I have seen the future and it Zux! Here’s a useful Vox piece on why we shouldn’t panic about Facebook’s new “Instant Articles” feature. The piece is useful because it is so unconvincing. I wasn’t panicked before. Basically the Vox argument is:

a) Facebook dominates the web. (There’s a stunning chart demonstrating why the profitablity of practically every web site now hinges on Facebook.)

b) Facebook’s mysterious algorithm gives them the power to favor or disfavor specific publications or articles;

c) “Instant articles” will give them even more power to favor or disfavor specific publications, as more and more people read the articles that Facebook agrees to host on its servers;

d) So, hey, don’t worry!

P.S.: Vox‘s Timothy B. Lee argues that big news outfits like the New York Times can stand up to Facebook the way ESPN can stand up to cable operators. Even if that’s true,  you have to be a big outfit like the NYT or ESPN to have that kind of leverage, no? What does that mean for small, unaffiliated content providers (e.g., me, or Talking Points Memo) who don’t have protection from a big outfit? The pressure for concentration will only increase. The Web was supposed to be an Army of Davids.

P.P.S.: Lee says “There’s No Reason for Facebook to Censor Instant Articles.” Really?  You don’t think they’d ever tweak their secret algorithm to, say, disfavor articles calling for less immigration, or an end to Mark Zuckerberg’s precious H-1B visa program? I’m not so sure. (I didn’t think Tucker Carlson had a reason to censor my pieces to avoid offending Fox, but reality is cruder than the textbook models would have it.)

I predict a lot of Zucking up. At Vox it may already have started.

Why worry about inequality, Take 2: In Vox, Matt Yglesias argues explains that the Democrats’ famous “Great Gatsby Curve” is bunk. The Curve purported to show that money inequality has been accompanied by lower “relative mobility” — the ability of Americans to move up and down the economic ladder. But Yglesias notes  that “detailed analysis … does not show a decline in intergenerational mobility since 1971, even though inequality has skyrocketed.” Don’t tell President Obama.**

What liberals should focus on instead, says Yglesias, is more what Scott Winship calls “absolute mobility” — rising living standards up and down the ladder. But, according to Winship (whose work Yglesias cites on the Gatsby issue), inequality hasn’t prevented living standards from rising either for the vast majority of Americans, though they haven’t risen all that much. Elizabeth Warren may claim otherwise (“the top 10 percent gets 100 percent of the income growth over the course of a generation”) but her recent op-ed piece actually links to an article that refutes her point and supports Winship.

So if rising income inequality hasn’t undermined those two desirable types of mobility, why worry about it? Is there anything valuable it has undermined, some good whose arrow has actually started to point down as the inequality arrow goes up? I would say yes — social equality, the sense that all Americans are equal in the eyes of each other. Winship can’t easily disprove this because social equality is not an economic concept! If I were a Democratic speechwriter looking to stir up some anti-inequality votes, I’d try that angle.

To be sure: This doesn’t mean that, when it comes to social equality, the main economic problem is those at the very top getting richer. Stagnant wages for unskilled workers at the very bottom may be more important. It also doesn’t mean the way to undo the damage is to reverse the broad income inequality trend. The left (Warren and De Blasio included) has no plan that comes close to being able to do that. The most effective way to attack the problem may be directly (by building class-mixing institutions, like Obamacare could have been) rather than by trying to reshape the whole income bell curve.

But it’s hard to see how the recent changes in that curve — in an unequal direction — haven’t made the problem worse.

__________

** — Or Prof. Krugman.

Is Jeb now a human pinata on Iraq? I think so! After asking for a Mulligan, Jeb Bush has now given his second, and presumably final answer to the question of whether he’d still invade Iraq “knowing what we know now.” The answer is: “I don’t know what that decision would have been.” Somehow this is not satisfying in a presidential candidate! A president is supposed to be able to make up his mind. And, given the unpopularity of the Iraq War even among Republicans, Bush’s non-answer would seem to open him up to the argument that “You can’t still think going into Iraq now, as a sane human being, was the right thing to do.” That’s Laura Ingraham’s quote.

Among potential presidential contenders, Gov. Chris Christie has also already gotten in his whacks (“I don’t think you could honestly say that if we knew then that there was no WMD that the country should have gone to war.”) Ted Cruz says “Of course not.” Who’s next? If Marco Rubio piles on we’ll know the polling on the issue really is against the war KWWKN (Knowing What We Know Now) among Republicans. … Update: Rubio gets in his lick. (“Not only would I not have been in favor of it, but President Bush would not have.”) Also Kasich.

P.S.: The interesting Jeb answer would have been “no.” He can’t even dis his brother to that extent? Why is it so important to Jeb that there be no “space between me and my brother”? Tells us something about Jeb we needed to know, involving baggage (lots) and balls (not so much). …