Dirk Niepelt

To counteract discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, the State of California prohibits state funded travel (for instance, by employees of the University of California) to states deemed to discriminate, including Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee.

In Daniel Quinn’s “Ishmael,” a gorilla offers his perspective on human civilization and the narratives surrounding it. Ishmael—the gorilla—characterizes the early agricultural revolution as the takeoff of the nowadays-dominant “Takers’” culture, a culture that does not only reject the hunter-gatherer and herder life of “Leaver” tribes but also finds it acceptable to eradicate the latter. The Takers reject the notion that man is part of a balanced, competitive and evolving natural system;...

In a Bank of England Financial Stability Paper, Olga Cielinska, Andreas Joseph, Ujwal Shreyas, John Tanner and Michalis Vasios analyze transactions on the Swiss Franc foreign exchange over-the-counter derivatives market around January 15, 2015, the day when the Swiss National Bank de-pegged the Swiss Franc. From the abstract: The removal of the floor led to extreme price moves in the forwards market, similar to those observed in the spot market, while trading in the Swiss franc options...

The World Wealth and Income Database.

In the Tagesanzeiger, Felix Schaad offers a caricature with the title: “Donald Trump rejects the notion that he could be blackmailed.”

On his (Le Monde) blog, Thomas Piketty emphasizes that labor productivity in France and Germany is as high as in the US, and much higher than in Italy or the UK (his figures here and here).

Ted Honderich’s The Determinism and Freedom Philosophy Website.

In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Causal Determinism, Carl Hoefer suggests in the concluding section (Determinism and Human Action) that there is hope for those who want to believe in free will: There is a long tradition of compatibilists arguing that freedom is fully compatible with physical determinism; a prominent recent defender is John Fischer (1994, 2012). Hume went so far as to argue that determinism is a necessary condition for freedom—or at least, he argued that...

On Moneyness, JP Koning argues that India’s demonetization experiment could have suffered from fewer frictions if bank notes had been overstamped rather than immediately withdrawn.

The Local reports that in order to cut costs, Denmark’s parliament passed a bill in December that will lead to the imposition of an “education cap.” The bill restricts individuals who already have a higher education degree from pursuing a degree in another field at the same or a lower level.