My weekly reading for December 29, 2024

by David Friedman, “Substack by David Friedman”, December 25, 2024.

Fragments:

In 2024, Republicans won just under two-thirds of the vote in Tennessee. Still, they won eight of the state’s nine congressional districts. All else being equal, Republicans would likely have a slim one-seat majority in the U.S. House of Representatives today, rather than a five-seat advantage, if Tennessee were less heavily gerrymandered. (The Economist: At the state level, democracy in America is cracking)

Two-thirds of voters getting eight of the nine seats in Congress would be anomalous in a proportional representation system, but the US congressional elections are the first past the post. If Tennessee’s population were evenly divided, with the same percentage of Republican and Democratic voters in each congressional district, the majority party would win them all – even if the vote split were 51/49. With an almost two-to-one majority, Democrats can only gain seats if their voters are concentrated in one or a few districts.

And:

So much for the Economist As far as the article is concerned, its claim is not supported by either logic or current law. No court has interpreted the Voters Rights Act as a justification for forced redistricting to make the number of congressional representatives from each party proportional to the number of votes cast for that party.

If that ever happens, the Libertarian Party, with 0.42% of the vote in 2024, would have to indict its two members of Congress.

by Jeanna Smialek, New York TimesDecember 6, 2024. (HT to Tyler Cowen for missing this one at the time.)

Fragments:

FRED – whose name stands for Federal Reserve Economic Data – was born in 1991. But he was a gleam in the eyes of the St. Louis Fed long before that.

And:

The story began in the 1960s, with an economist named Homer Jones (now called the ‘grandfather of FRED”). Mr. Jones was director of research at the Fed’s St. Louis branch, and he wanted to make the central bank’s decisions more based on data, so he began sending typed data reports to Fed officials around the country.

Note from DRH: The story doesn’t mention it, but Milton Friedman credited his teacher Homer Jones with getting him interested in economics.

by Chelsea Follett, Human progressDecember 24, 2024.

Fragments:

Writer PJ O’Rourke famously quipped, “When you think of the good old days, think of one word: dentistry.” So let’s follow his advice. James Wynbrandts The Excruciating History of Dentistry: Tasty Stories and Oral Oddities from Babylon to Braces offers plenty to chew on. Like the New York Times book review so to speak: ‘Wynbrandt has clearly done his homework.’

The teeth of our ancestors were in a terrible condition. As Wynbrandt notes while describing the Old Testamentcalling a woman’s teeth sheep-white and noting that none were missing was once counted as high praise worthy of a love poem. After all, healthy teeth used to be much rarer than they are today. The first mass-produced bristle toothbrush did not appear in England until the 1780s, during that country’s industrialization. Our pre-industrial ancestors had only a primitive understanding of what caused their teeth to rot, fall out, and constantly hurt.

And:

As noted, broken jaws were another common result of tooth extraction. In 1530 the first printed book on dentistry, the German one, appeared Zene Artzneyor “Medicines for the Teeth,” advised: “The sign by which you can judge whether the jaw is broken or whether some of it has broken off is when the socket from which the tooth has been extracted bleeds more than normal, and the jaw swells. so much so that one cannot open the mouth, and the cavity festers and swells.” In the 17th century, when sugar became more widely available in Europe, tooth decay became an even more common condition. The wealthy, who had the first and most abundant access to sugar, were hit first and hardest. In 1602 it was noted that Queen Elizabeth I ‘shows some decay, which, to conceal when she comes into public, she puts many fine cloths into her mouth to accentuate her cheeks. In other words, she was missing enough teeth to even affect the appearance of her face, with her skin sagging in the space where teeth would normally be.

DRH comment: In 2015, I strongly disagreed with the following statement by Milton and Rose Friedman in Free to choose:

Industrial progress, mechanical improvements, all the great wonders of modern times have meant little to the wealthy. The wealthy in ancient Greece would hardly have benefited from modern plumbing; running water was replaced by walking servants.

I don’t know about Milton and Rose, but I certainly consider modern dentistry to be one of the wonders of the modern age. The excerpt above says why.

by John Miltimore, The everyday economyDecember 25, 2024.

Randolph’s racism seems less severe than Mortimer’s. After all, denying a man a job because of his race and making racist comments is much harder than observing musical talent (real or perceived) in a group of people. But both are examples of racism; and the audience sees this clearly. Furthermore, we later see that Randolph’s kinder, gentler racism is not far removed from Mortimer’s, as Randolph agrees with his brother after his racist outburst.

Of course, not everyone agrees with this analysis. Some might argue that Mortimer is more racist than Randolph. What’s important to understand is that the Duke brothers’ racism comes from the same place: they don’t see Billy Ray as a individuallyeven after testing his mettle.

And:

“[Racism] is the idea of ​​attributing moral, social, or political significance to a man’s genetic ancestry—the idea that a man’s intellectual and characterological qualities are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry,” Rand wrote in The virtue of selfishness. “Which in practice means that a man should not be judged by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.”

Rand, an individualist, called racism “the lowest, most primitive form of collectivism” – and she was right. Unfortunately, this primitive collectivism became institutionalized in America for much of the twentieth century Jim Crow lawsthat marginalized African Americans and enforced racial segregation and disenfranchisement in the South.

And:

“I don’t think white people worldwide have really taken into account the extent to which their own personal identities are shaped by constructions of whiteness,” says Kendi. said during a recent conversation. “Whiteness prevents white people from connecting with humanity.”

You don’t need a PhD to see that Kendi’s “anti-racism,” despite all this fancy language, is deeply racist. Like Randolph and Mortimer, he does not see people as individuals; he sees them in terms of their race (in this case “whiteness”).