Real-world free markets deliver one broad benefit that flies under the radar of economic theory: They shield humanity from its own Social Desirability Bias. Markets do the good things that sounds bad. Good things like driving incompetent, unresponsive, and obsolete businesses into bankruptcy. Producing “shameful” products people secretly love. Refusing to produce “admirable” products they secretly loathe.
Keeping costly products out of the hands of people who barely appreciate them. Putting convenience above safety. Firing superfluous workers so they search for constructive ways to spend their lives. Charging people to drive. Charging extra during rush hour. Inducing teens to abandon their childish dreams. Persuading grown-ups to volunteer for the uninspiring dirty jobs that someone has to do.
Surface dust poses a fundamental challenge to extraterrestrial human exploration:
On Mars, this challenge is compounded by regional and global dust cycles that coat sensitive hardware.
[…]
We observe particulates measuring as small as 100 to 200 nm on spacesuit samples and calibration targets. Compositionally, this dust is a phosphorus-, iron-, and sulfur-enriched mafic silicate accumulating on materials analogous to the planned external layers of potential crew systems.
[…]
Human flights to the lunar surface were complicated by the adverse effects of angular and abrasive lunar dust on hardware and astronaut health (1). Lunar dust adhered to the Extravehicular Mobility Units (EMUs) of the crew during Extravehicular Activities (EVAs) on the surface and entered the pressurized Lunar Module at the conclusion of each EVA. Exposure to this dust prompted physiological responses from some Apollo crew members akin to hay fever (2, 3). Moreover, lunar dust also negatively affected hardware by etching surfaces, damaging seals, reducing radiator efficiency, obstructing moving parts, and wearing down EMUs to the point that some approached operational limits as missions concluded (4). Although Martian dust differs fundamentally from lunar dust, shaped by distinct geological histories involving water activity, volcanism, impacts, and atmospheres, it is expected to present analogous mechanical and physiological hazards to future crews, albeit through differing mechanisms and severities (5). Notably, the aeolian activity that rounds Martian particulates renders them markedly less angular and abrasive than lunar agglutinates (6), and several hazards of concern to Apollo crews, including the abrasion of coatings and optical surfaces, have not been observed to a comparable degree over decades of robotic Mars surface operations. Recent Mars surface missions have nonetheless demonstrated detrimental effects of dust on engineering systems, including performance-degrading accumulation on solar arrays (7) and solar radiation sensors (8), as well as physical damage to meteorological wind sensors from blown debris (9). Such effects are largely tractable through established design practice (e.g., dust covers over motors and electronics, validation of mechanisms in dust-laden chamber testing on Earth; 10, 11), reflecting decades of accumulated experience protecting robotic hardware on the Martian surface. No comparable heritage exists for protecting humans from Mars dust, and the fine and ultrafine fractions most relevant to crew health remain the least constrained. Continued characterization of Martian dust is made possible by orbiting and landed spacecraft and is a high priority in preparation for crewed missions to Mars (12).
[…]
The ubiquity of Martian dust, particularly its persistence on vertical surfaces subjected to operational vibrations, presents a critical challenge for crewed surface missions. The reduced Martian gravity extends the atmospheric residence time of fine and ultrafine particles, while their magnetic and electrostatic properties promote adhesion to diverse hardware surfaces. Consequently, the infiltration of fine and ultrafine particulates into pressurized habitats represents a primary contamination risk. This vector necessitates the development of rigorous mitigation plans and containment protocols for both crewed outposts and sample receiving facilities (e.g., ref. 43).
[…]
A growing body of evidence from both orbital and surface missions suggests that Martian dust is chemically reactive, potentially toxic, and likely to induce inflammatory responses in biological systems (e.g., refs. 52 and 53).
[…]
Martian dust may have a distinct morphology from the agglutinate-rich lunar dust due to the active aeolian environment of the Martian surface, and the presence of fine and ultrafine particles raises new concerns for astronaut health during surface missions. First, pulmonary mucus is largely ineffective at clearing particles smaller than PM5 (60). Second, particles smaller than ~PM1, such as those reported herein, can evade respiratory clearance mechanisms and penetrate deeply into tissues and organs typically inaccessible to larger particles (Fig. 4; 61). Third, ultrafine particles can bypass the blood–brain barrier by traveling directly from the nasal cavity to the brain via the olfactory nerve (62). Ultrafine Mars dust is enriched in chemically reactive species and therefore represents a direct pathway for neurotoxicants to accumulate in central nervous system tissues and bloodstream (Fig. 4 and SI Appendix, Table S1). Martian dust may therefore not only accumulate in the lungs but also in the liver, kidneys, and brain, potentially leading to systemic physiological and neurological damage. Long-term exposure to ultrafine particles can lead to the development of lung disease via multiple mechanisms (63).
There’s the old-school stuff: a folder that comes home in each of their backpacks weekly, filled with flyers and graded work and tests to sign; a binder with a nightly behavior and reading log, also for me to sign. I get texts and emails with the school’s weekly newsletter, updates from the PTA, and, more than anything else, notifications about posts on the various platforms and apps the school uses.
That brings me to the new-school stuff: ClassDojo for one kid. Bloomz for another (except for choir information, which is on ClassDojo). Something called PowerSchool, which is meant to be the district’s hub for grades but also—for some mysterious reason—sends me weekly automated emails telling me that the balance in my daughters’ accounts has fallen below $5. (This makes no sense. For one thing, their school lunch is free. For another, school payments are handled on another platform entirely.)
I’d like to think that, given the volume of information I receive, I have a solid grasp of how my children are faring in school. But I have reason to doubt as much.
[…]
When information is spread and frequently repeated across platforms, it’s hard to know where to look for updates—especially if there’s seemingly little rhyme or reason to what gets announced where. And the sheer volume of communications can make prioritizing difficult. “You have this undifferentiated fire hose of content coming at you from the school, but it’s not stratified in a useful way,” Matthias Schabel, a father of three in Portland, Oregon, told me. Often, important notices are tucked into messages that also contain a lot of fluff—a notification for Pajama Day, a reminder that Chuck E. Cheese is hosting a back-to-school night, an announcement that the district is holding a flower sale at the football game. The paradoxical outcome is that although the school might be sharing essential information with you, you can’t trust that you’ll see it.
[…]
The share of K–8 parents attending parent-teacher conferences has fallen from 77 percent in 2017 to 57 percent today, according to the most recent data from Learning Heroes. This reluctance or inability to meet in person makes it tough for teachers to convey news about a child falling behind. “If I’m concerned about something,” Boruff said, “that’s not a conversation I want to have on ParentSquare.”
Dominic Cummins provides a “Hollywood pitch summary” of his perspective on AI and power:
a) the destruction will be greater than the optimists think, b) attempts by the old regimes to regulate it will probably generally do more harm than good, c) I hope it accelerates regime change because the old regimes are driving us to violence/war, d) the politics of the ‘stop’ people are generally somewhere between the worst kind of student politics and extremely dangerous and I’d rather take my chances defending the old Anglo civilisation than ‘we need a form of Stalinism for safety’, e) those most concerned about it should stop treating AI policy as another ‘policy’, where they try to ‘engage in rational debate’ and hope the old regime executes ‘better policy’, and face that the AI revolution is entangled with the death of the post-1945 world and the creation of whatever’s coming, so push what is falling, ditch rationalism, ditch ‘solving alignment’ is ‘the answer’ — you will not find a technical solution to politics and power; f) the most important thing is that a subset of elites now outside politics face they will have to abandon their happy lives and go to DC and build a new regime, as did Washington, Lincoln, and FDR…
A few months ago, Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, mused on stage, Tim Harford says, about the impact of generative AI on society:
“I don’t know how we’ll respond,” he told Kenny Malone of NPR’s Planet Money. “A hundred years ago, CS Lewis wrote a book called The Screwtape Letters, about a demon in Hell whose job is writing letters to their boss, a senior demon, a manager demon, about their attempts to corrupt a person on Earth. And they have a letter where they say, Wonderful news. My human has just got an invention called the telephone.”
And what’s wrong with the telephone, one might ask? Clark recalls the junior demon explaining, “Whenever my person is alone and would otherwise introspect on themselves and be drawn closer to God, they will instead pick up the phone and call their friends, which brings them closer to Hell. Now, what does that get right and wrong? What it gets right is that things like phones actually massively changed how people relate to one another.”
Why, then, did CS Lewis argue that the telephone was a shortcut to the inferno? Fans of Lewis will have guessed at the answer: he didn’t. Jack Clark had misremembered almost all of his claims. Lewis didn’t write The Screwtape Letters (1942) a century ago; they are not letters from a junior demon, but addressed to him from his uncle, Screwtape. And there is no mention of the telephone at all.
Without wishing to criticise Jack Clark too harshly for misspeaking in an onstage conversation (it’s easily done) there is something magnificently symbolic about hearing such an authority on generative AI produce a string of charming, thought-provoking and believable claims about CS Lewis, all of which turn out to be factually incorrect. Planet Money added a “clarification” to their recording of the conversation, noting that CS Lewis had “talked about the downsides of gadgetry, including the wireless radio” in “a different private letter”.
Curious as to exactly what CS Lewis said about the radio, I tracked down a quotation widely attributed to him — an ironic piece of advice explaining how to avoid God: “Concentrate on money, sex, status, health and (above all) on your own grievances. Keep the radio on. Live in a crowd. Use plenty of sedation.”
But where did he originally write those words? I pasted the quote into Google, but ahead of any search results, Google’s AI Gemini hastened to misinform: “You are quoting or closely paraphrasing CS Lewis from The Screwtape Letters.” Nice try, senior tempter; they were written two decades after Screwtape.
The fourth episode of the second season of Sold a Story looks at a poor, Black neighborhood in Houston, where Principal Thaddeus Lott transformed a struggling elementary school with Direct Instruction and laments that critics doubted his amazing results:
Wesley hadn’t become the best school in Houston. There were still about 20 schools — all with higher income populations — that were scoring better than Wesley. But Wesley was doing better than some schools in wealthy, white neighborhoods. And no school with as many kids from poor families was performing anywhere close.
Gayle Fallon, who was the head of the Houston teacher’s union, appeared in an interview with Chris Wallace of ABC News in 1991:
Chris Wallace: Why the suspicion?
Fallon: I think they suspect them because they are poor, Black children and because in the mindset in the administration they don’t believe poor, Black children can outperform suburban white children. And they are doing it. And they are doing it routinely.
Wallace: Ms. Fallon, you’re, you’re making a very serious charge.
Fallon: Right.
Wallace: You’re basically accusing the school district, the top administrators, of racism.
Fallon: Yes. I think probably racism of the worst kind. You know, it’s not even conscious racism. It’s a racism of lowering your expectations for minority students.
Raymond: That’s totally fallacious. It’s absolutely not true.
We’re supposed to be indignant that anyone would be skeptical of a school suddenly wildly outperforming its history.
The fifth episode covers what makes Direct Instruction effective:
There have been hundreds of studies since Project Follow Through. Direct Instruction is now one of the most researched education programs out there.
And there’s another body of research that’s relevant. Cognitive science — research on how people learn.
That science was still relatively new when Direct Instruction was first being developed.
But a lot of what Zig and his colleagues built into their programs lines up remarkably well with what cognitive scientists later figured out.
[…]
The idea is that a teacher can communicate something so clearly that students will learn what you want them to learn.
Zig and Doug had a name for this: Faultless communication.
[…]
You have to be really clear, so kids learn what you’re trying to teach them.
But you can’t teach kids everything. There’s not enough time in the school day for that.
And you don’t need to teach kids everything.
You need to give kids a foundation, so they can learn things you haven’t taught them.
[…]
Kids figuring things out on their own. You’ve heard that before.
That’s the goal of discovery learning — for kids to become independent learners.
Zig wanted kids to become independent learners too.
The disagreement was about how kids get there.
[…]
An expert already knows a lot about a topic. When they encounter something new, they have knowledge to draw on. They can connect the dots. Come up with insights and ideas of their own.
That’s what Carl wanted his students to do. He wanted them to think like experts.
But they weren’t. They were still beginners.
[…]
His students needed to know more.
And the cognitive science research he was reading kept pointing to the benefits of teaching things directly. Especially for beginners. And especially for certain kinds of knowledge.
[…]
Jean and her team went through all the studies they’d found. They excluded some for things like poor research design. Took the more than 300 studies that were left and calculated what is known as an “effect size.”
[…]
The average overall effect size for Direct Instruction across all the studies was .56.
That might not sound like a big number. But it’s a big number in the land of education and effect sizes. Researchers generally consider an effect size of .25 to be educationally significant.
Direct Instruction’s average effect size was more than twice that.
[…]
Several of the studies tracked students for years. In some cases, from elementary school all the way through high school. And students who’d had Direct Instruction were still doing better.
That kind of staying power is unusual. A lot happens to a student as they move through school — different teachers, different classes. But years later, the Direct Instruction advantage was still there.
And Direct Instruction worked for all kinds of students. Not just kids in special education. Not just kids in certain racial or ethnic groups. Not just kids from low-income families.
Sales of print books have increased nearly twenty-five per cent from a decade ago. The number of independent bookstores in the United States has climbed steeply since 2009, with a seventy-per-cent increase since 2020. A survey by the Pew Research Center found that thirty-eight per cent of American adults read one to five books in 2025, and fourteen per cent read at least twenty. The global book market is expected to grow five per cent annually for the next several years; for the generation now entering college, book sales are at a lifetime high.
In its lament for fading literacy, the Atlantic mentioned current data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, whose reading survey of thousands of students began in 1971. “Just 35 percent of high-school seniors were ‘proficient’ at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument,” the magazine’s staff writer Rose Horowitch observed. That sounds bad, but the same figure a decade ago was thirty-seven per cent—just two points higher—and in the gloriously unwired age of 1992 it was forty. And the survey’s broad news was good. American nine-year-olds performed much better on reading assessments in 2025 than in 1971, and thirteen-year-olds’ performance held steady. The reading skills of English learners have risen in the past two decades, and, unlike in 1971, the top quarter of Black and Hispanic students today out-read the average white child.
“I thought that piece in the Atlantic made some good points, but the idea that reading has finished and we have moved into a kind of post-literate dark age strikes me as absurd,” Robert Darnton, a historian of the book and a former director of the Harvard University Library, told me. “ I have a little collection of jeremiads, and one is from 1928, when Walter Benjamin said, ‘Everything indicates that the book is nearing its end.’ ” He added, “There’s this unprecedented change in the technology of reading, and people are naturally reacting to that, because it’s disorienting. How do we make sense of changes that have hit us so fast?” “Every decade, there is a new scapegoat for why the reading public is diminishing,” Nancy Bass Wyden, who owns the Strand Book Store, told me. “The fact of the matter is that books are one of our most enduring forms of human expression.”
The illusion of decline might come in part because people consume books differently. Pew reported that, in 2025, the number of adults who read a print book during the year was eight percentage points less than it was in 2011—but that the number who read an e-book and the number who listened to an audiobook each increased by almost double the same proportion.
Unlike its predecessors, To Have and Have Not did not come out through Princeton University Press—nor through any academic book publisher, for that matter. The peer reviewers just aren’t having it. Some won’t even read it.
Clark’s manuscript instead appears online in PDF form, free of charge but with the occasional typo still intact, via Econ Journal Watch, a publication focused on debates within economics.
[…]
The book advances a provocative argument, drawing together several of Clark’s recent academic papers—and several enormous datasets—to claim that social status not only persists strongly within families but does so specifically through genetic inheritance, to a far greater degree than virtually anyone has claimed.
[…]
To Have and Have Not is built on an incredible trove of historical information, including centuries’ worth of English genealogies and marriage records, as well as the population registers of modern Sweden and Denmark. The sheer scale of these data allows Clark to see how social status runs in families—across many links in the tree, both horizontal (from siblings to distant cousins) and vertical (from parents to kids to grandkids)—and to measure status in several ways, including occupational prestige, education, and housing quality.
[…]
To take a typical example, in Clark’s data on Britons born from 1910 to 1996, siblings’ home values correlated at about 0.33. In other words, if someone has an extremely expensive house, three standard deviations above the mean, our best guess would be for their sibling to have a merely nice house, one standard deviation above the mean—closer to the overall average than to the sibling.
[…]
When one moves from siblings all the way to cousins in that same housing-value analysis, the correlation drops only modestly, to 0.21. The general rule he discovers—across many different status measures, and across several centuries notwithstanding massive changes to society and technology—is that these correlations, despite starting out at a modest level, drop by only about one-fifth with each extra degree of relatedness. (Cousins are two steps more distant than siblings in this sense.)
[…]
When variables are measured poorly, or when they fail to capture important details of an underlying concept, the resulting correlations will appear artificially weak.
Thus, our focus shouldn’t linger on the modest correlations among immediate family members. Those aren’t a beautiful testament to the randomness of life and the possibility of change; they’re just misleading. Rather, the very slow decay of the correlations as we move through family trees is where the action is. It reveals a “latent” status that is extremely persistent. Clark finds measurable links in status even among fourth cousins, whose shared ancestors are five generations back.
[…]
Clark’s answer is assortative mating. If people marry others who are similar in their “latent” genetic social status—presumably by matching on a mix of education, intelligence, social graces, work ethic, family connections, and so on—each link in the family tree doesn’t simply add genetic randomness but rather springs from a careful romantic match of like with like. Using a formula that goes back to the pioneering British statistician and geneticist Ronald Fisher, Clark is even able to calculate how strong matching on this latent status must be: to explain the slow decay of social status across degrees of relatedness through genes alone, spouses must be correlated on their genetic status at 0.57. If someone has genetic social status one standard deviation above the mean, he’ll marry someone of status 0.57 standard deviations above it, on average.
[…]
Clark’s own takeaways from his analysis include that “England is, and has been, close to a meritocracy for many generations,” that “much of the 10 percent of national income typically spent on education by high income economies is largely a social waste,” that genetic transmission of status implies “an incentive to select high status immigrants, and reject low status ones,” and that the “relative fecundity of people at the top and the bottom of social abilities” will affect future social outcomes.
Britain’s medieval lead industry had restarted by the mid-600s:
According to a charter summary attributed to the year 835, a nobleman named Humberht paid the rent on an estate in Derbyshire in lead bars, having to organize its transport all the way to Canterbury.
A new study has found an older record of the Peak District’s medieval lead industry, in the teeth of the people who worked it.
Lead in their tooth enamel shows that production had restarted by the middle of the seventh century and that, by about AD 750, children around the mines at Castleton were growing up in heavily polluted homes.
[…]
Roman and medieval lead waste was re-smelted again and again between the 16th and 19th centuries, which erased many of the traces archaeologists would normally use, according to the University of Nottingham.
“Enamel does not remodel after its initial formation, so these samples provide a closed record of lead concentrations during childhood, between the ages of approximately four and 12 years,” the authors write.
[…]
The researchers sampled 17 people: ten from two Castleton cemeteries, Joule Yard (seventh to eleventh centuries) and Spital Field (twelfth to fifteenth), five from a seventh-century cemetery at Wigber Low, and two from the Iron Age site of Eldon Hole.
Lead in teeth is measured in parts per million (ppm), and according to the study values below 0.5 ppm reflect natural background levels, while anything above 0.6 to 0.7 ppm points to human activity.
“All but one of the medieval individuals had lead concentrations of more than 10ppm,” the authors write, “indicating substantial anthropogenic lead exposure in childhood.” Four of the 15 medieval people had levels above 40 ppm.
Even in the seventh century, the team says, the most exposed children in these Derbyshire mining communities carried as much lead as people in industrial cities of about 1750 to 1850, or more.
At Wigber Low, the pattern seemed to follow rank. A man buried in the seventh century with a sixth-century sword, probably an heirloom, had just 2 ppm, about what people in Iron Age and Roman cemeteries outside lead regions carried.
A young woman from the same cemetery, who died at about 17, had 69.1 ppm. A man in an unfurnished grave, who may have grown up in western Britain, had 29.5 ppm.
Most of the Russian ships were unregistered and sailed without transponders, making them a kind of regional adjunct of Moscow’s “shadow fleet” that ships Russian oil and other goods to the global market in defiance of international sanctions.
The Black Sea shadow fleet has, or had, a more limited remit. It helped supply Russian forces in southern Ukraine—in particular, the Crimean Peninsula, which functions as a kind of unsinkable aircraft carrier for Russian air power.
On July 7, Ukraine’s deep strike drone force finally started hunting the Russian ships—starting with the tankers that represented the bulk of the shadow fleet. By day five of the counter-shipping effort, the Ukrainians had hit and damaged no fewer than 76 tankers and even a few tugboats sent to assist the damaged tankers.
“To be clear, 76 tankers comprise a massive fraction of Russia’s shadow fleet” of unregistered ships, RAND analyst Michael Bohnert explained. “At this rate, in two weeks, there will be next to no Russian tankers in the Black Sea,” Bohnert predicted.
In fact, it took a bit longer for Ukrainian drones to effectively erase Russian shipping from the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea. But they did do so—mostly with propeller-driven Fire Point FP-1s and FP-2s. After four weeks, the drones had struck more than 200 Russian ships: the majority of the regional shadow fleet.
The basic, $50,000 FP-1 carries a 130-pound warhead 600 miles under satellite, 5G and mesh radio control. Trading range for firepower, the FP-2 carries a 440-pound warhead out to a distance of around 120 miles.
Upgraded versions of both the FP-1 and FP-2 extended the range of each and also added A.I.-assisted targeting that helped the drones strike ships’ bridges and machinery without also penetrating their hulls and risking environmentally damaging oil spills.
Absent a strong Russian response, the Black Sea countershipping campaign could have ended in a decisive victory for Ukraine. The problem for the Ukrainians is that the Russians also have drones—and, equally importantly, a substantial inventory of cruise and ballistic missiles.
Bob Sykes: One way to hide information is to mix it into a sea of noise.
Bruce: Scott Alexander made the point that everyone texting all the time is at least practicing basic literacy. And everyone who uses social media instead of television video news is reading, like reading the papers fifty years ago. Kurt Vonnegut used to say that if you walked into a house and saw his books or Tolkein’s, it didn’t mean they were reading the stuff. It was just furniture for a certain sort of person. But some were reading.
Bob Sykes: For some time now, Russia has imposed a total blockade on the Ukrainian Black Sea ports.
Lucklucky: Since when did Afghanistan not initiate the conflict? Or Iran? Actually there are several times the US would have been justified to answer Iran’s aggression and did not.
Phil B: “It started giving more money to the Follow Through models that had not done well.” Or, as it is known in the trade, reinforcing failure. Had those funds been spent on schools and pupils that did well, then how much better would they have succeeded? Compare and contrast the results of spending $50,000 per pupil in an inner city school and $20,000 per pupil in a less “diverse” neighbourhood. But failure must not only be reinforced but rewarded with more cash.
Isegoria: Asking Grok about that claim was eye opening: The frequently repeated claim that the US “initiated 81% of 248 armed conflicts from 1945 to 2001” originates in a Chinese Society for Human Rights Studies report (circulated around 2022 amid US-China tensions). It is not based on transparent methodology matching UCDP, Correlates of War (COW), or similar standards, treats “initiated” expansively (including indirect involvement, proxies, or interventions in existing conflicts), and is widely regarded...
Bob Sykes: One is reminded that of the 250, or so, armed conflicts since 1945, 80% were started by the US, and almost always against countries at peace with us and our allies. Recent examples are Panama, Haiti (too numerous to count), Granada (a UK commonwealth member), Serbia, Somalia (still active after 34 years), Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq (twice), Syria, Yemen, Iran, Venezuela, Lebanon (by proxy), and Ukraine. The coup of 2014 that installed the current neonazi junta was our doing.
Isegoria: From The Screwtape Letters (Letter 27), by C.S. Lewis: And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another.
David Foster: CS Lewis said (quoting very loosely) that if you want to destroy and infantry unit, you cut it off from its adjacent units…if you want to destroy a generation, you cut it off from its adjacent generations.
McChuck: A mild fever for a day or two after an inoculation is nothing. It’s a normal response to your body fighting an infection — which is the entire point of the inoculation. The strokes, heart attacks, and blood clots after the mRNA Covid shots are of real concern — but of course they can’t possibly study those, because they “don’t exist”.
Ozornik: It’s funny to read it against this: “The CDC advised her to take her temperature”, posted here on October 14th, 2026 Both Marburg and Ebola are not airborn and require direct bodily contact to spread. Methinks the author of the book might be either one of the lowest form of human existence – a journalist, or might have monetary interest in scaremongering oblivious sheeple. Oh, wait.
Phileas Frogg: People who intend to sit atop hierarchies should acquire the skills for getting and remaining on top of hierarchies. The great delusion of modern education is that they’ll somehow accomplish this by being good at math or engineering. I didn’t realize until I was in my mid-20′s that networking is an art, a specific skillset that needs deliberate cultivation. The best part is that when you tell most people they don’t believe you and just keep on hammering on about...
PM: Phileas Frogg says: “The first country to fully re-embrace rule by warriors is going to be hellacious to deal with for a few years.” Which puts me very much in mind of the Russian Federation’s ongoing initiative to load their bureaucracy with returning veterans of the SMO.
Bruce: Characters in 19th Century novels are constantly “overworking” and then taking off a summer or an entire year from their jobs. Getting ‘tired and emotional’? or other euphemisms for ‘publicly drunk’? Lot of overdrinking at work in 19th century culture.
Phileas Frogg: The side with better PPP is always more militarily dangerous than the side with better GDP. We’re going to learn that hard lesson very soon, but what do you expect? We’re ruled by bankers and merchants, while Russia and China are ruled by spies and engineers. The first country to fully re-embrace rule by warriors is going to be hellacious to deal with for a few years.
Bob Sykes: The novels of Jane Austin, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy, truly excellent as stories, also provide detailed descriptions of life in Britain during the 19th Century. Austin for the gentry, Dickens for the urban poor, and Hardy for the rural working class. Also, A.J.P. Taylor’s history of WWI has an analysis of the economic conditions in the run up to the War, and he concludes that working class was materially better off under wartime rationing than during the peace in the early 1900’s. The...
Jim: Traditionalists think that education should prioritize acquiring knowledge, that it should focus on ‘hard’ subjects like science, mathematics, and foreign languages, and that it should take place in a highly structured environment, where students’ time and behavior are tightly regulated. Progressives think that education should prioritize acquiring skills, that it should embrace ‘soft’ subjects beyond the supposed academic core, and that students should be given wide freedom in which to develop...
Steve Sailer: Characters in 19th Century novels are constantly “overworking” ; and then taking off a summer or an entire year from their jobs. That doesn’t happen that much anymore. It’s a little hard to grasp what that was about.
Dan Kurt: “Hely Hutchinson Almond, headmaster of Loretto School, who described his school’s priorities as ‘First – character, second…’” A late professor of modern history told me that the German military from the reforms in the early 19th century until its defeat in WW2 tried to select its officers under the chief criterion of one’s Character.
In his upcoming book, Unbeatable, Bryan Caplan makes the brutally honest case for free markets: 
