Stetson > Recent Status Updates

This portion catalogs how much older Congress has become while showing that the judiciary has been old for its entire history. Moyn asserts the Senate and the courts were designed to be gerontocratic.

The essential vs social argument makes the single political axis look false but it starts to look like a less compelling rebuttal when the authors have to address some latent human psychological tendencies like circle of care, hierarchy, equality, etc.

Lewis has assembled a book around a category error. Her problem isn't with "genius" per se, it's that we (society) make allowances and create indulgences for high status individuals. This is an aspect of basic human behavior. All the justifications are post hoc anyway. Dissecting them is like trying to chase down shadows. No one thinks Trump is an actual genius but normal political rules do not obtain.

Begins to trace the cultural origins of the "genius myth" starting with Avonian Willy then proceeding through to the Romantics and then eventually settle on Galton, who systematizes the concept and makes it an innate property.

Opens with Musk portrait, who would most likely be the consensus figure of genius identified by the zeitgeist when corrected for partisan blinders. She uses the flawed Musk to transition to her criticism of our cultural understand of genius as a property inherent to an individual - usually a domineering and eccentric male with talents that happen to be in demand in a particular time and space.

An issue with the analysis I see so far is that al-Gharbi has a normative position that influences his analysis of things like the gig economy or mating dynamics among symbolic capitalists but he doesn't openly defend this normative position. This is something that is often observed in left-of-center sociological analysis and ultimately dooms the impact of the work. The normative position requires defense.

Work is very thoughtful about defining what the social upheaval of the 2010s actually was. It still leans heavily on Turchin's elite overproduction and draws ad hoc from deep roots ideas about WASPness and puritanism but it's very generative and the data is useful.

Moyn appear to be working from a cult of youth type of position that is characteristic of leftist. I think we should sideline both the elderly and the youth. Political power should be greatest for the bourgeois (e.g. tax paying, property owning, working households of married parents with children). These types have the most skin in the game in the present and future.

Seems more or less a retelling of Bordieu's ideas while pulling in some evo-psych/right-of-center philosophy (Girard). It is a very clear re-telling with lots of useful ideas.

Deaton takes a fairly woke turn about halfway through. He confesses his reluctance to become an American citizens until Obama was elected... Then he whines that economists have basically demonstrate that the claims of climate change alarmists are bunk.

has an interesting essay on healthcare economics wrt to his own hip replacement. Lots on the sensitivity of statistical metrics to politics. Lots on inequality. He seems somewhat less aware of the serious criticisms on Piketty and related work on inequality. He mentions critique but not the most fatal one.

This book is a product analogous to a statisticians finding out that all the founding fathers of the field were eugenicists or racists and then deciding that everything is tainted. The decoupling abilities of Lewis are particularly low.

Sometimes it's important to read works of fantasy. After finishing, I can't wait to pay the "multi-species reparations" I owe in as decarbonized a way as possible.