Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
John Komlos, NBER Working Paper.
The major consistent findings include what in the colloquial is
referred to as the "hollowing out" of the middle class. According
to these estimates, the income of the middle class 2nd and 3rd
quintiles increased at a rate of between 0.1% and 0.7% per annum,
i.e., barely distinguishable from zero. Even that meager rate was
achieved only through substantial transfer payments. In contrast,
the income of the top 1% grew at an astronomical rate of between 3.4%
and 3.9% per annum during the 32-year period, reaching an average
annual value of $918,000, up from $281,000 in 1979 (in 2011 dollars).
...
With interdependent utility functions only the welfare of the 5th
quintile experienced meaningful growth while those of the first
four quintiles tend to be either negligible or even negative.
Long before Edward Snowden went public, John Crane was a top Pentagon official fighting to protect NSA whistleblowers. Instead their lives were ruined -- and so was his.
The first is Thomas Drake, who blew the whistle on the very same
NSA activities 10 years before Snowden did. Drake was a much
higher-ranking NSA official than Snowden, and he obeyed US whistleblower
laws, raising his concerns through official channels. And he got crushed.
...
But there is another man whose story has never been told before,
who is speaking out publicly for the first time here. His name is
John Crane, and he was a senior official in the Department of Defense
who fought to provide fair treatment for whistleblowers such as
Thomas Drake -- until Crane himself was forced out of his job and
became a whistleblower as well.
Cognitive scientists have revealed systematic errors in human reasoning. There is disagreement about what these errors indicate about human rationality, but one upshot seems clear: human reasoning does not seem to fit traditional views of human rationality. This concern about rationality has made its way through various fields and has recently caught the attention of philosophers. The concern is that if philosophers are prone to systematic errors in reasoning, then the integrity of philosophy would be threatened. In this paper, I present some of the more famous work in cognitive science that has marshaled this concern. Then I present reasons to think that those with training in philosophy will be less prone to certain systematic errors in reasoning. The suggestion is that if philosophers could be shown to be less prone to such errors, then the worries about the integrity of philosophy could be constrained. Then I present evidence that, according to performance on the CRT (Frederick 2005), those who have benefited from training and selection in philosophy are indeed less prone to one kind of systematic error: irrationally arbitrating between intuitive and reflective responses. Nonetheless, philosophers are not entirely immune to this systematic error, and their proclivity for this error is statistically related to their responses to a variety of philosophical questions. So, while the evidence herein puts constraints on the worries about the integrity of philosophy, it by no means eliminates these worries. The conclusion, then, is that the present evidence offers prima facie reasons to ascribe a mitigated privilege to philosophers' ability to rationally arbitrate between intuitive and reflective responses.
and it's probably happened to you
A study published (paywall) today (May 16) in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences indicates that when we act
unethically, we're more likely to remember these actions less
clearly. Researchers from Northwestern University and Harvard
University coined the term "unethical amnesia" to describe this
phenomenon, which they believe stems from the fact that memories
of ourselves acting in ways we shouldn't are uncomfortable.
"Unethical amnesia is driven by the desire to lower one's distress
that comes from acting unethically and to maintain a positive
self-image as a moral individual," the authors write in the paper.
A Conversation With Gary Marcus (with Edge Video and audio).
Even though there's a lot of hype about AI and a lot of money being invested in AI, I feel like the field is headed in the wrong direction. There's been a local maximum where there's a lot of low-hanging fruit right now in a particular direction, which is mainly deep learning and big data. People are very excited about the big data and what it's giving them right now, but I'm not sure it's taking us closer to the deeper questions in artificial intelligence, like how we understand language or how we reason about the world.
Nordic societies seem to have it all: a historic tradition of women's
entrepreneurship, modern welfare states that provide support to
working parents, outstanding levels of women's participation in
the labour market and populations that strongly support the idea
of gender equality. It therefore comes as a surprise that Nordic
countries, in one international ranking after another, are shown
to have few women among top-managers and business owners. Another
surprise is that the three Baltic countries, which have more
conservative societies and a more small-government approach than
their Nordic neighbors, have more women managers, top executives
and business owners.
...
In this book, Dr. Nima Sanandaji shows that the apparent paradox
has a simple answer: Nordic welfare states are -- unintentionally
-- holding women back. Public sector monopolies and substantial
tax wedges limit women's progress in the labour market. Overly
generous parental leave systems encourage women to stay home
rather than work. Welfare state safety nets discourage women from
self-employment.
The report found that inequality was strongly associated with unhappiness -- a stark finding for rich countries like the United States, where rising disparities in income, wealth, health and well-being have fueled political discontent.