For almost the entire existence of humans, our ancestors pretty much never encountered someone of a different "race". It would be very surprising if we evolved the ability to notice race specifically.
But we often encountered people from different groups who might do us harm and were, at the very least, less trustworthy than people in our own group. So it would stand to reason that we became sensitive to who was "with us" and who was not.
Is it significantly different than noticing the difference between a big cat and a deer?
While interactions between races were far less before modern times, they tended to happen at evolutionary hot spots such as between modern humans and Neanderthals.
What I was trying to say is that there were very few interactions between people who obviously looked inherently different: "They have black skin; we have white skin." "We have straight eyes; they have slant eyes." So I think there was very little chance to have specific genetic sensitivity to that between humans.
Of course, we had a great ability to make distinctions and divide things into classes. "That cat is a fierce meat eater, and dangerous; that deer is a skittery plant eater, and potential dinner." "We pull our hair up and pin it there; they let it hang free and disgusting." "We crack our eggs at the short end; they crack their eggs at the long end."
And that can be turned into "We who have white skin are the same and good; they who have black skin are different and bad." But that's just an example of something much more general, not something specific to human visual difference.
Recall that before the last two or three hundred years “race” often referred to which country you were from, e.g. France or Ireland., if you were close by, and broader region if not. There doesn’t seem to have been a lot of sense of race separate from culture or region, unlike our handful of broad categories we use today.
Good point. Under 200 years then. Robert E Howard certainly uses it that way, although with a mix of the modern usage as well, and might not be indicative of general use.
In two different Monty Python movies Romans are referred to as a race and Jews are referred to as a race. If Romans can be a race then I don't see why Americans can't be a race at this point.
I think perhaps it is less useful to try to find the main environmental, policy, technology, or cultural causes for reduced fertility and to instead look towards the intentional policies of fertility suppression.
There's an excellent set of chapters in the recent "How to Hide an Empire" by Daniel Immerwahr at Northwestern that describes the efforts by American foreign policy leaders and nonprofit foundations to suppress fertility in Puerto Rico during the 20th century. As he describes it, the US implemented fertility suppression through its network of nonprofit medical and educational institutions to promote abortion, sterilization, and contraception in a plausibly deniable fashion. Surreptitious tests of on Puerto Rican women is part of how the birth control pill, IUDs, and other devices were tested for the American market. So we should start by rolling back the original suppression policies and then see what happens.
Bond market may also just be repricing the non-recession. No jumbo cuts bc no hard landing fears (from September), and therefore the long end of the curve reprices. It's hard to know what "the market" is thinking.
Sure. I'm just saying that in September, there was evidence of heightened deterioration in the labor market that had everyone clamoring for cuts and more cuts. Long end of the curve priced in those cuts. That evidence has dissipated somewhat, and now fewer cuts are priced in
“the U.S. government has many assets that it could sell. ” Ok, but is there reason to think that they would prefer this rather than inflating, especially as it would also be only a temporary solution?
I agree with Kurzban, but in a modern capitalistic economy, cooperating with almost anyone is productive so being "tribal" is potentially suboptimal. Nationalism, the propensity to expect transactions with non-nationals to be disadvantageous is a bigger problem (preventing more mutually beneficial transactions) than racism.
"We evolved to be tribal. We recognize the other group’s warpaint, so that we know when we are in the presence of the other tribe. Racism is a variation on that, but it is not an essential feature of human cognition."
Race is not a tribe but it is correlated. KKK-types and maybe some others explicitly equate race with a tribe. Some or maybe everyone implicitly link race with a tribe whether they recognize this tendency or not. I'm not suggesting I or anyone else knows how strong this tendency is, just that it exists.
I'd guess few here are big bond traders (20% or more financial assets in bonds, or >$1 million in bonds), so the interesting but technical "term premium" won't change many folks' econ estimates. (Thanks to link to a fine discussion of it.) The key line is simple: "Trump's policies will be stimulative for nominal growth, and the US will grow faster than other countries''
Even the EU, but especially Germany, is getting a load of 'US growth is faster' articles, like the recent EU report. As long as US growth remains higher than the big, rich alternatives (with legal protection for private property; NOT China), the increasing debt is not a crisis. Most Trump voters, like me, are sure that US growth will be higher, in his 4 year short-term final reign. (Does anybody know any Trump voter who voted Trump while believing the economy would be better under Harris/ Dems? -- Biggest reason for Trump to win.)
But yes to uncertainty, and thus volatility. Yet teasing out tariff policy from ai implementation effects and (hopefully) huge deregulation efforts will be tough for the econ historians, tho pundits will be trying.
Note- lots of pro-abortion folk might have thought Trump would be a little better on economy, but abortion trumped economy for those with Female Freedom values.
What we learned in this election is that abortion is like #100 on the list of important issues for the persuadable voter (lots of non-persuadable women hold it #1, but they were never voting GOP anyway).
People are willing to confine their abortion views to state referendums.
I didn't learn it like that, but defining "persuadable voter" as one for whom legal abortion is not important does mean it's not really falsifiable, yet also not informative. Trump's frequent stance, "up to the states", is an excellent way to get a few pro-abortion women to support national Reps on the economy or immigration, despite important abortion difference. With abortion disagreement now at the state level, not national.
Fear of the Trump Hitler Demon, under the guise of "saving democracy" was the only big issue that motivated Dem voters. Most probably didn't hear the version of "saving bureaucracy". Here's a sample AP analysis; earlier I saw a WaPo graph.
Florida voted 58% in favor of abortion and 56% for Trump. That means that huge swaths of pro-abortion people just did not care enough about abortion to vote on it outside of a direct referendum.
Take this sentence: "When the Brits were no longer around to keep a lid on it, racial conflict in the former Rhodesia became a bloodbath".
This use of the word race deviates, obviously, from that which is important to the modern liberal paradigm, wherein race has some cosmological, wu-wu, almost quantum mechanical meaning - and is not about the bumping together of thousands of human groups.
The fact is, the essence of the history of the various human lineages (sapiens, neanderthalensis, etc.) on down into modern times - is movement combined with largely in-group breeding. Of course group difference is noted - is paramount.
Though the author of that piece disavows any political intentions around what he describes as his then-PC, no-longer-useful findings, they serve myth, it seems to me. At most the work he describes sounds like an effort at a new scheme of semantics.
Race exists and is one important fact about the world. Any clear-eyed person knows this. And this bareboned statement of fact is much less fraught, much less damaging - than the insane baggage piled on it by the race industry grifters of the world, and all the intellectuals who came before them, whose hand puppets they are ... and who are directly responsible for the events of the last half-century in e.g. Rhodesia/Zimbabwe.
Alice Evans would like to “see careful empirical research on how new technologies are affecting social relationships.” However, others apparently have had enough:
“Australia's Social Media Ban
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced legislation yesterday to ban social media for children under 16. The proposed law, set to be introduced in Parliament in the coming weeks, would require platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and X, to bar access to children and teenage users. There are no exceptions for parental consent.
If approved, companies would have 12 months to implement blocking measures or face potential fines. Albanese said the platforms would bear responsibility, with no penalties for users, arguing the ban is necessary due to social media's harmful effects on young people's mental health. Critics contend an all-out ban will not work and argue that social media is a valuable tool for social support.
About 95% of teens use some kind of social media, spending an average of 4.8 hours daily—41% of high-use teens rate their mental health as poor or very poor. The US Surgeon General has called for tobacco-style warning labels on social media platforms.”
But it doesn’t seem as if a mere ban will do anything to actively encourage healthier social interaction.
Absent the traditions and rituals that formerly prepared young people for mature social life, the odds might be low. Parents might do well to consider resurrecting and encouraging their offspring’s participation in activities such as cotillion classes that foster social confidence and grace. (https://www.southernliving.com/culture/cotillion-class ) Most communities already have all sorts of sponsored activities for teenagers (https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/10022/chapter/7 ). Adding cotillion classes to these offerings might have the potential to help reinvigorate the relationship between the sexes in the next generation.
Re Evans - Phone addiction is a global phenomenon and the idea of it contributing to spread of fantasy thinking is tempting to me. But there is other phenomena and she's right that some rigorous research would be helpful.
When I saw a Snow Crash reference, my sense that you would be the perfect dinner companion jumped even higher!
For almost the entire existence of humans, our ancestors pretty much never encountered someone of a different "race". It would be very surprising if we evolved the ability to notice race specifically.
But we often encountered people from different groups who might do us harm and were, at the very least, less trustworthy than people in our own group. So it would stand to reason that we became sensitive to who was "with us" and who was not.
Is it significantly different than noticing the difference between a big cat and a deer?
While interactions between races were far less before modern times, they tended to happen at evolutionary hot spots such as between modern humans and Neanderthals.
What I was trying to say is that there were very few interactions between people who obviously looked inherently different: "They have black skin; we have white skin." "We have straight eyes; they have slant eyes." So I think there was very little chance to have specific genetic sensitivity to that between humans.
Of course, we had a great ability to make distinctions and divide things into classes. "That cat is a fierce meat eater, and dangerous; that deer is a skittery plant eater, and potential dinner." "We pull our hair up and pin it there; they let it hang free and disgusting." "We crack our eggs at the short end; they crack their eggs at the long end."
And that can be turned into "We who have white skin are the same and good; they who have black skin are different and bad." But that's just an example of something much more general, not something specific to human visual difference.
Recall that before the last two or three hundred years “race” often referred to which country you were from, e.g. France or Ireland., if you were close by, and broader region if not. There doesn’t seem to have been a lot of sense of race separate from culture or region, unlike our handful of broad categories we use today.
It’s newer than that; I’ve read dozens of books from the 1800s that talk about the French race, the Irish race, etc.
Good point. Under 200 years then. Robert E Howard certainly uses it that way, although with a mix of the modern usage as well, and might not be indicative of general use.
In two different Monty Python movies Romans are referred to as a race and Jews are referred to as a race. If Romans can be a race then I don't see why Americans can't be a race at this point.
I think perhaps it is less useful to try to find the main environmental, policy, technology, or cultural causes for reduced fertility and to instead look towards the intentional policies of fertility suppression.
There's an excellent set of chapters in the recent "How to Hide an Empire" by Daniel Immerwahr at Northwestern that describes the efforts by American foreign policy leaders and nonprofit foundations to suppress fertility in Puerto Rico during the 20th century. As he describes it, the US implemented fertility suppression through its network of nonprofit medical and educational institutions to promote abortion, sterilization, and contraception in a plausibly deniable fashion. Surreptitious tests of on Puerto Rican women is part of how the birth control pill, IUDs, and other devices were tested for the American market. So we should start by rolling back the original suppression policies and then see what happens.
Bond market may also just be repricing the non-recession. No jumbo cuts bc no hard landing fears (from September), and therefore the long end of the curve reprices. It's hard to know what "the market" is thinking.
I'm not predicting but I doubt we are past the point where a hard landing is possible before a significant upturn.
Sure. I'm just saying that in September, there was evidence of heightened deterioration in the labor market that had everyone clamoring for cuts and more cuts. Long end of the curve priced in those cuts. That evidence has dissipated somewhat, and now fewer cuts are priced in
“the U.S. government has many assets that it could sell. ” Ok, but is there reason to think that they would prefer this rather than inflating, especially as it would also be only a temporary solution?
I agree with Kurzban, but in a modern capitalistic economy, cooperating with almost anyone is productive so being "tribal" is potentially suboptimal. Nationalism, the propensity to expect transactions with non-nationals to be disadvantageous is a bigger problem (preventing more mutually beneficial transactions) than racism.
"We evolved to be tribal. We recognize the other group’s warpaint, so that we know when we are in the presence of the other tribe. Racism is a variation on that, but it is not an essential feature of human cognition."
Race is not a tribe but it is correlated. KKK-types and maybe some others explicitly equate race with a tribe. Some or maybe everyone implicitly link race with a tribe whether they recognize this tendency or not. I'm not suggesting I or anyone else knows how strong this tendency is, just that it exists.
Bruce Sterling's Distraction is kind of fun.
I'd guess few here are big bond traders (20% or more financial assets in bonds, or >$1 million in bonds), so the interesting but technical "term premium" won't change many folks' econ estimates. (Thanks to link to a fine discussion of it.) The key line is simple: "Trump's policies will be stimulative for nominal growth, and the US will grow faster than other countries''
Even the EU, but especially Germany, is getting a load of 'US growth is faster' articles, like the recent EU report. As long as US growth remains higher than the big, rich alternatives (with legal protection for private property; NOT China), the increasing debt is not a crisis. Most Trump voters, like me, are sure that US growth will be higher, in his 4 year short-term final reign. (Does anybody know any Trump voter who voted Trump while believing the economy would be better under Harris/ Dems? -- Biggest reason for Trump to win.)
But yes to uncertainty, and thus volatility. Yet teasing out tariff policy from ai implementation effects and (hopefully) huge deregulation efforts will be tough for the econ historians, tho pundits will be trying.
Note- lots of pro-abortion folk might have thought Trump would be a little better on economy, but abortion trumped economy for those with Female Freedom values.
What we learned in this election is that abortion is like #100 on the list of important issues for the persuadable voter (lots of non-persuadable women hold it #1, but they were never voting GOP anyway).
People are willing to confine their abortion views to state referendums.
I didn't learn it like that, but defining "persuadable voter" as one for whom legal abortion is not important does mean it's not really falsifiable, yet also not informative. Trump's frequent stance, "up to the states", is an excellent way to get a few pro-abortion women to support national Reps on the economy or immigration, despite important abortion difference. With abortion disagreement now at the state level, not national.
Fear of the Trump Hitler Demon, under the guise of "saving democracy" was the only big issue that motivated Dem voters. Most probably didn't hear the version of "saving bureaucracy". Here's a sample AP analysis; earlier I saw a WaPo graph.
https://apnews.com/article/ap-votecast-elections-harris-trump-voters-d5cf4e3611f50ec4349d93ddc7f037cd
Florida voted 58% in favor of abortion and 56% for Trump. That means that huge swaths of pro-abortion people just did not care enough about abortion to vote on it outside of a direct referendum.
Take this sentence: "When the Brits were no longer around to keep a lid on it, racial conflict in the former Rhodesia became a bloodbath".
This use of the word race deviates, obviously, from that which is important to the modern liberal paradigm, wherein race has some cosmological, wu-wu, almost quantum mechanical meaning - and is not about the bumping together of thousands of human groups.
The fact is, the essence of the history of the various human lineages (sapiens, neanderthalensis, etc.) on down into modern times - is movement combined with largely in-group breeding. Of course group difference is noted - is paramount.
Though the author of that piece disavows any political intentions around what he describes as his then-PC, no-longer-useful findings, they serve myth, it seems to me. At most the work he describes sounds like an effort at a new scheme of semantics.
Race exists and is one important fact about the world. Any clear-eyed person knows this. And this bareboned statement of fact is much less fraught, much less damaging - than the insane baggage piled on it by the race industry grifters of the world, and all the intellectuals who came before them, whose hand puppets they are ... and who are directly responsible for the events of the last half-century in e.g. Rhodesia/Zimbabwe.
Alice Evans would like to “see careful empirical research on how new technologies are affecting social relationships.” However, others apparently have had enough:
“Australia's Social Media Ban
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced legislation yesterday to ban social media for children under 16. The proposed law, set to be introduced in Parliament in the coming weeks, would require platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and X, to bar access to children and teenage users. There are no exceptions for parental consent.
If approved, companies would have 12 months to implement blocking measures or face potential fines. Albanese said the platforms would bear responsibility, with no penalties for users, arguing the ban is necessary due to social media's harmful effects on young people's mental health. Critics contend an all-out ban will not work and argue that social media is a valuable tool for social support.
About 95% of teens use some kind of social media, spending an average of 4.8 hours daily—41% of high-use teens rate their mental health as poor or very poor. The US Surgeon General has called for tobacco-style warning labels on social media platforms.”
(https://join1440.com/newsletter/social-media-ban-interest-rates-and-the-sistine-chapel )
But it doesn’t seem as if a mere ban will do anything to actively encourage healthier social interaction.
Absent the traditions and rituals that formerly prepared young people for mature social life, the odds might be low. Parents might do well to consider resurrecting and encouraging their offspring’s participation in activities such as cotillion classes that foster social confidence and grace. (https://www.southernliving.com/culture/cotillion-class ) Most communities already have all sorts of sponsored activities for teenagers (https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/10022/chapter/7 ). Adding cotillion classes to these offerings might have the potential to help reinvigorate the relationship between the sexes in the next generation.
On the Evans' more research question, it is interesting that Sweden's education system has found sufficient evidence to chuck out devices and reverse course to the analog direction. https://www.government.se/articles/2024/02/government-investing-in-more-reading-time-and-less-screen-time/
The Swedish health agency has also issued recommendations to limit childhood screen exposure. https://www.euronews.com/health/2024/09/03/parents-should-ban-screen-use-for-children-under-2-swedens-public-health-agency-warns
Re Evans - Phone addiction is a global phenomenon and the idea of it contributing to spread of fantasy thinking is tempting to me. But there is other phenomena and she's right that some rigorous research would be helpful.