Links to Consider, 11/8/2024
Alf on the bond market; Robert Kurzban on racism; Tanner Greer's foreign policy classifications; Alice Evans on the fertility collapse
As we approach US elections, bond markets are telling us - yes, “this time is different”.
Persistent fiscal deficits regardless of who wins US elections can lead to more volatile inflation backdrops, and to more boom/bust cycles.
If all you know about interest rates is that the Fed lowered them, you will be surprised that mortgage rates have been heading up. The reason is that mortgage rates key off of long-term bond rates, and long-term bond rates have risen.
Alf says that this is because of worries about higher inflation down the road, rather than fears of a U.S. debt crisis. I think he’s right, because fears of a debt crisis would cause interest rates to rise more strongly and more quickly.
Incidentally, one reason to believe that there will never be a U.S. debt crisis is that the U.S. government has many assets that it could sell. A lot of public land, for example. I call this the “Snow Crash Scenario.” In Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel, the state has withered away, not in a Communist way, but in a capitalist one. Private multinational corporations have replaced governments. The U.S. government has sold all of its buildings and military infrastructure to corporations.
humans don’t have a special ability or propensity to notice race. We do, however, work hard to identify what coalition people belong to: which groups do they belong to and cooperate with? So, today, racial groups sort of hijack this function, so it only looks like we automatically notice and remember race.
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. That is how I read Kurzban.
Currently, I think a four-quadrant “political-compass” is a useful way to make sense of the geopolitical debate…
One axis is a measure of optimism vs. pessimism…
My y-axis, on the other hand, presents two poles of argument, one focused on power and the other focused on values
Compare my own four quadrants, derived from Walter Russell Mead. Greer’s optimists might be my interventionists, and his power/values axis could be my realism/idealism axis.
Country-specific studies, while valuable, often miss the bigger picture. The Economist recently blamed England's falling fertility on housing prices and delayed motherhood. But how does that explain similar nose-dives in rural Guatemala?
…I would like to see careful empirical research on how new technologies are affecting social relationships. Our pocket-sized dopamine dispensers offer endless streams of stimulation, potentially out-competing real-world connection. In Mexico’s small towns of Cuetzelan and Cholula, mothers repeatedly expressed concerns that their teenagers were hooked on their phones.
substacks referenced above:
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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.