Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Why Competition in the Politics Industry is Failing America

  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."

• "The Meritocracy Trap," explained

  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.

• Your Brain, Free Will and the Law

  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?

• Can Killing Cookies Save Journalism?

  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.

• When The Magic Happens

  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.

• Jeffrey Epstein's Money Tainted My Workplace. Then Ronan Farrow's Botched Reporting Trashed My Reputation

  It seems to me the New Yorker needs to correct its mistakes, but who knows.
  Quillette podcast interview here.
  

• Health Feedback

  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.
  

• The Nonconformist - Thomas Sowell

  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?

• The Enigma of Clarence Thomas by Corey Robin

  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).