I’ll be having a lunch meetup with Bryan Caplan on December 10 just outside of Los Angeles. You can RSVP here. The price is meant to cover the meal, tax, tip, and non-alcoholic drinks. If you don’t want to eat, you can simply show up. I just want people who eat to pay ahead of time, so I don’t have to go around trying to collect money at the end.
Below, in the links you will find discussions of what Hitler’s DNA tells us about historical causation, the failed (or failing) efforts to build a line city in Saudi Arabia, Sweden as the possible EHC capital of the world, the rise of Chinese pharma, young men becoming addicted to screens, why language preservation is an authoritarian ideology, and much more.
1. On the effort to oust Maduro. It looks like Rubio managed to convince Trump that Maduro was some kind of major drug dealer, because he wanted to pursue regime change anyway. Trump appears to have had instincts going in both directions, but Rubio really cares and is close to the president so he’s getting his way. The stated reasons for the policy — terrorism, drug dealing, weaponizing migrants — appear to be pretextual, though maybe Trump believes some of them. The idea that these justifications are fake is reportedly what the intelligence says, and it makes sense too. It’s like the question of whether Saddam was involved with al-Qaida. Why would he do such a thing and invite American intervention, absent some reason based in national interest or ideology? Regardless, I think pushing for regime change is the right policy here. I’m sick of the idea that’s become almost conventional wisdom that you should never change the government of a country, no matter how awful. I’d be comfortable taking out the leadership of Venezuela and seeing if something better emerges.
2. Works in Progress talks to economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverd about the fertility crisis. He seems to index too little on smartphones and too much on most other things to explain the last two decades, where fertility has collapsed everywhere.
At one point they discuss why poverty is more rural in East Asia while you see it in the cities in the West. The explanation I think is that there’s no reason that poverty should exist in cities unless your underclass is unusually dysfunctional. Cities are the place where you find the most economic opportunities. And some of our ghettos in the US are extremely well placed for success and would be excellent communities to live in if only the locals were better behaved. Look at Oakland and Chicago. The US is an extreme case, but the UK also has urban poverty for the same reason.
East Asia is very weird because by Western standards there’s basically no urban dysfunction. So all urban dwellers can benefit from economic opportunities, without bearing the costs in terms of everything from noise pollution to the threat of violence. This is a terribly underrated fact. Cities produce so much wealth, and when you add our high tolerance for dysfunction, people can survive there by just mooching off society.
Another note: nice to hear an Ivy League professor say we should prefer professionals in particular to have more kids. One of those things that’s very obvious from any rational perspective but people are afraid to say. I like the host bringing the conversation back to the idea that we just need to get rid of distortions through subsidies disproportionately having an impact on the behavior of the poor. Tomayto-tomahto.
3. 20% of post WWII prime ministers of Japan have been Christians, a group that makes up less than 1% of the population. On how they became an elite. One thought that struck me reading this is how inconsistent this story is with theories about Asian culture historically valuing education, and that explaining modern success. Japan in the nineteenth century didn’t have educational establishments and had to rely on Christian missionaries and schools. Asians weren’t that into education after all! Yet in the modern world they are much better than all other major populations in math and science. The cultural explanations for this are completely ad hoc.
4. BBC podcast (Apple link) on Hitler’s DNA. Here’s the accompanying article. I was shocked to find that he was in the top 1% for schizophrenia, autism, and bipolar. If those traits are distributed at random, there’s only a one in a million chance anyone would be that high on all three! Yet I checked and, as I suspected, the polygenic scores are correlated with one another. So Hitler’s result was closer to something like 1 in 25,000. Still, it’s fascinating that you can tell from his genetics he was a highly unusual man. Autism makes perfect sense given his obsession with ideas. I also wonder whether paranoid political views are a sign of mild schizophrenia. Chalk one up for the great man theory of history. Hitler was genetically unique.
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