NEWS YOU CAN USE: Strangers less awkward, more interested in deep conversation than people think.
Minister for Attack: Can anything stop Peter Dutton?
Defence Minister Peter Dutton is running a hard line towards China. But he’s not unstoppable. A federal election is coming up and the voters of Dickson could very well vote him out.
Science Why It’s Difficult
To Enjoy Success
FASTER, PLEASE: Patch could give new life to weak heart.
These Sea Slugs Break a Cardinal Rule of Animal Life The Atlantic
The workers who keep global supply chains moving are warning of a ‘system collapse’ CNN
Global supply chains at risk of collapse, warn business leaders FT
Leader of Prestigious Yale Program Resigns, Citing Donor Pressure NYT
AP: Military units track guns using tech that could aid foes AP. Oopsie.
Pentagon, Lockheed Agree to Cut F-35 Delivery Rate American Machinist
Class Warfare
Body Horror The Baffler. Well worth a read; gets better as it goes on.
Capital Finds a Way The Age of Invention. Dutch capital drove the first enclosures.
Canada grants asylum to four people who hid Edward Snowden in Hong Kong Guardian. Virtue rewarded!
Jobs for Sale: Corruption and Misallocation in Hiring
Corrupt government hiring is common in developing countries. This paper uses original data to document the operation and consequences of corrupt hiring in a health bureaucracy. Hires pay bribes averaging 17 months of salary, but contrary to conventional wisdom, their observable quality is comparable to counterfactual merit-based hires. Exploiting variation across jobs, I show that the consequences of corrupt allocations depend on the correlation between wealth and quality among applicants: service delivery outcomes are good for jobs where this was positive and poor when negative. In this setting, the correlation was typically positive, leading to relatively good performance of hires.
That is from a new AER paper by Jeffrey Weaver.