Even Cooler Than You Thought, Eh?

 

Baumol Cost Disease

Or Baumol Effect.  I had never heard of it until today.  Because all prices are relative, if the price of something goes down...No, I am not going to dare explain it.  I am reading a paper by Alex Tabarrok from Marginal Revolution and keep thinking I understand it, but the next page reveals that I probably don't. I really thought I had it when I grasped that when productivity improves in one facet of building a house, the wages go up even in areas that have not improved, because they are now the bottleneck that prevents the houses from being finished. But I think I am oversimplifying, as I am told it applies more strongly to services than to manufactured goods. 

It was recommended to me as explaining a great deal about economics, as it is a principle that works across countries, across industries, and across time. It is independent of regulation, though regulation keeps trying to correct it.

So have at it, with my blessing.  I'm going to try something else. 

Progressive Intellectuals

Image v. Reality  at Fake Nous.

My usual audience will wonder Why are we going over this ground again? It's a fair cop. This will look like many other discussions we have seen here and at our small corner of the internet.

First, it's a great name for site.  I was determined to link to something from the main page; the host is a philosophy professor with significant libertarian leanings. He doesn't pull punches.

I have spent many years around progressive intellectuals. They fill the academic world and the elite cultural circles of our society. As a group, they seem to me incredibly deceived and self-deceived people—much more self-deceived than right-wing intellectuals (of whom there are far fewer). Their worldview revolves around self-serving lies, and much of their self-image is practically the opposite of reality. 

Second, many of the themes I have tried to tie into the Dueling Intellectuals debate over the years are in this article. Echoes of the various tribes will show up.

That is the first element of progressive self-deception: they style themselves warriors against prejudice, but they are the biggest force stoking prejudice in our society. They think that their prejudice is different because the group they’re attacking is actually bad. They don’t see their stereotypes as stereotypes but just as the truth. That, of course, is what all bigots think. 

Many leftists seem to live in an alternate reality in which our society—including the most left-wing-dominated of institutions—is filled with neo-Nazis bent on hurting women and minorities at every turn. In the academic world, you can hear people talking about how biased the academic world is against women, in the very same meeting that everyone present agrees to give women preference over men in hiring, and no one notices the dissonance. Constantly talking about how the other side has all the power, while being constantly directly confronted with their own side’s power. 

 Third, some new insights I had not thought of, or not articulated as clearly

 This sort of echo chamber tends to make people overconfident, to make them ignore problems with their worldview and even take increasingly extreme and implausible positions. Conservative intellectuals, by contrast, are probably more self-aware because they keep hearing criticisms from left-wing intellectuals. (But this is not true of the right-wing masses, who ignore the left-wing intellectuals.) 

I have a friend who worked long amongst liberals who had tiring and irritating prejudices.  But she took a new job that involved a lot of work with bluer-collar guys who had different false beliefs, about contrails and power lines.  There was a general cynicism that everything was not what it seemed and was either a sham or a shady plot by the worst of the powerful.  CS Lewis noted much the same nearly a hundred years ago. It was not merely different prejudices, but a different kind of prejudice.

 

Grover Cleveland's Grandson

I keep forgetting this bit of NH trivia.  George Cleveland, a grandson of Grover Cleveland is still alive, up in Tamworth. We used to vacation up there, and bsking's family is quite familiar with the area. Her father Mike, also a commenter here, lived in the next town over when younger and they have a lake cabin up there.  It is in the borderland where the Lakes Region leaves off and the White Mountains pick up.

George is my age, but I've never met him and don't know that we have friends in common. 

Raining Tonight

 

Semantic Shift

 I noticed today in an older book, The Memoirs of Count Witte, that he uses the word "practically" to mean in every practical sense: "I was practically the head of the Odessa Railroad." We would interpret that now to mean "I was almost the head of the Odessa Railroad." It's one of the fun things about reading older works, sensing the changes.

Trans Advocates

 No One Expects the Tranish Inquisition - Helen Joyce  

A Requiem For Nutrition

 Two years ago from Cremieux Recueil Food Probably isn't Making People Smarter or Dumber 

It is thorough. You can almost hear him thinking "Someone is going to bring up this objection right away.  Let me nip that in the bud." I understand that, and my overlong essays of ten and fifteen years ago illustrate it. He casts far afield to head critics off at the pass (metaphor alert: where he can nip them in the bud) with a long discussion on the Flynn Effect, the observation that IQ's have been rising across multiple populations for over a century*. The first guess that people have on this is nutrition, because that has been shown to be true in terms of height, and nutrition has varied within cultures and among cultures because of war and famine, creating rather dramatic natural experiments. It was not a crackpot theory. However, when looked at more closely it hasn't held up.

 We have noted that 20-point Dutch gain on a Raven’s-type test registered by military samples tested in 1952, 1962, 1972, and 1982. Did the Dutch 18-year-olds of 1982 really have a better diet than the 18-year-olds of 1972? The former outscored the latter by fully 8 IQ points. It is interesting that the Dutch 18-year-olds of 1962 did have a known nutritional handicap. They were either in the womb or born during the great Dutch famine of 1944—when German troops monopolized food and brought sections of the population to near starvation. Yet, they do not show up even as a blip in the pattern of Dutch IQ gains. It is as if the famine had never occurred.

 

 Iodine improves IQ in fetuses; adults as well? A meta-analysis of relevant studies says no.

Micronutrient supplements in Nepal and Indonesia; exposure to lead; even Ramadan 

 Among the White British students, the month of pregnancy Ramadan took place in wasn’t related to test scores, and among Caribbeans, the same thing was true. But, for Muslims, scores were lower if their mother was pregnant during Ramadan, and maybe lowest at two to three months in. (But even that is only one point difference.) 

*And has now stopped, puzzlingly. 

Come From Away

We went to see Come From Away at the Winnipesaukee Playhouse in Meredith.  That theater has some uncomfortable seats, but the production was good enough that the cast quickly overcame that and I no longer noticed. The script is about the 38 planes diverted on 9-11 to Newfoundland, Canada and stuck there for 3+ days, with the locals unexpectedly on the hook for taking care of them. If a production comes by, you will enjoy it.

 

The Letter

 Joe Cocker's movements are described as energetic and idiosyncratic. They always looked like some sort of neurological damage to me. It's a real contrast to Leon Russell, who looks as if it's not actually very interesting to be playing at a rock festival.  But I loved Cocker's voice. 

 There was a time in late highschool, 1970 or '71 when girls wore those blue boots with big stars, called "Joe Cocker's"

Are "Free Speech" Advocates Really Just Closet Racists?

No.

Oh, like you wanted some evidence or something?  If you must.  In fact, they show slightly more racial tolerance.

So-Called "Intersex" Individuals

 This particular post on Substack by Dr. T is good enough that I reprint it in full. In my comment there I noted that when I worked with Turner Syndrome and Klinefelter Syndrome patients in the 90's, the former were always clear that they are female and the latter that they are male.  They are a large percentage of the folks that trans advocates like to call intersex and imply that they are ambiguously gendered, but they do not in fact undermine the binary.  Dr. T assured me that this is still the case.

 Having accused my argument of being reductionist, simplistic and outdated, the SubStacker I quoted in my previous note went on to accuse my argument of an even worse transgression.

“[Your argument] also willfully ignores the existence of intersex individuals, whose biological reality defies your rigid binary, as well as the progress made in countries like India, where legal recognition of identity is increasingly based on lived reality rather than just chromosomes…”

I did not “wilfully” ignore “the existence of intersex individuals”.  My note did not mention disorders of sex development (abbreviated as DSDs) because the existence of congenital biological conditions (present at birth) in which the development of chromosomal, gonadal and/or anatomical sex is atypical do not challenge the binary (female/male) and immutable (unchangeable from birth until death) nature of biological sex in the human species.

In common with most biological scientists and health care professionals who treat people with DSDs, I do not use the obsolete term ‘intersex’ for a number of reasons.

First, the term ‘intersex’ is stigmatizing because it implies that ‘intersex’ is a person’s identity (as in, “she is intersex”).  In contrast, the term ‘DSD’ refers to an often debilitating biomedical condition that a person has from birth and throughout their life, not who a person is.  The use of DSD in place of intersex seeks to put the person first, as we do when we say that a person has a disability, rather than saying that the person is disabled.

Second, calling people who have DSDs, “intersex”, is both scientifically indefensible and an insult to the humanity of these people.  The people who used to be called “intersex freaks of nature”are not located somewhere on a sex continuum between a woman (a female person) and a man (a male person).  Nor do these people have a sex that is other than female or male.  The claim that DSDs create a variety of sexes, other than female or male, usually ranging from three to six other sexes, but even extending to a multitude of other sexes, is scientific sophistry serving the transgender political agenda.

Third, the social and biomedical challenges faced by people with DSDs have been weaponised by transgenderists in their war on the material reality of biological sex.  By including the letter ‘I for intersex’ in the LGBTQIA+ acronym, transgenderists claim that people with DSDs have ‘a queer gender identity’.  This has done a great disservice to people with DSDs and their families who are focused on ending the ignorance, stigma and trauma associated with DSDs and who do not want to serve as clown fish in scientifically ludicrous attempts to disprove that sex is binary and immutable in the human species.

The main source of the ignorance, stigma and trauma associated with DSDs is the mistaken belief that all people with DSDs are sexually ambiguous, meaning that, at birth, they can not be classed as either female or male and so need to be arbitrarily assigned a sex by their birth attendants.

DSDs encompass over 60 different congenital biological conditions and are relatively common, affecting approximately 2% of live births, but the vast majority of these live births are unambiguously sexed either female or male in terms of their chromosomal, gonadal and anatomical sex, even though one or more of these determinants of sex are atypical to some extent.  Less than 0.018% of live births are affected by a rare DSD that either causes a mismatch between chromosomal (male) sex and anatomical (female) sex or results in anatomical (mainly genital) sex that is so malformed that it is not classifiable as exclusively female or male, but is never both.

The former type of DSD involves disorders of testicular development or disorders affecting the synthesis of testosterone produced by the testes.  In the absence of the masculinising effects of testosterone, a foetus will follow the female developmental pathway in utero.

Wednesday Links

Mary Parker Follett The Godmother of Management She saw the invisible authority of common purpose as more powerful than hierarchical authority

Just Plain Rivka  has been added to my Tuesday Zoom book club and now her substack Logic and Morality goes on my sidebar. I think she said she has twelve children age 2-23, and now the the youngest is out of diapers she wants to create a change in her life. Just a remarkable thing to say, eh?

Data Republican on the one paranoia to rule them all. I remarked long ago that wherever a paranoia starts, it seems to slowly work its way to the Jews. I worked with paranoid people my whole career. I have to suspect that for all the focus on Musk and Bezos, the current focus on billionaires owes something to the old trope about "Jewish Bankers." Yet even I have been amazed at the speed and intensity at which it operates now. It has come to this:  I don't dare ask my brother what he thinks. He has been sympathetic to Palestine for a long time, but not at the expense of the Jews until Obama's first presidency. 

Strange Women Lying In Ponds 

I had heard that there is linguistic evidence of isolated words making it from Indo-European into Chinese, a completely unrelated language, but all I had seen before was names of tribes from Central Asia showing up in some very early Chinese records. Those Steppe barbarians got around, after all. But this is a clear word itself, mit in Old Chinese means "honey." As in Indo-European *medhu, found in descendant Greek methy, amethyst but most recognisably in "mead."  The contact point looks like Tocharian B, a wild eastern outlier of PIE that split off early.