I was out for a run this weekend with a friend who also works in the financial industry. As we sat down afterward over a cup of tea, our conversation turned—unsurprisingly—to the risk of a Black Monday tomorrow. This, in case you’re wondering, is how investors are spending their weekend: nervously looking ahead to next week’s open. Accidents happen in financial markets, but it’s not often they’re triggered by policy errors as egregious as the one we saw last week from Donald Trump. Not to worry, though; Mr. Trump and his team have a habit of throwing mud at the wall to see what sticks. This one, clearly, is sliding down pretty quickly. So they’ll walk it back, right?
Read MoreMy “Millennial’s Manifesto” is up as an audio essay on Apple Podcast. Go have a listen! Also consider subscribing to the podcast channel. The cadence of these audio essays is slow, one essay every one or two months, so you won’t be overwhelmed by content. I know many people prefer to listen to their content rather than reading (more about that below), and my decision to start publishing audio essays is my attempt to cater for that. Thanks again for reading and listening.
Read MoreI am a big fan of US economist and academic Glenn Loury. He is smart, honest and well-articulated. He is also not afraid of an intellectual scrap if he stumbles upon one. He is an indispensable public commentator and intellectual whose ideas and influence go far beyond the confines of race, and associated social issues, in the US where he has staked his claim to fame and authority most comprehensively. Glenn has an impressive back-catalogue of writing and citations, but the best way to get a sense of him is by listening to his podcast the Glenn Show, which can be found on all the usual platforms. I am also a big fan of his co-conspirator, John McWorter, a US linguist and public intellectual, with whom Glenn runs a bi-weekly conversation on his podcast, and Q&A for paying subscribers. It is a must-listen. On this occasion, however, I want to recommend Glenn’s recent discussion with Larry Kotlikoff, a US academic economist, in which they discuss the economic policy ideas of the two candidates in the upcoming US presidential election ideas, and the US economy more generally. As the title of the podcast goes; if only we had an economist in the White House!
Read MoreThe Economist’s Free Exchange column drops in on the question of an economic motherhood penalty from childbirth. It is nice to see that the Economist correctly distinguishes between two distinct economic motherhood penalties, both of which can be traced to the interplay between evolutionary forces and modernity, where the latter in this case is defined as an environment with rapidly increasing returns to investment in human capital and education. The first, between fathers and mothers, emerge because the cost of child-rearing especially in the early part of a child’s life overwhelmingly falls on the mother, a conclusion which follows from Trivers (1972). This is true in terms of the cost during pregnancy and immediately after too. It is also true before we consider the possibility that the resource allocation trade-off for many women shifts in the wake of motherhood. The second motherhood penalty occurs between women. Put simply, in an economic structure where childless women have the ability to devote all their resources to somatic investment and take advantage of the above-mentioned increasing returns to human capital investment, the wage and wealth divergence between women who have many children and those who have none will widen significantly, at least in theory. For more on this, I cover the theory in more detail in my essay on fertility and sexual selection; see here.
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