A long article talking about how a modern state is created, with much relevance to current "undeveloped" countries.

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-mexico-built-a-state

How Mexico built a state ( Read more... )

Pratchett and Gaiman's novel Good Omens features a book of prophecy, "The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch" which is absolutely accurate. Unfortunately, it is written in a style that is so oblique that nobody can understand the prophecies until they come true. E.g. one involves a "chariot of the East", which turns out to be a ( Read more... )

Back in the Pleistocene, I was walking through a basement corridor at MIT and passed the door of what must have been a bio lab. On the glass was taped a cartoon which was titled something like "The four ages of DNA". The first frame was a stone tablet with the letters DNA chiseled in it. "DNA exists and is important but we have no idea what it ( Read more... )

The few times I read an analysis of the Ukraine War that mentions the repeated actions by Western powers (primarily the United States), my skin crawls, because I can never frame a refutation of the proposal: This war is aligned with the United States's neo-imperialist mission. I don't want to address that as a moral question. And my concept of " ( Read more... )

So "CatGirl Kulak (Anarchonomicon)" attempts the most difficult literary thesis ever, in a Twitter thread: "The great American novel has been written and its ATLAS SHRUGGED." She largely makes it ( Read more... )

One of the most plausible consequences of immigration is that it increases the supply of workers. And you would expect by simple economic theory that if the bulk of the immigrants have a particular set or level of skills, the wages for that kind of work would go down. The practical problem with that observation, like a lot of economic theory, is ( Read more... )

For the Fourth of July, I quote Collections: My Country Isn’t a Nation by Bret Devereaux:

So we have our definition of a nation: a people, historically connected geographically coherent territory, with a shared language, culture and myth of common birth-origin. The United States obviously fails this definition. It isn’t even remotely close ( Read more... )

"Trump is no great moral theorist, but he does have a certain cunning about human behavior, enough, possibly to foresee that the Great Statucide would proceed by what conservative writer Rod Dreher has dubbed “the Law of Merited Impossibility”: Conservatives warning about the dire consequences of some social change are dismissed as hysterical ( Read more... )

Yet another economist (this time, Tyler Cowen) wrote an article on the recurrent theme The Jobs Are There. Where Are the Wages? -- The U.S. just completed one of its worst decades ever for payroll growth.But really, what employees get from their employers hasn't done that badly. From elsewhere: "One recent study shows that, between 1970 and 2016, ( Read more... )

Economic Principals discusses the phenomenon of “deaths of despair”. Following the links, it seems that this phenomenon is unique to the United States, despite that working-class people (men especially) have been hard-hit by globalization in all the advanced countries.

During the tedium of the Coronavirus-19 pandemic is a terrible time to publish ( Read more... )