Links and quotes for June 28, 2016: Danish social mobility, Facebook vs. Google+, and more

The Scandinavian Fantasy: The Sources of Intergenerational Mobility in Denmark and the U.S. – IZA  

Greater Danish income mobility is largely a consequence of redistributional tax, transfer, and wage compression policies. While Danish social policies for children produce more favorable cognitive test scores for disadvantaged children, these do not translate into more favorable educational outcomes, partly because of disincentives to acquire education arising from the redistributional policies that increase income mobility. …

The failure to promote greater educational mobility in spite of providing generous social services is most likely rooted in the welfare state. Our findings point to wage compression and the higher levels of welfare benefits as being counterproductive in providing incentives to pursue education. The low returns to education observed in Denmark, in particular at the lower levels of education, help explain the disconnect between the egalitarian childhood policies in Denmark and the roughly equal levels of educational mobility in Denmark and the U.S. The sorting of families into neighborhoods and schools by levels of parental advantage is likely another contributing factor. While the Danish welfare state may mitigate some childhood inequalities, substantial skill gaps still remain.

Scientists uncover route for finding out what makes individuals nice or nasty – University of Exeter

Smartphones Won’t Make Your Kids Dumb. We Think (?) – Scientific American

How Mark Zuckerberg led Facebook’s war to crush Google Plus – Vanity Fair

Google Plus was Google finally taking note of Facebook and confronting the company head-on, rather than via cloak-and-dagger recruitment shenanigans and catty disses at tech conferences. It hit Facebook like a bomb. Zuck took it as an existential threat comparable to the Soviets’ placing nukes in Cuba in 1962. Google Plus was the great enemy’s sally into our own hemisphere, and it gripped Zuck like nothing else. He declared “Lockdown,” the first and only one during my time there. As was duly explained to the more recent employees, Lockdown was a state of war that dated to Facebook’s earliest days, when no one could leave the building while the company confronted some threat, either competitive or technical.

How, might you ask, was Lockdown officially announced? We received an e-mail at 1:45 P.M. the day Google Plus launched, instructing us to gather around the Aquarium, the glass-walled cube that was Zuck’s throne room. Actually, it technically instructed us to gather around the Lockdown sign. This was a neon sign bolted to the upper reaches of the Aquarium, above the cube of glass, almost like the NO VACANCY sign on a highway motel. By the time the company had gathered itself around, that sign was illuminated, tipping us off to what was coming. …

… [Zuckerberg in his speech] changed gears and erupted with a burst of rhetoric referencing one of the ancient classics he had studied at Harvard and before. “You know, one of my favorite Roman orators ended every speech with the phrase Carthago delenda est. ‘Carthage must be destroyed.’ For some reason I think of that now.” He paused as a wave of laughter tore through the crowd.

Households Less Likely to Say Using Credit Is OK – St. Louis Fed

Which MBAs Make More: Consultants or Small-Business Owners? – HBR

Robots won’t replace teachers because they can’t inspire us – Re/code

As Big Data Comes to College, Officials Wrestle to Set New Ethical Norms – Chronicle of Higher Ed

Britain Punches Above Its Weight In EU – Diana Furchtgott-Roth “Take economic growth, for instance, as measured by the World Bank. From 2010 to 2014, the latest data available, the average EU country, excluding the UK, grew at a rate of 1.0 percent per year. The UK grew at nearly double that rate—2.0 percent per year. In cumulative terms, the EU, excluding the UK, has grown 5.6 percent since 2010, while the UK has grown 10.2 percent. For comparison, the United States grew 2.2 percent annually and 11.6 percent cumulatively over this period.”