The Horror

Children born into poverty in rural America achieve higher average income levels as adults than their urban peers. As economic opportunity tends to be more abundant in cities, this "rural advantage" in income mobility seems paradoxical. This article resolves this puzzle by applying multilevel analysis to new spatial measures of rurality and place-level data on intergenerational income mobility. We show that the high level of rural income mobility is principally driven by boys of rural-origin, who are more likely than their urban peers to grow up in communities with a predominance of two-parent households. The rural advantage is most pronounced among Whites and Hispanics, as well as those who were raised in the middle of the country. --a research paper

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Does 'cease-fire now' include Hamas' rockets, too?

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There are two problems with industrial policy: information and incentives. Government officials don’t have, and can’t have, the information they need to carry out an industrial policy that creates benefits that exceed costs. Also, they don’t have the right incentives. If they spend literally billions of dollars of government revenue on buttressing an industry and the industry fails, they don’t suffer any personal wealth loss and don’t even lose their jobs. The only cost to them as individuals is their prorated share of tax revenues, which will typically be no more than a few hundred dollars. So what ends up happening is that subsidies and preferential treatment are given to the politically powerful, which reduces the amount of capital available for unsubsidized entrepreneurs and innovators.--Henderson

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The Horror

R. F. Kuang is the new wunderkind, a legitimate polymath, scholar, classist, and linguist who is, horrifyingly, only 27 years old. She is called a fantasy writer with a trilogy--The Poppy Wars--, a creative story titled Babel (with the unsettling subtitle "The Necessity of Violence"), and, more recently, Yellowface. Underlying themes are colonialism, bigotry, and violence. I started with Babel.

Babel is a story that has, as a theme, etymology, which I plan to reincorporate into this notebook. But Babel did not prepare me for Poppy Wars. It starts innocently as a downtrodden orphan with martial arts skills and ambitious dreams. It becomes a meticulous, close-up documentation of man's savagery to man. Chapters are devoted to murder, maiming, and torture.

It soon becomes apparent that she is writing about Nanking.

Nanking, where over 300,000 Chinese were tortured, beheaded, disemboweled, buried alive, raped, and murdered in a killing spree too meticulous and casual to be called a frenzy, was written about by another Asian genius writer, Iris Chang, in The Rape of Nanking. As she continued her research, Chang became so horrified that she became sleepless and depressed and eventually killed herself.

These descriptions have not invited close scrutiny because they are so upsetting. As a result, the Nanking horrors are not very well known. But more importantly, like the Hamas horrors, they are not believed. That veiled view of Man is foundational to those who would improve the condition of Man by using human power that denies Man's violent, cruel nature.

Hamas and Nanking raise a question as to what the human norm really is. 

And who the outlier really is.