Things to Read on the Evening of February 26, 2015
Must- and Shall-Reads:
- : “Ezra Klein is pushing back against the Healthcare Reform 2.0 talk with an interesting and I think wrong post at Vox…”
- : The simple reason Walmart & TJ Maxx are handing out raises — people are quitting
- : The Financialization Project
- : The Gender Pay Gap: How Has It Evolved Over Time?
- : A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality
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: Teeth Whitening at the Supreme Court: The Antitrust Limits of Professional Sovereignty: “The Supreme Court’s 6-3 opinion in North Carolina State Board of Dental Examiners vs. FTC is out…. It… in an unexpected way… delineat[es] antitrust’s limits on the states’ powers to regulate, de-regulate, and out-source regulation to a “non-sovereign actor.”… [The case] has ended up as a poster child for the clear articulation and active supervision standards required to determine whether an anticompetitive policy is indeed the policy of a given state, and entitled to immunity…. North Carolina’s Dental Board functioned more as a trade association with super powers granted to it by the state–apparently with an open-ended portfolio of responsibilities relating to dentistry in the state…. The dissent argues the delegation was valid and the Sherman Act does not sit to second guess the wisdom or even fairness of the delegation. Whatever you think of the dissent, Justice Alito is spot on when he notes that the majority opinion is potentially quite disruptive for state medical licensing boards… long been under full sway of the regulated health professions…. We have almost no tradition of genuine state regulation of doctors, dentists, and optometrists other than the North Carolina Dental Board model…. If we aim to take it over it will not be a taking it back, but a taking it on–an invention out of whole cloth.” -
: Fairness and Frictions: The Impact of Unequal Raises on Quit Behavior: “At a large U.S. retailer… discrete pay steps created discontinuities in raises, where workers initially earning within 1 cent of each other got raises that differed by 10 cents…. We find large causal effects of wages on quits…. The large effects of wages on quits mostly reflects relative-pay concerns and not market comparisons…. After accounting for peer effects, quits do not appear to be very sensitive to wages–suggesting substantial employer wage–setting power…. The relative-pay concerns are asymmetric… driven mainly by workers who are paid below their peers, suggesting concerns about fairness or disadvantageous inequity.” -
: Breaking the Web: “I absolutely loved this New York Times column which lamented… apps… [with no] capability to link…. ‘Unlike web pages, mobile apps do not have links. They do not have web addresses. They live in worlds by themselves, largely cut off from one another and the broader Internet. And so it is much harder to share the information found on them.’ Yes, yes, for the love of God yes. We have broken HTTP… a good specification which we’ve steadily whittled away…. A core understanding of HTTP should be a base requirement for working in this business. To not do that is to ignore a massive part of digital history (which we’re also very good at)…. Narcissism runs rampant in this industry, and our willingness to throw away and ignore some of the core philosophies of HTTP is just one manifestation of this. Rant over.” -
: I’m writing a newsletter: “I made the case for Obama’s new regulations on investment advisors, did an explainer on Greece’s deal with the Eurogroup, aggregating some cool diagrams of an energy-negative house in Australia, aggregated a cool chart about cohabitation among unmarried parents, and offered a hot take on partisanship and patriotism…. Those pieces… are all designed for the social web as it exists in the winter of 2014-2015, which is to say that they are designed to be viable as atomic pieces of content read and shared by people who have no idea who I am or what I’ve done before. There’s a lot to like about the contemporary social web, but one thing it lacks that I loved about blogging was the sense of direct, continual engagement between author and audience. My solution to that, I hope, is a newsletter. Specifically this newsletter. Communication between myself and a self-selected audience of individuals who I hope will subscribe with the intention of reading regularly and coming back for more…. Though I will always–always–have a very special place in my heart for blogging as a medium…. This will be like blogging, but for your inbox… it will come out frequently–but unpredictably. And like a Matthew Yglesias blog, it will come with plenty of typos and minimal editing…” -
: Is There a Site That Is the Opposite of Zero Hedge?: “Back in 2009 or so, I found Zero Hedge… and it seemed like a well-reasoned, thoughtful, informative blog, with a number of clearly articulated reasons why the Fed’s actions were unsustainable, would fail, etc. Now, many years later, I see that none of these clearly articulated positions have come true. Everything they said couldn’t and wouldn’t happen did in fact happen. So, having missed out on the market’s huge rally, I am looking for some other well articulated blog…”
Should Be Aware of: