Robert Kelly argues that North Korea’s nuclear program is almost certainly for deterrence, which I think is clearly right.
Jonny Anomaly and Brian Boutwell published a good piece on Quillette where they warn against the danger of ignoring the possibility that results in sociological research are confounded by genetics. You may recall that Boutwell already co-wrote another essay about this a few months ago, which I shared here at the time.
Alex Tabarrok wrote a great essay in which he argues that, despite what Shashi Taroor claims in a recent book, the British Empire is not to blame for most of India’s problem.
PRRI published a study which concludes that cultural anxieties played a greater role in Trump’s success among white work-class voters than economic worries. In particular, according to a logistic regression the authors of that study performed, the strongest predictors of a vote for Trump among these voters were the belief that illegal immigrants should be deported and the fear of cultural displacement. I will probably say more about this at some point, but for now I just wanted to flag it, as it’s interesting.
Mark Mills argues that electric cars do not spell the doom of the oil industry. He’s probably right that, even if we make optimistic assumptions, electric cars will remain a small proportion of vehicles for a long time, but I don’t know enough about this to know whether the rest of what he says is correct.