- Sean Trende wrote a very good piece about the lessons we should draw from Ossoff’s failure in Georgia. (As I noted before, Trende is one of the most interesting political commentators in the US. In fact, if you should read only one of them, it should probably be him.) If I were a Democrat, I think the possibility that gains for the party are not efficiently distributed would be what keeps me up at night when I think about 2018, so I would really like to see more data about this.
- This article argues that recent genetic discoveries have bolstered the case for the Aryan invasion theory in India. This piece objects that it neglects researchers who disagree with that interpretation. I don’t really know anything about this debate, which is highly politicized, so I have no opinion. One thing I find weird with the Aryan invasion theory is that, even if migration was sex biased, it’s still surprising that ~17% of the population carries a Y-chromosome of Indo-European origin but that there is no detectable Indo-European contribution to the mtDNA. It seems that, in order to explain that, you would have to assume both that the sex ratio was ridiculously biased toward males among the migrants and that they basically didn’t mate at all with women in their own group. I really find that hard to believe unless the number of migrants was much lower than what I imagine necessary to make a lasting genetic contribution in the indigenous population.
- I just found this good review of the literature on the effect of inequality on growth. The conclusion is that, at least in the case of developed countries, inequality doesn’t seem to have any effect on growth when you control for absolute poverty.
- The New York Times has a piece which explains how the efforts to save migrants in the Mediterranean have created a stronger incentive to try to cross. This will only come as a surprise to the sophisticates, who insist despite all the evidence to the contrary that would-be migrants don’t respond to incentives. We could solve that problem by adopting a policy similar to Australia’s, which despite the hysteria it generated no doubt saved thousands of lives, but I’m not holding my breath.
- According to this article, the evidence does not support the claim that fracking contaminates drinking water, yet opponents of fracking continue to make it. It wouldn’t surprise me if this were true, but I never looked into this, so if you think it’s false please explain why in the comments.
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There are a ton of cases where the mitochondrial data and the y-chromosome data just don’t line out. the estimates of the most recent common male ancestor and the most recent common female ancestor, for example, just dont line up at all. The response is always, well, that’s logically possible for this or that reason. and yeah, its logically possible. But I think the whole enterprise looks shady as hell.
In some cases, differing results from Y-chromosome and mitochondrial results can be explained by high levels of polygyny, and the associated high variation in levels of male reproductive success. But I don’t think will work for an Aryan invasion, since the Indo-Europeans were generally monogamous, to the extent that human beings can achieve that state.