Monday assorted links
1. Checkout lanes for people who want it to be slow?
2. “In summary I’d say the most important and mysterious unanswered question of economics is the point from #2: which cooperative norms are chosen to be enforced and how does this come about?” Link here.
3. Larry Summers and his wife discussing poetry, mostly Larry doing the reading (video), and discussion here.
4. New and important results on why labor’s share has fallen:
The recent fall of labor’s share of GDP in numerous countries is well-documented, but its causes are poorly understood. We sketch a “superstar firm” model where industries are increasingly characterized by “winner take most” competition, leading a small number of highly profitable (and low labor share) firms to command growing market share. Building on Autor et al. (2017), we evaluate and confirm two core claims of the superstar firm hypothesis: the concentration of sales among firms within industries has risen across much of the private sector; and industries with larger increases in concentration exhibit a larger decline in labor’s share.
That is from Autor, Dorn, Katz, Patterson, and van Reenen.