There are a whole lot of interesting and troubling statistics in this discussion of social mobility and inequality in the US.

Imagine yourself on the socioeconomic ladder with one end of a rubber band around your ankle and the other around your parents’ rung. The strength of the rubber determines how hard it is for you to escape the rung on which you were born. If your parents are high on the ladder, the band will pull you up should you fall; if they are low, it will drag you down when you start to rise. Economists represent this concept with a number they call “intergenerational earnings elasticity,” or IGE, which measures how much of a child’s deviation from average income can be accounted for by the parents’ income. An IGE of zero means that there’s no relationship at all between parents’ income and that of their offspring. An IGE of one says that the destiny of a child is to end up right where she came into the world.

According to Miles Corak, an economics professor at the City University of New York, half a century ago IGE in America was less than 0.3. Today, it is about 0.5. In America, the game is half over once you’ve selected your parents. IGE is now higher here than in almost every other developed economy. On this measure of economic mobility, the United States is more like Chile or Argentina than Japan or Germany.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/

Replication crisis, episode 1382:

This new paper found that among kids whose mothers had a college degree, those who waited for a second marshmallow did no better in the long run—in terms of standardized test scores and mothers’ reports of their children’s behavior—than those who dug right in. Similarly, among kids whose mothers did not have college degrees, those who waited did no better than those who gave in to temptation, once other factors like household income and the child’s home environment at age 3 (evaluated according to a standard research measure that notes, for instance, the number of books that researchers observed in the home and how responsive mothers were to their children in the researchers’ presence) were taken into account. For those kids, self-control alone couldn’t overcome economic and social disadvantages.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/marshmallow-test/561779/

The flat Earth is the post-truth landscape. As a group, its residents view themselves as staunch empiricists, their eyes wide open. The plane truth, they say, can be grasped in experiments that anyone can do at home. For instance, approach a large body of water and hold up a ruler to the horizon: it’s flat all the way across. What pond, lake, or sea have you ever seen where the surface of its waters curves? Another argument holds that, if Earth were truly spherical, an airplane flying above it would need to constantly adjust its nose downward to avoid flying straight into space. If, say, you flew on a plane and put a spirit level—one of those levels that you buy at the hardware store, with a capsule of liquid and an air bubble in the middle—on your tray table, the level should reveal a slight downward inclination. But it doesn’t: the level is level, the flight is level, the nose of the plane is level, and therefore the surface of Earth must be level. Marble performed this experiment himself, recorded it, posted it on YouTube, and a co-worker started a Reddit thread that linked to it. Soon Marble had twenty-two thousand followers and a nickname, the Spirit-Level Guy.

“We’re not trying to express any degree of intellectual superiority,” he said at the conference. “I’m just trying to wake people up to the idea that they’ve been lied to. It’s what you would do with any friend.”

https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/looking-for-life-on-a-flat-earth

I’m extremely interested in universal basic income, and I think we’re going to need UBI or something like it if we’re going to make it into the future without catastrophically upending society. I’ve just recently started reading about negative income tax, which has the same effect, but might be significantly easier to implement.

I’ll seize this opportunity to plug GiveDirectly, where your money simultaneously supports people in enormous poverty, and contributes to the largest study ever done on UBI.

This town in California’s Central Valley has long functioned as a display case for wrenching troubles afflicting American life: The housing bust that turned Stockton into an epicenter of a national foreclosure disaster and plunged the city into bankruptcy. The homeless people clustered in tents along the railroad tracks. Boarded-up storefronts on cracked sidewalks. Gang violence.

Now, Stockton hopes to make itself an exhibition ground for elevated fortunes through a simple yet unorthodox experiment. It is readying plans to deliver $500 a month in donated cash to perhaps 100 local families, no strings attached. The trial could start as soon as the fall and continue for about two years.

It’s worth noting that the article makes a fundamental and very common error: “In the United States, a program supplying $10,000 a year to every American would cost $3 trillion.” But of course (all else being equal) everyone receives $10k a year, and because the money has to come from somewhere, everyone pays an extra $10k a year (on average) in taxes. In other words, the base cost is zero. Because we have a progressive income tax system (as we should!), people who are poor enough to pay no taxes end up $10k ahead. People who have enormous wealth will end up paying considerably more than is offset by the $10k they receive. So it’s basically a low-bureaucracy way of making our tax system more progressive, at no intrinsic cost.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/business/stockton-basic-income.html

Tokyo is home to the world’s busiest train stations, with the capital’s rail operators handling a combined 13 billion passenger trips annually. Ridership of that volume requires a deft blend of engineering, planning, and psychology. Beneath the bustle, unobtrusive features are designed to unconsciously manipulate passenger behavior, via light, sound, and other means. Japan’s boundless creativity in this realm reflects the deep consideration given to public transportation in the country.

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/05/the-amazing-psychology-of-japanese-train-stations/560822/

Very cool stuff. Warning: the article gets pretty far down into the weeds.

The accuracy of the cesium clock has improved greatly since 1955, increasing by a factor of 10 or so every decade. Nowadays, timekeeping based on cesium clocks accrues errors at a rate of just 0.02 nanosecond per day. If we had started such a clock when Earth began, about 4.5 billion years ago, it would be off by only about 30 seconds today.

But we can do better. A new generation of atomic clocks that use laser light instead of microwave radiation can divide time more finely. About six years ago, researchers completed single-ion versions of these optical clocks, made with an ion of either aluminum or mercury. These surpassed the accuracy of cesium clocks by a full order of magnitude.

Now, a new offshoot of this technology, the optical-lattice clock (OLC), has taken the lead. Unlike single-ion clocks, which yield one measurement of frequency at a time, OLCs can simultaneously measure thousands of atoms held in place by a powerful standing laser beam, driving down statistical uncertainty. In the past year, these clocks have managed to surpass the best single-ion optical clocks in both accuracy and stability. With further development, they will lose no more than a second over 13.8 billion years—the present-day age of the universe.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/satellites/introducing-the-worlds-most-precise-clock

Very interesting read. I hadn’t realized that politicians’ stances on impeachment might well play a major role this November.

Today, the impeachment of Donald Trump exists on the brink of plausibility. The sine qua non of an impeachment investigation, to say nothing of actual votes to charge and remove the President, is a Democratic takeover of the House in the November elections. Such a change now looks better than possible, maybe even probable. At the same time, the President appears to be in ever-greater legal peril from dual investigations, one led by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, and the other by federal prosecutors in New York. In April, F.B.I. agents raided the offices of Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime lawyer and fixer, and removed telephones and business records. Cohen has not been charged with a crime, but the prospect of a case against him, with the chance that he might plead guilty and reveal everything he knows, represents a substantial risk for the President. In Washington, Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national-security adviser, and Rick Gates, who worked on Trump’s campaign and in his White House, have both already pleaded guilty to charges brought by Mueller and agreed to coöperate with his investigation. The full extent of Mueller’s findings is not known, raising the possibility that more legal and political damage to the President is yet to come. While Rudolph Giuliani, Trump’s attorney, may or may not be correct that Mueller believes he lacks the legal authority to indict the President, the possibility of impeachment clearly exists—if Congress has the evidence, and the will, to proceed.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/28/will-the-fervor-for-impeachment-start-a-democratic-civil-war

This is an absolutely terrific teardown of the problems with “Universal Basic Jobs.” It looks like Basic Jobs will be an issue in the Democratic primaries, so if you’re likely to vote Democrat, this is an important read.

I grudgingly forgive capitalism the misery it causes, because it’s the engine that lifts countries out of poverty. It’s a precondition for a free and prosperous society; attempts to overthrow it have so consistently led to poverty, tyranny, or genocide that we no longer believe its proponents’ earnest oaths that this time they’ve got it right. For right now, there’s no good alternative.

But if we have a basic jobs guarantee, it will cause all the same misery, and I won’t forgive it. The flimsy justifications we can think up won’t be up to the task of justifying the vast suffering it will cause. We can’t excuse it as necessary to produce the goods and services we rely on. We can’t excuse it as a necessary condition for political freedom. If a worker asks “why?”, our only answer will be “because Cory Booker thought a basic jobs guarantee would play better among the electorate than basic income, now get back to packing boxes and collapsing from dehydration”. There will be an alternative: a basic income guarantee. We will have rejected it.

I feel like as a quasi-libertarian, I sometimes downplay how awful private industry, capitalism, and the modern workplace are. If so, I apologize. The only possible excuse for defending such a flood of misery is what inevitably happens when people meddle with it. But the price of such morally tenuous greater-good style reasoning is that you need to stay hyper-aware of times when you don’t need to defend the system, when there is a chance to do better without destroying everything. I think basic income is such a chance. And I think basic jobs are a tiny modification to the idea, which destroys its potential and perpetuates all the worst parts of the existing system.

Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs: Against Hijacking Utopia

The news last week that scientists had developed a brain implant that boosts memory — an implantable “cognitive prosthetic,” in the jargon — should be astounding even to the cynical.

NYT