Seeing the tsunami of comments, I realize the irony: You are right that I was admitting to puzzlement at the fact that (many, not all) centi-billionaires act like the homo economicus of the basic economic textbook😀: They maximize utility (or at least wealth), try to keep as much as they can, and the hell with other motives. And, indeed, this is what puzzles me. I would have thought (but this is the left wing me…) that they would care about more, including the welfare of others less lucky, and would be willing to pay the tax. That they might even volunteer to help (a few of them actually do). I hear from the comments (although I suspect none comes from a centibillionaire…) is that maybe they care (although some of the comments are : Why should they?). But, even if they do, they do not trust the government not to come back with another “one time tax”. And that money given to the government is a waste of money. This may indeed be the reason, and I should not have been surprised. I am afraid that there is not much the CA state can do in terms of credible commitments not to come back for more. But on the waste argument. The centibillionaires could have come back and offered public private partnerships to fund specific projects that they find worth funding. (Or maybe the state could have offered them)

Eu menti, n tenho netflix. A gente vai estudar matematica com Serge Lang até encontrar a saida de samsara Bom dia

On the microeconomic foundations of macro stabilisation: The Hall-Woodford prize in historical perspective beatricecherrier.wordpress.c…

Very satisfying

The fictional Flower-class corvette HMS Compass Rose (K49) that appeared in the 1953 film 'The Cruel Sea' was actually the real-life warship HMS Coreopsis. The vessel, which served as a convoy escort in the Second World War, was scrapped shortly after filming these scenes.

Here is the Vanderbilt-Washington St. Louis report on the state of anthropology, by Joseph Henrich @JoHenrich. It is the most systematic of the reports issued so far and it is the most devastating. (The Morson report on literary studies is arguably even more critical, but is is a very weak report.) Henrich's argument is systematically laid out with ample evidence. The status of autoethnography represents as clear an example of epistemic decay as one can imagine. As for politicization, the examples speak for themselves and cannot be dismissed as cherry picking. Henrich makes clear his position in the debates on the status of anthropology and should be lauded for this. He is also impressively circumspect in discussing various survey results with low response rates. My one surprise is that he did not address cultural relativism in anthropology in contexts such as the assessment of female genital mutilation, where the relativism bleeds into an untenable moral relativism. Henrich effectively uses the responses to the initial Commission on the State of Scholarship statement to buttress his arguments. He was too polite to note that, in an interview, she apparently did not know who he is. (Interview is slightly ambiguous on whether he did not recognize the name per se, but most favorable interpretation still very unflattering.) Especially embarrassing given Henrich's visibility in economics. vanderbilt.edu/principles/st…

I had not realised before that the Bronze Age Collapse was literally *caused* by iron. Bronze age powers like the Egyptians, Hittites and Babylonians used bronze weapons, made by combining copper and tin. Tin was so scarce that only the richest and most powerful groups could access it and the bronze weapons it allowed. (Tin was so rare that it was being transported from Cornwall to the Middle East more than 1000 years BC.) The scarcity of tin gave these empires a near-monopoly on violence. Iron weapons are not actually any better than bronze ones – they're not stronger or easier to work with, as I'd assumed. They're just much, much easier to mass produce once you have bloomeries, which are the first furnaces that were hot enough to melt iron in a way that made them useable for weapons. Bloomeries meant that iron ore, which was widespread, could be used to make weapons anywhere. That led to warlords, bandits and city-states rising in a massive decentralization of military power, which the Bronze Age empires were unable to resist. After the invention of the bloomery, skeletons show a measurable increase in weapon-inflicted injuries. 'Destruction layers' with bones and signs of burning have been found from this time at archaeological sites including Troy. Ancient writers – including Herodotus, Ovid, and the writers of the Old Testament – believed the invention of iron had unleashed a new age of violence. New at Works in Progress, WEAPONS OF MASS DECENTRALIZATION: how iron itself brought about the Bronze Age Collapse. And what technologies could do the same today? worksinprogress.co/issue/wea…

Propuesta de conversión del Acorazado Yamato en un híbrido Acorazado-portaaviones. ¿Qué tal esta configuración?