Jason Collins writes,

Incarceration removes young men from the mating market during their mating prime. As the propensity to commit crime is heritable, the removal of criminals from the mating market will reduce the frequency of the genes associated with crime in the next generation.

So prison sentences that are created for the stated purposes of punishment and deterrence have primarily eugenic value? Read the whole thing, as well as the article to which he refers.

Stephen Gordon writes,

the last time the real, per capita value of US housing equity was at its current level. Even after looking at all of these graphs, the answer astonished me: 1978

As Tyler Cowen would say, we are a lot poorer than we thought we were. Read the whole thing. Note that a big reason that housing equity is so low is that mortgage borrowing grew by more than even the bubble-inflated value of houses. It very much fits Cowen’s story that people borrowed and consumed a lot because we over-estimated our wealth.

Russ Roberts writes,

Today, a couple of workers can manage an egg-laying operation of almost a million chickens laying 240,000,000 eggs a year. How can two people pick up those eggs or feed those chickens or keep them healthy with medication? They can’t. The hen house does the work–it’s really smart. The two workers keep an eye on a highly mechanized, computerized process that would have been unimaginable 50 years ago.

Yes, there is technological unemployment. Russ continues,

Somehow, new jobs get created to replace the old ones. Despite losing millions of jobs to technology and to trade, even in a recession we have more total jobs than we did when the steel and auto and telephone and food industries had a lot more workers and a lot fewer machines.

Re-reading the first sentence, with its passive voice, I can almost feel his hands waving. The PSST story is that entrepreneurs must figure out how to reallocate resources when productivity rises faster than demand in some industries. I want to suggest that it can be a very difficult process. As labor gets more specialized and production processes become more roundabout, large adjustments require more steps.