2025-09-21
omega severer
There’s an article in the latest issue of the LRB1 by William Davies which reviews When the Clock Broke and Hayek’s Bastards, two books which essentially blame right-wing populism on libertarianism. The annoying thing is that I can’t totally write this accusation off, given the impact of the Tea Party and the surprising number of “libertarians” who have turned into Trump defenders. But in general, I feel like if you blame everything you don’t like on everyone who doesn’t agree with you, treating them all as one single entity, you’ll end up with a very confused model of the world. As a chaser, it’s worth listening to this Core Memory episode, where Ashlee interviews Jan Sramek on the history and current status of the California Forever project.
Ege Erdil points out that much of the rising cost that Brian Potter noted in American electricity prices is actually inflation. That being said, it seems to me that even electricity prices remaining static is a suboptimal state of affairs.
Noah Smith has a good overview of the H1B visa business and of the ascendancy of the anti-immigration wing in the American right2. On that note, Caleb Watney has a tweet on H1B visa reform, including a link to an Institute for Progress proposal to turn the visa lottery into an auction, although Lauren Gilbert suggests that this would negatively affect university researchers. It seems to me that this could be solved by splitting the H1B into two streams, one for research and one for industry, but I also realize that there’s a spectrum between generating the optimal visa scheme and the number of changes which are actually politically allowable or feasible. Some more relevant tweets while we’re on the topic.
Eneasz Brodski has an interesting post on how identifying with the protagonists of stories is in some sense indicative of a theory of mind failure, because often the author’s actual intention is to write someone who is unusual, which is statistically unlikely to be like you.
Hyun Woo Kim has a short story in the Metropolitan Review about a Korean couple living their twilight years in America. I recall a while ago Noah Smith had a post on graphic novels which told the second-generation immigrant story, and I mentioned that actually I would rather read the stories of their parents instead. The children are more or less the same, Asian-American, but the parents were fully formed in their home culture and actually clash. In this case, they are not just “Asian” but recognizably Korean in their obsession with particular forms of status and hierarchy, not only competing with others using their children, but even with a child in a game.
Robert Yaman on NextHen, a company which is making chicken farming both more efficient and more humane by making it possible for layer hens to lay broiler eggs. Tangentially related, Martin Boudry on how alternative proteins should (not) be marketed.
Also interesting in this issue, Sheila Fitzpatrick on cancellation.