therabbithole

TIL - China may be executing thousands of people per year, according to Amnesty International

International migrants send $781 billions per year to families back home. That's over >3x global aid.

About 6% goes to bank fees. Reducing these fees would unlock a huge amount of redistribution.

We know this partly also because when countries introduced mandatory birth registration, there was a sudden drop in people who lived beyond 100 years old. Here's a paper from earlier this year on this:

"Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud" Saul Justin Newman https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v3

Alternative link: https://archive.ph/2024.12.07-131609/https://www.nytimes.com...

Between 2001-2021, the Veteran Affairs Disability Compensation payments in the US quadrupled

Based on quasi-random assignment of recruits to units the paper finds deployment can't explain the rise in disability payments, which is more likely driven by policy changes. The Economist published an article about this today, linking the issue also with conversations around efficiency in public spending:

>"The biggest shift over the past two decades has been an ever-expanding list of “presumptive conditions”—ailments that are assumed to be service-related without requiring proof. This list now includes common afflictions such as asthma, chronic rhinitis and type-2 diabetes. Once on the payroll, veterans rarely leave it and can pile on new claims indefinitely. Many start with minor conditions such as sleep apnea, and stack on additional diagnoses until they reach the maximum payout... Research shows disability payments have markedly reduced employment among veterans, and delivered no measurable improvement to their mental or physical health."

Reminded me of “talent is everywhere but opportunity is not” essay: https://ourworldindata.org/talent-is-everywhere-opportunity-...

An alternative link that doesn’t require registration: http://paulnovosad.com/pdf/nobel-prizes.pdf

There’s an interactive chart based on this data where you can compare any income decile across countries over time: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/incomes-across-distribu...

"What caused the end of antiquity, the shift of economic activity away from the Mediterranean towards northern Europe? [...] Our estimates suggest that reduced trade openness arising from the cost of crossing the newly formed border between Christianity and Islam, combined with technical progress and increased minting output in Muslim Spain and in the Frankish lands, explains the increased urbanization of western and northern Europe relative to the eastern Mediterranean from the 8th to the 10th century."

This has now been published in the American Economic Review (behind a paywall) here: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20230016&from...

The author of that article also makes the data and code for some of the interactive data visualizations available via Observable notebooks: https://observablehq.com/@climatelab/map-temperature-forecas...

Alternative link: https://archive.ph/OTNuo#selection-897.4-897.19

I hadn’t realised I was (nearly always) meant to use original titles. It does make sense, thank you for the civil and clear explanation. I’ll take it into account.

There’s a section “Potential Mechanisms” on page 18 of the PDF.

“Table 4 presents the effect of increased broadband availability on several county level economic outcomes. Each column includes all controls and fixed effects included our preferred specification. Column 1 reports that the result of a 10% increase in a county's population with access to broadband internet is a reduction in poverty rate of 0.089 percentage points. Column 2 indicates that a ten percentage point increase in broadband availability results in a reduction of unemployment in the county of 0.013 percentage points.”