Links for mid-January 2026
Dying your hair unnatural colours is associated with depression, even after controlling for a wide range of variables (although some of those may be colliders: dying your hair raises your relative status amongst countercultural leftist peers, diminishes it amongst others, so you sort into left-leaning groups which affects your beliefs?).
Somalian IQs are about where we would expect given PISA scores and GDP. It's not even clear (for this country at least) that Lynn even picked an unrepresentative sample. In fact, sub 80 median IQs for African countries is bullish for those sceptical of the upper-bound heritability estimates. Unlike in America, where nutrition needs are basically guaranteed (and given Medicaid and blacks more likely to be in poverty, they get good healthcare coverage), environment differs substantially. If you're sceptical of IQ being 50%+ heritable, then in advanced economies it's largely a function of peers and “culture”, yet they assortatively match according to shared traits. I'm not sure, from a politically correct standpoint, whether saying that black culture causes their socioeconomic difficulties is any less insulting than invoking genetics. After all, culture is partly a function of agency, and no one can change their genetics.
Many extremist groups surprisingly select for high IQ (e.g. the Taliban), likely because they are highly ideological, and ideology requires competency in abstract thought.
If you accept Jones’ argument that mean/median national IQ affects growth via its link to institutional quality, and that migrants import their native cultures, then admittedly the high number of dependents is an issue for immigration proponents. My response is that this is largely an artefact of policy, and that open borders would let in more workers, so reduce the proportion of dependents. Migration policy in Britain encouraged the migration of dependents and asylum seekers, whilst imposing substantial barriers to high and low skilled workers. Past waves of migration in Britain was largely state-sponsored. Open borders without the state implicitly subsidising certain types of migration, or groups of migrants, would likely produce better selection. Of course, I'm not opposed to elites excluding the culturally-driven preferences of those migrants or the backlash; we do this all the time with (for instance) cordon sanitaires and racism (in the latter case, normalising free association might increase support for open borders).
On neoplasticism and queer art. Leftists dominate art production for a reason. Conservatives cannot just reproduce pre-20th century in the name of "beauty": art relies on innovation. Most contemporary/postmodern art is in fact good if you pay attention.
“It is strange that people read Burke and Scruton, and then say to themselves, ‘I know how to restore an imagined world of beauty, decency and goodness: I will vote for tasteless, unvirtuous, lying, xenophobic, authoritarian, fascistic, oligarchic grifters!’ It makes no sense.” It makes sense if you consider national conservatism itself a grift, or essentially reverse-engineering a grift to create an ex-post ideological justification, devoid of substance.
Trump's Colectivos thugs targeting native citizens. No regard for due process whatsoever.
On the negative externalities of suicides. Here I ask ChatGPT how the morality of suicide could change with indefinite lifespans however.
Some Dry January reading: alcohol was the 7th leading risk factor for mortality in 2016: 2·2% of female deaths & 6·8% male deaths. For those 15-49, the highest risk factor - 3·8% of female deaths & 12·2% of male deaths. Note that this toll (for 15-49) covers alcohol-related suicides as well as accidents and physical health complications. Age-related diseases play a more salient role for the 50+ group.
Are relatively prosperous, economically liberal autocracies systematically misreporting their data? If so, and we adjust, then even the relatively competent autocracies diminish in utility.
How vouching could generate incentives for rent extraction. Of course, one interpretation of history is that governments themselves are a product of rent extraction, as opposed to solely coordinating the production of public goods (Acemoglu’s view). It seems to me that the missing link is EHC: governments controlled by high EHC groups, with the necessary checks and balances, are optimal. Moreover, government could act as principal and set the rules of the game and the court infrastructure, and disincentivise pure rent seeking, whilst delegating law enforcement to private actors?
I wonder if there's a tradeoff between signalling competence vs listening to the other party here, and if the optimum depends on the context of the dialogue?
GLP-1s do not pay for themselves. If obesity yields a negative effect on productivity (hence income), those on GLP-1s see a lifetime wealth boost, and given that healthcare is a normal good, they then increase their healthcare expenditures?
“Is it just me or have many new empirical econ papers come out in recent times that pretty much just confirm that basic econ 101 intuition is mostly correct? Of course you can build complicated models with search costs, frictions, information asymmetries and monopsony power, but maybe markets are actually quite efficient in real life and the performance still approaches the neoclassical models, especially in the long-run. Especially here with the 40 year time frame, poverty reduction just with increasing minimum wages is impossible in the neoclassical framework. 40 years gave the market enough time to fully adjust, and show the true anti-poverty effect: zero.”
"We investigate whether places that increase health care spending also tend to be places that increase health". "They do not." This make sense if you consider healthcare a normal good. Hence why the US has high expenditures as a proportion of GDP.
"There is a robust positive relationship between education and free market views in most developed and developing countries". "In the case of the USSR with its anti-market educational content, a change in required years of schooling saw an increase in pro-market sentiment among those people affected." Of course, with respect to social liberalism, the correlation is strong and well-established. Liberalism is the smartest ideology.
British economic performance is actually somewhat better than the Western average, although our productivity figures remain abysmal.
Contraception does not reduce fertility in one study.
In America, “the median violent rapist is released within ten years. The median robber is released before five years have passed. The median person who assaulted someone else gets out before two years are through!”
Any prediction of a mass replacement of labour with AI is likely to be very flawed. Stop fretting about the inequality singularity, it's not happening anytime soon!