Things to Read at Nighttime on May 6, 2015

Must- and Should-Reads:

• Emily Badger: “At the top were places–Dupage County in suburban Chicago; Fairfax County, Va.–that dramatically improve a poor child’s odds of moving up the economic ladder. At the bottom were the places that have the opposite effect, counties that exert a kind of negative pull on children, where every year of childhood whittles away at a poor kid’s odds of thriving as an adult in a way that can be measured by his potential earnings in adulthood. Ranked last on this list: Baltimore City. ‘Baltimore is at the bottom,’ Hendren says. ‘But it’s really at the bottom for boys.'”
• Ben Thompson: “Books were a commodity… [and] exceptionally high-priced. The list price of a new book contained a 50 percent markup for the retailer…. Bezos–who a few years later would coin the famous phrase, ‘Your margin is my opportunity’–could sell books at a significant discount while still making money on each transaction…. Moreover, the nature of Amazon’s business… resulted in a negative cash conversion cycle that freed up much more cash for investment than would otherwise be warranted by Amazon’s margins, an effect that was greatly magnified by Amazon’s growth rate. This made books, over the long-run, a truly profitable business for Amazon…” https://stratechery.com/2015/the-aws-ipo/
• Dylan Matthews: “But for all Ryan’s rhetoric… he’s also the author… budgets that would… inflict… massive human suffering on the nation’s most vulnerable residents…. He’s going to argue that taking trillions away from the poor is somehow actually good for them. It doesn’t help that the first policy statement he makes is an out-and-out lie: ‘After a 50-year war on poverty and trillions of dollars spent, we still have the same poverty rates’…”
• Eduardo Porter: What the Debate on Inequality Is Missing
• Must-Read: Planet Money: The Fall And Rise Of U.S. Inequality
• Herman K. Trabish: Under pressure from Koch-funded groups, Kansas axes renewables mandate
• Must-Read: David Glasner: John Taylor’s Cluelessness about Strategy, Tactics and Discretion
• Jérémie Cohen-Setton: The American poverty traps: what are the factors influencing upward mobility in the US?

Over at Equitable Growth—The Equitablog

• Plus:

• Things to Read on the Evening of January 31, 2015

And Over Here:

• Might Like to Be Aware of:

• Alexander Hertel-Fernandez: When Bosses Recruit Employees into Politics

• Phryne
• Lunchtime Must Read: Robert Lucas Rejects the “Microfoundational” Project
• Sappho: The Flames of the Tigers are lighting the Road to Berlin