Links to Consider, 10/20/2024

Ted Gioia on human connection; Peter Wallison on privatizing bank regulation; Russ Roberts and me on misinformation; The Psmiths on the fertility decline

Ted Gioia writes,

If you want a happy life, you nurture them. If you let them all topple, you’re at grave risk.

1. Connection with the natural world;

2. Connection with family, friends, neighbors, colleagues;

3. Connection with history and tradition;

4. Connection with the community via institutions and organizations (e.g., civic engagement);

5. Connection via charitable acts, and giving (material and emotional) support;

6. Connection with spiritual and other metaphysical or higher values—sources of meaning outside the materialist realm;

7. Connection with creative human expression in art;

8. Connection via all those other things a computer can't provide (love, forgiveness, fidelity, trust, empathy, kindness, etc.).

Peter Wallison writes,

In this system, a monitoring group (“MG”), a private company somewhat like an accounting firm that employs qualified bank monitors and supervisors, would contract with the banks it will monitor. 

Regulation as it’s done now—through various agencies of the federal government—has left the people and businesses of the United States, the richest and most advanced country on Earth, with regular financial crises, personal financial losses, and needless disruptions in their lives and activities.

You can compare this with my essay on privatizing the job of shutting down banks before they get into too much trouble.

On his podcast, Russ Roberts gave me a lot to think about. We start with the topic of misinformation. The podcast was recorded more than a month ago, and you can see where it stimulated several of my more recent posts. I think this podcast starts to get lively when I talk about my dispute with the water company.

We've had spikes in our water meter about once a year, where all of a sudden it's showing thousands of gallons being used. And I caught one about a week ago where it said we used 16,000 gallons of water in a week--and it was actually a week where we were away from the house.

And, so I'm having this argument with the water company over it, and the water company says, 'You have a leak.' And I said, 'Well, here are my reasons why I don't think it's a leak. Number one, it seemed to fix itself.' Right? The following week, we were down to 100 gallons when we were out of town. And, there's no water damage anywhere in the house. So, 16,000 gallons of water came out of a plumbing leak.

John Psmith writes,

The correct way to view all the changes that Carney lists is as a sort of transmission belt that has slowly and inexorably propagated and magnified the effects of the one, very simple technological change that occurred. The story goes something like this: birth control is introduced, but large families are still normative and supported by generations of cultural accretion. So people still have an above-replacement number of kids, because they remember their mothers and grandmothers having 10 or 12 kids, and because society is still basically set up for families. But time passes, and culture gradually shifts to accommodate material reality. Law and economics follow culture. The next generation remembers their parents having 3 or 4, and maybe manages 1 or 2 themselves. The fewer people are having lots of kids, the less of a constituency there is for having lots of kids, and the harder society makes it, further turning the screws on marginal parents.

substacks referenced above: @

JOINT REVIEW: Family Unfriendly, by Timothy P. Carney

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8 Ways of Connecting Your Wi-Fi Can't Deliver