Interesting Sentences

The Economist: The world could be on the verge of a great management revolution: making robots behave like humans rather than the 20th century’s preferred option, making humans behave like robots.

HT: Grandiloquent Bloviator: “If you’re not the consumer, you’re the product.” Also known as: there is no such thing as a free lunch on the internet. If you can’t tell what the website is trying to sell you, they are either selling your eyes to advertisers or your information. 

Beckworth: “money is special: it is the only asset on every other market (i.e. it is the medium of exchange) and thus is the only one that can affect every other market.  Money, therefore, is what makes it possible to have economy-wide recessions.”

Marron: Sometimes, it’s more than $100 lying on the sidewalk: “You can sell 9,999 shares of The Donald …  at $0.52 a piece [on Intrade]. In just that one trade, you can pocket almost $5,200 of free money.” The only question is whether the government decides this is an illegal activity for influencing voting and elections. “For the latest Trump action, click here.”

The Economist: “The [United Arab Emerites] government aims to reduce the rising number of single local women by offering prizes of up to $19,000 to men who marry them.”
 

The history of political cartooning in South Africa: “I tried to define when South African cartooning started … all the way back to a cartoon which was published in 1819 by George Cruikshank who was a leading London caricaturist of the day. I called it the Cruikshank’s cannibal cartoon. It shows the white settlers being devoured by these cannibal figures – these huge, hulking monstrous figures. … For me that became an iconic cartoon, a prototypical South African cartoon.”
 

Yglesias on Chomsky’s denunciation of Osama’s death as an illegal assassination: “International law is made by states, powerful states have a disproportionate role in shaping it, and powerful states have obvious reasons to not be super-interested in the due process of suspected international terrorists or the sensibilities of mid-sized countries. Many people are pacifists and/or strong critics of western military power, and that’s fine. But it’s simply not the case that international law is identical with these policy preferences. On the contrary, one of the main functions of the international institutional order is precisely to legitimate the use of deadly military force by western powers."

Calzadilla, Rehdanz, and Tol: “Trade liberalization tends to reduce water use in water scarce regions, and increase water use in water abundant regions, even though water markets do not exist in most countries “

Easterly and Freschi: “Belief in Hell raised … economic growth potential. … A different twist than the Protestant Ethic: Scared Rich?