AynCrap

A podcast, Citations Needed , forgot that poverty, violence, hunger and infant mortality are declining and decided that all of the media folk saying positive things about the major trend of our time (modern economic growth) are all wrong. The neoliberal optimism industry is hard at work pushing a cherry-picked slab of bias in our faces and we fellow optimists are all being bamboozled. Of course this is completely wrong, per abundant scholarship and evidence, some even tweeted by Pinker himself on November 24th 2018, four days before this podcast was released. At 05:00 into the podcast they seem to suggest that liberal capitalism = alt-right and fascism! You might wonder why I bother mentioning this since they say they don't take the fish hook theory very seriously themselves. It's because they insist on reading things Pinker isn't saying into Pinker's public statements, so I will work from the assumption that I am supposed to read things these podcasters aren'

The Economics Detective is a fun podcast series looking into economic subjects in detail. This makes it very informative! One fascinating edition of the podcast looks at the question of why Ancient Greece circa 500 to 300 BCE did not transition to 1% plus annual economic growth rates. They even talk about McCloskey's ideas thesis! The position of the interviewee, George Trimidas, is that lack of resources (mainly coal) for steel-smelting explains the failure of the initial Greek efflorescence to transition into 1% plus annual economic growth. He does also acknowledge the absence of a sympathetic attitude toward the bourgeoisie, citing the risk of being subject to the illiberal Athenian practice of 'ostracism'. [ 1 ] [1] http://economicsdetective.com/2018/08/no-ancient-greek-industrial-revolution-conversation-george-tridimas/?fbclid=IwAR08gXZsBjDkU97PY4LO2Xk3kdgK-058VvtK4m_EPW13XOWNZhHiYrXhMxo

I recently found  a review of Ha-Joon Chang's book Kicking Away the Ladder on one of my fave websites, EH.net. In the review the author (Douglas Irwin) finds Chang's argument that barriers to free trade are required for a country to develop unconvincing. Chang fails to persuade Irwin because he does not engage with the existing economic history literature on the very subject (economic policy and its effects on development) that he is discussing.

On the website of the Guardian an article was posted that makes sense. [ 1 ] Author Oliver Burkeman brings up a fascinating experiment in which people were presented with a range of dots in various colors along a spectrum including unambiguous blue dots and asked to identify which dots were blue and which were not. [ 2 ] The researchers found that subjects ascribed blueness gradually more and more widely as more and more of the near-pure blue dots were removed in successive iterations of the experiment. Effectively the subjects were moving the goalposts of what constituted blueness in their own heads. Burkeman points out that on an objective scale pretty much everything is getting better for pretty much everybody these days, making the case that the perception to the contrary is a result of the goalpost-moving described above, referred to in the research as "prevalence-induced concept change". [1] 'Are things getting worse - or does it just feel that way?' b

Dave Rubin has a show on Youtube wherein he interviews various characters of a liberal/libertarian bent. In one of those interviews he chatted with Bryan Caplan on anarcho-capitalism and its corollaries. Cool interview, huh? Below is an argument over a comment made by Caplan with regard to arbitration. [ 1 ] ~~~ SpiderDemon 11 months ago Arbitration gets problems solved in a few days? Bullshit, try months or years, and with more money than most people have to pay for it. This guy is a fraud.  This is how it works, get a loan from a bank to build a house, construction company builds your house not to code so the city won't let you live in it, bank forecloses on your house when you stop paying.  That's "anarcho capitalism" in the US. It's where

So I was reading a piece on The Outline about identity politics when the author, Sean McElwee, brought up a survey he had penned and collated to establish how positions on economic and racial issues align; Could Democrats win over racially conservative whites with economic populism? It’s unlikely, because people who oppose racial justice also tend to oppose liberal economic policies.  To test this, I created scales of economic and racial liberalism, using two questions that have been on the American National Election Studies surveys since 1972. One question asks respondents to place themselves on a one-to-seven point scale on government aid to black Americans, the other on a one-to-seven scale on guaranteeing jobs and income for all Americans. In 1972, only 54 percent of white Americans who took the racially liberal position (supporting aid to black Americans) also took the economically liberal position (guaranteeing jobs and income).  By 2016, 74 percent did. And in 1972,