Results for “rene girard”
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Monday assorted links

1. “With my neuromuscular disability, plastic straws are necessary tools for my hydration and nutrition.

2. “In effect, Medicaid expansion coverage is acting as an employment incentive program for people with disabilities.

3. “Getayawkal Ayele had tried to revive the corpse of Belay Biftu by lying on top of him and repeatedly yelling “Belay, wake up”.”

4. NGDP futures market on Augur.

5. Trump tariffs will hurt newspapers.

6. Summary of some aspects of Rene Girard.

My Conversation with Chris Blattman

The very very highly rated but still underrated Chris Blattman was in top form, here is the transcript and audio.  We had a chance to do this one when he was in town for a week.  We talked about the problem with cash transfers, violence, child soldiers, charter cities, Rene Girard, how to do an Africa trip, Battlestar Galactica, why Ethiopia is growing rapidly, why civil war has become less common, why Colombia and the New World have been so violent, the mysteries of Botswana, and Chris’s favorite Australian TV show, among other topics, including of course the Chris Blattman production function.  Here is one excerpt:

BLATTMAN: There’s this famous paper on Vietnam veterans in the US where they find that being conscripted into fighting in Vietnam had positive effects on the wages of blacks and negative effects on the wages of whites. The reason was, it was really down to, what was your alternative labor market and training experience in the absence of this war?

We found something similar in Uganda, something eerily familiar, which is that the women economically weren’t so worse off. I wouldn’t say they were better off, but they weren’t necessarily affected adversely in an economic sense — they were adversely affected in other ways 5 or 10 or 15 years down the road — while the men were.

It spoke to just how terrible women’s options were. Being conscripted and abducted to be a rebel wife, to some degree, wasn’t that different than what your marriage opportunities looked like if there wasn’t a war.

For men, it just meant that you were out of the civilian labor market, getting a bunch of skills that had turned out not to be very useful. It was bad for them. A different war, a different context, and a different labor market, and that can switch.

COWEN: How many northern Ugandan child soldiers have you interviewed?

BLATTMAN: A few hundred. At least a couple hundred, maybe more. It depends if you count someone who’s involved for a month versus two years. Certainly, the long, long-term soldiers who were there for many, many years are few, maybe only a couple dozen.

COWEN: Those contacts, those conversations, how have they changed your outlook on life emotionally, intellectually, otherwise?

And:

COWEN: True or false, most humans are bad at violence?

BLATTMAN: I think they learn quickly. Probably they’re bad at first.

COWEN: In the micro evidence on violence, and the more individual-level evidence, and then finally macro evidence — like will there be a civil war? — do you think there’s ultimately an overarching theory that ties these all together? Or are they just separate levels of investigation, where you have empirical results, and they stand somewhat separate, and they’ll always be distinct areas?

How optimistic are you about a grand unified theory of violence?

BLATTMAN: I think these individual, how I react in the moment, fight-or-flight-type mechanisms are quite distinct from the way that small groups or large groups or nations go to war. But once you get beyond that to the level of small groups and larger groups and nations, I see a lot of unity in the theory.

Do read or listen to the whole thing.  By the way, he says the Canadian political system is overrated.

Monday assorted links

1. Excerpt from forthcoming biography of Rene Girard.

2. Politico update on anti-aging drugs (caveat emptor).

3. Norway decriminalizes drugs.

4. Appreciation of Calestous Juma.  And another tribute.

5. Are early stage investors biased against women?  And the gender wage gap in the U.S. government.  And The Economist on women in economics.  It is good to read this trio together.  And some South Korean data.

6. Another argument for religion, it relates to #5 as well.

7. Josh Barro on the final tax bill.

Wednesday assorted links

1. Chess players’ fame versus their merit.

2. Haggis recipe could be tweaked to beat U.S. ban.

3. Who has the edge in getting organs for transplant? (guess)

4. Sumner on Bernanke, more here.  And it is scary that Bernanke feels the need to write a blog post opposing the notion that Congress raid the capital of the Fed.  It gets sent to the Treasury anyway.

5. NYT obituary of Rene Girard, with lots on Peter Thiel too.  It is also odd what this piece leaves out.

6. More from Gelman on mortality rates.

My Product Hunt dialogue

I very much enjoyed this Live Chat, and I thank the participants for all of their stimulating questions and remarks.  Here is one excerpt:

Ben Casnocha:

How do you think your career and life would have been different if blogging, twitter, and digital media had be ubiquitous in your teens and 20’s? Would you have still pursued an academic path or would you have become a full-time columnist/commentator/speaker earlier on? I seem to recall you saying at one point that you’re glad the internet didn’t exist early on in your life as it gave you the time to read the classics and develop a substantive base of knowledge.

Tyler Cowen:

I am glad I was forced to live in “book culture” and “meat space’ for my first forty years. Or maybe thirty-five years would have been enough. People these days have lost the sense of information being scarce, and counterintuitively that makes it harder for them to develop profound thoughts. It’s like practicing chess by asking the computer right away, all the time, what the right move is.

[and later] …contemporary academic is overly bureaucratized and there is a very good chance I would [if I were starting today] look for another model of success and contentment. It is an open question whether or not I could find one. Whatever its limitations, there is still a followable formula for academic success, which of course is part of the problem.

Other topics include when is the best age to live in various parts of the world, Alban Berg and Rilke, Marc Andreessen, my one hidden talent, Rene Girard, labor market networks, optimal travel into the past, and which is the most underrated or overrated wisdom tradition.  Do read the whole thing.

Assorted links

1. Gelman criticizes Levitt on drunk driving; Jeff Ely chimes in here.

2. A new method for measuring earthquakes, tweets per minute.

3. Political souvenirs, from Italy.

4. Wavvves is my favorite popular music album this year, except it isn't popular.

5. Germans are happier if they earn less than their neighbors.

6. Peter Thiel's favorite thinker is Rene Girard.

7. Yegor Gaidar passes away at 53.

8. Policy communicators essay contest for $15,000.

Assorted links

1. Felix Salmon also recommends the new Bob Pozen book.

2. Are dreams just exercise for the brain?  I enjoyed this line: “I argue that dreaming is not a parallel state but that it is consciousness itself, in the absence of input from the senses…"

3. Rene Girard on war and apocalypse.

4. How much do (non-related) animals cooperate?

5. Via Kat, why we fall for "fast news."

6. How to improve the health care bill, by David Leonhardt.

View quake reading

Ryan Holiday blogs my email to him:

My reading was much different when I was younger. I would more likely
intensively engage with some important book totally full of new ideas.
Hayek. Parfit. Plato. And so on. There just aren’t books like that left
for me anymore. So I read many more, to learn bits, but haven’t in
years experienced a "view quake." That is sad, to me at least, but I
don’t know how to avoid how that has turned out. So enjoy your best
reading years while you can!

Quine should be on that list as well.  Nietzsche was a view quake in high school, though I find him oddly uninteresting upon rereading.  Here is Ryan’s post on Marcus Aurelius.; the Stoics collectively were a view quake for me, in economics there was Anthony Downs and Thomas Schelling and Albert Hirschmann.  David Hume.  Maybe Rene Girard was the last "view quake" author I read.  On the upside, greater context means that many more books are interesting than was the case before.

Many of you are asking me about Amazon Kindle, the new ebook (sort of); Jason Kottke offers a round-up of opinion.
 

The cultural foundations of capitalism

Sahil, a loyal MR reader, asks:

I
read your blog post about Roger Scruton’s new book, which you praised
for giving a "good sense of just how much cultural background is needed
to sustain liberty."  That’s an interesting notion.  Do you have
recommendation for books that examine this very idea in a more
systematic way?  I’m sure they’re out there, and I’d be interested to
read them.

I’ll offer a few suggestions: all of Max Weber, the books by Lawrence Harrison, Alan MacFarlane on English individualism, Jonathan Israel on the Dutch Republic, Joseph Conrad, Levi-Strauss’s Triste Tropiques, Rene Girard on Christianity, anything good on English history, Hoskyns on Russian history, Albion’s Seed, IQ and the Wealth of Nations, Gilbert Freyre on Brazil, de Tocqueville, Sarmiento on Argentina, Louis Hartz, and John Gunther on America.  The book "The Influence of the African-American Tradition on the American Ideal of Liberty" remains to be written.  Nor have I scratched the all-important and largely non-European notions of liberty from the Nordic regions, which fed into the English success.

Pro-commercial norms are not scarce, as is evident here in Zanzibar.  But those norms get you only to a medieval standard of living; as Mancur Olson stressed, they do not on their own support the structures of large-scale capitalism.  It is harder to convince people to place larger abstract ideas above immediate duties to friends, family, and clan, but that is indeed the central feature of the problem.

Comments are open, what do you all recommend?

Wednesday assorted links

1. “The most terrifying words in the English language are Balaji was right.”  Transcript of his now-famed podcast with Tim Ferriss.

2. Physical formidability and acceptance of police violence.

3. The Martians of Budapest.  And Girard, McLuhan, and Robbins on Interintellect.

4. A contrarian view on voting in Georgia.

5. Don Boudreaux upset at me.  I think on some issues he misrepresents my views (e.g., I don’t claim the age of the Covid deaths is irrelevant), and he pins a whole host of interventions on me that I do not favor.  But to respond to the main point on social cohesion, I’ll make a simple prediction: in terms of social cohesion the American southeast will come out of this whole mess looking relatively good, on both a national and global scale.  Countries such as Brazil and Mexico, which have downplayed Covid risks to an extreme degree, and imposed very few regulations on behavior, will come out looking quite bad in terms of both deaths and social cohesion.  I prefer the response of the U.S. southeast to that of Brazil and Mexico, and the response of the U.S. southeast is (broadly) the one I endorse in the podcast with Russ Roberts (assuming you can’t halt the whole thing early, and no we never should have banned any outdoor activities, etc.).  Don is otherwise a big proponent of comparative institutional analysis, but he isn’t doing nearly enough of that in his critique — social cohesion compared to what?  Which is the alternative that was going to give us greater social cohesion than what say Florida will end up with?

6. “Lego enthusiast explains why the black market for the toy bricks is so lucrative.”  Interesting throughout.

7. Marshall Sahlins has passed away.

8. AEI panel on whether the great stagnation is now over.

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