Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
Katherine M. Gehl and Michael E. Porters, Harvard Business School
Most people think of politics as its own unique public institution
governed by impartial laws dating back to the founders. Not
so. Politics is, in fact, an industry-most of whose key players are
private, gain-seeking organizations. The industry competes, just like
other industries, to grow and accumulate resources and influence
for itself. The key players work to advance their self-interests,
not necessarily the public interest.
...
As we have seen, the current partisan primary system is perhaps
the single most powerful obstacle to achieving outcomes for the
common good. Instead, states should move to a single primary ballot
for all candidates, no matter what their affiliation, and open up
primaries to all voters, not just registered party voters. The
top four vote-getters from such a single non-partisan ballot
would advance to the general election, instead of one winner from
each duopoly party. This incentivizes all candidates to present
themselves to a general electorate, not just appeal to a small
cadre of party-partisan voters
For more discussion see, A nonpartisan approach to fixing the politics industry.
Because they need to stoke party loyalty to win votes, elected officials often prefer not to solve our country's problems, Gehl maintained. "If the industry keeps alive divisive issues, like immigration, guns, and healthcare, and they continue to fester, then partisans and special interests on both sides are energized to continue to vote and engage along those very compelling product lines."
Discussion with Daniel Markovits the author of the new book.
Fifty, 60, 70 years ago, you could tell how poor somebody was by
how hard they worked. Today, that relationship has been completely
reversed. Elites work for a living. They work harder than they used
to. They work harder in terms of brute hours than the middle class
on average, and they get most of their income by working.
...
The rich today are no longer an indolent "leisure class" but
what Markovits calls a "superordinate" working class: they
work harder, longer, and perform more high-skilled work than ever
before. As a result, Markovits calculates that three-quarters of
elite income now originates from labor rather than inherited capital.
A foundational assumption of the aspirational critique is that a more fully meritocratic society is also a more equal one. But Markovits's analysis leads to the opposite conclusion: Skyrocketing inequality has taken place on meritocracy’s own terms.
Scientific American podcast with Stanford University neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky.
Sapolsky makes the claim that there is no free will. I agree with him in that there is no known mechanism to explain how free will could exist. But since there might be an explanation we don't know about yet, why not be agnostic about it? This seems to me to be a case of "what do atheists believe in".
Also Sapolsky suggested some ways society can make changes to the legal system. But if individuals don't have free will and society is made up of individuals, how can society be "free" to change the way it behaves? Isn't the way groups of people think and act predetermined also? And taking it to an extreme, once the big bang happened isn't the course of history predetermined?
A Dutch public broadcaster got rid of targeted digital ads-and its revenues went way up.
If the Google study was right, then NPO should have been heading
for financial disaster. The opposite turned out to be true. Instead,
the company found that ads served to users who opted out of cookies
were bringing in as much or more money as ads served to users who
opted in. The results were so strong that as of January 2020, NPO
simply got rid of advertising cookies altogether. And rather than
decline, its digital revenue is dramatically up, even after the
economic shock of the coronavirus pandemic.
...
When a user visits an NPO page, a signal automatically goes
out to advertisers inviting them to bid to show that user their
ad. But there's a crucial difference: With Google and most other
ad servers, advertisers are bidding on the user. With Ster's new
ad server, advertisers are blind-they receive no information on the
user. Instead, they get information about what the user is looking
at. Pages and videos are tagged based on their content. Instead of
targeting a certain type of customer, advertisers target customers
reading a certain type of article or watching a certain type of show.
Morgan Housel speculates on possible upsides of the Covid-19 pandemic.
All we know is that the most important changes of the last 100 years have taken place during upheavals. And we’re currently in the biggest upheaval of the last 100 years.
We know that creativity and discovery surge when people are forced to find, rather than just want, new solutions.
We know that an irony of technology is that economies often make their greatest leaps forward when the outlook is bleakest.
It might be one of the only silver linings of 2020.
It seems to me the New Yorker needs to correct its mistakes,
but who knows.
Quillette podcast interview
here.
A worldwide network of scientists sorting fact from fiction in
health and medical media coverage.
Our goal is to help readers know which news to trust.
Over a lifetime of scholarship and public engagement, economist Thomas Sowell has illuminated controversial topics such as race, poverty, and culture.
Sowell soon got himself emancipated and found a shelter for homeless
youth. "It was now very clear to me that there was only one person
in the world I could depend on," he realized. "Myself." With little
more than the clothes on his back, he began a long journey that
would lead him to the Marines, the Ivy League, and, briefly, the
White House, at the Department of Labor.
...
One way he pressure-tests this assumption is by finding conditions
in which we know, with near-certainty, that racial bias does not
exist, and then seeing if outcomes are, in fact, equal. For example,
between white Americans of French descent and white Americans of
Russian descent, it's safe to assume that neither group suffers
more bias than the other-if for no other reason than that they're
hard to tell apart. Nevertheless, the French descendants earn only
70 cents for every dollar earned by the Russian-Americans. Why such
a large gap? Sowell's basic insight is that the question is posed
backward. Why would we think that two ethnic groups with different
histories, demographics, social patterns, and cultural values would
nevertheless achieve identical results?
Book review.
Thomas's politics are based on his belief that the state can do nothing for African Americans other than perpetuate an underclass and that positive discrimination can only disable black men (there is no room in Thomas's "dreamscape", as Robin puts it, for black women).