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

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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

An overview of recent evidence on taxes and economic growth

https://taxfoundation.org/reviewing-recent-evidence-effect-taxes-economic-growth/

Can we defund NPR already ?

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/27/1000868262/colorado-becomes-first-state-to-ban-legacy-college-admissions

And no, just because wealthy students can pay for test prep doesn’t mean it improves scores in any significant manner (even Slate agrees! https://www.google.com/amp/s/slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-they-work-bias.amp). And the SAT measures general arithmetic and reading ability, so rich schools center their curricula on the SAT by teaching basic math and reading? What are the poor schools teaching then?

Epic

The fucking mental gymnastics liberals do to explain why black kids can’t get into selective NYC high schools

Glad to see Nicholas Wade writing again.

For those who don’t know, Wade wrote a book called a Troublesome Inheritance where he talked about a biological basis for race. He was “deboonked” by a bunch of left-wing anthropologists