Uncategorized

Article on Venezuela by Juan Manuel Santos, President of Columbia, on his relationship with Chavez and the current government.

BBC Article “What’s behind the turmoil in Venezuela”

Al Jazeera article “Venezuela’s crisis, explained from the beginning”

New York Magazine “What the hell is happing in Venezuela”

Wikipedia article “Shortages in Venezuela” relatively balanced view of what is going on.

Wikipedia article “Constituent assembly”

Wikipedia: Change in Agricultural production in Russia. From 1990 to 2005

40% of food in Russia from Dacha gardens (probably low)

Raw data from Russian State Statistics Service

Agricultural production by types of enterprise
(at constant prices; percent of total)

Statue of “Traitor” George Washington in Trafalgar Square     Also here.

The Lost Cause of the Confederacy is a set of revisionist beliefs that describes the Confederate cause as a heroic one against great odds despite its defeat. The beliefs endorse the virtues of the antebellum South, viewing the American Civil War as an honorable struggle for the Southern way of life,^[1] while minimizing or denying the central role of slavery. While it was not taught in the North, aspects of it did win acceptance there and helped the process of reunifying American whites.

Boston Free Speech permit issued for 100!! people

North Korean economics

Economy of North Korea: Wikipedia
Economy climbs to 17 year high.

Korea’s developing economy

Chatham House : Political analysis

What does Kim Jong Un really want

Source of Korean Rockets: Ukraine

North Korean Missle program

North Korean and Weapons of Mass Destruction

North Korean Preconditions for talks

How lousy life was in North Korea

The political philosophy of North Korea “Juche”

Core reading is this very long and very good essay on “Cost Disease” by blogger Scott Alexander at SlateStarCodex.  Cost Disease is the dramatic rise in costs for things like healthcare and education. Scott outlines the problem,  offers eight explanatory hypotheses and finds none of them explains the data.

Here’s an example of cost disease:

(For those who have not read SlateStarCodex before: Scott is a rigorous researcher and provides links to all of the data he uses to draw conclusions. 183 of us like his work well enough to pay, in aggregate, $261 per post for him to keep producing stuff. If you find his work as worthwhile as I do, I encourage you to subscribe through iPatreon–there’s a link on his home page.  Most of what he gets goes to other content creators.)

SSC has an active readership and there are 1022 responses to the post. Scott moderates the responses and throws out anyone posting crap, so the discussion is civil, well-informed, and often as valuable as the post.

Scott wrote a follow-up post “Highlights from the comments on Cost Disease” where he says:

I got many good responses to my Considerations On Cost Disease post, both in the comments and elsewhere. A lot of people thought the explanation was obvious; unfortunately, they all disagreed on what the obvious explanation was. Below are some of the responses I found most interesting.

[Note: my emphasis in the quote]

I’m sure that on Monday, a lot of us with find our own obvious explanations and many of us will disagree with one another about the obvious answer. Sadly, I will not be there in body but will be in spirit.

Scott later turned the discussion into an article published here. It’s pretty much the same post but I think it makes the “we don’t know why this is happening” conclusion a little clearer.

About 6 months later in this post,  Scott reports that he’d found something that he liked. He says:

“Center For A Stateless Society has probably the best response to my cost disease post I’ve seen so far, which suggests the problem is something like oligopolies, plus weird accounting rules that treat “costs” and “revenues” in confusing and inappropriate ways.”

I think it’s a pretty interesting, non-obvious, and at least partly correct explanation.