Over the last couple of weeks I have been trotting out an observation based on an interesting conversation about software engineering teams with Jonny Dimond: mediocre work is the worst kind of work.

There is an old economics joke: two economists are walking down the street. One spots a $20 bill lying on the ground and points it out to the other. “Can’t be real” says the second economist, “or someone would have picked it up already”.

Anyone interested in the impact of automation should check out this paper on the NBER “Automation and the Fate of Young Workers: Evidence from Telephone Operation in the Early 20th Century”.

There was a great story in the NY Times about the craziness around taxi medallions in New York - the things that let you own a cab - and some of the trouble it got drivers into. The medallion system among NYC taxis put a sharp divide between those who drove taxis and who owned them, which lead to people making some bad decisions to get on the other side of that line, aided by intermediaries who were neither buyers or sellers, but profited off the transaction.  The ridehailing apps came along and basically removed the barrier, but the scheme was so shaky it was destined to fail. 

Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary is an excellent review of the changes in the nature of work, and the future of work. Strongly recommended reading. 

Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine sometimes says that markets love completeness - if there are things which are bundled together, markets want to find ways to trade them individually.

Developers, and other technical practitioners, don’t respond well to marketing.

From a Stumbling and Mumbling post:

Or to be precise, monosonys: where there is a dominant supplier that gains pricing power through lack of competition. Timothy Taylor has an excellent post looking at the economics and linking (as always) to some solid research on the matter. There are some pecularities in job markets that make employment more vulnerable to big, powerful employers than you would otherwise think. To re-quote, the core point around the difference from product markets is the bi-directional matching:

Eugene Wei’s excellent Status as a Service post rang a bell for me in terms of the puzzle of the jobless prime age men in the US. The difference from just unemployment is that the folks in the jobless cohort have opted out of even trying to get work. They’re most white and in mostly former manufacturing heavy areas. They score lower on optimism than their counterparts in most of the world, and interestingly even lower than US black and latino men in similar states (See Graham and Pinto’s recent work). They view their life as worse than their parents, and don’t expect it to get better.