Whyvert Profile picture
Dec 14 4 tweets 1 min read
Total cost of crime in the US is about $3 trillion
Source:
This excludes other indirect costs:
less urban density, which means less productivity, more sprawl;
less social capital and trust, worse institutions and bad governance
forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cPDptuFT…
People underrate the overall costs and harms of crime
bensouthwood.substack.com/p/how-bad-is-c…

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More from @whyvert

Dec 13
Many people are realizing that China is mercantilist.
They have used these means in solar panels, shipbuilding, telecoms equipment (Huawei), electric vehicle batteries. Image
This article says that "mercantilist" is an inadequate word. China is engaging in "brute force economics".
I think that term is too incendiary.
tnsr.org/2022/12/chinas… Image
In the 90s and early 2000s, Nortel based in Canada was one of the big telecom suppliers. Then Nortel fell at the same time as Huawei rose.
Reports that it had been the target of Chinese hacking, espionage and IP theft:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nortel#Es…
Read 5 tweets
Nov 2
Consider two new things about China

1. China’s GDP might be less than half its official figure.

Autocracies including China lie: they have less observed nightlight growth than announced GDP growth. (Could be the provinces lying to Beijing to meet their annual growth targets.)
2. Rural & migrant Chinese children have avg Raven's IQ only 88.95.

(Rural & migrant is at least 1/2 maybe 2/3 the country's population.)

China only tests select cities in PISA so this map is misleading. China as a whole isn't in the green.
Read 5 tweets
Nov 2
An eyeball correlation on the map: countries with similar ancestry have similar levels of democracy.

Because European settlement spread democracy. English settlers from the 1600s onward set up assemblies in their colonies. Some groups then adopted it, others like Arabs didn't.
New study confirms this eyeball association:

"language ancestry explains about 12.3% and religious ancestry as much as 17.4% of the variance in democratic indicators."
Source: Shared cultural ancestry predicts the global diffusion of democracy
(open access)
cambridge.org/core/journals/…
Read 4 tweets
Oct 25
Today's geopolitics.
We are seeing a clash between inland states vs maritime states.
Inland: China, Russia, Persia.
Maritime: Western Europe and its offshoots plus maritime East Asia.
The clash between the two has recurred for 2000 years. Athens vs Sparta. Greece vs Persia. England vs successive European continental power states.
Maritime states have always been smaller, more capitalist, less autocratic than inland states (on average).
The inland states have no shared ideology other than a rejection of modern liberalism.
Read 5 tweets
Oct 25
Richard endorses modernization theory.
There's some truth to it.
The World Values Survey to my mind shows that (a) the WEIRD are getting way more WEIRD, (b) some of the rest are modernizing, and (c) some are staying put. Image
I put together the WVS maps for 2010 and 2022.
(a) not much movement "northwards" up the y-axis towards secularism.
(b) the already secular seem to be moving "eastwards" along the x-axis towards more self-expression
(c) the non-modern don't seem to change much Image
A better version of the 2022 map. Image
Read 5 tweets
Oct 11
On Indigenous Peoples Day, a few examples of recent demographic expansion/settler colonialism.
1. Much of the territory of current China is a result of conquest 1600-1800 and subsequent Han settlement.
2. Javanese. The Indonesian government has promoted "transmigration" of Javanese to Sumatra and Papua. Papuans especially decry this as racial colonialism and periodically demonstrate against it.
3. Vietnam. Vietnamese (Kinh) expanded from the Red River southwards over the past several hundred years.
Read 9 tweets

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