111–119 of 119 posts
Once again Occam's butterknife is spotted in the wild. Richard Lynn, call your office: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations
I purchased your fancy new razor but the blade snapped off when I tried to slice Korea in two. I want a refund.
I can't get past how needlessly wordy this article is. It's as if someone is trying to flaunt their language skills and it distracts me from the actual content; I must admit that I read the whole thing and did not catch wind of the author's point. Sentences like these just read as nonsense to me: "The intuition behind the theory is nonetheless compelling, which makes the scarcity of policy prescriptions frustrating."
I've just disagreed with the authors about Botswana and the French Revolution. Nonetheless, they are wise and understand why nations fail. People suffer when nations fail. What should people do differently to avoid their nations failing? Since the authors had described the problems so well, I hoped that they would offer advice, for I felt sure that it would also be good. They give very little advice. I found that frustrating.
There is a lot of meaning packed into that sentence (read in context). It is brief, not wordy. Unpacking the sentence to make its meaning plain for all to read is self-defeating because it requires too many words. That surfeit of words, if sustained for the length of a book review, re-hides the meaning.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, this thread just became some kind of magnet for racists, didn't it. Since you are apparently very proud of your IQ, perhaps you can read the actual article and try to comment on something related to the article's substance, and not just give us a knee jerk reaction based on the title.
The implicit comment is that the article's substance is of no conceivable relevance, because it fails to mention the most obvious possible cause - human genetic diversity - for the pattern it purports to analyze. It's one thing to refute or qualify the null hypothesis. It's another to ignore it. Why shouldn't it be the null hypothesis that genetic diversity is the cause of global inequality? Human beings have been th…
The plausibility of a link between prosperity and IQ is also going to depend on one's basic assumptions about how nations work. Suppose that national prosperity is basically a battle between the good guys building and the bad guys looting. What happens when both the good guys and the bad guys are smarter? Smarter bad guys makes things worse and the bad guys generally out number the good guys, so it is no surprise that the planet's smartest race lose 30million members to a man made famine.
There are rival basic assumptions, around which one could build ones political theorizing. I like "Man versus Nature". So I'm temperamentally inclined to smarter is better. But I can see how some-one who sees the world as "Man versus Man" would dismiss "IQ leads to prosperity" as not worth considering, because there is no underlying mechanism to make it work.
Note that this is a review by the (economically conservative) Economist . I haven't read Why Nations Fail , but I do read their blog[1] and my interpretation of their theories is much less absolute than the Economist's is - or rather, I think the emphasis is more on the problems of Extractive institutions (which may well be state institutions, but also could be private institutions or hybrids or the two). For example…
> Note that this is a review by the (economically conservative) Economist. I thought they were one of the most liberal papers in existence. (In the classical European sense.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No it isn't. The author's main point is that corrupt governments siphon wealth into privileged hands at the expense of the public good. This isn't same as "allowing" wealth inequality. You can try to elide these things into being the same, but now you're misrepresenting things to make a politically charged point.
Geez. I'm not on a soapbox here. Don't accuse me. If you're going to say I'm wrong, at least point out how I'm wrong. There isn't a big difference between what I said and: >> corrupt governments siphon wealth into privileged hands at the expense of the public good. The effect is the same. Too much money in too few hands. Countries don't only need the rule of law to protect us from violence. We also need it to protect…
That's basically how capitalism works if left to its own devices. The place doesn't have to do anything at all.
Note that this is a review by the (economically conservative) Economist . I haven't read Why Nations Fail , but I do read their blog[1] and my interpretation of their theories is much less absolute than the Economist's is - or rather, I think the emphasis is more on the problems of Extractive institutions (which may well be state institutions, but also could be private institutions or hybrids or the two). For example…
> Note that this is a review by the (economically conservative) Economist. I thought they were one of the most liberal papers in existence. (In the classical European sense.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Note that this is a review by the (economically conservative) Economist. I thought they were one of the most liberal papers in existence. (In the classical European sense.)
They believe in smaller rather than larger government. Choose your label..
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sentence is perfectly clear to me, and English is not my first language. I don't even perceive the style as pretentious or "wordy": it seems the appropriate register for a magazine like the Economist.
it seems the appropriate register for a magazine like the Economist. I guess that may be true, but why should it be that way? It could have been restated as 'the theory's good, I had expected more predictions'.
People who don't like big words work to continually reassure themselves they're missing no precision of meaning or accuracy of tone. They often are. The selection has a grade level of 15.73 (aka, Junior in college)
Doesn't mean everything should be expressed at the college reading level, but it doesn't mean everything else should be expressed at the reading level of a 6th grader.
To move this sentence down to the flesch reading level of a 6th grader requires the following:
>The intuition behind the theory is nonetheless compelling, which makes the scarcity of policy prescriptions frustrating
to
>Acemoglu's idea make sense to me. I'm still mad and unsettled that it does not tell the government what to do to fix the problem.
FK Grade level of 5.8
And it had to go into the 1st person to do so, Try to write the sentence, capturing all the nuance of what he's saying and keeping it in the third person. Requires several more lines.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? I found _Collapse_ to be much more boring than I expected. One of the major reasons he claims that a society collapses is a lack of trading partners. Not very sexy at all, and not leftist.
> Not very sexy at all, and not leftist. I can't make out whether that's meant as a compliment or a complaint. Would you elaborate on that description, please?