The US murder rate was 5.0 per 100,000 inhabitants, and the robbery rate was 81.6 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2019. Here’s what the five-year trend looks like: …
…Which got me thinking: if human experience and behavior is the product of gene-environment interactions, what does liberty even mean? The dictionary says liberty is “the condition of being free from control or restrictions”, but being a “product” of genes+environment doesn’t leave any room for being free from control.
Long story short: The US continues to be ravaged by the Covid beast. Sweden got off to an awful start but has regained the upper hand. Denmark and Norway hit back hard in the beginning, then eased up rather quickly. Now the Nordic kids are back in school while a good number of their US counterparts still have to contend with online instruction.
…Bottom line: individuals with greater proficiency in literacy and math earn more, on average, than individuals who are less proficient. With that in mind, consider the following charts…
Between 1989 and 2008, 1,125 lawsuits were filed challenging the US Forest Service land management decisions. The Forest Service won around half these cases and either lost or settled the rest. Almost 80% of the lawsuits were initiated by environmental groups seeking to protect National Forests. Litigants generally challenged vegetative management, such as debris removal and thinning forests through logging and controlled burns. The median time to case deposition was a year and a half.
Just 16 states account for two-thirds of Covid-related deaths in the US. Covid mortality rates track population density fairly closely. Political party affiliation also tracks population density, a phenomenon known as the “density divide”. To simplify a bit, the less densely populated an area, the more Republican and the less affected by Covid. It’s no surprise, then, that Republicans are less concerned about Covid-19 than the Democrats..
A climate-driven global redistribution of species is already underway. But many of the species at greatest risk of extinction from changing weather patterns have insurmountable dispersal barriers – they can’t move elsewhere without help, because roads, cities, farmland, and warring humans get in the way. We could “let nature take its course”, meaning allow mass extinctions. Or, we could very carefully and only as a last resort, move endangered species to save them. Of course, introduced species would have to be monitored closely to insure they’re not too disruptive a presence in their new biological communities. But those communities are already being disrupted by climate change.
As for the relationship between inequality and happiness, it’s complicated. Inequality alone - that is, controlling for poverty and social mobility - does not appear to a strong, consistent or direct effect on society-wide levels of happiness. And in the US and elsewhere, surveys have consistently found that inequality simply isn’t a pressing issue for most people. Still, the very thought of inequality does makes some people very angry and indignant. But those reactions are often based on ideas, e.g. social justice or a zero-sum understanding of economics.
“The impact of missed education could be lasting. “If a child is not reading at grade level by the third grade, they are four times less likely to graduate high school,” says Christakis. “And low-income children are six times less likely.” - Dimitri Christakis of Seattle Children’s Research Institute, quoted in The New Scientist September 2, 2020
People often change their political minds as they get older. Adolescents and young adults tend to form political opinions that reflect those of their peers or are more extreme versions of their parents’ politics (as befits the intensity of youth). Then something happens: the intrepid fledglings leave home and school, enter the greater world of work and responsibility, and begin to doubt their old certainties about how the world is and should be. Or at least some do.
To make matters worse, there are almost as many “near-poor” California residents as there are poor residents. In other words, more than a third of Californians are living in or near poverty (Public Policy Institute of California July 2020).
Gilens and Page also treat average citizens and economic elites as though they were two distinct groups. But they’re not. According to multiyear tax return data, over half of American householders reach the top 10% income bracket for one or more years by age 60 (over two-thirds reach the top 20% of the income distribution). If getting into the top 10% counts as being an economic elite, then over half of ordinary citizens become economic elites at some point in their lives (and over two-thirds get to be near-elites). Sorta muddies the water.
There is other evidence that one can be risk-sensitive and relatively unstressed at the same time. Take business owners, for whom sensitivity to risk is an essential job requirement. Yet personality studies have shown business owners to be rather emotionally resilient: risk tolerant, stress tolerant, adaptable, and tolerant of financial insecurity.
Of course, the reductionists could be partly right in some cases under some conditions. This is ultimately an empirical matter. The challenge is to separate sound studies from junk studies. Take Sapolsky’s assertion that a young child’s personality predicts her politics as an adult. What is his basis for such a claim? One measly study…
Politicians and civil servants who favor an engineering approach to problem-solving may be dismissed as “mere technocrats”. The assumption here is that either one is the methodical, step-by-step sort, or you are a Big Picture person guided by a strong sense of moral purpose. Granted, at any moment, if one is counting trees, one is unlikely to be seeing the forest. But that doesn’t mean an engineer can’t see the Big Picture…
If one truly believes “social issues can’t be solved logically because they involve people, who are emotional and irrational” or that “what people think ultimately comes down to their personal moral compass, not a dispassionate evaluation of the facts”, why even bother to engage people who think differently than we do? Today’s partisans might respond: the better to gain ammunition against the enemy.
As it turns out, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently forecast that US energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions would decline by 11% in 2020. Since CO2 emissions account for around 97% of energy-related emissions, we will likely lower CO2 emissions by 10.7% this year alone. How can we lower emissions even more? …
An Excerpt: “Defying conventional wisdom about a polarized electorate, a report based on in-depth surveys of more than 80,000 Americans shows that majorities from both parties agree on nearly 150 key policy positions across more than a dozen top policy areas. The research suggests that Americans are eager for their elected representatives to cross party lines to start tackling the nation’s toughest problems…In the surveys, respondents were given in-depth information about the policy issues and legislative proposals under consideration in Congress, and evaluated arguments for and against each policy option before coming to their conclusions. The content was reviewed by experts at both ends of the spectrum of opinion on the issues.”
Now that’s the way to conduct a survey!
I’ll start this exploration with my long-standing definition of ideology as “an army of convictions about how the world is and how it ought to be.” This definition is remarkably similar to one provided by Cory Clark and Bo Winegard in their paper, Tribalism in War and Peace: The Nature and Evolution of Ideological Epistemology and Its Significance for Modern Social Science:
By ideology, we mean, roughly, a mental model of the world and the social order that is both descriptive (how the world is) and normative (how it should be); and by sacred value, we mean, roughly, a value that is held particularly fervidly and that one is incredibly reluctant to relinquish.
So what are ideological tendencies? Ways of thinking and reasoning that distort reality and which are motivated by ideological beliefs. Some examples: …
The first step in fixing a problem is understanding it. That includes having a solid grasp of how big the problem is, relevant context, and whether the problem is getting better or worse. So I’ve been doing some research on the problem of police brutality against blacks. Here is a bit of what I’ve found: