Lemon Party

In my economics class this week we learned about asymmetric information and adverse selection, as exemplified by the lemon problem. The classic example is used cars: if someone has a good car to sell, they know it’s a good car and want to get the best price for it. But the buyer can’t know whether it’s good or not, and won’t pay top dollar for it. Therefore, only sellers of lemons enter the market, driving down prices and driving out sellers with good products. This is resolved with market signals like guarantees, which are costly to sellers of low-quality products and cheap for sellers of good-quality products.

The second example we got was education. Your extension school degree, our professor says, may or may not improve your actual productivity or value as a worker. There are people who argue that educational attainment doesn’t actually improve productivity. But it demonstrates your productivity. It is theoretically more time-consuming and therefore more expensive for a low-productivity worker to pursue a degree.

Your degree, in other words, is a badge saying you can jump through arbitrary hoops. It’s an expensive piece of paper that demonstrates how hard you can work to get expensive pieces of paper. (This model does not, of course, take into account any of the other reasons that some people might find it harder to attend and graduate from college).

It was not exactly the most inspiring motivation to study for my exam.

Mainstream Republicans
Iowa’s longest-serving Republican has renounced his party, saying that today’s mainstream Republican party is repugnant.
Twitter will have a hard time cracking down on white nationalism because algorithms can’t tell it apart from mainstream Republican talking points.
A video of a random dude at a Trump rally wearing a “Hillary for Prison” shirt and shouting “Jew-S-A” at the “Jew media” has not gone viral because it’s kind of par for the course.
Standard Republican talking point: Democrats promote infanticide. I’ve actually gotten Facebook ads accusing Mass Democrats of supporting an “infanticide bill.” This rhetoric is both nonsensical and dangerous and will lead directly to the murder of physicians.
White nationalist Steve Scalise was exposed as such in 2015, but is still in office.
Republican-led campaigns in Texas and Tennessee are trying to make voter registration harder in the face of increasing minority voter turnout.

Cultivating joy
A classic: Slime eels in highway crash.
Red Pandas are pretty cute.
Unlikely kitten/mouse friendship.