Random links
- Why Boredom Is Good for Your Creativity
- An awesome quote from Graham Linehan to start things off: "I have to use all these programs that cut off the internet, force me to be bored, because being bored is an essential part of writing, and the internet has made it very hard to be bored."
- Sharing the knowledge burden
- "I'm most inclined to think that it's the pace of societal evolution that is most binding: growth proceeds at the fastest pace that legal and social institutions can tolerate.
Think of the challenges that would face the would-be tacocopter entrepreneurs. Consider that issues surrounding liability and law, rather than technology, now appear to be the biggest obstacle to autonomous vehicles." - Wishful thinking: If we only had a stable energy policy
- "In this column energy expert Rapier provides three examples — originating with both Democrats and Republicans and impacting both renewable energy and fossil fuels — of how constantly shifting legislation makes it very difficult to plan and execute energy projects." Found this via KP who disagree somewhat with the article's conclusion that "the real reason we have dysfunctional energy policies is that we elect dysfunctional leaders" - arguing instead that stable policy "would reduce policymakers’ significance to that of mere policy-caretakers, and no one shows much reverence for caretakers (nor donates to the caretakers’ Super-PACs)."
- Cut to grow
- A paper from a conservative think tank. Based on a graph of % change in GDP vs. % change in government spending in the country it draws the conclusion that "there is no obvious relationship between a decrease in government spending and a decrease in GDP. Keynesians would expect the line to slope upward; in fact, it slopes slightly downward. ... The chart has two policy implications. First, austerity has not caused even near-term harm to countries that have undertaken it. Second, austerity is something of a free lunch. This is because, as studies (such as a 2010 paper by economists Andreas Bergh and Martin Karlsson) show, longer-run growth is higher in countries with smaller governments. Nations that reduce spending today can do so without fearing that the longer-run growth is beingpurchased with a costly near-term recession."
- In escape from Japan doomsday, capital takes flight
- "For many, nuclear radiation leaks at Fukushima served as a catalyst to take another hard look at Japan's economic woes - massive public debt, an ageing population, low economic growth and deflation - and made them seem more insurmountable than before." - seems that it's now not just the old but also the young looking at acquiring property outside of Japan and eventually moving there.
- Valuing Domestic Product
- The NYT tackles the issue of how the work done at home impacts GDP: "Marry your butler (or your research assistant) and share your income equally instead of paying him by the hour. The size of G.D.P. will shrink. Divorce him, and G.D.P. is likely to expand. ... the new estimates of the value of unpaid domestic work represent a conservative lower bound. Yet they are by no means low: inclusion raises the level of G.D.P. 39 percent in 1965 and 25.7 percent in 2010. ... Within the United States (as in other countries), there is far less variation across households in the value of home production than in the value of market income. As a result, the value of home production reduces the overall level of inequality in living standards. Full-time housewives are, in a sense, equalizers."