The Shift from Public to Private Markets in Tech Funding →

Very interesting notes in relation to the "tech bubble" talk:

Yesterday, the folks at Andreessen-Horowitz released a slide deck on their reasoning why “this time it is different” on tech funding and bubbles. It is worth a little of your time but here are the take aways:
  • The amount of money going into tech start-ups is still much less than it was in the dot.com bubbleof 2000. Indeed, as a share of GDP funding has been flat since that time. It is also flat as a function of people online.

However:

  • The tech funding is heavily geographically concentrated. We know that this is the case with entrepreneurial activity (see here) and I think it is becoming more so.
  • That means that while an economy-wide view of funding shows flatness in the aggregates, I wonder if we did just a Silicon Valley analysis, it would look like this. My guess is that funding from Silicon Valley to Silicon Valley has increased.
  • Given this, I think the heart of the move to earlier stage funding is doing hand in hand with the increase in wealth concentration...

Conservatives, Universal Registration, and “Informed Voters” →

If I can expand Foster’s thought a bit, he’s making a simple argument: Democracy requires informed citizens, but the larger the pool of voters, the less likely the average citizen is especially informed. Far from enhancing democracy, universal voter registration might make it worse.
(It’s a classic “perversity thesis” for those of you who read your Hirschman.)
I’m sympathetic to this view, especially since it seems inevitable that more voters—even if they’re just potential voters—equals a less intelligent electorate. But consider this: The story of our democracy is of progressive expansion: Landed white males to all white males, all white males to all males, all males to men and women. Each expansion brought in “uninformed” people, and yet, the electorate isn’t less informed than it was when voting was the privilege of a few. What gives?
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I said there were two things, and here’s the second. Conservatives have a genuinely different view of voting than liberals. For liberals, voting is good in its own right, and universal registration affirms that everyone is a valuable member of society. That they count, and their voice should too. Conservatives, by contrast, tend to see voting as a means to an end: Good governance and wise leadership. And if that’s true, then there’s every reason to limit the franchise; to put obstacles to voting and to ensure that only the most motivated people come to the polls.
But they should know that this argument doesn’t just apply to universal registration: It applies to every voting expansion, from the 15th Amendment to women’s suffrage. In other words, it proves too much.
Which is to say this: Maybe our history shows that, far worsening our politics, making it easier to vote is how we give all Americans a chance to be great—and informed—citizens.

Protecting public safety while reducing the prison headcount →

Three things to like about Ross Douthat’s Sunday column on incarceration:
1.  He starts in the right place: the sheer scale and horror of mass incarceration, especially as practiced in this country. (Douthat is right: by any reasonable definition, SuperMax is torture.)
2. He acknowledges the key fact: there aren’t enough harmless prisoners that releasing them would solve the problem. If we want to get to civilized levels of incarceration we need to let out some seriously guilty and possibly dangerous people.  Just to get back to the U.S. historical level – already about 50% above European rates – we would have to let out four out of five current inmates. That means freeing large numbers of armed robbers, rapists, and murderers.
3. And he asks the right question: how to do that without ending our twenty-year winning streak in crime reduction...

In China, Don’t Mistake the Trees for the Forest →

The chart reminds us that China is a large and heterogeneous country—and, as it happens, social unrest isn’t a national referendum. You don’t need a majority vote from a whole country to get popular protest that can threaten to reorder national politics; you just need to reach a critical point, and that point can often be reached with a very small fraction of the total population. So, instead of looking at national tendencies to infer national risk, we should look at the tails of the relevant distributions to see if they’re getting thicker or longer. The people and places at the wrong ends of those distributions represent pockets of potential unrest; other things being equal, the more of them there are, the greater the cumulative probability of relevant action.

For American pundits, China isn’t a country. It’s a fantasyland. →

And because China is so vast, its successes can be attributed to whatever your pet cause is. Do you oppose free markets and privatization, like John Ross, former economic policy adviser for the city of London? Then China’s success is because of the role of the state. Do you favor free markets, like the libertarian Cato Institute? Then China’s success is because of its opening up. Are you an environmentalist? China is working on huge green-energy projects. Are you an energy lobbyist? China’s building gigantic pipeline projects. Are you an enthusiast for the Protestant work ethic, like historian Niall Ferguson, who describes it as one of his “killer apps” for civilizations? Then credit China’s manufacturing boom to its 40 million Protestants — even though they’re less than 5 percent of its 1.3 billion people.
With a massively changing country, correlation and causation are easily confused. China’s boom years in the 2000s, for instance, correspond nicely with an explosion in the number of pet dogs; perhaps some canine enthusiast is even now explaining how this is evidence that Bo, not Barack, should be making policy.

Pick-Up Artists and Pro-Family Conservatives Agree: Women Only Marry for Money →

Roosh’s suspicion of women’s work and education carries over to conservative mistrust of welfare used by women because both camps believe female independence undermines American families. Of course, rather than focusing on trying to cattle-prod women into marriage with the threat of poverty, we could always focus on the reasons women leave relationships, such as the asymmetrical division of emotional labor. We could also try to make young people more financially secure with job guarantees or a universal basic income. But these policies, alas, may be too woman-friendly to survive the currents of conservative thought, which blend, as Roosh V demonstrates, with considerably darker waters.

SEAL Team 6: A Secret History of Quiet Killings and Blurred Lines →

They have plotted deadly missions from secret bases in the badlands of Somalia. In Afghanistan, they have engaged in combat so intimate that they have emerged soaked in blood that was not their own. On clandestine raids in the dead of the night, their weapons of choice have ranged from customized carbines to primeval tomahawks.
Around the world, they have run spying stations disguised as commercial boats, posed as civilian employees of front companies and operated undercover at embassies as male-female pairs, tracking those the United States wants to kill or capture.
Those operations are part of the hidden history of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, one of the nation’s most mythologized, most secretive and least scrutinized military organizations. Once a small group reserved for specialized but rare missions, the unit best known for killing Osama bin Laden has been transformed by more than a decade of combat into a global manhunting machine.
That role reflects America’s new way of war, in which conflict is distinguished not by battlefield wins and losses, but by the relentless killing of suspected militants.
Almost everything about SEAL Team 6, a classified Special Operations unit, is shrouded in secrecy — the Pentagon does not even publicly acknowledge that name — though some of its exploits have emerged in largely admiring accounts in recent years. But an examination of Team 6’s evolution, drawn from dozens of interviews with current and former team members, other military officials and reviews of government documents, reveals a far more complex, provocative tale.
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When suspicions have been raised about misconduct, outside oversight has been limited. Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees SEAL Team 6 missions, conducted its own inquiries into more than a half-dozen episodes, but seldom referred them to Navy investigators. “JSOC investigates JSOC, and that’s part of the problem,” said one former senior military officer experienced in special operations, who like many others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because Team 6’s activities are classified.
Even the military’s civilian overseers do not regularly examine the unit’s operations. “This is an area where Congress notoriously doesn’t want to know too much,” said Harold Koh, the State Department’s former top legal adviser, who provided guidance to the Obama administration on clandestine war.