China possible fact of the day
A Chinese researcher claims that he helped make the world’s first genetically edited babies — twin girls born this month whose DNA he said he altered with a powerful new tool capable of rewriting the very blueprint of life.
If true, it would be a profound leap of science and ethics.
A U.S. scientist said he took part in the work in China, but this kind of gene editing is banned in the United States because the DNA changes can pass to future generations and it risks harming other genes.
Here is the full story. Here is further background.
Best fiction of 2018
This year produced a strong set of top entries, though with little depth past these favorites. Note that sometimes my review lies behind the link:
Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Stories.
Gaël Faye, Small Country. Think Burundi, spillover from genocide, descent into madness, and “the eyes of a child caught in the maelstrom of history.”
Madeline Miller, Circe.
Karl Ove Knausgaard, volume six, My Struggle. Or should it be listed in the non-fiction section?
Can Xue, Love in the New Millennium.
Anna Burns, Milkman, Booker Prize winner, Northern Ireland, troubles, here is a good and accurate review.
Homer’s Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson.
Uwe Johnson, From a Year in the Life of Gessine Cresspahl. I haven’t read this one yet, I did some browse, and I am fairly confident it belongs on this list. 1760 pp.
Which are your picks?
Katie Haun debates Paul Krugman on crypto
Sunday assorted links
2. “Africa actually extends northward to about the same latitude as Norfolk, Virginia.” And Barcelona is at the same latitude as Chicago.
4. The rise of the neo-banks? (NYT)
5. China plans first underseas tunnel for high-speed trains.
The best book of 2018
Soon I’ll offer up my longer lists for fiction and non-fiction, but let’s start at the top. My nomination for best book of the year is Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey. It is a joy to read, the best of the five translations I know, and it has received strong reviews from scholars for its accuracy and fidelity. I also would give a top rating to the book’s introductory essay, a mini-book in itself.
Normally I would say more about a book of the year, but a) many of you already know the Odyssey in some form or another, and b) this spring I’ll be doing a Conversations with Tyler with Emily Wilson, and I’ll save up my broader thoughts for then. I’ll just say for now it is one of the greatest works of political thought, as well as a wonderful story. In any case, a reread of this one is imperative, and you will learn new and fresh things.
There you go!
Daredevil and the Doctrine of Double Effect
Daredevil on Netflix: Season 3 is excellent. A fight scene (in the prison) is as good as the famous hallway scene in Season 1. Another stellar performance by Vincent D’Onofrio. A good plot and a satisfying filling in of Karen’s backstory. Sophisticated visuals and use of sound.
That was my tweet. One thing that did annoy me was the prominent reliance of the writers on the Thou Shall Not Kill trope. Foggy even says “once you cross that line, there’s no return”. Ugh, give me a break. The trope is tired and it also annoys me as an economist. Daredevil has been in a lot of fights and with probability approaching 1 he has already killed. Did none of those prison guards or cops have thin skulls? And why should there be a line? Is killing two people with expected probability of 1/2 really so much better than killing one person with expected probability 1?
As I thought about this more, however, the Thou Shall Not Kill trope is least objectionable in Daredevil. Daredevil is a serious Catholic and can thus call upon Thomas Aquinas’s Doctrine of Double Effect. Aquinas argues that:
moral acts take their species according to what is intended, and not according to what is beside the intention…
Thus, Foggy, the ever-precise lawyer, is correct. Catholic doctrine draws a line between intending to kill and expecting to kill. Expecting to kill is ok, intending to kill is not. I am not a fan of the doctrine of double effect as among other flaws it too easily allows people to shrug off war crimes and the killing of innocents (heh, we only intended to kill the groom, the fact that we also killed the soon-to-be wife and guests, well that was beside the intention). Nevertheless, I will allow that the doctrine of double effects gets the Daredevil writers off the hook for inappropriate use of cliche. Batman, however, has no excuse.
Addendum: For an excellent review of Daredevil Seasons 1-3 from the point of view of Christianity, see this post at Christ and Pop Culture.
Facts about lotteries
The $29.8 billion Americans spent on the lottery in 1995 worked out to about $112 per capita. Today, per capita spending is up to $225 dollars a year. Again, part of that is the result of more states jumping on the lotto bandwagon.
These are per capita figures, accounting for every man, woman and child in the country. The average lottery player spends quite a bit more than that: If we subtract the 73 million people under age 18, and divide the remaining 250 million in half (since only 49 percent buy a lotto ticket in a given year), it works out to $600 a year in expenses for the average lotto player. Some survey data show that a disproportionate share of regular lottery players fall into low-income brackets.
…Massachusetts leads the nation with an astonishing $767 in annual per capita lotto spending. It’s followed by West Virginia ($594), Rhode Island ($513), Delaware ($421) and New York ($421).
Here is the story by Christopher Ingraham.
*A Fistful of Shells*
The author is Toby Green, and the subtitle is West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution. Here is one excerpt:
The past twenty years have seen a huge boom in studies that show the many different ways in which — even in the shadow of slavery — Africans were decisive actors in building modernity in the Americas. Rice-growing technologies in West Africa contributed to the emergence of rice plantations in South Carolina and northern Brazil; livestock and herding skills from West Africa were used by Africa herders in many parts of the New World, from Louisiana to Argentina; and fencing techniques were imported from West Africa and used in agriculture and in defending communities of runaway slaves (known as maroons). Healing practices from Dahomey and Angola were brought to Brazil and the Spanish Caribbean, and helped to develop new treatments in the colonies; healing practices and medicines were also borrowed by the Portuguese in Angola in an early form of ‘bio-prospecting’. Warfare techniques learn in the Kingdom of Kongo and in the Oyo-Yoruba Kingdom of what is now southern Nigeria were vital to the success of the Haitian revolution in 1804, as well as the rebellions against slavery in Brazil and Cuba in the early nineteenth century. In short, just as there were shared frameworks of diplomacy through which Atlantic African kingdoms sought political influence, so the modern world emerged from a mixed cultural framework in which many different peoples from West and West-Central Africa played a significant part.
This book is full of economics, currency movements (both gold and cowrie shells), battles between empires (Portuguese vs. Dutch, above all), and the longue durée. It is the “Braudel of West Africa,” and the best book on West Africa I have ever read. It is especially strong on Lusaphone Africa, and one underlying theme is that West Africa was globalizing even before colonialism came along. Toby Green, by the way, has an impressive background in philosophy and music as well as in history more narrowly conceived.
Very strongly recommended. It is not out until March of 2019 but you can pre-order now.
Saturday assorted links
2. Andaman thread.
3. Japanese MIE: hiring someone to play your daughter’s father.
4. Singapore 1992 found footage documentary.
6. God wants Ethiopians to prosper (The Economist).
Nairobi information markets in everything
I recently spent several weeks in the slum districts of Nairobi, researching al-Shabaab’s criminal activities in the Horn of Africa. I expected to learn about the traditional criminal practices of terrorist groups: drugs, arms, money laundering, and perhaps even a regional particularity like sugar smuggling. What I wasn’t expecting to discover was a highly structured, hierarchical network in which sex workers sell information gleaned from their customers — specifically, corrupt police officers — to al-Shabaab. As one interviewee noted, “If you want information here, you use the prostitutes and street kids — they see everything, go everywhere, and nobody notices them.”
The strength and depth of this sex worker-militant network surprised me and many terrorism experts in the West I spoke with, but it’s an open secret among Nairobi residents. My first interview subject didn’t understand why I wanted more details — surely everyone knew about it? Many of my interviewees were neighbors of, or otherwise friendly with, the sex workers involved. They described an arrangement in which al-Shabaab offered money to women who picked up interesting information in the course of their regular sex work — pillow talk from politicians, police officers, and businessmen. One local memorably opined: “Of course! Half the reason these men go to [sex workers] is to complain about their lives. Why not get paid for listening?”
Here is more from Katherine Petrich.
Microsoft is now the world’s most valuable company
Microsoft’s current market cap has overtaken Apple’s, after living for nearly a decade in the shadow of the Cupertino company.
At the time of writing Microsoft’s intra-day Market Cap is now 751.88B, higher than competing company Apple Inc. which is now 749.75B, by more than 2 billion dollars.
Amazon (currently 741.90B) and Apple were dubbed the world’s most valuable tech companies by Market Cap earlier this year as they crossed the $1 trillion mark. With Microsoft now overshadowing all three, including Alphabet Inc, the firm now looks to be the most valuable tech company…
Investors are concerned about slowing revenue growth at the so-called FANG companies (Facebook, Apple, Netflix and Google), a club of high flyers Microsoft has traditionally been excluded from.
Now they are betting company spending on cloud services and software will remain strong as companies strive to increase efficiency and productivity, while Facebook and Google are increasingly coming under scrutiny for their consumer data practices.
Microsoft’s cloud segment, in particular, is expected to do well, with Office 365 the lead programs in the market for cloud-based productivity tools, while Azure services for storing data and running apps in the cloud is in a solid second position to Amazon’s AWS. Microsoft is also increasingly relying on a steady subscription business which is less subject to volatility.
Here is the full story.
Friday assorted links
1. Scott Sumner on Stubborn Attachments.
2. Excellent and accurate review of Anna Burns’s Milkman, a strong and enduring work of fiction about Northern Ireland.
3. On the constancy of the rate of gdp growth.
4. Smithsonian scholars pick their favorite books of the year.
5. Nick Bostrom has a new paper on the vulnerable world hypothesis (pdf).
6. Paul Romer on how to boost science (WSJ).
A Time to Fast
Over one hundred years ago researchers demonstrated that calorie restriction in rats increased lifespan, sometimes by as much as 50%. Since that time, the finding has been replicated and extended to primates. A few humans have taken up the diet but for most of us easy access to delicious food trumps willpower. A new paper in Science reviews the literature on calorie restriction and also offers some evidence that less restrictive regimes such as intermittent fasting may have similar effects.
First on calorie restriction. As noted, we have data on mice and primates showing increased lifespan and we also have data on humans showing the same physiological improvements as seen in other species:
In humans, short-term trials such as the multicenter CALERIE (Comprehensive Assessment of Long-Term Effects of Reducing Intake of Energy) study (26–29), the observational studies of centenarians residing in Okinawa who have been exposed to CR for most of their lives (30), and observations of the members of the Calorie Restriction Society (CRONies) who self-impose CR (31) have shown the occurrence of many of the same physiological, metabolic, and molecular benefits typically associated with long-lived animals on CR. These studies support the observation that long-term CR preserves a more youthful functionality by improving several markers of health, including decreases in body weight, metabolic rate, and oxidative damage (14); lower incidence of cardiovascular disease (31) and cancer; and decreased activity of the insulin-Akt-FOXO signaling pathway (32, 33).
Although these findings clearly indicate that a reduction of caloric intake could be an effective intervention to improve health and prevent disease during aging in humans, there are several obstacles [including safety concerns and lack of data in older popualtions] and…The current “obesogenic” social environment makes it difficult for individuals to adhere to strict dietary regimens and lifestyle modifications for long periods of time. Thus, there is interest in alternative feeding regimens that may recapitulate at least some of the beneficial effects of CR by controlling feeding-fasting patterns with little or no reduction in caloric intake.
So what else works? Three regimes have shown promise. 1) Time Restricted Feeding (TRF), i.e. limiting eating time to a 4-12 period during the day and preferably earlier in the day, 2) Intermittent Fasting (IF)–say a 24-hour period of 1/4 calorie consumption once or twice a week and 3) a Fasting Mimicking Diet (FMD) in which calories are restricted to 30% of normal with a higher proportion coming from fat and doing this for five days periodically, i.e. once a month to once very couple of months. The diagram presents the main results and evidence.
Michael Nielsen Twitter thread of his favorite Twitter threads
The Republican Club — why is this painting interesting?
It hangs in the White House, and Trump seems to like the picture. What about the image is striking? I can think of a few things:
1. There are no Founding Fathers in the painting, or other references to the more distant past, and so “Republicans” are presented as a distinct club of their own, above and beyond the broader American tradition. (On the far right, is that Theodore Roosevelt, Vernon Smith, or somebody else?)
2. The first George Bush (upper left), and Gerald Ford, are both denied a “seat at the proverbial table.” Bush seems to look on with admiration. The second George Bush, on the left side of the table seated, appears run down and haggard, defeated by the job. He looks a wee bit like a paler Obama.
3. Nixon, who had to resign, drinks alcohol while Trump seems to have Coca-Cola.
4. Reagan is shown as Trump’s only peer, while Eisenhower is the one “closest” to Trump, and the one most appreciative. Of course many of Trump’s policy preferences seem aimed at returning us to the Eisenhower era in some way (higher tariffs, lower immigration, less regulation, etc.)
5. Trump is the only one with a tie, except for TR, and it is a striking red tie.
6. Hoover, Harding, and Coolidge are in the distant back right.
7. It reminds me of a variety of “Last Supper” paintings, though not Leonardo’s. There are twelve of them.
8. The background, with its column and twinklings lights, is reminiscent of late 19th century French impressionism.
9. Who is the bearded figure in the foreground, with his back to us? At first I thought it was Mephistopheles, but it turns out to be Lincoln. He is a passive onlooker with weak shoulders, and with no commanding or influential presence of his own.
10. Andy Thomas, the artist, also painted the very different The Democratic Club. You could write a short book on the contrasts between the two paintings, for instance notice the Democrats are drinking beer and have a much wider and open background, with fewer columns.
Here is a related interview about the painting. Via Anecdotal.