On April 15, 1945, British forces, including units of the British Second Army and the 11th Armoured Division, entered Bergen-Belsen and liberated the remaining prisoners. The sight that greeted the liberators was horrifying. They found tens of thousands of emaciated and diseased prisoners, along with thousands of unburied corpses strewn throughout the camp. The liberation […]
I spoke to my friends at the Sloavkian think tank INESS (the Institute of Economic and Social Studies) recently. We talked about my 2025 paper Anti-Capitalism and Public Health and you can watch the video below.
Imagine waking up and discovering that, overnight, you had been granted superpowers. With a touch of your finger, you could cause new housing to emerge in places with housing shortages. It would cost you next to nothing. You could just do it.
This paper estimates the economic value to the United States of eliminating cancer mortality over a 35-year horizon beginning in 2030, which would eliminate 30.7 million cancer deaths with a total mortality burden of 380 million life-years. We quantify the economic value of this substantial reduction in cancer mortality by incorporating the monetized value of…
For a long time the otherwise admirable organization Doctors Without Borders (also known as “MSF” for its French name Médecins Sans Frontières) has been accused of antisemitism. The accusations have been credible enough to make me curb my donations to the group. I still regret having donated over $10,000 to the organization after Kelly Houle…
There’s no real “rule” here, but simply Maher’s assertion—one that many people won’t sccept in the Time of Demonization—that people can do both good and bad things (it’s better to say that then brand someone as good or evil, though of course people can lean toward one side or another). This monologue was prompted, of…
We study how international migrant income prospects affect long-run development in origin areas. We leverage the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis exchange rate shocks in a shift-share identification strategy across Philippine provinces. Initial migrant income shocks are magnified six-fold over time, increasing domestic income, education levels, migrant skills, and high-skilled migration. Remarkably, 74.9 percent of long-run…
On the afternoon of April 9th the BBC New website published a report by David Gritten under the headline “Al Jazeera condemns killing of… The post BBC News once again promotes ‘targeting journalists’ narrative appeared first on CAMERA UK.
From the still-active Sam Peltzman: I document a sudden, sharp and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness in the US population. It occurred during 2020, the year of the Covid pandemic, and mainly persists through 2024. This happiness crash spread across nearly all typical demographics and geographies. The happiest groups pre-Covid (e.g., whites, high income,…
How things have changed. Nowadays we wouldn’t dream of giving our children cocaine to treat sore throats or toothaches, Firstly because we know how devastating cocaine is and secondly we would be arrested, But in days of yore it was perfectly acceptable to give you offspring and indeed yourself a ‘healthy’ dose of cocaine.
The Barnum effect is the tendency for people to accept vague, general personality descriptions as if they were specifically true of them. For example, if someone reads: “You sometimes doubt whether you have made the right decision, but you also have a strong independent streak.” many people feel that it describes them personally, even though it could describe a […]
As always, an Aussie who wishes to remain anonymous sent me this link, and noted that New Zealand isn’t the only country in the Antipodes that tries to make science (again “Western science”) coequal with indigenous knowledge. Clicking on the screenshot below will take you to the strategy developed by the Aussie government: the “Australian…
The Stresa Front was a short-lived diplomatic alignment in 1935 between United Kingdom, France, and Italy, formed in response to the growing threat posed by Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler. Named after the Italian town of Stresa, where representatives met in April 1935, the agreement aimed to preserve the post–World War I European order and […]
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
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