Today's Awww! Moment

With thanks to commenter Desert_Joe at Joe.My.God.:

Dominos

You may have read about the High Court of Taiwan declaring the island's marriage laws, which limit marriage to a man and a woman, unconstitutional. Well, now there's huge pressure on the government of Thailand to re-introduce a bill legalizing same-sex marriage. Via Joe.My.God.:

The Ministry of Justice has vowed to take action in favour of a petition demanding a stalled bill on gay rights be enacted. The Constitutional Court of Taiwan ruled in favour of same-sex marriage on May 24 and now calls to follow suit in Thailand may be gaining strength.

Pitikan Sithidej, director-general of the Rights and Liberties Protection Department at the Justice Ministry, said he received the petition to set the wheels in motion again on May 17 and will push for getting the bill approved at the earliest possible date.

The petition has been signed by nearly 60,000 people and was organised by the website Change.org. It backs same-sex marriage rights and other equal benefits for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people and couples. The proposed law has been in a state of limbo since it was introduced in 2013.

Call it the domino effect: Essentially the same thing happened in Europe after The Netherlands legalized same-sex marriage in 2000. (There's quite an interesting pattern there if one follows the timeline: It's all very incremental, but it goes all the way back to the 1970s, starting with the notorious Baker v. Nelson case, for which the Supreme Court denied certiorari "for want of a serious federal question," a rationale that has since received the ridicule it deserves.)

But what we see over again is that one polity takes the plunge (first banning SSM, and later adopting legal recognition), followed by others falling into line

It's also been incremental in terms of substance: first we have "civil unions" or some equivalent, and then when the sky doesn't fall, it becomes full marriage.

A lot of back and forth if you look a the timeline, but one thing sticks out: no country that has adopted marriage equality has back-tracked.

Today's Must-Read: The Failure of Economics

Economics has become omnipresent in contemporary society -- we calculate everything in terms of percentage of GDP and don't quite believe in anything that doesn't have a number attached. However, three young economists have called for major revamping of the discipline itself.

Here's a review of their book, The Econocracy -- it's The Guardian, so it is a long, in-depth, and thorough discussion:

In the autumn of 2011, as the world’s financial system lurched from crash to crisis, the authors of this book began, as undergraduates, to study economics. While their lectures took place at the University of Manchester the eurozone was in flames. The students’ first term would last longer than the Greek government. Banks across the west were still on life support. And David Cameron was imposing on Britons year on year of swingeing spending cuts.

Yet the bushfires those teenagers saw raging each night on the news got barely a mention in the seminars they sat through, they say: the biggest economic catastrophe of our times “wasn’t mentioned in our lectures and what we were learning didn’t seem to have any relevance to understanding it”, they write in The Econocracy. “We were memorising and regurgitating abstract economic models for multiple-choice exams.”

Take your time with this one -- it's worth it.

Via Nick's Place.

Yes, There Is Still A United Kingdom

Of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. From The Guardian:

The yes campaign scored four big successes, winning 53% of the vote in Scotland's largest city, Glasgow, 54% in West Dunbartonshire, 57% in Dundee and 51% in North Lanarkshire.

However, the no camp was victorious in 28 authorities. It won overwhelmingly in areas where it was expected to do well, including Edinburgh, Aberdeenshire and Borders, but also in areas that could have gone to the yes campaign, including Falkirk, Inverclyde, Eilean Siar and Clackmannanshire.

In the final count, the no camp clocked up 2,001,926 votes (55.3%) to 1,617,989 for yes (44.7%).

The question was, for those not following the story, "Should Scotland be an independent country?"

Near-Miss du Jour

In Barcelona. The UTair jet was cleared for landing, but apparently someone forgot to tell the pilot of the Aerolineas Argentinas plane to stop.

I live on the approach path to O'Hare International Airport, so this is kind of a thing for me -- I see the planes coming in over Lake Michigan at all hours of the day. It's actually sort of strange, with that Chicago kind of surreality: sitting in the park, I can see swallows, gulls, sometimes crows, and the occasional heron flying by -- and a couple of jets.