Tag: readinglist

Great example of status quo bias in an article about the flu this week. And EU privacy laws are helping a murderer wipe his history from Google. Fun stuff!

• The “Right to be Forgotten” doubles back and shoots the shark. Volokh Conspiracy. Wow! So now EU privacy laws are responsible for something even worse than cookie popups everywhere.
• Why doesn’t the flu freak us out more? Futurity. File this one under “Cognitive Biases: Status Quo Bias”. Same reason why people aren’t deathly afraid of riding in cars.
• Trump Didn’t Shrink U.S. Military Commitments Abroad—He Expanded Them. Foreign Affairs. In my private life I’ve frequently tempered my criticism of President Trump by saying something along the lines of, “But I like that he’s bringing troops home.” I guess that’s just a myth?
• Big Calculator: How Texas Instruments Monopolized Math Class. Medium. Isn’t this supposed to be impossible in a market economy? What prevents competition here?
• How Not To Die. Paul Graham. Personally inspirational.

The most important financial news of the past two weeks is that scientists have discovered that Jackson Pollock’s technique cleverly avoided a characteristic of fluid dynamics that leads to unwanted curly tails on paint pourings. Finance!

• Pollock paintings avoid a curly physics problem. futurity.com.
• You silly, silly people. Tyler Cowen. Politics… don’t matter.
• The Myth of the Nazi War Machine. Notes on Liberty.
• Lindsey Graham keeps moving the goalposts to downplay Trump’s Ukraine dealings. Vox. I think a lot of the drama that has unfolded with the Trump administration was fairly predictable in 2016, but one thing that has surprised me is the absolute downfall of Sen. Lindsey Graham as a serious person.
• Stab a Book, the Book Won’t Die. Craigmod.
• Immediate brain plasticity after one hour of brain–computer interface. Journal of Physiology. Brains are so, so cool.
• It’s Time to Take Down the Mona Lisa. NY Times.
• How to Steal a Billion. Oversharing. In the future, it will be good to think back and remember the WeWork saga whenever a financial guy in a suit is trying to tell you he has a special understanding of the marketplace.

An extra long list this week to catch up after Hurricane Dorian. Favorite quote this week: “Thus, accumulating evidence shows that over-representation of males in STEM fields is perhaps better framed as under-representation of males in reading fields and the latter is driven by relatively low reading achievement among males.”

• Circumstances in Which I Will Not Pet Your Dog. New Yorker. Yep, pretty much.
• Girls’ comparative advantage in reading can largely explain the gender gap in math-related fields. Marginal Revolution. Evidence that the gender gap in math/science is primarily caused by boys being terrible at reading in school.
• Active Learning Works But Students Don’t Like It. Marginal Revolution, again.
• The American Working Man Still Isn’t Working. Foreign Affairs. I was quite shocked by the fact that 13.7% of men age 25-54 are not working, up from 12.8% in 2007.
• Greta Thunberg Is the Anti-Trump. New Yorker. When I was sixteen I mostly played Mortal Kombat Trilogy all day after school. Inspiring!
• A crack just emerged in the financial markets: The NY Fed spends $53 billion to rescue the overnight lending market. CNN Business. Odd.
• A Lunar Space Elevator Is Actually Feasible & Inexpensive, Scientists Find. Observer. Science is so cool.
• Physicists Finally Nail the Proton’s Size, and Hope Dies. Quanta Magazine. Even when science is kind of boring, it’s still so cool.
• The boring technology behind a one-person internet company. Wenbin Fang, ListenNotes. Not investment-related at all, but I loved this article and found it encouraging as a fellow one-person internet company.

I really enjoyed the article about Google’s internal culture, but the key article this week is a short blog from PIMCO on the possibility of negative interest rates in the U.S.

• How Government Prolonged the Lobotomy. AIER. Super creepy.
• What is Amazon? Zack Canter. HT Tyler Cowen.
• Study: many of the “oldest” people in the world may not be as old as we think. Vox. I feel like this type of thing is going to pop up more and more as people do Big Data things.
• Three Years of Misery Inside Google, the Happiest Company in Tech. Wired.
• How One City Saved $5 Million by Routing School Buses with an Algorithm. Route Fifty.
• GitHub Stars Won’t Pay Your Rent. Medium.
• Interest Rates: Naturally Negative? PIMCO. The world is not prepared for a negative dollar interest rate.

Support for minimum wage hikes, food stamps, passive indexing, and free trade. I’m kind of all over the place this week. Plus an engraving of Adam Smith wearing one of those cool wigs like a boss.

• Congress has never let the federal minimum wage erode for this long. Economic Policy Institute.
• Verdict Is In: Food Stamps Put Poor Kids on Path to Success. Bloomberg.
• Trump Says U.S. Will Hit China With More Tariffs. NY Times.
• Winner Takes All Applies to Stocks, Too. Barry Ritholtz. Barry interprets this data as providing encouragement to both active investors and passive indexers, but I see it as strongly supporting indexing, and no support for active investing.
• The progressive case for free trade. Vox. This is an interesting piece. I agree with all of it, but this is most definitely NOT a “progressive” case for free trade. It’s a concise outline of the basic economic, moral, and libertarian case for free trade. A+ on the article, F- on picking a title for the article.

Here are a few financial articles that I found interesting this week. Let me know if I missed some!

• Is it True that 40% of Americans Can’t Handle a $400 Emergency Expense?: CATO Institute. Short answer: Nope.
• Amazon wants to pay the New York Times and BuzzFeed to expand so it can reach more shoppers outside the US: Vox.com.
• An Interview With A Man Who Eats Leftover Food From Strangers’ Plates In Restaurants: Not financial or economic but very funny. Hat tip Tyler Cowen.
• Trump Delays Auto Tariffs in Press for Deal With Japan, Europe: NY Times.