Links to Consider, 3/27
Alice Evans on ancient slavery; Donald McNeil on fighting a pandemic; Will Rinehart on America's advantages; Rob Henderson on evolution and emotions
The Middle Nile’s alluvial floodplains were rather sparse. Semi-arid lands favoured pastoralism - suggests David Wengrow. Since Nubian herders moved with their cattle, they were much harder to tax, and this inhibited coercive state development. Weaker state defences also made Nubians much more vulnerable, so they were repeatedly raided for livestock and slaves.
Ancient Egypt was much more circumscribed and saw the early emergence of both cooperation, coercion and state formation. The Kerma kingdom was far less centralised and was continually raided for slaves. This fits Schönholzer and François’s broader finding that states were less likely to emerge in regions where agricultural productivity was more uniform.
Her essay describes the role that Africa’s geography and ecology played in making slave-taking economical, even before Western colonists arrived. But the Atlantic slave trade supercharged the tendencies toward predatory states and slave-raiding, including that undertaken by Islamic states. Evans concludes that centuries of violence and slave-taking helped shape a culture of gender inequality.
Peace and security are hugely important pathways for gender equality - in Africa and worldwide.
I’ve been denounced as a totalitarian for arguing in favor of a rapid, aggressive, Pentagon-like response to epidemics, for closing borders, restricting travel, ending home quarantine, ending religious exemptions, and imposing rigorous vaccine mandates (and, yes, brief but rigidly enforced shutdowns and mask mandates if testing data suggest that they will keep local hospitals from being overwhelmed—not to please teachers unions). I estimate that our failed response meant we lost almost 550,000 more lives than we should have to Covid. And I think that if we don’t get better at this, we’ll lose more Americans next time.
Early in the pandemic, I called for a military-style lockdown. It was a “go big or go home” argument. I believed that our half-baked lockdowns would fail. But perhaps if for two weeks you really made everyone stay home except for soldiers delivering meals and taking people to hospitals? …probably would have failed also, but I put the idea out there.
The United States has the second largest mineral wealth in the world, estimated at $45 trillion. While most of that wealth is in coal and timber, we have substantial deposits of copper, lead, molybdenum, phosphates, rare earth elements, uranium, bauxite, iron, nickel, potash, and many other minerals that make the modern world.
…Compared to other rich, industrialized nations, the United States has a big, young, educated population. Millennials number 72.1 million in the United States, and they are being followed by Gen Z, which numbers 69.6 million. These two large cohorts have kept our median age below the averages of our peers, creating a population pyramid that is far less top-heavy. Sure, our falling birthrate poses challenges, but we won’t be facing the immediate problems gripping countries like Germany, Italy, Japan, and South Korea.
His new newsletter looks potentially interesting.
why do we not all have some fixed optimal set of attributes with regard to our personalities, mental and physical abilities, temperament, preferences, and so on? A large body of research in evolutionary biology and psychology suggests that evolution has not selected a singular optimal set of traits because no such set exists across all possible varied environments. For example, Personality A (e.g., proneness to behavioral expressions of rage) might be optimal in environment Y whereas personality B (e.g., strong impulse control) might be best suited for environment X.
I would add that an important component of the environment is other people and their personalities. The equilibrium is not just one personality. It is a mix. Too many cheaters and order breaks down. Too many cooperators and it pays to be a cheater.
An emotion is a superordinate program that controls the minds many micro-programs—attention, memory, learning, goal choice, motivational priorities, categories and conceptual frameworks, and so on.
…the emotion of happiness is not an end goal; it is a means to an end. The things that made us happy in the ancestral environment were typically things that benefited our likelihood of survival and reproduction.
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"But perhaps if for two weeks you really made everyone stay home except for soldiers delivering meals and taking people to hospitals?"
Think about this for a little bit and you will rapidly see the reason any general lockdowns were doomed to fail if your plan is to 'stop the spread' or even slow it down.
Who is staffing those hospitals? You need doctors, nurses, and support staff like janitors. They need supplies of all sorts as well as food so you need to deliver those, too. You need to keep the lights on so you need the people who run and maintain power plants, and electric and natural gas distribution systems, as well as coal for plants that use it. They need supplies, too, that need to be delivered. Those supply deliveries come from all over so you need to support all the people operating transportation systems. Stuff breaks down (MV Dali has entered the chat) so now you need to have mechanics and supply them with parts to perform repairs. Need I go on, and I haven't even started on where you're getting the food to distribute. The best estimates I've seen are that most urban areas have less then a week's supply of food on hand so you're not going to lock down for more than a few days at best, certainly less than a month and probably not even the magic two weeks (another number Brix and Fauci likely pulled out of their nethers, like six feet.)
On the other hand, maybe they didn't fail because they were designed to give the feeling of being protected to the people who were demanding the most protection, the laptop class (and teachers unions). If those deplorables would have just known their place was to risk infection, illness, and death so the laptop class could stay sequestered everything would have been fine.
Re: "the emotion of happiness is not an end goal; it is a means to an end." — Rob Henderson
This seems mistaken. Genes don't have "an end." States of nature have causes, not ends. Key causes are mechanisms in natural evolution — genetic variation and environmental selection for reproductive fitness.
My intuition is that happiness, usually, is a mental state that is a by-product (side-effect) of other pursuits.
Happiness may be momentary and occasional. Or it may be settled. Some persons are blessed with a sunny disposition. And some persons just want to be unhappy.
Sometimes, one's own happiness is a conscious end (intentional goal), when one forms a long-range plan for a life well-lived, in the belief that such a course will make oneself happy.
Sometimes, the happiness of others is one's goal — and one might find one's own happiness, too, in the end, as a happy by-product of altruism.