Glancing at the title I thought this was going to be something about a history of a Turkish nuclear program.
That guy does not dig the Age of Reason. When I was kid any educated person would genuflect to the Age of Reason and therefore the Founding Fathers. It's a shame that's changing.
Why does he write 'defend' the economics of slavery? Regular people complained about the economics of slavery even in ancient Rome (at least according to the HBO show 'Rome' and I can't imagine TV would lie to me). I think a deep examination of the economics of slavery would be fine, and I doubt they would come up with something that would convince modern Americans that the benefits are just too good to pass up.
As for clitoral circumcision, there is little chance of finding dispositive evidence that we should be doing it for ladies' health. So what's the problem? Is he really scared that we could discover that circumcised women live to 120?
Blank Slate is not the opposite of hereditarian and is a silly extremist position for a materialist to take. If you believe our minds are purely spiritual constructs, then maybe, but it's shocking to me that cognitive scientists took it seriously in the 20th century.
Western liberalism has a long list of unprincipled exceptions that keep piling up since the Progressive era: freedom of association, the Westphalian order, the marketplace of ideas, enumerated powers, legislative supremacy, freedom to fail, classical education, etc.
The economics of slavery is an interesting and well-studied topic. The health benefits of female circumcision might be worth studying too. Nobel laureate Robert Fogel wrote the best-known book on slavery, for which he was much criticized. People didn't like the conclusion that if you want to maximize productivity in cotton growing, using big gangs of people forced to long hours will do it. Somehow they thought that implied slavery is good.
Fogel's "Time on the Cross" in the 1970s showed why the Union had to fight to get rid of slavery: while it had previously been economically marginal in the tobacco-growing era and was expected to somehow fade away in the fullness of time, in the King Cotton boom of the 1850s, it was wildly profitable, so white Southerners were obsessed with justifying it and expanding it. Well meaning Northerners like Frederick Law Olmstead had written books before the Civil War arguing that slavery was money-losing, so Southerners should ease off on it. But Fogel found it was a bonanza.
In addition to soil depletion, late 18th cent. tobacco planters found themselves with too many dependent people too old to work productively or sell. Would that have happened in the Cotton Belt eventually? How many of the older cotton-pickers starved or froze when they were suddenly on their own? The Caribbean and South American owners avoided the problem with disease and overwork. They must have bought fewer females, so they had to keep buying more men, and we got the leftover women.
In "The Political Economy of Slavery", Eugene Genovese- at that time a Marxist-argues that even in the cotton fields, slavery was very inefficient. Poor workmanship. Breaking of equipment. I would add that lack of incentives led to poor production. Slavery was long on the decline in the old tobacco belt of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee. Maryland's Eastern Shore wisely got out of tobacco in the 18th Century. It is noteworthy that two of the most important abolitionists, Frederick Douglass and Harriett Tubman, grew up on the Eastern Shore.
The balance sheet for the supposed economic bonanza of slavery doesn't include essentially free land and monopsony status of the landed gentry, who actually couldn't afford steel mills or decent colleges. Like every society founded on helot labor the gains are captured by the top and the GDP per capita remains stagnant or declines. It astonishes me the South got prole whites to fight for her.
The Anglosphere will not let go of the idea that importing everyone else's coolies to do work they regard as beneath their teenagers just has to be REALLY lucrative. It doesn't work and it's never worked.
Slavery was much more than an economic system. It was a social system that solidified the whole society. Poorer whites with no slaves could always know that they were above the slave. Many of the poorer whites made up the slave patrols which paid fairly well. Essentially, the sharecropping system and Jim Crow were extensions of the old social system pre-1861.
Steve is right, and it should be obvious to anyone who thinks it through that slavery was not unprofitable. If cotton prices sank, then slaves at the 1855 price of, say, $1000 would be unprofitable, but the market price of a slave would fall to $500 and slavery would be profitable again. The same with land-- if it is worn out, it becomes cheaper. To be sure, at some point the price of a slave would go negative, meaning a slave wouldn't be worth his cornbread and bacon, but that would never have happened.
Slavery only ends for political or religious reasons. You can't just wait for it to disappear somehow.
But the slaves are not adding value; they're profitability is wholly dependent on the price of cotton. This puts them on the expense side of the ledger with the shovels and the draft horses. It's not like Rome conquering Greece and realizing it's more lucrative to extend imperial citizenship and their own province and extract taxes from it.
As iSteve favorite Lee Kuan Yew pointed out, you can't build an economy off berry pickers.
Slaves are assets, not liabilities. So are shovels and draft horses. You are confusing the income statement with the balance sheet in your mind, I think.
Agreed. They are a depreciating capital good that requires overseers with guns and whips in addition to the calories, unlike the mechanical harvesters. They make financial sense in pre-industrial economies with huge tracts of arable land you got for free from the Crown.
One possibility is that even without war British cotton manufacturers would have proactively set out to break the Southern cotton monopoly the way they did reactively when war broke out and the South, curiously, imposed an embargo on cotton exports to Britain. The Brits quickly found that cotton grew fine in Brazil, Egypt, and India too, so cotton was never the relative bonanza again that it was for the south in the 1850s despite global demand for cotton skyrocketing, and Southern dreams of how rich and powerful they'd be in the later 19th Century due to continued growth in demand for cotton fizzled. The price of cotton didn't fall in absolute terms but it undershot Southern expectations.
But it was the nation's no.1 export until early last century.
Looking through a few of the thousand pages of old buildings in the archimaps.tumblr this week, I came across the 1895-1922 NY Cotton Exchange in lower Manhattan. An ancestor was Counsel and then President of the US Cotton Futures Association in NYC and DC, so he must have worked in the building, and his NCpedia page says it was a presidential appointment, though I can find nothing else about it online. I hope he didn't reduce cotton to no.2.
Nothing new under the sun. Recall that Socrates death sentence was in punishment for critical thinking and skepticism. There will always be those ready to kill to keep their own power, world view and gods. Happily reality and truth seem pretty determined to carry on anyway.
Happy New Year Steve! Another great year of information and wit on your Substack, X account, etc. And a 2024 improvement in your retirement accounts, I hope. Bill in SoCal
Turk was a not entirely uncommon Eastern European Ashkenazi name. I personally knew 3 different Turks. It likely denotes derivation from Turka, Ukraine, a town that was around %50 Jewish until WW2.
"Today, we can estimate a child’s adult height, how far they will go in school, and their weight as an adult―all from a cheek swab, finger prick, or vial of saliva."
Can this even be done retrospectively? I'd like to supply somebody with a cheek swab and read their description of me. Who do I call?
They can estimate from genes the average height of a group of people better than they can an individual, although this accuracy starts to break down as the groups come from different racial backgrounds.
Interesting that he says investigation into the human potential of non-Euro immigrants is closed when as far as I can tell, it was only 'open' insofar as it was simply asserted that they are all upside with no hard supporting evidence for that ever presented, much less examined. Would he say subjects such as the application of puberty blockers and/or surgical intervention in minors who claim to have gender dysphoria to be closed as well? I suspect if it were just a few years ago he would, but thanks to more inquiring minds the evidence appears to be its a massive medical and ethical mistake that is increasingly difficult for political and policy elites to ignore.
But really, at the end of the day when a scientist says that some subjects that clearly are open questions cannot be pursued, you are dealing with a fundamentally dishonest person no matter how credentialed.
It's interesting how, now that the US has truly become a divided country, people intuitively understand that we don't all share the same values.
For decades the media/establishment was able to manufacture a consensus about what was good and bad despite the erosion of traditional American values that accelerated in the postwar period.
Back in the 90s, somebody like Turkheimer could call certain research evil and all the right-thinking people would agree and that would be the end of it. Dissent would be relegated to fringe organizations that would be routinely demonized by the likes of the ADL and SPLC.
Thank God that's over. Now Turkheimer's "consensus" is limited to a minority of the US, with most Americans recognizing that he has his own agenda that doesn't necessarily align with theirs.
It's such an amazing turn of events that I'm still adjusting to it.
"the idea that immigrants are less evolved than white Europeans"
Nobody except Turkheimer is saying this, least of all evolutionary biologists. Every species, and every population, has evolved to optimise its fitness in its particular environment. The idea that humans are "more evolved" than, for example, goats is untrue - and Stephen Jay Gould himself stated this in one of his books.
There are many conclusions one can draw:
(a) Turkheimer's argument for "stare decisis" is itself contradicted by the criterion of "stare decisis" and therefore should be struck down.
(b) Turkheimer believes that groups with lower IQ are "less evolved" than those with higher IQ - therefore that Jews and Chinese are "more evolved" than Caucasians, who are "more evolved" than blacks. Perhaps he also believes that taller groups such as the Masai are more evolved than shorter groups such as the Inuit.
(c) Liberals accuse conservatives of racist beliefs that they do not actually hold; when they do so they are projecting their own forbidden thoughts.
(d) Turkheimer's ideas about race are sophomoric because in his milieu discussion of the subject is forbidden. This self-censorship evidently has unhealthy consequences. Liberals would make a stronger case if they spent time actually engaging with unwelcome ideas. Instead they deny that race even exists and they want to prevent other people publishing any evidence to the contrary.
I noticed the bit about "less evolved" too. It is reminiscent of 1920s and 30s ideas that evolving towards a higher state is something which whites have done more of than other races. I suspect his thinking is that the race realism of today is morally contaminated by a genealogy going back to Lothrop Stoddard and Gobineau, and moral contamination can never be purged by improved scientific standards.
I think this sentence from the Substack post is the key to Turkheimer. "The problem is that on a completely wide-open model, there is no need for journals and no need for editors."
So what if the electronic republic of letters does mean that there is no need for them? Authority would have nothing to do, that is what, and no such thing can be allowed. "Our framework places research projects along two axes of a faith-morals map. Most research, fortunately is contrary to neither faith nor morals..." You could parody the whole thing along these lines.
Glancing at the title I thought this was going to be something about a history of a Turkish nuclear program.
That guy does not dig the Age of Reason. When I was kid any educated person would genuflect to the Age of Reason and therefore the Founding Fathers. It's a shame that's changing.
Why does he write 'defend' the economics of slavery? Regular people complained about the economics of slavery even in ancient Rome (at least according to the HBO show 'Rome' and I can't imagine TV would lie to me). I think a deep examination of the economics of slavery would be fine, and I doubt they would come up with something that would convince modern Americans that the benefits are just too good to pass up.
As for clitoral circumcision, there is little chance of finding dispositive evidence that we should be doing it for ladies' health. So what's the problem? Is he really scared that we could discover that circumcised women live to 120?
Blank Slate is not the opposite of hereditarian and is a silly extremist position for a materialist to take. If you believe our minds are purely spiritual constructs, then maybe, but it's shocking to me that cognitive scientists took it seriously in the 20th century.
Western liberalism has a long list of unprincipled exceptions that keep piling up since the Progressive era: freedom of association, the Westphalian order, the marketplace of ideas, enumerated powers, legislative supremacy, freedom to fail, classical education, etc.
The economics of slavery is an interesting and well-studied topic. The health benefits of female circumcision might be worth studying too. Nobel laureate Robert Fogel wrote the best-known book on slavery, for which he was much criticized. People didn't like the conclusion that if you want to maximize productivity in cotton growing, using big gangs of people forced to long hours will do it. Somehow they thought that implied slavery is good.
Fogel's "Time on the Cross" in the 1970s showed why the Union had to fight to get rid of slavery: while it had previously been economically marginal in the tobacco-growing era and was expected to somehow fade away in the fullness of time, in the King Cotton boom of the 1850s, it was wildly profitable, so white Southerners were obsessed with justifying it and expanding it. Well meaning Northerners like Frederick Law Olmstead had written books before the Civil War arguing that slavery was money-losing, so Southerners should ease off on it. But Fogel found it was a bonanza.
In addition to soil depletion, late 18th cent. tobacco planters found themselves with too many dependent people too old to work productively or sell. Would that have happened in the Cotton Belt eventually? How many of the older cotton-pickers starved or froze when they were suddenly on their own? The Caribbean and South American owners avoided the problem with disease and overwork. They must have bought fewer females, so they had to keep buying more men, and we got the leftover women.
In "The Political Economy of Slavery", Eugene Genovese- at that time a Marxist-argues that even in the cotton fields, slavery was very inefficient. Poor workmanship. Breaking of equipment. I would add that lack of incentives led to poor production. Slavery was long on the decline in the old tobacco belt of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee. Maryland's Eastern Shore wisely got out of tobacco in the 18th Century. It is noteworthy that two of the most important abolitionists, Frederick Douglass and Harriett Tubman, grew up on the Eastern Shore.
The balance sheet for the supposed economic bonanza of slavery doesn't include essentially free land and monopsony status of the landed gentry, who actually couldn't afford steel mills or decent colleges. Like every society founded on helot labor the gains are captured by the top and the GDP per capita remains stagnant or declines. It astonishes me the South got prole whites to fight for her.
The Anglosphere will not let go of the idea that importing everyone else's coolies to do work they regard as beneath their teenagers just has to be REALLY lucrative. It doesn't work and it's never worked.
Slavery was much more than an economic system. It was a social system that solidified the whole society. Poorer whites with no slaves could always know that they were above the slave. Many of the poorer whites made up the slave patrols which paid fairly well. Essentially, the sharecropping system and Jim Crow were extensions of the old social system pre-1861.
Steve is right, and it should be obvious to anyone who thinks it through that slavery was not unprofitable. If cotton prices sank, then slaves at the 1855 price of, say, $1000 would be unprofitable, but the market price of a slave would fall to $500 and slavery would be profitable again. The same with land-- if it is worn out, it becomes cheaper. To be sure, at some point the price of a slave would go negative, meaning a slave wouldn't be worth his cornbread and bacon, but that would never have happened.
Slavery only ends for political or religious reasons. You can't just wait for it to disappear somehow.
But the slaves are not adding value; they're profitability is wholly dependent on the price of cotton. This puts them on the expense side of the ledger with the shovels and the draft horses. It's not like Rome conquering Greece and realizing it's more lucrative to extend imperial citizenship and their own province and extract taxes from it.
As iSteve favorite Lee Kuan Yew pointed out, you can't build an economy off berry pickers.
Slaves are assets, not liabilities. So are shovels and draft horses. You are confusing the income statement with the balance sheet in your mind, I think.
Agreed. They are a depreciating capital good that requires overseers with guns and whips in addition to the calories, unlike the mechanical harvesters. They make financial sense in pre-industrial economies with huge tracts of arable land you got for free from the Crown.
My impression is that many FFVs became rich not from planting but from selling off pieces of their land grants and purchases.
One possibility is that even without war British cotton manufacturers would have proactively set out to break the Southern cotton monopoly the way they did reactively when war broke out and the South, curiously, imposed an embargo on cotton exports to Britain. The Brits quickly found that cotton grew fine in Brazil, Egypt, and India too, so cotton was never the relative bonanza again that it was for the south in the 1850s despite global demand for cotton skyrocketing, and Southern dreams of how rich and powerful they'd be in the later 19th Century due to continued growth in demand for cotton fizzled. The price of cotton didn't fall in absolute terms but it undershot Southern expectations.
But it was the nation's no.1 export until early last century.
Looking through a few of the thousand pages of old buildings in the archimaps.tumblr this week, I came across the 1895-1922 NY Cotton Exchange in lower Manhattan. An ancestor was Counsel and then President of the US Cotton Futures Association in NYC and DC, so he must have worked in the building, and his NCpedia page says it was a presidential appointment, though I can find nothing else about it online. I hope he didn't reduce cotton to no.2.
The transatlantic slave trade was basically over by 1800.
This doubled the price of *existing* slaves as there was no new supply.
And of course meant that slaveowners had a lot more to lose from emancipation.
Excellent point. The Confederate Constitution banned the importation of slaves.
Nothing new under the sun. Recall that Socrates death sentence was in punishment for critical thinking and skepticism. There will always be those ready to kill to keep their own power, world view and gods. Happily reality and truth seem pretty determined to carry on anyway.
Happy New Year Steve! Another great year of information and wit on your Substack, X account, etc. And a 2024 improvement in your retirement accounts, I hope. Bill in SoCal
Turkheimer is an interesting last name
Turk was a not entirely uncommon Eastern European Ashkenazi name. I personally knew 3 different Turks. It likely denotes derivation from Turka, Ukraine, a town that was around %50 Jewish until WW2.
"Today, we can estimate a child’s adult height, how far they will go in school, and their weight as an adult―all from a cheek swab, finger prick, or vial of saliva."
Can this even be done retrospectively? I'd like to supply somebody with a cheek swab and read their description of me. Who do I call?
They can estimate from genes the average height of a group of people better than they can an individual, although this accuracy starts to break down as the groups come from different racial backgrounds.
There's this particular tree we've been warned to stay away from, but it's so tempting.
"how our genes seek the nurture they need to express themselves"
I'm officially freaked out now.
In fairness to Turkheimer he’s transparent about what he is trying to censor.
People in academia who are better than Turkheimer at censorship are a lot more covert (and probably better at it).
I'm sure Conley's book will have lots of new facts, but its thesis sounds like that of Matt Ridley's now 22 year old Nature Via Nurture.
Interesting that he says investigation into the human potential of non-Euro immigrants is closed when as far as I can tell, it was only 'open' insofar as it was simply asserted that they are all upside with no hard supporting evidence for that ever presented, much less examined. Would he say subjects such as the application of puberty blockers and/or surgical intervention in minors who claim to have gender dysphoria to be closed as well? I suspect if it were just a few years ago he would, but thanks to more inquiring minds the evidence appears to be its a massive medical and ethical mistake that is increasingly difficult for political and policy elites to ignore.
But really, at the end of the day when a scientist says that some subjects that clearly are open questions cannot be pursued, you are dealing with a fundamentally dishonest person no matter how credentialed.
It's interesting how, now that the US has truly become a divided country, people intuitively understand that we don't all share the same values.
For decades the media/establishment was able to manufacture a consensus about what was good and bad despite the erosion of traditional American values that accelerated in the postwar period.
Back in the 90s, somebody like Turkheimer could call certain research evil and all the right-thinking people would agree and that would be the end of it. Dissent would be relegated to fringe organizations that would be routinely demonized by the likes of the ADL and SPLC.
Thank God that's over. Now Turkheimer's "consensus" is limited to a minority of the US, with most Americans recognizing that he has his own agenda that doesn't necessarily align with theirs.
It's such an amazing turn of events that I'm still adjusting to it.
The Turkheimer paper lost me at the 2nd sentence: "And when does scientific research go beyond being merely controversial to be something far worse?"
There is something far worser than mere controversy.
"the idea that immigrants are less evolved than white Europeans"
Nobody except Turkheimer is saying this, least of all evolutionary biologists. Every species, and every population, has evolved to optimise its fitness in its particular environment. The idea that humans are "more evolved" than, for example, goats is untrue - and Stephen Jay Gould himself stated this in one of his books.
There are many conclusions one can draw:
(a) Turkheimer's argument for "stare decisis" is itself contradicted by the criterion of "stare decisis" and therefore should be struck down.
(b) Turkheimer believes that groups with lower IQ are "less evolved" than those with higher IQ - therefore that Jews and Chinese are "more evolved" than Caucasians, who are "more evolved" than blacks. Perhaps he also believes that taller groups such as the Masai are more evolved than shorter groups such as the Inuit.
(c) Liberals accuse conservatives of racist beliefs that they do not actually hold; when they do so they are projecting their own forbidden thoughts.
(d) Turkheimer's ideas about race are sophomoric because in his milieu discussion of the subject is forbidden. This self-censorship evidently has unhealthy consequences. Liberals would make a stronger case if they spent time actually engaging with unwelcome ideas. Instead they deny that race even exists and they want to prevent other people publishing any evidence to the contrary.
I noticed the bit about "less evolved" too. It is reminiscent of 1920s and 30s ideas that evolving towards a higher state is something which whites have done more of than other races. I suspect his thinking is that the race realism of today is morally contaminated by a genealogy going back to Lothrop Stoddard and Gobineau, and moral contamination can never be purged by improved scientific standards.
I think this sentence from the Substack post is the key to Turkheimer. "The problem is that on a completely wide-open model, there is no need for journals and no need for editors."
So what if the electronic republic of letters does mean that there is no need for them? Authority would have nothing to do, that is what, and no such thing can be allowed. "Our framework places research projects along two axes of a faith-morals map. Most research, fortunately is contrary to neither faith nor morals..." You could parody the whole thing along these lines.