Links 2018/09/27

• "Self-driving homes could be the future of affordable housing". If the technology pans out, we'll still probably screw it up as described by this actually-good-internet-comment: "Poor people will not live in glorious RV parks. They'll be shunted to shitty areas by new NIMBY laws and charged exorbitant fees for services."
• "Reductions in childhood mortality have prevented 100m deaths since 1990". #latestagecapitalism
• Jason Furman, the previous Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, gives a history of the policies we passed to counter the Great Recession and summarizes the evidence we've gathered since then. Link to the paper and link to the easier-to-read twitter thread. One interesting thing is in his "lessons for the future" at the bottom, he discusses how many recent studies have suggested tax cuts are a much more effective form of stimulus than previously believed. This is good (if true), because they are presumably both technically and politically easier to do at whatever amount makes sense than finding a bunch of temporary spending projects.
• www.nber.org/papers/w25000: "state-wide minimum teacher salary laws created sharp differences in teacher wages between adjacent counties. These differences had large impacts on schooling attainment, suggesting an important causal role for school quality in mediating upward mobility"
• Trump, the "law-and-order president", wants his Justice Department to not prosecute Republican congressmen for crimes. This seems like the sort of thing that would be done in secret, and once leaked, would be a huge scandal for a president. But this is... a tweet to the public:
  

  Two long running, Obama era, investigations of two very popular Republican Congressmen were brought to a well publicized charge, just ahead of the Mid-Terms, by the Jeff Sessions Justice Department. Two easy wins now in doubt because there is not enough time. Good job Jeff......

  — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 3, 2018