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The world is a lot more peaceful than it used to be. Quit your whining and watch the video: Pinker is a lot smarter and open-minded than the talking heads and liberal worryworts that most of you are used to.
For instance, the violent death rate in Europe during the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad, 20th century was about 5% of that for hunter-gatherers.
Via Gongol.
It's looking like Hillary vs. Rudy. Consider this:
Brad DeLong: "... I think it is the two cents' worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994--is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life".
Daniel W. Drezner: "... Despite the fact that this collection of individuals would likely disagree about pretty much everything, there was an airtight conensus about one and only one point: A Giuliani presidency would be an unmitigated disaster for the United States."
I think it's fair to say that these guys would be broadly inclined to vote Democratic and Republican respectively.
Scared yet?
More details from A Fistful of Euros about Transnistria - a nasty little state without a country, run for profit by thugs.
This is heretical, but maybe trade restrictions are popular because they just don't hurt that much.
In perusing the World Bank's Overall Trade Restrictiveness Indices, I'm struck by how startling low the deadweight losses are from trade restrictions.
In most cases, they amount to a few tenths of a percent shaved off of GDP growth each year.
The sample is not particularly representative: 73 countries out of the 200 or so we have, and a lot of the nasty ones aren't on the list.
Even so, the median deadweight loss subtracts just 0.2% of off annual growth rates.
I emphasize in my principles of macro classes that the limit of what can be accurately felt by the public is a difference in GDP growth of about 1% either way. To me, this suggests that most people out in the real world are not capable of feeling the effects of trade restrictions.
To put this in perspective, suppose that your real income grew at the average rate of real GDP growth observed in the U.S. over recent decades: about 3.5% per year. Over a 40 year career, your income would go up by just about 300%. If we drop that down to 3.3% per year, you would cut that down to about 265%. That's not anything to sneeze at, but it isn't exactly mind-blowing either.
Do note that there are also distributional consequences, and shoe leather costs associated with trade restrictions that are not being measured here.
Hat tip to Ben Muse.
Y'all probably heard this already (I was away from my computer when the verdict came in late yesterday afternoon).
Anyway, Warren Jeffs was found guilty of both counts, looking at 5 to life for each, with sentencing just before Thanksgiving.
My guess is that now they've found him guilty of something, they'll try him for other crimes (like a federal flight from prosecution charge) so that they can get him into ADX Florence. That might seem like overkill for such a timid looking guy, but the security has been unbelievable in St. George the last few weeks, so they definitely think he is a jailbreak risk with potentially violent followers.
I'm glad they got him, but this is really just a show trial. There's a ton of corruption and fraud at the top of the FLDS hierarchy, and that's what the authorities need to go after. No sign of movement on that front though.
It's sad too. This is a deeply ignorant, and probably mildly retarded fellow, who has been raised in a world where assuming that all your actions are faultless is encouraged. And, he lives in a society that is quite used to deciding that some people are incapable of making mistakes. This is not a recipe for success.
Lastly, the whole idea that there had to be sex involved in order for the authorities to get involved is a sad testament on contemporary America. Teenage girls make bad sexual choices all the time; Jeffs encouraged this in a particular sort of way that isn't all that uncommon in other parts of the world. That doesn't make it a good thing, but we need to recognize that this guy is probably also a statutory rapist - but no one is talking about that personality quirk. Then there is the idea that he made these statutory rapes take place; that's absolutely true, but we don't usually go after gang leaders for encouraging gang rapes - instead we think of that as part of a bigger criminal enterprise.
And there's the rub. The FLDS hierarchy is a criminal racket that engages in a huge number of bad behaviors - and no one cares, or pays attention. If The Crips run a neighborhood where they dominate girls, tell them as teenagers that they need to submit to rape, and assign a gangbanger to do it, the authorities recognize that this is part of a bigger problem and attack on multiple fronts. But, when a bunch of ignorant white folks from the rural west do it in the name of religion, we turn a blind eye to most of their activities. That's got to change.
Al Gore wasn't the only "Gucci farmer". Check out the map of agricultural subsidy recipients living in Manhattan in this Ben Muse post.
Better graphic design is coming to signs on the interstate (the piece has interesting bits on typefaces used in public works England, France, and Germany, as well as the new one for the National Park Service).
The skinny is that the old typeface, known as Highway Gothic (you can buy something similar called Interstate here), is being displaced by new typeface called Clearview (you can buy something similar called ClearviewHwy here).
The big difference is that the dark interior open spaces of the letters are larger - this reduces the tendency of the letters to turn into blobs when brightly illuminated.
Via Kottke.
The Dinosaur Heresies is a little more involved reading project than yesterday's feature, Digging Dinosaurs
The author is Bob Bakker, once the enfant terrible of paleontology, now a senior scientist at the center of the field.
This is the book that really put dinosaurs back into public knowledge. The image we have today of quick moving, agile, sly and colorful dinosaurs really starts with Bakker (although the Jurassic Park book
The book is the most erudite I've read in a year or so. There's a huge amount about anatomy, physiology and geology, but there's also zoology, psychology, and artistry mixed in (Bakker fills the books with dozens of pen and ink drawings). It's filled with big ideas: why cold-bloodedness would not have worked out for dinosaurs, why this made them fast, how they co-evolved with flowering plants, and so on.
If you know a lot about dinosaurs already, this is still a classic that you should read.
If you want to learn about dinosaurs, you could certainly get a ton out of this one place. I wouldn't call the book difficult either - I think a novice could grasp just about anything that Bakker discusses.
More below the fold.
Megan McArdle is in the same boat as me:
America is not going to sign onto any sort of significant, comprehensive reduction strategy as part of a global treaty. Before my liberal readers freak out, this does not make me happy. I'm one of those crunchy cons (well, crunchy libertarians, anyway), you've been reading about. The odds are very good that I support stiffer carbon taxes, and live a lower-carbon, more environmentally friendly lifestyle, than you do. But politically, I don't see any way that this is going to happen.
Perhaps I feel the way I do about environmental measures because I don't suffer from as much angst about the way I live my life.
That Vladimir Putin pocketed the 5 caret Super Bowl ring of the owner of the New England Patriots.
Lest we forget, this is the guy in charge of a country that kills foreign citizens in their own country with impunity.
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