Sunday, September 20, 2020

Long term studies of childhood and later development

The lifelong studies that hold clues to what today’s kids might have in store Book Review of 
The Origins of You: How Childhood Shapes Later LifeJay Belsky, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie E. Moffitt & Richie Poulton Harvard Univ. Press (2020)

Monday, September 14, 2020

Frederick Soddy's economics

It seems that the Nobelm Prize winner in chemistry has written extensively on economics, in particular debt before Michael Hudson.
Frederick Soddy's Debt Economics
Another post in Illogical Economics with some links.
Michael Hudson:"Frederick Soddy pointed this out in the 1920s, describing financial claims as “virtual wealth,” on the opposite side of the balance sheet from tangible capital formation. Adam Smith had argued that money is not real wealth. Bank loans, stocks and bonds are financial claims on wealth. 
The essence of balance-sheet accounting is that assets on the left side equal liabilities on the right-hand side, plus net worth (assets free of debt). It would be double-counting to add an economy’s physical means of production (the asset side of the balance sheet) together with the debt and property claims on these assets (on the liabilities side). Yet most public discourse focuses more on asset prices than on the even faster growth of debt.
Soddy was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1921, showing that good economists sometimes do win – except that he won for his contribution to chemistry, not economics. In an analogy to Ptolemaic astronomy, today’s academic gatekeepers depict an economic system shaped by consumer choice rather than revolving around finance." from https://www.prosper.org.au/2010/05/the-counter-enlightenment/

Sunday, September 13, 2020

Tim Harford on statistics and vivid reports

Tim Harford  "Statistics, lies and the virus: Tim Harford’s five lessons from a pandemic" in Financial Times :"Rather than bringing some kind of consensus, more years of education simply seem to provide people with the cognitive tools they require to reach the politically convenient conclusion. From climate change to gun control to certain vaccines, there are questions for which the answer is not a matter of evidence but a matter of group identity." https://app.ft.com/content/92f64ea9-3378-4ffe-9fff-318ed8e3245e?fbclid=IwAR3-oyqteypUnXpBV7MpVH-zL2hmgUXIlVuvZuMxl3i7-2g7ixF6e1bqsCs

Affirmative action returns to University of California


University of California votes to restore affirmative action nearly 24 years after it was outlawed

 An earlier strategy of the university:"The UC system subsequently sought to restore diversity with race-neutral measures. In 2001, it began guaranteeing admission for all students who ranked in the top 4% of their high school class, ensuring that those in all neighborhoods would have an equal shot at a UC education." from another report. The need is felt by reports such as this Black newborns three times more likely to die when cared for by white doctor: study though there are claims like this:
Med school professor removed by UPMC as fellowship director over white paper "In the paper, originally published in the Journal of the American Heart Association on March 24, Wang argued that affirmative action efforts through diversity, inclusion and equity in medicine have been largely unsuccessful because of a “limited qualified applicant pool and legal challenges to the use of race and ethnicity in admissions to institutions of higher education.”

Early years of C.R. Rao

THE ET INTERVIEW:PROFESSOR C.R. RAOInterviewed by Anil K. BeraUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignIt
A four hour series of opinions and speeches during his 100 th birthday cekebratipns, a bit chaotic but some of these are coming separately on YouTube https://www.facebook.com/100001729304581/posts/3297381710329440/
His popular book Statistics and Truth available free online at various sites.

Friday, September 11, 2020

Tuesday, September 08, 2020

Bellator 2019

Available on YouTube https://youtu.be/xs3aPA3X_5Y
One of the popular dances from the film https://youtu.be/sDZA54sTqwQ

Sunday, September 06, 2020

S. Radhakrishnsn


The Calm, Studied Brilliance Of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan by Keerthik Sasidharsn in Swarajya, considered a right we ing magazine.

David Graeber links

David Graeber Left Us a Parting Gift — His Thoughts on Kropotkin’s “Mutual Aid” by Pier Marco Tacca
An Everyday Anarchist: David Graeber, 1961-2020 by Paul Mason:"His most profound insight was, for me, not the need for prefigurative activism, but a critique of Marxism’s totalising claims and the all or nothing strategy that flows from them. Graeber’s antidote to the fatalism of a generation who thought themselves trapped in capitalism’s inescapable matrix was to reject the idea of a “capitalist totality”: there is capital, and it subsumes other things – like friendship, co-operation, consumption and culture."
A Jewish goodbye to David Graeber by Benjamin Balthaser in Jacobin
For the first time in my life, I'm frightened to be Jewish by David Graeber himself in Open Democracy about an year ago.
I neglected reading David Graeber because of his cantankerous attitude in some discussion, see for example, the discussion on his book 'Debt' in  Crooked Timber https://crookedtimber.org/2012/02/22/seminar-on-david-graebers-debt-the-first-5000-years-introduction/.
And  https://crookedtimber.org/?s=David+Graeber 
But from these articles, if seems that he had several interesting ideas worth studying.