Tombs of the Mughals

Is there a "home field" advantage with no audience?

                                Tombs of the Mughals

The Mughals of Northern India are famous for their tombs, Humayun’s tomb in Delhi, Jahangir’s Tomb in Lahore and, of course, the Taj Mahal. Why so many tombs? Culture surely has something to do with it, although conservative Muslims tend to frown on tombs and ancestor worship as interference with the communication between man and God. Incentives are another reason.
Under the Mansabdari system which governed the nobility, the Mughal Emperor didn’t give perpetual grants of land. On death, all land that had been granted to the noble reverted back to the Emperor, effectively a 100% estate tax. In other words, land titling for the Mughal nobility was not hereditary. Since land could not be handed down to the next generation, there was very little incentive for the Mughal nobility to build palaces or the kind of ancestral homes that are common in Europe. The one exception to the rule, however, was for tombs. Tombs would not revert back to the Emperor. Hence the many Mughal tombs
Here is some lovely jali (stone lattice) work in Barber’s tomb in the Humayan tomb complex.

The Aga Khan Development Network has done some great restoration work on Isa Khan’s tomb, again in the Humayun’s tomb complex. Here’s the ceiling and another piece of jali work.

From Tabarrok

The Reach of Education

                                                       The Reach of Education

United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA). That union represents more than 35,000 teachers in the nation's second-largest school district. Earlier this month, UTLA published a paper calling for schools to remain closed until the district could ensure adequate supplies of protective gear for teachers and students. UTLA also demanded the reconfiguring of classrooms to allow for social distancing.

But that wasn't it. UTLA also stated that the pandemic requires an immediate moratorium on new charter schools in Los Angeles.
It is also demanding things that the officials in charge of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) don't have the power to grant, such as the passage of Medicare for All, new state-level wealth taxes in California, and a federal bailout of the LAUSD—which is struggling to meet pension obligations for retired teachers and staff.


More than 10 teachers unions—including those in Boston, Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul—have joined up with the Democratic Socialists of America to say that "schools cannot continue in this crisis without the resources our students need and deserve."
What sort of demands are being made? For starters, those unions want a national ban on evictions, a moratorium on charter schools, an end to voucher programs, and the abolition of standardized testing. They also want a "massive infusion of federal money"—though it is unclear how much that actually is—paid for by, of course, "taxing billionaires and Wall Street."

(excerpted from an article somewhere)

The Great Production of Slavery

                       The Great Production of Slavery


From McCloskey on the revolting 1619 Lie:

Both Senator [Tom] Cotton [R-AR] and the 1619 Project have the economic history wrong.
If it were true, the numerous slave societies of olden times, such as Rome in 30 BCE or Norway in 700 CE, would have long ago experienced the Great Enrichment, of 3,000 percent per person for the poorest in Britain and Japan and many other non-slave places 1800 to the present. Likewise, by now Canada, say, with no slaves or much of any connection with slavery, would have remained very poor. Switzerland. New Zealand. Botswana.


What “built”” the US and every other country now prosperous was not stealing from poor people, or for that matter piling up routine investment, but massive innovation—cheap steel, electricity, vaccines, the modern university, mobility of labor and capital, the internal combustion engine, sewage treatment, artificial fertilizer, radio, radar, free trade, jet planes, the green revolution, containerization, computers, and above all the shamefully delayed but in the end thoroughly achieved liberation of slaves, poor men, women, colonial peoples, immigrants, free Blacks, gays. Under what Adam Smith called “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty”—in a word, liberalism– -people were permitted for the first time to have a go. It was their new liberty to innovate, not slavery or forced investment, that made billions rich, and will make the entire world rich. Or it will do so unless the 1619 Project and Senator Cotton, populists of left or right, with their Just-So understandings of history, kill it.

Accolades

                                       Accolades


These are difficult times and any optimism should be valued. Emergent Ventures from Mercatus Center and George Mason University has created prizes related to innovative approaches to The Virus. It should make everyone feel better--for the future if not the present. .Here is the list of winners:

1. Social leadership prize: Helen Chu and her team at the University of Washington.

Dr. Helen Y. Chu, an infectious disease expert in Seattle, knew that the United States did not have much time…

As luck would have it, Dr. Chu had a way to monitor the region. For months, as part of a research project into the flu, she and a team of researchers had been collecting nasal swabs from residents experiencing symptoms throughout the Puget Sound region.

To repurpose the tests for monitoring the coronavirus, they would need the support of state and federal officials. But nearly everywhere Dr. Chu turned, officials repeatedly rejected the idea, interviews and emails show, even as weeks crawled by and outbreaks emerged in countries outside of China, where the infection began.

By Feb. 25, Dr. Chu and her colleagues could not bear to wait any longer. They began performing coronavirus tests, without government approval.

What came back confirmed their worst fear. They quickly had a positive test from a local teenager with no recent travel history. The coronavirus had already established itself on American soil without anybody realizing it. (from nyt)

2. Data gathering and presentation prize: Avi Schiffmann

A self-taught computer maven from Seattle, Avi Schiffmann uses web scraping technology to accurately report on developing pandemic, while fighting misinformation and panic. He is seventeen.

3. Prize for good policy thinking: The Imperial College researchers, led by Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist.

Neil and his team calculated numerically what the basic options and policy trade-offs were in the coronavirus space. Even those who disagree with parts of their model are using it as a basic framework for discussion.

4. Prize for rapid speedy response: Curative, Inc. (legal name Snap Genomics, based in Silicon Valley)

Originally a sepsis diagnostics company, they very rapidly repositioned their staff and laboratories to scale up COVID-19 testing. They also acted rapidly, early, and pro-actively to round up the necessary materials for such testing, and they are currently churning out a high number of usable test kits each day, with that number rising rapidly. The company is also working on identifying which are the individuals most like to spread the disease and getting them tested first.

McCullough on Heyne

                     McCullough on Heyne

Some points from a review by Russ McCullough of Paul Heyne:

“Morality has more to do with intentions than with results; so the person who tried to run you down with his car is morally more culpable than the person who actually ran you down but while trying to get to church.”

Consider the phrase, “Hunger is an injustice.” As he explains, generally speaking, “no one intends the hunger of other people” and therefore there is no injustice.

He is one of the earliest writers to highlight the distinction between economic systems and the morality of people participating in those systems. His analogy to a traffic system is great:
An economic system that successfully coordinates the efforts of millions of people will necessarily work like an urban traffic system: Individuals will pursue their own goals, obeying general rules of the game, in response to the net advantages they perceive in their immediate environment, and adjusting those net advantages in the process so that they more adequately accommodate the diverse wants and abilities of the participants.

Paul is quick to emphasize that it is impossible for the government to “extract just outcomes from the economic system” and that efficiency gains from the market system can allow individuals to better foster personal relationships, community, and family. People who attribute materialism, consumerism, and selfishness to capitalism are confusing personal morality with impersonal markets.

Private property within the social system of capitalism is helpful because of his insight that “property rights are rights with respect to other people, and are therefore inescapably social, not private.” These rights combined with rules that state that only voluntary exchange is allowed create a fabulous social phenomenon where individual success “depends on your ability to persuade other people to cooperate” with you. Ultimately, efforts to curb or change the virtue of profit maximization are misplaced. Those efforts should instead be made to create better rules of the game so that the rent seeking benefits of lobbyists and other special interests are reduced, and political markets are made more competitive.

Disparities

Is Critical Theory an example of Begging the Question?

                                         Disparities

In 2018, women earned 62% or more of the bachelor’s degrees in 9 out of the 16 academic fields: Health Professions (84.5% and the greatest gender disparity for either sex for the 16 majors), Public Administration (82.8% and the field with the second-highest gender imbalance), Education (81.6% and the field with the third-highest gender disparity), Psychology (78.9%), English (70.8%), Foreign Languages (68.8%), Communication and Journalism (65.5%), Biology (62.2%) Visual and Performing Arts (61.4%).

Women have earned a majority of degrees in Biology in every year since 1988, and have earned more than 60% of those degrees in 8 of the last 17 years, including a peak 62.2% share in both 2004 and 2018.

Women have never earned fewer than 60% of bachelor’s degrees in any year of the following since 1971: Health Professions, Public Administration, Education, English, Foreign Languages, and Visual/Performing Arts. For Psychology, women have earned a majority share every year since 1974, a 60% share or greater starting in 1979, a 70% share or greater starting in 1988 and a 75% share or greater starting in 1999.

For the four academic fields of Business, Architecture, Math and Statistics, and Physical Sciences, women earned a slight minority of those degrees in 2018 ranging between 40.0% for Physics and 47.1% for Architecture. For the other two of the four fields, women earned 42.4% of Math/Statistics degrees, 47.0% of Business degrees. For degrees in Business, the female share exceeded 50% in 2002, 2003 and 2004 but then has gradually declined since then to a 47.0% share in 2018, the lowest share since 1990.

Over the 1971 to 2018 period, the three largest increases in the female shares of degrees were in Business (from 9.1% to 47.0% = +37.9 percentage points), Architecture (from 11.9% to 47.1% = +35.2 percentage points) and Psychology (from 44.4% to 78.9% +34.5 percentage points).

In 2018, the female shares of bachelor’s degrees in all of the 16 academic fields except Business increased from the previous year. The biggest annual increase in 2018 by academic field was the 1.8 percentage point increase in the female share of engineering degrees from 20.4% in 2017 to 22.2% in 2018, a new all-time high.

Sunday/Treasure and Pearl

                     Sunday/Treasure and Pearl

In today's gospel, the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, a pearl of great price. These are interesting smilies, physical representations of the spiritual. And strange suggestions. Both are appropriated, not created, found and not earned. More, they are both of oblique origin, the treasure is someone else's, the pearl the reaction to an impurity.


The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

R. S. Thomas