessly oppressed its impoverished and disenfranchised black majority.

Or consider Cuba, which Transparency International today considers to be less corrupt than Greece. Cuba is poorer now than at the time of Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1958. The reason isn’t graft or the enrichment of the country’s elites. The problem is communist dictatorship: The economic institutions established by the Castro brothers discourage investment, innovation and entrepreneurship.

It would have been nice had the authors explored further what this means. What institutions can/should get developed and how does one develop them when their transparency and creation run counter to the entrenched interests of local elites?

Self inflicted wounds: Another company leaves Connecticut

What's galling is that these regulations that hurt businesses are supposed to help workers. Without jobs how are these workers really helped? A farewell letter (TheArtsMechanical):

With the Litchfield hills and Connecticut in our rear-view mirror as we move our 101-year-old manufacturing company to South Carolina, we are nostalgic, excited, and disappointed.

We love Torrington and Connecticut but not all the things the General Assembly and the governor have done to induce us to leave family and friends behind. After more than a century of manufacturing in Connecticut, we are not looking for handouts.

We have paid our fair share, but enough is enough.

Connecticut’s high cost of doing business and its anti-employer attitude have finally driven us out. We are not moving for any government incentives.

Consider these facts:
• We sold our 50,000-square-foot building for enough money to buy a 100,000-square-foot building — and still had enough money left to pay for the transport of 100 trailer loads of machinery and equipment to our new site.
• The property taxes on our big new facility in South Carolina are much less than those on our smaller former building in Connecticut.
• Our utility costs in South Carolina, especially for electricity, will be about a third of what we paid here, though our space will more than double.
• We are taking a third of our employees with us and paying them the same wages. With South Carolina’s lower cost of living, it is as if they are getting a big raise. And we pay our new employees in South Carolina competitive local wages. These savings could no longer be ignored.

At the same time, the constant hostility of the General Assembly, the governor, and state agencies, particularly the state Labor Department, settled the matter against staying in Connecticut.

Year after year employers like us have to fight off efforts to: — Expand state requirements for paid sick leave.
— Increase the highest minimum wage in the nation to $15 per hour and more.
— Require paid family and medical leave.
— Impose unworkable restrictions on workforce scheduling.
— Restrict our ability to talk to our employees about union organizing efforts.
— And, of course, make us pay for every new “investment” policymakers think is a good idea.

We have always believed that to attract the best employees, we need to be among the best employers. We have never paid minimum wage and we have always offered our employees excellent benefits, including health insurance plans, paid vacation time, disability insurance, a 401(k) plan with employer matching contributions, profit sharing, and other time off based on individual needs.

Some people in authority in Connecticut refuse to understand that a mandated $15 minimum wage would mean that companies like ours would have to raise pay across the board. It would mean that rather than investing in our company and being able to create more jobs, we would have to raise pay for all employees, including those who are already being paid a good wage. These cost increases would cause us to raise the price of our product and become less competitive with companies outside Connecticut.

To make it worse, staying in Connecticut would require us to speculate on how much more our taxes and costs will go up as state government fails to pass a balanced budget.

Under the current administration state government has imposed nearly $4 billion in tax increases and still runs a deficit.

We can’t afford to wait for the governor and the legislature to see they have a spending problem and to address it. We can’t wait for state government to make any more “investments” by giving our money to a few favored companies.

Perhaps the final straw for us was our mind-boggling treatment by the Labor Department, which actually awarded unemployment compensation to an employee who was fired for threatening a supervisor with physical harm. No one is surprised that the only state agency we heard from when the word got out that we were thinking of leaving was the Labor Department, which insisted that we allow it into our company to conduct a seminar for our employees to tell them how to get all the benefits they were entitled to.

Confusion over the Obama Administration's decision on Keystone XL encapsulated

"In 2015 US denies oil market access to its ally Canada but grants access to Iran." (nextbigfuture via Instapundit). I'm guessing Canada will end up selling its oil to China because that's going to be far better for the environment?

Harvard economist Raj Chetty: how to improve income mobility

Any starting point that doesn't start with the fixed pie fallacy and focusing on bringing down the rich instead of bringing up the poor, I think, is a good one though I wonder if each party is just looking to for what it wants to hear (WSJ):

In a presidential campaign where candidates from both parties are blaming globalization for a shrinking middle class, a 36-year-old India-born economist has a different explanation: Bad neighborhoods and bad teachers rob poor children of the chance to climb into the middle class.

His solution? Help the children and their families move to better neighborhoods.

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 problem with the Sanders phenomenon

First, the Foundation of Economic Education notes, is his (mistaken?) belief that the 'rich are getting richer' on the backs of the poor. The reality is somewhat different:

Senator Sanders is half right: the rich are getting richer. However, his assertion that the poor are becoming poorer is incorrect. The poor are becoming richer as well.

Economist Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institute showed that between 1979 and 2010, the real (inflation-adjusted) after-tax income of the top 1% of U.S. income-earners grew by an impressive 202%.

He also showed that the real after-tax income of the bottom fifth of income-earners grew by 49%. All groups made real income gains. While the rich are making gains at a faster pace, both the rich and the poor are in fact becoming richer.

The irony is that while the Democratic slate for President is made up of privileged white people, their advocacy isn't so much for policies that address poverty but bringing down the rich (or more precisely, high income earners - conveniently excluding the wealthy who already have capital and continue to generate wealth through their capital/inheritances, NYPost via Instapundit):

Progressives, in other words, are shooting at the wrong target. The moral problem posed by the distribution of wealth isn’t inequality.

It’s poverty.

The same issue? Frankfurt shows they’re not. Suppose, he says, there is a resource that will keep a person alive, but only if that person has five units of it. There are 10 people, and 40 units of the resource. If it’s distributed equally, everybody gets four units — and dies. To insist on equality in that case, he argues, “would be morally grotesque.”

Fortunately, says Frankfurt, we don’t really try to promote equality. Even those who worry about inequality adjust their consumption to their own assessments of their needs. They don’t reduce their consumption because it’s unfair for them to have money.

More (WashingtonPost via Instapundit): What Bernie Sanders doesn't understand about income inequality.

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...

The retreat in global poverty is because of, not in spite of capitalism

Do those who despise markets, really, in effect, just want people to be poorer? (Cato)

As Deaton notes that “the rapid growth of average incomes, particularly in China and India, and particularly after 1975, did much to reduce extreme poverty in the world. In China most of all, but also in India, the escape of hundreds of millions from traditional and long-established poverty qualifies as the greatest escape of all.”

The importance of growth cannot be overstated. There is not a single example of a country emerging from widespread poverty without sustained economic growth.

As University of Oxford Professor Paul Collier writes in his book “The Bottom Billion,” “Growth is not a cure-all, but lack of growth is a kill-all.”

Even people who were traditionally skeptical of the free markets increasingly recognize that private enterprise is the key to prosperity.

Bring out the world's smallest violin for the "inequality ... in breakfast sandwiches"

On the bright side, maybe it's more an indication of how far we've come? Too idiotic to satire (WashingtonPost)

The role that convenience has played in the rise of breakfast sandwiches rubs up against their gourmet counterparts. Many of the fancier versions, including those sold at BEC, are better eaten with both hands, a seat and a handful of napkins. They're sit-down breakfast sandwiches and run contrary to the very nature of the food. They have created a sort of bizarre form of food inequality.

This same duality, of course, is true of many foods — of hamburgers, for instance. But other sandwiches aren't as much a staple of people's weeks as those eaten at breakfast.

Nobel prize winner Angus Deaton on unwinding inequality

Inequality isn't as important as how it happens (HBR):

Whether international or domestic, inequality becomes intolerable when individuals who have gotten ahead for whatever reason use their power to pull further ahead—and even to render others worse off in absolute terms. When successful people—businessmen, lawyers, traders, doctors—use their success to change the rules in their favor, by lobbying or funding politicians, that success is no longer something to be celebrated. When they push for what they see as important without perceiving that others have different priorities—the rich have little need of public health care or public education, for example—they undermine the provision of public goods on which the rest of us depend. When they make it hard for those without wealth (or not beholden to wealth) to fully participate in society, they undermine the democratic process. Justice Louis Brandeis once said, “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

This is why, even as we recognize that some inequality is “good,” we find it so troubling. It is one thing for some people to escape deprivation and leave others behind. It is quite another when the escapees use their newfound freedom to block the paths of those trying to find their own way out.

More from an interesting study on race and inequality in the US (WSJ):

This data raises tons of uncomfortable questions with no easy answers. One question that Mr. Thompson and Mr. Suarez wanted to answer was why the racial wealth gaps in the U.S. are so large. This might sound straightforward–maybe the wealthy simply earned and inherited more money. But that’s not what the data shows. Even after accounting for different incomes, inheritances, education and other factors, these gaps between families of different races remain, especially among the wealthy. It turns out that documenting the gaps is only the first step.

Denton's observations of the Indian and Chinese economies (WSJ): "China and India are the success stories; rapid growth in large countries is an engine that can make a colossal dent in world poverty."

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.

The ongoing fight for school choice

The idea of school choice, has made substantial inroads, but Charter Schools have got a long way to go and the fight won't be easy (WSJ):

More than two decades since charter schools first appeared in the U.S. as an experiment, they are poised to become mainstream in many parts of the country. About 2.5 million, or 5.1% of public-school students, were enrolled in charter schools in the 2013-2014 school year, up from 300,000, or 0.7%, in 1999-2000, according to federal statistics.

Nearly every major city has charters, challenging the traditional public-school model as parents increasingly send their children to these privately run but publicly funded institutions and politicians allocate more tax dollars.

The dispute in Boston and similar clashes in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Los Angeles are surfacing as local charter schools reach or surpass a 15% to 20% market share in those cities.

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)

Angus Deaton of Princeton University wins the Nobel prize

A critic of foreign aid, particularly where it comes to economic development and state capacity, Deaton has been at the forefront of "understanding and measuring world poverty" according to Alex Tabarrok (MarginalRevolution). Deaton on foreign aid:

Unfortunately, the world’s rich countries currently are making things worse. Foreign aid – transfers from rich countries to poor countries – has much to its credit, particularly in terms of health care, with many people alive today who would otherwise be dead. But foreign aid also undermines the development of local state capacity.

This is most obvious in countries – mostly in Africa – where the government receives aid directly and aid flows are large relative to fiscal expenditure (often more than half the total). Such governments need no contract with their citizens, no parliament, and no tax-collection system. If they are accountable to anyone, it is to the donors; but even this fails in practice, because the donors, under pressure from their own citizens (who rightly want to help the poor), need to disburse money just as much as poor-country governments need to receive it, if not more so.

More from WSJ.

The cost of regulation

No matter the party, regulations just keep increasing - of course the good news, is that the politicians are starting to take notice (Mercatus):

It's been a long time coming, but structural reforms to the regulatory process are finally starting to reach the mainstream. Presidential candidates, and sitting members of Congress alike, are increasingly proposing ideas and legislation that would change the way regulatory agencies go about making regulations, rather than reacting to each individual regulation as it is produced (although, to be sure, that still happens, too). And it's for good reason that more and more people want to change the regulatory process.

In years past, it may have been easy for politicians to delegate responsibility to agencies and then act as if the issue had been solved. But the delegate-and-forget-about-it doctrine led to a fourth branch of government — the regulatory agencies — producing far more law than Congress itself, and accumulating a stockpile of regulations that is so large that it would require nearly three years for a person to read through the current federal regulatory code.

And the costs aren't incidental:

For our RegData project, we counted the number of individual restrictions — words and phrases that indicate a specific prohibited or mandatory activity — contained in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). In the 2014 CFR, we found about 1.1 million restrictions, each one every bit as legally binding as a law passed by Congress and signed by the president.

According to the 2016 Regulator's Budget by Susan Dudley and Melinda Warren, taxpayers spent about $62 billion on the production and enforcement of regulations, although that figure excludes a number of significant regulators for technical reasons — and both the budget and number of restrictions have grown consistently over the time they have been measured. Over the last 20 years, the regulatory budget has more than doubled in real terms, while the number of total restrictions has grown by about 220,000 — a 25 percent increase.

Government on whole milk warnings: "oops"

An argument of why governments should be slow to regulate and control (Cato):

Let scientists conduct research, let other scientists examine it, let journalists report it, let doctors give us advice. But let’s keep nutrition – and much else – in the realm of persuasion, not force. First, because it’s wrong to use force against peaceful people, and second, because we might be wrong.

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)

Though the environmental apocalyptic predictions change, the solution remains the same...

More government control (libertarianism.org). I'm not sure that's a coincidence.

Reshaping healthcare in the developing world

Getting healthcare right for the poor (WSJ):

Indian philanthropist and cardiac surgeon Dr. Devi Prasad Shetty is the Chairman of Narayana Health in Bangalore. Born in a small village, Shetty went to school in Bangalore before studying in the UK. After returning to India in 1989, Mother Teresa had a heart attack, and Dr. Shetty was called to operate on her. From then on, he served as her personal physician.

Shetty founded Narayana Health in 2000. He is often called the “Henry Ford” of heart surgery in India. 12 percent of heart surgeries in India are performed by Narayana doctors. Narayana Health is a network of 32 hospitals in 20 locations throughout India. The company provides affordable health care to India’s poorest citizens. Shetty plans to expand Narayana Health internationally to Africa, Asia and Latin America. His first hospital outside of India is in the Cayman Islands.

[...] First of all, we have invested a huge amount of money in the infrastructure of the hospitals. If the same amount of infrastructure is provided in hospitals in the U.S. and Europe, it hardly gets used for eight to nine hours a day. We use our infrastructure for 14 to 15 hours a day. Secondly, we perform one of the largest number of heart surgeries in the world. Through working with us, companies capture 12% of the Indian market for cardiac health care. This brings our input costs down. Third, we’re also an academic institution training heart surgeons, cardiologists, perfusionists and nurses. We conduct 79 training programs on campus, so half of the workforce here is not paid by us. They are students undergoing a training program.

If "labor-friendly policies" are so friendly to labor...

Why do so many laborers choose to move to more conservative states that are purportedly less friendly to labor? (theDailySignal)

The so-called “progressives” love to talk about how their policies will create a worker’s paradise, but then why is it that day after day, month after month, year after year, people are fleeing liberal blue states for conservative red states?

The new Census data on where we live and where we moved to in 2014 shows that the top seven states with the biggest percentage increase in in-migration from other states are in order: North Dakota, Nevada, South Carolina, Colorado, Florida, Arizona, and Texas. All of these states are red, except Colorado, which is purple.

Meanwhile, the leading exodus states of the continental states in percentage terms were Alaska, New York, Illinois, Connecticut, New Mexico, New Jersey, and Kansas. All of these states are blue, except Alaska and Kansas.

Do Americans need to be protected from pay day loans?

According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), yes (theDailySignal). One predictable consequence that will be written off as "unintended": the people who they're aiming to help will be worse off as they will have fewer financial options.

Philanthrocapitalism

I'd object to the term capitalism - which isn't what the Nation author thinks it means, but he raises a few interesting points about the influence specific business people just because they bring money from other realms into development (especially when they argue against the very markets in which they created value).

On the other hand, it's their money to spend and waste as they please. No one is forcing us to listen to what they say.

"Not a victim"

Her story makes talk of microaggressions and "triggers" seem absurd. The story of one 16 year old girl's escape from North Korea (Reason.com):

"I watched the movie Titanic and I was shocked. Like, how could this kind of ridiculous film exist? I'd never seen people dying for love, except dying for the regime and the party."

When Yeonmi was thirteen, she and her mother escaped into China, where they were kidnapped and sold into slavery: "Chinese government, if they catch us, will sell us back to North Korea, so we are very vulnerable in China. Chinese people, they know that."

Sex traffickers took advantage of that vulnerability. "That's what happened to both of us, my mother and me." At the time, she didn't know what sex was. "I didn't even know what kissing was."

Read the whole thing.

What overregulation?

"One in three jobs in the US economy now requires government permission to hold — and many jobs requiring licenses pose no health risk." Because paperwork shuffled back and forth between bureaucrats while restricting competition creates jobs? (Cato)

This isn't going to end the way they think it will...

Obama Administration seeks to regulate temp agencies out of existence (DailyCaller):

The joint-employer standard has been around for decades. It normally helps to establish which company has responsibility over employees when multiple companies contract with one another. If one company is found to assert enough control over the employees of a company with which it holds a contract, the two companies will both be considered employers over the employees.

The NLRB has been trying to expand upon the standard. Critics like the International Franchise Association have argued the rule change is an attempt to benefit unions. This is because it’s much easier to unionize one large joint-employer as opposed to many separate employers that just so happen to contract with one another.

“For manufacturers, this case is yet another example of the NLRB changing well-established and functioning labor laws,” Amanda Wood, director of human resources for the National Association of Manufacturers, told the Washington Examiner. “Without a justifiable and sufficient change in circumstance and in how the business community operates.”

Environmentalism: an excuse to use tax payers to make the rich richer?

From Reason:

Do poor people drive Tesla roadsters? Not exactly. The average household income of Tesla owners is just shy of $300,000 per year. Low end models begin at $70,000 but rise to over $105,000. Fortunately, the Feds take a bit of the sting out of the price by handing over a $7,500 tax credit to purchasers of electric cars. A new study, "The Distributional Effects of U.S. Clean Energy Tax Credits," by two energy economists at the University of California, Berkeley finds that the rich are the chief beneficiaries of billions in federal tax credits aimed at encouraging people to buy and install energy efficient and low-carbon technologies.

What does it mean to live in poverty in the US?

Comparatively different to the rest of the world (DailySignal):

According to the government’s own reports, the typical American defined as poor by the Census Bureau has a car, air conditioning, and cable or satellite TV. Half of the poor have computers, 43 percent have Internet, and 40 percent have a wide-screen plasma or LCD TV.

Far from being overcrowded, poor Americans have more living space in their home than the average non-poor person in Western Europe. Some 42 percent of all poor households actually own their own homes; on average, this is a well-maintained three-bedroom house with one and a half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, only 4 percent of poor children were hungry for even a single day in the prior year because the family could not afford food. By its own report, the average poor person had sufficient funds to meet all essential needs and was able to obtain medical care for his family throughout the year whenever needed.

Seeing the poor as a monolithic block sets poverty reduction policies up for failure, argues Robert L. Woodson Sr. from Heritage (DailySignal):

Over the past 10 years, in spite of massive and growing funding of America’s anti-poverty agenda, the percentage of individuals able to support themselves free of government welfare has declined. The fundamental reason the nation has failed to effectively reduce dependency and promote self-sufficiency is that we’ve been misdiagnosing poverty.

People experience poverty for varied reasons. Remedies for poverty should take this diversity into account. Through my experience with the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise and the nearly 3,000 community groups working in low-income neighborhoods it has served, I have come to understand that there are typically four basic categories of the poor.

Read it all.

Where millenials are becoming entrepreneurs in the US

Interesting study on entrepreneurship amongst millenials (FastCompany):

The most recent index from the Kauffman Foundation found that 24.7% of all entrepreneurs were 20 to 34 years old, and those with college degrees were starting businesses in unprecedented numbers.

So where, exactly, are they starting all these businesses?

[...] 1. Birmingham, Alabama
2. Boise, Idaho
3. Boulder, Colorado
4. Nashville, Tennessee
5. Manchester, New Hampshire

Where they aren't:

1. Providence, Rhode Island
2. New Haven, Connecticut
3. Buffalo, New York
4. Albuquerque, New Mexico
5. Hartford, Connecticut

What's behind that "rapid decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease"?

Nick Kristof completely omits the lede (Cato):

The Homo sapiens has been on this earth for 200,000 years. For 99.9% of that time, we lived in ignorance, poverty and misery. What has changed? Reading the NYT, the reader is left with the impression that “good stuff,” like manna from heaven, suddenly was conjured up out of thin air.

Not so. The key to the improvements in the lives of ordinary people over the last 200 years were industrialization and trade, which generated historically unprecedented rates of growth. And the importance of growth cannot be overemphasized. There is not a single example of a country emerging from widespread poverty without sustained economic growth. As University of Oxford Professor Paul Collier writes, “Growth is not a cure-all, but lack of growth is a kill-all.”

It reminds me of Robert Heinlein's quote:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as "bad luck.

Saving the world one t-shirt at a time

Trade not aid (Cato):

Garment factories in poor countries might look dirty and dangerous to westerners, but in fact, they are one of our best hopes for poverty reduction and human development...Western activists rail against 'sweatshops,' but among researchers and economists from left to right there is a consensus that these jobs are the stepping stones out of poverty. All countries that have managed to industrialize its economy and combat poverty in modern times have done so by moving into such labor-intensive exports markets.

Reimagining CO2 into something useful

Sponsored by Canada's oil sands industry, it's an interesting alternative to regulating our way to solving environmental problems (COSIA.ca):

The US$20 million NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE is a global initiative, operated by the XPRIZE Foundation, designed to accelerate new technologies by converting CO2 emissions from industrial facilities for electricity generation and oil and gas production into valuable and usable products.

The competition is structured as a two-track prize, with the new technologies tested at either a coal power plant or a natural gas power plant. A total of US$20M will be awarded to winning teams, with US$10M awarded for each track.

Of course the sad part, is that any current proposed regulation does nothing to account for any future innovations that might come out of this and would have far greater impact than the myopic regulations proposed.

Cato: that $750 generic pill is a pure artifact of regulation

Yep - but for some no matter the problem the solution is always more government (Cato):

As you probably know if you follow the news, a man named Martin Shkreli in charge of a startup firm called Turing Pharmaceuticals bought the rights to a drug called pyrimethamine (brand name Daraprim), used in the treatment of AIDS and malaria, and announced that he was jacking up its price from $13.60 to $750. Massive outrage resulted, which has echoed through social media for the past week.

Pyrimethamine is long since off patent. It is not difficult to manufacture, and sells cheaply in Europe. But under the distinctive food and drug laws of the United States you can’t just start turning out pills in your factory to compete with Shkreli, at least not without compiling and submitting a huge pile of regulatory paper with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. This calls on the services of lawyers and scientists, costs a lot of money, and takes time, and you might or might not be able to recover the costs from the relatively small pool of users.

Update (mises): Why are there are so many shortages in generic drugs?

How much better do groups of amateurs beat professional forecasters?

As it turns out about 30% - but as it turns, out the reason is because they have "doubt" (WSJ):

The top 2%, whom Prof. Tetlock dubs “superforecasters,” have above-average — but rarely genius-level — intelligence. Many are mathematicians, scientists or software engineers; but among the others are a pharmacist, a Pilates instructor, a caseworker for the Pennsylvania state welfare department and a Canadian underwater-hockey coach.

The forecasters competed online against four other teams and against government intelligence experts to answer nearly 500 questions over the course of four years: Will the president of Tunisia go into exile in the next month? Will the gold price exceed $1,850 on Sept. 30, 2011? Will OPEC agree to cut its oil output at or before its November 2014 meeting?

It turned out that, after rigorous statistical controls, the elite amateurs were on average about 30% more accurate than the experts with access to classified information. What’s more, the full pool of amateurs also outperformed the experts.

The most careful, curious, open-minded, persistent and self-critical — as measured by a battery of psychological tests — did the best.

“What you think is much less important than how you think,” says Prof. Tetlock; superforecasters regard their views “as hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded.”

California's man-made drought: not because of the lack of rain

But because of the prioritization of fish above people. The infrastructure needed to support people, never got built (theDailySignal):

Even now, in the Sierra foothills, state officials empty reservoirs to protect “unimpeded” river flows to benefit small numbers of non-endangered hatchery fish. The California Coastal Commission, the powerful agency with control of development along the shoreline, is holding up a privately planned desalination plant over concerns about its impact on plankton. The environment-friendly commission want to force the developers to build a pumping system that destroys the economics of the plant.

[...] Even the federal government is in on the action. In the far northern part of the state, along the Klamath River, federal environment officials want to remove four dams that provide water storage near the Oregon border. Their goal is to help preserve the habitat of non-native salmon. The “destroy the dams” movement had gained so much steam in recent years that San Franciscans were asked in a 2012 advisory vote to destroy the O’Shaughnessy dam in Yosemite National Park and drain the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir—the main source of water for the state’s third-largest city. Even that city’s notoriously lefty voters said “no” to shutting their main water spigot.

[...] Recent reports showed that farmers use 80 percent of California’s water resources. It’s true that farmers are an important interest group. And because of the state’s old and quirky system of water rights, we see infuriating misuses of resources—e.g., farmers growing water-intensive hay in one of the driest regions on Earth, the southern Imperial Valley.

But that 80 percent number was deceptive because it completely omitted environmental uses of water, which constitute more than 50 percent of the state’s flows. Farmers, businesses, and residents fight over what remains. What we’re seeing—water releases to benefit a small number of common fish, removing dams along major rivers, delays of desalination plants, failure to build adequate water storage—is not an anomaly. It is the cumulative effect of water policies dominated by environmental interests.

Black lives matter... but not as much as teachers unions?

New York's Mayor DeBlasio aims to close charter schools in NYC at the behest of his Teachers Union supporters (WSJ):

Good charters offer part of the answer. In New York, Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter schools are arguably the best. Yet the mayor, his schools chancellor and the teachers union all apparently prefer maintaining the present inequality rather than allow Ms. Moskowitz to open more of her charters in poor minority neighborhoods.

The Success Academies are 58% black and about 27% Hispanic. Even so, these children regularly outscore their counterparts in wealthy suburban areas. So while each year the Success Academies prove that black kids can compete as equals with white kids so long as the bar is set high and teachers are held accountable, in the schools run by Mayor de Blasio the achievement gap between black and white has widened.

Welcome to progressive New York. Where black and Latino children in poor neighborhoods are condemned to failed schools with almost no possibility of escape. While the schools where kids are treated equally and black lives really do matter get the back of the mayor’s hand.

Fortunately it's not going to happen without a fight:

Elon Musk: fully autonomous cars "in approximately 3 years"

I hope he's right (TechCrunch):

Musk is now saying that Tesla cars should have “full autonomy” in “approximately three years.”

As for when regulators are ready to sanction self-driving technologies, they “probably will not allow for full autonomy for one to three years after that,” said Musk. “It depends on the market. Some will be more forward-leaning than others.”

What if banning private prisons made things worse?

I haven't always been comfortable with the idea of private prisons because of the problem with incentives and cronyism related to government contracts but as Reason.com notes:

There’s a key difference, however, between privately run prisons and government-run counterparts: the contract mechanism, which provides a vehicle for accountability. If dissatisfied with performance, a government can cancel a prison contract with a private company. By contrast, the government tends not to fire itself, and the watchmen ultimately watch themselves.

Of course, this depends on contracts that allow for cancellation. What's more interesting is how some states are being proactive about reshaping incentives:

In 2013, Pennsylvania cancelled all of its contracts with private operators of community corrections centers and rebid them on a performance basis, tying vendor compensation to their performance at reducing recidivism rates among the populations they manage. The state corrections agency recently announced an overall 11.3% reduction in recidivism across its 42 contracted community corrections centers between July 2014 and June 2015, marking the second consecutive year of decline.

That same year, Pennsylvania awarded a five-year correctional mental health services contract that was updated to significantly enhance performance expectations, including financial incentives to reduce the number of misconducts for mentally ill offenders, the number of inmates recommitted to prison mental health units, and the number of recommitments to prison residential treatment units. Conversely, the state can impose financial penalties on the contractor if it fails to achieve targeted baseline results for those same metrics.

Coming clean about the VW emissions scandal: more regulatory malpractice

Oops (WSJ)

A consensus has formed, in a remarkably short time since the VW scandal, that Europe’s rush to embrace diesel cars was a colossal policy error. For a meaningless cut in greenhouse emissions, Europe got higher emissions of nitrogen oxides and diesel particulates. While claims of thousands of additional deaths from this diesel pollution are questionable, Europe now realizes it converted half its cars to diesel for no good reason. And this is just the beginning.

If carbon dioxide is a problem, cars were never the solution. Cars and light trucks account for less than 8% of global emissions; U.S. cars and light trucks account for less than 3%. U.S. car makers are being required by government to spend hundreds of billions on fuel-mileage improvements in the name of global warming that will have virtually zero effect on global warming.

Regulatory malpractice: why the US hasn't developed electric planes

From Wired:

In 2004, the Federal Aviation Administration created a new category of airplanes, called Light Sport Aircraft (LSA), to make it easier and cheaper for manufacturers to certify simple, fun-to-fly airplanes.

The new rules have allowed for the creation of dozens of new two-seat airplane designs. None of these are electric, however, because in the preamble to the rule, the FAA wrote that all planes in this class must have “a single, reciprocating engine, if powered.”

The point of the rule, FAA officials acknowledge, was to keep more powerful turbine engines out of the picture. The banning of electric powertrains is unfortunate collateral damage.

“This is the thing that has scuttled electric aircraft’s significant development, for years,” says Dan Johnson, president of the Light Aircraft Manufacturing Association, a trade group. “Just by changing six or eight words, you could undo the problem — but we can’t get there.”

How capitalism improves the environment

From Reason.com:

In the 1950s, the Belarussian-born American economist Simon Kuznets hypothesized that income inequality as a nation industrializes can be shaped like an inverted U—it increases in the early stages of growth, reaches an apex, and then starts tapering down as the economy matures. The switch begins to happen after a critical mass of people abandon farm life for the big cities, where they obtain better education, benefit from economies of scale, and start agitating for policy changes.

Ironically, at a time when Kuznets' original concept has come under intensified attack in the inequality-obsessed developed world, its application to the environment has gained considerable purchase both academically and observationally. As Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey traces in "The End of Doom" (page 20), many of the woes that people still assume are getting worse are actually improving in the most advanced countries.

The coming fake meat

I'm pretty optimistic about this - and it makes sense in that it would mean meat becomes far more scalable and cheaper for human consumption while reducing waste (NYTimes):

“The true challenge will be to recreate more complex pieces of meat that are the pinnacle of the meat industry,” he added. “I believe that plausible, good-tasting steaks and pork loins are only a matter of time.”

Puglisi is advising Beyond Meat, a start-up that is a leader in the field, with investments from Bill Gates and both Biz Stone and Ev Williams of Twitter fame, not to mention Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture capital firm that backed Google and Amazon. Beyond Meat says its sales are doubling each year.

Whoever thought public housing was a good idea...

... should have to live there. The 'unintended consequences' of forcing people whose only commonality is poverty, to live in a ghetto. 'City: Murder victim should have known ‘risks’ of public housing' (NYPost):

The family of a college student murdered at her East Harlem housing project doesn’t deserve a dime from the city — because she should have known the “risks” of being on the dangerous grounds, city lawyers claim in court papers.

“I can’t believe they’re saying she’s responsible for her murder,” Olivia Brown’s mother, Crystal, told The Post Friday.

“Everybody has a right to be safe in their home. Why wasn’t my daughter safe? Because we’re poor and live in public housing?”

Making it more difficult for Americans to 'go galt'?

The US has decided to increase the cost of renouncing a US citizenship by 422%. According to the US State Department, it's about cost recovery... because the cost increased 422% between last year and this year? (Forbes):

When the news broke a year ago that the U.S. was hiking the fee to renounce U.S. citizenship by 422% there was a backlash. If anything, the uptick in American expatriations grew rather than declined. The U.S. State Department said raising the fee for renunciation of U.S. citizenship is about demand and paperwork. Perhaps, but a hike from $450 to $2,350 is still steep. That is more than twenty times the average level in other high-income countries. The State Department complains about demand on their services and all the extra workload they have to process people who are on their way out.

More on Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos

She's now 31 years old with a majority ownership of a company valued in excess of $9 billion (Inc):

Her parents both have had careers with noble ambition--her mother was a foreign-policy and defense aide on Capitol Hill, and her father is now the global water coordinator for USAID--but Holmes decided government agencies were not effective enough. She'd watched "all these people with incredibly good intentions" get mired in bureaucracy and politics while trying to make an impact, she says. Meanwhile, with a startup, Holmes adds, "you say, 'We're going to do this,' and you design an organization to do it."

[...] Over the past 18 months the momentum behind Theranos has been building. There's the recent deal with the prestigious Cleveland Clinic, which will use Theranos technology to test its patients. Theranos secured agreements with Capital BlueCross and AmeriHealth Caritas to be a preferred provider. A partnership with the Carlos Slim Foundation, which runs a network of health care centers in Mexico, will use Theranos tests to screen for, among other things, diabetes, a disease known to be preventable with early detection. In July, Arizona passed the country's first bill, co-authored by Theranos, allowing patients to order blood tests without a prescription. And then there's the massive Walgreens deal.

Any of Theranos's advances could potentially transform the lab test industry. But it's in pricing that Theranos arguably has the most powerful opportunity to disrupt, a point the usually restrained Holmes allows herself to get worked up over. "The premise that you're going to run a business, and that if someone is in need, I'm going to charge them a ton of money, is completely wrong," she says. "Price should be the same for everyone, period. And the price should be affordable." Theranos never charges more than half the rate set by Medicare for blood tests; in some cases, it's a 10th of the cost. A test for HIV can cost more than $80. Theranos charges $16.56.

Previously mentioned here and here.

'Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time...'

The 'unintended consequences' of excluding electric cars from high tolls in Norway (WSJ):

On the losing side of Mr. Nordbø’s commute are local municipalities, including Finnøy, which went into debt to dig the $70 million tunnel but charge no fee on electric cars because of national policies aimed at curbing carbon emissions.

The incentive helped convince many islanders to shift to electric cars. The vehicles now account for about a quarter of tunnel traffic, and allow owners to dodge one of the heaviest toll burdens in the country.

How regulation kills jobs

By making it more difficult for new entrants / startups / entrepreneurs (USNews):

While we find that regulation reduces the number of new business start-ups, it does not appear to harm existing businesses. In fact, we find that the largest firms in an industry – those with more than 500 employees – actually benefit when regulation increases. Why? They are less likely to go out of business, presumably because they are better able to hire accountants and lawyers to deal with the red tape. In addition, they can afford to hire lobbyists that ensure regulation is tailored to their advantage. Potential entrepreneurs, on the other hand, have neither the resources nor the political connections necessary to overcome the same red tape.

Federal regulation increased 28 percent from 1997 to 2012. The economy of the late '90s is not usually remembered as a time when unregulated firms were wreaking havoc on the economy. Our study results suggest that even just returning to the modestly lower level of regulation of the late '90s would lead to over 6,000 additional new businesses being started and 100,000 new jobs being created every year.

The morality of capitalism

Pope Francis: prioritizing the environment over the poor

"In his encyclical Laudato Si’, published today, the pope lambasts wasteful consumerism and unchecked human economic activity as a root of climate change, singling out one product in particular for censure: the air conditioner" (National Review)

Two years ago, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a study concluding that air conditioning reduced heat-related deaths in the United States by 80 percent and could save even more lives in hotter, often poorer countries. A/C is an especially promising life-saving technology given the potential effects of climate change, the authors contend. “The typical Indian experiences 33 days annually where the temperature exceeds 90 degrees fahrenheit and this is projected to increase by as much as 100 days by the end of the century.”

What Pope Francis gets terribly wrong

Markets are the greatest anti-poverty tool we have (Reason):

"Entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid." With those 10 words, spoken to an audience at Georgetown University in 2013, philanthropist rock star Bono demonstrated a keener understanding of economic reality than the leader of global Catholicism.

The U2 frontman clearly has it right—and Pope Francis is wrong to suggest that poverty is growing, or that capitalism, free markets, and globalization are fueling the (non-existent) problem. In just two decades, extreme poverty has been reduced by more than 50 percent. "In 1990, almost half of the population in developing regions lived on less than $1.25 a day," reads a 2014 report from the United Nations. "This rate dropped to 22 per cent by 2010, reducing the number of people living in extreme poverty by 700 million."

How was this secular miracle achieved? The bulk of the answer is through economic development, as nascent markets began to take hold in large swaths of the world that were until recently desperately poor. A 2013 editorial from The Economist noted that the Millennium Development Goals "may have helped marginally, by creating a yardstick for measuring progress, and by focusing minds on the evil of poverty. Most of the credit, however, must go to capitalism and free trade, for they enable economies to grow—and it was growth, principally, that has eased destitution."

More from Mercatus: "Capitalism isn't flawless. But it far outperforms any known alternative at peacefully uniting the peoples of the world in the practical and moral enterprise of producing dignity and extraordinary wealth for the masses" And more still from USA Today: "What the United States has accomplished under a free enterprise system at home and abroad proves that business is not part of the problem; rather, it is a big part of the solution." Rich Lowry in the Politico is scathing: "In his interviews and writings, the pope blames capitalism for a host of ills, from income inequality to the degradation of people to the despoliation of the planet. Of course, no human system is perfect, and the pope wouldn’t be the pope if he didn’t warn against soulless consumerism. Where he loses credibility is in making a material case against capitalism. When it comes to the miracles of widespread prosperity and enhanced well-being wrought by capitalist development, the pope is a denier."

The fall of Chicago

Self inflicted wounds (OCRegister):

When I grew up in the north suburbs of Chicago in the 1960s and ’70s, Illinois was still a‎ financial and industrial powerhouse. The Land of Lincoln had a low-rate flat income tax, the property taxes were reasonable, the state ran budget surpluses, and Illinois was the home of such iconic megaemployers as Caterpillar, Sears Roebuck and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

Last week the state, had to sheepishly announce that it doesn’t even have the money in the bank to pay lottery winners. Now jackpot winners are suing the state to get their rightful money.

Perhaps the state will need a second lottery to raise money to pay off the winners from the first lottery.‎

Chicago is so broke that its bonds are junk status, and Mayor Rahm Emmanuel had to go hat in hand last week to the state capital, Springfield, for bailout money to pay the bills.

Does knowledge of economics matter at least as much as algebra?

Even more so (Mises)

Yet once we understand that all human action is economic action, we understand that we can’t escape or evade our responsibility to understand at least basic economics. To think otherwise is to avoid responsibility for our own lives.

While we shake our heads when twenty year olds can’t read at the college level or do simple algebra, we don’t worry much whether they never take economics. We would be alarmed if our children couldn’t perform basic math to know how much change they should get at a cash register, but we send them out into the world far more susceptible to being cheated by politicians. Why do we want our kids to learn at least basic geography, chemistry, and physics? And grammar, spelling, literature, history, and civics? We want them to know these things so they can navigate their lives properly as adults

And the problems with mathematical economics (Mises).

How cronyism hurts entrepreneurship

It might be shocking to some people, but entrepreneurs don't just do it for the money (USNews)

Psychologists have found the intrinsic desire to master challenges, known as "mastery," to be an important human drive. Economics has emphasized the external or monetary rewards for business, typically to the exclusion of mastery.

The words of entrepreneurs provide evidence for mastery as a business motive. Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino's Pizza, has remarked, "To me, the real substance of life and work is the constant battle to excel." Cable television pioneer Ted Turner observed, "America is about competition and rising above that competition." Michael Bloomberg has said that, "Even today, after toiling for 30 years, I wake up looking forward to practicing my profession, creating something, competing against the best … receiving psychic compensation money can't buy."

And actions speak louder than words. Many members of the Forbes Richest Americans list work long hours, even though they already have more money than one could spend in several lifetimes. A 2013 profile noted that Bill Gates was looking forward to working more with product managers in the upcoming year. Serial entrepreneur Richard Branson has started over 200 businesses and never tires of the challenge of making a new venture succeed.

[...] Cronyism can reward favored entrepreneurs with profits, but not necessarily mastery. Many top athletes would not care to compete in a contest rigged in their own favor. Similarly, some entrepreneurs or businesses, who may be well-positioned to take on a new challenge, do not seek government favoritism. And others may choose not to compete when it's clear that their performance doesn't necessarily equal results in a rigged marketplace.

The extension of cronyism in an economy over time can affect the types of individuals who choose business as a career. Profits for entrepreneurs who successfully court favor with politicians may not satisfy those with a true competitive streak. Imagine a track meet where the organizers rig the races so that their favorites, and not the best runners, win. Such a meet will likely fail to attract the world's best competitors.

The effects on the quality of entrepreneurship could be devastating in the long-term. After mastery-seekers choose other pursuits, the remaining profit-seekers will likely have no qualms about seeking or benefitting from government favors. A vicious cycle of cronyism could ensue, as more favoritism results in a group of business leaders more willing to lobby, leading in turn to more favors.

Victimhood, microaggressions, and a bit of good news

Supposedly the good news is that the national debate in the US over microaggressions is only really a debate because social status is improving among what traditionally have been disadvantaged groups:

As social status becomes more equal, they argue, people become more sensitive to any slights perceived as aiming to increase the level of inequality in a relationship. In addition, as cultural diversity increases, any attempts seen as trying to reduce it or diminish its importance are deemed as a morally deviant form of domination. As the New York University moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt has astutely observed, "As progress is made toward a more equal and humane society, it takes a smaller and smaller offense to trigger a high level of outrage. The goalposts shift, allowing participants to maintain a constant level of anger and constant level of perceived victimization."

Those experiencing what they think are microaggressions seek third-party redress of their grievances by assuming the pose of victim. "People portray themselves as oppressed by the powerful—as damaged, disadvantaged, and needy," write Campbell and Manning. The process heralds the emergence of a culture of victimhood that is distinct from earlier honor and dignity cultures. This is nothing less than demoralizing and polarizing.

Victimhood devalues/ignores individual power and responsibility. The irony is that the solutions proposed by those who supposedly advocate for victims are for entitlement systems that more permanently reduce individual power and transfer it to the state.

Why frequent business travel is so bad for you...

Hmmm... apparently there are a few reasons mixed in with a healthy dose of scaremongering... (Fastcompany):

If aging faster isn’t scary enough, it turns out that frequent business travelers are exposed to more radiation than is considered healthy. "Radiation exposure is hundreds of times higher at high altitude than at ground," says Cohen.

Matter of fact, it’s so high that "there have been calls to classify frequent business travelers as ‘radiation workers,'" he says, and notes that just seven round-trip flights a year from New York to Tokyo (about 85,000 miles) exceeds the limit for public exposure to radiation. As Cohen notes in his paper, "radiation exposure amongst commercial aircrew even exceeds that of nuclear power workers."

NYC's homeless crisis and 'unintended consequences'

It so happens the positions of 'advocates' were for a system that not only preserved the status quo but was self serving - funding the organizations that benefited from homelessness (NYPost via Instapundit):

Then, precisely as we predicted, the number of people in homeless shelters started to rise sharply, going from 38,800 in May 2011 to more than 60,000 at the peak earlier this year.

During the 2011 budget debate, the Coalition for the Homeless dismissed the Bloomberg administration’s predictions about what would happen if the Advantage program was cut by the state. They claimed our dire warnings constituted nothing more than “scare tactics.”

The results speak for themselves.

What makes us who we are?

It's more than an interesting philosophical question as it turns out. A new paper looking at Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases suggests that it's not in our intellect or memory but in our moral character (WSJ):

The researchers found that the people who cared for the FTD patients were much more likely to feel that they had become different people than the caregivers of the Alzheimer’s patients. The ALS caregivers were least likely to feel that the patient had become a different person. What’s more, a sophisticated statistical analysis showed that this was the effect of changes in the patient’s moral behavior in particular. Across all three groups, changes in moral behavior predicted changes in perceived identity, while changes in memory or intellect did not.

These results suggest something profound. Our moral character, after all, is what links us to other people. It’s the part of us that goes beyond our own tangle of neurons to touch the brains and lives of others. Because that moral character is central to who we are, there is a sense in which Edith literally, and not just metaphorically, lives on in the people who loved her.

No, communism wouldn't work any better today just because we have better computers...

It's befuddling that anyone would think it would (Bloomberg via Instapundit):

I’ll swing for the fences and argue that no, even with better computers, Communism isn’t going to work. Nor some gauzy vision of post-capitalism that looks like Communism, but with YouTube videos.

In retrospect, Communism seems wildly stupid, or at least, incredibly naive. Did the people who dreamed up this system not understand the enormous incentive problems they were creating? As Ayn Rand dramatized the problem in “Atlas Shrugged”: “It’s miseries, not work, that had become the coin of the realm — so it turned into a contest among six thousand panhandlers, each claiming that his need was worse than his brother’s. How else could it be done?” The incentives of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” drive toward falling production, which means there won’t be enough to cover the needs.

Or as a former colleague who fled Communist Poland once told me, “They pretended to pay us, and we pretended to work.” There is a reason that basically all the Communist and Socialist regimes ended in some degree of authoritarianism.

Hugo Chavez: "one of the most disastrous leaders the world has seen"

Another example of how socialism works in practice (Bloomberg):

Yes, he steered a bunch of money to the poor, and did lots of things that drove both labor unions and business leaders nuts. The head of the country’s chamber of commerce even replaced him as president in a 2002 coup attempt that failed after two days. But as of 2005 Venezuela still had the highest per-capita gross domestic product in Latin America (adjusted for purchasing-power parity), and no trouble paying its bills. Chavez supporters could even point to some indicators that poverty and malnutrition were on the decline.

Now, of course, Venezuela’s economy is a disaster. The government stopped releasing regular economic statistics in December, but one official told Bloomberg News the annual inflation rate is 150 percent. The latest estimate from the Troubled Currencies Project run by Steve H. Hanke of the Cato Institute and Johns Hopkins, meanwhile, is that inflation is really 808 percent. Food shortages have become a problem, a debt default seems almost certain, and a complete economic collapse isn’t out of the question. By 2014 Venezuela had, by the World Bank’s PPP-adjusted accounting, slid to fifth place in per-capita GDP in Latin America, behind Chile, Cuba (!), Uruguay and Panama. Mexico and Brazil may pass it this year, despite their own economic troubles. Even next-door neighbor Colombia is getting within striking distance.

The end of (extreme) poverty?

Cato says yes:

Ending extreme poverty may sound like a remote dream voiced by idealists and beauty pageant contestants, but that goal’s attainment is actually closer than you think. The share of people living in absolute poverty (i.e., living on less than $1 a day) has dwindled to around five percent of the world’s population. Much of this progress can be attributed to massive poverty reduction in China that elevated hundreds of millions of people out of destitution.

Ranking the fiscal solvency of American states (and territory)

Not surprisingly, Puerto Rico is dead last. Runners up are Illinois, New Jersey and Massachusetts (Mercatus).

Breakthrough in LASERs could speed rise of self driving cars

As Glenn Reynolds says, faster please (Wired).

Where the moral argument for a "living wage" fails

The war to put additional price controls on wages continues (Mises):

Behind this effort is a philosophical claim that employers are morally obligated to pay “a living wage” to employees, so they can afford necessities (however ambiguously defined) on a single wage, working forty hours per week. This moral argument singles out employers as the morally responsible party in the living wage equation, even though the variables that determine a living wage go far beyond the wage earned.

[...] And yes, it’s true that plenty of activists regularly denounce landlords as “slumlords” or greedy capitalists for charging the highest rents the market will bear. And there are still plenty of activists who argue for price controls on rents and food. But they’re in a small minority nowadays. The vast majority of voters and policymakers recognize that government-dictated prices on food and housing lead to shortages. Setting a price ceiling on rents or home prices simply means that fewer housing units will be built, while setting a price ceiling on eggs, or milk or bread will simply mean that fewer of those staples will be brought to market.

Such assertions are barely even debated anymore, as can be seen in the near-extinction of new rent-control efforts in the political sphere. You won’t see many op-eds this Labor Day arguing for price controls on fruit, gasoline, and apartments. You won’t see any articles denouncing homeowners for selling their homes at the highest price they can get, when they really should be slashing prices to make homeownership more affordable for first-time homebuyers.

So, for whatever reason, homeowners, grocers, and others are exempt from the wrath of the activists for not keeping real wages low. The employers, on the other hand — those who pay the nominal wage — remain well within the sights of the activists since, for some arbitrary reason, the full moral obligation of providing a living wage falls on the employer.

How markets are triumphing over the Saudis

While they had previously been successful at quashing upstarts by flooding the marketing with cheap oil, that strategy hasn't worked this time for the Saudis (WSJ):

What the Saudis and the naysayers closer to home seem to have forgotten is that the free market is the greatest incubator of technological innovation. Energy producers in this country have gauged the challenges of lower prices, are working to tackle them, and it’s paying off.

The technology behind shale production is advancing rapidly, and its costs are falling. Today the industry can tap multiple separate oil pools from a single vertical hole, drilling horizontally through miles of rock with computer-guided, steerable drill bits. Some of these “octopus” wells can feature as many as 18 horizontal shafts.

Articles about falling rig counts don’t take this into account. We’re seeing additional innovations such as the use of recycled “fracking” water, carbon dioxide and other substances to break formations, reducing the use of precious fresh water in drilling.

An extended period of below-$40 prices—if that’s what’s ahead—will have an effect on the industry and many families will have to endure consolidation and layoffs. Weaker and overleveraged players will go out of business. The oil industry as we knew it before prices dropped may never be the same.

But if history is any guide, oil and gas prices won’t remain low forever. And the technology, the talent and the infrastructure associated with America’s energy renaissance aren’t going away. They’re new facts in the global landscape. When prices rise, American capital will flow back to the oil patch and production will ramp up again.