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I spoke yesterday with Dan Sichel, a Wellesley economist and a Lady Gaga fan. Both of these facts are relevant for this story.

The U.S. government is about to tweak the way it measures the economy, and some of the biggest changes will affect the entertainment industry.

Under the current system, Sichel told me, Lady Gaga's sales of concert tickets, online songs and CDs all count toward gross domestic product. But the value of the time she spends in the studio working on new songs isn't counted. That's about to change.

"It's quite analogous to a factory investing in a new machine," Sichel says.

Under the new rules, Lady Gaga sitting in front of her laptop, staring at the sky, thinking up new songs will count as investment, which is part of GDP. A similar change is coming for movies.

Money companies spend on research and development will also be added to GDP.

Why haven't these things counted before? The accounting rules for GDP were written in a simpler time, when most companies produced physical things. But over time, the economy has increasingly shifted toward producing intangible goods.

In all, the tweaks will add an estimated 3 percent to the size of the U.S. economy. Historical GDP numbers will also be adjusted, so the charts won't show any big jump. And for most people, the important thing to pay attention to is not the absolute size of GDP, but the change over time: How much is the economy growing?

The U.S. Senate may vote this week on the Marketplace Fairness Act, a bill that would allow states to collect sales tax from more online retailers. And as the political and retail landscape has shifted from the last time around, the Senate is expected to approve the measure.

The proposal to require online sellers to collect out-of-state sales tax has been kicked around for many years. For a decade, Amazon was a fierce opponent.

And Amazon had U.S. Supreme Court precedent on its side. In 1992 — years before online retail took off — the high court said that out-of-state businesses do not need to collect and remit sales tax where they do not have a physical presence.

But much has changed.

For one thing, empty state and local government coffers have politicians hunting for new tax revenue.

And in retail, the old lines that divide online sellers from brick-and-mortar shops have blurred. Just about every shop, no matter its size, has an online presence.

Conversely, Amazon itself has built a network of distribution centers around the country, meaning it has a physical presence in many states and must therefore collect sales tax.

'Omnichannel' Shopping

The industry calls this convergence between online and offline sellers "omnichannel" shopping.

Michael Kercheval, CEO of the International Council of Shopping Centers and a member of a coalition supporting the new tax bill, says this change has transformed the cast of who supports this new tax.

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Planet Money

Most People Are Supposed To Pay This Tax. Almost Nobody Actually Pays It.

Black and Latino homebuyers pay more for housing than whites and Asians, according to a study released this week by Duke University. The price difference is about 3.5 percent.

That may not sound like a lot. But Patrick Bayer, a Duke economics professor who led the study, says when you do the math, that percentage can translate to about $5,000 or $10,000 per housing sale.

"If you buy several houses over the course of your lifetime, those are real major differences in home equity or housing wealth," Bayer explains.

The study, which is currently a working paper at the National Bureau of Economic Research, looked at home sales from 1990 to 2008 in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Bayer's research concluded that racial prejudice by home sellers did not influence the price difference overall. In fact, according to the working paper, "the average price premium paid by black and Hispanic buyers is about the same regardless of the race of the seller."

But one factor may be inexperience among black and Latino homebuyers, who are more likely to be purchasing their first homes. Bayer also notes that real estate agents often offer a more limited menu of housing options to minority homebuyers, who may feel pressure to pay more when they do find the right fit.

"God doesn't play dice."

I'm sure the reader has heard this famous saying from Einstein in a 1926 letter to fellow physicist Max Born. Perhaps not so clear to most people is what God and what dice Einstein was referring to. His worries reflect a deep concern about how far our explanations of Nature can go. They speak to the heart of what science is, an issue that remains contentious to this day.

Einstein was referring to quantum physics, the physics that describes the behavior of molecules, atoms and subatomic particles — like electrons and the Higgs boson. The "dice" relate to probabilities, the fact that in the quantum world the cozy determinism of our classical worldview goes down the drain.

In our everyday life objects follow well-behaved histories from point A to point B. In the realm of the very small this determinism fails completely. We can, at most, compute probabilities that a particle will be at this or that point in space (within the accuracy of the measuring device). Even more bizarre, before we detect a particle we can't even tell if it exists. All we have is potentiality.

In an extreme interpretation, we can say that the act of detection "creates" the particle. But if that's the case, what about bigger objects? Aren't they made of atoms, which are quantum objects? Does a mountain only exist when we look at it? Surely, that's kind of ridiculous. Mount Everest is there whether we look at it or not. But how can you tell? Do we know that Mount Everest is out there when we are not looking, or do we infer that from common sense?

To Einstein, this loss of predictive determinism couldn't be the last word in our description of Nature. Another theory, deeper and broader, should be able to explain the paradoxes of the quantum world. Was he right?

A lot has happened in eight decades. Experiments have tried again and again to find flaws in traditional quantum mechanics, perhaps opening a window into an alternative theory. All to no avail: it really looks as if quantum mechanics is here to stay. Nature is inherently uncertain and we have to come to terms with it.

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, stating that we can't know both position and velocity of a particle with arbitrary accuracy, is more than an obstacle to knowledge; it's the way Nature operates. God does seem to play dice, and the tremendous successes of quantum physics are a testament to our ability to make sense of a very bizarre state of affairs.

Einstein's sentence in his letter to Born is actually different from the snippet above:

Quantum mechanics demands serious attention. But an inner voice tells me that this is not the true Jacob. The theory accomplishes a lot, but it does not bring us closer to the secrets of the Old One. In any case, I am convinced that He does not play dice.