1. St. Monday, American Inequality and Class Struggle: One of my favorite things about writing the faiV is when I get the chance to point readers to something they would likely never come across otherwise. So how about a blog post from a woodworking tool vendor about 19th century labor practices, craft unions and the gig economy? Once you read that, you'll want to remind yourself about this piece from Sendhil Mullainathan about employment as a commitment device (paper here), and this paper from Dupas, Robinson and Saavedra on Kenyan bike taxi drivers' version of St. Monday.
Back to modern America, here's Matt Bruenig on class struggle and wealth inequality through the lens of American Airlines, Thomas Picketty and Suresh Naidu. I feel a particular affinity for this item this week having watched American Airlines employees for a solid 12 hours try to do their jobs while simultaneously giving up the pretense that they have any idea what is going on.
2. Our Algorithmic Overlords: Facebook is investing a lot in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Sometimes that work isn't about getting you to spend more time on Facebook...or is it? With researchers at Georgia Tech, Facebook has been working on teaching machines to negotiate by "watching" human negotiations. One of the first things the machines learned was to "deceive." I use quotes here because while it's the word the researchers use, I'm not sure you can use the word deceive in this context. And that's not the only part of the description that seems overly anthropomorphic.
Meanwhile, Lant Pritchett has a new post at CGD that ties together Silicon Valley, robots, labor unions, migration and development. And probably some other things as well. If I read Lant correctly, he would approve of Facebook's negotiating 'bots since negotiation is a scarce and expensive resource (though outsourcing negotiation is filled with principal-agent problems). I guess that means a world where robots are negotiating labor contracts for low- and mid-skill workers would be a better one than the one we're currently in?
3. Statistics, Research Quality and External Validity: Here's another piece from Lant on external validity and multi-dimensional considerations when trying to systematize education evidence. A simpler way to put it: He's got some intriguing 3-dimensional charts that allow for thinking a bit more carefully about likely outcomes of interventions, given multiple factors influence how much a child learns in school. It closely parallels some early conversations I've had for my next book with Susan Athey and Guido Imbens, so I'm paying close attention. And if you can't get enough Lant, you could always check out my current book. Yes, both of those sentences are shameless plugs.
4. Household Finance: If you read the faiV regularly you know I think about household finance a lot and how little we really know about household finance decisions. Viviana Zelizer is a sociologist who opened a lot of vistas on household finance--particularly on the importance of understanding that money has meaning. Money isn't just a store of value, it's a store of values. Here's Zelizer on new research into how households use money (which may mention a recent project I've been a part of) from the LA Review of Books. Here's a very different, but complementary, view on issues of household finance and values: how much should someone save for retirement. I usually hate pieces like this, but this one does a great job of showing how each of the standard pieces of advice could be wrong. And here's another form of values impinging on household finance: The "marriageable male" effect is breaking down.
5. Digital Finance: Ignacio Mas can't be digitized. At least not yet (I'm sure Facebook is working on it). And that's a problem that ultimately comes back to financial regulations, scale and the reasons that the poor are often shut out of quality financial services. Serving poor customers is expensive relative to the profits that can be generated, unless you can scale, which means standardization, which often equates to poor service because poor customers are not uniform.
And for something completely different, but definitely relevant to digital financial services and regulation, here's a story about pressures on Uber to allow repressive governments access to their data in return for access to markets. Hmmm...I wonder what other data repressive governments might want to have access to?
Billy Bragg and the Blokes performing St. Monday. Have a good weekend.
