- Justin Reynolds tells the story of how the Soviet Union almost created the Internet but didn’t. He is getting his information from a book by Benjamin Peters, about a project under the Soviet Union to use a network of mainframes to solve the calculation problem.
- Jonny Anomaly and Brian Boutwell published a clever essay on Quilette in which they argue that people in developed countries should have more countries. Malthusianism is one of those ideas that just won’t go away. No matter how many times it’s been proven wrong, it always comes back in another form.
- The New York Times has a piece discussing the problem that Democrats have with immigration. I disagree with a number of things in that article, but it still contains interesting stuff. As I plan to explain when I post my analysis of the election, I think the importance of immigration in Trump’s victory has been hugely underestimated by commentators and, as I noted previously, I also think that, as a result, the Democrats are making a big strategic mistake by using that issue to go after Trump.
- A Morning Consult poll for Politico shows that more people would vote for Trump than Warren, even though more people would probably vote for a Democratic candidate. Now, there are few politicians in the US that I despise more than Warren (John McCain is one of them, but he is a sui generis maniac), who is a demagogue of the worst kind. But independently of how I feel about her, I’m always baffled that so many people, especially in academia, are so utterly lacking in political sense that they actually think she would be a good candidate for the Democrats. If I were a Republican, and believed in God, I would pray every day for the Democrats to be stupid enough to pick her to run against Trump in 2020. In fact, according to this article in the Washington Examiner, that’s exactly what the Republicans are doing.
- Robert Cherry wrote a good article on the relationship between race and crime for RealClearPolitics. Obviously, it’s a complicated issue, but he makes some interesting points. I really want to write about the topic of neighborhood effect at some point, which I think is very important for this debate.
6 thoughts
Comments are closed.
Re: Boutwell and Anomaly: I’m all for greater and more eugenic fertility in developed countries, but that essay was just misguided and in parts horribly wrong.
Julian Simon and cornucopianism appeal to a very small subset of educated low fertility people. And for that subset the fertility is limited mainly by other factors than them being environmentalists… Playing too much Civ perhaps? Where else do they get this taste for a greater population?
For most people the title of Simon’s The Ultimate Resource sounds sinister. A resource for whom? The masters of universe who want bigger markets and more immigration etc? Why else should there be a time preference for more people in the present?
In fact, we would do wisely to save resources and lower existential risks for the future by deferring population growth, as living standards are probably better in the future.
Simon’s idea that more people proportionally results in more innovation is stupid. There are natural population invariant timescales in both inventing and applying technology. Costs also add inertia. Not all low value fields are thus saturated, but I don’t think the world is starving for genius in the paperclip industry.
Most people aren’t extensive utilitarians. (ie. don’t accept the Repugnant Conclusion) They only care about their own welfare, and the average welfare at best. Both are negatively affected by population growth. Disease, pollution, land and resource scarcity all get worse with more population.
It would be far more effective just to tell it like it is: If you’re happy and successful and want people in the future be the same, you should have more children than average.
You make a lot of points in your comments and I don’t have time to reply to everything.
Many of the things you say are empirical claims which I think are false or, at least, I’m not sure they’re true. For instance, you say that “there are natural population invariant timescales in both inventing and applying technology”, but I really would be surprised if that were true. I think it’s probably true that scientific/technological progress is not a linear function of the population, but I would be amazed if it were not at least a monotonically increasing function of population.
You also say that “we would do wisely to save resources and lower existential risks for the future by deferring population growth, as living standards are probably better in the future”, which I think can’t be right. Unless we have a very good reason to think that living standards won’t grow indefinitely, which I don’t think we have, by applying this rule, we’d just defer population growth indefinitely.
Maybe there are reasons not to grow the population anyway, but I don’t think the fact that future generations will have a higher standard of living is one, especially since I still think Anomaly and Boutwell are right that a larger population results in more scientific/technological progress and higher standards of living other things being equal. (Of course, other things are not equal and we must therefore determine which effect dominates, but that’s a complicated issue about which I don’t know much.)
You seem to have sent a link to an older post by mistake.
By the way, why do you despise Elizabeth Warren?
You mean I sent the wrong link to people who subscribed to the blog by email? Did the link you received by email send you here? I made a mistake in creating the permalin of the most recent batch of links, but I don’t understand why it should have taken you here. That’s really weird…
As for Warren, I despise her because I think she is a demagogue, who benefits politically from spreading what she knows to be nonsense. For instance, she blamed the financial crisis on the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, even though she knows it had nothing to do with it. I have a draft of a post on this I will publish when I have time.
Exactly, the link that I received by email sent me here.
This is really weird. I added a note to this post in order to let people know about it. Thanks for letting me know! [EDIT: I removed the note since by now I don’t think any of the subscribers is going to come here by mistake.]