Writing and highlights, week of January 18, 2021
Highlights from articles, books, podcasts and reviews I read this week.
Articles
Naturally, this supervillain, like all the others, had a tragic origin story: the death of his brother, the subversion of the genre he loved, the primal urge to continue making music outside of the system that had sustained him and then spit him out.
The roots of modern right-wing extremism lie in the post-World War II reaction to FDR’s New Deal and the Republican embrace of it under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Opponents of an active government insisted that it undermined American liberty by redistributing tax dollars from hardworking white men to those eager for a handout—usually Black men, in their telling. Modern government, they insisted, was bringing socialism to America. They set out to combat it, trying to slash the government back to the form it took in the 1920s.
For the past four years, Trump and his enablers have tried to insist that unrest in the country is caused by “Antifa,” an unorganized group of anti-fascists who show up at rallies to confront right-wing protesters. But the Department of Homeland Security this summer identified “anarchist and anti-government extremists” as “the most significant threat… against law enforcement.”
Environmental anxieties haven’t toppled neoliberalism. Instead, to an unprecedented degree, they infiltrated it. (Or perhaps they were appropriated by it. It’s an open question.)
But alarmists have to take the good news where they find it. And while mood affiliation is not always the best guide to the state of the world, in 2020, for me, there were three main sources of hope. The first is the fact that the age of climate denial is over.
The second source of good news is the arrival on the global stage of climate self-interest.
The third cause for optimism is that, while the timelines to tolerably disruptive climate outcomes have already evaporated, the timelines to the next set of benchmarks is much more forgiving.
“Humans are producing no-analogue climates, no-analog ecosystems, a whole no-analog future,” she writes. The book’s key question is: What innovations will we jerry-rig, and what risky interventions will we conscience, as we slide down the precipice? Her ambivalent response is “If there is to be an answer to the problem of control, it’s going to be more control.”
“One big conservation proposal that’s out there is E. O. Wilson’s ‘half-earth’ — we should put a half of the planet aside for other species. But even that — which I would certainly support — isn’t really conserving the world. That is changing the world. That’s not the world that we had.”
Those models suggest unmitigated warming could cost global GDP more than 20% of its value by the end of the century; limit warming to two degrees and climate change would still kill as many people each year as COVID-19 has
A just state, Augustine reasoned, is a community bound by caritas, or agapē in Greek, love that is selfless and directed toward humankind
Henrich’s genius and the source of his methodological originality reside in his application of contemporary social science to uncover universal laws, and to classify and categorize social reality in a context-free approach
The main shortcoming of Henrich’s analysis is its reliance on linear causality. Tracing an outcome, e.g., the distinctive psychology of Western society, to an original cause, the Church ban on cousins wedding, is in itself WEIRD
The economists' empirical toolkit now has structured around 5 types of tools for causal inference: lab/controlled experiments; Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs); natural experiments; observational methods and structural models.
You know who manages by metrics? Big companies like Google, Amazon and LinkedIn.
And what do they have in common?
Their core product got notably worse over time.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
First of all, I think that looking at metrics can be helpful. They just shouldn’t be the sole yardstick decisions are measured against
But the forecasts hinge on a number of presumptions. Even if you accept that a ton of cool, potentially economy-driving ideas may be out there on the horizon, who is to say their time will come in the 2020s
In a milestone 1989 paper, Paul David, a Stanford economics professor, wrote that electricity had followed a natural arc. Like steam a century before, electricity was a “general purpose technology” that, after decades of gestation, was propelling not only itself to enormous success, but countless other industries and the entire economy
The Roaring Twenties were fueled in no small part by a youthful population with a median age of 25; two thirds of the country was 35 and younger, filled with verve and entrepreneurialism.
The prediction engine – the conceptual tool used by today’s leading brain scientists to understand the deepest essence of our humanity – is also the one wielded by today’s most powerful corporations and governments.
If software has eaten the world, its predictive engines have digested it, and we are living in the society it spat out.
‘spending metabolic money to build complex brains pays dividends in the search for adaptive success’
The strength of this association between predictive economics and brain sciences matters, because – if we aren’t careful – it can encourage us to reduce our fellow humans to mere pieces of machinery
Are we shovelling more of ourselves into the mouth of the machine, just to see what it churns out?
But John Yarmuth, a Democratic representative from Louisville, Kentucky, who has known McConnell since the late sixties, told me he’d long predicted that the alliance between Trump and McConnell would end once the President could no longer help McConnell. “Three years ago, I said he’d wait until Trump was an existential threat to the Party, and then cut him loose,” Yarmuth said. “He’s been furious with Trump for a long time. Many who know him have talked with him about how much he hates Trump.” But, Yarmuth noted, McConnell, focussed on Republican judicial appointments, “made a Faustian deal for all those judges.”
