Links and quotes for Feb. 23, 2016: Basic incomes, the War on Poverty, and more

The Unintended Consequences of the War on Poverty – Cato |

Attempts to ameliorate economic inequalities through the War on Poverty involved escalating the volume of public aid transfers… All these outcomes—slower economic growth, higher poverty rates, and greater income inequality—are the predictable unintended consequences of the War on Poverty.

A New Breed of Trader on Wall Street: Coders With a Ph.D. – NYTimes |

The Madness of Airline Élite Status – The New Yorker |

Fed Up With Uber And Lyft, Drivers Plan To Launch Competing App – FastCo |

It’s Time to Consider a Basic Income Guarantee – RCM |

So, the economics of a basic income likely make more sense today. What about the politics? Especially in America, where the Protestant work ethic came to live? Right now, a basic income would represent a huge leap away from the existing American social contract. But the political mood is shifting in unpredictable ways. What the supporters of both Sanders and Trump share is a sense that things are badly broken down. Radical ideas are all the rage.

Are big-city transportation systems too complex for human minds? Oxford University |

After analysing the world’s 15 largest metropolitan transport networks, the researchers estimated that the information limit for planning a trip is around 8 bits. (A ‘bit’ is a binary digit – the most basic unit of information.)

Additionally, similar to the ‘Dunbar number’, which estimates a limit to the size of an individual’s friendship circle, this cognitive limit for transportation suggests that maps should not consist of more than 250 connection points to be easily readable.

Using journeys with exactly two connections as their basis (that is, visiting four stations in total), the researchers found that navigating transport networks in major cities – including London – can come perilously close to exceeding humans’ cognitive powers.

Rockefeller Really Was Way Richer Than You Are – Barry Ritholtz |

Is Tribalism the Worst Idea in History? – FEE  |

The Closing of the Academic Mind – Chris Patten  |

The role of a university is to promote the clash of ideas, to test the results of research with other scholars, and to impart new knowledge to students. Freedom of speech is thus fundamental to what universities are, enabling them to sustain a sense of common humanity and uphold the mutual tolerance and understanding that underpin any free society. That, of course, makes universities dangerous to authoritarian governments, which seek to stifle the ability to raise and attempt to answer difficult questions.

But if any denial of academic liberty is a blow struck against the meaning of a university, the irony today is that some of the most worrying attacks on these values have been coming from inside universities.

In the United States and the United Kingdom, some students and teachers now seek to constrain argument and debate. They contend that people should not be exposed to ideas with which they strongly disagree. Moreover, they argue that history should be rewritten to expunge the names (though not the endowments) of those who fail to pass today’s tests of political correctness. Thomas Jefferson and Cecil Rhodes, among others, have been targeted. And how would Churchill and Washington fare if the same tests were applied to them?