• Why the industrialization of Africa will soon be driving the global economy — Noah Smith, Noahpinion
• Interview with Patrick Collison: co-founder of Stripe, on progress, technology, and the future — Noah Smith, Noahpinion
• How inflation works — Noah Smith, Noahpinion
• In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a voice: about 200 million women in the country are illiterate, but voice memo and image-sharing apps make it easier to connect, communicate, and run businesses — helping each other learn the internet, report illegal logging, sell clothing and designs — Yasaswini Sampathkumar, WIRED
• How a minimum-wage increase is being felt in a low-wage city: is $15 an hour too much, or not enough? Fresno, Calif., may be a laboratory for a debate over the minimum wage heating up at the national level — Sydney Ember, New York Times
• Could index funds be 'worse than Marxism'?: economists and policy makers are worried that the Vanguard model of passive investment is hurting markets — Annie Lowrey, The Atlantic
• Best-Performing Cities 2021: ranked by job growth, wage/salary growth, high-tech GDP growth, high-tech industry share, household broadband access, and affordable housing — Milken Institute
  • Five tiers, further divided by large and small cities; top large city = Provo-Orem, UT; top small city = Idaho Falls, ID
  • Tier 1: many from the Intermountain West and southern metros with tech industries (Austin, Phoenix, Nashville) — show growth beyond Silicon Valley and Boston
  • Tier 2: includes some CA metros, which dropped from Tier 1 due to lack of affordable housing and declining short-term job growth
  • Tier 3: biggest US cities (NYC, LA, Houston, DC) — many characterized by both high-income and low-income areas with high-tech concentration and high cost of living
  • Cities with big gains: Wichita, Durham, Madison, Albuquerque
• Child labor in palm oil industry tied to Girl Scout cookies: children often drop out of school to help their families work on palm plantations — and palm oil (even so-called sustainably-sourced varieties) in many of our products comes from their labor — Robin McDowell and Margie Mason, AP
• $600 checks are a "crime," says the pope's favorite economist — Anand Giridharadas and Mariana Mazzucato, The.Ink
• Low-skill workers aren't a problem to be fixed: "The label 'low-skill' flattens workers to a single attribute, ignoring the capacities they have and devaluing the jobs they do." — Annie Lowrey, The Atlantic
• 'A managerial Mephistopheles': inside the mind of Jeff Bezos: "The Amazon founder's relentless quest for 'customer ecstasy' made him one of the world's richest people — now he's looking to the unlimited resources of space. Is he the genius our age of consumerism deserves?" — Mark O'Connell, The Guardian
  • Amazon generally bad for authors (sells below suggested retail → author gets less) — but we all still use it, because it's the path of least resistance; even the smallest hassle is a dealbreaker to purchase elsewhere (40% of US online purchases, 30% UK)
  • To understand the meaning of Amazon, must distinguish between people having political beliefs and moral principles, and acting consistently with them
  • Would technically be reasonable to purchase from more ethical online retailers, but Amazon is more than a marketplace — it's infrastructure undergirding the internet itself (AWS hosts The Guardian, GE, Netflix, Twitter, government)
    • Franklin Foer: "If Marxist revolutionaries ever seized power in the United States, they could nationalize Amazon and call it a day."
    • As it enters grocery, pharma, and health insurance markets, the value of existing players plummets
  • Has never paid dividends, only recently profitable — reinvests everything to achieve "endless growth," the ideal capitalist entity
  • Bezos's view: the crisis of our time is energy shortage; Blue Origin's goal is to outsource heavy industry and mining to space, establishing off-world colonies — his concern about climate change is less about environmental damage than resource limitation leading to consumer goods "rationing," which would limit Amazon's endless growth
  • Bezos is less interested in being the richest man alive than being an inventor — his innovations are logistical, not technological
  • Amazon runs on extremely controlled and surveilled labor, increasing exploitation; aims to use tech to remove human limitations to efficiency at both consumer and labor ends — "will guarantee you a life of worldly customer ecstasy as long as you avert your eyes from the iniquities being carried out in your name"
• Why we can't stop talking about billionaires: tech billionaires emerged from a year of hardship as central, almost too central, characters in American life — Theodore Schleifer, Vox
• If you have access to a billionaire, "most are very easy to program by simply playing to their insecurity and desire for acknowledgement of exceptionalism" — a sorta terrifying hypothesis
• Baby bonds could shrink the Black-white wealth gap: a race-neutral plan to give young Americans economic security at birth — the Pressley-Booker bill, essentially Social Security for young people — Fabiola Cineas, Vox
• Philanthropy and COVID-19: measuring one year of giving: MacKenzie Scott is responsible for over 40% of all COVID-giving; recommendations: give unrestricted grants, target marginalized communities, support operational and administrative costs — Candid
• Lord of the Roths: how tech mogul Peter Thiel turned a retirement account for the middle class into a $5 billion tax-free piggy bank — ProPublica
• Mapping the deforestation footprint of nations reveals growing threat to tropical forests: combining several data sources to quantify and map global deforestation footprints, linking deforestation to international trade and global supply chains — Nguyen Tien Hoang and Keiichiro Kanemoto, Nature
• The perils of free parking: the modern day tragedy of the commons — Works in Progress
• Play Tradle: like Wordle, but guess what country exports the given distribution of products
• The system that has developed to bring products to the most remote locations — those that even Amazon doesn't service — is quite impressive — Rest of World

Related

• Billionaire Wilderness — Justin Farrell
• How Renewable Energy Jobs Can Uplift Fossil Fuel Communities and Remake Climate Politics — Adie Tomer, Joseph W. Kane, Caroline George
• Work — James Suzman