[PHOTO] Looking south on downtown Toronto from Bathurst at Davenport

I was walking south on Bathurst Street when I almost reached Davenport Road, realized the vista that the utility poles were framing, and took a picture.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• blogTO describes Toronto's Great Fire of 1904.


• Centauri Dreams and D-Brief react to the discovery of Kepler-186f, The Dragon's Gaze linking to a paper that models potential climates on the world.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes, as does io9, that an Earth-like planet doesn't need a stabilizing moon to be habitable. If anything, a shifting axis may help a planet avoid ice ages.


• Eastern Approaches notes that the Czech Republic isn't getting a Russian corporation to renovate its nuclear power plants.


• Geocurrents notes the ongoing maritime border dispute between Romania and Ukraine.


• Language Log notes an example of Chinese characters being used as annotations for Vietnamese script.


• The Map Room's Jonathan Crowe links to a copy of the only fantasy literature setting map needed. (The cliches are cringe-worthy.)


• Marginal Revolution takes note of the ongoing real estate boom in Vancouver.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes that Ukraine needs to keep Odessa, not only because of the city's importance as a coastal port but because of its oil refinery.


• The Russian Demographics Blog links to a paper analyzing the different kinds of processes of depopulation in European Russia.


• Towleroad notes that a photo exhibit showing same-sex couples kissing in Catholic churches, closed down in Rome, is now up in New York City.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes that it's quite rare to actually see police officers suffer serious penalties for lying.


• Window on Eurasia points readers to the writings of Andrey Piontkovsky, who argues that Putin's push for territorial annexations is more destabilizing (because more uncertain) than the Cold War.
  
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell observes an uncanny congruence between maps of England showing ancient patterns of Viking settlement and contemporary patterns of areas with benefit cuts.

[NEWS] Some Saturday links

• Al Jazeera notes on the seemingly inevitable exodus of Muslims from the Central African Republic and reports on the wariness of Georgians versus Russia.


• Bloomberg and Bloomberg BusinessWeek touch upon a variety of interesting things: the leading role of Poland in supporting Ukraine; the introduction of egg-freezing technology to women who want to postpone parenthood; the interest of South Korea in getting more Chinese tourists to its Cheju island; the willingness of Russia to sell natural gas to China when faced with a shrinking European market; the desire of Japan and India to get closer to each other; and, the growth of second-tier cities in the United States.


• CBC touches upon dating and relationship issues for First Nations people regarding endogamy and exogamy, the business of Canadian fashion retailer Joe Fresh in Bangladesh, and the role of an Iraqi expatriate in Norway in creating that country's sovereign wealth fund.


• Eurasianet notes that, for their own reasons, Kazakhstan and Armenia are getting closer to Russia.


• The Inter Press Service writes about the failed US-backed ZunZuneo social network in Cuba, the Vietnamese-Filipino alliance against China, and the discomfort of rising powers with Russia's annexation of Crimea.


• IRIN News notes that asylum seekers in Indonesia once hoping to make it to Australia are now desperate for options, and comments on how Turkey is integrating its own program with its foreign policy.


• Open Democracy comments on Venetian separatism, Polish lessons for Ukraine, and the slow institutional progress of gay rights in Hong Kong.

[FORUM] Do you think that robots will cannibalize our economies?

A recent post at Lawyers, Guns and Money by Paul Campos the 11th of this month entitled "Economic possibilities for our future robot overlords" caught my attention. Briefly? A prescient essay by John Maynard Keynes about wealth per capita and income was interestingly wrong.

[I]n 1939 John Maynard Keynes published what eventually became a famous essay, entitled “Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren,” in which he tried to predict what “the progressive countries” (what would now be called the developed world) would look like in 2030.

The essay makes two big predictions:

(1) By 2030 the developed world would be in per capita terms four to eight times wealthier than it was a century earlier.

(2) This explosion of wealth would produce a tremendous reduction of hours worked, as people chose leisure over yet more income.

The first prediction was almost uncannily accurate, while the second has turned out to be completely wrong in regard to the United States, and largely wrong about Europe.

[. . . W]ork hours in the US and Europe had declined considerably over the previous half century, and Keynes assumed that the income effect — the declining marginal utility of income in relation to leisure — would cause this trend to continue. Since then, however, the decline in working hours has ceased almost completely in the US, and slowed down drastically in Europe (Europeans do work about 20% fewer hours than Americans however, which is not a trivial distinction).

Economics being a rather tautological discipline, there is of course a ready theoretical explanation for this as well: the substitution effect — i.e., to the extent that productivity increases are reflected in higher income per hour worked, each hour of forgone work in favor of leisure becomes more costly to the worker.

Income growth has fallen far behind GDP per capita, and may be likely to continue to fall.

In the late 1960s, median household income was nearly double per capita GDP, while today we have nearly a one to one relationship between the two metrics (Households are on average only slightly smaller today. I don’t have figures for 1967 handy, but in 1975 the average household included 2.89 people, while in 2012 it featured 2.54 persons). Or to put it another way, if over the past 45 years the nation’s increasing wealth as measured by output had ended up getting distributed equally across income groups as income, median household income in the US would be nearly $100,000 per year, rather than half that sum.

Why? At his blog, Noel Maurer has complained at length about robots and advanced computer systems cannibalizing formerly middle-class occupations. (He has a tag, and everything.) At a deeper level, this slow income growth--accompanied by growing inequality--is ultimately a matter of policy.

Will this trend change, do you think? Or will it persist until something--I dare to predict something unpleasant--occurs?

Discuss.