Jack

The law's supporters should define what kind of specific outcomes they expect.

For rent and utilities to be considered affordable, they are supposed to take up no more than 30 percent of a household’s income. But that goal is increasingly unattainable for middle-income families as a tightening market pushes up rents ever faster, outrunning modest rises in pay.

The strain is not limited to the usual high-cost cities like New York and San Francisco. An analysis for The New York Times by Zillow, the real estate website, found 90 cities where the median rent — not including utilities — was more than 30 percent of the median gross income.

In Chicago, rent as a percentage of income has risen to 31 percent, from a historical average of 21 percent. In New Orleans, it has more than doubled, to 35 percent from 14 percent. Zillow calculated the historical average using data from 1985 to 2000.

Nationally, half of all renters are now spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing, according to a comprehensive Harvard study, up from 38 percent of renters in 2000.

That is from Shaila Dewan.  And Ryan Avent adds comment.

Here is a new study from the New Zealand Productivity Commission, and here is the basic puzzle:

Based on its policy settings, the authors estimate that New Zealand’s GDP per capita should be 20% above the OECD average. But it is actually over 20% below average, making New Zealand a clear outlier. The size of the gap indicates an apparent “productivity paradox” that costs more than 40 cents in every dollar of output.

Here is one problem:

The increasing importance of global value chains – where production activities are spread across countries – may have worsened the impact of New Zealand’s geographic isolation on trade in goods.  Because global value chains typically require intensive interaction and just-in-time delivery, they tend to be regionally based. For New Zealand, international transportation costs for goods are about twice as high as in Europe. This reduces access to large markets and the scope for participation in global value chains , where the transfer of advanced technologies now often occurs.

More generally, the “gravity equation” — also known as distance — makes it harder for New Zealand to trade with the rest of the world.

Another big problem has to do with problems of underinvestment in knowledge-based capital:

Most of the rest of New Zealand’s productivity gap…appears to come from an underinvestment in knowledge-based capital. Knowledge-based capital encompasses a wide range of assets including product design, inter-firm networks, R&D and organisational know-how. Knowledge-based capital can be used simultaneously by more and more firms without re-incurring the initial development costs.  This generates increasing returns to scale – an important property that makes ideas and knowledge a key engine of productivity growth.  It can also be difficult to prevent others from using knowledge-based capital, an example of “spillovers” of knowledge and ideas between firms.

While comprehensive data on knowledge-based capital are currently not available, indications are that New Zealand ranks well in software investment and trademarks but very poorly in R&D and, to a lesser extent, patents. Indeed, R&D intensity in New Zealand – particularly business R&D – is among the lowest in the OECD. This not only reduces capacity for frontier innovation but also the ability of firms to absorb new ideas developed elsewhere, constraining technological catch-up.

In part, New Zealand suffers a low return on R&D due to its limited access to large markets, which reduces the likely payoff from the successful commercialisation of new ideas. New Zealand’s economic structure may also play a role. The industries in which New Zealand specialises typically have low R&D intensity. For instance, across countries, R&D in agriculture rarely exceeds 0.5% of value-add.

Here is a good FT summary blog post on the study.

I would have liked more comparison with the time when New Zealand was one of the world’s wealthiest nations per capita, and when, pre-1973, privileged access to British markets for Kiwi lamb and dairy was enough to maintain such high living standards.  And might we be reading a very different piece if the Chinese had a stronger taste for milk?

I recall the Michael Porter report from the 1990s, arguing that New Zealand did not have enough strong economic sectors which could lead to the accretion of cumulative advantages.

Overall, if there is any nation which should be aiming to double or triple its population, it is New Zealand.

Net profit at Alibaba Group, China’s largest e-commerce company, more than doubled in the 4th quarter, fueling speculation that the company may be on track for the largest-ever IPO in the United States sometime this year. Net profit increased to $1.3 billion from $642 million a year earlier, on revenue climbed [...]

If it hurt to write that check to Uncle Sam, you're not alone: personal income taxes have risen in 21 out of 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries in recent years. The biggest increases overall were reported in Portugal, the Slovak Republic and the United States. Today, Americans [...]

While not quite inducing Beatlemania, French economist Thomas Piketty’s visit this week to America has inspired the Washington analog of teenage frenzy.

The Heartbleed bug crushed our faith in the secure web, but a world without the encryption software that Heartbleed exploited would be even worse. In fact, it's time for the web to take a good hard look at a new idea: encryption everywhere.

For the second time in three years, one man's urine is forcing the city of Portland, Ore., to drain millions of gallons of treated water currently stored in an open reservoir. The first time someone was caught pissing in one of these open storage facilities back in 2011 the city ended up draining 7.5 million gallons of water, Fox News reports. But this time around, the urine made its way into an even larger reservoir, so the city is now planning to dump the entirety of the its contents — contents that amount to 38 million gallons of treated water — directly into the city's sewage system.

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What do you get when you build a bird house modeled after a coffee shop and stick a camera in front of it? The answer is NRK's Piip Show, a "reality show" that's unlike anything you've ever seen. The 24/7 online broadcast captures every moment as a variety of birds (and sometimes squirrels) stop for a breather and tussle over food that's regularly dropped into the feeder. The show's concept was originally dreamt up by photographer Magne Klann in 2003, but it's now more popular than ever thanks to Norwegian TV station NRK.

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BlackBerry has had its fair share of missteps over the years, but investing in the health tech startup NantHealth isn't one of them.

What would happen if the characters from "Game of Thrones" found themselves in an alternate universe where everyone behaved as if they lived in a Disney musical?

The crossover of the plot from Captain America: The Winter Soldier to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was a shot in the arm for the TV series, but maybe not enough of one.

Nintendo's really hurting for games for its Wii U console, but now it has a new well to tap: The library of the Game Boy Advance.

Scientists have discovered that sea otters can get the flu — and not just any flu, either. According to the Smithsonian, these mammals are the world's newest carriers of H1N1, the flu strain that lead to a human pandemic back in 2009. And, according to a study published in Emerging and Infectious Diseases, scientists have no idea how these Northern sea otters caught it.

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As many as one third of patients who receive a "persistent vegetative state" diagnosis might still be conscious, reports Maclean's. These results, published today in The Lancet, carry many ethical and legal implications for how healthcare professionals and society at large regard patients who appear to have lost all consciouness.

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Since Marissa Mayer took over at Yahoo, she has made a steady push to rebuild the photo-sharing community at Flickr by overhauling its products. Today Flickr is getting its most dramatic makeover to date, with a total redesign of the apps for iOS and Android that make it a more direct competitor to Instagram and other photo-sharing services. It takes the easy-capture and sharing features of Instagram and pairs them with the worry-free backup of Dropbox and Google+. The result is an app that is faster and more fun to use, even as its imitation of features that others made famous will likely draw charges of copying.

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NSA leaker Edward Snowden is currently living under asylum in Russia, so it makes sense that he would want to know about the country's own surveillance practices. He managed to take his inquiry straight to the top and pose the question to none other than President Vladimir Putin during a live, state-run television broadcast. "I've seen little public discussion of Russia's own involvement in the policies of mass surveillance," he said. "So I'd like to ask you: Does Russia intercept, store or analyze, in any way, the communications of millions of individuals?" The show's host claimed that Snowden "revolutionized the world by leaking the information about American secret services" before he appeared via video link.

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RunKeeper is one of the most popular run-tracking apps for the iPhone, and today it's launching a new app called Breeze to take count of how much you're walking around too. The app works only on the iPhone 5S and is based around its M7 motion processor, which is always collecting your steps in the background. Using that, it's able to display exactly how far you've walked that day as soon as you open it up. While there's no shortage of pedometer apps for the iPhone 5S, Breeze stands out by keeping its interface simple, giving you a personalized walking goal to reach every day and telling you exactly how close you should be to it during any given hour.

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Scientists have discovered four species of Brazilian insects in which the females possess a penis and the males possess a vagina. This announcement, made today in the journal Current Biology, represents the first documented instance of a "female penis" in the animal kingdom.

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There's truly a Kickstarter project for just about everything. Case in point: a new fundraising effort to pool together $5 million to buy the upcoming Wu-Tang Clan album, which the group is planning make available to only one lucky person. Last month, Wu-Tang Clan member Robert "RZA" Digg described the album, called The Wu — Once Upon a Time In Shaolin, as a true collectors item, something equivalent to "having the scepter of an Egyptian king." The group's already been offered $5 million for it, putting it well out of the reach of normal humans. And that's not sitting well with two twenty-somethings from California and Utah, who have taken to Kickstarter to raise those funds collectively, then distribute the album to backers:

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Looking to help ease the costs of driver background checks and insurance, the on-demand car service adds a new fee to customers' bills.

Well-known shirtless outdoorsman stock photography model Vladimir Putin had a little fun today, telling a Russian audience that he thinks Barack Obama would totally rescue him if he started drowning.

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All anyone ever wanted to talk about for the past few months has been Frozen. It's so fun! The songs are so good! We want to lip sync them! Disney Animation is better than Pixar now! And so on and so on. Was it really that good, guys? HISHE thinks it could have better. Or at least, different with this alternate ending where Anna and Elsa's parents just don't understand what the heck to do (and go to someone who knows very well how to help mutants).

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A 17-year-old male is now in coma after suffering a heart attack when a friend jokingly squeezed his testicles. Dr. Irwin Goldstein—urologist and San Diego Sexual Medicine's director—says it's very possible to have a heart attack because the trauma can release a huge amount of adrenalin.

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Blizzard's best-known for its RTS franchises and insanely popular MMORPG World of Warcraft, not to mention the Diablo series. With fans of the publisher's prior work kept sated and docile by sequels and expansions, Blizzard's turned some of its...

Twenty-seven wooden blocks weighing 600 pounds each? That's no regular game of Jenga—that's a job for a team of five giant, yet agile, Cat excavators and telehandlers to take on. Just some machines having fun.

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It's fair to say, not all toasters are created equal. But the Bugatti Noun is a god amongst toasters, a futurist but elegant combination of glass and chrome that would stand out in any kitchen. And it does more than just toast.

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Viruses are incompetent but smart little things. Unable to make proteins on their own, they hijack ours for their own nefarious purposes. But what if we gave the viruses broken proteins? An incredibly rare genetic disorder in a brother and sister pair does exactly that, making them immune to many classes of viruses—and suggesting new possibilities for antiviral treatments.

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For the first and perhaps the last time ever, NASA's Cassini spacecraft, whose mission is to orbit Saturn, has captured a new moon emerge from the Jovian planet's rings. As you might know, the birth of a moon is an extremely rare event, and in...

By Alex Hanton,Evan V. Symon  Published: April 15th, 2014  No matter how many deranged, megalomaniacal psychopaths there are in our governing bodies, political shenanigans are usually less about flamethrower robots and more about balding men in suits lying about fiscal policy. But occasionally the government