Weekend Reading, Watching and Listening Recommendations (October 8, 2021)
Why Are Wages So Low In So Many Markets?; How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle Class; Why Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went down; Paul Collier discusses development traps; Exit, Voice and Bitcoin
Read: Why Are Wages So Low In So Many Markets? Using data from Burning Glass Technologies — a company that collects online job postings from about 40,000 websites, “the near-universe of online U.S. job vacancies” — the paper’s coauthors paint an eye-opening picture of labor market concentration, as seen in the map below.
Read: How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle Class [via the Atlantic]
Read: A simple explanation of why Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went down
Listen: Paul Collier discusses development traps, whether and how the bottom billion countries have benefited from globalization, the extent to which democracy fosters development, why mainstream economics has largely ignored the concept of sustainable development and the growing popularity of the de-growth movement.
Watch: A famous [and very interesting] talk by entrepreneur and computer scientist Balaji Srinivasan at Y Combinator on “Exit, Voice and Bitcoin” [a play on Hirschman’s “Exit, Voice and Loyalty”]