Discrimination, Hate Speech, and Digital Dividends

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The Age of Congestion Pricing May Finally Be Upon Us

Aarian Marshall | Wired | Retweeted by Jennifer Huddleston

Complaints about traffic ring loudly from cities across the country. Until recently, charging people to drive on roads during heavy-traffic times was politically unsound, but now it might be a good solution to unclogging America’s congested highways and streets.

Estonia, the Digital Republic

Nathan Heller | The New Yorker | Retweeted by Alex Tabarrok

Voting, disputing parking tickets, and accessing health records–all this can now be done online as part of E-Estonia, a program which saves the country two percent of its GDP annually.

Platforms, Promotion, and Product Discovery: Evidence from Spotify Playlists

Luis Aguiar, Joel Waldfogel| VoxEU | Tweeted by Brent Skorup

Platforms like Spotify have a heavy market share of the music streaming industry. Inclusion on Spotify’s Today’s Top Hits playlist translates to 19.4 million streams and $77,000 in payments on average.

Postmodern Monetary Theory

Phillip W. Magness | American Institute for Economic Research | Shared by Donald Boudreaux

Modern Monetary Theory–the idea that underlies high-dollar proposals such as the Green New Deal–sounds like a new idea, but it’s almost a century old.

Orchestrating False Beliefs about Gender Discrimination

Jonatan Pallesen | Medium | Tweeted by Veronique de Rugy

A study showing women are more likely to be discriminated against than men in orchestra auditions, which has made the rounds on social media, is less than settled.

“Men Are Scum”: Inside Facebook’s War on Hate Speech

Simon van Zuylen-Wood | Vanity Fair | Shared by Tyler Cowen

In 2017, Marcia Belsky was banned from Facebook for 30 days for commenting “Men are scum.” One reporter sat in on a meeting of the team responsible for policing hate speech on the platform.

The Obama-Trump Economic Boom

Alan S. Blinder | The Wall Street Journal | Tweeted by Christine McDaniel

The economic boom is now 116 months old, and quickly approaching the all-time record of 120 months. Neither tariffs nor inflation are likely to stop it.

No, Data Is Not the New Oil

Antonio García Martínez | Wired | Retweeted by Adam Thierer

Unlike data, oil is a liquid, fungible, and transportable commodity. Comparing the two to rationalize data dividends is unsound, because data requires an infrastructure to be valuable.

Here’s What Oregon’s Huge New Transit Housing Bill Would Legalize

Michael Andersen | Sightline Institute | Retweeted by Salim Furth

One proposal to allow for more housing around transit would help ease sprawl and infrastructure costs in urban areas.