Making sense of the Arab explosion
Pastoralist peoples exploding out of the their lands and conquering farming peoples is a recurring feature of human history.
Likely expansion of the Indo-Europeans.
Articles from Skepticlawyer
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Working class alienation as a driver of political polarisation
This is based on a comment I made here.
The US has a legislated two Party system. (Left-cynics say that if the Soviet Communist Party had divided itself into two wings who disagreed on abortion, it would still be in power.)
Firms, Cities, States: who has open borders and why?
This is based on a comment I made here.
Econblogger Robin Hanson notes that firms and cities have open borders and argues that:
So if nations act differently from firms and cities, that should be because either:
Montesquieu and the US: explaining the US’s Presidential aberration
That pioneer political scientist Montesquieu‘s theory of the separation of powers was both a very odd take on the English system of government (which he claimed it to be) but also very influential in the drafting of the US Constitution.
Giving something away for free is not a sign of it having value
The progressivist war against citizenship took another big leap forward with the British Labour Party decision committing the Party to giving the vote in general elections to all UK residents.
The urban rural divide in the US and other complexities of polarisation
Former libertarian, now progressive, Will Wilkinson has a report up on the rural urban divide in US politics (pdf), connecting the concentration of economic production in a service economy in megacities, sorting by migration and internal movement, and cognitive patterns (particularly pertaining to
Silver is the monetary metal with proven historical resilience
This is based on a comment I made here:
Milton Friedman suggested that the pre-1873 mix of silver standard, gold standard, and dual standard countries was possibly more stable than having almost all the major countries on the gold standard. I think he is correct: that international monetary order certainly lasted a lot longer.
Save us from historically tone deaf academics living in intellectual bubbles
The Evolution Institute wants to apply up to date Darwinism to politics. In their own words:
Clades not clusters: about the folk theory of race
A clade is a group of organisms with a common ancestors. Identifying clades in human genetics maps out the ancestry of human groups. Like most genetic analysis of human populations, it is based on identifying
How to play intersectionality
I recently read, in quick succession, “Whiteness as Property” published in 1993 by Cheryl L.