Recent Links

 The Myth of Assimilation at Aporia.  We assert many things in America which are not true.

To begin with, the story rests on a quiet omission: a very large share of European immigrants didn’t assimilate at all. They went home.

Between roughly 1850 and 1920, return migration was a defining feature of transatlantic mobility. The return rate of European immigrants during this period was 25–40%. In some decades it reached 60–75% (Bandiera et al., 2013). Italians are the canonical case: between 1890 and 1920, more than half returned to Italy (Klein, 1983). This return migration was negatively selected — the poorer and less successful immigrants were the most likely to leave (Abramitzky et al., 2019). What we now remember as “successful assimilation” is partly explained by survivorship bias. America did not lift entire populations into the middle class. It retained those who were already capable of doing well and quietly shed the rest. 

Maternal Mortality by Lyman Stone.  No other country measures this the same way we do.  Also...

 Here, you can see that mortality rates are extremely similar across groups, with perhaps two notable exceptions: women under 21, and women over 40. This tells us that most of the effect we saw above of lower mortality for pregnant women was a product of the age difference between pregnant and nonpregnant women— but not all of it!

Free Will is Undefeated A lot has been written.  Rob Henderson adds to it with some things I had not considered before. 

 Stuart Doyle offers a useful analogy that challenges this claim. Suppose we ask whether an apple is red. The determinist looks closer. He realizes the apple is nothing but atoms. Because no individual atom is red, he concludes the apple can’t really be red. The error is obvious. Color exists at the scale of the apple, not at the scale of an atom.

We have evolved to consciously hold multiple choices in our minds and pick one. Why would this happen if choice were not real? 

The Hidden Crimes of Parolees. Advocacy groups will tell you that they are re-incarcerated for "merely technical" violations like missing an appointment.  City Journal shows how this is not so.  The numbers are being jiggered.