- Scott Sumner: The Great Depression: Elevator pitch. Wherein Sumner outlines his book on the Great Depression, The Midas Paradox, which I haven’t read but is now on the pile. Even just the outline has brought my level of understanding from zero to a vague sense of what went wrong.
- Ernie Smith: Compartmentalizing. I knew about the shipping container revolution before reading this brief history on Tedium, but I forgot just how much ships themselves transformed to accommodate the new invention to the point of being overoptimized.
- Sasha Gusev: Embryo selection company Herasight goes all in on eugenics. What it says on the tin, and these people are brain-dead morons who want to use polygenic risk scores for the betterment of society. The company’s white paper lists Benefits to future people as the very first item under the section “Moral reasons for embryo screening”. Gusev, a geneticist, has written an excellent overview of why polygenic risk scores are not that straightforward to use for even individual embryo selection and personally I think it is a terrible idea, but to each their own for individual decisions. The betterment of society ploy, however, is playing with fire that already burned through Europe not 100 years ago.
- Jay Caspian Kang for The New Yorker: If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books?. Subtitle: “Books are inefficient, and the internet is training us to expect optimized experiences.” My answer is that it depends, although the author would very much like for us to apply Betteridge’s law in our heads. (ᔥTyler Cowen)
- Kyla Scanlon: Everyone is Gambling and No One is Happy. At this point Scanlon’s essays are starting to blend in with one another, but I would like to highlight this one for pointing out a smart thing Paul Krugman wrote, The link is to his Substack newsletter, not the actual post, because that is for some reason the link Scanlon included in her own essay. Not being a Krugman reader myself I can’t tell if this is what he actually wrote or if it is Scanlon’s clever interpretation. Frustrating. which I understand to be a rare occurrence. Here are three concepts not captured by standard economics analysis that are contributing to the financial malaise:
- Economic inclusion: Can you afford to participate in society?
- Security: Are you one broken tooth away from bankruptcy?
- Fairness: Are you being scammed?
Sounds right.