Boundless Reads #117
Greetings from Connecticut! Enjoy this weeks reads.
#1 Basic Income?: The economist Daron Acemoglu writes that a negative income tax makes more sense than a Universal Basic Income. He also argues that these policies should be focused on re-igniting democratic processes rather than handouts along the lines "the robots took our jobs!"
Many current social problems are rooted in our neglect of the democratic process. The solution isn’t to dribble out enough crumbs to keep people at home, distracted, and otherwise pacified. Rather, we need to rejuvenate democratic politics, boost civic involvement, and seek collective solutions.
#2 Coding: If you ever wanted to read something that might really make you understand the essential basics of coding, check out this post from Ryan Kulp - The Best Post Ever Written on Learning How To Code.
#3 Stories: Nice story with family videos from the 1940s about how one woman was able to re-write the story of her parent's marriage.
#4 Creativity: I've always been fascinated by how constraints can enable creativity. This post on the white stripes is an argument for finding the right rules.
These rules constrained the band to a box — but it was their box, and staying in that box helped enable their rapid-fire creativity. “I’m disgusted by artists or songwriters who pretend there are no rules,” Jack White said in a New York Times interview. “There’s nothing guiding them in their creativity. We could’ve spent six months making our last album. We could have recorded 600 tracks. Instead, we went and made the whole album, 18 songs, in 10 days.” By restricting their creative process, how-to rules freed the White Stripes to follow a short, clear path to their favorite patch of creativity.
#5 Prestige: I wrote a short post about the hidden "prestige hierarchies" that shape our behavior more than we can imagine and how our conceptions of prestige are shifting with the emergence of digital online and new offline communities.
+ Related reads: Sarah Kendzior, Scott Alexander, and Kevin Simler all have fantastic related essays.
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