The inimitable Jonmon a/k/a Jonathan Monsarrat, after sinking into the ooze for several years, has decided to come back to haunt us. Viz., he has hired a lawyer (an unsavory one, IMHO) to threaten to sue Ron Newman again, despite having been firmly spanked the last time he tried. As far as I can tell, Ron transferred the Davis Square LJ archive ( Read more... )

On February 10, 2010, Niall Ferguson said (as many others have said) that a financial disaster is about to hit the United StatesIt's a long time coming, it seems ( Read more... )

I looked up the figures for the Australian fires. The fire losses are rated as somewhat below 4 billion (Australian) dollars. The Australian GDP is a little less than 2 trillion dollars per year. So the fires are costing maybe 0.2% of the GDP, which is less than I would guess based on the press coverage ( Read more... )

The ever-fascinating Slate Star Codex blog takes up a truly counterintuitive problem: Everyone knows that "extremely large costs and benefits are levied and granted by government". It follows that rational people and organizations will be devoting quite a bit of money -- a substantial fraction of their budgets -- to influencing government to ( Read more... )

So I was in the library yesterday and happened to pick up the January issue of New Republic. It had an article, "Educated Fools" (summary) which contained one of those blindingly obvious statements that (as far as I know) nobody has previously stated: If it weren't for the racial divide in US culture, it's likely that no working-class people ( Read more... )

One of the bigger mysteries in history is what happened to the major cultures of the Mediterranean world over the past thousand years or so. At the beginning of the period, the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) empire and the great Arab/Muslim empire were by far the most advanced and powerful cultures. At the end of the period, both of those cultures had ( Read more... )

An informative discussion on the status of advanced countries: Their birth rates are dropping, so to maintain an economy to pay for services to old people, they need to import workers. This isn't hard, but in the modern world, this often means importing lower-skilled workers from places that are ethnically different. Usually, the existing ( Read more... )

If you follow my previous post back into the Marginal Revolution blog, someone commented there:
Aren't the disemployment effects of automation/AI bounded by those of globalization? In the worst case scenario, a general AI is built that, perhaps after some up significant front costs, has small marginal costs (electricity, licensing fees for the IP ( Read more... )

Back in 2007, an economist released a study which suggested that a lot of white-collar jobs could easily be outsourced. Given the damage that had been done to blue-collar employment by the outsourcing of manufacturing to other countries, this put quite a shudder in people. One interesting point was that the author had constructed an index of ( Read more... )

A compendium of evidence that there's no shortage of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) graduates from U.S. colleges.