Implications for þe Economy of Biological & Cultural Human Evolution

BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-01-16 Su

CONDITION: Manic!

I have the galleys of Slouching Towards Utopia <https://bit.ly/3pP3Krk> to check this MLK weekend. And it is a long slog: I never trained my brain to see what is in front of my eyes as opposed to what my brain predicts should be in front of my eyes. But as I do try to check it, going in reverse order from the back sentence by sentence in an attempt to see each one with truly fresh eyes and without preconceptions about what it must say, I find myself becoming more and more manic.

True: I see no letters of fire that will by the logic of iron necessity inscribe themselves on the minds and souls of readers, and thus make it κτῆμά τε ἐς αἰεὶ, a treasure for all time.

But it is damned good. Paragraph by paragraph, it is damned good.

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Back up to the spring of 1979, my first year of college: my best friend Michael Froomkin came up from New Haven, where he was going to school, to Cambridge. We wound up going to my Government 106B political philosophy lecture. Afterwards we went up to the podium, where the lecture, the God like Michael Walzer was gathering his notes, to join the people asking him clarifying questions. My friend Michael noted a striking difference between how Walzer dealt with the texts and what the teachers at Yale were doing. They were giving extraordinarily close and convoluted readings of individual sentences, as if every comma in a key sentence was supposed to carry deep weight, send you on a 10-minute reflection on what that comma might mean, and conclude that it reversed the apparent surface import of the sentence. (But, since you couldn’t do that for the whole book, you had to somehow pick out which were the key sentences to be tortured and have their surface meaning reversed in that way.) Walzer, by contrast, treated each paragraph as one of a set of fumbling attempts by the author to put his finger on a set of concepts and ideas that they only dimly grasped.

Walzer replied that, first, we should not forget that this book, Machiavelli’s The Prince <https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.221835/page/n2/mode/1up>, was hastily written as an audition for a job in the post-coup Medici régime of Florence (and also as an attempt to make them realize that he was a useful tool they could use, rather than an obstacle to be tortured)—not one in which every comma was labored over to ensure that the key esoteric message was conveyed to a small hermetic circle of cognoscenti while escaping the notice of casual or even careful-but-not-initiate readers.

Walzer replied that, second, he had to view writers like Machiavelli and Locke as guys sorta like him—smarter than him and probably more insightful about the worlds they were enmeshed in, but also at a disadvantage since Walzer had more giants to stand on the shoulders of. And he, Walzer said, could not help but remember as he read them how he felt when he wrote a book:

1. He started out with what seemed to be brilliant and irrefutable important insights that he could not quite see how to get down on paper.

2. He wrote feverishly, confident that he was riding were letters of fire that would by the logic of iron necessity inscribe themselves on the minds and souls of readers for all time.

3. But when the book emerged from the press—no letters of fire, just black-ink chicken scratchings, from which only a thoughtful and generous reader could derive the insights he had hoped to impart, which he, Walzer, now found inadequate and beyond his full grasp.

I am not having that kind of letdown right now. Not at all.

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First: Biological & Cultural Human Evolution

When Melissa Dell teaches the original from which I have appropriated my history of economic growth course, she starts with human evolution. She starts 5 million years ago or so, with the divergence of our lineage from the chimpanzee-bonobo lineage. But I am pretty sure that we do not know enough for it to be worth spending a full week or even half a week on human evolution.

Nevertheless, her reading for that introduction can be read with enormous profit:

Joseph Henrich (2016): The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (Princeton: Princeton University Press): Gesher Benot Ya'aqov… 750,000 years ago…. Stone-tool manufacturing… food processing… controlled fire… hand axes, cleavers, blades, knives, awls, scrapers, and choppers… from flint, basalt, and limestone, tool manufacture was done on-site, often from giant slabs carried in from a distant quarry…. Freshwater crabs, turtles, reptiles, and at least nine types of fish… [plus] seeds, acorns, olives, grapes, nuts, water chestnuts… the submerged prickly water lily….

In the next 300,000 years after the activities at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, Homo erectus changed sufficiently, including a brain expansion to 1200 cm3, to justify a new species name, Homo heidelbergensis… projectile weapons… a variety of techniques for producing stone blades… consistent within sites or populations but… vary[ing] between populations. Distinct tool traditions and composite tools that exploited natural glues weren’t far behind.….

By 750,000 years ago at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, there’s little doubt that we are dealing with a cultural species who hunts large game, catches big fish, maintains hearths, cooks, manufactures complex tools, cooperates in moving giant slabs, and gathers and processes diverse plants. The bottom line: cumulative cultural evolution is old in our species’ lineage, dating back at least hundreds of thousands of years, but probably millions of years…

And:

‘Physically weak, slow… dependent on eating cooked food, though we don’t innately know how to make fire or cook…. Our colons are too short, stomachs too small, and teeth too petite. Our infants are born fat and dangerously premature… not so impressive when we go head-to-head in problem-solving tests against other apes….

We are a cultural species. Probably over a million years ago, members of our evolutionary lineage began learning from each other in such a way that culture became cumulative…. Our capacities for learning from others are themselves finely honed products of natural selection…. Cultural learning abilities gave rise to an interaction between an accumulating body of cultural information and genetic evolution that has shaped, and continues to shape, our anatomy, physiology, and psychology…

SELECTIONS: <https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-heinrich-secret-selections.pdf>

The history of human evolution is still extraordinarily blurred. Moreover, inn my view, very, very, very little of “EvoPsych” results are going to durably replicate. Whatever I would teach about human evolution before 50,000 years or so would, I think, probably be wrong.

Nevertheless, it is very important. So let me set out 10 theses. These are all debatable and disputable. But I think they are worth keeping in mind as likely (ha!) results of our evolutionary history, and as important underpinnings of the economic history of the past 50,000 years:

1. We are all very very very close cousins. The overwhelming proportion of all of our ancestry comes from one roughly-1000 person or so group 70,000 years ago. Small admixtures from other human groups that were then roaming the world were then added to this mix.

2. We were human long before 70,000 years ago. People from 10 or 20 times further in the past would in all likelihood be able to fit into our society. Homo ergaster, homo erectus, homo heidelbergensis, homo neanderthalis, homo denisovo, the Red Deer Cave people, and us homo sapiens—and maybe homo floresiensis—are all, in a very real sense, us.

3. We are cultural-learning intelligences, coevolved biologically and culturally to build up a huge component of our nature-manipulation and group-organization toolkits from observing others of our species, and thus learning the accumulated cultural patterns of past ages.

4. We are, overwhelmingly, collectively an anthology intelligence: smart not because each of us is smart, but because we can and do learn from, teach, and communicate with others at a furious rate.

5. We are also a time-binding anthology intelligence: not just us around here who are now thinking, but also our predecessors thinking in the past. That is what gives us our smarts, and allows us to survive.

6. Since the invention of writing 5000 years ago, the time-binding-ness of our anthology-intelligence nature has been amped up by a full order of magnitude. Our knowledge from the past is not just embedded in present-day cultural patterns, but is also via direct communication from them to us, as we take durable squiggles and from them spin-up and run on our wetware sub-Turing instantiations of the human minds that made the squiggles.

7. Our intelligence on an individual level is quite limited. We find it very hard to think except in terms of narratives: those narratives usually taking the form of cause and effect, of journeys forward through space, and of sin and retribution, nemesis and hubris. Thoughts that do not fall into those patterns are very hard for us to have, and very very hard for us to communicate to others.

8. Thus we should not expect our anthology intelligence to get things right. It can get things right in an awesome and mindbending way. But large groups of people can also get things very very wrong and persist in error to a remarkable degree.

9. Given how incompetent most of us must be in most of the work that our culture has the knowledge to have somebody do, our prosperity—nay, our survival—depends on establishing a cooperative division of labor. We both divide labor and also induce ourselves to cooperate by being primed to form and reinforce social bonds based not on grooming each other to remove parasites (as other monkeys do), and not by mock-mounting each other in para-reproductive activity (as canids do), but rather via forming gift-exchange relationships.

10. With the invention of money, all of a sudden each of our individual social gift-exchange networks changes from having to be a long-term close-relationship network (limited only to our close kin, our immediate neighbors, and our good friends—and not all of those). All of a sudden our potential division of labor expands to encompass every single other human in the world. This has powerful consequences for us as an anthology intelligence devoted to organizing our selves and manipulating nature.

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One Video:

David Card & al.: American Economic Association Awards Ceremony and Presidential Address <https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2022/livecasts/aea-awards>

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One Picture: Theodora & Her Court:

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Very Briefly Noted:

• Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSM) Q4 2021 Earnings Call Transcript<https://news.alphastreet.com/taiwan-semiconductor-manufacturing-co-ltd-tsmc-q4-2021-earnings-call-transcript/>

• Latin Language Stack Exchange: The Last Sentence in Thuc. 1.22: ‘My history is an everlasting possession, not a prize composition which is heard and forgotten… <https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/13197/trying-to-translate-the-last-sentence-in-thuc-1-22>

• Jonathan Bernstein: Madison, Majorities and the Threat to the Republic<https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-01-14/madison-majorities-and-the-threat-to-the-republic>

• J. Kenji López-Alt: Two-Minute Mayonnaise Recipe: ‘Using an immersion blender, you end up with a cup full of creamy, perfectly emulsified, real-deal, better-than-anything-you-can-buy mayonnaise… <https://www.seriouseats.com/two-minute-mayonnaise>

• Noah Smith: ’I think that my podcast co-host @delong may be overthinking it a bit when it comes to China’s development…

Noah Smith 🐇@Noahpinion

18/Thus, I would urge @delong and others not to convince themselves that China has somehow broken the mold when it comes to economic development. It fits very well into the existing mold... (end)

braddelong.substack.com

Trying to Grasp þe Reality of China Today

11:10 PM · Jan 9, 2022

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2 Reposts · 33 Likes

• John Ganz: What Is Trumpism?: ‘As for “Trumpism” as a category of politics apart from Trump the individual, I think we still have to observe carefully whether it is a Caesarism stillborn or still “in gestation.” In aid of those observations, the cases of fascism will remain an important context…

What Is Trumpism?

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Paragraphs:

Samuel Hammond: Meeting Manchin in the Middle: ‘The time has come for Child Tax Credit advocates… to accept an inconvenient truth: Joe Manchin is a sitting U.S. senator, and we are not…. Manchin’s dual demands for a work requirement and making access to the credit easier for children raised by their grandparents… are in obvious tension…. Yet there are ways to square this circle. For example, grandparents and other caregivers on fixed incomes could become eligible for the full credit even if the CTC retained a modest earnings test for able-bodied parents of working age. Manchin’s seemingly incompatible requests make more sense with added context. Of the grandparents in West Virginia who live with their grandchildren, 54 percent are the primary guardian or caregiver—the second-highest rate in the country and a disturbing byproduct of the opioid epidemic sweeping the state…. My view is that an earnings test of any kind will be unnecessarily cumbersome to administer. But at risk of repeating myself, my personal opinion is worth precisely nothing when it comes time for the Senate to vote. Considering that the alternative is no CTC expansion whatsoever, anti-poverty and pro-family advocates have every reason to meet Manchin in the middle…. Unfortunately… potential middle-ground options have not been broached. Instead, the strategy has been to hold the line, call Manchin’s bluff, and mount a pressure campaign that has only strengthened his centrist reputation…. As economist Dani Rodrik puts it, “politics is second best, at best.” It’s now on Senate Democrats to meet with Manchin and, together, design the second-best damn CTC expansion they possibly can…

LINK: <https://www.niskanencenter.org/meeting-manchin-in-the-middle/>

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Aaron Rupar: Fauci Accused Rand Paul of Politicizing the Pandemic for Profit. And He Had Receipts: ‘the shabby performances by some of the Republican senators really stood out. In addition to Paul and Marshall, you had Susan Collins pursuing a confused line of questioning that suggested vaccination was overrated and Tommy Tuberville asking about the quack “cure” ivermectin. But given where the party is today, Republicans trying to turn a pandemic that’s killed nearly 850,000 into Benghazi 2.0 isn’t really as surprising as it should be. The outright ugliness of the remarks by both Paul and Marshall really stood out, though. Instead of making an earnest effort to inform their constituents about how best to protect themselves and those around them, they’re pulling out all the stops to undermine the notion that public health experts should be listened to at all. And, tragically, people who listen to their misinformation earnestly are already paying a price…

LINK:

Fauci accused Rand Paul of politicizing the pandemic for profit. And he had receipts.

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Tyler Cowen: Economist & Public Intellectual: ‘I don’t think I have very definite answers to your questions on inflation. The Fed is moving in the proper direction, but how can we judge whether they are disinflating too fast or too slowly? Where is the database on recoveries from pandemics? This is quite an unusual recession, as durable goods boomed, the opposite of the usual scenario. And it is services that proved super-cyclical, again in an exceptional way. I think about your questions a good deal, but any answer would be a stab in the dark. As for boosting growth, my number one recommendation would be much more high-skilled immigration. And then more low-skilled immigration to take care of their kids and help run their errands…

LINK:

Interview: Tyler Cowen, economist and public intellectual

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Bret Devereaux: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part I: Words: ‘For reasons we’ll talk about later in this series, the resources available for this kind of copying would hit an all-time-low during the period from the fifth to the seventh centuries—this was expensive work for poor societies to engage in. And here it is worth thus stopping to note how exceptional a moment of preservation this period is. The literary tradition of Mediterranean antiquity represents the oldest literary tradition to survive in an unbroken line of transmission to the present (alongside Chinese literature). The literary traditions of the Bronze Age (c. 3000–1200 BC and the period directly before antiquity broadly construed) were all lost and had to be rediscovered, with stone and clay tablets recovered archaeologically and written languages reconstructed. The Greeks and Romans certainly made little effort to preserve the literature of those who went before them! In that context, what is actually historically remarkable here is not that the people of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages lost some books… but that they saved some…. Never before had a literary tradition been saved in this way…. Far from destroying the literature of classical antiquity, it was the medieval Church itself that was the single institution most engaged in the preservation of it…

LINK: <https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-i-words/>

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Yair Rosenberg: Your Bubble is Not the Culture: ‘The A.V. Club: “Fantastic Beasts 3 has a new title, new release date, same old massively disappointing writer: J.K. Rowling’s script will reveal The Secrets Of Dumbledore next April, if anyone can bring themselves to care.” Rolling Stone: “Thanks to the labors of TikTok teens, a wider audience now has to confront that we may have been ‘Wrong About’ Miranda and Hamilton.” Polygon:

The Wizarding World canon already divides the fanbase … But Rowling and Warner Bros. continue to chug out Wizarding World content that doesn’t explore stories that fans are interested in.”

Now, here’s what’s actually been happening in the real world…. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s soundtrack for the hit Disney film Encanto displaced Adele’s 30 as the No. 1 album on the Billboard 200. At the same time, Miranda himself hit No. 1 on the Hot 100 Songwriters Chart…. Back in 2020, after the film version of Hamilton was released on Disney+, the cast album for the musical surged to No. 2 on the Billboard chart, five years after its premiere. It was the highest-charting cast album since 1969. As of this writing, the album ranks as No. 47, and has never fallen out of the top 200 since it first appeared….

As for the Wizarding World… the biggest Harry Potter store in the world opened in New York City to rave reviews. HBO is currently airing several specials celebrating 20 years since the first Harry Potter movie…. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has reopened on Broadway. The persistent popularity of Potter probably explains why outlets whose critics insist that the Potter party is over keep publishing pieces about the franchise…. Rowling herself is doing just fine as well. The latest entry in her successful Cormoran Strike detective series, which she writes under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, was an international best seller and moved more copies upon release than any prior book in the series. In May, it won Best Crime and Thriller Fiction Book of the Year at the British Book Awards….

What explains this discrepancy between what some critics are claiming and what consumers are actually enjoying? Here are three reasons: Being a critic can lead you to lose sight of the experience of the audience…. Many cultural critics live in an unrepresentative internet bubble…. Culture writers, like most people, want to justify their existence and significance…. Cultural criticism—like any form of guidance—can’t be heard when it’s entirely disconnected from the people it’s meant to reach…. If anything is “cringe,” it’s culture writers telling their audiences that they should hate the things that bring them joy…

LINK: <https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/deep-shtetl/61e06b2c55e52500217add01/your-bubble-is-not-the-culture-lin-manuel-miranda-harry-potter/>

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John Maynard Keynes (1924): A Tract On Monetary Reform: ‘In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic. All of us, from the Governor of the Bank of England downwards, are now primarily interested in preserving the stability of business, prices, and employment, and are not likely, when the choice is forced on us, deliberately to sacrifice these to the outworn dogma, which had its value once, of £3 : 17 : lO 1/2 per ounce. Advocates of the ancient standard do not observe how remote it now is from the spirit and the requirements of the age. A regulated non-metallic standard has slipped in unnoticed. It exists. Whilst the economists dozed, the academic dream of a hundred years, doffing its cap and gown, clad in paper rags, has crept into the real world by means of the bad fairies—always so much more potent than the good—the wicked Ministers of Finance.

For these reasons enlightened advocates of the restoration of gold, such as Mr. Hawtrey, do not welcome it as the return of a “natural” currency, and intend, quite decidedly, that it shall be a “managed” one… a constitutional monarch, shorn of his ancient despotic powers and compelled to accept the advice of a Parliament of Banks…. He contemplates… “co-operation among central banks”… an international convention… “preventing undue fluctuations in the purchasing power of gold"…. “It is not easy,” he admits, “to promote international action, and should it fail, the wisest course for the time being might be to concentrate on the stabilisation of sterling in terms of commodities, rather than tie the pound to a metal, the vagaries of which cannot be foreseen.”

It is natural to ask, in face of advocacy of this kind, why it is necessary to drag in gold at all. Mr. Hawtrey lays no stress on the obvious support for his compromise, namely the force of sentiment and tradition, and the preference of Englishmen for shearing a monarch of his powers rather than of his head. But he adduces three other reasons: (1) that gold is required as a liquid reserve for the settlement of international balances of indebtedness; (2) that it enables an experiment to be made without cutting adrift from the old system; and (3) that the vested interests of gold producers must be considered…

LINK: <https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.16773/page/n5/mode/1up>

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PAID SUBSCRIBER ONLY Content Below:

Beating the Drum for Slouching Towards Utopia

As you can probably guess from the first item in today's edition of Grasping Reality Newsletter, my number one focus for the next nine months is going to be trying to make the launch of my Slouching Towards Utopia <https://bit.ly/3pP3Krk> book a wild success:

& "Slouching Towards Utopia" Is a Go...

I think—nay, I know—that the book is very good, and speaks to topics of great importance. It is fully the equal, in terms of the audience it deserves, of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, & Steel, of Robert Gordon's Rise & Fall of American Growth, of Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes. Whether it will get the audience that those books received is quite unlikely, and is in the lap of Tykhe. Lots and lots of things have to go right for even a great book to gain its proper wide audience.

So what can I do to maximize my chances? The only idea I have had yet that strikes me as very good is to tweet out, between now and publication day on September 6, about one sentence a day <http://twitter.com/delong>—and then annotate that sentence in a semi-talmudic way:

Slouching Tweetstorm:

But I badly need more ideas to try to raise my chances of a home run here from 0.1% up to 1%…

Any suggestions?