Category: Culture
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Shades of 2050
I have long had a problem with projections of the racial makeup of the USA which implicitly neglect the complexities inherent in the identity of someone of mixed origin. A new study analyzing Census data on interracial marriages between 1980 and 2008 highlights some of the subtleties: The study also examined trends in biracial and…
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South Asian I.Q.
Check out the discussion at Steve Sailer’s weblog. People always ask my opinion on this issue. All I’d say is this: don’t bet against the Chinese.
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Old Man’s Culture
too A few readers reminded me of the recent Rachel Caspari article in Scientific American, The Evolution of Grandparents. It’s actually based on her earlier research, published in PNAS in 2004, Older age becomes common late in human evolution. I …
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Liberals more politically picky in mates?
In the early 2000s I recall Joel Grus telling me how reality television would become a pretty powerful exploratory tool for social science. I’m not quite sure of that now (there here’s a game-theoretic analysis of Survivor!). For example, c…
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Nikki Haley as white
Apparently Nikki Haley checked her race as “white” in some form in 2001. The horror! First, Nikki Haley kind of looks on the white side. Second, though I check “Asian” I do so because of its cultural valence, and that valence is socially constructed. The “Asian American” category as encompassing South Asians is an artifact…
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Probability of pregnancy by age
I just finished reading My Fertility Crisis, which is excerpted from a longer piece you can get on Kindle for $1.99. The author is a single woman in her early 40s who is going through IVF treatments, without success so far. She outlines the choices she…
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New Delhi “slut walk”
What SlutWalk Looks Like in New Delhi. I don’t want to minimize the problem of sexual assault in a general sense anywhere, but considering the specific issue of how rape in addressed and confronted in much of South Asia this seems to be a worthwhile campaign. More broadly there needs to be the emphasis that…
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A world full of children
The figure to the left is from a new paper in Science, When the World’s Population Took Off: The Springboard of the Neolithic Demographic Transition. It reports the findings from 133 cemeteries in the northern hemisphere in regards to the proportion …
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Smart educated men less likely to think cheating always wrong
Lots of commentary below on my post about extramarital sex. I guess that’s fine, but I’m really not too interested your theories, I can do basic logic after introspection too. In fact, I can go down the street and ask a random person and I&…
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Tolerance of extramarital sex by sex
Are Empowered Women Driving Reduced Tolerance Of Extramarital Affairs?: My girlfriend’s theory about this, which makes sense to me, is that as women’s labor market opportunities have improved their dependency on husbands for economic security has d…
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Ingenuity’s flight toward rents
Andrew Oh-Willeke, Esq., observes: One example of cyclicality that continues to today is the practice of law. The basic principles of Roman private law and the complaints that people made about lawyers and litigation were remarkably similar in the 300s…
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When gods become demons
This comment is interesting to me: —yes, a pox on poco jargon. Virtually every kind of high culture (be it performance or visual art) in South Asia has been almost entirely reinvented in the past century (with help from white devils), though in the poco academy it remains shrouded in the mists of hoary antiquity,…
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Population control is Islamophobic and classist
First, let me state I’m not a proponent of either the “Birth Dearth” or “Overpopulation” positions. I think both stances lack nuance. But that’s not the point of my post. I get periodic news updates on my smart phone, and I saw this title which piqued my interest, Beckhams a ‘bad example’ for families. I’m…
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The destruction of ‘authentic’ culture
My Summer at an Indian Call Center: Next is “culture training,” in which trainees memorize colloquialisms and state capitals, study clips of Seinfeld and photos of Walmarts, and eat in cafeterias serving paneer burgers and pizza topped with lamb pepperoni. Trainers aim to impart something they call “international culture”—which is, of course, no culture at…
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Two South Asian charter polities
Finally finished Strange Parallels: Volume 2, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800-1830. I’ll have a review up at my main blog, though I’m still wondering what the best tack for surveying a 900 page survey is. But there is one point of major relevance to…
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The punctuated equilibrium of culture
John Winthrop, ~1600. Mitt Romney, 2008 – image credit, Jessica Rinaldi Recently Megan Mcardle had a post up where she expressed curiosity as to why “futurists” circa 1900 had a tendency not to imagine revolutions in clothing style …
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Muslim Britons & the gays
Sunny Hundal states: The poll marks a sharp contrast to findings by Gallup in 2009 that 0% of British Muslims were tolerant towards homosexuality. But the two results are not contradictory: Muslims can agree that Islam does not tolerate homosexuality, while celebrating gay rights enshrined in the law. This is possible. But honestly it just…
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The different dynamics of memes vs. genes
In my long post below, Celts to Anglo-Saxons, in light of updated assumptions, I had a “cartoon” demographic model in mind which I attempted to sketch out in words. But sometimes prose isn’t the best in terms of precision, and almost …
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Geert Wilders and banning lying
A few people have asked me about the Geert Wilders’ affair. If you don’t know Geert Wilders’ is a right-wing Dutch politician prone to making inflammatory remarks about Islam. He’s been brought to court on the grounds of whether his comments violated the speech laws in much of Europe, which sanction inciting or hateful speech.…
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Islam as perversion
There are some actions which are alien, and frankly repugnant, in other societies. But there are other some actions which are simply obscene on the face of it, and the utilitarian or casuistical logic which justifies them are perverse and simply brook no comprehension beyond the fact that they take humans to their logical ends…