Results for “the culture that is japan”
217 found

Thursday assorted links

1. Durlauf.

2. “Atmanand Shanbhag, chairman of Chariot World Tours, claimed to have “strong contacts” in the UK who have told him that the vaccine will be made available for foreigners by mid-March in 2021.

3. To think that rescheduling second dose appointments is such a problem…(UK).  This is what the GPs are saying.

4. The sanity of Greg Ip (WSJ, on the checks).

5. The kanji culture that is Japan.

6. New data on the transmissibility of the new strain, not good news.  It seems to basically mean a much expanded pool of superspreaders?  And Zeynep on the new strain (Atlantic).

Saturday assorted links

1. Magness on Keynes on eugenics.

2.  Has the Oxford team come up with a malaria vaccine?  (ho hum!)  And China just turned on its experimental fusion reactor.  These things don’t even deserve their own blog posts any more.

3. Paul Graham writing about more than he admits to be writing about.

4. Paleolithic maritime activity.

5. A plan for the more rapid approval of vaccines.

6. MIE: Japanese KitKat has been aged in whisky barrels from Islay, Scotland.

7. The culture that is Ohio: “Students can wrestle, but can’t shake hands.”

8. Arbitrage!

Monday assorted links

1. Data on the oldest companies in the world.  Often small, and related to food and/or hospitality.  Often Japanese.

2. “The Trans-Universal Zombie Church of the Blissful Ringing is a religion that emerged in the context of a period of political uprising in Slovenia in 2012–13 and later consolidated into a church that now claims 12,000 members.

3. “We find that COVID-19 has likely become the leading cause of death (surpassing unintentional overdoses) among young adults aged 25-44 in some areas of the United States during substantial COVID-19 outbreaks.

4. While America has been dithering, good (but not surprising) news on AstraZeneca.  The vaccine may come to UK hospitals by November.

5. a16z podcast on textiles, with Virginia Postrel and Sonal Chokshi.

6. 12-minute nasal swab test coming to the UK.

7. Data on the French second wave.

What I’ve been reading

1. Martin Amis, Inside Story: A Novel.  Except it is a memoir rather than a novel, definitely fun, and has received excellent reviews in Britain, less so in the U.S.  Does not require that you know or like the novels of Amis.  Christopher Hitchens plays a critical role in the narrative.  Idea-rich, but somehow I don’t quite care, and this one feels like it would have been a much better book twenty years ago.

2. Tobias S. Harris, The Iconoclast: Shinzo Abe and the New Japan (UK Amazon listing, I paid the shipping charge, here is the U.S. listing). Yes a good biography of Abe, but most of all a book to make Japanese politics seem normal, rather than something connected to a country with a Kakuhidou movement.

3. Donald W. Braben, Scientific Freedom: The Elixir of Civilization, Stripe Press reprint.  Here is the book’s home page.

4. Les Payne and Tamara Payne, The Dead Are Arising: the Life of Malcolm X.  I pawed through this book, and it gave off signals of being high quality.  But somehow reading it didn’t hold my interest.  I then googled to a few reviews, but I rapidly realized (again) that such reviews are these days untrustworthy.  Try this NYT review, starting with this sentence: “Les Payne’s “The Dead Are Arising” arrives in late 2020, bequeathed to an America choked by racism and lawlessness.”  The reviewer makes a bunch of intelligent observations, interspersed with gushing about Malcolm X (“It is hard not to want Malcolm back, because his charisma is undeniable”), but I am never told why I should read the book.  At the end I learn the reviewer is “…the dean of academic affairs and a professor of American studies at Wellesley College.”  Signal extraction problem, anyone?  I call the current regime a tax on my willingness to put more time into the book.

Adam Thierer, Evasive Entrepreneurs & the Future of Governance: How Innovation Improves Economies and Governments, extends the important idea of permissionless innovation.

Jason Brennan, Good Work If You Can Get It: How to Succeed in Academia.  My blurb said “The one book to read about trying to become a professor.”

My Conversation with Audrey Tang

For me one of the most fun episodes, here is the audio, video, and transcript.  And here is the longer than ever before summary, befitting the chat itself:

Audrey Tang began reading classical works like the Shūjīng and Tao Te Ching at the age of 5 and learned the programming language Perl at the age of 12. Now, the autodidact and self-described “conservative anarchist” is a software engineer and the first non-binary digital minister of Taiwan. Their work focuses on how social and digital technologies can foster empathy, democracy, and human progress.

Audrey joined Tyler to discuss how Taiwan approached regulating Chinese tech companies, the inherent extraterritoriality of data norms, how Finnegans Wake has influenced their approach to technology, the benefits of radical transparency in communication, why they appreciate the laziness of Perl, using “humor over rumor” to combat online disinformation, why Taiwan views democracy as a set of social technologies, how their politics have been influenced by Taiwan’s indigenous communities and their oral culture, what Chinese literature teaches about change, how they view Confucianism as a Daoist, how they would improve Taiwanese education, why they view mistakes in the American experiment as inevitable — but not insurmountable, the role of civic tech in Taiwan’s pandemic response, the most important remnants of Japanese influence remaining in Taiwan, why they love Magic: The Gathering, the transculturalism that makes Taiwan particularly open and accepting of LGBT lifestyles, growing up with parents who were journalists, how being transgender makes them more empathetic, the ways American values still underpin the internet, what he learned from previous Occupy movements, why translation, rotation, and scaling are important skills for becoming a better thinker, and more.

This bit could have come from GPT-3:

COWEN: How useful a way is it of conceptualizing your politics to think of it as a mix of some Taiwanese Aboriginal traditions mixed in with Daoism, experience in programming, and then your own theory of humor and fun? And if you put all of that together, the result is Audrey Tang’s politics. Correct or not?

TANG: Well as of now, of course. But of course, I’m also growing, like a distributed ledger.

And this:

COWEN: You’re working, of course, in Taiwanese government. What’s the biggest thing wrong with economists?

TANG: You mean the magazine?

COWEN: No, no, the people, economists as thinkers. What’s their biggest defect or flaw?

TANG: I don’t know. I haven’t met an economist that I didn’t like, so I don’t think there’s any particular personality flaws there.

Finally:

COWEN: Now, my country, the United States, has made many, many mistakes at an almost metaphysical level. What is it in the United States that those mistakes have come from? What’s our deeper failing behind all those mistakes?

TANG: I don’t know. Isn’t America this grand experiment to keep making mistakes and correcting them in the open and share it with the world? That’s the American experiment.

COWEN: Have we started correcting them yet?

TANG: I’m sure that you have.

Definitely recommended.

Friday assorted links

1. PBA cards, and implicit trades with police.

2. Australia: “Lawyers and civil liberty groups have expressed concerns about the way a pregnant woman was arrested at her home in Ballarat for allegedly encouraging people to take part in an anti-lockdown rally.”  I guess she didn’t have a good enough PBA card.

3. The football culture that is Fargo.  10,000 at an indoors game?  And is a two-puffin photo twice as good as a one-puffin photo?

4. Should a consortium of 45 hospitals defy the FDA’s directive on convalescent plasma and run an RCT instead?

5. New data on the Russian vaccine.

6. Obituary for David Graeber.

7. MIE: The Japanese companies that help people vanish.

Monday assorted links

1. 2007 Thomas A. Garett piece on the economics of the 1918 flu pandemic.  What else has been written on the macro side?

2. The economic impact of the 1918 flu on Brazil.

3. John Gray being John Gray (but “Second Life”??).

4. Economists studying the coronavirus (NYT).  and 2009 Becker-Posner short essay on the economics of pandemics.

5. Why Veneto did better than Lombardy (FT, less hospitalization is one reason).

6. Covid requests for everything: “Kaddish will be said by a group of people who currently have a mild case of Coronavirus and are together at the Prima Palace Hotel in Jerusalem (they are the only people who are legally able to Daven with a Minyan right now.”

7. Scott Adams, Covid-19 forecaster.

8. How Chinese apps handled Covid-19, excellent post.

9. The Covid culture that is middle-aged Pink Floyd fans from New Jersey.  You know you want to read this one.

10. MIT economics paper on ventilator rationing schemes, offers concrete proposals, not just BS.

11. “It’s not clear to me whether the divergent dynamics of epidemics will outweigh the homeostatic effect of human behavior.

12. Covid-19 has disrupted the progressives’ “organizing juggernaut.”

13. A South Korean exam with social distancing.

14. New NBER paper on Covid-19 and stock returns, and another.  And the curve is already flattening in NYC.

15. Japan finally declares state of emergency.  By the way, the mounds of evidence (testing data, not all public) are piling up against the “so many of us already have been exposed” theories.

16. Henry reviews the new William Gibson book.

Wednesday assorted links

1. “…if the US stayed completely shut down for two months, the typical US worker would work about the same number of hours this year as a pre-pandemic German worker.”

2. Timeline of the federal government response to coronavirus.

3. Anti-price gouging laws mean masks leave America, I wonder if Alex is preparing a whole post on this link?

4. Holman Jenkins of the WSJ goes Straussian on the Straussian bloggers.

5. The culture that is Bengali priorities: sweet shops will stay open.  And a short history of coronavirus in Japan.  And Ezra Klein interviews Evan Osnos on coronavirus and U.S.-China relations.

6. Self-isolation proves a boon to rainfall project.

7. Why there are lags in scaling up California testing.  A very good (and depressing) piece.

8. Mossad officer describes their battle for ventilators.  And is the U.S. taking ventilators from Paraguay? (speculative)

9. The singing stops in southern Italy as tensions rise.

10. “Our infectiousness model suggests that the total contribution to R0 from pre-symptomatics is 0.9 (0.2 – 1.1), almost enough to sustain an epidemic on its own. For SARS, the corresponding estimate was almost zero (9), immediately telling us that different containment strategies will be needed for COVID-19.”  Link here.

11. Hospitals that won’t let their doctors wear masks (NYT).

12. Economist Peter Sinclair has died from Covid-19.

13. Should very young countries such as Nigeria opt for suppression?

14. Japan cries “Uncle!”

15. Our system of scientific funding is broken for rapid science (recommended).

Saturday assorted links

1. Economist Hans Stoll has passed away.

2. Who are the workers most needing support and how can we get cash to them?

3. Recommended occupational licensing reforms.  And Certificate of Need and nurse practitioner laws.  And the case for relaxing pharmacy regulations.

4. Why did U.S. testing get so held up? (quite good)

5. Covid-19 forecasting site from The Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford.

6. How slim are restaurant margins?

7. Mercatus “Way Forward” suggestions.

8. On why the German death rate is lower.

9. New Haven asks for coronavirus housing help, Yale says no.

10. Are Italian deaths being undercounted?  And it seems Spanish deaths are being undercounted (in Spanish).

11. Japan now admits the situation there is much worse than had been recognized.

12. The self-isolation culture that is royal Thai.

13. Boom times for boredom.

14. “History will not absolve Bolsonaro.

15. Rhode Island police go after New Yorkers seeking refuge (Bloomberg).

Thursday assorted links

1. India database on Covid-19.

2. Jerry Brito’s feed of newstories on coronavirus.

3. David Beckworth on the Fed and direct cash transfers.

4. Ozimek and Lettieri propose emergency loans for small businesses.

5. Bohemian Rhapsody, but about the coronavirus.  Recommended, for those who care.

6. “OKZoomer Is a New Dating Service for Quarantined College Kids.

7. New version of the seen vs. the unseen.

8. Scott Sumner on Herbert Hoover.

9. Five books on plagues and pandemics.  By Sarah Skwire.

10. Music streaming is falling because of coronavirus.

11. What is up with coronavirus in Japan?  Why so little?  Or is it about to strike?

12. Coronavirus Tech Handbook.

13. Mossad pulls in many test kits.

Thursday assorted links

1. Various Magnus Carlsen updates.

2. Mark Koyama reviews Walter Scheidel’s Escape from Rome.

3. “Two programmer-musicians wrote every possible MIDI melody in existence to a hard drive, copyrighted the whole thing, and then released it all to the public in an attempt to stop musicians from getting sued.

4. Pandemics and the advantages of globalization.  And “A troop of special Chinese ducks is waiting to be deployed to neighbouring Pakistan to fight a swarm of crop-eating pests that threaten regional food security.

5. If you lose Taiwan, you lose Japan.

6. What the Singaporean PM said about coronavirus.  And illiquid Hypermind betting market in coronavirus.

7. Gary Chamberlain has passed away.

Saturday assorted links

1. Sino-African architecture.

2. Phasing out squat toilets in Tokyo (a few years ago they were 40% of the total).  And has Germany moved to a de facto UBI?

3. “‘Parasite’ Backers Gain $100 Million on Film Tackling Inequality.

4. New Yorker covers Bryan Caplan on Open Borders.

5. Types of highway interchanges and their efficiency ratings.

6. Seeking to abolish the family?  Crazy and and maybe evil too, but interesting.

What libertarianism has become and will become — State Capacity Libertarianism

Having tracked the libertarian “movement” for much of my life, I believe it is now pretty much hollowed out, at least in terms of flow.  One branch split off into Ron Paul-ism and less savory alt right directions, and another, more establishment branch remains out there in force but not really commanding new adherents.  For one thing, it doesn’t seem that old-style libertarianism can solve or even very well address a number of major problems, most significantly climate change.  For another, smart people are on the internet, and the internet seems to encourage synthetic and eclectic views, at least among the smart and curious.  Unlike the mass culture of the 1970s, it does not tend to breed “capital L Libertarianism.”  On top of all that, the out-migration from narrowly libertarian views has been severe, most of all from educated women.

There is also the word “classical liberal,” but what is “classical” supposed to mean that is not question-begging?  The classical liberalism of its time focused on 19th century problems — appropriate for the 19th century of course — but from WWII onwards it has been a very different ballgame.

Along the way, I believe the smart classical liberals and libertarians have, as if guided by an invisible hand, evolved into a view that I dub with the entirely non-sticky name of State Capacity Libertarianism.  I define State Capacity Libertarianism in terms of a number of propositions:

1. Markets and capitalism are very powerful, give them their due.

2. Earlier in history, a strong state was necessary to back the formation of capitalism and also to protect individual rights (do read Koyama and Johnson on state capacity).  Strong states remain necessary to maintain and extend capitalism and markets.  This includes keeping China at bay abroad and keeping elections free from foreign interference, as well as developing effective laws and regulations for intangible capital, intellectual property, and the new world of the internet.  (If you’ve read my other works, you will know this is not a call for massive regulation of Big Tech.)

3. A strong state is distinct from a very large or tyrannical state.  A good strong state should see the maintenance and extension of capitalism as one of its primary duties, in many cases its #1 duty.

4. Rapid increases in state capacity can be very dangerous (earlier Japan, Germany), but high levels of state capacity are not inherently tyrannical.  Denmark should in fact have a smaller government, but it is still one of the freer and more secure places in the world, at least for Danish citizens albeit not for everybody.

5. Many of the failures of today’s America are failures of excess regulation, but many others are failures of state capacity.  Our governments cannot address climate change, much improve K-12 education, fix traffic congestion, or improve the quality of their discretionary spending.  Much of our physical infrastructure is stagnant or declining in quality.  I favor much more immigration, nonetheless I think our government needs clear standards for who cannot get in, who will be forced to leave, and a workable court system to back all that up and today we do not have that either.

Those problems require state capacity — albeit to boost markets — in a way that classical libertarianism is poorly suited to deal with.  Furthermore, libertarianism is parasitic upon State Capacity Libertarianism to some degree.  For instance, even if you favor education privatization, in the shorter run we still need to make the current system much better.  That would even make privatization easier, if that is your goal.

6. I will cite again the philosophical framework of my book Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals.

7. The fundamental growth experience of recent decades has been the rise of capitalism, markets, and high living standards in East Asia, and State Capacity Libertarianism has no problem or embarrassment in endorsing those developments.  It remains the case that such progress (or better) could have been made with more markets and less government.  Still, state capacity had to grow in those countries and indeed it did.  Public health improvements are another major success story of our time, and those have relied heavily on state capacity — let’s just admit it.

8. The major problem areas of our time have been Africa and South Asia.  They are both lacking in markets and also in state capacity.

9. State Capacity Libertarians are more likely to have positive views of infrastructure, science subsidies, nuclear power (requires state support!), and space programs than are mainstream libertarians or modern Democrats.  Modern Democrats often claim to favor those items, and sincerely in my view, but de facto they are very willing to sacrifice them for redistribution, egalitarian and fairness concerns, mood affiliation, and serving traditional Democratic interest groups.  For instance, modern Democrats have run New York for some time now, and they’ve done a terrible job building and fixing things.  Nor are Democrats doing much to boost nuclear power as a partial solution to climate change, if anything the contrary.

10. State Capacity Libertarianism has no problem endorsing higher quality government and governance, whereas traditional libertarianism is more likely to embrace or at least be wishy-washy toward small, corrupt regimes, due to some of the residual liberties they leave behind.

11. State Capacity Libertarianism is not non-interventionist in foreign policy, as it believes in strong alliances with other relatively free nations, when feasible.  That said, the usual libertarian “problems of intervention because government makes a lot of mistakes” bar still should be applied to specific military actions.  But the alliances can be hugely beneficial, as illustrated by much of 20th century foreign policy and today much of Asia — which still relies on Pax Americana.

It is interesting to contrast State Capacity Libertarianism to liberaltarianism, another offshoot of libertarianism.  On most substantive issues, the liberaltarians might be very close to State Capacity Libertarians.  But emphasis and focus really matter, and I would offer this (partial) list of differences:

a. The liberaltarian starts by assuring “the left” that they favor lots of government transfer programs.  The State Capacity Libertarian recognizes that demands of mercy are never ending, that economic growth can benefit people more than transfers, and, within the governmental sphere, it is willing to emphasize an analytical, “cold-hearted” comparison between government discretionary spending and transfer spending.  Discretionary spending might well win out at many margins.

b. The “polarizing Left” is explicitly opposed to a lot of capitalism, and de facto standing in opposition to state capacity, due to the polarization, which tends to thwart problem-solving.  The polarizing Left is thus a bigger villain for State Capacity Libertarianism than it is for liberaltarianism.  For the liberaltarians, temporary alliances with the polarizing Left are possible because both oppose Trump and other bad elements of the right wing.  It is easy — maybe too easy — to market liberaltarianism to the Left as a critique and revision of libertarians and conservatives.

c. Liberaltarian Will Wilkinson made the mistake of expressing enthusiasm for Elizabeth Warren.  It is hard to imagine a State Capacity Libertarian making this same mistake, since so much of Warren’s energy is directed toward tearing down American business.  Ban fracking? Really?  Send money to Russia, Saudi Arabia, lose American jobs, and make climate change worse, all at the same time?  Nope.

d. State Capacity Libertarianism is more likely to make a mistake of say endorsing high-speed rail from LA to Sf (if indeed that is a mistake), and decrying the ability of U.S. governments to get such a thing done.  “Which mistakes they are most likely to commit” is an underrated way of assessing political philosophies.

You will note the influence of Peter Thiel on State Capacity Libertarianism, though I have never heard him frame the issues in this way.

Furthermore, “which ideas survive well in internet debate” has been an important filter on the evolution of the doctrine.  That point is under-discussed, for all sorts of issues, and it may get a blog post of its own.

Here is my earlier essay on the paradox of libertarianism, relevant for background.

Happy New Year everyone!

Extreme Aging

Japan now has over 70,000 people who are more than 100 years old.

That stunning fact comes from Extreme Economies, an interesting new book by Richard Davies. Davies looks at extreme economies around the world such as extreme failure (Darien, Kinshasa, Glasgow), extreme resilience (Aceh, Angola Prison, LA), extreme inequality (Santiago) and in the case of Japan (Akita), extreme aging.

Japan’s aging is unprecedented and is having effects throughout the economy and society:

In 1975 social security and healthcare spending commanded 22 percent of the country’s tax revenues; by 2017 the figure, driven up by elderly care and pensions, had risen to 55 percent. By the early 2020s the figure is set to hit 60 percent. To look at it in another way, every other public service in Japan — education, transport, infrastructure, defense, the environment, the arts–could rely on almost 80 percent of tax revenue in 1975, but the increase in elderly-related spending means that only 40 percent is left for other national public expenditures. In budgetary terms, ageing is eating Japan.

As a country, Japan is aging not just because it’s people are getting older but because it’s birth rate is well below replacement. This year there will be fewer than 900,000 births in all of Japan–a number not seen since 1874 when Japan’s total population was much smaller. Overall, Japan’s population is declining.

Population decline may have some good effects but the combination of fewer young people and more elderly people is straining Japanese culture along with its finances. The young naturally resent the increasing burden put on them for supporting the elderly. As with all Ponzi schemes, pay-as-you-go social security schemes come under stress when the population is no longer growing.

…over the next 30 years or so, many countries’ pension systems will require young workers to fund a system that everyone knows will be far less generous by 2040. It is hardly a way to generate confidence in public policy.

And those 70,000 centenarians? Almost 90 percent are women so an aging society is a gender unbalanced society meaning old people lose caregivers or at least someone to share a household with.

Davies is interested in Japan as an example of where many countries are going,

Southern Europe, in particular, is following fast with Italy, Spain and Portugal already experiencing population decline. Germany will start to shrink in 2022, Korea in the early 2030s. Akita, Japan’s cutting edge of ageing economics,…offers a valuable window on the future.

Charles Murray’s *Human Diversity*

His new book is coming out in January, and the subtitle is The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class. I will get to the details shortly, but my bottom-line review is “Not as controversial as you might think,” but do note the normalization at the end of that phrase.

Here is one bit from p.294 toward the end of the book:

Nothing we are going to learn will diminish our common humanity.  Nothing we learn will justify rank-ordering human groups from superior to inferior — the bundles of qualities that make us human are far too complicated for that.  Nothing we learn will lend itself to genetic determinism.  We live our lives with an abundance of unpredictability, both genetic and environmental.

Most of the book defends ten key propositions, laid out on pp.7-8.  The first four of those propositions concern differences between men and women (“Sex differences in personality are consistent worldwide…”) and I do not find those controversial, so I will not cover them.  The chapters on those propositions provide a good survey of the evidence, and a good answer to the denialists, though I doubt if Murray is the right person to win them over.  Let’s now turn to the other propositions, with my commentary along the way:

5. Human populations are genetically distinctive in ways that correspond to self-identified race and ethnicity.

True, but Murray’s analysis did not push me beyond the usual citations of lactose intolerance, sickle cell anemia, adaptation to high altitudes, and the like.  That said, pp.190-195 offer a very dense discussion of target alleles for various traits, such as schizophrenia, and how those target alleles vary across different groups.  I found those pages difficult to follow, and also wished that discussion had been fifty pages rather than five.  Toward the end of that discussion, Murray does write (p.194): “…proof of the role of natural selection for many genetic differences will remain unobservable without methodological breakthroughs.”  With that I definitely agree.

On p.195 he adds “It is implausible to expect that none of the imbalances will yield evidence of significant genetic differences related to phenotypic differences across continental populations.”  That returns to my core point about this book not shifting my priors.  You could agree with that sentence (noting the ambiguity in the word “significant”) and still have a quite modest vision of what those differences might mean.  In any case, nothing in the book pushes me beyond that sentence in the direction of the geneticists.

And here the contrast with the chapters on men and women becomes (unintentionally?) glaring: those biological differences are relatively easy to demonstrate, so perhaps hard-to-demonstrate biological differences are not so significant.  That too is just a conjecture, but there are multiple ways to play the “absence of evidence” and “how to interpret the residuals” cards, and I wish those had received a more extensive philosophy of science-like discussion.

Now let’s move to the next proposition:

6. Evolutionary selection pressure since humans left Africa has been extensive and mostly local.

That one strikes me as a miswording or misstatement, though I do not see that it corresponds to any actual mistakes in the broader text.  You might think that general, non-local evolutionary selection for all humans has been quite large over the millennia, relative to local selection.  I genuinely do not know the ratio here, but Murray does not seem to address the actual comparison of “across all human groups” vs. “local” as loci of selection pressures.

Next up:

7. Continental population differences in variants associated with personality, abilities, and social behavior are common.

Clearly true, but note this proposition does not claim biological roots for those differences.  The real question comes in the next proposition:

8. The shared environment usually plays a minor role in explaining personalities, abilities, and social behavior.

Here I have what I think is a major disagreement with Murray.  If he means the term “shared environment” in the narrow sense used by say twin studies, he is probably correct.  But in the more literal, Webster-derived conception of “shared environment” I very much disagree.  Culture is a truly major shaper of our personalities, abilities, and social behavior, and self-evidently so. For my taste the book did not contain nearly enough discussion of culture and in fact there is virtually no discussion of the concept or its power, as a look at the index will verify.  The real lesson of “twins studies plus anthropology” is that you have to control almost all of a person’s environment to have a major impact, but a major impact indeed can be had.  I behave very differently than my Irish potato famine ancestors, and not because I am genetically 1/8 from the Madeira Islands.  That said, within the narrower range of environmental variation measured in twins studies…well those studies seem to be fairly accurate.

9. Class structure is importantly based on differences in abilities that have a substantial genetic component.

Correct as stated, but I see those differences as much less genetic than Murray does.  For instance, IQ is to some extent heritable, but how much does that shape economic outcomes?  It is worth turning to Murray’s discussion on p.232 and the associated footnote 17 (pp.428-429).  His main source is what is to me a flawed meta-study on IQ and job performance (Murray to his credit does also cite the best-known critique of such studies).  I would opt more directly for the labor market literature on IQ and individual earnings, based on actual measured wages, which shows fairly modest correlations between IQ and earnings (read here, here and here).  So, at the very least, the inherited IQ-based permanent stratification version of The Bell Curve argument is much more compelling to Murray than it is to me.

10. Outside interventions are inherently constrained in the effects they can have on personality, abilities, and social behavior.

Clearly this is literally true, if only because of the meaning of “constrained.”  But mostly I would repeat my remarks on culture from #8.  Cultures change, and over time they are likely to change a great deal.  For instance, early in the 20th century, Korea, Japan, and China often were described as low work ethic cultures.  As cultures change, in turn those cultures can shape the personalities, abilities, and social behaviors of subsequent generations, in significant ways albeit constrained.  So while Murray is correct as stated, I believe I would disagree with his intended substantive point about the weight of relative forces.

Overall this is a serious and well-written book that presents a great deal of scientific evidence very effectively.  Anyone reading it will learn a lot.  But it didn’t change my mind on much, least of all the most controversial questions in this area.  If anything, in the Bayesian sense it probably nudged me away from geneticist-based arguments, simply because it did not push me any further towards them.

Murray of course will write the book he wants to, but my personal wish list was two-fold: a) a book leaving most of the normal science behind, and focusing only on the uncertain and controversial frontier issues, in great detail, and b) much more discussion of the import of culture.

Most of all, I am happy that America’s culture of achievement is inducing Murray to continue to produce major works at the age of 76, soon to be 77.

You can pre-order here.