Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the global economy →

On the Sunday talk shows, Trump made variations of the same argument he made in 2012 —  that as president he would be able to bring back lost manufacturing jobs from China and Mexico. If there’s been a policy “theme” to Trump’s campaign — and my colleague David Fahrenthold cogently explains why I put quotes around that word — it’s that past U.S. presidents have been bad trade negotiators and that because of these bad trade deals the rest of the world is somehow fleeing the U.S. manufacturing sector. This is a message he’s delivered again and again and again.

Trump’s message is very appealing to those who genuinely believe this narrative about the U.S. economic decline. It’s also a big lie.

...

If you want more evidence, consider Monday’s excellent New York Times story by Hiroko Tabuchi about Chinese textile firms now relocating factories back to the United States. It turns out that rising labor costs in China compared with the United States has improved U.S. competitiveness. According to Tabuchi, “for every $1 required to manufacture in the United States, Boston Consulting estimates that it costs 96 cents to manufacture in China.”

So that means a massive exodus of Chinese jobs coming to the United States, right? Wrong:

The work is highly automated, with the factory’s 32 production lines churning out about 85 tons of yarn a day. Even when Keer opens a second factory next year, it will hire just 500 workers, a fraction of the thousands of workers who toiled at cotton mills across the South for much of the 19th and 20th centuries — a big reason Keer is able to keep costs down.

The smartphone is the new sun →

Today, there are well over 2bn smartphones in use, and there are between 3.5 and 4.5bn people with a mobile phone of some kind, out of only a little over 5bn adults on earth. Over the next few years almost all of the people who don't yet have a phone will get one, and almost all of the phones on earth will become smartphones. A decade ago some of that was subject to debate - today it isn't. What all those people pay for data, and how they charge their phones, may be a challenge, but the smartphone itself is close to a universal product for humanity - the first the tech industry has ever had.

...The smartphone wars mean there's now a firehose of cheap, low-power, ever-more-sophisticated smartphone components available for anyone else to use - it's as though someone dumped a shipping container worth of Lego on the floor and we're working out what to make. In parallel, the contract manufacturers that make all of those smartphones can also make other things with those components. These two factors - the components and the contract manufacturers, together the supply chain -  are behind the explosion of smart devices of every kinds - drones, wearables, internet of things, connected homes, cars, TVs and so on. 

The New Science of Sentencing →

More like "The Bad Science of Sentencing". You don't turn people back from bad behavior by telling them you believe they're likely to continue; that's a self-fulfilling prophecy-in-the-making. This is terribly stupid and evil. Instead, if you have reason to suspect people will fall back into crime, take the enormous amounts of money that would be spent on keeping them locked up longer, and invest that in, oh: jobs programs, training, therapy... Things that have a chance of benefiting society in the long term, instead of further degrading people and making the situation worse.

Criminal sentencing has long been based on the present crime and, sometimes, the defendant’s past criminal record. In Pennsylvania, judges could soon consider a new dimension: the future.

Pennsylvania is on the verge of becoming one of the first states in the country to base criminal sentences not only on what crimes people have been convicted of, but also on whether they are deemed likely to commit additional crimes. As early as next year, judges there could receive statistically derived tools known as risk assessments to help them decide how much prison time — if any — to assign.

Bipartisan Push Builds to Relax Sentencing Laws →

Even in a Congress riven by partisanship, the priorities of libertarian-leaning Republicans and left-leaning Democrats have come together, led by the example of several states that have adopted similar policies to reduce their prison costs.

As senators work to meld several proposals into one bill, one important change would be to expand the so-called safety-valve provisions that give judges discretion to sentence low-level drug offenders to less time in prison than the mandatory minimum term if they meet certain requirements.

Another would allow lower-risk prisoners to participate in recidivism programs to earn up to a 25 percent reduction of their sentence. Lawmakers would also like to create more alternatives to incarceration for low-level drug offenders. Nearly half of all current federal prisoners are serving sentences for drug crimes.

The Trouble with Pinker's Argument about 'The Trouble With Harvard' →

Quoted in full:

What does elite education provide, and why do the rich do whatever it takes to gain entrance into top tier institutions? If we don't understand this, we don't understand what we need to provide for everyone else. Here's the full study.

Here's a key point: it's not content knowledge. It's not even academic skills nor critical thinking. If we focus only on these, the elite institutions offer no advantage. Why then are they elite? Kevin Carey suggests that the elites "select the best and the brightest", but this isn't true either. They select the richest. They then turn these very average intelligences into social and economic successes.

The focus on quality, as I argue, is a distraction. We need to provide people not only with learning, but with the social network, tools and empowerment that a proper education produces. As Cathy Davidson says, "What if the issue isn't what Harvard can and does do brilliantly but what, for the students who do not go to elite schools, they must do for themselves: ensure their own success.

What 2,000 Calories Looks Like →

Here, we show you what roughly 2,000 calories looks like at some large chains. (Depending on age and gender, most adults should eat between 1,600 and 2,400 calories a day.) Researchers have long understood that people are more likely to finish what’s on their plate than to stop eating because they’ve consumed a given amount of food. It’s “the completion compulsion,” a phrase coined in the 1950s by the psychologist Paul S. Siegel. Combine that compulsion with the rising number of restaurant meals Americans eat and the substance of those meals, and you start to understand why we’ve put on so much weight. But there is some good news: As you’ll see below, it’s not so hard to eat bountifully and stay under 2,000 calories. It’s just hard to do so at most restaurants.

Affluent children reach top universities no matter the system →

They calculate that high-achieving children from privileged backgrounds in England have a 53 per cent chance of entering a Russell Group university, compared with a one in four chance for their disadvantaged peers. The chances of not entering higher education at all are one in 20 and one in five, respectively.

The results for the US were similar, with high-achieving children from advantaged backgrounds having a 58 per cent chance of entering a highly selective university, compared with 27 per cent for the less privileged group. The prospects of not entering any university were 8 per cent and 27 per cent, respectively.

Why did Iran sign on to a deal that will weaken its regional hold? →

So why did Iran sign on to a deal that will undermine its regional strategy? The obvious answer is that economic sanctions forced Iran to choose between political stability at home and hegemony over the region. On that score, then, the nuclear deal has in one swoop ended Iran’s nuclear threat and hobbled its regional agenda.

But equally important is that Iran’s main regional worry has become the so-called Islamic State. The extremist Sunni force has emerged as an anti-Shiite and anti-Iranian juggernaut that now controls vast territory in Iraq and Syria and is a growing presence in Afghanistan. The Islamic State has the potential to expand into other Sunni Arab states and thereby present Iran and its Shiite allies with a significant strategic threat.

Iran has been fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and it could be doing the same in Afghanistan before long. This could be a long war, and that reality has forced Iran to rethink its strategic calculus. Confronting the Islamic State requires not a nuclear umbrella but a reduction of tensions with the international community and greater economic resources. The threat of the Islamic State, more so than any promise of hegemony over the region, was likely a decisive factor in Iran’s decision to sign away the nuclear cover for its regional strategy.