Economist Redux #1

In general, I try to at least skim The Economist every week. Although I read the print version, I'm trying something out here where I post some quick thoughts about my favorite articles each week:

• In general, it's hard to be a politically literate and not have a strong aversion to mandatory minimum sentencing and the current state of the U.S. criminal justice system. These two articles, about overpowered prosecutors and their surprisingly coercive tactics when dealing with co-operators, reinforce this general theme.
• One of the smartest people I knew in college was a phenomenal orator who had studied the classics with a rigor that I found exceptional. We always used to joke that he was perfectly suited to be a philosopher king, and fortunately for him, it sounds like philosophy and classics may be the path towards being a better manager, at least according to Schumpeter this week. This is the second such article in as many months, so it sounds like someone on the staff is trying to incept us all with the idea that our liberal arts education was worthwhile anyhow.
• How do we reverse inequality in a world where fixed transit costs make computers, robots, and cell phones cheaper than the cheapest labor? Ah, I just love these special reports. They are never particularly ground-breaking, but they lay things out so succinctly. Specifically, the section about housing prices in high-demand urban areas was quite good. The most interesting section, though, ran through some fun facts about ICT (Information and Communications Technology). It sounds like there are a couple of economists at MIT (Autor and Acemoglu) who I should be reading about; they are doing some interesting work around classifying multidimensional complexity of specific jobs, and I should probably read a bit more about this; it's likely that their work will point towards a number of different areas for technology to displace people, and continue the inexorable trend of capital replacing labor (uh oh!). Many fun opaque references to Picketty were also funny, given their recent lambasting of Capital.

Overall, this was fun. Hopefully I can maintain this section, I think it will be helpful for me to remember fun facts, like the fact that the market is currently valuing Yahoo at roughly 20% of WhatsApp when you take away Alibaba, Yahoo Japan and its cash holdings.