Re: Calvin and Hobbes explain the bailout
Dave Land wrote: Folks, Bill Watterson is a certifiable genius: http://budurl.com/5c72 Published more than a dozen years ago (I don't have my son's box set handy to check the exact date). I sure miss that comic strip. Excellent. That's just excellent. Genius is the word indeed. Who enjoyed it more, your son or you? ;-) /c ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Calvin and Hobbes explain the bailout
On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 1:57 PM, Dave Land dml...@gmail.com wrote: Folks, Bill Watterson is a certifiable genius: http://budurl.com/5c72 Published more than a dozen years ago (I don't have my son's box set handy to check the exact date). I sure miss that comic strip. Dave ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l Classic! thankx john ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Calvin and Hobbes explain the bailout
On Dec 13, 2008, at 4:33 AM, Claes Wallin wrote: Dave Land wrote: Folks, Bill Watterson is a certifiable genius: http://budurl.com/5c72 Published more than a dozen years ago (I don't have my son's box set handy to check the exact date). I sure miss that comic strip. Excellent. That's just excellent. Genius is the word indeed. Who enjoyed it more, your son or you? ;-) It's a tie, for sure. After buying the box set for him last Christmas, we read it from cover to cover (to cover to cover, to cover to cover: all three volumes) over the space of about six months. I hadn't seen every cartoon when Watterson was still drawing them, so some parts were brand new to both of us. Amazing that a comic strip about a six-year-old and his imaginary tiger can bring so much joy, and even a tear or two along the way. Watterson steadfastly refused to allow his creation to be licensed, but the first Christmas strip -- when Calvin and Hobbes had been running only a month and a week -- really should have been turned into a card: http://budurl.com/6h46 Dave ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: What is wealth?
Dan M wrote: -Original Message- From: brin-l-boun...@mccmedia.com [mailto:brin-l-boun...@mccmedia.com] On Behalf Of Olin Elliott Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2008 7:05 PM To: Killer Bs (David Brin et al) Discussion Subject: Re: What is wealth? Wealth can be defined in evolutionary terms. Whatever enhances your health, your security, your status or your power in the group is wealth. In other words -- in a state of nature -- anything the possession of which improves your reproductive fitness. That is the ultimate basis of the concept of wealth, and all our elaborations and abstractions don't change that much. What about the facts, would they change things much? :-) I think there is some viability in the sociobiological argument that wealth increases the attractiveness of men as mates. But, if you look at the selfish gene as an embodiment of sociobiology, you see that wealth has had a paradoxical effect. Look at the wealthiest countries in the world. With the exception of the US, they have fertility rates below replacement, some (like Japan, Germany and Italy) far below replacement. The countries with high fertility rates tend to be poorer. Thus, wealth is anti-correlated with the probability a person's gene marker will be seen in a given member of the Nth generation after one's own (which is a standard measure of sociobiological fitness). I tend to think that is a pretty simple manifestation of the Demographic Transition. Children are a net asset in poorer countries (they can be put to work, can support you in old age, etc.). In richer economies, children are a luxury good that cost you a lot and deliver no economic return, hence you will tend to have fewer of them. Regards, -- Kevin B. O'Brien TANSTAAFL zwil...@zwilnik.com Linux User #333216 The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe. - H.L. Mencken ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
RE: What is wealth?
-Original Message- From: brin-l-boun...@mccmedia.com [mailto:brin-l-boun...@mccmedia.com] On Behalf Of David Hobby Sent: Friday, December 12, 2008 6:52 PM To: Killer Bs (David Brin et al) Discussion Subject: Re: What is wealth? Dan M wrote: ... Look at the wealthiest countries in the world. With the exception of the US, they have fertility rates below replacement, some (like Japan, Germany and Italy) far below replacement. The countries with high fertility rates tend to be poorer. Thus, wealth is anti-correlated with the probability a person's gene marker will be seen in a given member of the Nth generation after one's own (which is a standard measure of sociobiological fitness). ... Dan-- Sad to say, that remains to be seen. Once wealth has been equalized across the world, then it's reasonable to count numbers of descendants. Its true that its impossible to predict the future, but we've had 50 years of trends, and that's worth something. IIRC, baring some technological breakthrough that will allow folks to live far longer fairly soon, the die is cast for the decline of Europe and Japan. Take Japan as an extreme example. It's somewhat unusual in that it has a double population peak in 2008. The first on is 55-59, the second 35-39. 30-35 is close to 35-39, but then it drops off fast, ending up with 0-4 only half of 35-39. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the bottom line is that the overwhelming majority of females are either out of or leaving the age range of fertility. (65% are 35 or older). As a result, baring a drastic immediate cultural change, the aging and then decline of Japan's population is all but written in stone. The EU as a whole is not as dramatic, but it should expect to see a 20% or so decline in population every year. So, it would take a massive change in attitude to reverse this. The single shining counterexample to all of this is the US, which I'd argue is a unique multicultural country. Second, mass disease/starvation still exists, but it's mostly in Africa. The largest two countries (China and India) have done a great job of pulling themselves out of abject poverty over the last 20 years. China has gone from a per capita income (inflation adjusted dollars) of $1700 to $7600 over that time. That's not rich, but factors of almost 5 are nothing to be sneezed at. India has not done as well: $1100 to $3700, but that's still better than a factor of 3. I remember (maybe you are too young to) the massive starvation in India in the '60s. Now, there is still extreme poverty there, but there is not the same risk to human life. So, we are within a decade of this type of drastic drop in poor country populations being confined to Sub-Sahara Africa. Fertility rates are falling around the world, but nowhere so drastic (besides Russia which is falling out of the developed world) as in the highly developed world outside of the US. A couple of caveats, to be sure. Still, summary info can be made from data. The world will be far less Japanese and European in 100 years than it is today. And it is far less Japanese and European today than it was 100 years ago. Finally, are you thinking about a possible/probable collapse of civilization? That's one possibility that I had not addressed here. Dan M. If the poorer countries wind up with huge population crashes on the way to global equality, then having fewer children who were better off financially may turn out to have been a good reproductive strategy. : ( ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
RE: What is wealth?
-Original Message- From: brin-l-boun...@mccmedia.com [mailto:brin-l-boun...@mccmedia.com] On Behalf Of Kevin B. O'Brien Sent: Saturday, December 13, 2008 9:00 PM To: Killer Bs (David Brin et al) Discussion Subject: Re: What is wealth? The countries with high fertility rates tend to be poorer. Thus, wealth is anti-correlated with the probability a person's gene marker will be seen in a given member of the Nth generation after one's own (which is a standard measure of sociobiological fitness). I tend to think that is a pretty simple manifestation of the Demographic Transition. Children are a net asset in poorer countries (they can be put to work, can support you in old age, etc.). In richer economies, children are a luxury good that cost you a lot and deliver no economic return, hence you will tend to have fewer of them. You know, if you took this and the first statement of yours I responded to as axioms, you could probably put together a system in which both A and ~A are both provable statements. (This was considered a big negative when I took math and logic). :-) So, I think you have to pick one of the two statements you made and reject the other. Or, say that both have some impact, but are not nearly as universal as you've portrayed. Indeed, while I think the latter statement has some truth, the data don't really fit it as a sole explanation. Russia's birth rate fell as its economic conditions fell. There were far fewer births in the Great Depression as there were in the post WWII prosperity. The US has a far higher birth rate among college educated women than Japan does. My suggestion is that sociobiology is a viewpoint to be used, among others, and that it is not a simple explanation. But, unlike others on the list, I do think partial understandings can be helpful. Dan M. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: What is wealth?
Dan M wrote: -Original Message- From: brin-l-boun...@mccmedia.com [mailto:brin-l-boun...@mccmedia.com] On Behalf Of Kevin B. O'Brien Sent: Saturday, December 13, 2008 9:00 PM To: Killer Bs (David Brin et al) Discussion Subject: Re: What is wealth? The countries with high fertility rates tend to be poorer. Thus, wealth is anti-correlated with the probability a person's gene marker will be seen in a given member of the Nth generation after one's own (which is a standard measure of sociobiological fitness). I tend to think that is a pretty simple manifestation of the Demographic Transition. Children are a net asset in poorer countries (they can be put to work, can support you in old age, etc.). In richer economies, children are a luxury good that cost you a lot and deliver no economic return, hence you will tend to have fewer of them. You know, if you took this and the first statement of yours I responded to as axioms, you could probably put together a system in which both A and ~A are both provable statements. (This was considered a big negative when I took math and logic). :-) So, I think you have to pick one of the two statements you made and reject the other. Or, say that both have some impact, but are not nearly as universal as you've portrayed. Indeed, while I think the latter statement has some truth, the data don't really fit it as a sole explanation. Russia's birth rate fell as its economic conditions fell. There were far fewer births in the Great Depression as there were in the post WWII prosperity. The US has a far higher birth rate among college educated women than Japan does. My suggestion is that sociobiology is a viewpoint to be used, among others, and that it is not a simple explanation. But, unlike others on the list, I do think partial understandings can be helpful. I don't think this is contradictory at all. When a wealthy country undergoes a temporary economic change, does it change the social expectations and norms? I don't think so. That would require prolonged long-term change. So during the Depression, you did not see people suddenly sending their kids out to work in the factories, etc. Now, if you were to make a permanent change in the American economy that reduced us to a standard of living typical of a peasant economy, that would probably result in eventual change in our social structure and expectations. But I would expect that to take a few generations at the very least. And as far as I know, there has not been an example of any country actually running the demographic transition in reverse. The examples you cite are perfectly consistent with a society that views children as a luxury good. One ought to find that the consumption of luxury goods goes down during economic downturns. The fallacy here is that you are confusing long-term and short-term effects. The Demographic Transition is a model of a long-term shift in social norms about children under the influence of rising incomes as economies develop. When applied cross-sectionally to countries at different stages of development, it matches up pretty well with the data. You are trying to falsify it by applying the model to short-term fluctuations in economies with relatively fixed social norms, which the model was never intended to explain in the first place. Normal economic theory is quite sufficient there. (As a side note, short-term fluctuations are what standard economic theories handle best. Supply and demand really do work pretty well in the day to day stuff. It is when you get to questions of long-term growth and development that things get a little murkier.) The change process is gradual in the other direction as well. When a poorer economy begins to develop, the death rate falls due to better nutrition, better health care, etc. but the birth rate does not, immediately, fall at all. That is one of the reasons for exploding populations in other parts of the world. It usually takes several generations for people's behavior to adjust, and then the birth rate starts to fall. So you can have equilibrium, roughly, at either a low income level, with high birth rates and high death rates, or at high income level, with low birth rates and low death rates. During the transition between these equilibria, you get exploding populations. Now, I want to make clear that I am not primarily a demographer, so there may well be more recent research on this topic. But when I was in graduate school, the data seemed pretty consistent with this model, and it was generally accepted among economic demographers. I was exposed to it primarily by my interest in development economics. Regards, -- Kevin B. O'Brien TANSTAAFL zwil...@zwilnik.com Linux User #333216 Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished. -- Jeremy Bentham
Re: Calvin and Hobbes explain the bailout
It's a tie, for sure. After buying the box set for him last Christmas, we read it from cover to cover (to cover to cover, to cover to cover: all three volumes) over the space of about six months. I hadn't seen every cartoon when Watterson was still drawing them, so some parts were brand new to both of us. The box set is not quite a complete collection of all Calvin and Hobbes. Here's an interesting page of rare Watterson material... http://www.platypuscomix.net/otherpeople/watterson.html I find it amusing that he looks so much like Calvins father. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: What is wealth?
There are two authors who have a decent handle on historical wealth. Azar Gat is one of them, http://cniss.wustl.edu/workshoppapers/gatpres1.pdf Gregory Clark is the other, one http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Capitalism%20Genes.pdf If you prefer hearing to reading, try here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYspzYiX_kg Keith Henson ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
