Its my Friday Lay Day blog and, today, I am travelling for most of it on my way to the US. I will be giving a talk on Monday morning in San Francisco on employment guarantees at the ASSA meetings. Later next week (Wednesday and Thursday), I will be in Los Angeles. I have some free time each of the next several days if anyone out there would like to catch up. I will be back into blogging action on Monday (and the quiz will be available tomorrow). Note also that I won’t be attending to moderating comments for an extended period today. That means that those with external links might sit in the queue for some time and I will get around to dealing with them when I have a connection again. For the next several hours I will be immersed in a novel about post-Colonial Jamaica, the CIA, gangs, and that sort of stuff. I am currently reading – A Brief History of Seven Killings – which is a very long and detailed book written by the US-based, Jamaican author Marlon James. Here are a few more snippets.