Reviews and News:
Should we discuss research that shows cognitive differences between races? John McWhorter says no. Jonathan Anomaly and Brian Boutwell say yes.
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Henry David Thoreau’s diet: He probably didn’t steal pies but may have eaten a woodchuck.
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In defense of globalization: “Policymakers should focus on adapting to economic change, not resisting it.”
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When is stress good for you?
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Molly Keane’s sweet and sour life and work.
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Who are the Scandinavians? “Danes today tend to think of Swedes as uptight metrosexuals; Swedes see their neighbors across the Oresund as jaywalking, pot-smoking anarchists; and both agree that Norwegians are dull, backwoods hicks with an annoying amount of oil wealth. But as Ferguson points out, distinctions among the three nations were obvious to visitors even in the Viking age, and there is no such thing as a monolithic Nordic past... Yet there are also things that unite Scandinavians: a common root language, a shared Protestantism and, Ferguson is convinced, that seam of melancholy running below the surface.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The American Conservative, Andre Archie writes about Thomas Sowell’s legacy, particularly his argument against “luck egalitarians”:
“After more than a quarter century of sharing his thoughts and opinions through his Creators Syndicate newspaper column, Thomas Sowell recently decided to retire from column writing. It is a loss to public discourse and especially a loss to the African-American community, for reasons I shall explore below. Luckily, the reading public still has access to Sowell’s trenchant political and social observations and analyses through his many books, including his latest, Wealth, Poverty and Politics, a revised and enlarged edition of a 2015 volume of the same title.
“His overall aim is to clarify the facts and causes of income and social inequalities. In pursuing this aim, he challenges the thinking of “luck egalitarians,” the moral philosophy of John Rawls, and the redistributionists, all of whom advocate various concepts of equal opportunity and disparate political schemes to summon desired outcomes through social engineering. Often these conceptions of equal opportunity assume that most of the differences in achievement between individuals and groups should either be even or random. In the case of luck egalitarians, advocates of an extreme version of equal opportunity, life chances should depend only on an individual’s responsible choices, not on brute luck. Luck egalitarians deem morally illegitimate such things as one’s genetic endowment, abilities, and the circumstances of birth; however, they also deem morally legitimate things that are acquired, both tangible and intangible, through deliberate and calculated choices.
“Sowell capitalizes on this dichotomy and argues against the assumption made by equal opportunity warriors about achievement “disparities” or “gaps” among individuals and groups. The assumption, according to Sowell, is that many economic and social outcomes would tend to be either even or random, if left to the natural course of events, so that the strikingly uneven and non-random outcomes so often observed in the real world imply either adverse human intervention or else some genetic differences in the people whose outcomes are so different. Due to the decline of genetic determinism, it becomes intellectually attractive to surmise that disparities in outcomes that are not even or random can be explained by discrimination or some other form of malicious intent.
“Sowell offers an alternative view that does not assume evenness or randomness among individual and group achievement.”
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Photo: Badlands
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Poem: David Yezzi, “Dying the Day Prince Died”
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