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Politics and Economics
“The inhabitants of a particular town are much better acquainted with its wants and interests than with those of other places; and are better judges of the capacity of their neighbours than of that of the rest of their countrymen. The members, therefore, of the legislature should not be chosen from the general body of the nation; but it is proper that in every considerable place a representative should be elected by the inhabitants.” (Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, 1748)
“Political liberty is to be found … only when there is no abuse of power. But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go.” - Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws
Climate change is mostly about bad weather becoming worse over time, to the detriment of humans and the rest of the biosphere. However, one doesn’t have to believe in climate change to care about bad weather and its impacts. Nor does one need to believe in climate change to want to fix problems associated with today’s bad weather. And since problem-solving capacity builds over time, whatever is learned fixing today’s problems will help us fix similar problems in the future.
The same goes for fossil fuel companies and the meat industry. Yes, these are businesses whose main interest is profit and survival. I don’t expect them to willingly self-destruct. That doesn’t mean they can’t be allies on some environmental issues, eg, reducing methane emissions. But I don’t require that they really care about these issues. Environmental allies don’t need to be pure of motive as long as they contribute…
Some may feel that optimism undermines the spirit of political activism and thus makes people less open to “structural change”. This is not an unreasonable proposition: if optimism is based on positive experiences, why would anyone want to hobble a system that has improved the quality of life for so most of humanity?
What I find surprising is the sharp rise in public concern about the environment during the pre-Covid Trump administration, despite the administration’s anti-environmental rhetoric, aggressive deregulation and cost-cutting measures. Apparently, the administration’s top-down messaging was unable to override the inclination of Americans to care more about nature when bread-and-butters worries subside.
Grandiosity refers to a sense of specialness and self-importance that might lead you to:
boast about real or exaggerated accomplishments
consider yourself more talented or intelligent than others
dismiss or try to one-up the achievements of others
believe you’re above rules or ordinary limits
fail to recognize that your actions could harm others
lash out in anger when someone criticizes you or points out a flaw in your plans
— from “What is Grandiosity?”, PsychCentral
“A sanity-preserving maxim among observers of Mr Trump is to pay attention not to what he says but to what he does. Better yet, pay attention not to what he says or does but to what the courts allow him to do. By this standard, Mr Trump’s first-month frenzy is likely to fall well short of a constitutional crisis. (The Economist, Donald Trump is a reckless president, but not yet a lawless one. February 22, 2025)
This post is an update to a post on rent control I wrote in 2022. It was inspired by a Zoom conversation I had some weeks ago. We were talking about rent control and I mentioned there was plenty of research showing that rent control often does more harm than good. My comment triggered a quick response, “yeah, that’s what conservatives say”. (For the record, I’m not a conservative).
Why does this matter? Because longitudinal studies have found that students who performed worse in PISA at age 15 are less likely to attain higher levels of education by the age of 25, and are more likely to be out of the labor market entirely, ie, not in education, employment or training. For many, a lifetime of economic hardship and reliance on public services follows.
Part of this performance gap can be explained by socio-economic and language factors, e.g., poverty and lack of fluency in the language used on the tests. I imagine age at immigration matters as well: a person who immigrates as a teenager will likely find school harder in their new country than someone who arrived as a baby. Following this logic, I’d expect second-generation immigrants - born in a country to at least one foreign-born parent - would have little difficulty adapting to a country’s education system and so their PISA scores would reflect this.
Immigrant students often do worse on PISA assessments than non-immigrant students, especially in industrialized countries. However, the performance gap between immigrants and non-immigrants varies considerably across countries. For example…
“Does a person's perception of their place within the general socioeconomic order directly influence their physical and psychological well-being? Let's pretend that researchers find robust evidence that subjective social status does indeed predict various indicators of well-being, e.g., people who rate themselves lower in the pecking order are less healthy or happy than those with higher self-ratings. What can we learn from such evidence? Nothing much by itself. We'd have to dig deeper.” - Singh-Manoux, Adler, and Marmot (2003)
There is no hard-and-fast threshold for an acceptable clearance rate. That said, Oakland’s rate is abysmal. No wonder Oakland’s the most dangerous city in the US!
These posts will explore factors that are thought to influence violent crime rates, such as police response times, clearance rates, conviction rates, sentencing norms, and demographics. I will limit my exploration to the 10 safest and 10 most dangerous cities listed in the above chart, the better to reveal patterns of influence. Hopefully, these cities keep good records.
For comparison, as of 9/30/24, the Dow Jones average net profit margin was 2.46%; the Nasdaq average net profit margin was 16.09%. And according to a January 2024 analysis by NYU Stern School of Business, the average net profit margin for US corporations across 94 industries was 8.54%, based on a sample of 6481 firms.
Americans used to be fairly united on the need to protect the environment through stricter laws and regulations. That consensus took a nosedive in the 1990s and has never recovered…
The authors don’t tell us why Medicare and insurers are increasingly relying on prior authorization, nor do they address the prevalence of unnecessary or low-value medical care or the risks associated with such care. That’s a huge omission. Potential harms should be weighed against potential benefits, the better to find solutions that preserve benefits while reducing harm. As for the prevalence and risk of unnecessary and low-value care, evidence suggests that up to one-fifth of healthcare spending is wasted on such care and around 10% of patients are harmed in the process.
Around a quarter of healthcare spending in the US is wasted, much of it on unnecessary or low-value tests and procedures that do not improve patient outcomes. Here are a few ways countries and healthcare systems are tackling the problem…
“False consciousness [is] the notion that people are so misled about reality that they act against their own interests. What was once the preserve of Marxists, flummoxed that workers refused to lose their capitalist chains, is now the fall-back position for the modern [left], which worries that voters cannot accurately comprehend the world in which they live.” - Are voters as clueless as Labour’s intelligentsia thinks? The Economist, November 30, 2024.