Should we really be trying to hunt down Kony of Invisible Children fame? Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that we should not because:

• The Colombian Civil War demonstrates that if you kill one ‘bad-guy’ then another will come along to take their place.
• The international community should want to not only remove the current Kony, but eliminate the possibility of any future Konys rising up.
• This requires understanding the complex history of Uganda and its politics.

To read more about why Kony exists in Uganda, what Angelina Jolie thinks about him, and the role that colonialism played click here.

Source: Why Nations Fail

Michcael Cooper reported on an initiative by San Francisco to reduce the time spent looking for a parking spot through utilization of the laws of supply and demand. Highlights include:

• San Francisco is slowly implementing variable rate parking meters – meters that raise or lower their prices based on supply and demand.
• Prices could soon reach as high as $6.00 an hour for the most sought after spots.
• The overall aim is to have at least one open spot in each parking area.
• People have raised concerns that this could segregate the poor and the rich since it might close off certain areas from the poor.
• City officials respond that the money raised goes into providing mass transit and so ultimately benefits the poor.

To read more about the Professor that started it all, the role that mobile phones have to play, and what the evidence so far suggests about the effectiveness of the policy, click here.

Source: The New York Times

Via: Marginal Revolution

The Economist’s Free Exchange blog recently discussed some of the puzzles of the contemporary American economy. They include:

• GDP is growing slower than economists expect.
• The existing rates of GDP growth should lead to around a 2.5% decrease in unemployment. Yet unemployment has actually decreased by 5.1%.
• Inflation is higher than it should be.

Free Exchanges goes onto note that one explanation that would be consistent with all of these statistics would be a permanent long-term reduction in American potential output. While the author is uncomfortable with this explanation because it suggests that Americans woke up one day to “find their left arms had fallen off” the explanation has the advantage of simplicity.

To read other explanations for the phenomena, Japan’s experience, and why the failure to deliver more monetary and fiscal stimulus might have been more tragic than we realized, click here.

Source: The Economist

There are a lot of eligible mates around so why is it that men and women become anxious about relationships in their early-20s and lose all patience? Datingwise reports:

• The phenomenon is mostly due to the transformation of courtship from “romance” to “relationships”
• In romance you limit yourself to people who are your age and single.
• In the more modern relationship system it’s normal for people of vastly different ages and martial statuses to be in a relationship with one another.
• Moreover in romance there is a clear evolution and destination. In the relationship system the relationship might be the end unto itself rather than a stepping stone to a wider commitment.
• After a few bad relationships individuals become increasingly cynical and disheartened by relationships and seem to give up.

To read why this is not a huge social problem, why our society will just have to evolve and create a new social script, and the role that gender identity plays, click here.

Source: Datingwise

Via: Newmark’s Door

Yes. Yes it is. That, at least, is how Libby Copeland answers the question. Researchers have found that it’s bad for men, women, children, and society. Here’s why:

• Women: Since polygyny – the specific practice of one man taking on many wives – is so common one would imagine that it would, in fact, be a better arrangement for women because they are in higher demand. But that’s not how it works out because:
  • The high demand and subsequent pressures this creates causes women to get married at younger and younger ages.
  • Fathers and brothers realize that having a young female in the family is valuable and thus become controlling, selling girls to the highest bidder.
  • Once married women are trapped in households where they’re competing against other women for their husband’s attention, making life a constant struggle.
• Men: Older, richer men hog all of the women leaving none for the majority.
• Children: Polygamous arrangements are associated with higher rates of child mortality. This might be because in polygamous relationships there is less investment in any one child as the husband normally has many wives and many children.
• Society: Men are more likely to engage in rape. Moreover without any families to invest in other, non-sexual, crimes also rise.

To read more about the effects of polygamy, why our culture is fascinated with it, and certain conditions where polygamy may not really be so bad, click here.

Source: Slate

Apple helped reduce the amount of meaningless statistics thrown about when it came to gadgets. Things like gigahertz, megapixels, and even gigabytes, don’t mean what people think they do. But by marketing the iPad as 4G Apple has taken a step back argues Farhad Manjoo who believes that the 3G/4G label should be dropped entirely. Here’s why:

• A wireless standard known as HSPA+ was referred to as 3G for most of recent history, because it was the third generation of wireless technology.
• When LTE came about it was referred to as 4G because it was the fourth generation. LTE was initially much faster than HSPA+.
• However engineers figured out how to make HSPA+ even faster than LTE in theory. This now meant that in the future a 3G device would be faster than a 4G device. To solve this, companies were allowed to refer to their HSPA+ networks as 4G.
• The problem though is that while HSPA+ can theoretically be faster than LTE, it currently is not. Therefore Apple’s customers were mislead into thinking their iPhones got faster when the 3G label was replaced with the 4G label in the latest upgrade. The speed remained the same, all that changed was the label.

To read more on why somebody selling you a 4G device “thinks you’re a fool”, why AT&T criticized others when they first took the decision that it is emulating now, and why even true 4G doesn’t mean anything anyway, click here.

Source: Slate

David Brooks writes “If the 20th century was the century of the population explosion, the 21st century… is looking like the century of the fertility implosion”. He notes:

• Iran’s average birth rate is now similar to New England – the region with the lowest fertility in the United States.
• In Middle Eastern countries in particular the drop in birth rates has been record-breaking.
• This is a problem because, as Tyler Cowen notes: “These societies will be old before they will be wealthy. Which means perhaps they will never be wealthy.”
• This doesn’t necessary have to be true. South Korea and Taiwan managed to grow despite declining birth rates. But it’s much easier to grow if you have a growing population.
• European and Asian countries are dealing with the same trends.
• Due to immigration the United States’ birth rate remains relatively high but if everybody else is getting older then American living standards will still be hurt.

To read what people mean by the “Gray Tsunami”, the implications of Russia’s high death rates and low birthrates, and why even India’s population growth might run into problems click here.

Source: The New York Times

Via: Marginal Revolution

Women do two-thirds of the world’s work, yet only make 10% of the world’s money meaning that there’s still a lot of work to be done in the quest for gender equality. Western European countries are normally held up as the pinnacle of female/male equality but David Kenner and Uri Friedman at Foreign Policy note that some surprising countries have made rapid strides. They include:

• The Philippines is the most impressive Asian country on the list.
• Spain which in the 1970s didn’t allow women to serve as witnesses or open bank accounts had, in 2011, more women than men in the country’s cabinet.
• South Africa and Lesotho are the best sub-Saharan African countries for women. Lesotho managed to edge out its much larger neighbor in the rankings.
• 71% of Latvia’s university graduates are female, and the supreme court is evenly split between men and women.
• Cuba comes out top among Latin American countries.

To read more about each of these countries, the substantial effort that most of these countries still have to make, and the (sometimes male) feminists that drove these achievements click here.

Source: Foreign Policy

Via: Freakonomics