culture

The collapse of fertility

Spandrel has a post wondering where all the babies went, and whenever I propose one of the usual suspects, for example no fault divorce, denormalization of masculinity, and such, he says “Ah, but many Muslim countries also have fertility collapse”. Good point. So let us look at a Muslim country with dramatic fertility collapse, and see if we can find any of the usual suspects.

economics

Darkness is the norm

Copper production shows three peaks: The Roman Empire in the west, the Song Dynasty, and modernity. The Roman Empire in the west and the Song Dynasty had about seven times the preceding and following level of copper production, thus while those civilizations were going concerns, they had far more production and wealth than the rest of the world put together. When the Roman Empire in the West fell, its GDP …

liberty

Freedom in Russia and the US

Let us compare the career of journalist and writer Yulia Latynina, with the career of Dinesh D’Souza. Yulia Latynina is a Russian megaphone for the Harvard microphone.  Supposedly Bush was a moron, Putin is a tyrant, Putin is a homophobe, Putin murders his political opponents, or jails them on vague laws, selectively enforced  Putin is a sexist, Putin is a criminal, and friend of criminals, and so on and so forth. …

economics

No real AI progress

AI is a hard problem, and even if we had a healthy society, we might still be stuck. That buildings are not getting taller and that fabs are not getting cheaper and not making smaller and smaller devices is social decay. That we are stuck on AI is more that it is high hanging fruit. According to Yudkowsky, we will have AI when computers have as much computing power as …

economics

mens rea

I have been arguing that social decay is ending technological and scientific progress.  In most areas it has strikingly slowed, in some areas, going backwards in the west, as we forget how to do what once we could do.  Others, however, argue that technological and scientific progress is still running hot, or that if it has slowed, it is that we ran out of low hanging fruit. But a big …

economics

Tall buildings and the social order

To make and keep the upper stories of a tall building habitable requires routine high technology.  The lifts have to work, the water needs to be pumped, the toilets have let the poop down one hundred stories without shattering violence.  It is not all that expensive.  Current office space costs in the centers of major cities are so high that very tall buildings are immensely profitable.  It is simply difficult …

politics

Cthulhu swims only left

The Orthosphere and Zippy Catholic seem curiously optimistic about the future of the Roman Catholic Church. Seems to me that anyone who is genuinely Roman Catholic should be making spiritual and organizational preparations for excommunication. Here are some entertaining bits from the Pope’s interview with La Republica, which came to my attention when it was parodied as “The Third Vatican Council”.  I at first mistook the parody for the real …

politics

Demotism and lies

North Korea is demotic.  The US is demotic.  North Korea murders large numbers of people.  The US does not.  Scott Alexander argues, therefore, that the word demotic is not meaningful, in that it lumps unlike things together. The North Korean regime is based on lies, since it claims its right to rule comes from the will of the people.  Therefore, the North Korean regime needs an elaborate apparatus of thought …