Well, just the way I asked it, our gut feelings about the economically powerful are obviously not a product of hunter-gatherer life, given that such societies have minimal hierarchy, and so minimal disparities in power, material wealth, privileges of all kinds, etc. Hunter-gatherers don’t even tolerate would-be elite-strivers, so beyond a blanket condemnation of trying […]

As a New Year’s gift, here is a free copy of an entry I put up on my data blog (details on that here). It’s a quantitative look at the history of race and culture in America, together with qualitative examples that illustrate the story that the numbers tell. Enjoy. Previously I looked at how […]

Earlier this year, John Tierney reviewed several studies on how delaying gratification makes us feel better in the short term by preventing guilt but makes us feel more miserable in the long term by causing regret over missed opportunities. I added my two cents here, just to note that this sounds like part of the […]

Google results for +”nobel laureate” +X, where X is one of the following: Chemistry: 317,000Physics: 415,000Medicine: 467,000Economics: 484,000 Of course, there are more winners to refer to in Physics than in Economics, so we should control for that. Dividing the number of Google results by the number of winners gives these per capita rates: Chemistry: […]

In this discussion about pop music at Steve Sailer’s, the topic of generations came up, and it’s one where few of the people who talk about it have a good grasp of how things work. For example, the Wikipedia entry on generation notes that cultural generations only showed up with industrialization and modernization — true […]

The other day I saw a flier for a colloquium in my department that sounded kind of interesting, but I thought “It probably won’t be worth it,” and I ended up not going. After all, anyone with an internet connection can find a cyber-colloquium to participate in — and drawn from a much wider range […]

After reading Arthur De Vany’s Hollywood Economics and Winners, Losers, and Microsoft by Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis, I got the impression that antitrust cases on the whole have been misguided and often remarkably stupid. Looking a little more into it, I found that economists now are pretty much agreed on that picture. Here is […]

Toward the end of this episode of EconTalk, Nassim Taleb (Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan) talks about religion and the history of medicine. He notes that one of the benefits of adhering to religious practices was that you probably avoided going to a doctor when you were in trouble — you prayed to a […]

Recently at my personal blog I’ve been focusing on the idiocy of Web 2.0′s central strategy for growth, namely creating online networks or communities where costly participation is given away for free. (The profitable online papers charge, YouTube and Facebook still not profitable, and a more general round-up of the second dot-com bust.) The hope […]

At the end of an otherwise good reflection in the WSJ on where Google can go from here, we read the following: It would be foolish to predict that Google won’t have another business success, of course. Microsoft managed to leverage its strength in PC operating systems into a stranglehold over the word-processing and spreadsheet […]

Here is a brief description of the idea that price bubbles are caused by people buying something, not necessarily because they think it’s worth anything, but because they think they can find an even greater fool to buy it at a higher price. This continues until no more such fools can be found, and this […]

Steve points us to a brief review by Steven Pinker on the decline in war and violence. Focusing just on homicide rates, what exactly does that mean — a decline in violence during modern times? It is impossible to have a solid feel for the observation Pinker wants to explain without seeing time series data […]

Those are the first three articles that I’ve posted to a new blog of mine, Patterns in science and culture, where all of my data-rich posts will go from now on. I’ll still review existing work or throw out “what if?” posts here, but if it requires looking up and analyzing data, you’ll only be […]

In the Angry Nintendo Nerd’s video about the Virtual Boy — a short-lived video game console that claimed to offer a “virtual reality” experience — he says that back in the mid-1990s, it seemed like the coolest thing, but that now no one cares about virtual reality. This, he claims, is why even with better […]

Mathematical models of contagious diseases usually look at how people flow between three categories: Susceptible, Infected, and Recovered. In some of these models, the immunity of the Recovered class may become lost over time, putting them back into the Susceptible class. This means that if an epidemic flares up and dies down, it may do […]

In 1990, Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis wrote an article detailing the history of the now standard QWERTY keyboard layout vs. its main competitor, the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard. (Read it here for free, and read through the rest of Liebowitz’s articles at his homepage.) In brief, the greatest results in favor of the DSK came […]

There’s a post on porn and rape that’s making the rounds (among the blogs I read, at Half Sigma and Roissy so far). The author claims to show that a greater availability of pornography is associated with lower rape rates. But it is not — nor are the two directly related. They simply appear unrelated […]

In the new issue of The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell reviews some book about using the appeal of FREE to grow your business. This is supposed to apply most strongly to information, so that as more and more of a firm’s product / service consists of information, the more it can use the appeal of […]

Some readers here may already follow the food-related stuff I write about at my personal blog. Well, to allow myself to write more about diet, nutrition, and food in general, I’ve started a new blog called Low Carb Art and Science. Lord knows there are already lots of blogs that deal with the topic, but […]

Updated This may be old hat for some readers, but it’s worth reviewing and providing some good new data for. The motivation is the idea that monopoly-haters have that when some company comes to dominate the market, they will have no incentive to change things — after all, they’ve already captured most of the audience. […]