In Literary Wealth, Ward Just shares his five favorite novels about the pursuit of money:
Another article notes that the Dutch are the world’s tallest people:
Most of us are taller than our parents, who probably are taller than their parents. But in the Netherlands, the generational progression has reached new heights.In the last 150 years, the Dutch have become the tallest people on Earth — and experts say they’re still getting bigger. It is a tale of a nation’s health and wealth.
Prosperity propelled the collective growth spurt that began in the mid-1800s and was only interrupted during the harsh years of the Nazi occupation in the 1940s — when average heights actually declined.
With their protein-rich diet and a national health service that pampers infants, the Dutch are standing taller than ever. The average Dutchman stands just over 6 feet, while women average nearly 5-foot-7.
[...]
The Dutch were not noted for their height until recently. It was only in the 1950s that they passed the Americans, who stood tallest for most of the last 200 years, said John Komlos, a leading expert on the subject who is professor of economic history at the University of Munich in Germany. He said the United States has now fallen behind Denmark.Many Dutch are much taller than average. So many, in fact, that four years ago the government adjusted building codes to raise the standards for door frames and ceilings. Doors must now be 7-feet, 6 1/2-inches high.
[...]
In 1848, one man out of four was rejected by the Dutch military because he was shorter than 5-foot-2. Today, fewer than one in 1,000 is that short.George Maat, an anthropologist at Leiden University Medical Center, cites a study done in 1861 correlating the height of conscripts to the availability and price of rye, then the main food crop. One year after a poor crop, the number of men rejected as too short shot up.
Height appears to come naturally with the territory. Two thousand years ago, the men of the Low Countries stood about 5-foot-9 — tall for the age — and were enlisted as guards for the Roman emperor, Maat said.
Average heights declined over the next 1,800 years as food supply failed to keep pace with population growth and people moved into disease-ridden cities, said Maat. He spoke from his office, cluttered with leg bones and skulls, overlooking a grassy quadrangle that is the burial site of thousands killed by plague in 1635.
Even during the 17th century, when Amsterdam was the world’s richest city, wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few merchants and average height did not increase.
It took until World War I for the Dutch to regain the 4 inches they lost over two millennia.
Jacob Sullum says that drug warriors are playing into the Taliban’s hands:
Poppy farmers welcome the Taliban because the Taliban offer them ‘protection.’ Protection from whom? From their own government, which is trying to destroy their livelihood under pressure from the U.S. and the U.K.Afghanistan is one of the world’s poorest countries, and the UNODC estimates that opium accounted for more than 50 percent of its GDP in 2005. By his own account, then, Costa is demanding that the Afghan government wipe out half of the country’s economy, with conspicuous assistance from U.S. and British forces. Does that sound like a recipe for peace and stability?
It’s no mystery why barely subsisting Afghanis choose to grow opium poppies instead of legal crops, contrary to the wishes of foreign governments. According to the UNODC, a hectare of poppies earned farmers some $5,400 last year, about 10 times what they could get by growing wheat.
Western governments, the U.S. foremost among them, created this incentive by banning opium to begin with, thereby enabling criminals (including terrorists) to earn a risk premium. Having artificially boosted the price of opium, the U.S. now asks desperately poor Afghan peasants to resist this financial attraction for the sake of Westerners who fail to resist the pharmacological attraction of heroin.
Carles Boix discusses The Roots of Democracy:
To make sense of the plight of Iraq, the Middle East and, for that matter, broad swaths of the developing world, we must understand first the nature of the democratic game. Democracy is a mechanism of decision in which, to a large extent, everything is up for grabs at each electoral contest. The majority of the day may choose to redraw property rights or alter the institutional and taxation landscape, thus dramatically reorganizing the entire social and economic fabric of the country. Hence, democracies survive only when all sides show restraint in their demands and accept the possibility of losing the election. In the Middle East, where inequality is rampant and wealth often derives from well-defined and easy-to-expropriate assets such as oil wells and other mineral resources, democracy poses an undeniable threat to those who profit from the authoritarian status quo. Not surprisingly, the minority in control of the state will be relentless in opposing the introduction of free elections. Thus, it is not nationalism or even religious animosities that explain the current violence in Iraq — but rather oil, its geographical distribution, and the loss of its political control by the Sunni minority that monopolized the state until two years ago.
I recommend reading the whole article. (Hat tip to Albion’s Seedlings.)
Jerry Bower looks at increasing inequality in Census and Sensibility:
I’m giving you a red pill and a blue pill. If you take the red pill, your income will roughly double in the next ten years, but your neighbor’s income will triple. If you take the blue pill you and your neighbor will stay the same, equal to each other now and ten years from now. Which pill are you going to take?I really like that question, because it’s such a timesaver. When levelers (people obsessed with income inequality) used to call my radio program, I would typically debate statistics with them. But that took too long. It’s better just to get to the point and expose the different moral universes in which we live.
In my universe, also known as reality, social progress inevitably leads to inequality. It’s a statistical necessity. As the world gets bigger the bell curve gets wider. Distributions work that way. In a world of 7 billion people the top IQ will be higher above the mean than in a world with one billion people. The fastest miler will almost certainly be faster than the fastest miler in a smaller world.
Jim Bennett speaks of Shangri-La and Dogpatch:
However, we view Tibet fundamentally from Indian eyes, a legacy of the fact that our first knowledge of it comes from British Imperial sources, going back to Younghusband’s expedition and before. The British saw it as the Indians had, as a mysterious and saintly land of mystics, whose writing and religion were derived from Indian sources, hidden behind the Himalayas, and reachable only through an extraordinarily arduous journey through the world’s most impressive mountains.The Chinese, however, saw it as the even poorer land behind the poorest provinces of Han China proper, reachable through a difficult but not extraordinary journey in which things just got a little poorer, a little dirtier, and a little less properly Chinese day by day. They saw Tibet basically as inhabited by poorer and more ignorant cousins, with bizarre and rather unsavory religious practices, sort of the way we view backcountry snake-handling fundamentalists.
In short, for Indians, and by extension the Anglosphere, Tibet was Shangri-La; to the Chinese, it was Dogpatch. The Chinese tend to view the Western fascination with Tibetan religion and the Daili Lama the way we would view some backwoods snake-handling preacher who inexplicably was heralded as a deeply wise and holy man in some other part of the world. It’s so inexplicable to them that the whole business seems like some transparently ridiculous anti-Chinese plot dreamed up by the encircling imperialists.
In Gophers by TKO, “war nerd” Gary Brecher shares some lessons from Lebanon:
The IDF hasn’t been a real underdog for a long time. Amateurs look at the map of the Middle East, see poor li’l Israel in the middle of all that Arab real estate and think the IDF is still the underdog. Nope — Israel was set up by a bunch of smart, educated Europeans, and when you match an army of those guys, backed by billions in US military aid, against peasant conscripts, only a fool bets on the peasants. Doesn’t matter how much real estate they have, peasants in uniform are useless in conventional warfare against smart, motivated Western troops.Till now — till Hezbollah. Hezbollah chose when and where and how they were going to fight Israel. Here are the lessons they learned. Read’em and weep, because they work just as good against US armed forces and tactics as they do against the IDF.
The lessons:
If you’re not familiar with the Stormtrooper Effect by name, you’re nonetheless aware of the phenomenon. In many movies, notably Star Wars, the highly trained elite troops can’t manage to hit anything, especially not the protagonists.
If you’re vaguely familiar with the original Star Trek, you’re also familiar with Redshirts, the no-name quasi-Marines in red shirts, who apparently exist purely to die — and thus convey the dire danger the ship’s officers face.
Here’s the big philosophical question:
What would happen if Imperial Stormtroopers and Redshirts got in a firefight?
I’ll let you ponder that as I share another important action-story law, the Inverse Ninja Law:
The Inverse Ninja Law states that the effectiveness of a group of ninjas is inversely proportional to the number of ninjas in the group. While a single enemy ninja is often portrayed as a significant threat to the protagonists, a large group of ninjas is significantly less of a threat, and as such is easily defeated. This is sometimes applicable to other close combat-oriented minions as well.
Writer Dan Simmons is building a house, and he muses on a number of interesting houses, including Harlan Ellison’s Wonderland:
The first time I visited Ellison Wonderland more than 20 years ago was the day I realized that most of us live in our homes more like tourists who keep their stuff in their suitcases during their entire stay somewhere (somewhere called . . . life), making little real mark on our environment. Entering many people’s homes is like coming into some place they’ve rented and expect to leave soon. Entering Harlan’s home is like entering Harlan’s mind. Actually, you don’t have to enter the house to get the first taste of Harlan’s mind.Finding his little street may be a challenge, but picking out Harlan’s home once you’re on the street should be easy. Just look for the Martian temple. Do you think I’m kidding? Just check out this photo I pulled from the Net –
Then, after you’ve parked at the curb and are heading for his front door – only a few steps from the street – you enter the next layer of Harlan Ellison’s cerebral cortex. Is it the 1949 Packard parked in the carport? No. Is it the beautiful, elaborately carved custom front door? Not yet. No, as you enter the small entry courtyard area next to the carport, the glint of sunlight on razorwire catches your attention and you glance up toward the roof of the carport and the deck up there outside his writing office, all protected by the razorwire, and you notice the gargoyles. And then you notice that the gargoyles look familiar . . . wait, isn’t that . . .?? It is. Phyllis Schafley. And the monstrosity next to it is Spiro Agnew. So Richard Nixon has to be . . . ah, there he is, that grinning saurian thing.
But the full shock awaits you inside.
I’ve heard different tallies for Harlan Ellison’s book and art collection: 100,000 books and 15,000 works of art? 200,000 books and 28,000 works of art? Depends upon who’s counting, I imagine – although Harlan and his minions have every single book, painting, poster, and collectible carefully catalogued – but let’s agree that there’s one hell of a lot of art and reading material in Harlan Ellison’s house.
Actually, during the terrible Northridge earthquake at 4:30 a.m. on January 17, 1994 – (no jokes or humor in this paragraph, folks) – a friend of mine, Ed Bryant, was staying at Harlan’s home, which, you should remember, is just below Mulholland Drive along the high ridge separating the Los Angeles basin from the San Fernando Valley, and Ed, thrown out of bed by the violent tremors, had to swim out of the house,. Everyone who escaped had to swim . . . swim through books and art and broken glass that filled the hallways to a depth of four feet.
In Is There an Elephant in Here? — which reprints the first chapter of his new book, The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican Party — Ryan Sager looks at the struggle for control of the modern conservative movement:
By smoothing off its rough, small-government edges, Rove’s theory goes, the GOP can pick off ever-bigger chunks of the Democrats’ base: working-class voters can be won over by dropping traditional Republican objections to generous spending on entitlement programs; black, Hispanic and Catholic voters can be won over with ever-harsher attacks on abortion and homosexuality; big business can be kept on board through ever-larger corporate subsidies and tax breaks, and so on and so forth. By being as many things to as many people as possible, according to the theory, the Republican Party may be able to eclipse the Democratic Party for decades to come. Bush is the test case.
Definitely read the whole article.
In Mind Games, John Cassidy summarizes recent work in the burgeoning field of neuroeconomics:
Trust plays a key role in many economic transactions, from buying a secondhand car to choosing a college. In the simplest version of the trust game, one player gives some money to another player, who invests it on his behalf and then decides how much to return to him and how much to keep. The more the first player invests, the more he stands to gain, but the more he has to trust the second player. If the players trust each other, both will do well. If they don’t, neither will end up with much money.Fehr and his collaborators divided a group of student volunteers into two groups. The members of one group were each given six puffs of the nasal spray Syntocinon, which contains oxytocin, a hormone that the brain produces during breast-feeding, sexual intercourse, and other intimate types of social bonding. The members of the other group were given a placebo spray.
Scientists believe that oxytocin is connected to stress reduction, enhanced sociability, and, possibly, falling in love. The researchers hypothesized that oxytocin would make people more trusting, and their results appear to support this claim. Of the twenty-nine students who were given oxytocin, thirteen invested the maximum money allowed, compared with just six out of twenty-nine in the control group. “That’s a pretty remarkable finding,” Camerer told me. “If you asked most economists how they would produce more trust in a game, they would say change the payoffs or get the participants to play the game repeatedly: those are the standard tools. If you said, ‘Try spraying oxytocin in the nostrils,’ they would say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ You’re tricking the brain, and it seems to work.”?
Rumors impede vaccinations in some areas:
For Ramatu Garba, the polio vaccine is more curse than savior — part of an evil conspiracy hatched in the West to sterilize Nigerian girls.”“Allah used Muslim scientists to expose the Western plot of using polio vaccines to reduce our population,” said the 28-year-old Muslim food vendor in this northern Nigerian town. Each time health teams have tried to vaccinate her daughter, Garba has refused.
[...]
In Nigeria, some mothers try to fool health workers into believing their children have been vaccinated by painting their children’s fingers with nail polish, an attempt to imitate the ink marks used in vaccine drives to record that a child has been immunized.In Pakistan, a petition was recently filed to the Peshawar High Court, asking the government to end the $167 million polio eradication program; it cited Nigerian documents that alleged the vaccine is contaminated with estrogen. In the past, polio vaccinators in Quetta have been stoned and chased out by angry locals.
And in Kenya, polio vaccination campaigns have been compromised by devil worship allegations: parents express fears that having their children open their mouths to receive the oral vaccine would result in their tongues being magically removed.
Shankar Vedantam explains that In Crises, People Tend to Live, or Die, Together:
Computer models assume that people will flow out of a building like water, emptying through every possible exit. But the reality is far different. People talk. They confer. They go back to their desk. They change their mind. They try to exit the building the way they came in, rather than through the nearest door.Building engineers at the World Trade Center had estimated that escaping people would move at a rate of more than three feet per second. On Sept. 11, 2001, said Jason Averill, an engineer at the National Institute for Standards and Technology who studies human behavior during evacuations, people escaped at only one-fifth that speed. Although the towers were only one-third to one-half full, the stairwells were at capacity, he said. Had the buildings been full, Averill said, about 14,000 people would probably have died.
One study after the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center found that group size was a significant factor in determining how quickly people exited the building after a van loaded with explosives went off in an underground parking lot: Individuals who were part of larger groups, such as large workplaces, took longer to escape than individuals who were part of smaller groups.
That is because the larger the group, the greater the effort and time needed to build a common understanding of the event and a consensus about a course of action, said sociologist Benigno E. Aguirre of the University of Delaware. If a single person in a group does not want to take an alarm seriously, he or she can impede the escape of the entire group.
The picture of what happened on Sept. 11 is very different from conventional assumptions about crowd behavior, in which it is assumed that people would push each other out of the way to save their own lives. In actuality, human beings in crisis behave more nobly — and this could also be their undoing. People reach out not only to build a shared understanding of the event but also to help one another. In so doing, they may delay their own escape. This may be why groups often perish or survive together — people are unwilling to escape if someone they know and care about is left behind.
Frank Miller (The Dark Knight Returns) talks about That Old Piece of Cloth, the American flag:
To me, [the flag] stood for unthinking patriotism. It meant about as much to me as that insipid peace sign that was everywhere I looked: just another symbol of a generation’s sentimentality, of its narcissistic worship of its own past glories.Then came that sunny September morning when airplanes crashed into towers a very few miles from my home and thousands of my neighbors were ruthlessly incinerated — reduced to ash. Now, I draw and write comic books. One thing my job involves is making up bad guys. Imagining human villainy in all its forms. Now the real thing had shown up. The real thing murdered my neighbors. In my city. In my country. Breathing in that awful, chalky crap that filled up the lungs of every New Yorker, then coughing it right out, not knowing what I was coughing up.
For the first time in my life, I know how it feels to face an existential menace. They want us to die. All of a sudden I realize what my parents were talking about all those years.
Patriotism, I now believe, isn’t some sentimental, old conceit. It’s self-preservation. I believe patriotism is central to a nation’s survival. Ben Franklin said it: If we don’t all hang together, we all hang separately. Just like you have to fight to protect your friends and family, and you count on them to watch your own back.
So you’ve got to do what you can to help your country survive. That’s if you think your country is worth a damn. Warts and all.
So I’ve gotten rather fond of that old piece of cloth. Now, when I look at it, I see something precious. I see something perishable.
In Welcome Aboard, the Economist says that “in-flight announcements are not entirely truthful” and offers up an honest one:
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. We are delighted to welcome you aboard Veritas Airways, the airline that tells it like it is. Please ensure that your seat belt is fastened, your seat back is upright and your tray-table is stowed. At Veritas Airways, your safety is our first priority. Actually, that is not quite true: if it were, our seats would be rear-facing, like those in military aircraft, since they are safer in the event of an emergency landing. But then hardly anybody would buy our tickets and we would go bust.The flight attendants are now pointing out the emergency exits. This is the part of the announcement that you might want to pay attention to. So stop your sudoku for a minute and listen: knowing in advance where the exits are makes a dramatic difference to your chances of survival if we have to evacuate the aircraft. Also, please keep your seat belt fastened when seated, even if the seat-belt light is not illuminated. This is to protect you from the risk of clear-air turbulence, a rare but extremely nasty form of disturbance that can cause severe injury. Imagine the heavy food trolleys jumping into the air and bashing into the overhead lockers, and you will have some idea of how nasty it can be. We don’t want to scare you. Still, keep that seat belt fastened all the same.
Your life-jacket can be found under your seat, but please do not remove it now. In fact, do not bother to look for it at all. In the event of a landing on water, an unprecedented miracle will have occurred, because in the history of aviation the number of wide-bodied aircraft that have made successful landings on water is zero. This aircraft is equipped with inflatable slides that detach to form life rafts, not that it makes any difference. Please remove high-heeled shoes before using the slides. We might as well add that space helmets and anti-gravity belts should also be removed, since even to mention the use of the slides as rafts is to enter the realm of science fiction.
Please switch off all mobile phones, since they can interfere with the aircraft’s navigation systems. At least, that’s what you’ve always been told. The real reason to switch them off is because they interfere with mobile networks on the ground, but somehow that doesn’t sound quite so good. On most flights a few mobile phones are left on by mistake, so if they were really dangerous we would not allow them on board at all, if you think about it. We will have to come clean about this next year, when we introduce in-flight calling across the Veritas fleet. At that point the prospect of taking a cut of the sky-high calling charges will miraculously cause our safety concerns about mobile phones to evaporate.
On channel 11 of our in-flight entertainment system you will find a video consisting of abstract imagery and a new-age soundtrack, with a voice-over explaining some exercises you can do to reduce the risk of deep-vein thrombosis. We are aware that this video is tedious, but it is not meant to be fun. It is meant to limit our liability in the event of lawsuits.
Once we have reached cruising altitude you will be offered a light meal and a choice of beverages—a word that sounds so much better than just saying ‘drinks’, don’t you think? The purpose of these refreshments is partly to keep you in your seats where you cannot do yourselves or anyone else any harm. Please consume alcohol in moderate quantities so that you become mildly sedated but not rowdy. That said, we can always turn the cabin air-quality down a notch or two to help ensure that you are sufficiently drowsy.
After take-off, the most dangerous part of the flight, the captain will say a few words that will either be so quiet that you will not be able to hear them, or so loud that they could wake the dead. So please sit back, relax and enjoy the flight. We appreciate that you have a choice of airlines and we thank you for choosing Veritas, a member of an incomprehensible alliance of obscure foreign outfits, most of which you have never heard of. Cabin crew, please make sure we have remembered to close the doors. Sorry, I mean: ‘Doors to automatic and cross-check’. Thank you for flying Veritas.