Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Why Elizabeth Warren's Accountable Capitalism Act Will Be Good for Shareholders

  The Massachusetts senator described how as recently as the early 1980s, even conservative groups acknowledged publicly that corporations were responsible to employees and communities as well as to shareholders. And as we've written, and is implicit in the Warren article, there is no such thing as a legal obligation to "maximize shareholder value". It's simply an ideology that has become widely accepted, even as some of its most prominent advocates, such as Harvard's Michael Jensen, have since renounced it. But this practice has become so deeply embedded and so damaging that it will apparently take a change in rules, or at least a credible and live threat to do so, to change behavior in boardrooms and the C-suite.

• Why Does Trump Get More Credit Than Obama for the Same Economy?

  Jonathan Chait, Aug. 7, 2018

  The preferred Republican answer is that Trump has turned the economy around with his brilliant combination of deal-making, tax-cutting, and freeing Job Creators of laborious Obama-era regulation. There is no evidence whatsoever for this widespread claim. Ramesh Ponnuru and Michael Strain, two conservative writers, examine a wide array of economic data, and find the economy is performing no better now than it did in Obama's second term. Overall economic growth is the same, and job growth is slightly slower. The Trump tax cut is supposed to spur more investment, which would increase incomes over the long run, but there is no sign of any increased investment so far.

  Also see, Cherry-Picking to Overhype Jobs Gains from Tax Cuts
• Real World vs. Book Knowledge

  Morgan Housel

  Athletic performance isn't just what you're physically capable of. It's what you're capable of within the context of what your brain is willing to endure at a given moment's risk and reward.
  ...
  Keynes had discovered for economics the same thing Hill discovered for physiology: It's difficult to measure today how something will perform tomorrow, because both people and economies are not pure machines. They have souls. And in the real world, souls drive performance in ways you'd never imagine in the classroom. Hill called it "moral factors". Keynes called it "animal spirits." Both can be summarized as, "People in the wild are different from people on paper. Study accordingly"

• Radical Markets

  New book by Eric A. Posner & E. Glen Weyl offering five very original and controversial ways to improve our economy.

  • Property is Monopoly
  • Radical Democracy
  • Uniting the World's Workers
  • Dismembering the Octopus
  • Data as Labor

  Russ Roberts interviews one of the authors, Glen Weyl, about the book on his podcast Econtalk.

• Creativity at the Knowledge Frontier:

  The Impact of Specialization in Fast- and Slow-paced Domains

  We show that generalist scientists performed best when the pace of change was slower and their ability to draw from diverse knowledge domains was an advantage in the field, but specialists gained advantage when the pace of change increased and their deeper expertise allowed them to use new knowledge created at the knowledge frontier. We discuss and test the roles of cognitive mechanisms and of competition for scarce resources. Specifically, we show that specialists became more desirable collaborators when the pace of change was faster, but when the pace of change was slower, generalists were more sought after as collaborators.

• Steven Pinker Critiques the Inequality Alarmism of Thomas Piketty

  In Enlightenment Now, Pinker makes a crucial counterpoint-the distinction between relative and absolute prosperity: "Total wealth today is vastly greater than it was in 1910, so if the poorer half own the same proportion, they are far richer, not 'as poor'." Put simply, people can be much richer in absolute terms despite a relatively smaller share of total wealth.
  ...
  This simple but powerful insight often confuses the inequality crowd. They tend to lump poverty and inequality together, which is a clear category error.

  It's the author (Quinn Connelly) who is confused. Steven Pinker didn't come to that conclusion. As has been shown, even with non-human mammals, relative wealth is as important (maybe even more so) as absolute wealth.

• Podcasting is not walled (yet)

  Podcasts are simply RSS feeds with links to media files (usually mp3s).

  If some company decides not to include an URL in their catalog, this shouldn’t really matter. An URL is an URL, the content is there. Both Apple and Google are pretty much hiding the feature that makes podcasting as free and un-censorable as websites.

  I agree. I listen to many podcasts and although I can always find the RSS feed, it's a pain and it shouldn't be.

• 10 reasons to ignore computer science degrees

  Many organizations are looking beyond the CS degree to hire programmers who can deliver real results. Here's why they might be right.

• Invisible Girlfriend

  Someone to share with. No strings attached.
  An invisible girlfriend always listens to you and knows just what to say.
  

  WHAT'S AN INVISIBLE GIRLFRIEND?
  A DIGITAL VERSION OF A REAL GIRLFRIEND WITHOUT THE BAGGAGE.
  HOW DOES IT WORK?
  BUILD her TO YOUR SPECIFICATIONS. YOU CHOOSE her AGE, PHOTO, AND PERSONALITY.