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Vaguely interesting (June 29)

(1)  “64% of black adults say blacks are treated less fairly than whites in the workplace, compared with 22% of whites who say the same.”

(2)  “Results indicate that unlike official statistics that have shown poverty rates to be fairly flat since the 1960s, poverty rates have dropped by 40% when measured using a historical anchored SPM over the same period. Results … show that government policies, not market incomes, are driving the declines observed over time.”

(3)  “Wilson’s embrace of Proposition 187 was followed by significant Hispanic movement toward the Democratic Party in California. … This suggests that state-level actors can influence partisan coalitions in their state, beyond what would be expected from national-level factors.”

(4)  “Globalization didn’t create a lot of losers, but the ones it did [i.e., the working class in the richest countries] were concentrated in the countries that were the driving force behind it. This was a political powder keg. If rich-world workers were losing ground even when times were good, what would happen if we got hit by one of the financial crises the new global economy seemed to spawn every few years?”

(5)  As a bit of social psychology, it’s fascinating to watch the libertarians at reason.com try to convince themselves that the Brexit vote could really mean that British voters favor pro-cosmopolitan but anti-regulation policies—just like libertarians do. I mean, yeah, it looks like the Leave side was propelled by less-educated, older, native-born voters, and we know that these are just the sorts of folks who don’t like immigration, but it could still totally be the case that the Leave voters were pro-immigration libertarians. Right? (I’m reminded of Festinger’s When Prophecy Fails.)

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