Timothy Taylor has a great summary of Santiago Levy’s Under-Rewarded Efforts, a book about the lack of productivity growth in Mexico. One of the core points is that the social welfare system drew a big distinction between salaried and non-salaried workers, which failed to account for the incentives that would create:

Bradley Tusk’s fun book The Fixer describes some of the political fights he took on. One was for Handy, a gig economy house cleaning and services market place. Handy wanted to pay into a portable benefits plan, but avoid pushing it’s contractors into employee status, and avoiding that triggered a fight with unions (particularly 32BJ in New York).

I realised that the distinction I drew yesterday between reshaping the economy and reshaping businesses is better described by Joel Mokyr’s terms macroinvention and microinvention. 

Fred Wilson posted a (relatively long for him) blog entry about, roughly, whether billionaires are immoral, and the current progressive agenda.

Marx famously described a varied world of work, which he viewed as a better one: 

Recently, Arnold Kling posted a list of Klingisms, which is worth a look. One caught my eye in particular:

Just listened to a very interesting EconTalk episode with Ed Dolan. He outlines a healthcare approach that seems, first blush, an interesting option for the US. 

I have recently been reading Steven Hill’s Raw Deal, a mix of useful policy recommendations and ranty polemic against the gig economy. During one section he mentions, in an aside, the situation a few folks have suggested, where a private firm cherry picks the best bus routes in a city, depriving transport authorities from much needed revenue and while exploiting the infrastructure maintained by the public. Hill points to San Francisco where this had already started happening.

Astronomer Royal Martin Rees gave a Long Now SALT talk last night around the topics in his new book, On The Future, which covers long term threats and opportunities for humanity. One of the approaches I found particularly interesting was being explicit about the discount rates applied when considering different kinds of preventative measures. 

As the job market changes, one way people can maintain or grow their incomes is by pivoting to more in-demands fields. For all the automation and expansion, relatively few people are unemployed (joblessness is a somewhat different boat), and most industries are unable to hire all the people they would like due to lack of appropriate candidates.