One of the best pieces every published in The Atlantic is this 97-year-old piece by "A Woman Resident in Russia".
In it, she described the chaos that resulted when Communists destroyed the institution of marriage.
Let's read about what happened when Soviets ruined marriage🧵
"To clear the family out of the accumulated dust of the ages we had to give it a good shakeup, and we did."
Russia boasted it had no illegitimate children. True. They eliminated the "illegitimate" category.
"Men took to changing wives" and 300,000 abandoned children resulted.
"It was not... unusual... for a boy of twenty to have had three or four wives, or for a girl of the same age to have had three or four abortions."
"I recall another victim of the breakdown of families ties.... She was divorced by her husband after their first child was born. He then married another woman, had a child by her, deserted both, and returned to his first wife, by whom he had a second child."
Not all women suffered from the breakdown. Some exploited it.
"Women of light behavior" would blackmail men into paying alimony.
Some men found ways to profit from this as well.
They would trick a woman into marriage, use her as an employee on the farm, and then divorce her when the season was through.
It wasn't just rural areas that buckled under the effects of marriage dissolution.
One group of students became indignant at accusations of licentiousness and declared that having sex was the only real amusement left, so they deserved free abortions.
Some chapters of the League of Communist Youth decried people who wouldn't do hook-ups and even organized circles to encourage free loving.
The Communists were ideologically committed to the idea that the state should rear the children.
This proved too expensive, so this "annoying test of Communist theories" could be given a failing grade.
The debates over a new, free-love abiding law took place in the Tsar's throneroom, with its gilded walls and vaulted ceilings, and the throne, replaced with a simple wooden platform.
The opposition to the law suggested it would abolish marriage, destroy the family, legalize polygamy, and ruin the peasantry.
Trotsky and Soltz offered contradictory explanations for their positions.
Smidovich and Kollontai provided their own opinions as well.
Kollontai wanted a social insurance scheme, like a sovereign fund for abandoned kids. Incidentally, she was the ambassador to Norway.
"If opinion on the proposed law is divided in the cities, the feeling in the villages, where eighty per cent of the Russians live, is overwhelmingly against it."
Here's what one peasant spokesman had to say:
"The... circulation of revolutionary ideas on the desirability of abolishing the family has not... eliminated old-fashioned passions of love and jealousy."
"Even Communist women have been known to commit suicide because their husbands' attentions were diverted elsewhere."
The Soviets eventually did crack down. Free love could not last, and this brief experiment in it led them to abandon attempts to bring it about.
The Communists simply couldn't uproot human nature.
The medians here indicate the ages where the median person reaches their highest performance level in various cognitive tasks.
Here are some brief notes on cognitive aging.
For many tasks, performance declines kick in early and they happen gracefully across the adult lifespan.
Sometimes this sort of data is misleading, because age impacts sampling, so there do appear to be differences between longitudinal and cross-sectional results.
Though the differences aren't too large, they can help to explain old-age variance increases.
You may have heard that most of the gap is due to the "child penalty" women face after they give birth. Across the developed world, that is increasingly true.
Let's look at this with some great Austrian data.
First: the gap since the 1950s.
When mothers give birth, they suffer a large penalty to earnings and employment.
Some have suggested a way to reduce this penalty is to expand paid parental leave. If there's longer parental leave, what happens?
Well, not much. If anything, leave policies may worsen penalties.
What about when parental leave policies are changed from very little (2 months) to something substantial (12 months)?
Again, the effect is not very large relative to the initial child penalty itself and it may be harmful because it cuts into female labor supply.
The research was little more than correlating metropolitan statistical area (MSA) level variables with the # of mass shooting events (MSEs) that took place in them.
Here's their correlation matrix. What stands out?
Note: population size only correlated at 0.45 with # of MSEs.
The analysis culminated in a linear regression.
After their variable selection was completed, they were left with three predictors: Black percentage of MSA, an index of segregation, and the income Gini (inequality).
Only the Black percentage predicted the number of MSEs.
Is American society irredeemably racist against Blacks?
One way to test this is to check if businesses are harmed when their owners are identified as Black people. If society is racist, they should lose clientele.
A new preprint used Yelp's Black-owned business label to test:
Businesses labeled as Black-owned received 36% more page views, 52% more website views, 71% more calls, 34% more orders, and 36% more revenue.
This effect was observed for
- Businesses that claimed they were Black-owned
- Businesses where reviewers noted they were Black-owned
This wasn't observed when the business was Black-owned but didn't identify as such: the effect was not driven by something that impacted all Black businesses regardless of label.
Comparing early and late adopters showed an effect on both. Time-varying effects aren't on the menu.
Gender dysphoria diagnoses have greatly increased over time, and as they have, the age of diagnosis has gotten younger. Also, girls have a younger age of diagnosis than boys.
When We Get Back Home was a humorous Japanese occupation-era comic series depicting what American soldiers would do when they returned from their time in Japan.
The series is an excellent glimpse into how Americans viewed Japan.