Jan & Feb '23

Hayek and Schmitt on the ‘depoliticization’ of the economy.

Vietnam’s red Napoleon.

How do I draw a pair of buttocks?

Childhoods of exceptional people.

Russell commented that the development of such gifted individuals required a childhood period in which there was little or no pressure for conformity, a time in which the child could develop and pursue his or her own interests no matter how unusual or bizarre.

In solitude I used to wander about the garden, alternately collecting birds’ eggs and meditation on the flight of time. If I may judge by my own recollections, the important and formative impressions of childhood rise to consciousness only in fugitive moments in the midst of childish occupations, and are never mentioned to adults. I think periods of browsing during which no occupation is imposed from without are important in youth because they give time for the formation of these apparently fugitive but really vital impressions.

The debt ceiling is scarier this time.

Just how costly [technical default] can be is evident in a 1979 episode when Treasury inadvertently missed payments on Treasury bills maturing that spring. The mishap was caused in part by fallout from a delay in raising the debt limit, but also by problems with word processing equipment the Treasury used at the time to pay investors. Even though investors received their payments with only a small delay, T-bill yields initially jumped by 60 basis points and remained elevated for several months thereafter. The cost to taxpayers was ultimately in the tens of billions of dollars.

Why was Roman concrete so durable?

The censor who ended the Soviet Union.

One day, a year after the war was over, he heard that a train car of returning soldiers was passing through. He limped over to the train station to see if he could greet them. But when the train finally came to the station, it did not stop. As he soon learned, this is because these soldiers were not actually on their way home. Instead, the train contained a few of the nearly two million returning Soviet prisoners of war on their way to Siberian filtration camps—surrender had become a criminal offense during the desperate days of 1941 under Red Army Order 270. Prisoners liberated by the Western Allies were investigated for espionage. From there, many would be deported to the Far East, where they were to toil in the platinum mines of Magadan.

The Secret Speech sparked a crisis of faith among many of the younger cadres, including Yakovlev, and initiated a broader, gradual decay in party discipline that would continue for 40 years. Compared to its mass mobilization during the Stalin era, the party’s ability to embark on great projects and reforms would begin to slowly wither away. In the mind of every would-be hardliner, the question lingered: if even the Central Committee wasn’t safe, then what could happen to me?

In one meeting of the Politburo in 1988, Yakovlev noted that less than 15 percent of the population generally approved of economic and political reforms—half the support of 1986.

Perestroika from the very beginning…was an attempt to execute all the reforms from above, and it was done in the hopes that people would follow the enlightened rulers. All the attempts at reform in Russian history were of similar nature, and probably this is why all of them have resulted in no absolute success.

But common sense is not a useful or visionary tool for reshaping reality—oftentimes, the only lasting solutions to hard problems of social organization are unintuitive, and they might even involve irrational belief in the sovereign, the state, or the divine.

Building a virtual machine inside ChatGPT.

Why didn’t we get the four hour workday?

Politics is not downstream from culture.

How a woman whose muscles disappeared discovered she shared a disease with a muscle-bound Olympic medalist.

Castes and evolutionary stasis.

Most Japanese clam up in horror when the topic is broached, and so most young Japanese know far more about discrimination against blacks in America than about discrimination against burakumin in Japan. Some junior high school students in the town of Omiya, where there are many buraku, looked puzzled when the topic of burakumin came up. “Who are they?” a teen-age girl asked. “I’ve never heard of them.”

Energetic aliens.

Can a human eye see a single photon?

The researchers found that about 90 photons had to enter the eye for a 60% success rate in responding. Since only about 10% of photons arriving at the eye actually reach the retina, this means that about 9 photons were actually required at the receptors. Since the photons would have been spread over about 350 rods, the experimenters were able to conclude statistically that the rods must be responding to single photons, even if the subjects were not able to see such photons when they arrived too infrequently.

How researchers flashed lights at people to improve learning.

Why pessimism sounds smart.

Dealers & Gamblers.

Homo erectus made their ‘last stand’ 100,000 years ago on an Indonesian island.

France’s baby bust.

In 1700, almost 1 in 25 inhabitants on Earth, and one in five in Europe, was French. Today, less than a percent of humanity is French.

So, the demographic transition took place exceptionally early in France, but why? In my research, I argue that the diminished sway of the Catholic Church, nearly 30 years before the French Revolution, was the key driver of the fertility decline. Since at least Tocqueville, and more recently Emmanuel Todd, we know that a sustained loosening of traditional religious moral constraints took place in the mid-eighteenth century, at a scale and extent that no other country has achieved.

Fertility rate roundup #1.

Economists suggest Korea needs to do more to improve gender equality so that women feel less worried about losing their jobs by having children. High education and housing costs are among other factors putting pressure on fertility, data show.

Wait, what? The solution to raising fertility is to promote gender equality so that women can worry less about losing their jobs? This is obvious nonsense. It does not make sense. Gender equality is a good thing for many reasons. Raising the fertility rate is not one of them. Not all good things go together. Finding out how to get them all at the same time is the problem one must solve, the solution isn’t to pretend they cause each other. Nor is gender equality helpful in making women worry less about losing their jobs.