The above video is from Eurovision. A bunch of 20-something Italians doing rock music is pretty weird, since rock is dead for all practical purposes in the USA.I’ve been setting up some Amazon book lists. So here is one for population genetics. I also set them up for the steppe, Roman Empire, and the origins of Islam. I’ll be adding more lists and fleshing them out.
Lots of content on my Substack. I assume most readers of this weblog are on the e-list, but who knows? Perhaps of note, two posts on the Romani. Also check out my interview with J. P. Mallory.
The ungated podcast site has more than two dozen podcasts now. If you haven’t posted a review on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher, please do so.
The media’s lab leak fiasco. Matt Yglesias does a forensic analysis of what happened.
I’m reading Peace, Poverty and Betrayal for a review at UnHerd.
I’ve been corresponding with a reader who is of English Romanichal background, and my supposition that they have less South Asian ancestry than Roma and Iberian Romani seems correct. Closer to 10-15% than 20-30%. A lot of the ancestry (from Ancestry/Family Tree DNA) is assigned as British, so that indicates the dilution may have happened in the United Kingdom.
E. O. Wilson’s Social Conquest of the Earth is now $2.99 on Kindle (don’t know how long this will last).
The “noble lie” on masks probably wasn’t a lie: Why Western public health went all-in on a campaign against masks. Basically, they didn’t know what they were talking about, but their authority is based on the premise that they do. Also, the evidence in favor of masks isn’t really that strong, just like it wasn’t strong against them. People have polarized this issue in a way that’s crazy.
Deciphering signatures of natural selection via deep learning.
Transposable elements drive the evolution of genome streamlining.
Please, Think Critically About College Admissions: you can’t help the disadvantaged by refusing to engage in critical thinking. This is nothing new to readers of this weblog, but the wave of mainstream-media propaganda around this issue is reading going to go into overdrive soon, so it is best to have the literature familiar to you (also, read A Year Without Miles).
What shall become of Charles Darwin?
I don’t remember how I was linked to this, but I found it tremendously amusing:
“The Native Scholar Who Wasn’t: More than a decade ago, a prominent academic was exposed for having faked her Cherokee ancestry. Why has her career continued to thrive?” By Sarah Viren Published May 25, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/magazine/cherokee-native-american-andrea-smith.html
“Of the 1,500 university educators listed as Native American at the time, said Bill Cross, who helped found the American Indian/Alaska Native Professors Association, “we’re looking realistically at one-third of those being Indians.”
Elizabeth Warren is not alone. She is just the tip of the iceberg. Academia, particularly the world of grievance studies, is shot through with fraud.
Razib
What do you think about the “Shadow of the Sword” by Tom Holland with regards to the origins of Islam?
I continue to be obsessed with the origins of coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.
I have begun to regard the case that it was created in a laboratory by gain of function research as having been established prima facie. A defense has not been foreclosed, but no one has brought forward anything other than generalities (e.g., all other new diseases have been zoonotic). What the defense really needs is a dead pangolin shot through with virus, or something like that. I suspect that if the Chinese had one, they would display it to the world.
The real issue to me is what are the consequences of the fact. The first one is that US policy towards China needs to change radically and very soon. More on that below.
The second is that Washington has developed a sclerotic and totally self interested fourth branch of government that is inimical to the health and welfare of the American people. More on that below too.
(Google translated) – OVER 200 CHILDREN FOUND ON THE TERRITORY OF THE INTERNET IN KAMLUPS
That boarding school functioned from 1890 to 1969 under the control of the Catholic Church. It then came under the control of the federal government of Canada and existed until 1978.
Ellen Turpel-Lafond, who investigates the disappearances of Indian children: “The discovery of the remains of children in Kamloops confirms what the indigenous peoples have been saying for years: that many children who went to that school never returned. I believe that the purpose of the boarding school was to take control of the children of the indigenous population, to destroy its cultural identity and the connection of children with their families. ”
For almost 170 years, Canada denationalized the children of Indians, abused many physically and sexually, and killed a frightening number! Regardless of whether the total number of victims is around 4,000 or around 50,000! And the Catholic Church took part in everything for almost 80 years, which – at least in Kamloops – played a leading role. The Canadian leadership is already saying in a Jesuit way that it is a “tragedy of unimaginable proportions”.
MT>>> The previous text is related to the ‘Indo-European’ serial. This genocide is one in many since the first genocide by Yamnaya people on indigenous Europeans. Their descendants later tried to destroy indigenous people on other continents, too. We are faced with enormous hypocrisy of western societies which try to dictate to the whole world how to behave. Some reflections we can see even here. Before our eyes they killed millions in Vietnam, a half of a million Iraqi children and dropped depleted uranium on the whole of Serbia. All this based on false premises and unashamed hypocrisy. And? – nothing. It is not a coincidence that IE archaeologists, although know, avoid mentioning the first Yamnaya genocide.
from Tyler Cowen today:
Here is Ross Douthat at the NYT:
…there’s a pretty big difference between a world where the Chinese regime can say, We weren’t responsible for Covid but we crushed the virus and the West did not, because we’re strong and they’re decadent, and a world where this was basically their Chernobyl except their incompetence and cover-up sickened not just one of their own cities but also the entire globe.
The latter scenario would also open a debate about how the United States should try to enforce international scientific research safeguards, or how we should operate in a world where they can’t be reasonably enforced.
I agree, and would add one point about why this matters so much. “Our wet market was low quality and poorly governed” is a story consistent with the Chinese elites not being entirely at fault. Wet markets, after all, are a kind of atavism, and China knows the country is going to evolve away from them over time. They represent the old order. You can think of the CCP as both building infrastructure and moving the country’s food markets into modernity (that’s infrastructure too, isn’t it?), albeit with lags. “We waited too long to get rid of the wet markets” is bad, but if anything suggests the CCP should have done all the more to revolutionize and modernize China. In contrast, the story of “our government-run research labs are low quality and poorly governed”…that seems to place the blame entirely on the shoulders of the CCP and also on its technocratic, modernizing tendencies. Under that account, the CCP spread something that “the earlier China” did not, and that strikes strongly at the heart of CCP legitimacy. Keep in mind how much the Chinese apply a historical perspective to everything.
A number of you have asked me what I think of the lab leak hypothesis. A few months ago I placed the chance of it at 20-30%, as a number of private correspondents can attest. Currently I am up to 50-60%.
@Matt
So I was going through the gnxp archive in 2006 to 2010 at random. Temporal (quasi)nostalgia diving to see what happened in the past. I found a comment from you which looked like an introductory one. Early-ish March 2008, was that really your first comment on gnxp?
Is there a way I can mute or hide Milan’s comments on WordPress?
I enjoy the comments here, and often read the posts without looking at the names first. But I really don’t want to waste my time reading his stuff anymore.
For the last 40 years the premise of US policy towards China has been that as it grew economically and opened to world commerce it would see the advantages of liberal government and cooperative behavior on the international stage. It would become like US. China’s economic growth would create a growing middle class that would demand further liberalization and better behavior by its government.
We were wrong. We had deluded ourselves into believing that China and the Chinese were just like US. Unfortunately, they are just like themselves. The interests and needs that have driven every Chinese regime drive this one just as they drove the Han, the Tang, the Song, the Yuan, the Ming, and the Qing.
The same sort of delusion drove our dealings in the Middle East from 9/11 to the collapse of the Arab spring.
We need to reorient (get it) our foreign policy to stop treating China like we would like to be treated, and to start treating them as a strong dangerous country that is determined to bend the world to its will.
We need to disentangle ourselves economically from China. We need to remove them from our supply chains and exclude them from our economy, our universities, our culture. The dogma of free trade needs to be done away with. We should trade freely with our friends, allies, and neighbors, but not China. If we need cheap labor, we should get it from South and Southeast Asia.
We need to spend lots of money on the Navy. We need to bolster the defenses of Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. We need to get out of the Middle East.
You can choose on Recent comments not to read my comments. It seems that something irritates you? This is Open Thread and anyone can write about the topics that are interesting to them. One reflection of hypocrisy is exactly your comment. I do write some things which some other may do not like to hear. Can you find something what is incorrect? You can choose to push your head into sand, but this will not change the reality. I present my view based on evidence (many of them) and if you find one thing incorrect I will leave this blog.
@Roger Sweeny: Thanks for the link, I like Douthat, but I don’t read the NYTimes.
However, the response to China’s creation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is less interesting. There are ten or fifteen things that drive my attitude towards China, such as, its actions in the South China Sea, its treatment of Uighurs, Tibetans, and Hong Kong, its threats against Taiwan, its spying in US research labs, its manipulation of American businesses. The virus is just one more. it may be one that allows me to sell a hard line towards China, but it is just one more.
The more interesting and difficult issue is what to make of our own government. I will not go into the blow by blow of the testing fiasco of CDC and FDA last year, or the mask follies. I am unpersuaded that any public health intervention or lockdown made much difference. the one thing that the Federal Government did that was and is important and constructive was the Operation Warp Speed vaccine project.
What disturbs me is the role that Saint Anthony Fauci, M.D. played in funding gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. His responses to direct questioning about so far are evasive and disingenuous. Biologist Richard Ebright a professor at Rutgers and a long time opponent of gain of function research tweeted:
https://twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1397196998705651720
“Fauci’s testimony was demonstrably false. The Wuhan lab used NIH funding to construct novel chimeric SARS-related coronavirus able to infect human cells and laboratory animals. The research was–unequivocally–gain of function research.”
“The Wuhan lab constructed novel chimeric viruses that combined spike genes from new bat SARS-related coronaviruses with the genomic backbone of another bat SARS-related coroavirus. These were viruses that were novel, not viruses that were present in nature.”
Fauci is a long time proponent of gain of function research. He wrote articles in suport of it in 2012. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3484390/ Obama declared a moratorium on GoF research in 2014. Fauci subsequently gave a grant to Peter Daszak of “EcoHealth Alliance” which was funneled to WIV.
Fauci now denies having funded WIV and having any knowledge of what Daszak did with the money. Fauci should be fired at the very least.
But, the thing that gnaws at me is the ability of Fauci to survive and thrive in our Government spending our money on his pet projects against the wishes of the Elected officials who are supposed to be in charge.
If he were the only one, it would be upsetting, But, we see traces of that all over. take the NSA for example. We are under cyber siege from ransomware pirates. Where is NSA. They have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to spy on Americans, but their hacking superpowers have no use in defending us. They did get hacked themselves and lose control of a number of exploits a few years ago. They also got cleaned out by Edward Snowden.
Or, the Pentagon. The F-35 has done more damage to the US Air Force than the MiG 15. The fiasco with the KC-767 refueling airplane, that was built on a 30 year old commercial platform so they could mess up the details. The Zumwalt Destroyer, the Gerald Ford Aircraft Carrier, the littoral combat ship. And we need the Navy to work really badly.
And Biden wants a 6 trillion dollar budget that pretty much guarantees a 2.5T$ deficit.
We are in very deep kimchi.
Enough. Just a link on my other recent obsession:
“Ban Cryptocurrency to Fight Ransomware: The existence of bitcoin and the rest benefits nobody except criminals and speculators.” By Lee Reiners |
May 25, 2021
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ban-cryptocurrency-to-fight-ransomware-11621962831
(Borrowed lines) The world should be alerted to the continuing deployment of biological and chemical weapons laboratories by the US around the world, which shows its heightened cold-war mentality is causing security dilemmas in vulnerable regions, observers noted.
British journalist Jon Mitchell’s new book “Poisoning the Pacific” shows how for decades the US military’s work on bio-weapons has caused serious contamination in the Pacific islands under its control.
The book details how the use of chemical weapons such as radioactive substances, nerve agents, and Agent Orange by the US military, has contaminate vast areas of the Western Pacific and harmed people working in its laboratories.
The US has set up bio-labs in 25 countries and regions in the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia and countries of the former Soviet Union, with 16 in Ukraine alone, according to media reports. Some places where the labs are based have seen large-scale outbreaks of measles and other dangerous infectious diseases, reports indicate.
USA Today reported that since 2003, hundreds of incidents involving accidental contact with deadly pathogens have occurred in US bio-labs in the US and abroad. People who come in direct contact with the pathogens can become infected, and then spread a virus to communities and start an epidemic.
According to the report of the Korea Herald in April 2019, the Pentagon in May 2015 confirmed that a US’ laboratory in Utah had “inadvertently” sent live anthrax samples to one of its military bases in South Korea.
Local residents poured into the street to express fear of the possible biological agent experiment, reports show.
The US’ bio-lab deployment in former Soviet countries such as Georgian and Ukraine are notable, said Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council. US research activities in bio-labs in members of the Commonwealth of the Independent States have caused grave concern, he said. “The United States not only builds bio-labs in these countries, but also tries to do so in other places across the world. Its research lacks transparency and runs counter to the rules of the international community and international organizations,” Medvedev said.
The main purpose of US deployed bio-labs around the world is to maintain and expand its overseas interests and consolidate its hegemonic position in the world.
@DaThang, can’t remember. If it seems like me (but maybe with some dumber ideas), it could be me, while if it reads really differently, fairly common name. Think I was probably reading stuff by then but not sure if I was bothering to leave comments.
@Matt. The comment said something about Miss Baker’s biology class.
Eurovision is not reality
1-To date only Europeans Z2103 and I2a-L699 can be considered descendants of the Yamnaya culture because they are the only male lineages that have been found in that culture (and the first of them has barely been documented in western europe).
2- There is no scientific proof that the cultures of old Europe were exterminated by the Yamnaya horsemen. they did not have enough demographic and technological capacity to exterminate a whole continent. They are only fairy tales of some unprofessional researchers.
Ergo we western Europeans have not inherited any extermination gene from our Yamnaya ancestors, all humans have inherited our violent and genocidal behavior from our ancestors, or do you think that the Aztecs and Mayas who made human sacrifices and were cannibals, were nuns of charity when the Spaniards arrived?
@Gaska: You should subscribe to Razib’s substack. Everybody should subscribe to Razib’s substack. [link at the top of this page]. If you do, you should listen to his podcast:
“Kristian Kristiansen: the birth of Northern Europe: Were the Corded Ware the “most murderous” people in the history of the world?”
https://razib.substack.com/p/kristiankristiansen
@DaThang, ah, that’s probably not me then.
@Gaska, interesting to see you. Can I suggest that you and Milan Todorovic hold a public debate about ancient European history? It would be something to see.
@Roger Sweeny: I went back and read the Douthat article. He quoted and linked (without approval) an article by David Frum, who, as a speech writer for Bush Fils, invented the phrase: “Axis of Evil”. That was then and this is now. Frum has developed a massive case of TDS. He apparently thinks it sufficient for him to label any policy he does like as being from Trump to cast it into the outer darkness.
Frum does not want the creation of SARS-CoV-2 virus to interrupt our open door and open legs policy to China. He writes that:
“If Chinese labs are unsafe, the United States and the world must find a way to induce China to improve their safety. And that imperative implies more cooperation with China, not less. It implies more binding of China to the international order, more cross-border health-and-safety standards, more American scientists in Chinese labs, and concomitantly, more Chinese scientists in American labs.”
“Trump’s Supporters Are Getting the Lab-Leak Story Backwards: If their thesis is right, it points to a course opposite what they propose.” By David Frum
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/trumps-supporters-are-getting-lab-leak-story-backward/619004/
At the level of ordinary thinking this is silly. Doubling down, which is what he is advocating, is seldom wise. But here, where the virus is number 15 on the list of issues created by the Chinese regime, it is head poundingly stupid.
The Frum quotes have the feel of post-Soviet times. The feel that contact with western/American institutions will automatically make people “more like us” because our mixed economy and human rights are obviously superior. (Wasn’t that the lesson of 1989-91?) The feel that international institutions, the “international order”, will be friendly to American ideals and subject to American control. The feel that the Chinese government will be fine with being a “little brother” in an American-led world.
But Chairman Xi has very different ideas, one of the most important of which is that the Soviet government’s first big mistake was condemning Stalin. (Tanner Greer has written a lot about this.)
@Roger Sweeny:
Yes. My late mother was a scholar of Russian Civilization. I remember being with her and a neighbor, who wanted to know what she thought about the state of affairs in Russia then. (January 1992, the Soviet Union had dissolved in December 1991). The neighbor thought that Russia would become European and western liberal. My mother rejected the idea very strongly and said that Russia would become what it has always been, a fascist dictatorship.
As I point out above, we saw the same sort of delusional narcissistic thinking during the first decade of this century.
It is an American character trait. In some ways it is endearingly optimistic. In other ways it is stupid and self defeating.
I should add that I do not think that Xi’s personal beliefs and opinions are very important. He is doing what almost every other ruler of China would be doing in his place. China is going to continue to be China. Russia will continue to be Russia. And, the Islamic Middle East will continue to be what it is.
Thought an interesting comment on China’s “Three Child Policy” change – https://theweek.com/china/1001003/chinas-new-three-child-policy-far-from-enough-demography-expert-says
The demographer above is focused on what it is not; and it’s not a complete removal of the birth limit. He suggests that the CCP is constrained because if “Chinese Communist Party were to completely roll back those restrictions, “it makes a statement on the policies” that the party itself implemented in the past, likely making it too risky for now”. The CCP is in some sense constrained in its capacity to reverse itself, not endowed with freedom from ideological constraints.
(Relatedly, I perhaps would not have thought, if asked in the 2000s, that I’d ever see any North American Conservative arguing that the greatness of China as under one-party Communist Party rule is that it can engage in top-down cultural engineering that rejects decadent capitalist materialism by systematically isolating Chinese from corrupting American culture. And that this will supposedly allow them to recover from a demographic transition that otherwise proceeds without check in all countries all across the world (including in Americophobic Russia), as if demographic transition was really caused by contagion with American/Western culture. And generally advocating for the State to, in some sense, initiate policy to manage the fertility decisions of its people to fulfil the needs of the State and the collective greater good, rather than simply make their decisions with a view of their personal pursuit of happiness. And yet at least one example this very day – https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1399345348603039750 … Early 21st century, at least as seen via twitter, is in some ways surprisingly big on diversity of thought, huh?)
Tanner Greer (again) had a 24 April post, The Problem of the New Right, basically arguing that New Right intellectuals want to use government force to do “good things” but that many “right” voters instead want to be left alone. Pull quote: “The enemies are well defined: Hayek and Friedman, Locke and Jefferson.”
(There was also a 24 May follow-up, Further Notes on the New Right.)
@Matt: The CCP regime lifting the the one child limit to two and now three children is just plain meaningless. Every society that has industrialized and urbanized has gone through a demographic transition. China would have had a transition without a one child policy.
The policy probably made the situation worse by scaring parents who wanted a boy because of the traditional expectation that a boy would support his parents in their old age and ensure the continuity of the ancestor cult with the possibility that a string of girls would prevent that from happening. The result from selective abortion and infanticide was a imbalance between the sexes has developed in China of about 20 to 30 million fewer women of marriageable age than men. This is the demographic equivalent of stepping on a rake.
Just permitting women to have more children will not float the boat. They need a lot more women.
@Roger, that’s one lens to use. I don’t think Hanania sees himself as part of the “New Right” (and largely seems to hate them as far as I can tell, or maybe that’s blending different things), but possibly he could be viewed as such.
I’m not sure about the rest of Greer’s article making an argument that New Right is a self defeating intellectual project as seeks national renewal from clay that is not as concerned with common good.
Please, no. We don’t need cheap labor from anywhere. Have you seen our labor participation rate of late?
I dislike the ChiComs (more like ChiFascists) as much as the next person, but we don’t need a bigger navy. We need to withdraw our forces from everywhere, except maybe some token elements in the UK and Japan. And mind our own business.
Finished “Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race”
LOTS of fertility info in that one, I think Dr. Khan might like it.
In Open Thread before discussed how selected different migration streams to USA / Europe are and I’ve mentioned before a dataset (https://www.iab.de/en/daten/iab-brain-drain-data.aspx) that estimates the share of low (less than high school), medium (high school), high (attainment above high school) among migrant stock.
I thought it would be interesting to plot this against country current Education HDI and against averages for people in destination countries, for USA and UK.
Also this could allow me to combine different subregions and disaggregate East Asia from Southeast Asia and South Asia and so on.
So quick galleries here at https://imgur.com/a/DEIOL30
Different colours for average of all streams, regional averages, individual sources and destination country average (which I took from Wikipedia data).
(Total migrant stock doesn’t add up to quite 100 because there was about 3-6 percent small countries without HDI data).
(Method for the “Migrant Stock Average Education 2010” is to score low as 0.33, medium as 0.66 and high as 1, then combine in a weighted fashion, such that if all were low then 0.33 and all high then 1).
Assuming the source data is accurate, in general you can see that most sources are on average upselected, certainly relative to local HDI and in many cases relative to local natives. However USA and UK do also have a few large sources who are either neutrally selected, not very unselected or downselected, for this USA this is largely Mexico which almost exclusively comprises large scale unselected migration, while for the UK this is Caribbean and South Asia. Nothing surprising.
There’s not much relationship between sending country HDI and migrant stream education, which is what we should expect if the system is selecting from streams on a relatively similar basis, not normalized to sending country.
In the US aggregating South Asia and West Africa are both more selected than the average country while East Asia is more average, but East Asia is still upselected relative to the US mean, and certainly relative to sending countries in East Asia.
(Age also probably has some effect on streams; the UK seems to have a relatively low educated share of East Asian migration, but this is probably because a large share of UK East Asian migration comes from Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s, before development, and then many other people from the East Asian diaspora from British colonies, and not as many from PRC, recently, which was more short term students, certainly when this data was sourced in 2010. Similarly the UK’s low education migrant stock from Ireland, dominating European migration to the UK, probably reflects quite old people now).
The US and UK seem to overall have a similar share of high education migration, but the US’s migrant average, particularly excepting Mexico, is higher relative to the average, because the UK has had more low education and the US more medium education level. (It seems like high school grads have preferred the USA, while UK has had more education from people with only primary school).
Note that in the UK case in particular though, there is a particularly pronounced absence of middle level education in favour of extremes. If accurate, UK seems particularly a place where the average don’t move to, and this probably impacts the general perception of migrants vs locals (positively and negatively). This is also apparent in the US but more subtly.
Methods like this probably have limits. If there’s upselection even at this fairly coarse grain, you’ll probably find even more upselection at finer-grained higher thresholds (like doctorates and Masters, not just Bachelors). So this probably underestimates selection at the really high end, which would matter more for super-elite universities. In general it seems like the picture for these two countries is a lot of selection at the high end from a diverse range of countries, then quite a lot of selection at lower end from just a few prominent source countries, and proportionately low selection from the middle.
(This is all assuming the data is accurate; they say it’s preliminary data, so it may change, and it seems odd that the US and UK patterns of high to medium to low are as different as they are, but this may be reality).
Couple pastebins in CSV that can be used in PAST, in case anyone wanted to look at data directly. UK at https://pastebin.com/spn21HM5/ and USA at https://pastebin.com/Hnx2b9M4.
@Matt
The fit immigrant hypothesis, which has ample evidentiary support, suggests that in almost every respect relevant to health and socio-economic success that emigrants are more fit than folks who don’t migrate. This is true even within immigration streams with low levels of formal education. As a result, even if their own limited formal education and age limited capacity to become fluent in the language of their new home holds them back socioeconomically, with greater opportunity, their children generally thrive.
@ohwilleke, when I put the phrase “Fit Immigrant Hypothesis” into Google, I can only find 10 hits of you discussing it in comments at this and other blogs (inc. you own). Is it perhaps known in slightly different terms in some large body of work that supports it? (As to the idea, maybe German and Japanese Brazilians really are amazing relative to Germans and Japanese, maybe French Canadians really are great compared to French… Or maybe not.)
The best (most comprehensive) datasets on migrant quality in the 19th and early 20th century I think are these Norwegian ones which Abramitzky, Boustan and Erikson has published analyses on, because of the large share of emigration (second largest as a proportion of home country, after Ireland) and typical Scandinavian record-keeping (there was a long term exit census). That found that you had poor and unskilled migration – https://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/march/immigration-lessons-learned-030813.html – possibly due to peculiarities of Norway, maybe not. Definitely seems relatively poor and relatively huddled. (Also studies return migrants, who were negatively selected again, but were able to use funds amnd skills from their American experience to establish a more prosperous life – https://news.stanford.edu/press-releases/2017/09/11/returning-home-age-mass-migration/)
That leaves open that migrants were still positively selected on some unobservable variables. So to tackle this question Abramitzky and collaborators are back on the case and Norwergian record keeping comes to the rescue once again, leading to this – https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Workshops-Seminars/Economic-History/bouston-090302.pdf – “We construct a novel data set of Norway-to-US migrants and their brothers. Because brothers share a common family environment and a portion of their genetic material, the earnings of brothers who remained in Norway provide our best estimate for what migrants’ earnings would have been had they not migrated. By migrating from Norway to the US, we estimate that Norwegian men could increase their earnings by between 60 and 100 percent. By comparing within-brother estimates to estimates that use both within- and between-household variation, we find evidence for positive selection from rural areas and negative selection from urban areas. An instrumental variables procedure, which uses birth order as an instrument for migration, reinforces the finding of negative selection among migrants from Norwegian cities.”.
The rural (positive) effect appears to be milder than the urban (negative) effect for this set – “For men born in urban areas, we find that a naïve estimate of the return to migration is at least 11 percent – and may be up to 140 percent – too low due to negative selection. In contrast, any selection among men born in rural areas appears to have been mild. The US economy may have been hindered by the arrival of negatively selected urban migrants. Understanding the different patterns of selection in rural and urban areas is a fruitful direction for future research.”
The above is part of a project which seems ongoing and also mentions in the project description – https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/112540/version/V1/view .
We could raise a remaining objection to this by saying that nonetheless “Families that are better on unobserved variables than their population are more likely to move, so brothers does not really control it”. That seems fairly thin gruel but is testable through comparing family background level data.
As for what really drives selection, Beck Knudsen’s selection for individualism seems interesting – https://twitter.com/asbeckknudsen/status/1087655865753223168?lang=en
I think this depends on the time frame. Early migrants from China were not upscale by any means or highly credentialed educationally, and the same goes for Japan. Both sent mostly peasants and laborers prior to World War II.
There was an exodus of the educated from China in the aftermath of the communist takeover of the mainland. Similarly, the peak of the Korean immigration was in the 1980’s and the educational selectivity was higher than the average in South Korea at the time.
I’d love to see the data on what it’s like now. For example, 55% of foreign-born Koreans in America currently have at least bachelor’s degrees while 47% or so South Koreans in South Korea do. However, in the youngest adult cohort those in 20’s to early 30’s, the bachelor’s rate in South Korea is something like 70% (with junior college, the rate jumps to 98%).
Since immigration from South Korea has declined significantly (so much so that the last Census showed an actual decrease in those who identify as Korean in the U.S. from the Census before), I suspect that Koreans in America will have a lower educational attainment than those in Korea, even factoring in the fact that Koreans born in America have a slightly higher rate than their foreign-born counterparts.
I think this depends on the time frame. Early migrants from China were not upscale by any means or highly credentialed educationally, and the same goes for Japan. Both sent mostly peasants and laborers prior to World War II.
you are correct. japan we have good data for. a disproportionate number were LANDLESS from southern/western japan. that is, downselected.
the model minority idea in the 50s and early 60s was in the context of the descendents of chinese/japanese peasants and laborers doing well
@Jason
I don’t know why you would want to do that. You would have missed finding out that Serbs might be the only ethnic/religious group that would cause an ordinary person to stop and ask himself: Are we absolutely certain that these Ustase guys are the “bad” guys. Also, since the Ancient Greeks were really Serbs and not Greeks, it is only a matter of time before an awesome Serbian speaker/linguist will translate Linear A for the benefit of us all.
Regarding early waves of East Asian immigrants, it’s interesting to consider Hawaii. Large numbers of East Asians migrated to Hawaii during the plantation era – largely Chinese and Japanese peasants. While Japanese Hawaiians in particular did become something of a local governing class once statehood was achieved, the community did not develop any national prominence. The state has only slightly above average educational attainment, the University of Hawaii is not particularly notable, and the state isn’t known for economic dynamism or producing a lot of intellectual heavyweights (even in comparison to its small population).
I thought that (unlike BP) this is a moron-proof blog but, it seems, I was wrong. Only moron could be a public fan of Ustase, the most murderous killers in human history, who used 57 identified (Gideon Greif) different ways to kill almost 1.5 million Serbs in the ww2 and who only had a concentration camp for children. This just confirms my assertion in the IE serial when the first genocide in history by Yamnaya people was confirmed. That is probably the reason why the moron is hiding his name, nationality, language and gender. There is also a frustration because he/she could not respond on any fact I mentioned in my comment. There is also a lie that I stated that sc. ‘ancient’ Greeks were Serbs.I hope there will be thread about the ‘antiquity’ of Greeks which will present when and where they came from to today’s Greece, who gave them the name and what is its meaning, which language they spoke, etc. There was also an unsuccessful attempt of making a joke regarding Linear A on Crete. GnXp readers could be interested to read a less known paper by Italian linguist G.Tomezzoli which can be useful in future discussions:
Pavel Serafimov, Giancarlo Tomezzoli
EVIDENCE FOR EARLY SLAVIC PRESENCE IN MINOAN CRETE
New Reading of the Linear A Inscription on the Golden Signet Ring of Mavro Spelio
Abstract
The Paleolithic continuity theory does not state precisely which areas of South-Eastern Europe
or outside were actually settled by the Slavs in the antiquity. Thus, it is sometime surprising to
recognize that artifacts with inscriptions attributed to other cultures, tribe names, toponyms and
hydronyms in areas not traditionally admitted as settled by Slavs actually preserve evidences of
their ancient Slavic origin. Several relevant and different facts indicate a Slavic presence in Crete
in the 2nd millennium BC. To the above facts, we have to add the discovery of the inscribed golden
signet ring found in the chamber tomb IX E. 1 of Mavro Spelio cemetery, near Knossos on Crete.
In 1963 Georgiev translated the inscription by the help of similarities with the Hittite language;
however, his transcription and translation appear not very probable. Another more recent attempt
of translating the inscription was provided by Woudhuizen, which represents an improvement of
the interpretation of Consani.
The Linear A words of the inscription on the golden signet ring of Mavro Spelio appear to have
meaning in a language of Slavic Minoan peoples. It is remarkable that in the inscription, although
about 3500-4000 years old, all the words have very close counterparts even in the Modern Slavic
languages. Our transcription and translation confirm such statements and open new regarding
of ancient history in this region.
Full paper is at:
https://korenine.si/zborniki/zbornik11/serafimov_slavic_crete.pdf
@Twinkie, yeah, the total stock is gonna be a composite over time. That means that it might undershoot or overshoot differences in recent selection (like your example). Also where countries have recently shown strong education HDI growth (Korea and China?) comparing stock achievement to current HDI probably underestimates historical upselection and overestimates downselection, because where migration is relatively old, they had more normal education profile for when they migrated (like in my UK Hong Kong migration example for a very extreme version).
I don’t know about the specifics of actual total tertiary education though (as opposed to rank upselection / downselection). If older Koreans in US were upselected (and it seems so), and younger American born Koreans exceeding even modestly the average 60% Asian American enrollment rate (and it seems likely?) then there wouldn’t seem to be too likely to reverse within ethnic group? It seems possible though.
Supposedly relatively many college educated young NEETs in SK – https://yannprell.com/are-koreans-too-educated/ (Maybe this has changed since 2013).
When I told my wife that 98% of Koreans in the youngest adult cohort have a college degree, she said, “Who’s gonna pick up the trash over there?”
I retorted, “The ones who went to a junior college, I guess.” But in reality, it will probably be robots. I always get a kick out of the robot that helps you at the Incheon Airport (and also the one that cleans and shines the floor).
Young adult unemployment is high in ROK (but corporations being what they are, Korean corporations are always lobbying to bring foreign workers, e.g. Indians for IT).
Re: Hawaii. It isn’t just the Asians in Hawaii who are “mediocre.” Pretty much everyone from there is. It was an extractive, plantation economy and, rather like the old American South, was not a conducive environment for economic and intellectual dynamism. Even now, with tourism being such a huge sector, it still remains an extractive economy (though the military presence helps some).
In the pre-war period, I think Hawaii received a similar profile Japanese migrants as CA and WA did – peasants. Yet the latter became much more notable than the ones who went to HI.
A good receiving location is kind of useful; another paper by Abramitzky (https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/2021-abramitzky.pdf) finds that “Immigrants’ advantage (in upward mobility) is similar historically and today despite dramatic shifts in sending countries and US immigration policy. Immigrants achieve this advantage in part by choosing to settle in locations that offer better prospects for their children.”
…
Figure 7 shows that indeed including fixed effects for the US South or for census division diminishes the intergenerational gaps at the twenty-fifth percentile by roughly 50 percent in both historical cohorts (1880–1910, 1880–1910). The intergenerational gaps are further reduced when we add childhood state fixed effects (fourth bar of each graph), and they fully close when we further include either childhood state-by-urban status (fifth bar) or childhood county fixed effects (sixth bar). We thus conclude that immigrant parents’ location choice was an important driver of the immigrant mobility advantage we see in the past.
If you’ve got some population that’s just in a bad place for these income etc metric (whether it be the upland South or Hawaii), then it probably does have an effect. Multiple of these things like source country “HDI” + selection level + receiving location probably all feed in to explain things.
…
In other news (that’s more “cool stuff people did in the ancient past” than “boring modern economic stuff”) – https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01443-8 –
“Pyramid made of dirt is world’s oldest known war memorial – Grave goods suggest that some of the people whose bones are buried in the Syrian monument were charioteers. People living some 4,500 years ago in what is now Syria built what might be the world’s first memorial to war dead.
Anne Porter at the University of Toronto in Canada and her colleagues re-analysed bones and artefacts found in a 22-metre-high artificial mound near the Euphrates River. The mound, called White Monument because the materials used in its construction cause it to glisten in sunlight, was used for rituals and burials for some 300 years until around 2450 BC. Then, between 2450 and 2300 BC, a series of horizontal steps were built over the original mound, turning it into a stepped pyramid that would have been visible over long distances.
The researchers found that the remains of at least 30 people, mostly male, were buried in the steps. The bodies seem to have been carefully interred along with earthen pellets that might have been fired on foes, as well as the skins and bones of donkey-like animals that were used to pull battle carts.” (Link to paper in article)
Referring chariots in the sense of the heavier vehicles (“battle carts”) that were about before the light chariot, as that conventionally originates in Potapovka Sintashta culture later than this, and doesn’t reach Mesopotamia until hundreds of years after its invention. There is some interesting stuff about these battle carts in the paper.
Mentioned this Economist Model of Covid-19 Excess Deaths before in May: https://outline.com/PYEgK3
Peru death toll was last week recently revised by 2.6x to a number close to this estimate, so that gives some justification, hence thought would plot that generally against recorded death / million, and some other indices: https://imgur.com/a/9vzVefE
Under recorded death tolls there are some situations where development indices and freedom indices positively correlate with deaths/million. But under the estimated excess deaths this is not so and uncorrelated, and would probably reverse to a negative correlation if age distributions were taken into account.
My apologies for copying a part of my comment from the Substack to GnXp readers because, I suppose that some will be interested to face the challenge at the end of this comment:
… There are so many historical falsifications, but I could not see that anyone here noticed this or, if noticed, they are afraid to talk about this. I guess you (RK) envisage some risks for yourself as well if you clearly state some of them. It is interesting the psychology of your readers. Some simply do not want to hear that falsifications exist, others, who are aware of this, are waiting to be rectified somewhere from the top. Both groups are deeply irritated that some individuals, free shooters without any powerful backing (like me), by using only the knowledge and basic logic, indicate some obvious falsifications. It seems that they are enjoying the warmth and conformity of deep shit without much waving.
I already experienced that one of them tried to ban me (although he could easily just bypass my comment), the other even indirectly proposed nothing less than my extermination referring on Ustasa’s methods. I think that these falsifications are both, the root cause and a consequence, of the hatred toward ancient and modern Serbs in last few thousands of years (Assange said that the future always first comes to Serbia).
Recently, one reader complained when I stated that Vandals were old Serbs, i.e. a tribe which spoke Serbian language. For dummies, modern Serbs are a small fraction of ancient Serbs who (together with Lusitanian Serbs in Germany) preserved their original name. There are about 750 names used for tribes who, since ancient times spoke Serbian language and can be, based on the language, genetics, mythology and anthropology, considered as (ancient) Serbs.
Considering the previous, it is understandable that I still haven’t received any reply on my questions – the meaning of the name of Europe, ONE only proof/account of sc. Slavic migration to Balkan, the meaning of words – med (‘medicine’), land, rg, veda, etc.
A propos Vandals, there is another challenge (on which is a whole industry built) for readers to explain. All books, so as notorious wiki, say that Goths were Germanic tribes. Well, I state that they were sc. Slavs (i.e. Serbs). To prove this, one word only would be sufficient – the Romans’ name for Goths – Dacians – but others can have a different opinion/supporting evidence. I hope that, at least, is clear that Vikings were Slavs, too, not Germans. Good riding.
I am hearing rumours that the current draught in comments is caused by intensive research of the origin of Goths by BP (Benetton pundits). Unresolved tasks are piling despite the strong incentives in a form of cases of Croesus (btw, who was Croesus and which language he spoke?) delivered personally by J.Docker.M and his elephants from his Margaret River hometown because China stopped the import due to Australia’s ‘all the way with LBJ’ or BS(sleepy)J, or whatever, policy. I wrote before about their movements from Danube: on the west – to Spain and north Africa, on the north – to Sweden and Scandinavia and back, on the east – to India (via steppe), on the south – to Egypt (and India). It is a fantastic topic.
What’s up, Milan? I’m not a Docker fan – I couldn’t tell you what has been happening in the AFL. I don’t care.
And I didn’t say Margaret River was my home town, I said I was born there (in the two room timber shack they laughably called a hospital).
I didn’t have a home town, I lived at a railway siding 18 miles out of Margaret River which no longer exists, because they tore up the tracks a long time ago. When I was born, the official population of where I lived went from 3 to 4 – my parents, older sister and me, but that was in the days when they didn’t count Aboriginal people in the census. So the first place I lived is no longer marked on the maps. It doesn’t exist any more. I’m the man from nowhere.
I’m not ignoring you. I’m languishing in the sin bin, so I gave you a ‘like’ instead. I don’t think anyone else is going to, so what the hell – we Sandgropers need to stick together, right?
So when they built the Great Pyramids why did they switch to hieroglyphics instead of using their Linear A?
You have a reading comprehension problem. I didn’t say that it was a good idea for fascists to kill you. I said that you, and Serbs like you, if there are any, would cause confusion as to which side was the good guys.
It seems that many previous questions cannot be answered because many of us don’t know who we are and how we got here. There are few reading recommendations on the Substack. The first main historical crossroad was a clash of civilisations partially described in the podcasts when sc. Indo-Europeans (Yamnaya) nomads which economy and movements were based on few domesticated animals came to Europe where found “Old European towns with a considerable concentration of population, temples several stories high, a sacred script, spacious houses of four or five rooms, professional ceramicists, weavers, copper and gold metallurgists, and other artisans producing a range of sophisticated goods” (Gimbutas 1991: viii). It is pretty unconvincing that these nomads with stone maces brought the language which influenced the most of modern languages but this is another story.
Well, there is a book which I, myself, still haven’t read but I have listened the author’s interviews and I could recommend the reading of – The Mystery of the Danube Civilisation, written by Harald Haarmann where he presents some basics of Vinca, the oldest European civilisation (‘Old Europe’, Danube civilisation, Iron Gates). There is a good enough preview (about 20 pages) for free reading at:
https://www.booktopia.com.au/the-mystery-of-the-danube-civilisation-harald-haarmann/ebook/9783843806466.html
There are longer interviews on youtube but those who have only 2 minutes of free time can listen a short YT clip (Danube Script from Old Europe 5000 – 3500 BC):
what is best in life? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAGjuRwx_Y8
Milan – I recommend listening to the podcast with Kristian Kristiansen. It is all explained there.
Doc Jay – Actually, I was rather watching a sunrise than sunset, although I know Woosha and had already bought a Bob Katter’ hat to be a gold-digger around his hometown. Also, I did listen KK podcast and left my comment there (I could re-chew it here), his title in other paper is more than sufficient.