1. Thesaurus.com is “fingerprinting” you.

2. Acemoglu talk and John Nye comment at Cato.

3. “We find that trade-related job losses account for roughly 7% of the South’s over-representation in the Army during our period of study.”

4. “Quantitative analysis suggests that global financial integration alone can account for 34% to 55% of the observed increase in the current top one percent wealth share in the U.S., but indicates a possible reversal in the future.“

Yes, in a nutshell, as Gordon Tullock used to claim:

Are states led by women less prone to conflict than states led by men? We answer this question by examining the effect of female rule on war among European polities over the 15th-20th centuries. We utilize gender of the first born and presence of a female sibling among previous monarchs as instruments for queenly rule. We find that polities led by queens were more likely to engage in war than polities led by kings. Moreover, the tendency of queens to engage as aggressors varied by marital status. Among unmarried monarchs, queens were more likely to be attacked than kings. Among married monarchs, queens were more likely to participate as attackers than kings, and, more likely to fight alongside allies. These results are consistent with an account in which marriages strengthened queenly reigns because married queens were more likely to secure alliances and enlist their spouses to help them rule. Married kings, in contrast, were less inclined to utilize a similar division of labor. These asymmetries, which reflected prevailing gender norms, ultimately enabled queens to pursue more aggressive war policies.

That is by Oeindrila Dube and S.P. Harish, here is the working paper version, here is the forthcoming in the JPE version.

1. Do you talk about it in Open Borders Bryan Caplan says yes.

2. The effect of wrapping neatness on gift attitudes never my strong suit.

3. Ariel Rubinstein Five Books on game theory.

4. “Holter charges $5,000 a day per truck to individuals threatened by fires, but even in an emergency won’t send his team out until his clients read through a detailed contract.”

5. China and the United States in higher education (NYT).

1. Alice Evans podcast with Daron Acemoglu.

2. The Queen has someone to wear in her shoes.

3. Scott Aaronson explains quantum supremacy to NYT readers.

4. “The other day I was considering the purchase of a double LP when a thought crossed my mind – how many times would I need people to stream my music on Spotify to pay for this double LP?

The estimated answer turned out to be 8,459.”  Link here.

5. Reid Hofman interviews Patrick Collison.

6. Japanese Halloween costumes.

Here is an old 2007 essay of mine from Wilson Quarterly, one which most of you have not read.  The key point is that your most critical competitors are now much more distant and indeed invisible than before, and that this will have social and economic implications.  Here is one excerpt:

George Shackle, the neglected Scottish economist, wrote in his 1973 book Epistemics and Economics that the entrepreneur imagines a future no one else sees. For Shackle, the entrepreneur is not just a trader, a manager, or an initiator of enterprise. The fundamental entrepreneurial activity is creative, and it occurs in the mind rather than the physical world. The creators of YouTube and Facebook did not require a new raw material or even a radically new programming technique; most of all they were blessed with the ability to imagine a new way to present material and connect people to one another. Their competitors, if that phrase can even be used, were the young potential entrepreneurs who might have hit upon similar ideas first, but didn’t. These phantom rivals were not out in the public arena, promoting their corporations or thumping their chests and proclaiming grand plans. Rather they were quietly doodling away on their computers in scattered suburbs and cities, perhaps after finishing their homework for the ­evening.

Invisible competition also gives an edge to people who can manage and interpret their own feedback. In the past, if you lost a job to a person who was smarter than you or had a better line of patter, you could size up the winner and gauge where you fell short. Now you can’t always see who crossed the finish line ahead of you. The future will favor people like Madonna, the pop star and media icon who has successfully reinvented herself so many times because she has an uncanny sense of where popular culture is bound and how to get there ­first.

And this:

The nations most disadvantaged by invisible competition may be those that exist in proximity to a key rival. They risk focusing too narrowly on one challenge and getting used to the idea that competition takes a highly visible form. Transfixed by its rivalry with India, Pakistan may be oblivious to other concerns. A similar preoccupation makes it harder for many people in the Middle East to take a global ­perspective.

I still like the piece.