2026-03-17 02:15:17
The most controversial of the forced removals occurred in the second half of the 1960s, with the expulsion of 65,000 coloureds from District Six, a vibrant inner-city ward of Cape Town, where whites, many of the slumlords, owned 56% of the property. Against their will, District Six residents were moved out to the sandy townships of the Cape Flats. In Johannesburg, the inner-city suburb of Sophiatown, where blacks could own freehold property, was another notorious site of forced removals. Often long-established community institutions such as churches and schools had to be abandoned.
That is from the very good book by Hermann Giliomee The Afrikaners: A Concise History.
The post The hyper-NIMBY of earlier Cape Town and South Africa appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-03-17 00:10:03
2. Germany attacking free speech.
4. What do robot demos and videos show?
5. How WWI damaged British innovation?
6. Social media is more of a habit than an addiction.
7. The rise of popcorn at the movies (WSJ).
The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-03-16 19:25:05
Matt Yglesias has a good post on the UK’s Triple Lock, which requires that UK pensions rise in line with whichever is highest: wages, inflation, or 2.5 percent. Luis Garicano calls this “the single stupidest policy in the entire Western world” — and I’d be inclined to agree, if only the competition weren’t so fierce.
The triple lock guarantees that pensioner incomes grow at the expense of everything else, and the mechanism bites hardest when the economy is weakest. During the 2009 financial crisis wages fell and inflation declined, for example, yet pensioner incomes rose by 2.5 percent! (Technically this was under a double-lock period; the triple lock came slightly later — as if the lesson from the crisis was that the guarantee hadn’t been generous enough.)
Now, as Yglesias notes, if voters were actually happy with pensioner income growing at the expense of worker income, that would be one thing. But no one seems happy with the result. The same pattern is clear in the United States:
As I wrote in January, there is a pattern in American politics where per capita benefits for elderly people have gotten consistently more generous in the 21st century even as the ratio of retired people to working-age people has risen.
This keeps happening because it’s evidently what the voters want. Making public policy more generous to senior citizens enjoys both broad support among the mass public and it’s something that elites in the two parties find acceptable even if neither side is particularly enthusiastic about it. But what makes it a dark pattern in my view is that voters seem incredibly grumpy about the results.
Nobody’s saying things have been going great in America over the past quarter century.
Instead, the right is obsessed with the idea that mysterious forces of fraud have run off with all the money, while the left has convinced itself that billionaires aren’t paying any taxes.
But it’s not some huge secret why it seems like the government keeps spending and spending without us getting any amazing new public services — it’s transfers to the elderly.
The contradictions of “Elderism” are an example of rational irrationality. Individual voters bears essentially no cost for holding inconsistent political beliefs — wanting generous pensions and robust public services and low taxes is essentially free, since no single vote determines the outcome. The irrationality is individually rational and collectively ruinous. Voters are not necessarily confused about what they want; they simply face no price for wanting incompatible things. Arrow’s impossibility theorem adds another layer: even if each voter held perfectly coherent preferences, there is no reliable procedure for aggregating them into a coherent social choice. The grumpiness Yglesias documents may not reflect hypocrisy so much as the incoherence of demanding that collective choice makes sense — collective choice cannot be rationalized by coherent preferences and thus it’s perfectly possible that democracy can simultaneously “choose” generous pensions and “demand” better services for workers, with no mechanism to register the contradiction until the bill arrives.
The post Understanding Demonic Policies appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-03-16 15:21:46
If strong AI will lower the value of your human capital, your current wage is relatively high compared to your future wage. That is an argument for working harder now, at least if your current and pending pay can rise with greater effort (not true for all jobs).
If strong AI can at least potentially boost the value of your human capital, you should be investing in learning AI skills right now. No need to fall behind on something so important. You also might have the chance to use that money and buy into the proper capital and land assets.
So…WORK HARDER!
Addendum: From Ricardo in the comments:
Suppose you are the best maker of horse carriages in Belgium around the time the automobile is invented. You might want to take on as many orders as possible for new carriages because you know your future is precarious. Or, maybe you get your hands on one of these new-fangled automobiles as soon as possible and learn how fix them. Both options require you to WORK HARDER but these seem to be the two best options available. Paradoxical but true.
The post Why you should work much harder RIGHT NOW appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-03-16 12:30:39
Moral disagreement across politics revolves around the key question, “Who is a victim?” Twelve studies explain moral conflict with assumptions of vulnerability (AoVs): liberals and conservatives disagree about who is especially vulnerable to victimization, harm, and mistreatment. AoVs predict moral judgments, implicit attitudes, and charitable behavior—and explain the link between ideology and moral judgment (usually better than moral foundations). Four clusters of targets—the Environment, the Othered, the Powerful, and the Divine—explain many political debates, from immigration and policing to religion and racism. In general, liberals see vulnerability as group-based, dividing the moral world into groups of vulnerable victims and invulnerable oppressors. Conservatives downplay group-based differences, seeing vulnerability as more individual and evenly distributed. AoVs can be experimentally manipulated and causally impact moral evaluations. These results support a universal harm-based moral mind (Theory of Dyadic Morality): moral disagreement reflects different understandings of harm, not different foundations.
That is from a recent paper by Jake Womick, Emily Kubin, and Kurt Gray. Via the excellent, non-victimized Kevin Lewis.
The post Who is a victim? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-03-16 01:57:47
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. He is one of the leading historians of ancient Egypt, and he has a recent book out on Ptolemaic Egypt, namely The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra.
Here is his Wikipedia page, he also has served as Vice Chancellor of Fiji National University, and worked extensively as a development director for Cambridge. Here is his personal home page.
So what should I ask him?
The post What should I ask Toby Wilkinson? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.