1: SB79 is (hopefully) statewide upzoning near transit. I didn’t realize, though, that so much of San Francisco is near a transit stop that this effectively allows multifamily in the entire city. Big deal if it passes!

2: Exactly what is going on with total factor productivity — The productivity statistics (and those who measure them) are doing their best! Whatever’s going on with TFP stagnation, it’s either real or it has to do with how we measure output.

3: Scientific Publishing: Enough is Enough - by Seemay Chou — For a while I thought I wanted to be a professor of economics. I even got one paper published: The Economic Benefit of the Freedom of the Seas. But I couldn’t convince myself that I wanted to do research (as in, research aimed at peer-reviewed articles) so much of the time. I’m glad to see new models and incentives tested out! (Maybe it will trickle down to the dismal social sciences).

4: No Rivals: The Prophet (Part I) - by Mario Gabriele — Paywalled; I’m waiting til the whole series is out to buy a subscription.

5: Making the Invisible Hand Visible: Managers and the Allocation of Workers to Jobs - by Virginia Minni — before I got some people management experience, I would have thought this was entirely unbelievable. But most people (myself included) are not running at full speed. It’s really hard to motivate yourself!

The data covers 200,000 white-collar workers and 30,000 managers over 10 years in 100 countries. I identify good managers as the top 30% by their speed of promotion and leverage exogenous variation induced by the rotation of managers across teams. I find that good managers cause workers to reallocate within the firm through lateral and vertical transfers. This leads to large and persistent gains in workers’ career progression and productivity. Seven years after the manager transition, workers earn 30% more and perform better on objective performance measures. In terms of aggregate firm productivity, doubling the share of good managers would increase output per worker by 61% at the establishment level.

6: Anatar | American Apparel Manufacturing — just a landing page for now, but a startup I’d like to follow.

7: Chinese treasure ship - Wikipedia — an open browser tab because what if the Ming dynasty had landed on the west coast of North America, found gold, triggered an industrial revolution, and taken over the western US in the 1700s? I’ve heard lots of Age of Discovery “what if”s for Zheng He, but I think much more interesting is to draw the counterfactual forward 300 years. I’d read the book, or at least watch the movie.

8: Harry Hopkins - Wikipedia — FDR’s trusted right-hand, especially during WWII. Died of cancer as (because?) the war ended. I’d never heard of him; how many influential confidants / second-in-commands are like that? Another book I’d like to read.

9: Glad this got 45M views — kids born today can expect to see the 22nd century! With a bit of luck (and progress) I might too.

10: “Not having kids is not a remotely effective climate mitigation strategy” — someone did the math. Had no one done the math before?? Glad to have this to share now.

11: Matt Shares What He’s Learned about the Running Shoe Industry Over 10+ Years - Doctors of Running — new running shoes take 3 to 5 years from design to retail

Disclaimer: Something something sharing a link is a recommendation but not necessarily an endorsement or a sign of agreement something something.