In 2003, Tirole and fellow economist Olivier Blanchard proposed a “lay-off tax”. Instead of heavy taxation of salaries, which dissuades companies from hiring workers, they said France should tax companies for sacking people. Tirole also suggested a “single labour contract” to replace the current dual system in which insiders have permanent contracts and outsiders temporary ones. Neither idea flew.
Second, the migrants are coming. “As an economist I think migration is a good thing, but with a small caveat: if you don’t have jobs for them, we’ll get people who will be very unhappy about being in France.” Third, he says, the digital economy will quickly destroy many jobs. He adds, half-jokingly: “Maybe my job won’t exist any more. Maybe all teaching will be done from Cambridge, Mass.”
I like our welfare system, schools which are widely available to people, a health system.
and we will lose the discipline of the euro. I don’t want to answer your question. I don’t want to think about it.”
-Christ, what an asshole. “Tirole speaking sense” this isn’t.
Agreed with prior_approval: there’s no way there’s a single MR reader who thinks Tyler read all these 514 pages.
Voices from Chernobyl (by a former admirer of Felix Dzerzhinsky) is said to be utter garbage. Probably so are all the other books in that Guardian list.
As for the Go-playing software article, my main takeaway is “software isn’t very smart”. Or, alternatively, “humans are crazy smart in some areas”.
@Milo Minderbinder:
The text and background at Marginal Counterrevolution make the site virtually unreadable.
It was much worse when it started. And, in any case, what do you prefer the background to have been? Seriously, guys, comment below. It’s not like I didn’t do any testing on what made the text most readable. I did quite a bit. And I don’t think you can change the text brightness and color in the theme I picked.
BTW, this is what the site looks like as of 4:15 Eastern Time on December 5, 2015:
@Milo
Read my reply again.
I cannot change the font color with my present theme. Only my background. If you find a theme that looks as good as the one I picked with a better font color, please, be my guest. A white background would make blockquoted text unreadable. I checked.
Against Jebel al-Lawz 
Layout is secondary to legibility. This is too much trouble to read. It’s wordpress. Either change the css code or find a different theme. https://thethemefoundry.com/blog/how-to-customize-a-wordpress-theme/
Reads fine for me. And it’s WordPress.com, not WordPress.org, and I am not paying for Custom Design. So I can’t change the CSS. I’ve tested this #df1a1a color on several different monitors.
It’s too difficult to find themes that look sorta like Tyler Cowen’s WordPress.org one.
Okay, due to popular demand, I have changed my background to #515151 . I think people find strong colors distracting and too difficult to focus on. I liked the red, though.
Tested on another monitor and switched to #666666 .
Hm. People were right. Less saturated tones were easier on the eyes. I don’t even feel the need to squint. I wonder why that is.
You should always use high contrast between font color and background. IE, dark back ground and light font or like back ground and dark font. Also, stay away from in between font and background because the contrast will always be murky. I spent 15 years engineering Human-Computer interface systems for plants. Many of your readers will not see colors the same way as you do, many of them will have different type monitors, and web browsers. So, the basics are best. That being said, I do like the snow!
-That’s what I’m trying to do. Again, the poor choice of font shades is the theme’s fault, not mine, and I’m not paying for Custom Design and don’t have the time to search through every theme. Have I been successful at maximizing contrast between font and background? I liked the red background, but the people who commented on it didn’t like it. Is the grey better?
The Red has very poor contrast with black text. The Dark Gray has moderately poor contrast. However, the Light gray “used in the quoted section” seems like a pretty good choice.
I don’t want the quoted section to become invisible.
The grey is better than the red. but black on grey is still too low contrast to bother with. Do you really need to use the block quote feature? I think it’s better to have a site that people can read easily, even if you had to forgo block quotes and use >>> <<< instead.
If it’s all White, you won’t be able to see the snow.