Bryan Caplan

A fundamental lesson from my posts these last two weeks on modernization, industrial policy, and development is that development economics should be about understanding why South Korea got rich but Bolivia did not. The current field has largely given up on that question. Sharply identified RCTs on small micro programs are a fine way to publish in the AER and get tenure at a fancy university, but a profession that knows everything about microfinance impact evaluations and almost nothing about industrialization has misallocated its own intellectual capital on a pretty heroic scale. Four images of Seoul:

Rome was a massive slave society: about one person in every ten was a slave. Slaves weren’t a different race, or a different religion, or anything that would make people think they were a fundamentally different type of person. Many free Romans were aware they were descended from slaves. But despite all of this, Rome never developed an abolition movement. Free Romans were convinced that slavery was justified.

NYT reports on Nancy Mace's wild stories about her being a "survivor" without mentioning that there's basically no way any of it is true. They're portraying this lunatic, along with Boebert and UFO Luna, as a brave truth teller because she wants to bring MeToo to the right.

Not that this stuff doesn't contain some elements of truth, but I notice that conservatives have gotten unhealthily obsessed with various efforts to pathologize and psychoanalyze why people disagree with them — all this "luxury beliefs" stuff blah blah. It's loser shit.

Maybe doing normal human nature things (socializing, marrying, babies, walking in nature) makes you happy. Weird

I don’t think that’s the reason. I think the reason is students felt that there no good jobs with humanities degrees, especially in the new financialized economy.