Question 73

 

Question 73

Economic logic itself contradicts social engineering in its varied forms. If the social engineers were so smart, as I noted long ago in studying the rhetoric of storytelling in economics, why aren’t they rich? Industrial policy, anyone? It’s a fair question to ask of any expert proposing to run your life with helpful suggestions or with coerced policies based on an alleged ability to predict the future. Supernormal profit … is a strict implication of a supposed ability to predict and control. Yet we can’t predict and control, not profitably, in a creative economy. Name the economist who predicted the internet or containerization or the Green Revolution or the automobile or the modern university or the steam engine.--mccloskey

Matriculation and graduation rates in General Surgery programs for Black men declined over the study period 2005-2018. Only 2.7% of general surgery residency graduates in 2018 were Black men, down from 4.3% in 2005.

Expressway shootings in Chicago-Cook County rose from 51 in 2019 to 130 in 2020 to 273 in 2021. These expressway shootings pushed Chicago’s actual 2021 murder total north of 800.
Expressway killings aren’t counted in the official city numbers because expressways are under state jurisdiction. But try telling that to Chicagoans. “It’s almost like a modern, 21st century form of dueling,” said Illinois State Police Director Brendan Kelly. “[People get into fights with] each other on social media, they threaten one another and they say . . . ‘Let’s take this out to the expressway.’”

Carlsen was briefly #2 in the Norwegian Poker Championship (among more than 1000 players total).

He considered the fact that primarily women were responsible for Russia policy in the Obama administration to be an intentional attempt to humiliate him. --krastev on putin

 
Re: Stacy Schiff’s “Witches,” a 2015 history of the Salem trials. “The delusion ran for about 18 months,” Mr. Mamet says, summarizing the book, “and after that, since they couldn’t explain it, they just forgot it. It never happened.” 

In January 1937, the USSR commissioned a census, the first census since 1926. The census was not intended for public dissemination. Instead, it was developed purely for leadership decision-making purposes. When the data was collected and reported, it showed a massive level of mortality due to the famines of 1932-3. The data, while accurate, was unacceptable. As a result, all of the statisticians involved with the project were arrested and executed. Again, the data was never intended for public consumption. The leadership themselves could not allow themselves to be exposed to data that contradicted what they wanted to hear.