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

Open Thread – 10/18/2020 – Gene Expression

Taking a break from the book club, I’m finishing up books that I never finished though started. So, The Turks in World History. Recommended. Not so deep as to confuse, but not so casual as to be Wikipedia.

In Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past the citation goes to http://www.razib.com/wordpress/. For whatever reason I notice a lot of academics check http://www.razib.com/wordpress/, rather than this weblog. I mention this because http://www.razib.com/wordpress/ is an aggregator that accesses all my RSS, so if I publish something somewhere else, it will be loaded on that website (e.g., if I publish in NRO, City Journal, etc., it automatically gets pushed to the aggregator). I created the website for the total content feed, but just pointing it out for those who like bookmarks rather than RSS feeds. The stylizing isn’t great, but I doubt most readers of this weblog are here for the styling.

The Five Deadly Sins of the Left. The author, Ruy Teixeira, was behind the emerging Democratic majority hypothesis.

Statistics used to infer inter-breeding between humans and Neanderthals are strongly predicted by flanking sequence heterozygosity.

Want to remind readers of Cabellero’s Quantitative Genetics. Excellent book, and pretty affordable and up-to-date.

With Covid-19 Under Control, China’s Economy Surges Ahead. Every time I post something like that someone says (on Twitter): “Actually China’s economy is all fake.” As someone who has been paying attention to China’s economy for 20 years, and frankly been very skeptical of a lot of their numbers, this assertion goes into the true-but-trivial category. There’s a lot of fakery. But that’s irrelevant to the qualitative fact that Chinese prosperity in 2020 is a fact.

The Crypto State? How Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other technologies could point the way to new systems of governance. This is in City Journal. I’ll be having something out in CJ again soon.

New Research (not by me!) on Kids, Babies, Day Care & Schools. It’s hard to navigate between “the sky is falling” and “it’s just the flu bro.” I think Emily Oster has been trying hard to do so. There’s a lot of politicization in public health, so I listen to her since I think she aims to be as free as possible.


He is undoubtedly the most influential intellectual in America today. And, he is also one of the stupidest. I’ve told my eight-year-old daughter some of his ideas, and she looked at me incredulously. Then again, she’s on the order of 2.3 standard deviations or so above Dr. Kendi’s intelligence. In any case, he’s so dull he has no idea when he expresses thoughts which, as Oliver Trialdi pointed out, suggest he’s joining the “Intellectual Dark Web.”

How Mark Zuckerberg Learned Politics. A few years ago Zuck rediscovered spirituality. All this indicates a future public profile much bigger than toady.

Steven Pinker’s obituary for Judith Rich Harris. She was a friend of this blog, and I always enjoyed corresponding with her and her husband.

Not All Identities Are Created Equal.

Introduction to Social Science Genetics.

The Next China? India Must First Beat Bangladesh. Indians are kind of jumping the shark over this…but, yeah, it’s a bad sign that on a per capita basis Bangladesh will surpass India. But, the real story is India has many regions that lag way behind. Maharashtra, where Mumbai is, has a higher per capita income than Bangladesh and a far larger GDP. But states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are huge, and poorer than Bangladesh.

The Age of Confucian Rule: The Song Transformation of China. This is an excellent book. Recommend it to everyone.

Ancient DNA from Guam and the Peopling of the Pacific. Look like the Lapita. I used to play “ratball” with a guy from Guam named Tulio back when I was 15.

Phylogenetic Permulations: a statistically rigorous approach to measure confidence in associations between phenotypes and genetic elements in a phylogenetic context.

The rate of whole-genome duplication can be accelerated by hybridization.

Empirical variance component regression for sequence-function relationships.

8 Million Have Slipped Into Poverty Since May as Federal Aid Has Dried Up. I’m against austerity. COVID-19 has been a disaster for the economy, and it’s “no one’s fault.” Not going to lie, I suspect a debt crisis is in our future, but I doubt that this stimulus will be dispositive in either direction.

54 thoughts on “Open Thread – 10/18/2020 – Gene Expression

  1. I was surprised to see Social Science Genetics. Blank slate etc. Is this an outlier? I read Dalton Conley’s book a while back, The Genome Factor, and understood that he was a sociology outlier.

    Hopefully I’m wrong..

  2. Yes. It’s qualitatively true that China is the only major country whose economy is back into positive growth, and they just had a strong third quarter. People can quibble about the numbers, but qualitatively it’s self-evident.

    But I picked up on something interesting: Chinese consumers trust Australian products like baby formula and nutritional supplements because “Australia is a clean country” with not a lot of counterfeiting, fakery and lack of food safety (which is rife in China). So, a whole industry of “daigou” has developed – Chinese people in Australia (students and others) running a side gig of buying stuff ordered by people in China online and sending it by courier to China, and the daigou take a margin as payment for doing the shopping, packaging and arranging with courier companies to send the stuff. Whole stores in Oz have opened to cater to these daigou shopping on behalf of people in China, and it has become a big and growing business (or was).

    But this year the bottom has fallen out of this – the daigou report that their business is down to only 10% of what it was last year. Various reasons are given.

    One is that people in China have less money to spend due to the huge hit on the economy (a lot of businesses closed and a lot of people lost their jobs, and that is far from coming back fully – a lot of small and medium enterprises have lost all of their capital, so they can’t come back).

    A very interesting one is that people in China now prefer to source goods in China because Australia has coronavirus and China hasn’t, and they are concerned about live coronavirus on packaging, or even that the goods themselves might be contaminated. So the perception has shifted: they now see China as cleaner than Australia (even though the numbers in Australia are low compared to many countries).

    A third one which is both a consequence and a cause is that a lot of the courier companies have gone bankrupt and disappeared, with 7,000 packages in transit which have gone missing. The daigou are having to pay an extra fee to recover their lost packages, or just not getting them back at all – no one knows where they are.

    With my daughter living/working in the Mainland and concerned about food safety, local friends have advised her that when she shops for fresh produce, she should buy the most expensive stuff she can find, because that is the most likely to be safe to eat (because of lack of soil contamination, insecticides, whatever). It is a really big deal there, and this is in a big, prosperous and modern city, not somewhere out in the sticks. There is huge lack of trust pervading the whole of society over this, and a lot of it is justified.

    I keep being drawn back to what Twinkie has commented at various times about security of supply lines, and the wretched ‘just in time’ thing. To that can be added food safety, to which I guess you could add safety of medical supplies and other things – this is not only a problem in China, it is a growing concern everywhere. Australia has had its own food safety issues and scandals, you just don’t get to read about them in the international MSM.

  3. One more thing which I found interesting, which a lot of readers might not know about – currently, a great deal of American money is being invested in Chinese bonds; a hell of a lot. Huge amounts of American investors’ money is flowing into China. And also into Hong Kong – a lot of hot money flowing in, when you might expect that people would be getting their money out.

    And that was also happening in Hong Kong last year all through the period of violent protests and domestic terrorism – not what you would expect intuitively.

  4. @Razib: “I’m against austerity. COVID-19 has been a disaster for the economy, and it’s “no one’s fault.” Not going to lie, I suspect a debt crisis is in our future, but I doubt that this stimulus will be dispositive in either direction.”

    Totally agree. The upcoming monetary crisis is systemic, it is overdue and the current pandmic and economic crisis just accelerated things. That kind of stimulus won’t make a real difference. If at all, it will stabilise the economy and system more than it will hurt, helping people and businesses in need for the time being. But the big crash became almost inevitable by now, blaming stimuli and social help is kind of ridiculous, because the systemic hazard is in comparison so huge, that this is peanuts in comparison.

    The financial elite will just blame it on Covid-19 and will try to get all kinds of nasty things politically through in the aftermath of the crash and monetary reset. That’s what people should have an eye on, because its about the stability of the world, social well-being of billions and the future of society as a whole, if those responsible for the disaster being allowed to shape the world like the Oligarchy wants it. And their vision of the world is not best characterised by “more free, fair and prosperous”, that’s for sure.

  5. Chinese bonds at 3% or more look good. There is a currency risk — although there are dollar denominated bonds out there.

    What is interesting about China’s recovery is that:

    1) It actually isn’t debt fueled this time. Everyone was hoping for a chinese stimulus package and there isn’t one. Some loosening limits on what banks can loans and but there hasn’t been much of a fiscal or monetary response.

    2) There is no social safety net in China. Again contrast that to the western countries which have collectively spent about $20 trillion dollars on a safety net in the last year.

    3) The convergence of grand strategy and climate politics. Its always been there — why do you think we want the Saudis as allies — but so baked into our worldview its hard to see. The Chinese are making is more explicit. China would love to cut import, particularly of energy. Adam Tooze has been very good on this.

  6. They’ve just cut all imports of Australian coal, both coking coal for steel production and coal to fuel power stations.

  7. @John: Plutocracy and big funds diversifying and searching for safe havens in case the dollar bubble blows up. I don’t wonder a lot of the surplus money goes to China. If its lost, it was just hot air anyway. If it holds and the dollar and American economy truly crumbles, this might be invaluable for many so they think. The future is currently more volatile than it was for many decades.
    People comparing this at worst with the time of the oil price shock are wrong. Rather thats the optimistic scenario.

  8. What I forgot to stress before is that debt is not the primary problem for stable and good state, it can just be written off and taken in by the Central bank. The real problem is where debt and created money goes into. If goes into the productive sectors and consumption, its good, just don’t overheat the economy, but if it goes primarily into bubbles and speculation, its bad, even worse if the speculative money flows back into the real economy and hurts it.
    Now the gap between the real economy and the money speculation is bigger than it ever was. Trillions of newly created money are flowing almost exclusively into high risk speculation and harmful bubbles. It became ridiculous.
    At some point either the money flow being reduced, and the bubbles burst, or the money flow doesn’t stop, but the currency is losing any credibility and plummets into nothing (hyperinflation). The US-dollar economy has now, as it seems, only the choice of either ending it by themselves (let the bubbles burst) or waiting until the rest of world loses any faith and support for the dollar bubble.

  9. “Then again, she’s on the order of 2.3 standard deviations or so above Dr. Kendi’s intelligence.”

    Go ahead rip on Kendi’s intelligence. But, you can’t rip on his bank account. The guy may be peddling total bovine dejecta, but he is coining money so fast, he has to spend all of his waking hours counting it. A perfect example of Mencken’s apothegm: Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.

    BTW: I am not saying your daughter is not brilliant, she undoubtedly is. But Kendi is in his own evil way brilliant too. He is as much of a grifter as was Bernie Madoff, but unlike Madoff he has pulled off a scam that is perfectly legal. Which makes him one of the all time great criminal geniuses. Professor Moriarty, I presume.

  10. “The Five Deadly Sins of the Left. The author, Ruy Teixeira, was behind the emerging Democratic majority hypothesis.”

    Linked there is three deadly sins of the right. I guess that leaves the left two sins worse than the right.

    Actually Teixera is criticizing the current identity obsessed left from the view point of the old left.

    I am a conservative, but I really miss the old left. You could argue with them. The current @$$#013$ have absolutely nothing intelligent to say and all arguments are meet with invective and abuse.

  11. China and prosperity:

    I am sure that the Chinese published economic statistics are garbage. I also accept that there are 350 million Chinese (i.e. more people than in the US) who have attained European levels of prosperity. They live in the mostly coastal areas such as Guangdong, Shanghai, and Beijing. I am also sure that there are another 350 million Chinese living in 3rd world levels of poverty back in the back of the out back. Not to mention millions in Gulags.

    I am also sure that their control over Covid19 is a sham based on 2 things.

    First, they figured out early on that the virus mostly sickened and killed people over 60. They do not care about, nor do they keep track of, deaths among the aged. They were having a tough time figuring out how to support retirees anyway, as they have no governmental pension system or health insurance scheme.

    Second, SARS type viruses have been circulating in China for years, mostly as short term low level URS infections (common colds). There is a lot of native cross immunity to the type. Europeans and Americans do not eat bats, nor do they muck out guano caves. They are naive to the virus. The Chinese regime says, well it sucks to be you.

  12. “Not All Identities Are Created Equal.”

    Razib’s essay at Quillete is excellent. GNXP readers should check it out.

  13. debt is not the primary problem for stable and good state, it can just be written off and taken in by the Central bank.

    What the horse does that mean? When the central bank takes in debt, it promises to pay off the debt when it comes due. When a debt is “written off”, the debt is NEVER paid off, nor is any interest paid on it. It is as worthless as a German million mark note during the pre-Hitler hyperinflation.

  14. “The Crypto State? How Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other technologies could point the way to new systems of governance.”

    I think that it is much more likely that the authorities will realize that cryptocurrency is providing liquidity to black hat hackers, drug and people smugglers, and tax evaders. They will strangle it by cutting it off from the official financial system.

  15. “8 Million Have Slipped Into Poverty Since May as Federal Aid Has Dried Up.”

    I would favor some more relief. But the last rounds were poorly structured. I.e. there was no reason to send checks to social security recipients, they had not lost their jobs. And, the level of unemployment relief was too high. it should not be more profitable to be on unemployment than it is to work. Maybe something more reasonable can be worked out after the election.

    Yes there is a debt problem. It was in train, but it will arrive sooner now. Social security is real trouble and the day is drawing nearer. There will be big tax increases and years of financial repression. Millennials financial futures look very grim. Their inheritance from the Boomers will be debts, not assets.

  16. “Chinese bonds at 3% or more look good. There is a currency risk — although there are dollar denominated bonds out there.”

    The real risk is that those bonds will be voided when the Sino American War starts.

  17. My impression, having finished graduate school in the past decade and done all the cross-program socializing, is that many people who go into the field of public health are STEM-inclined but not STEM-able 20somethings who have made their minds up about things and have pet issues they are dead-set upon before they join the program; the MPH or PhD is a credential, nothing more. MPHs and PhDs are expensive, scholarships are frequently pitiful for the average middle class student, jobs are hard to find, and even the good jobs still don’t pay particularly well until you are nearly 50, so I understand the idea that you should be able to *do what you want* with your degree, and not be constrained by the traditional conceptions, boundaries, and methods of what constitutes “public health”, particularly if there are people and think tanks willing to lavish money upon you for provocative theses and going beyond those conceptions, boundaries, and methods in favor of a result they want to see. In other words, you become a political hack, but you think you’re a scientist or medical doctor.

    And given the libertarian direction that American conservatism moved in over the past 50 years, where even the idea of “public health” is viewed as a stalking horse for restricting individual liberty, the field has almost no one who is not staunchly left-of-center politically.

  18. Juxtaposing your Quillette piece with Ruy Teixera’s section on identity politics is interesting. You take a dim view of making racial and ethnic identity central, as the presumed immutability of these traits and the zero-sum thinking they entail tends to inevitably produce disastrous conflict and, even in the best case scenario, long-term exploitation and violence against one group by another. It’s hard to see how this isn’t true. Teixera’s argument is that identity politics is starting to become bad, but it has been politically necessary to develop these consciousnesses for various immutable traits in order to overcome oppression. Like the Israelites in the Biblical tale of Exodus, it’s hard to see how this also isn’t true.

    But if such consciousnesses are necessary in certain exigencies, but are particularly disastrous in most cases, how does one make such consciousness go away when it is no longer politically necessary, and how does one know when is the right time to do so? It’s a difference of style, but not substance, between the Lothrop Stoddards of 1915, that the savage brown hordes will come to take what you have by right and racial consciousness is thus necessary as a defense, and the idpol practitioners today, that the things which the menacing white cabal have are things which they do not deserve and that you have every right to such that racial consciousness is necessary in order to overcome these inequities. Hard to see how the latter will not beget the rise of the former soon enough.

  19. @Roger: “What the horse does that mean? When the central bank takes in debt, it promises to pay off the debt when it comes due. When a debt is “written off”, the debt is NEVER paid off, nor is any interest paid on it. It is as worthless as a German million mark note during the pre-Hitler hyperinflation.”

    You seem to misunderstand it. Banks can just issue money on their own, private banks with limitations, Central Banks with nearly none. If the Central Bank buys worthless bonds from the state, it buys them with money it creates and takes the value in its books. This game can go on forever.

    What you meant is probably private creditors to the state, but these can be paid off with money created by the Central Bank. There is in theory no limit to debt creation. The only problem is that people don’t accept the money any more or parts of the economy get so flooded, that bubbles and on the long term a too strong inflation starts spreading.

    But the inflation is caused by the money flooding the economy, as long as its productive, it provides growth, and as long as its in the financial markets and speculative sector, it just creates unbelievable wealth for the insiders and profiteers. If the US-dollar would be evaluated based on its economic value in comparison to the quantity of money in circulation, it would have been in hyperinflation long time ago. In fact there is no reasonable counting of dollars any more, they largely have given up on money control.

    Just look at the monetary aggregate of M3 for the United States:

    https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MABMM301USM189S

    This brings profit gains or stock market gains of 5 percent into perspective, doesn’t it? Even more so what the value of savings, wages and social benefits is relative to the money circulating and largely being in the hands of the Plutocracy and its financial institutions.

    And their counting is, according to many experts absolutely insufficient and misses a large fraction of the total money supply. The current situation is beyond “normal” exponential growth patterns.

    The problem is if the created money goes in bubbles and speculation, instead of real values and production. You can create money as long as your state stays strong, like you want, you just have to adapt the supply to the economic needs and care for the productive, “real world economy”.

    The Neoliberal sharkish and plutocratic Financial Capitalism of London and New York is the opposite, and the rotting goes deep, because too many Anglo-people being involved, down to the middle class.

    A basic problem is social, health and pension care. If those are private, they accumulate a huge amount of money and begin to push people out of their jobs, do outsourcing, ruin communities and society. People don’t care for family, children, their community, nation, state and social politics, because they have invested their work into financial products and funds on which they rely.
    This was the first step of Capitalisation going awry, the second was when banks starting to compete more directly with the funds, by creating shadow banks and half-legal or even openly illagal offshore investment systems which did speculate with money they lend and create themselves.
    The Oligarchy got unbelievably rich and powerful with this scheme, but the state, public and real world economy began to suffer more and more, with the USA and GB being the spearhead of this sick development.

    The Financial cycle they created is like the old Capitalist ones, but much bigger and now prolonged for more than a decade, becoming more and more like a simple-minded ponzi-scheme. And now, they have the best excuse for the bubble bursting, yes “its all Corona”!

    And they hope the whole middle and middle-upper class in the USA, which wealth being mostly saved in overpriced real estate, instable and risky funds and crude dollars, will do nothing under their new “woke regime” and with communication and political control when losing everything.

    The only reason the USA have no hyperinflation today is that its still the No. 1 superpower and can
    a) blackmail other states and economies
    b) others depend from the very same structures and money flow, even China does (for now).

    But the clock is ticking. And while I say only idiots say gold is better, because its not, it just creates golden chains controlled by the Plutocracy again, rather than a reasonable Central Banking policy, which should be always the best choice, to have gold could become a priority for Central Banks around the world when the system crashes.

    Interestingly, China and Russia are supposed to have gathered more every year, so did many European states. Canada has nothing, the USA is unknown, but the gold reserves are supposed to be fairly low – not privately, because all profiteers gathered it, but the state and Central Bank, who really knows? Do you trust this:
    https://fiscal.treasury.gov/reports-statements/gold-report/current.html

    We’ll see. Its like everybody which knows a little bit about financial and money economy knows the US-dollar system is meant to implode, but like a king’s death coming untimely, nobody want it to happen now, so everybody tries to keep the sick king alive for the time being.

    Other states would have been broke long time ago with the same data, its all credit with money, and credit is just about believing and trusting into the value of the thing which is our currency.

  20. Its also interesting how the Glass-Steagall repeal being reflected in the M3 exponential growth latest since the 2000’s:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_legislation

    Compare again:
    https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MABMM301USM189S

    Before 2000 there was a more or less sustainable money supply increase for the USA, since then no more. That’s just going into a true catastrophy for long and 2008 was just a foreshock, fairly easy to handle, yet it was badly done. Imagine these geniuses doing their next big tricks. On the one hand I’m afraid, because they really might blow up occidental civilisation, probably even the world, on the other hand I can’t wish them to succeed, because they would make it a evil monster anyway. Its no rocket science to see where this is going to end, its just corrupted or fearful experts telling the people b******t and trying ignore the elephant in the room until it stomps on them.

    Around 2008 was the very last chance to make it right, but they crushed every criticism, look at what they did to Occupy Wallstreet, all these “Leftist writers” bought by the Plutocracy, or the “greatest president of all times”, Obama. But now its too late for a soft escape and “Corona” and “Climate change” together with “social anti-discrimination and anti-hate policies”, the new surveillance & control state, are supposed to keep people down and under control, accepting all kind of crap they will try to do in the transition, when the monetary reset has to start and people will suffer, truly suffer. And surely, Trump will be made responsible too – he didn’t do it right, but he inherited most of the mess anyway.

  21. Put me in the purely agnostic column when it comes to using lockdowns as a response to COVID19. I think it may be a very long time and a lot of data crunching before we know whether we have done the right things.

    Research Letter | October 12, 2020
    “Excess Deaths From COVID-19 and Other Causes, March-July 2020”
    Woolf et al | JAMA. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.19545

    Between March 1 and August 1, 2020, 1,336,561 deaths occurred in the US, a 20% increase over expected deaths (1,111,031 [95% CI, 1,110,364 to 1,111,697]). … Of the 225,530 excess deaths, 150,541 (67%) were attributed to COVID-19.

    “Pandemic isolation has killed thousands of Alzheimer’s patients while families watch from afar” By William Wan | September 16

    Beyond the staggering U.S. deaths caused directly by the novel coronavirus, more than 134,200 people have died from Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia since March. That is 13,200 more U.S. deaths caused by dementia than expected, compared with previous years, according to an analysis of federal data by The Washington Post.

    Overlooked amid America’s war against the coronavirus is this reality: People with dementia are dying not just from the virus but from the very strategy of isolation that’s supposed to protect them. In recent months, doctors have reported increased falls, pulmonary infections, depression and sudden frailty in patients who had been stable for years.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/09/16/coronavirus-dementia-alzheimers-deaths/

  22. I doubt the dollar will collapse because there is no alternative currency. I would move money to a German euro but not one with Italy. Neither the pound nor the yen look appealing. Well run minnows like the Swiss Franc are not viable for large amounts of money. I don’t trust China. All these other countries have rapidly shrinking populations which does not bode well for their futures.

    That leaves the US dollar as the least bad option for the foreseeable future.

  23. @Obs I completely agree that a central bank can pretty much create as much money as it wants. It can then use that money to buy debt. But if it creates too much money, it creates inflation. People will not sell their debt at old prices but at higher prices, and the bank has to keep creating more money if it wants to keep buying debt. It can’t just keep buying and buying without a care in the world. If it creates way too much money, it creates hyperinflation and the debt is now worthless. A bond that pays 6 marks in interest “isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on” if a million marks won’t buy a loaf of bread.

    A central bank is actually fairly limited in how much money it can create without causing a lot of problems. And as you say, because of the unique position of the United States, the Federal Reserve has fewer effective constraints than most central banks.

    But your Marxian “blame it on the Plutocracy (and their allies the cultural marxists)” is getting so tiresome. The Fed bought assets and created money after the financial crisis to try to keep the economy from staying in the big recession. It is creating money now to support the bipartisan “give money to people who are hurting because of COVID”. It may well be a dangerous strategy. Arnold Kling likens it to someone who jumps off a tall building and says as she passes the fifth floor, “I don’t see any problems.”

    But the idea that this was all done because “the Plutocracy” ordered it is as wrong as the idea that there are relatively few women in STEM because of “the patriarchy” or that there are so few blacks with high SAT scores because of “structural racism”.

  24. Go ahead rip on Kendi’s intelligence. But, you can’t rip on his bank account. The guy may be peddling total bovine dejecta, but he is coining money so fast, he has to spend all of his waking hours counting it.

    https://quillette.com/2020/09/23/rallying-to-protect-admissions-standards-at-americas-best-public-high-school/

    Meanwhile, out in the open, FCPS school officials were observing Virginia’s “Racial Truth and Reconciliation Week” with a video session hosted by celebrity CRT guru Ibram Kendi. He earned $20,000 for his one-hour presentation according to the contract, almost as much as an instructional assistant makes in one year. On Twitter, Fairfax County school staff fawned over Kendi like he was a rock star, punctuating their tweets with #FCPSCall2Action.

    By the way, while the Chinese build infrastructure and upgrade its workforce, we in the United States are doing this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2020/10/19/thomas-jefferson-high-school-diversity/

    Fewer Asian kids doing neuroscience and more black kids doing social justice work at the nation’s premier public STEM magnet school!

  25. @Roger:
    “@Obs I completely agree that a central bank can pretty much create as much money as it wants. It can then use that money to buy debt. But if it creates too much money, it creates inflation. People will not sell their debt at old prices but at higher prices, and the bank has to keep creating more money if it wants to keep buying debt. It can’t just keep buying and buying without a care in the world. If it creates way too much money, it creates hyperinflation and the debt is now worthless.”

    As I wrote about, that’s simple, and I agree with it. The problem is so many morons cry for a gold standard, without telling people what that meant in the past. The other problem is that money supply by the Central Bank as such doesn’t have to create exceeding inflation, yet alone hyperinflation. Like you said, they just need to care for the real economy and supply accordingly. The US-dollar however is now solely based on the monopolistic, dominant world system position of the USA, its economic value approachs that of a ramsch-currency. Because of the current crisis, however, others get in a similar position and most prefer to keep up the status quo until a solution is out in the form of a monetary reset or it just blows up.

    “But your Marxian “blame it on the Plutocracy (and their allies the cultural marxists)” is getting so tiresome.”

    There is nothing Marxian about it. Just watch these two documentaries and read Richard A. Werner, then we talk again about “Marxian” based criticism.
    The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YgFDZNXPyg
    Princes of the Yen:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-IZZxyb1GI

    The laws and economic framework was altered, throughout the 1980’s, but especially in the 1990’s, towards a purely Financial Capitalist system. This is not even classical Capitalism any more, but a private-state partnership or better overtake of an Oligarchy, which completely destroyed, on purpose, the old economic fundaments for this kind of global casino under the dominance of a few.

    If you look at the money aggregate development over the years, since Clinton repealed Glass-Steagall, the only thing the Corona crisis does do is replacing the unsustainable exponential growth with an even stepper curve which busts the dollar bubble not in 5-15 years from now, but in 1-5 years. Now you could blame Covid-19 and social politics for this, but the vast majority of the created money goes directly into the financial Oligarchy’s institutional wealth creation machine.
    And you have to consider that even M3 is for sure no realistic depiction, because the interbank businesses too got so much out of control, that the real dollar sum flowing in the system must be a magnitude higher, completely detached from anything in the real economy. The banks were lending each other newly created money and speculated with it in the casino Capitalism and as long as everybody participated and the real economy doesn’t looked all too sick, to destroy the illusion, it can go on.
    That happened with the housing market in 2008, which should have been the wake up call, but no, they just pumped more money into the system, WITHOUT CORRECTING IT. And with a correction I don’t mean any “Marxian” stuff, like you seem to tell me, but controlled Capitalist environment, with a regulating state, not one being the menial for the Plutocracy. This is not just in favour of “statist” people, but in favour of business too. Because the current banking system is totally rotten, to the detriment of small banks and any kind of real business below the biggest multi-national corporations and investment funds, which are all interconnected in this system.
    It strangles the real economy and it does so, especially in Britain and the USA, for decades now. Actually this, which anything but “Socialism”, is and will become even more the biggest foe of productive and creative real world entrepreneurship. Its insider and fortune based privileges ridicule every kind of meritocratic narrative.

    That of all people these bunch, the less than a per mil on top, finance and protect Cultural Marxists is one the ugliest and most hypocritical of all things the US “elite” ever has done. Talking about “Black lives matter” and “white privileges”, while really exploiting, ruining and at the same overtaking a whole state and society with the most corrupted and manipulated of schemes is an unprecedented crime. And they even try to extend their “new society” to the world! Its so amazing and you still argue about “Marxism”, I don’t know why.

  26. I keep being drawn back to what Twinkie has commented at various times about security of supply lines, and the wretched ‘just in time’ thing. To that can be added food safety, to which I guess you could add safety of medical supplies and other things

    Real fun starts when power, water treatment, and/or sanitation are disrupted.

  27. “Real fun starts when power, water treatment, and/or sanitation are disrupted.”

    Indeed. In the crisis of the wars and interwar period in Central Europe, the country folk was always well off, they could rely on their own products and even sell the surplus on the black market. These days, without fuel and supply, they are not much better off than most urban people. There is absolutely no sustainable self-sufficiency anywhere. The few farmers which are still there can’t even seed without constant supply.
    So we are completely dependent from this modern economic framework working, even those which think they might be largely self-sufficient, since most of them aren’t.

  28. People here can argue the toss, but the biggest mistake the Australian states made was to privatise the power and water supplies. There are some things that should never be privatised, and those things are essential services and strategically important things like ports and airports.

  29. @Twinkie

    On Kendi, it seems the dumber your message, the more fawning your fans are. Kendi’s message is dumb, and is about as simple as that of an 80s rock star. People are supposed to grow out of this type of idol-worship by the time they reach adulthood, but the past couple generations in America are staying in terminal adolescence. They’re still biologically adults, though, so they need to dress up their idol worship in something that appears a bit more intellectual than a rock star’s “the youth rock and will party in the streets, screw old people”. I would actually prefer the latter as an organizing principle than what Kendi is selling, at least it’s fun.

  30. @Mekal In college, I hated “intellectual history”, the history of intellectual’s ideas. Some times, the ideas were creative, logical attempts to make sense of things–that, however, we know now are wrong, like phlogiston.

    But so often they were full of unjustified logical leaps, and assertions about reality that just weren’t true. And I found myself almost screaming internally, “How can they be so sure this is true? Why is this so popular with intelligent people?!?”

    The great, useful thing I got out of “intellectual history” was learning how common it was for intelligent, educated people to be ridiculously wrong and ridiculously sure of themselves. Kendi is a tragedy but not a surprise.

  31. This isn’t Brown Pundits but : why do you think Uttar Pradesh is worse off than Kerala and the South?
    The North has enjoyed a long tradition of engagement with the wider Sasanian world then Islamicate world. The North’s languages are IndoEuropean; the religion, Islam, which I’m not a fan of as a whole, but it seems to be a Persianate Islam which could handle science better than what you get in Saudi. The South is Dravidian, an isolate.
    I should think the North should be better off.

  32. well remember UP has no sea access. so that’s a thing.

    second, behavioral economists have shown that ppl in UP and bihar would prefer to be big fish in small ponds as opposed to small fish in big ponds, even if the latter would make them wealthier. so they’re stuck in a vicious circle

  33. well remember UP has no sea access. so that’s a thing.

    I don’t know much about Indian history, but hadn’t the southern coastal areas of India (Kerala in particular) long enjoyed commercial contacts with the rest of the world even prior to the arrival of the Europeans? The Romans, the Arabs, the Chinese, and the Southeast Asians traded (avidly at times) with the southern parts of India, with the Malabar Coast being mentioned prominently by several of these cultures. It sounds like the kind of a thing that would foster a “globally-aware” merchant elite class the influence of which would persist to this date.

  34. the biggest mistake the Australian states made was to privatise the power and water supplies. There are some things that should never be privatised, and those things are essential services and strategically important things like ports and airports.

    I am a patriot before I am an economic conservative (certainly I am not a corporatist), so I agree that “essential services and strategically important things” should not be privatized and entrusted to the profit-motive of avaricious men. Men who run publicly-traded corporations have turned out to be greedy and unpatriotic wherever they go and also quite short-sighted, so… no.

    That said, the reason I brought up disruption of power, water treatment, and sanitation is that such a disruption is particularly hard on a “coddled” population such as that in the U.S. and in much of the Western world, where people don’t prepare for low possibility, but highly catastrophic contingencies (except in such areas that experience frequent natural disasters).

    People whose societies are backward or have been broken (usually by war) have learned to cope with such disruptions and are prepared for them. Even then the young and the old in them tend to suffer. In the rich West, the bulk of the population is completely unprepared to deal with what keeps the lights and heat (and A/C) on, water potable, and disease-causing refuse away.

    Back when I used to work on research on disintegrating hypothetical opponent polities with now the much touted “asymmetric warfare,” I became quickly aware that our Western societies could be far more easily damaged by the methods under consideration than the supposed targets. I might also add that many Western planners became fixated on technological aspects of the said asymmetric warfare and neglected the more fundamental things people tended to take for granted in developed societies. For example, “experts” were talking about fancy, tech-driven ways to disable the power supply when physically disrupting the sanitation system could be done much more effectively (if cheaply and crudely).

    Asymmetric warfare is, foremost, about psychological disintegration of the targeted population than it is about destruction, and we Westerners tend to be psychologically much more brittle and far more sensitive to negative changes to our sterile and bubbled environment.

  35. twinkie, re southern/coastal india, you are not wrong. the only issue is in parts of the south trade was taken over by muslims, who were disrupted by Portuguese.

  36. “A new study has confirmed the polarised impact the coronavirus pandemic has had on the global trade recovery, with East Asian economies powering ahead of those in the West. China, Taiwan and Vietnam are the only major trading economies whose exports have recovered strongly, with all three reporting strong growth in the third quarter of 2020, according to research by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad). The trio were among the only economies who brought the spread of Covid-19 under control early on – although the individual tactics employed were very different.

    Turkey was the only other nation within the Unctad dataset to show a recovery in exports, although this was only [a] marginal 0.7 per cent.”

    All liars, aren’t they Walter Sobchak?

  37. “Vietnam, whose exports surged by 10.9 per cent in the third quarter from a year earlier – the highest growth rate in the world, Unctad said – has reported only 1,141 cases of coronavirus as of Wednesday, with just 35 deaths.”

    Liars, eh Walter?

  38. Twinkie, your distaste towards Affirmative Action is palpable (and understandable) but studies I’ve seen on 2nd and 3rd gen Asian-Americans show that they largely support these programmes. I don’t think you’ll see them go away. There may be local areas with a high percentage of 1st gen parents (like in parts of NYC) where these attitudes don’t hold, but that will fade over time as their US-born kids grow up.

  39. On Indian North vs South debate, Arvind Subramanian (former CEA) has a very good paper out on India’s growth the last three decades.

    He demolishes some myths in the process, first of which is that India’s rise was driven by services alone. In reality, India recorded the 3rd highest growth in mfg exports. Only behind Vietnam and China.

    India’s export structure is also much more skill-intensive – again, even outside services – for its income level.

    This is part of the reason why, I believe, that UP and Bihar are so poor. Normally, poor regions of a country would export a lot of low-skill mfg goods, such as textiles, but India has been a huge underperformer in this category. Therefore, most exports tend to be concentrated in clusters with a high skill concentration (gujarat/tamil nadu for mfg, hyd/bangalore for tech, mumbai for financial services/banks etc).

    The same Subramanian did a report on Indian non-convergence between states. Typically, poorer states within a big country/union tend to converge over time. It’s easier to grow faster when you’re poor. So China’s poorer provinces have grown faster. The EU’s poorer states have as well. Yet, in India, the BIMARU states have not outgrown the richer ones. This is a bit of a development puzzle.

  40. @razib

    > behavioral economists have shown that ppl in UP and bihar would prefer to be big fish in small ponds

    Any particular studies? Never read anything on the north-south divergence and mildly interested. Search is not bringing anything up for me.

  41. Twinkie, your distaste towards Affirmative Action is palpable (and understandable) but studies I’ve seen on 2nd and 3rd gen Asian-Americans show that they largely support these programmes. I don’t think you’ll see them go away.

    I hate affirmative action, because I think it’s a publicly perpetuated lie. Its proponents should just say that they want to privilege blacks and Hispanics, because they don’t perform as well (or “test poorly”). That would be honest and carry the public conversation forward.

    My personal preference would be to use the affirmative action program to 1) salvage talented youngsters from genuinely underprivileged backgrounds and 2) increase real diversity.

    Regarding item 1), this means that the testing gap between the affirmative action admittee and others should not be large (you want admittees who can still “hack” it once making in instead of those who will fail, drop out, or end up doing “social justice” majors such as various ethnic studies), and that the criteria for underprivileged should be economic – which is measurable – rather than racial, which is both unjust and nebulous. Does Obama’s daughters really need affirmative action against white children of coal miners from West Virginia?

    Regarding item 2), if the proponents of affirmative action were really interested in true diversity whether it is philosophical, demographic, economic, religious, geographic, political, etc., Ivy League university would be scouring the deep South for Baptist children of blue collar rural whites instead of filling their ranks with liberal upper middle class and upper class children from urban and suburban areas. How much “diversity” are they serving up by admitting legions of liberal Jewish kids from tony zip codes of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and California (which are usually the top four states for admittees at most Ivies) who then make up 25-30% of the student body (often up to half of “white” students)?

    They are basically saying that having too many “Asian” students doesn’t help the purported goal of diversity (usually 15-20% at Ivies out of the general population of 6% of varying ethnic and economic backgrounds) when they admit upscale liberal Jewish students at 25-30% (out of the 2-3% of the population nationally), with nary a talk about there being too many similar Jewish students (saying that, of course, is a Hate Crime these days). How about letting in some dirt poor kids from the Bible belt who grew up doing 4-H and Junior ROTC and have never been outside the country?

    I’d be much more accepting of affirmative action – even if it were to degrade the prospects of my own children – if the real purpose were more genuine and honest – that of helping truly talented and underprivileged youths.

  42. Current thoughts on AA in education, may change any day and open to challenge: It seems like in a society like the US (and to a possibly lesser but increasing extent all “English speaking” countries these days) where you have a society with a large number of social and ethnic divisions, you do possibly need *some* kind of social mechanism of representing people who are talented within those communities, as leaders, even if they are not the very best overall on exams.

    (Rather than y’know, the most academically oriented group(s), which is probably heavily internationalised anyway and not so representative of any country, just dominates and runs everything and imposes its preferences. Which seems like it would probably be bad for social cohesion, an elite which is focused on achieving the same outcomes that the population generally desires, e.g. real democracy in practice.)

    Provided this doesn’t really form an alternative to representative democracy of course.

    And if you’ve got that, then there need to be some form of mechanism for making sure those people are trained and share some common ground as a social elite. Some kind of shared schooling / socialisation for these people.

    But present day “Affirmative Action” in elite university admissions seems like a pretty “sub optimal” way of achieving that ends; 1) it is pretty scattershot – affecting people who have no interest in leadership and just in learning and creating – and 2) affects “children” (e.g. late adolescents), which is a bad look. Further it’s based on damaging social fictions; that all the groups would just converge if they had enough “good examples” and mentors in the ranks of the university, and that all groups are equally academically talented, adjusted for social disadvantages and distractions.

    Also, I think you (we) would kind of want that universities don’t have such a decisive role in shared elite and general social identity as they have done, since that seems like it’s been pretty bad for society, by confusing their role as producers and stores of knowledge that strive for objective truth (rather than tools to promote some class interest and activism). So anything that sort of says “It’s not the universities (which wouldn’t use AA) that produce our leaders, but the national post-grad grand-ecole finishing schools specifically for leaders (which do use some form of AA)” seems like a good thing on that count too, to formally push perceptions of university away from this social leadership role.

    (Put simply, the test for “When is AA in education OK” should be roughly something like “How much does it affect a late teen child who just wants to study something apolitical like pure math or philosophy?”. If the answer to that is close to zero, then you’re converging on a form that is probably reasonably acceptable).

  43. Razib,

    Not sure if Ed Realist posts here anymore, but recently I saw a couple of her comments (on Twitter no less) playing Devil’s Advocate on supporting radical revisions to the of entrance exam based admissions to public elite high schools such as Stuyvesant, Thomas Jefferson, etc:

    “Let’s be accurate: they aren’t “rigorous”. They are exams that test far beyond grade level. They were originally designed for bright kids who picked stuff up, but kids are spending the equivalent of years in outside school learning the material. No great loss.End magnet schools.”
    https://twitter.com/Ed_Realist/status/1319056123773661185

    “They aren’t “succeeding spectacularly”. Not much evidence that *outputs* of the 7 spec high schools have done much more, despite the increase in incoming scores. Asian kids spend years in test prep. I prefer cut score on state tests to GPA, but random lottery after that is good.”
    https://twitter.com/Ed_Realist/status/1315036902387458048

    “Because test prep and obsessive training is not what education’s about, at least k-12, and they aren’t performing like $50K private school students any more than they are performing like the top students at any top public school.”
    https://twitter.com/Ed_Realist/status/1315376793029767168

    I’m not really well read in this “scene” as I don’t live in those areas, but does her analysis jibe with your anecdotal observations?

  44. It will be interesting if the post-Amy Barrett Supreme Court decides to do what the Warren Court did in 1954 (Brown v. Board of Education) and say, “We don’t care if you politicians can’t do the morally right thing. We’re saying racial discrimination is unconstitutional and you’re now stuck with that.”

    It will be especially interesting if they very specifically rely on Brown, which every progressive/Democrat/right-thinking person says is a great, wonderful historic decision.

    Of course, that might lead a Biden administration to try to expand the Supreme Court to reverse the decision, but it might actually lead to some honesty.

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