I was re-reading random parts of Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature and came across this: In an insightful book on the history of force, the political scientist James Payne suggests that ancient peoples put a low value on other people’s lives because pain and death were so common in their own. This set […]
Good evening. Or a fine morning to you, whatever the case may be. I am working on a project in my spare time. Some of the data I am collecting might make for good blog posts. Anyway, there are a few things whose trajectory I’d like to measure historically. I have come up ideas […]
Dead people aren’t allowed to drive. They aren’t allowed to vote. They aren’t allowed to testify in court, acquire weaponry, check out books from the library or acquire a pilot’s license. This makes sense. After all, dead people don’t have a functioning brain. As a result, we wouldn’t want them driving or voting or wandering […]
Some years ago I read this NBER working paper. (Note – a couple years later a slightly modified version appeared in the American Economic Journal but I will quote from the earlier, non-paywalled version since it is available to everyone.) Here’s the issue, in a nutshell: In this paper, we use administrative data from the […]
Here is the abstract from a paper that appeared two years ago in Molecular Psychiatry: Intelligence is a core construct in differential psychology and behavioural genetics, and should be so in cognitive neuroscience. It is one of the best predictors of important life outcomes such as education, occupation, mental and physical health and illness, and […]
I’m no expert on South Africa, but I did some reading and pieced together a brief history of the country’s last 50,000 to 150,000 years. It begins with the San. Depending on who you ask and what evidence they are looking at, the San people have been in Southern Africa for somewhere between 50,000 to […]
In the last few months I have gotten accused of racism a few times at this blog. I don’t think I am misrepresenting my accusers by stating that their claim is based primarily because of my views on a) immigration and b) the differences between the economic performance of different countries. The two issues actually […]
C-Span just released a ranking of US Presidents based based on a survey of historians, journalists and other scholars. Obama came in 12th. Here is the survey’s description of the process used to generate the rankings: C-SPAN’s academic advisors devised a survey in which participants used a one (“not effective”) to ten (“very effective”) scale to rate […]
Consider a country with a vicious ongoing multi-sided Civil War which includes some amount of deliberate large scale civilian extermination. You know the sort of thing: Syria today is just the most recent example, but there are other well-known examples from the last few decades. To keep things generic, let us refer to the various sides […]
Scott Alexander at Slate Star Codex has a very good post on cost disease. It definitely betrays a strong libertarian or conservative bias, but is nevertheless, worth reading. The piece that resonates with me is posted below. It has some good insights, one or two that are questionable (for anyone not firmly ensconced on the […]