I’ve almost collected all of Charles Murray’s books. Just need to buy “Human Accomplishment” and “What it Means to Be a Libertarian”

Also I guess he has a new book coming out in June which is pretty cool

Evidence has accumulated that only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers while the remaining 90% is due to characteristics associated with students.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/spanish-journal-of-psychology/article/abs/education-and-intelligence-pity-the-poor-teacher-because-student-characteristics-are-more-significant-than-teachers-or-schools/F73D9839D7E1398C33A117CB37E084E8

Delusional writer at Vox thinks that the Ma’Khia Bryant stabbing that happened in 3 seconds could have been de-escalated

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/first-person/22409527/makhia-bryant-deescalation

Charles Murray destroys delusional NYT op-Ed writer

And I think this one quote spotlights all that’s wrong with the modern liberal elite and education system. Yuppies believe discredited theories like multiple intelligence, emotional intelligence, “each child is gifted!” mantra yet they’ve never been around a single person of double digit IQ in their lives. This is why you can discredit most “education equity” type arguments, because the foundations of them are built on cracked glass

The fact that one of the jurors used George Floyd’s death as a means to push police reform is sufficient for a mistrial. This was carried out very poorly, and our justice system frankly should be embarrassed.

Although “economists” like Richard Wolff cite graphs showing that extreme poverty began to plummet in China during Mao Zedong’s rule, Ravallion (2021) finds no basis for this argument. In fact, he finds that the overwhelming amount of poverty in China could be attributed to Mao’s communist policies, and poverty then sharply declined following Deng Xiaoping’s free market reforms in the 90s.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w28370

100 subscribers! Thank you so much for your loyalty everyone

Interesting. The number of left-handed people in a country is highly correlated with economic development

http://ftp.iza.org/dp14237.pdf

This video of Trump railing against the TPP in 2016 still gives me the chills. Sadly he completely blew all the messaging that got him elected to focus more on socialism and black unemployment. I’m sure it’ll be much of the same if he runs again in 2024. Man never learns

A list of different immigration related policies Republicans should focus on because they’re overwhelmingly popular with the public.

Making English the official language.
50 state E-Verify mandate
Banning dual citizenship
Funding for ICE and CBP
Enforce visa overstays
Reimpose limited travel ban
Cuts to H2B and other low skilled visas
Cuts to H1b visas
Cuts to J1 visas for students taking online classes
Restrictions on remittances
Skills test (I.e. IQ test) for immigrants
Include a written free response portion to the citizenship exam.
Modernize U.S.-Mexico border

Any good immigration overhaul the GOP proposes should include some or most of these.

I saw this cited in a Vox piece and the “study” was done by two bloggers from a travel website. The methodology is also pretty odd and (purposely?) leaves out measures the U.S. does better on than other countries (e.g. tax benefits). There were also a few Wikipedia citations for some of the measures used

Like the study basically implies that it’s better to be a kid in Turkey or Greece than the U.S. Obviously ridiculous

Elise Stefanik sucks but I think some people have unfairly criticized her voting record. Most of her opposition to Trump has been on environmental regulations, the tax plan in 2017 and the government shutdown in 2018 (along with a few military related things). If you take those things out her record is quite a bit better

But she also voted for the equality act and legal status for dreamers so that’s a few reasons why she still sucks

More bad news in the replication crisis. Serra-Garcia and Gneezy (2021) find that non-replicable studies are far more likely to be cited than replicable ones, and therefore are more likely to attract substantial public interest. This gives the public a false sense of what academic research actually says on a topic.

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/21/eabd1705.full

Despite the left’s assertion that hungry children is the fault of government funding, Weitzman et al. (2008) find that the rate of food insecurity in low income smoking households is double that of low income non smoking ones. In other words, many low income parents have the money to feed their children, but choose not to.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/04/AR2008110401938.html