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大東亞共現代性圏
I just noticed Tyler Cowen had blogged a Boston Globe article about the number of loanwords in various languages (is there something from the press Cowen will not blog ?), and his own take was to ask,...
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שׂבולת שׂמית
Stream-of-consciousness thoughts about why we say “Semitic” even though the root is “Shem”. And, yes, I know the Hebrew letters in the title say “semitic sibboleth” and not “shemitic shibboleth”. In my...
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Links 18 July 2014
I’m not intending to do “weekly links” or anything, but I wanted to highlight a blogpost by Victor Mair : what the Dungan language sounds like from snippets of the movie “Jesus” dubbed in Dungan. This...
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GDP is ageist but not sexist
Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex asked in his blogpost “Invisible Women” why the entry of women into the American labour force doesn’t seem to show up in the time series of GDP. Their introduction...
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Azar Gat’s Nations
I saw Razib Khan‘s review of Azar Gat’s Nations : The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism. Without intending to make it that long I posted a 1000-word comment there. Then...
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ελαδιοξιδιολατολαχανοκαρυκευμα
A very brief history of Greek diglossia. Most people know that even after the collapse of the western Roman empire, the Catholic Church continued the Latin tradition. But centuries before Odoacer...
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Der Todd des Euro
Part 1. The French anthropologist-demographer Emmanuel Todd, who is becoming increasingly fashionable in the Anglosphere, is also a scathing critic of the euro. I examine his “anthropological” views of...
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The “Anthropology” of Financial Crises
This is Part 2, continued from “Der Todd des Euro” (Emmanuel Todd on the euro), which critiqued his “anthropological” perspective on Germany. Here I make some observations on the role of social capital...
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“The Great War and Modern Memory”
I am on holiday-hiatus for August and will return to posting in September. In the meanwhile, a book recommendation. The start of this month also coincides with the centenary of a momentous calamity....
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Plant breeding, not working slaves harder, drove cotton efficiency gains in...
Summary : New cultivars of cotton led to an unprecedented rise in the productivity of US southern cotton in the 60 years before the American Civil War. The Economist magazine may have said some stupid...
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Baptism by Blood Cotton
The underlying claim in Edward Baptist’s “oral economic history” of slavery, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, is that slave owners, through the scientific...
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Econ-Fi
What if human wants are not infinite ? And/or, what about the sci-fi future where machines can do pretty much everything humans can do, and do it better, and cost less to produce than to hire a human ?...
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Baumol’s Cure in Remission
In the comments section of a Razib Khan blogpost, one “Realistic Leftist” denies skill-biased technological change has much to do with median wage stagnation in the United States : “…both worker...
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Global Income Distribution in 20 Charts
The global distribution of income in 1970-2006 in 20 charts. Not much text. Posting the charts because I thought they were neat… In the late 1990s I used to follow inequality issues closely, but I’ve...
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The emptiness of life will save us from mass unemployment
In general, people are too cheery when the economy is booming, and too gloomy about the future during recessions. Right now, pessimism about the consequences of “skill-biased technological change” is...
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Ye Olde Inæqualitee Shoppe
A quick note : Income inequality in pre-industrial societies was, in general, lower than in modern industrial societies, but traditional agrarian economies tended to be closer to their “maximum...
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Piketty & Slave Wealth
A quick note on Piketty, slave-wealth and US capitalism. Matthew Yglesias had a Vox article thundering “American prosperity was built on slavery and torture” as part of his reaction to Edward Baptist’s...
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Conscientiousness & Technology
From the plastics industry, a very concrete, real-life example of how conscientiousness matters in the use of a medium-level technology and how high(er)-technology might help. In the past I have argued...
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A horse ! A horse ! My serfdom for a horse !
Part 2, England, of my critique of Nick Szabo’s view of industrialisation. This is continued from Part 1, “Chinese workers were cheaper than English horses“. What do coal, American slave cotton, and...
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Chinese workers were cheaper than English horses
My critique of Nick Szabo’s “horse theory” of the Great Divergence between Western Europe and East Asia. This part is about China in the 18th century. See Part 2 for the general issue of...
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