Why Warm Countries Are Poorer Tomas Pueyo. Lew Kwan Yu used air conditioning to develop Singapore. The sunbelt didn't develop until air conditioning came along.
David Foster linked this over at Chicago Boyz, and I realised I had seen several others link to it in the last couple of months. What Caused the Baby Boom? I figured we should at least have this out there to talk about, as declining fertility has been a topic here. Sometimes it is good to ask the opposite question, not "Why is there evil?" but "Why is there good?" Not "Why are people poor?" but "Why are they rich?" Thus, not "Why have we stopped having babies?" but "Why did we have lots more babies for 30-40 years?" Unmentioned was the aspect of status of making enough so that your wife could stay home, which I recall was a big deal. It was a sign of having made it, perhaps even more so for immigrants.
The Free Press is going to be free in the other sense for a week. It's a good time to read some back articles that intrigued you.
The Psmiths* review Paul Fussel's Class: A Guide Through the American Status System from 1983. Earl Wajenberg from Wind Off the Hilltop has referenced it a few times over the years. It's a clever idea to even think of reviewing it, and they have a fascinating and well-written take.
Taxes on the wealthiest Until they sell their stock...or invest it differently...or die...they pay less than the 45% rate of the rest of the 1%. That's still quite a bit of coin, and not the 0% that often gets asserted by critics. The money does not lie around as coins in their basement that they can dive into like Scrooge McDuck. It's not static. In a lot of cases, it didn't even exist until they made it. Are a lot of them selfish, arrogant, jerks? Sure. Get over it. It doesn't affect you. See also what is meant by "Working Families."
*Does anyone recognise what this is a reference to?
3 comments:
I recently saw a synopsis of the "Scrooge McDuck and Money" cartoon and then read of his other star appearances, and think my previous association of McDuck as an idle duck sitting on a vault of money is a calumny. Perhaps that's an accurate portrayal in the early comics, and much less so in the later film uses of the character.
So basically, with a country in a planned high fantasy story being located in the tropics, I have to either relocate the country or else devise some explanation for why it doesn't suffer the common problems of IRL tropical countries.
I doubt I saw McDuck after 1970. Wikipedia says he became more of an adventurer
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