As if the fact that it is Wednesday the 13th wasn’t ominous enough, I’m going to share a number of horror-themed links with you today. Actually, no, I’m just going to share some links to random stuff you might find interesting:

* I really enjoyed Jessica Livington’s practical advice to her younger self, and you might enjoy it as well.

* “Twice as many U.S.-born tech entrepreneurs start ventures in their fifties as do those in their early twenties, as this paper will show.” So there’s still time!

* I often give Jonathan Shainin a hard time for being a knee-jerk left-winger, but he’s down with the laissez-faire agenda when it comes to migration and I will take what I can get. In a review of Doug Saunders’ Arrival City, he highlights a number of smart observations:

If a misplaced nostalgia has occluded our vision of rural deprivation, as Saunders forcefully contends, the popular impression of arrival cities has been no less distorted. “We tend to see them as fixed entities,” he writes, “an accumulation of inexpensive dwellings containing poor people, usually in less than salubrious conditions.” These neighborhoods are poor, and they often stay poor; but when such portals into the new global economy work properly, poor people merely pass through them, taking advantage of cheap rent, squatted land, or improvised dwellings to partake of the intensity of urban commerce. The arrival city, in Saunders’s account, is less a place than a “set of functions”: It takes people in; connects them to others (often from their village or region of origin); allows the accumulation of social and real capital, through education, labor, and landholding; and spurs upward mobility, which often leads out of the arrival city and into the urban core. “If people are flowing through” the arrival city, Saunders concludes, “transformed into full-fledged contributors to the life of the city whether they leave the arrival city or stay there, then it is working.”

Exactly. This framework also illuminates why debates over gentrification, displacement, and poverty are so frustrating. Cities attract the poor because they promise economic opportunity. People feel displaced in gentrifying neighborhood because the normal churn of residents tends to slow down as the quality of life of a neighborhood improves.

* PEG of Business Insider makes the case for France’s wealth tax. And I have to say, I think he’s convincing on the point that a wealth tax is preferable to, say, a capital gains tax.

* Rajeev Mantri has written a column on why Calcutta, or Kolkata as the locals prefer, has endured such a steep relative decline. Hint: It has something to do with the fact that it has been ruled by avowed Communists for most of the last forty years.

* Speaking of India, here’s more evidence that it has the potential to surpass China in the next few decades.

* Yuqing Xing writes on the iPhone and the real balance of trade.

* I really loved Ben Austen’s article on Megabus and the revolution in curbside coach travel.

* A few years back, the celebrated American novelist described George W. Bush as “a man unfit to run a hardware store let alone a nation like this one.” Strong words. I have to say, I don’t think I’d put Vice President Joe Biden in charge of, say, a filthy nail located inside the hardware store, because I’d worry that he’d poke out his own eye. And then, inevitably, he’d sue.

* Venessa Miemis has written a really, really thought-provoking post about the “The Bank of Facebook,” a riff on Facebook’s potential to form a new kind of currency.

* I really want to give Brink Lindsey’s latest paper due consideration. Why? Because I agree with everything he has to say about how to spur productivity-enhancing innovation in the most advanced market economies. He’s produced a well-researched, comprehensive, highly readable account of just about everything I’d want to say on the subject, only he’s far more lucid.