First: Science fiction. But the science is history. That is, as Paul Krugman observes, what made Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series so striking and thought-provoking: Paul Krugman: Introduction to... 1/
... “Foundation”: ‘how do the ‘Foundation’ novels lok to me now that I have, as my immigrant grandmother used to say, grown to mature adultery? Better than ever…<web.archive.org/web/2019091808…> 2/
...One Video: Michelle Holder & Lisa Cook: Child Care & the Economy: ‘A clip from… In Conversation at Equitable Growth 2021: Evidence for a Stronger Economic Future… <> 3/
...Very Briefly Noted: Erik Anderson: California Condors Reproduce Without a Male. A First: ‘Routine genetic testing revealed that two unrelated condors only had one parent. Their eggs were not fertilized by male sperm…. The females did not need a... <kpbs.org/news/local/202…> 4/
The Economist: How Did India Beat Covid–19?: ‘The virus exhausted itself after tearing through the vast population… <economist.com/the-economist-…> 5/
...Paragraphs: Bobby Jindal & Alex Castellanos: Immigration Without Assimilation Is Just Invasion... We must require a commitment to... individual autonomy, not an unlimited government…
...Samuel Hammond: The Free-Market Welfare State: Preserving Dynamism in a Volatile World: ’I argue that the contemporary rise of anti-market populism in America should be taken as an indictment of our inadequate social-insurance system... <niskanencenter.org/wp-content/upl…> 7/
...Davis Kedrosky: Peat’s Cradle: ‘It’s hard to imagine an Industrial Revolution without coal…. But as late as 1650, Britain was neither the world’s richest nor most energy-intensive economy... 8/
...Jeet Heer: The Federalist Society’s Silent Brush Off: ‘The Federalist Society has a longstanding relationship with Eastman.... They haven’t quite severed ties with Eastman but clearly don’t want him to be their public face... show signs of embarrassment but not of shame 9/END
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"I would hear occasional rumors of secret gold vaults underneath the Twin Towers in Manhattan.... After the Towers were destroyed… one of the first questions many New Yorkers asked was: What happened to the money?... Some... 2/
[Graeber cont.]: "...spoke of legions of emergency workers secretly summoned… desperately carting off tons of bullion…. One particularly colorful conspiracy theory suggested that the entire attack was really staged by speculators…. The truly remarkable thing… is... 3/
First: I must say that if I belonged to the Chinese Communist Party, I would not be at all confident about what the future is going to bring... 1/
...Economist: The Confidence of China’s Communist Party Is Striking: ’Since the Ming dynasty, Chinese who are oppressed by local officials have sighed, by way of explanation: “The heavens are high, and the emperor far away.” An earthier variant run... <economist.com/china/2021/10/…> 2/
...One Audio: Alice Evans: Ten Thousand Years of Patriarchy: ‘Our world is marked by the Great Gender Divergence. In India, Iran and Egypt, most women remain secluded and surveilled, with few friends. Chinese women work <draliceevans.com/post/ten-thous…> <podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/roc…>... 3/
BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-10-28 Th
Things that went whizzing by that I want to note & remember... 1/
...First: Alice Evans sends us to the very good Arash Nekoei & Fabian Sinn: The Origin of the Gender Gap: it is a count of records from the Human Biographical Record, finding that throughout history—save for Egypt in antiquity—only about 10% of women as men have records... 2/
... coming down to us that grant them a place in Human Biographical Record entries, with no significant changes over the millennia. While the 1900s do show the highest female share of entries since the -2000s, the difference is not (yet) very large... 3/
Herbert Hoover published his memoirs in 1952. So perhaps there is some retrospective rightward drift in his recollections of what he... 1/
... thought back in 1928—but only some: he did give the anti-collectivist speech that he quotes at length here.
And yet Al Smith’s pre-Great Depression Democratic Party was not at all a “collectivist” party. As Hoover points out, it was the Bourbon aristocracy of the... 2/
...South combined with the urban machines and with agrarian, consumer, and labor anti-monopolist groups. Labor unions and consumer and farming cooperatives were as far as they went toward “collectivism”. The socialists of the day were Eugene V. Debs—Robert La Follette—... 3/
From 1937, from Winston Churchill's book _Great Contemporaries_:
"When the usurper and tyrant is reduced to literary controversy, when the Communist instead of bombs produces effusions for... 1/
... the capitalist Press, when the refugee War Lord fights his battles over again, and the discharged executioner becomes chatty and garrulous at his fireside, we may rejoice in the signs that better days are come.
I have before me an article that Leon Trotsky alias... 2/
...Bronstein1 has recently contributed to John o’ London’s Weekly2 in which he deals with my descriptions of Lenin, with the Allied Intervention in Russia, with Lord Birkenhead and other suggestive topics. He has written this article from his exile in Turkey while... 3/
Key Insights: Paul Feyerabend was right—science is whatever scientists do: anything goes. But what healthy sciences that... 1/
...survive and flourish and good scientists do is put first and foremost discovering what actually is and making theories to understand reality. So Kuhn and Popper are also right.
2. Economics has not been much of a science. But this Card, Angrist, Imbens—and Krueger—... 2/
...Nobel Prize marks a very big possible improvement in this respect.
3. Keep at it! Keep doing your work no matter the brickbats, and you may, someday, look back and recognize that you have changed the world.
4. Pets are good: they drive you to “become the person your... 3/