(Links to all items are conglomerated at the end of the post.)
We will absolutely be returning to this story. The Financial Times has been attentive lately to issues of inequality and inequities perpetrated by capital against labor, which is not what one expects from the magazine on the regular.
Research has consistently shown that while most people express a desire for some distance between top and bottom, they would rather live in considerably more equal societies than they do at present. Many would even opt for the more egalitarian society if the overall pie was smaller than in a less equal one.
On this basis, it follows that one good way to evaluate which countries are better places to live than others is to ask: is life good for everyone there, or is it only good for rich people?
To find the answer, we can look at how people at different points on the income distribution compare to their peers elsewhere. If you’re a proud Brit or American, you may want to look away now.1
We’re worse than a monarchy on the inequality front. We’re worse than a society created to be grotesquely unequal.
You have to see the humor there.
Economist Dean Baker doesn’t see the humor there.
I have had many people ask me if there is not a better way to fight inflation than the current route of Federal Reserve Board rate hikes. Just to remind people, this route fights inflation by slowing the economy, throwing people out of work, and then forcing workers to take pay cuts.
It hardly seems fair that we again tell the Fed to throw the must vulnerable people out of work to get inflation under control. We can use other routes, if we plan ahead.
I know that this program has pretty much zero chance in Washington. It means challenging the Great Big Lie, that inequality just happened, but we can still talk about these sorts of alternatives. And progressives who actually want to see less inequality will push them.2
Baker’s essay may be behind a paywall, but that’s the essence of it: our inequality is due to policy decisions, and inflation can be attacked without targeting workers.
Congress is bad at building rocket ships.3
At a minimum.
Connor Friedersdorf says — a start to a sentence that usually elicits a rousing “who gives a fuck” from us — in the Atlantic that what the world really needs is a Logan’s Run scenario4 only at age 75 rather than 30. While he doesn't come right out and say that King Charles III and other world leaders and federal legislators should be culled at 75, we're sure that's what he means.5
We’ve been miffed at dictionaries about evolving definitions and the introduction of new words popularized by kids these days on our lawn, but we never thought to bomb them. A California man threatened not only Merriam-Webster, but Disney, Hasbro — it says “bro” right there in the name; how can they inflict a gender fluid Potato Head on us? — and “the governor of California, the mayor of New York City, a New York rabbi, [and] professors at Loyola Marymount University,”6 among others.
The Ig Nobel Prizes are out,7 featuring ritual enemas, constipated scorpions and our favorite, legal gibberish:
Legal contracts of all sorts are known for their impenetrable jargon and tortured sentence structure, which might be one reason most of us rarely read the many online terms of service agreements we encounter as we navigate our online lives. Granted, there are legal theorists who insist that … the jargon is necessary for technical precision. There are others who take issue with this idea, arguing that the law is actually built upon quite ordinary concepts like cause, consent, and best interest. So the impenetrability of legal texts is due to psycholinguistic factors.
The authors decided to put these competing hypotheses to the test, focusing on key psycholinguistic characteristics: nonstandard capitalization, such as phrases rendered in ALL CAPS; the frequency of archaic words (aforesaid, herein, to wit) that rarely appear in everyday speech; word choice (whether legal jargon can be replaced by simpler terms without out losing key nuances of meaning); the use of passive versus active voice; and center-embedding—when lawyers embed legal jargon within convoluted syntax.
First, the researchers analyzed a database of legal contracts and court documents between 2018 and 2020 and compared that analysis with a database of documents in standard English. They measured the frequency of each of the above characteristics and found a striking difference, with legal documents using them much more frequently. Next, 108 human subjects were asked to read 12 pairs of contract excerpts. The results supported the psycholinguistics hypothesis, with center-embedding presenting the greatest comprehension difficulty for readers.
It’s like doctors learning the prescription scrawl.
Fabulous photos from space.8
Clams don’t deserve their reputation for reticence.
A tight-lipped bivalve might sound like an odd creature for researchers to turn their ear to, but as we are coming to learn, clams are exceptional natural historians.
Similar to the rings of a tree, the growth bands on their shells hold crucial information on the environment and how it has changed throughout the years.
Like the lines of a diary, these intricate passages can be teased apart and read by scientists centuries after they were first 'written' down.
In fact, the ancestors of clams have been laying down passages in the mineral calcite for more than five hundred million years, nearly three hundred million years before the dinosaurs showed up, giving us an unprecedented window into past climates.
Cassandra-like, in a way, probably.9
We didn’t know that Jeff Bezos invested more than a billion dollars in a cellular regeneration startup. We too would prefer not to die if we needn't.10
Word to our mother, who has formally outlived Queen Elizabeth and should therefore inherit the Windsor fortune.
(Always on the lookout for new music, we are. What’re you listening to? Let us know in the comments. Musical contributors to this post include grandson, “Death of an Optimist;” The Heliocentrics, “Telemetric Sounds;” Khruangbin and Leon Bridges, “Texas Moon;” and Khruangbin, “Late Night Tales.”)
Dean Baker on how to fight inflation without hurting workers.
CNET’s story on the upcoming third attempt to launch the Artemis I.
Wikipedia summary of science fiction film Logan’s Run.
Friedersdorf in The Atlantic begging Charles III and his ilk to abdicate.
The MassLive story about a California man threatening to blow up a dictionary.
ScienceAlert has the skinny on the clams predicting climate disaster.