factory farming is an ethical choice to prioritize the welfare of future humans (lower ghg emissions) over current day cows.

and i'm okay with that.

also i weight cow welfare at a precise zero in my welfare function anyways.
clear.ucdavis.edu/blog/its-time-…
if you wanted one mathematical construct that i think is most closely a proxy for a quantitative rule of moral behavior, it would be the discount rate. lower discount rates are almost always more moral than higher discount rates. patience is the basic virtue.

It was a good thing to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It would have been a good thing to nuke Berlin if it had been an option earlier in the war.

Sherman's March to the Sea was not just morally acceptable, it was a moral requirement.

Replies are turned off. Not sorry. An actually just war:
1) Must be waged with a strategy calculated to minimize war duration, since war duration is by far the greatest cause of total civilian suffering
2) Must be waged with a strategy calculated to minimize odds of recurrence, for obvious reasons

Why did so many hunter gatherer groups around the world nearly-simultaneously and in an unconnected way develop agriculture?

This has been a kinda problematic question in human prehistory.

It may have been solved... by an economist?

Studying the economics of... Earth's orbit? Okay let's back up.

Earth's climate has a lot of moving parts. But a big factor, as every child knows, is that the sun is quite warm. But sometimes, a spot on earth is closer to the sun. And sometimes further. Because our planet is caterwampus, i.e. tilted on its axis.

Hugely important preprint for pronatal policy.

What happens when you exogenously 1) INCREASE WORK INCENTIVES by 2) boosting household returns to work but 3) you accidentally and randomly make it a gender-specific benefit?

Fertility both rises AND falls.
So first you need to understand the intervention.

The author calls it a basic income. But technically it was a back-to-work subsidy structured as an income floor for currently unemployed people in Finland. If you were poor, your current benefits were deducted from it.

why christianity was victorious, funerary epigraphy edition

source: prism.ucalgary.ca/server/api/cor…

when i tell you it is not a great idea to have more young adults living with parents, you should listen to me, i am not making it up. if you then ask those women if they are trying to conceive a child right now or about to start trying, there's an optimal proximity to parents:

right which is why fertility is so high in housing abundant tokyo

https://twitter.com/aarmlovi/status/1777713609474281574

okay but more seriously:

it's not that building housing is bad (it's not)

it's not that building dense housing is bad (it could be but isn't always)

it's that housing's effect on fertility depends on more than just affordability and density.

Do women face pressure to use contraception that isn't appropriate for them?

I think this is an important question, and so, with support from @FamStudies , fielded a survey module that asked women about some contraceptive attitudes and behaviors.

Answer: Yes.
ifstudies.org/blog/contracep… To begin with, for a variety of reasons related to sensitive topics, we didn't ask women "has somebody every bullied you into using contraception you didn't want" or "were you forcibly sterilized."

We followed with prior literature to identify possible "excess use."

This post is unfortunately fraught with empirical errors. Let's go through them.

https://twitter.com/MTabarrok/status/1776390910844010650

1) Is fertility U-shaped with income?

Answer: No. There's a zombie chart that has circulated for years that Maxwell has replicated, showing a U-shape of fertility in the ACS. I've shown this here:

https://x.com/lymanstoneky/status/1693412441793695830

*extremely exasperated academic voice*

In the debate over density and fertility with @MoreBirths @bryan_caplan @PTBwrites I just wish any of them were engaging with the literature.
mailchi.mp/eppc/fecundity… The best evidence we have suggests that living in dense environments causes lower fertility. We know that selective migration does not account for most of the suburban-urban fertility difference. We also know that price/fertility gradients are steeper in denser environments.

I like @jburnmurdoch but this entire post is wrong and detached from the scholarly literature. I appreciate the friendly cites to me, but the thesis is totally wrong. ft.com/content/838eeb… First of all, the lack of citation to either Bergsvik review is a serious misstep, e.g. here: or here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

This @WSJ piece on drones is fascinating, but also obviously incorrect on this one quite important point. wsj.com/tech/drone-swa…
It actually is totally technologically possible for a state or nonstate actor to get, say, 3,000 drones, and have 3,000 guys pilot them. That is possible. Tbh it's shocking it isn't already done in Ukraine; both sides have the manpower to do it.

this article is a demography reporting crime.

on the plus side, it quotes zero demographers, so you can trust that it won't be very helpful for understanding what's going on.

https://twitter.com/jeanmackenzie/status/1762674717360877693

it also quotes zero economists or sociologists. this isn't a disciplinary critique.

Today @ProfEmilyOster 's newsletter reviews a nice recent paper which shows pretty convincing evidence that younger siblings have lower lifetime income because they are exposed to more illnesses from near-age-older-siblings.

But there's a caveat.
web.stanford.edu/~mrossin/Child… To understand the caveat we need to wonder what a parent's objective is for a child.

Suppose a parent's objective is to maximize the average income of each child. On that basis, this paper suggests that parents should space children out quite a lot (like ~6 years).

Love classical school. Wife worked in one a long time, we're putting the kids in one.

I will never accept the idea that the American republic is mostly an instantiation of Greco-Roman republicanism rather than its actual true historic root, German-Nordic egalitarian norms.

https://twitter.com/PerfInjust/status/1759613882006401450

I will believe Classical education has truly come into its own when Classical school libraries have a larger number of reproductions of the Sagas and Eddas than Greek myths, when the Kalevala is read as often as the Odyssey.

Very cool!

https://twitter.com/MartinKolk/status/1759575513192927554

I really like this paper and I think @MartinKolk and @ognjenob maybe missed what I think is one of its biggest points of general relavence:

purely non-genetic traits (language) can in fact be extremely closely proxied by genetic kinship structure, which suggests genetic kinship structure cannot be isolated from cultural transmission

Recently I've been interacting with undergrads a lot and I have some advice for undergrad men:

Your value on the dating market drops by about 99% the moment you have a diploma in your hand. Plan accordingly. This may sound weird to say, so let me explain.

College is weird. Students have these artificially stratified social environments tightly focused on peers of similar ages and often similar interests, backgrounds, goals, capabilities, etc.

With falling fertility, a lot of people want to look to technology for solutions: can we expand things like IVF to extend reproductive lives and help women achieve their goals later in their biological life? Because skills-biased technical change and improved work opportunities for women have given young women strong incentives to postpone birth until later in life, maybe offering IVF can compensate!

It's an extremely plausible theory. And as it happens, also testable. States have rolled out mandates for coverage of various degrees of infertility services at different times. A very influential study in 2007 looked at these policy rollouts, and concluded that they considerably boosted first-birth rates for older women:

Three asterisks and an effect of 0.1385 first births per 1,000 women >35! That one finding has led to a fair amount of citation and lots of optimism.

But right off the bat you see the problem, right?

There's a negative coefficient for mandates generally, i.e. the under-35 women. And when we stratify by age, there's no significant effects at all. It gets worse: these specifications don't have state time trends. When those are included, half of the effect evaporates, and the only significant result remaining is a negative effect for younger black women:

And yet the author says:

Low bar for success IMHO.

But that was 2007. Since 2007, states have changed laws various times, and more data has accumulated.

So what does that data show?

Well, there have been a few studies in particular I think are important.

The first uses longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to assess in individual longitudinal data if infertility mandates alter marriage and fertility behavior across the life course. The intuition here is straightforward: if we see an aggregate relationship between infertility insurance mandates and birth rates, we should then be able to see a concordant relationship in individual panel data.


The finding? IVF may slightly increase first birth rates, but it leads to women marrying less at younger ages (even if slightly more at older ages). So IVF may have a small net benefit on first births, but it also reduces years-spent-married in younger ages. The availability of IVF doesn't just compensate for postponement, it creates more postponement. Other studies confirm this in data from the Current Population Survey. Infertility mandates don't just compensate, they also cause, marriage and fertility delay.
link.springer.com/article/10.100…
link.springer.com/article/10.100…

I have been very critical of childcare as a policy. But I believe a handful of institutions (most notably IKEA and the YMCA) have correctly identified the way to do childcare:

Build its price into the generalized cost of goods and services at the corporate level. When you go to IKEA, there is a playground area. You can drop your kids there. It is clean and safe and fine. Then you can go shopping. Afterwards you can pick up your kids and eat in the food hall.

None of this feels bizarre or radical, but it actually is.

Great thread. A serious deficiency of Anglophone history is that Keynes' silly "Versailles was too harsh" argument has proved so persuasive, whereas the obviously correct argument from Bainville "Versailles was not harsh enough" is forgotten.

https://twitter.com/Valen10Francois/status/1652630834141167617

The problem with arguments that a harsher peace couldn't have been imposed is that basically every Allied power other than America wanted a harsher peace and was willing to keep fighting a few more months to get one, and Wilson almost single-handedly thwarted that.

Quality research suggests that, for the population of people with diagnosed mood and behavioral disorders, pursuing therapy has real benefits in terms of alleviating symptoms. The benefits are not huge, and they don't extend to the general population, but they're real.

But...

https://twitter.com/matt_vanswol/status/1747021789518045469

A lot of people pursuing therapy do not have diagnosed conditions, nor would the use of a short diagnostic questionnaire indicate the presence of such conditions. There's no reason to expect any benefit for these people.