Substack cometh, and lo it is good. (Pricing)

Open Thread – 02/26/2020

Peter Turchin has put up a very positive review of a book, Unearthly Powers: Religious and Political Change in World History. Some people take my own recommendations to heart. I take Peter’s options to heart (Peter was the one who suggested Strange Parallels to me).

New Atheism: The Godlessness That Failed. I’ve talked to several people who were strident New Atheists ~2010 who are now disillusioned with the direction most “secular” people have taken in the USA. In fact, some admit to having more sympathy and fellow feeling for religious traditionalists, because they simply can’t keep track of the latest “woke” orthodoxy.

I haven’t said much about coronavirus because I don’t know much more than you. I think the risk is real, but probably not Black Death real. It seems pretty likely we’ll have serious economic adjustments to make. It seems pretty likely we’ll have a worldwide pandemic and serious loss of life. But probably not socially destabilizing in most cases. This is kind of on my mind because I noticed that people have started “prepping” through my Amazon affiliates. That’s how I know “Whole Egg Product” gives you 50,000 nonperishable calories for $189.

Many people are clearly aiming for non-perishable with high-calorie counts. This is the only explanation why someone purchased hundreds of dollars worth of spam with bacon recently.

Gotye’s Somebody I Used to Know if it was a 1980s video. Pretty impressive. I thought perhaps they made an alternative video, but it’s actually a reworking of some random clips.

Influence of Genetic Ancestry on Human Serum Proteome.

Spencer and I recorded an episode as guests on Tides of History. It should drop in April. In case you didn’t notice, we’re up to episode 8 on The Insight for season three. We’ll be releasing one on the genetics of ancient Egypt at some point soon.

Recent fluctuations in Mexican American genomes have altered the genetic architecture of biomedical traits.

Framing the Early Middle Ages is a very good book. A bit of a core dump and the author is going to fit everything into his materialist/Marxist framework, but that’s OK.

‘It’s Pretty Brutal’: The Sandwich Generation Pays a Price. Recently I read something about people who choose not to have children. These were discussions with people who were happy. It was interesting that all the people highlighted were in the age range of 45 to 55. I’m sure there are plenty of 70 and 80 year-olds who are happy being childless, but many who are happily childfree at 50 probably have a different perspective at 75. Anyway, life is long.

Escape from Wuhan.

A conversation on YouTube with James F. Crow.

They Wanted Research Funding, So They Entered the Lottery.

Why East Asians but not South Asians are underrepresented in leadership positions in the United States. I think this is related: SoftBank’s Rajeev Misra Used Campaign of Sabotage to Hobble Internal Rivals.

Can Solar Power Compete With Coal? In India, It’s Gaining Ground.

True colors: A literature review on the spatial distribution of eye and hair pigmentation.

Religious Groups in China Step Into the Coronavirus Crisis.

16 thoughts on “Open Thread – 02/26/2020

  1. “I think the risk is real, but probably not Black Death real.”

    I have one brother who is a critical care physician and another who is a middle man between Chinese factories and US retailers.

    The former thought your Insight podcast “Coronavirus and Zoonoses” was very informative.

    He is not that pessimistic on this outbreak. He does not think it will be worse than the worst influenzas of recent times. American Hospitals are better equipped than Chinese Hospitals. The US has time to stock up on anti-viral medicines. Also, warm weather usually breaks up the spread of respiratory ailments, the US will probably not get hit with COVID-19 until warmer weather kicks in.

    The other brother tells me that the crisis is beginning to recede in China. Most of the factories are reopening. There is street traffic in Shanghai. They still have a way to go to get back to normal but they are headed in that direction.

    All in all, I do not think that COVID-19 will be a material impact on the US economy this year. It may prove salutary in the long run by showing businesses that it is important to diversify supply chains and not be overly reliant on any one supplier.

  2. “In fact, some admit to having more sympathy and fellow feeling for religious traditionalists, because they simply can’t keep track of the latest “woke” orthodoxy.”

    A couple of them were being banged on by the Twitterati for being critical of Islam, even though they are critical of all religions.

    The left has simply collapsed into intellectual incoherence.

  3. “‘Whole Egg Product’ gives you 50,000 nonperishable calories for $189”

    The egg product comes from a company in Salt Lake City. No surprise there.

    The Mormons have a doctrine that a household should always have a year’s worth of food on hand. So there is a built in audience for that sort of thing.

  4. You linked the Chris Wickham book. right after your Tides of History guest shot. Wickham is a great favorite of ToH host Patrick Wyman.

    I have completely soured on political podcasts. Just about the only ones I listen to these days are the Insight, brown Pundits, and ToH.

  5. Funding Lotteries for research. Every scientist I talk to or read complains bitterly about the system of research funding. It is entirely too political* and structured so that incumbents are funded and newcomers find it almost impossible to break in.

    I think a lottery is a good idea. I am not sure that it is worse than what we have, and it might have a bigger upside. I would also favor lotteries for college admissions. another rigged system.

    *not in the sense of Democrat Republican or liberal conservative. Political in the sense that it is driven by institutional factors and favors the elite that controls it. Merit seems to have very little to do with it, if stories about the reproducibility crisis are to be credited.

  6. Prior to your episode on coronavirus, I had thought The Insight was on hiatus since “3000 years in the Levant”, but that’s because I’d been relying on a feed that aggregates your blog posts.

  7. “Can Solar Power Compete With Coal? In India, It’s Gaining Ground.”

    If your only metric is cost at time and point of generation, sure. But, if you want power at certain times and places, never.

    The solar, wind problem is intermittency. You can’t run a grid with intermittent power. You can’t run data systems with intermittent power. You can’t run medical equipment with intermittent power. tec. etc. etc.

    You can store intermittent power for later use if you have a sufficient quantity of storage equipment (batteries, hydroelectric) or you can use other systems such as natural gas or hydroelectric to replace the interrupted power. But in any event you have doubled or tripled your capital costs. And made the entire system unafordable.

    A demonstration of the truth of what I say is that those places that have gone the farthest with solar/wind (Germany, California) now have the highest electricity prices. 3 to 4 times as much as us poor benighted souls in flyover country.

  8. I wanted to comment that you occasionally express admiration to the Mormon society, so you probably acquired some Mormon followers for whom buying cases of nonperishable food is an article of faith … but Walter beat me to it 🙂

  9. I live in Toronto, which was hit hard by SARS in 2003 — 43 SARS deaths in a metropolitan area that then had a population of about 5 million (works out to about 6% of all known SARS deaths, in one city — not in the Far East). The economy here suffered big-time due to a large drop in tourism, after the WHO told people to stay away.

    The crisis ended up having political effects, as the conservative provincial government in Ontario was (largely correctly IMO) blamed for bungling the response after years of lax oversight and cost-cutting in the public-health portfolio. The governing party was punished for this at the ballot box later that year, when they lost power (not to regain it again until 2018).

    All this to say that when the coronavirus came to light in January, the country’s public-health system went into overdrive, and we too have had near-daily briefings and updates, despite there being only a few confirmed cases (and no deaths) in the city.

    One wonders what the outcome will be in places like China and Iran, where the virus is spreading due largely to authoritarianism (rather than plain old incompetence).

  10. Prior to your episode on coronavirus, I had thought The Insight was on hiatus since “3000 years in the Levant”, but that’s because I’d been relying on a feed that aggregates your blog posts.

    ok. i added the podcast to the aggregate feed. just haven’t had time for show notes.

  11. @Joe: You are absolutely right. I live in a place which had no proven cases so far, but we had news of suspected cases and within one hour many products were no longer available in the markets! With such mass actions its the same as with stock markets or bank runs: It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy and you lose if you try to ignore the mass behaviour.

    A minor false alarm was sufficient to disrupt the otherwise perfect and sufficient regional supply chain!

    Imagine a situation like in China and there will be big trouble. The Chinese failed badly with the first cases, did not take the first warnings of doctors seriously and even threatened them. That was absolutely wrong and is inexcusable! This shows the systemic failure in China, not taking its citizens serious enough. This is whats worst about its system.

    However, after that horrible failure they did most things right, not for the patients, again failure for its citizens, but for the containment of the virus.

    Looking at what is happening now elsewhere, I’m very pessimistic unless warmer, mostier weather helps big time.

    The way people die from Covid19 is horrible and what many articles dismiss is that even the survivors have a very hard time with many having permanent health impairment, especially of the lungs.

    The only good news is that kids seem to be safe. But if it spread, I’m at moderate risk and my parents at very high risk of infected. So its a serious thing.
    The death rate seems to depend on the medical care, but if infection rates would rise to Wuhan levels transregionally, show me a health system capable of giving optimal care to tens of thousands. Its impossible, latest when the personell becomes affected as well and its highly, extremely contagious.

    So the only hope we have is containment and waiting for better weather helping out. Where is global warming when you need it…

    This was a stress test for a major, more deadly pandemy and I think most states just failed miserably and Globalisation is causal.
    They should have limited transnational travel much earlier and much more drastically.

    Yes, its not black death, but because Chinas initial failure and the weak global response many thousands will die because of this systemic malfunction.

    Let’s hope its weather sensitive, or otherwise we might count millions.
    If it is those same idiots will say it was just unnecessary panic and not that bad anyway.
    But without Chinas aggressive containment or a more aggressive virus it would look very different. They should be more serious about such threats of global pandemics.

  12. Razib: Why East Asians but not South Asians are underrepresented in leadership positions in the United States. I think this is related: SoftBank’s Rajeev Misra Used Campaign of Sabotage to Hobble Internal Rivals.

    I would guess this is less about South Asian vs East Asian culture in general, but maybe more about migration streams?

    South Asian migrants to the USA more likely to come from “high family” background, used to being in charge, while East Asians maybe more likely to meet US education thresholds simply from high level of East Asian educational accomplishment while being culturally “ordinary folk”?

    Therefore South Asians more likely to have “the culture that is being a rich asshole”?

    East Asian migration is clearly highly selected – https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/aap-aap0000069.pdf“Hyper-Selectivity and the Remaking of Culture: Understanding the Asian American Achievement Paradox*”. But for a given level of educational background, different streams still might be different subsamples of their parent culture with respect to social rank and the culture of being upper class.

    *Interesting paper – seems to finds that Chinese migrants kids educational status mostly matches Father’s (Father with Bachelor’s Degree or higher 61.3% vs Child with Bachelor’s Degree of higher 63.1%), and mostly explained by this (most difference in outcomes from natives and other migrant streams explained by selection)… But with some upgrading those with parents with very low education into high categories, which is not the case with Mexican hypo-selected migrants (“the outcomes of both the children of Chinese and Mexican immigrants are consistent with the status attainment model, that is, the strongest predictor of a child’s educational attainment is his or her parents’ level of educational attainment. The status attainment model, however, falls short in explaining how even the children of poorly educated Chinese immigrants attain high educational outcomes.”).

  13. Razib — Looking forward to your appearance on Tides. (I am an avid listener.)

    FYI your “general” RSS feed just re-posted a whole bunch of older content, some seems to be a couple months old at least.

  14. I think the risk is real, but probably not Black Death real.

    I am speculating on it being somewhere between SARS and really bad influenza. I know, a pretty wide band there.

    The Mormons have a doctrine that a household should always have a year’s worth of food on hand.

    Yup. You can also go to the local Mormon-run canning operation to can your own food (or buy pre-canned food). Of course, self-canning is much less expensive than buying pre-canned. Non-Mormons are generally allowed to participate.

    South Asian migrants to the USA more likely to come from “high family” background, used to being in charge, while East Asians maybe more likely to meet US education thresholds simply from high level of East Asian educational accomplishment while being culturally “ordinary folk”?

    South Asian immigration in the U.S. is FAR MORE selected educationally than East Asian immigration. PEW has data on educational attainment by country of origin among Asians in America. I compared them to the origin country numbers on the web once on Unz. Let me re-post the data here. The following are percentage of those with at least bachelor’s degrees:

    Indians in origin country vs. foreign-born Indians in USA: 8% vs. 72% (74% among American-born)

    Chinese: 9% vs. 50% (66%)

    Koreans: 56%* vs. 52% (60%)

    *70% among the youngest adult cohort (you can see why, among the three, only the Korean immigration is declining).

    All Americans: 30%

  15. In an older comment I said what could change the course of history within a short time in the coming months.
    As it seems they come together all at once:
    – Corona pandemic
    – Serious recession with a real threat of a depression
    – Bursting of the dollar bubble
    – Escalation in the Near East
    – Refugee crisis in Europe out of control

    The next weeks might be big imho. Every decision those on top of our corrupted system make every day of the next weeks could make a huge difference for the course of events.
    Until now they did nothing too bad, but nothing good either, but rather watched how things unfold, more like spectators. Could been worse, but no good performance at all and the real challenges are coming.

  16. @Twinkie, yep, India (majority of South Asian) seems more selected in the US, in terms of education ratios, and education as a proxy the class selection is probably higher still for India if we think China achieved a more somewhat more egalitarian access to higher education (I don’t think that’s a totally unwarranted assumption?). Though China+India are both pretty hyper-selected.

    Korea seems harder to compare since the economic growth and modernization and growth in tertiary education has been so strong (70% among the youngest adult cohort as you note!), and it seems like you’d have adjust for what education was in Korea at the time the individuals migrated, though yeah, on the face of it it seems like lesser hyper-selection.

    OurWorldInData seems to possibly suggest some slightly different numbers:
    Total degree level education: https://tinyurl.com/wjl776z

    Gross enrollment in tertiary education following secondary school (high school leaving): https://tinyurl.com/rcyb8a9

    Mostly ones that would lift our estimate of how hyper-selected groups are (e.g. even SK has only 30% completion of tertiary education in pop over 15 in 2010, up on 20% in 2000, and tertiary education would be higher than actual bachelor’s degree). Possibly this relates to differences in definitions though.

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