64 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2024
  2. Oct 2022
    1. Forbidden Fruits: The Political Economy of Science, Religion, and GrowthRoland Bénabou, Davide Ticchi, and Andrea VindigniNBER Working Paper No. 21105
  3. Sep 2022
    1. In 1990, 15.1 percent of the poor were residingin high- poverty neighborhoods. That figure dropped to 10.3 percent by 2000,rose to 13.6 percent for 2010, and then fell to 11.9 percent for 2015.

      Is there a long term correlation between these rates and political parties? Is there a potential lag time between the two if there is?

  4. Aug 2022
  5. May 2022
    1. pretty much all the arguments that we would be making too if we've met a bunch of Jesuits fear right of kings and reveal the faith and it's actually it's 00:41:37 the indigenous sort of looking rationally

      Perhaps summarizing Graeber and Wengrow too much here, but..

      The Enlightenment came to us courtesy of discussions with Indigenous Peoples from the Americas.

  6. Apr 2022
  7. Feb 2022
  8. Jan 2022
    1. In an era where funding for good projects can be hard to come by, or is even endangered, we must affirmatively make the case for the study of how to improve human well-being. This possibility is a fundamental reason why the American public is interested in supporting the pursuit of knowledge, and rightly so.

      Keep in mind that they're asking this in an anti-science and post-fact political climate. Is progress studies the real end goal, or do we need political solutions? Better communication solutions? Better education solutions? Instead? First?

      Are they addressing the correct question/problem here?

  9. Dec 2021
    1. For Europeanaudiences, the indigenous critique would come as a shock to thesystem, revealing possibilities for human emancipation that, oncedisclosed, could hardly be ignored.

      Indigenous peoples of the Americas critiqued European institutions for their structures and lack of freedom. In turn, while some Europeans listened, they created an evolutionary political spectrum of increasing human complexity to combat this indigenous critique.

    1. Peruvian letters which was supposedly the letters home by a captured Inca princess who's trapped in France and they're commenting on French society and this is later remembered it 00:50:03 comes out in his late 1740s um it's later remembered as the first book which suggested the idea of the welfare state

      The 1747 book Letters of a Peruvian Woman by the prominent saloniste Madame de Graffigny, which viewed French society through the eyes of an imaginary kidnapped Inca princess, is remembered as the first book to suggest the idea of the welfare state.

    2. sort of classic banned tribe chief state hierarchy that 00:26:00 archeologists anthropologists still apply

      Traditional hierarchy used by many archaeologists and anthropologists:

      • band
      • tribe
      • chiefdom
      • state
    3. there's a great literature in 00:21:37 anthropology about the way that hunter-gatherer societies and many other societies action flip and alternate between very different kinds of political 00:21:49 arrangements depending partly on the time of year so one will have periods of great economic abundance let's say when the Bison or the deer or the woolly mammoth if we're in the Pleistocene 00:22:03 europe are coming through the valleys and you'll have extremely elaborate social measures put in place to make sure that hunting is successfully completed and during those periods you 00:22:17 might have a very authoritarian kind of political organization but once it's all over the society changes shape Marcel Mauss actually used the term social morphology I think to describe this 00:22:30 society moves and transforms

      Marcel Mauss defines social morphology as a way that societies flip or alternate between social structures depending on the seasons based on availability of food and potentially other factors.

      Perhaps to be found in Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo: A Study in Social Morphology #

    4. evolutionary theorists like Christopher berm whose book hierarchy in the forest he's a primatologist is quite explicit about 00:11:27 this and says well this is precisely what makes human politics different from the politics of say chimpanzees or bonobos or orangutangs is what he calls our actuarial intelligence which I 00:11:39 believe what he means by this is the fact that we can in fact imagine what another kind of society might be like

      Primatologist [[Christopher Boehm]] argues in his book Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior that humans are different from our primate ancestors because homo sapiens possess actuarial intelligence, or the ability to imagine what other kinds of society might look like.

    1. OK, maybe the road was longer and more tortuous than the traditional narrative suggests, but didn’t all humans end up embracing agriculture, and a form of social life characterised by hierarchy and inequality with it, eventually?

      Another good question to look for clues in the text.

    1. what they see as our three basic freedoms: the freedom to disobey, the freedom to go somewhere else, and the freedom to create new social arrangements?
    2. What is the state? the authors ask. Not a single stable package that’s persisted all the way from pharaonic Egypt to today, but a shifting combination of, as they enumerate them, the three elementary forms of domination: control of violence (sovereignty), control of information (bureaucracy), and personal charisma (manifested, for example, in electoral politics).
    3. The story is linear (the stages are followed in order, with no going back), uniform (they are followed the same way everywhere), progressive (the stages are “stages” in the first place, leading from lower to higher, more primitive to more sophisticated), deterministic (development is driven by technology, not human choice), and teleological (the process culminates in us).

      This might be the case if the tools drove the people, but isn't it more likely the way in which different people use the tools?

      Which direction gives rise to more complexity?

  10. Nov 2021
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  19. Feb 2021
    1. ReconfigBehSci. (2021, January 18). Calling lawyers, historians, and political scientists. A thread on the value of life. I’m still stunned by Lord Sumption, ex-judge on UK’s Supreme Court, now anti-lockdown campaigner, publicly stating that the life of a woman with stage 4 bowel cancer was ‘less valuable’ 1/4 [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1351118909886312449

  20. Jan 2021
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  27. Nov 2015
    1. According to Mark T. Mitchell, professor of political science at Patrick Henry College in Virginia: Gratitude is born of humility, for it acknowledges the giftedness of the creation and the benevolence of the Creator. This recognition gives birth to acts marked by attention and responsibility. Ingratitude, on the other hand, is marked by hubris, which denies the gift, and this always leads to inattention, irresponsibility, and abuse.