Economics

I’ve been reading a few heady books recently. One of those books is Playing with Reality: How Games Shape Our World. by Kelly Clancy. The Economist has a comprehensive review of the book with a lot of details. Playing with Reality was very interesting and I learned great deal. Initially, I had thought it was going to be about the history of games and how they had impacted thought. That is definitely in there, but there is so much more to it than that.

I’ve usually had good luck with the books from the best books list on The Economist. This year is no exception. I’ve recently read two of the books on the list: Playing with Reality and Slow Productivity and have started another, Co-Intelligence. So far, I’ve not been disappointed. I’ll start with Slow Productivity by Cal Newport and cover the others in future posts. I found it to be quite interesting. I see so much silly faux productivity out there; meetings just for sake of meetings, people answering IMs and emails at all hours but adding little clarity or insight to the discussion at hand, lack of time and space for focused effort, etc.

The Economist has a Special Report on the US economy titled “The envy of the world” (subscription required). It makes a very compelling case that, although things aren’t perfect, the US economy is doing much better than rich world peers and mostly better than emerging economies like China and India. The first piece of the puzzle is productivity. Overall labor productivity in the US is much higher than in Europe and increasing at a faster rate even adjusted for the greater number of hours US workers tend to put in over their peers.

Ray Kurzweil has been notably prescient with his predictions on how fast AI will come. Genius is a term thrown around often, but he really fits the bill. He’s invented some really cool stuff over a long period of time. His editorial in The Econonomist outlines his nicely bullish predictions about the impact of AI on humanity. The areas he believes will be most impacted are energy, manufacturing and medicine.

I’ve been keeping a journal on and off for over 30 years. It has never been a literary work, merely a recounting of what was going on that day, what was good, what wasn’t. A few years back, I started to make sure I wrote what I was thankful for each day. There is always something to be thankful for, even if it is just being alive. I’m glad I’ve kept with it because it’s fun to look back sometimes and see what I was doing and thinking about all those years ago.

An article in Governing highlighted some of the benefits of sidewalks to an area’s social life and interconnectedness. I remember when we bought our house in Roanoke over 20 years ago, I wouldn’t even consider neighborhoods without sidewalks. I grew up with sidewalks everywhere and they were great for us kids to be able to play on and for the adults to get around to see each other and maybe even walk over to the grocery or community pool.

The French government is spending €200 million to destroy wine due to lack of demand. That is interesting in and of itself but the most astounding figure in the article is the drop in European wine consumption: European Commission data for the year to June shows that wine consumption has fallen 7% in Italy, 10% in Spain, 15% in France, 22% in Germany and 34% in Portugal… That’s a big year over year drop.

This article on alcohol consumption trends is really interesting. My take away from it is that people used to be drunk all the time. According to some of the data cited in the article, people in Northern Europe used to drink about a liter of beer a day and about a liter of wine a day in Southern Europe. That is a ton of drinking. Of course, water was basically poison, so it makes sense.

The FTC has proposed a rule to ban non-compete agreements. This is great. A employer shouldn’t be able to prohibit people from pursuing their career wherever they want. Non-competes give employers way too much leverage over their employees. The evidence is clear that it suppresses wages and working conditions. Trade secrets and the like can still be protected. That’s company property and should not be abused by ex-employees. But, it’s un-American to deprive someone of their pursue Happiness and switch to any other job they might prefer for any reason.

I always wondered why when you use a card for a purchase you are asked on the screen “Debit or Credit?” Doesn’t the machine know? Isn’t it encoded in the card? This nifty article by Patrick McKenzie explains that and more about how ATMs work. It’s much more complex than I had thought but makes a lot of sense. Essentially debit and credit use two different networks for payment so the question is really about which network you want to use.