James Baker > Recent Status Updates

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Hes far too uncritical of people like Mises and Menger. I don’t doubt anything the author says per se, but I wonder what he’s omitting.

They don’t teach you shit in school lmao. John Flynn foreshadowed Road to Serfdom in equating FDR with Mussolini.

Everyone hates FDR lmao

Two unexpected parallels with the radical left: a dichotomy between the productive/proletariat and the predatory/bourgeoisie, albeit with different labeling s of who was in each camp, and secondly, the fact that many people like Proudhon and Josiah Warren saw themselves as advocates for individual Liberty despite having different economic takes as libertarians

I like that he acknowledges that “laissez faire” was an idea not a thing that actually happened in practice. However, I think he’s too quick to deny that 19th century America was not much closer to a libertarian economy than nowadays. It’s hard to measure “economic freedom” but by many proxies like size of g’v’t/ amount of regulation/ etc the gilded age was very different from now

The communities the author visits have harmonious parent-child relationships but I am still curious as to how these children end up. The Tanzanian families like to let their kids discover things for themselves, which is great for say, learning to forage. However, for skills like numeracy, literacy or Amy Chuas beloved violin, isn’t a little more guidance more effective?

I appreciate that this book isn’t about making ur kids rich or successful the way all the other books were. It’s just about making your kids tolerable to be around

If I ever have kids I’m gonna make them read this book

So apparently Inuit parents believe that yelling at children provokes them to fight back, which entirely correlates with Amy Chia’s experience with her daughters

One theory she drops is that the Catholic Churchcreated western Nuclear families with ever more strict prohibitions against incest. Inch resting

Apparently different people in different cultures are more/less likely to fall for the Muller-Lyer illusion. I’m extremely skeptical but I guess I have no real reason to be it’s just hmmm

Page 6 and I can already tell she’s gonna be long winded as shit fhfjdj

The author confesses to wearing shorts in the winter the caucasity smh

One more problem with twin studies: they’re always in the same country. This doesn’t negate the Tiger Mom theory that you can nurture your kids into being prodigies, because Chua claims that American and Chinese parents have minimal differences within groups but large differences between groups. Many of these twin studies are in the super homogenous Scandinavian countries too

My problem with twin studies is they only report the averages. If half of all parents (type A) nurture their kids to have more of trait X, and half of all parents (type B) nurture their kids to have less, 50% of all twin pairs will be with both parents of the same type, thus making the effect seem smaller by half if we cannot distinguish WHAT type B and A are (it could be an immeasurable like culture)

All of his talking about genetic determinism is once again reminiscent of the case against education by Freddie de Boer. Despite their opposite political beliefs, the two authors are oddly similar. Both are children of academics fun fact.

He goes through maybe a dozen studies. That’s great and all, but it still doesn’t feel like a thorough literature review

I retract my last statement he cites a few examples good job Bryan

He paints twin studies with SUCH a broad brush, with no specific references or anything. Disappointing

He cites two random decades old opinion polls as evidence that people don’t regret having kids. This is shoddy work so far

This book makes me pray for a vasectomy

This parenting shit hard as hell

And whaddya know I’m also skipping the chapter on breastfeeding

I am skipping the section about C sections sorry y’all

They’ve already mentioned Shahrukh Khan twice this book slaps

Talking about the immense amount of money invested in preparing kids for exams, and how it keeps increasing like an arms race, I suspect it is a strong indicator that education is about signaling, not human capital. Were these long hours capital formation, South Koreans would all be jillionaires, but I’m not sure if the data supports this.

Another benefit to these exam systems, is that they are a very straightforward way of keeping schools and teachers accountable. However, I fear that, on the margin, innovative or even definitively superior methods of teaching may be neglected by teachers whose careers depend on how they score on exams, and they will rigidly “teach to the test” instead.

She points out that while rigid, exam-based hyper-quantitative exams may not be very holistic, they are much more meritocratic than nepotism, and without standardized exams, jobs/education/resources would be distributed very nepotistically.