Hi friends!
I hope this last summer edition of the Weekend Reccs finds you well. In honor of the changing of the seasons, you can find out about an a short-lived alternative calendar, the French Republican calendar, which had three 10-day weeks in each month here.
The Weekend Reccs
RNC: Speaking time analysis. Allegations of misrepresentations by tenants. That’s all I have to share. Semi-related…here is an overview of the right-wing dominance of engagement on Facebook (s/o Aren Rendell). Although, I cannot emphasize enough that the internet is not real life, nor is even the coverage by mainstream media outlets. Let’s not forget March, when everyone hated Joe Biden except the voters.
Fed Fun(ds) Rate: Big news in the world of monetary policy. Here’s a great overview from Greg Ip. TL;DR the Fed has a dual mandate: (1) maximize sustainable employment and (2) keep prices stable. As Saint Matthew, an underrated momentary policy theorist put it: no one can serve two masters. Recognizing this tension, the Fed used to put emphasis on the latter, now it will more focus more on the prior.
Fresh Take: Brookings released a fresh take about autonomous cars and their potential to improve the use of policing resources. We’re probably far away from widespread adoption of autonomous cars, but I think the benefits are still underrated. Autonomous cars hold the potential to be the most influential technology of our age. That being said, our world has been constructed for, and around, passenger-operated automobiles. To fully capture the gains autonomous cars can provide we will need to rethink our cities, our streets, and our relationship with vehicles.
I hope to never again own a car, but if I have to, I hope it at least is autonomous. Today’s cars are dangerous for the operators, other drivers, and those not in cars: 1 in 106 people die in car crashes in America, 1 in 541 people die as pedestrians, 1 in 4060 die as bicyclists (source). This is not even to mention the toll that air pollution from combustion engines puts on the lungs of millions around the world. Finally, driving makes people stressed, unhealthy, and depressed, chipping away years from their lives in the form of heart disease, obesity, and other related causes of death.
Autonomous cars help with some of these issues, but not all of them. Electrification of autonomous cars gets us a little further. But we will face new challenges, though, too. By decreasing the cost of driving (by freeing the operator to do other tasks), people are incentivized to use cars more, and to push the suburbs further away from urban cores. This is bad for a lot of reasons. Density increases innovativeness and economic dynamism and decreases environmental strain. One solution to offset this would be to subsidize density.
Old faces: A media writer recreated the faces of Roman Emperors. It seems almost like you can see the qualities common ascribed to the emperors in their facial features (Commodus looks cowardly, Marcus Aurelius sagely, etc.). Perhaps this was the choice of the portrait “artist,” or that of the sculptor, or just my own biases. I put artist in quotations because I am not sure what exactly to call the creator of these portraits. He did an incredible amount of research to find photos of sculptures and descriptions of the emperors and then pulled this all together in a very neat tool called ArtBreeder. I played around with it for a bit yesterday; you should check it out. It seems the real power comes in when you can upload your own photos to one of its models (e.g. “portraits” or “landscapes”).
Long read: Abolish chairs.
If cars and chairs don’t kill you, try these: I think I am late to this trend but it turns out there are a ton of ridiculous sports sponsored by Red Bull. They include: Fast boat racing. Small boat racing. Rooftop skiing (ok this is an ad not a competition but still!). Running up steep things. Very fast plane flying. Very barely plane flying. Very paper plane flying. Very plane-less flying.
Quick Links: Mother Nature vs. Confederate monuments. Social capital and the virus. Chadwick Boseman’s last film posthumously premieres this November on Netflix.
Lagniappe
This week, I received an out-of-the-blue letter of gratitude from a reader who I do not know very well. It was incredibly touching for me and reminded me of a very important study from a few years ago in PsychScience. There has been a decent amount of research on the phenomena of sending letters of gratitude and the benefits it confers on the senders’ wellbeing. The gist of the study, though was that would-be senders of letters overestimate how awkward the letter would be and underestimate how much the recipient will appreciate the note. As both a frequent sender of such letters and now a very recent recipient I feel I can add my subjective data to this and say: you’ll feel great sending it and they’ll really appreciate it. You should write an out-of-the-blue thank you right now.
Graph(s) of the week
Your friend,
Harrison