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)