The Land is Inhospitable But The People Are Not

"In her constant living with animals she had caught their dumbness and their calm.
Flaubert.

I spent two days with a nomadic family in Northern Somalia, also called Somaliland.

The Trip

We hired a guy to drive us to the location, 5 hours from the city we're in, Burao. What I didn't know at the time was that our driver was a "milkman", he stopped at several intervals to collect milk from the nomadic families on the way, as well as sometimes drop supplies like rice and sugar. I was told the scenery was beautiful but we left at 6 pm and arrived at midnight, so we couldn't see anything.

The ride was extremely bumpy, there was a concrete highway for the first hour but after that, you have to drive on a dirt road. Because we booked four seats, we assumed we would be the only ones in the car, but it turned out the two other passengers were already there,  two kids shared the front seat and I sat in the back with 4 other adults, cozy!

TItanic and optimal waiting.

 In the last minutes of Titanic, after the ship sinks. Those who survive on the lifeboats have to make a choice.

Come back and try to fill the extra space they have and save a few people? Or just stay where they are and let them die? Easy choice, right? Wrong! The problem is that if there are too many survivors, they will all try to get on the boats and overcrowd them, leading to the death of everyone. But if you wait too long, everyone in the water will freeze and you won't be able to save anyone.

What you want to do is a version of what they tried to do in the Titanic, distribute people so you send in empty boats and keep the full ones away. Unfortunately, they took too long and most died.

Perhaps you can wait, a bit. And then slowly approach, in order to get a better view of the swimmers? And then decide whether to go further in, stay where you are and yell, or flee, depending on how many there are?

How rich should Iran be?

Iran is most famous for its extremely repressive government, and there is a perception that Iranians have high human capital. So I wanted to see how their development outcomes compare to nearby countries with similar GDP per capita in the region.

Jordan and Egypt are the comparison group. They are both slightly poorer. All data is from WB unless otherwise stated.

Life expectancy

Iran: 73.9

Jordan: 74.3

Egypt: 70.2

Infant Mortality

Iran: 10

Jordan: 12

Egypt: 16

Literacy Rate

Iran: 89

Jordan: 98

Egypt: 75

I wondered whether the low literacy rate in Iran is because of Iran-specific female seclusion so I looked it up.

Male Literacy Rate

Iran: 93

Jordan: 99

Egypt: 80

Ok, they look somewhat better, but this just tells me that Jordan is impressive and that Egypt is a shithole.

Male Labor force participation 

Iran: 71

Jordan: 63

Egypt: 71

This time Jordan is worse than the others.

I also looked at female labor force participation. Unsurprisingly all three are in the bottom seven. 

They are close in terms of HDI with Iran topping and Egypt bottoming.

Iran seems to have an IQ score of 80 using a dubious website,  Jordan is 5 points higher, and Egypt is 5 points lower, all in all, looks about average for that region of the world.

Conclusion

It looks to me that Iran doesn't look particularly impressive. The perception is probably fuelled by the impressive diaspora (more than a quarter of Iranian Americans have Master's degrees or higher).

Contra Haidt on the Teens

I was reading the Haidt piece on the kids, and he kept talking about major trends and statistics regarding teen suicide. I wanted to know how many deaths exactly a 131% increase in suicide entails.

*There are ~21 million kids aged 10 to 14, and their suicide rates increased by 1.4 kids per 100k from 2010 to 2021. There are also ~21 million kids aged 15 to 19, with an extra 2.5 kids per 100k unaliving.

So this is 294 extra deaths per year from suicide for the kids and 525 for the teens.  That's 819 extra suicide deaths per year. What percentage of this can we attribute to the phones?

The Cosmic Principle of Dramatic Irony

Notes on Prediction

Note: After writing this I found a Scott Alexander post similar to this that changes all my beliefs on the topic and renders this post half-obsolete, as is expected in any post by Scott.

Engel

There is this interesting phenomenon of people describing their current times and predicting based on it, and the conditions changing immediately after their observation. I noticed this after getting Engel’s The Condition of the Working Class in England. Where he describes doom and gloom and the honestly retched state the Industrial Revolution brought to England. The period Engel observed is now called Engels Pause. Mainly because Robert C Allen likes to spit on the graves of communists. Wikipedia says the period 1790-1840 is when productivity increased rapidly but real wages stagnated.

This means that the pause was already over by the time Engles observed it. Looking at some papers looks like you could extend the pause up to the mid-1850s, depending on the data you use. The difference could be that one set of data is for London and the other for all of Britain? I don't care enough about getting the years right to look into it closely. Some scholars like Gregory Clark apparently think Engels was Delulu, and everything was fine and dandy and real wages were rising, but Allen thinks Clark is the Delulu polemicist and I chose Allen as My Lord and Savior because he seems like less of a culture warrior.
 

Pinker 

One of the most popular posts on the SlateStarCodex Subreddit is called "Steven Pinker jinxes the world". It's about how Pinker's predictions about violence are unraveling after the publishing of his book*. I don't have much else to say so go read that and come back.

Fukuyama

After the fall of the Soviet Union Francis Fukuyama declared the End of History. Liberal Democracy is triumphant and has no real challengers. I didn't read his book but I did read the essay it's based on, and let me tell you. I think he is crazy. I consider myself a valiant defender of the Anglophone Analytic tradition in philosophy and seeing someone cite Hegel seriously makes me reconsider their humanity, intelligence, and foresight. So the realization that the biggest defender of American Hegemony thinks some Hegelian Spirit is the sole cause of it, is...terrifying.  

Regardless, I wanted to add Fukuyama to the list of the Cosmic Jinxers by citing the threat of Radical Islam, Nationalist Communism, and the Woke Authoritarian Left. However, Fukuyama says:

"Most of these analyses lack any larger conceptual framework for distinguishing between what is essential and what is contingent or accidental in world history, and are predictably superficial. If Mr. Gorbachev were ousted from the Kremlin or a new Ayatollah proclaimed the millennium from a desolate Middle Eastern capital, these same commentators would scramble to announce the rebirth of a new era of conflict."

This basically means that he is the Chad-Wojak with a Large Conceptual Framework and any criticism and doubt by recent events makes you the Virign-Wojak news addict.

I'm not convinced by his analytic framework but I think he is basically right, there aren't that many big threats to liberal democracy at the size of 20th-century communism and fascism. Islamism has already peaked and the Gulf countries are modernizing. But I worry that if we buy into his thesis we will get lazy and our enemies might find a chance. Which brings me to...

Thiel

Yesterday I listened to an episode of Conversations With Tyler, by the eponymous Tyler Cowen, interviewing Billionaire and right-wing philosopher Peter Thiel. As Tyler does with the guests he likes he kept grilling him about the fact that "we'll just muddle through" and worrying too much about the future of Western Civilisation or  America or whatever is unnecessary. But Thiel expressed a worry about uttering the forbidden words as if he expected that the optimist incantation would somehow reverse our fortunes. 

Maybe the normie view of history where there is lots of possibilities and we have limited predictive power is the right one?

In Islamic culture,  there is this thing where whenever you talk hoping for something, like say test results or job applications you have to suffix it with the saying "Inshallah" meaning "if God wills it." So whenever you say that you will get an A or that the recruiters will call back, you have to say Inshallah after, or else you're risking getting cursed or something. My guess is that it reminds you that things are in God's hands, but the additional benefit is to remind God that things are in his hands!

So in conclusion what I'm trying to say is that even if Fukuyama, Tyler, and the boomer optimists are right and we'll be fine, we should avoid talking and gloating about it too much, and remember to say Inshallah after we do.

How much would it cost to get replacement birth rate?

 https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.2307/1972123  

In a 1987 paper,  it was estimated that raising the birth rate from 1.9 to 2.1 would cost $380 billion in social expenditure. That's about a trillion in 2023 dollars. But the birth rate is now 1.7, so assuming linearity, doubling the cost seems likely. 2 trillion dollars, which would be 2/7 of US govt expenditure. The population is 40% bigger so 2.8 trillion. This is about $28,000 per extra baby. It's likely an underestimate because americans are richer now.

Asian American suicide

Note: This is messy but I left it as is, sorry. You can ask me about it if you know who I'm and I will explain.

TLDR; While it's true that in terms of ordering, suicide is the number one killer for young Asian Americans, their suicide rates are lower than average, and they have the lowest all-cause mortality of all ethnic groups.

 I saw a greentext on Reddit about how suicide is the number one killer for young Asian American males.

I wanted to check, it's validity and I found this post by a Ph.D. student.

I found this doc with the data and went to see if true.

It's true that 15-24 Asian Americans have suicide as their leading cause of death.

all-cause, all races (51.5, 95.6)* suicide (11.8, 17)

all-cause, suicide 20-24 hispanic (76.1, 11.5)

all-cause, suicide 20-24 white (95.1, 20)

all-cause, suicide 20-24 black (140.8, 13.4)

all-cause, suicide 20-24 native (163.3, 42)

all-cause Asian (26.5, 44.2), suicide (8.6, 14.6).

asians have the lowest all cause at 20-24, and 

*brackets are for age groups (15-19, 20-24)

The number is even lower for 25-29 Asians, but similar in all races

All-cause Asian (26.5, 44.2), suicide (8.6, 14.6)

So young Asians have a much lower all cause and slightly lower suicide mortality.

Let's check by sex:

all causes, all races, male (72.7, 137.9), suicide (17.9, 27.2)

all causes, all races female (29.4, 50.9), suicide (5.4, 6.2)

all causes, Asian, male (35.9, 61.2), suicide (11.6, 21.4)

all causes, Asian, female (16.9, 26.8), suicide (5.4, 7.6)

As you can see Asians are still markedly lower on all cause mortality. Asian suicide is only somewhat lower for males, Asian females have the same rate from 15-19, but are slightly higher for the 20-24 group.