Brent posted this as a reply to a post I made a few days ago. Worth bringing out front.
Here is the paper from the Manhattan Institute.
​"At present, break-even costs across U.S. shale fields range from $10 per barrel–$55 per barrel.50 Delivering North Dakota oil to Gulf Coast refineries and ports by rail can add another $15 per barrel. Using analytics to double output, thus cutting oil costs in half, means that shale break-even costs would drop to $5 per barrel–$25 per barrel. America’s shale fields would then be competitive in volume and in price with Saudi Arabia’s vaunted ultralow-cost oil fields."

Compares China with Russia.

Daniel Yergin, founder of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, said it is impossible for OPEC to knock out the US shale industry though a war of attrition even if it wants to, and even if large numbers of frackers fall by the wayside over coming months.
Mr Yergin said groups with deep pockets such as Blackstone and Carlyle will take over the infrastructure when the distressed assets are cheap enough, and bide their time until the oil cycle turns.
“The management may change and the companies may change but the resources will still be there,” he told the Daily Telegraph. The great unknown is how quickly the industry can revive once the global glut starts to clear - perhaps in the second half of the year - but it will clearly be much faster than for the conventional oil.
“It takes $10bn and five to ten years to launch a deep-water project. It takes $10m and just 20 days to drill for shale,” he said, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos.


Mr Yergin is author of “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power”, and is widely regarded as the guru of energy analysis.
He said shale companies have put up a much tougher fight than originally expected and are only now succumbing to the violence of the oil price crash, fifteen months after Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states began to flood the global market to flush out rivals.
“Shale has proven much more resilient than people thought. They imagined that if prices fell below $70 a barrel, these drillers would go out of business. They didn’t realize that shale is mid-cost, and not high cost,” he said.


Yet even if scores of US drillers go bust, the industry will live on, and a quantum leap in technology has changed the cost structure irreversibly. Output per rig has soared fourfold since 2009. It is now standard to drill multiples wells from the same site, and data analytics promise yet another leap foward in yields.
“$60 is the new $90. If the price of oil returns to a range between $50 and $60, this will bring back a lot of production. The Permian Basin in West Texas may be the second biggest field in the world after Ghawar in Saudi Arabia,” he said.
Zhu Min, the deputy director of the International Monetary Fund, said US shale has entirely changed the balance of power in the global oil market and there is little Opec can do about it.
“Shale has become the swing producer. Opec has clearly lost its monopoly power and can only set a bottom for prices. As soon as the price rises, shale will come back on and push it down again,” he said.

Once farmers have secure access to land, here are four core conditions they need to participate effectively in the economy and achieve food security:

1. Secure the natural resource base. First, water for irrigation enables farmers to produce year round in order to help them plan ahead and sell at favorable times and prices. Farmers should be supported in procuring basic rainwater harvesting systems now, while Kenya and other African countries work toward more permanent solutions to their water problems. Second, proper soil testing would tell farmers what inputs they need to improve soil health and crop productivity. This is essential. Currently, farmers have to send soil samples to the big cities for analysis. While organizations like soilcares which brings soil testing technology to the farmers’ fields have done tremendous work, such efforts need to be expanded to reach all farmers.

1. Alternative financing options are a must for smallholder farmers who are largely cash-strapped and unbanked. Without access to finance on favorable terms, high-quality supplies—like improved seeds—will remain out of reach. One option is to store data electronically that is required to secure financing. Some farmer records, such as bio data and farm profiles already exist in paper files. Adding information on transaction histories could enable farmers to access loans. For example, last year Farmer Thuku, an M-Farm farmer, was accorded a $3,800 loan using his transaction history with M-Farm.

1. Institutions that ensure timely payment of farmers to allow farmers to progressively access bigger and better markets. In many cases today, a group of farmers selling to a supermarket will have to wait three months to receive their payment. Delayed payments interrupt the production schedule of the farmers, who cannot invest in the next season’s planting without payment. Financial institutions like Umati Capital have come up with solutions to bridge this gap through advancing payment to farmers. But such solutions are often expensive and unavailable for farmers of fresh produce. Therefore, the cycle of selling to the middleman for reduced price to get instant cash continues.

1. Prioritize crucial infrastructure. It’s hard to be a farmer in Africa, and it’s even harder when you live up in the mountains and your only mode of transportation is a donkey cart, or when you have no cold room to store your produce, forcing you to sell immediately at a lower price. The development of transport, cold storage, and other crucial infrastructure should be a key priority for governments.

Jonah Leher
A new paper by a team of scientists at the University of Minnesota (Chiraag Mittal, Vladas Griskevicius, Jeffry Simpson, Sooyeon Sung and Ethan Young) investigates this surprising hypothesis. The researchers focused on two distinct aspects of cognition: inhibition and shifting.
Inhibition involves the exertion of mental control, as the mind overrides its own urges and interruptions. When you stay on task, or resist the marshmallow, or talk yourself out of a tantrum, you are relying on your inhibitory talents. Shifting, meanwhile, involves switching between different trains of thought. “People who are good at shifting are better at allowing their responses to be guided by the current situation rather than by an internal goal,” write the scientists. These people notice what’s happening around them and are able to adjust their mind accordingly. Several studies have found a correlation between such cognitive flexibility and academic achievement.
The researchers focused on these two cognitive functions because they seemed particularly relevant in stressful childhoods. Let’s start with inhibition. If you grow up in an impoverished environment, you probably learn the advantages of not waiting, as delaying a reward often means the reward will disappear. In such contexts, write the scientists, “a preference for immediate over delayed rewards…is actually more adaptive.” Self-control is for suckers.
However, the opposite logic might apply to shifting. If an environment is always changing – if it’s full of unpredictable people and intermittent comforts – then a child might become more sensitive to new patterns. They could learn how to cope by increasing their mental flexibility. 

Quartz
On selfish people:
This implies that people who grow up in families where selflessness is rewarded will develop an instinctively cooperative approach. Similarly, companies that do not deter employees from only thinking of themselves will likely have a selfish staff—even in cases where refusing to cooperate is actively harmful.
“It applies to interactions between friends, coworkers, family members—all interactions where you have the chance to do something that’s costly for you but beneficial for other people,” says Rand.
Cross-culturally, it suggests that those who grow up in countries without a strong rule of law will develop an uncooperative intuition, he adds.
Which means that if you meet an instinctively selfish person, reasoning is unlikely to persuade them to cooperate. But if you are that selfish person, you can blame evolution for your bad behavior.

Quartz 
Charlie Rose (Goldman Sachs)
Charlie Rose (BlackWater)

Bloomberg (Thanks Michael)
If robots rise, interest rates will fall.
That was the assumption of delegates at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, as revolutions in automation and artificial intelligence reshape how economies work.
The argument goes like this: As machines become more and more advanced, many workers will lose their jobs and others will see their wages fall. New technology will also increase the chances of a 1990s-style jump in productivity. Those forces will combine to restrain prices across the world economy, meaning that the era of slow inflation now challenging central bankers may only prove a sign of things to come.
“Technological progress will put a lid on how inflation can re-emerge,” Axel Weber, chairman of UBS Group AG and a former president of Germany’s Bundesbank, said in Davos.
The worry is that the so-called fourth industrial revolution will hurt an increasing share of the labor force, generating unemployment and putting pressure on wages and therefore consumption, especially of low-skilled employees.
Disrupted PoliticsThe Forum calculated more automation means over 5 million jobs will be lost by 2020 in 15 major developed and emerging economies. That prospect is already unsettling voters around the world, disrupting politics and fanning support for populists from Marine Le Pen to Donald Trump.
“The first effect is lower wages for those people who are replaced,” said Adam Posen, a former Bank of England policy maker who now runs the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “That should adjust over time, but the initial impact is deflationary.”
By making the remaining workforce more efficient, optimists are banking on a productivity boom akin to when the Internet age helped propel a 3.5 percent rate of productivity growth in the U.S. from 1996 to 2003, allowing central bankers to keep rates lower than otherwise. Bank of America Corp. calculates the adoption of robots and artificial intelligence could boost productivity by 30 percent in many industries.
Smashing Looms“The result is a low inflation environment,” said Laura Tyson, a former economic adviser to President Bill Clinton who now teaches at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
Another problem for the optimists is the impact on politics. As when Luddites smashed looms in the first industrial revolution, another reshaping of the world could provoke discord among voters and reactionary politics.
“It’s going to be radical change,” said Johan Dennelind, chief executive officer of TeliaSonera AB, a Swedish telecom operator. “It could be really painful. I think we have to admit that it will be, and use common sense to prepare for it.”
Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps said governments may have to respond by redistributing tax income toward those who suffer from the profits enjoyed by those who utilize the new advances.
Central bankers are already preparing for the challenge. In November, Andrew Haldane, the Bank of England’s chief economist, estimated automation could cost 15 million British jobs.
Policy Rethink“If substitutability between labor and capital is higher than in the past, labor’s bargaining power and share of income might be commensurably lower,” he said. “The upshot is a materially lower path for inflation.”
Such an environment is another reason why central banks will have to rethink how they go about delivering price stability, having repeatedly missed their inflation goals since the financial crisis, said Paul Sheard, chief global economist at Standard & Poor’s.
“It’s a reason for stepping back and having a brainstorm,” he said in Davos.

Thanks Brent!
"At the same time, governments around the world have become increasingly concerned with “double non-taxation”, i.e., companies not paying tax in either the country where they make their profits or the country where their headquarters are. Double non-taxation is one of the targets of the OECD/G20 project to counter tax base erosion and profit shifting (<http://www.oecd.org/tax/beps.htm>BEPS). Over 120 countries have participated in the project in recognition of the fact that a country trying to tackle BEPS on its own would probably lose out to more generous rivals. With the recent release of the final BEPS package, and the ongoing work on <http://www.oecd.org/ctp/exchange-of-tax-information/>exchange of tax information, governments are well equipped to meet this challenge."

Can Economics Change Your Mind?
Economics is sometimes dismissed as more art than science. In this skeptical view, economists and those who read economics are locked into ideologically motivated beliefs—liberals versus conservatives, for example—and just pick whatever empirical evidence supports those pre-conceived positions. I say this is wrong and solid empirical evidence, even of the complicated econometric sort, changes plenty of minds.
For one thing, it's changed my mind. Work from David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson has convinced me that in some local areas the job losses from free trade can be substantial, and that these communities have been slower to adjust than I expected. Importantly, the study is not simple and utilizes instrumental variables, representing the kind of econometrics that skeptics think can't convince anyone.
Another example is, Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics, who tells me the paper "Potential Output and Recessions: Are We Fooling Ourselves?" by Robert Martin, Teyanna Munyan, and Beth Anne Wilson changed his mind recently. This study suggests that recessions tend to have a permanent negative effect on output, which was previously not thought to be the case. As a result Moody's Analytics is undertaking more research on this.
Researchers also frequently set out to test a hypothesis they think is right, only to find it was wrong. Harvard economists Raj Chetty and John Friedman were skeptical of standardized test based measures of teacher performance, and they set off to do research, along with Jonah Rockoff, which they thought was "going to show that these measures don’t work, that this has to do with student motivation or principal selection or something else." Instead, their evidence convinced them they were wrong, and their results showed that value-added measures were good measures of teacher quality, and the authors argue that school districts should use them in teacher evaluations.

Tyler Cowen's version here.
Overall I find that history and theory-laden observation tend to be the forms of evidence which have convinced me the most.  #3 and #8 are examples of “sheer econometrics,” but that is not usually how minds are changed, mine included.