🐧 Javier

🇪🇸 Football team Sevilla released images of a number of beautiful processional floats made by the club on the eve of Holy Week

La defensa de la vida no es un capricho absurdo de ultracatólicos. El catolicismo defiende la vida, sí, pero los creyentes, precisamente, creen que las víctimas van al Cielo con Dios. Es nuestra parte material, ligada al mundo, la que más grita que la vida debe ser defendida.

Este es el plan. Otegi en 2021:

“Cerca de 150.000 vascos de religión musulmana”. EITB, tu telediario de confianza, que informa con aparente ligereza sobre los nuevos vascos, sus costumbres recientes… incluyendo, por ejemplo, a niñas pequeñas que llevan velo. Todo esto en un reportaje de hoy mismo.

Recordar es volver a vivir El milagro del Real Madrid para remontar al Manchester City en la Champions League de 2022. Dos goles de Rodrygo en el último minuto. Quién ganará hoy ?

"El ajedrez es aburrido. Prefiero el fútbol" La partida de ajedrez menos tensa:

Every time I discuss the economic and social disruptions caused by the worldwide decline in fertility, I hear the same response: artificial intelligence (AI) and robots will make this issue irrelevant. I find the answer deeply paradoxical because, despite being an economist, I am compelled to point out that the argument suffers from the mistake of “economism”: thinking that all social interactions in life are solely about productivity. Most of the problems caused by declining fertility are largely unrelated to productivity: the depopulation of rural areas, the collapse of public services, and inverted family structures in which one child supports four grandparents. Reducing all of this to purely economic terms is an extremely narrow view of society and life. A robot cannot visit your grandmother in a nursing home in a depopulated town in Korea. But there is an even more fundamental question: how do you know that societies will permit the deployment of artificial intelligence on a large enough scale? If we have learned anything from economic history, it is that societies repeatedly create barriers to wealth and hinder the adoption of new technologies. The Roman Empire had a working steam device, the aeolipile, and never developed it beyond a toy. The Ming dynasty burned Zheng He’s fleet and turned inward. Spain expelled its Jewish and Moorish populations at the height of its imperial power, gutting its merchant and artisan classes. The Ottoman Empire resisted the printing press for nearly three centuries after Gutenberg. Tokugawa Japan had firearms in the 1500s but chose to abandon them. The Qing restricted all foreign trade to a single port in Canton for over a century. Argentina was one of the ten richest countries in the world in 1910 and spent a century in relative decline through self-inflicted policy choices. The Soviet Union had world-class mathematicians and physicists but could not produce a decent pair of shoes because the institutional framework would not allow it. India’s License Raj strangled industrial development for four decades after independence. Closer to our own time, much of Europe spent decades resisting genetically modified crops despite the technology being available. Right now, the EU is drafting some of the strictest AI regulations in the world. And these problems will hit hardest where people least expect them. The conversation about aging and AI tends to focus on rich countries like the U.S. or Japan, but the most acute disruptions will come in emerging economies. Latin America and the Middle East have experienced some of the deepest and fastest declines in fertility on the planet. Colombia’s TFR is 1.06, Jamaica’s 1.20, Turkey’s 1.48, and Mexico’s 1.60. These countries are getting old before they get rich. On top of that, they face a double blow: not only are fewer children being born, but their most skilled and ambitious young workers are leaving. The doctors, engineers, and entrepreneurs who might drive AI adoption are moving to the US, Canada, or Europe. And let’s be honest: these are not exactly countries known for getting out of the way of innovation. The political economies of Latin America and the Middle East are riddled with extractive institutions, captured regulators, powerful incumbents who block competition, and states that struggle to deliver basic public services, let alone manage an AI transition. If Argentina could not reform its economy in a hundred years of trying (perhaps it is doing it now, but the jury is still out on whether this reform will be sustainable), if Mexico cannot keep its own engineers from leaving, if Egypt cannot fix its educational system, I am not sure why we should expect them to seamlessly deploy the most disruptive technology in human history. The countries that most need technological dynamism to offset demographic decline are precisely the ones least equipped to make it happen. There is nothing inevitable about adopting new technologies. It requires political will, institutional flexibility, and social acceptance. Aging, fiscally strained democracies dominated by elderly voters are not obviously the best candidates for any of those three. So when someone tells me “don’t worry, AI will fix it,” I hear an argument that assumes the best possible technological outcome, assumes societies will actually adopt it, assumes it will be deployed fast enough, and assumes the only thing that matters is productivity. That is four enormous assumptions stacked on top of each other. And I am sorry, but since I teach global economic history for a living, I have learned that optimistic assumptions are rarely validated by the crooked timber of humanity.

H. Arendt sobre la Burocracia: «El dominio de la burocracia o el dominio de un intrincado sistema de organismos del cual ningún hombre, ni uno, ni los mejores, ni algunos, ni la mayoría, pueden ser considerados responsables. Y que podría llamarse, muy apropiadamente, el dominio por parte de Nadie. Si, según el pensamiento político tradicional, identificamos la tiranía con el gobierno que no está obligado a rendir cuentas, el dominio por parte de Nadie es claramente el gobierno más tiránico de todos, ya que no hay una sola persona a la que se le pueda pedir siquiera que responda por lo que se lleva a cabo. Esta situación, que hace imposible localizar responsabilidades e identificar al enemigo, es una de las causas más destacadas de la agitación y rebeldía que afecta hoy al mundo entero, de su naturaleza caótica y su peligrosa tendencia a escapar a todo control destruyendo todo a su paso.»

A recent study found that giving men a pay raise led them to have more children, while giving women a pay raise led them to have fewer children. 🧵.