Tuesday assorted links

1. “Novels, when they work, use lies to tell the truth. The information marketplace, battling for an audience, tends, more and more, to transform intolerable truths into novelistic, riveting, enjoyable lies.”  From Elena Ferrante.

2. Marginal Revolution poem.

3. Health care cross subsidies.

4. Ancestral characteristics of modern populations.

5. The economics of postcards.

6. “In all technological fields, the number of patents per inventor has declined near-monotonically, except for large increases in inventor productivity in software and semiconductors in the late 1990s.”

7. Management advice improved firm performance, unless it was being received by an MBA.