Even janitors have noncompetes now. Nobody is safe.

One of the central contradictions of capitalism is that what makes it work — competition — is also what capitalists want to get rid of the most.

Matt O'Brien

It’s better to be born rich than gifted

A revolution in genomics is creeping into economics. It allows us to say something we might have suspected, but could never confirm: money trumps genes. Using one new, genome-based measure, economists found genetic endowments are distributed almost equally among children in low-income and high-income families. Success is not. The least-gifted children of high-income parents graduate from college at higher rates than the most-gifted children of low-income parents.

Andrew Van Dam

We Don’t Need to Replace the BQE, But We Will

“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” -Abraham Maslow

It should be no surprise that to every highway engineer the solution to traffic is always more roads. In this case, it is the NYC DOT, which last week announced their initial plan to rebuild the crumbling Brooklyn Heights cantilevered section of the BQE from Atlantic Ave to Sands St.

Andrew Lynch

Why US public transportation is so bad — and why Americans don’t care

Walker also says most American customers mistakenly prioritize reach over frequency; they want buses or trains everywhere, on every block, as opposed to a few trains that come all the time. “There is a distinctly American idea to have infrequent trains from the suburb into the city,” he says. “That’s an example where you put a line on map and people say, ‘Oh, [transit] exists,’ and someone who doesn’t understand frequency is going to think an area is being serviced when it is not.” Those who are more familiar with public transit understand that it’s better to have a few lines with frequent trains, rather than many lines that leave once every two hours. 

Aditi Shrikant

The 2008 crisis really did start off worse than the Great Depression

Matt O'Brien

How the Great Recession fueled for-profit colleges

Stef W. Kight

Special report: We're safer 10 years after financial crisis

Felix Salmon

New York’s Uber Cap Is Good News for Basically Everyone

Both the wage system and the cap will push Uber and its ilk to improve what are called “utilization rates,” or the percentage of miles during which the driver has a passenger. In 2017, that rate stood at just 58 percent, according to the TLC, meaning that TNC vehicles were driving empty more than 40 percent of the time. Despite the backing of an algorithm providing an endless stream of pick-ups, that’s scarcely an improvement over street-hail taxis, who (in 2014) had the meter running about 54 percent of the time.

As demand continues to increase (and it will, with a major subway line shutting down in less than a year’s time), the path forward looks like drivers clocking fewer, busier hours. That’s good news for existing drivers, good news for the environment, and good news for traffic congestion. 

Henry Grabar

The Cryptocurrency Game With a $9 Million Prize

Is Fomo3D an incisive critique, a scam, or a little of both?

Arvind Dilawar

New Report: Uber and Lyft Riders Aren’t Giving Up Their Cars—They’re Giving Up Transit

Because users are choosing the car ride instead of the subway and drivers spend a lot of time driving around without passengers (deadheading), Schaller projects services like Lyft and Uber put 2.8 new vehicle miles on the road for every mile of personal car travel they remove.

Henry Grabar

Domino's Pizza Fixing Potholes Is an Ominous Sign

Either government is failing, inequality is worsening, or both.

Noah Smith

For the biggest group of American workers, wages aren’t just flat. They’re falling.

For workers in “production and nonsupervisory” positions, the value of the average paycheck has declined in the past year. For those workers, average “real wages” — a measure of pay that takes inflation into account — fell from $22.62 in May 2017 to $22.59 in May 2018, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said.

“The extra growth we are seeing in the economy is going somewhere: to capital owners and people at the top of the income distribution,” said Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute and a former chief economist at the Labor Department, noting workers' share of corporate income remained relatively low as of January. “And what we've seen is in recent period a much higher share of total income earned going to owners of capital.”

Jeff Stein

Elizabeth Holmes Deserves Prison, but Her Indictment Won’t Make Silicon Valley Any Less Reckless

The only way to disincentivize founders from lying to investors is to throw one or two of them in jail for doing so. And Elizabeth Holmes doesn’t count. The Theranos indictment is likely to have zero deterrent effect, because it’s clear that she’s not really being prosecuted because she lied to investors. That’s just the easy, prosecutorial low-hanging fruit. The real reason for the prosecution is that her activities were incredibly reckless and dangerous on a human level for thousands of patients’ health.

Felix Salmon

Ajit Pai Is Twisting the Meaning of the “Open Internet”

In his op-ed, Pai insists that the internet will now be protected as a place “where you are free to go where you want, and say and do what you want, without having to ask anyone’s permission.” That may be true for large internet providers like Comcast, which will now be able to throttle or censor traffic on its networks however it wants, but it’s not true for most U.S. internet users, who generally have few, if any, options to take their business elsewhere.

April Glaser

New York City Street Parking Is Preposterously Corrupt

And the city has itself to blame.

Henry Grabar

The Myth That Markets Get Prices Right Won’t Die

All that irrational human behavior gets in the way.

Noah Smith

More and more companies have monopoly power over workers’ wages. That’s killing the economy.

Suresh Naidu, Eric Posner, and Glen Weyl

Econ 101 No Longer Explains the Job Market

Noah Smith

In all fairness, it probably never did. -ed.

Make Them Pay

Gun control activists must focus on fighting for the right to sue firearms manufacturers.

Cars became more crashworthy, and hence less lethal and injurious, as a result of tort litigation and federal regulation. Cars are instrumentalities of death and injury, not because producers and purchasers intend this, but because cars are involved in crashes and crashes cause death and injury. Similarly, most of the people who buy guns do not intend to use them for suicide or homicide, but these outcomes can be expected when guns are in use. In the case of automobiles, the law tracks the recognition that cars can be designed and marketed so as to enhance crashworthiness. Damage awards and regulatory penalties have motivated automobile manufacturers to improve crashworthiness and to promote crashworthiness as a desirable feature. Over time, this has yielded major reductions in the rates of fatality and injury from car use.

Heidi Li Feldman

The myth of “forcing people out of their cars”

At the same time, parking takes up land. And in some parts of the country (California certainly included), land is expensive, so paying the full price of a parking space might get expensive. The question is whether towns should require that new developments come with a certain minimum amount of new parking attached (as virtually every city, including New York City, currently does) or whether they should simply allow people to decide how much parking they want to pay for.

Matthew Yglesias