How did they get here? Apparently not across the Bering land bridge.
It’s interesting to see how much “science” has been overturned since I was kid, about things like dinosaurs, space and human migration. I suspect that the same will occur in nutrition and climate.
In the early 20th century, most progressives viewed as cutting-edge science what today looks like simple bigotry. “Eugenics and race science were not pseudosciences in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” Leonard emphasizes. “They were sciences,” supported by research laboratories and scholarly journals and promoted by professors at the country’s most prestigious universities.
While some socialists and conservatives also embraced them, Leonard argues, eugenics and scientific racism fit particularly well with progressive thought: “Eugenics was anti-individualistic; it promised efficiency; it required expertise, and it was founded on the authority of science.” Equally important, “biological ideas,” Leonard writes, gave progressive reformers “a conceptual scheme capable of accommodating the great contradiction at the heart of Progressive Era reform — its view of the poor as victims deserving state uplift and as threats requiring state restraint.” They could feel sorry for impoverished Americans while trying to restrict their influence and limit their numbers.
Know what else is “founded on the authority of science”? The war on the fossil-fuel industry, and the desire to control all aspects of our lives in the name of “saving the planet.”
In addition to restricting immigration, throwing people out of work with a minimum wage, and keeping blacks and other inferiors out of the job market, she could have also pointed out that gun control (another “progressive” idea) was traditionally intended to keep those inferior disarmed.
And nothing has changed. Accusations of “racism” against actual liberals by “progressives” remain, as with accusations of “hate,” and “violence,” and “ignorance,” psychological projection.
[Update a few minutes later]
How to get “progressive” students to understand the minimum wage:
When I get to the words “parasites,” I am aware that my tone of voice and demeanor are showing signs of disgust. They are disgusting sentiments, not easily read aloud to a classroom of students.
I think this is useful pedagogically for several reasons. First, it teaches students in political economy to carefully distinguish positive analysis from normative evaluation. By building this in early in the course, I find it easier to teach more difficult concepts like Coase and externalities. Second, it poses a striking challenge to students’ priors that good intentions lead to good policy. I use the opportunity to emphasize that economists judge policies by their outcomes, not the intentions behind them. Third, the example demonstrates the value of knowing something about the history of ideas and economic thought. It enriches their knowledge of both of the historical and contemporary debates and they remember it (I think). Fourth, the discussion invites a consideration of what values, views, and policies are consistent with their own normative positions. And finally, it is a powerful illustration of how ideas have consequences.
Yes. I wish that more teachers did this. But of course, too many of them are “progressives.”
Humans’ strange love affair with them.
Our current cat is the weirdest one we’ve ever had. She’s very social, and has never attacked us, other than nipping at my calves occasionally when she wants to be fed. In fact, that’s the only way she communicates orally; she never talks. I know her vocal cords work, because she will have discussion with other cats, but with us she’s silent, unless you squeeze her. It’s a problem in fact, because if she gets stuck in a closet, we’d never know, unless she bangs on the door. She also has a genetic defect that created a kink in her tail, making her look like a squirrel, so this may be another one.
A fascinating interview. I agree with him that the PhD system needs an overhaul. Seeking one has ruined many lives.
Mark Steyn reflects on the passing of John Glenn. I don’t agree entirely, and I think he misses some key points, one of which was that Apollo was a battle in the Cold War that didn’t have much to do with space. With regard to Charlton, anyone who thinks we’re in technological decline, and unable to do great things any more hasn’t been paying attention to what’s been happening in microelectronics, microbiology, and yes, spaceflight. I’d suggest that Mark read my recent essay on the need to get over Apolloism.
[Update a while later]
Henry Vanderbilt weighs in over at Arocket:
Apollo was amazing, yes. But it did things the brute-force, massively-expensive way. Just look at the size of a Saturn 5 ready for liftoff, versus how much came back. Multiply that by the size of the payroll for the hundreds of thousands building and operating it, spread over a handful of missions a year. That’s a lot of expensive aerospace talent and hardware spent on every mission – billions worth.
Of course, they had no choice but to do it that way. They had an urgent national goal, a tight deadline, an effectively unlimited budget – and a 1962 technology base. One example: The computer that flew a Saturn 5 weighed as much as a small car – and was less powerful than the chips we put in toasters.
Two things happened after Apollo, one immediately bad, one eventually good.
The bad thing is that in the seventies, bureaucrats took over, and did what bureaucrats do: They carved into stone doing things the Apollo way. Shuttle resulted: gorgeous, yes, but only somewhat less expendable and slightly less labor-intensive than Saturn 5. And, alas, somewhat more fragile.
For decades this bureaucracy defended their billions-per-mission turf and defeated all efforts to do things less expensively. (In fact it’s still trying, with a MANY-billions-per-mission bastard offspring of Shuttle and Saturn 5 called “Space Launch System”.)
But the other thing that happened is, back in the eighties a few of us saw this bureaucratic logjam forming, and looked into whether space really had to cost billions per mission. We concluded it didn’t. We began pushing the different approaches it’d take to get costs down to where all the useful things we might do in space begin to be affordable.
It took a lot longer than we hoped getting into this. But thirty years later, commercial space companies are doing things at a tenth of traditional NASA costs. And that’s even before the really radical new technologies kick in, like the reusable flyback boosters just entering test in the last couple of years.
I won’t defend the wasted decades. (It wasn’t us wasting them, though at a number of points we could have been less naive about how ruthlessly the bureaucrats would defend their turf.)
But at this point, despair over the wasted decades is obsolete. Costs are coming down fast, huge possibilities are opening up. We could still blow it, yes. But compared to even just five or ten years ago, right now the future’s so bright I gotta wear shades.
Henry Vanderbilt
Space Access Society
(founded in 1992 with the intent of being no longer needed and disposed of in five years. yeah well.)
As I said on the Space Show the other week, the future for human spaceflight has never been more exciting.
A new technique that reduces power consumption by five orders of magnitude.
This is the only down side:
Aside from saving battery life on today’s devices, wireless communication that uses almost no power will help enable an “Internet of Things” reality where household devices and wearable sensors can communicate using Wi-Fi without worrying about power.
Just what we need: More devices to become a part of DDOS botnets.
She’s probably the world’s most underestimated woman.
That’s the Republicans’ plan to undo the legislative atrocity that is ObamaCare.
[Update a few minutes later]
Democrats plan a fight to save ObamaCare. I agree with Stephen Green:
If you — or GOP lawmakers — aren’t mentally prepared for the howls, the accusations of racism/sexism/etc, the tales of woe, and the panic-mongering, then you don’t understand how Democrats play this game.
The ugliness hasn’t even begun to begin.
Sadly true.
Is it killing us?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that some 75 million Americans now suffer from metabolic syndrome. If sugar consumption is the trigger, as 50 years of research suggests, then it might be as much of a direct cause of diabetes as smoking cigarettes is of lung cancer. Without sugar in our diets, diabetes might be an exceedingly rare disease—as it appears once to have been.
When Yudkin and others suggested as much in the 1970s, the consensus opinion among nutritionists and physicians was that dietary fat was the primary dietary evil; they considered sugar relatively benign. We have been living with the consequences ever since.
It’s worth noting this in the context that lifespan has fallen for the first time in decades: “If you like your longevity, you can keep your longevity“:
In story after story, we read about demographers and medical experts puzzling over what’s gone wrong. They point to heart disease, obesity, drug use, stroke, Alzheimer’s, suicide. The USA Today article notes that since World War II, it’s been rare to see a rise in U.S. mortality rates, and such spikes have usually been linked to highly specific events such as the spread of AIDS in the early 1990s, or a “nasty flu season” in 1980. By contrast, what we’re seeing now are rising mortality rates involving a broad range of causes, especially among middle-aged Americans.
Missing from all these accounts is a single word that ought to command unblinking attention: Obamacare.
While I agree that wrecking the medical-insurance industry is part of the problem, and may account for the most recent decline, it’s compounded by criminally awful nutrition advice from the FDA. One way or another, federal policies are killing us by the millions.
[Update early afternoon]
And it's going to keep getting worse if we don't fix it soon. https://t.co/pXRt3PAt4s
— Michael Eades, M.D. (@DrEades) December 9, 2016
…by moving its denizens out into the real country:
here’s my plan: During the next four years, the Trump Administration — and Congress — should plan to move at least 25% of the federal workforce located in the Washington, D.C. metro area to other locations around the country: Places that are economically suffering (which will have the advantage of making federal workers’ salaries go farther) and that need the business. Should Trump get another four years, he should do it all over again.
What’s interesting is that Vox (of all places) has a similar proposal, from Matt Yglesias:
The poorest places in the United States have been poor for a very long time and lack the basic infrastructure of prosperity. But that’s not true in the Midwest, where cities were thriving two generations ago and where an enormous amount of infrastructure is in place. Midwestern states have acclaimed public university systems, airports that are large enough to serve as major hubs, and cities whose cultural legacies include major league pro sports teams, acclaimed museums, symphonies, theaters, and other amenities of big-city living.
But industrial decline has left these cities overbuilt, with shrunken populations that struggle to support the legacy infrastructure, and the infrastructure’s decline tends to only beget further regional decline.
At the same time, America’s major coastal cities are overcrowded. They suffer from endemic housing scarcity, massive traffic congestion, and a profound small-c political conservatism that prevents them from making the kind of regulatory changes that would allow them to build the new housing and infrastructure they need. Excess population that can’t be absorbed by the coasts tends to bounce to the growth-friendly cities of the Sunbelt that need to build anew what Milwaukee, Detroit, and Cleveland already have in terms of infrastructure and amenities.
A sensible approach would be for the federal government to take the lead in rebalancing America’s allocation of population and resources by taking a good hard look at whether so much federal activity needs to be concentrated in Washington, DC, and its suburbs. Moving agencies out of the DC area to the Midwest would obviously cause some short-term disruptions. But in the long run, relocated agencies’ employees would enjoy cheaper houses, shorter commutes, and a higher standard of living, while Midwestern communities would see their population and tax base stabilized and gain new opportunities for complementary industries to grow.
In this context, it’s worth noting that LBJ treated NASA as a sort of “Marshall Plan” for the south, which persisted in its poverty after the Civil War. Only the Cape is really geographically needed; the other centers could have been elsewhere.
Of course, the down side for this proposal (for DC-area residents) would be a plunge in housing prices.