Yes and no. Are Hispanics doing a better job of preventing teen births than Hispanics four years earlier? Yes. Are Hispanics doing a better job of preventing teenage pregnancies than white or black Americans? No, they aren’t. Why am I bringing this up? Because a Jezebel article on this is a bit unclear: Read More
The original state of humankind, in the olden times of unregulated fertility, is for birth rates to be high and infant and child death rates to be so high as to produce a population that is approximately stable. This is how all peoples lived prior to 1800. It is only since then that cumulative year-over-year capital gains have finally propelled humankind up and out of this condition, known as the Malthusian trap. The first immediate result in countries which have begun industrializing is a massive population boom as death rates at all ages drop and life expectancy doubles or triples.
Malthus, who lived at the very beginnings of the modern world, saw both early modern economic advances and a booming population in Great Britain and insisted that human fertility would catch up with and render futile any attempts at economic advance. What he did not see coming is what is now known as the Demographic Transition, which began around the same time, but in France. This demographic transition is typically divided into five stages. Read More
This has been an important week for Bitcoin, and therefore an important week for the history of money. Bitcoin, for those who don’t know, is an attempt at creating an electronic currency. Bitcoin has gained some traction, especially in black market activities where using a currency not controlled by a powerful government has its advantages. Read More
. . . is by Razib Khan:
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php
I think once you’ve looked it over, you’ll agree that Race/IQ denial is basically in the same sort of category as creationism. Though Race/IQ denial is a less severe scientific error than creationism, it’s the same sort of stuff.
In Steve Sailer’s essay on the use of the word “vibrant” as a liberal description of under-achieving NAMs (non-Asian minorities), he asks,
Is “vibrant” the post-Cold War version of “dynamic”?
If so, Richard Reid is an Africa scholar who writes with a distinctly pre-Cold War feel. Eschewing Frederick Cooper’s use of “vibrant” to describe black Africans, Reid instead likes to tell us how “dynamic” Africans are, in his A History of Modern Africa: 1800 to the Present. Below is a small sampling of his use of the word “dynamic.” I’m tired from the collecting “quotes” so this will have to do: Read More
I must be a masochist, but I noticed that Richard Reid seems to overuse quotation marks in his A History of Modern Africa, and so I began to take down instances of quote bloat, noting the pages on which they occur. For reasons that I cannot fully explain, I did this for half the book. If you want to get a taste for what academic quote syndrome looks like, take a gander at this: Read More
