In 1999, the United States had free and competitive markets in many industries that, in Europe, were dominated by oligopolies. Today the opposite is true. French households can typically choose among five or more internet-service providers; American households are lucky if they have a choice between two, and many have only one. The American airline industry has become fully oligopolistic; profits per passenger mile are now about twice as high as in Europe, where low-cost airlines compete aggressively with incumbents.

This is in part because the rest of the world was inspired by the United States and caught up, and in part because the United States became complacent and fell behind. In the late 1990s, legally incorporating a business in France took 15 administrative steps and 53 days; in 2016, it took only four days. Over the same period, however, the entry delay in the United States went up from four days to six days. In other words, opening a business used to be much faster in the United States than in France, but it is now somewhat slower.

The irony is that the free-market ideas and business models that benefit European consumers today were inspired by American regulations circa 1990. Meanwhile, in industry after industry in the United States—the country that invented antitrust laws—incumbent companies have increased their market power by acquiring nascent competitors, heavily lobbying regulators, and lavishly spending on campaign contributions. Free markets are supposed to punish private companies that take their customers for granted, but today many American companies have grown so dominant that they can get away with offering bad service, charging high prices, and collecting, exploiting, and inadequately guarding their customers’ private data.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/europe-not-america-home-free-market/600859/

I found this both interesting and helpful; even though I’m not on social media, I’ve certainly heard about or run across a fair number of these claims. It also helps clarify which popular sources of health information are likely to get their info correct and which ones to just ignore.

https://healthfeedback.org/the-most-popular-health-articles-of-2018-a-scientific-credibility-review/

My favorite magician, by far.

This is what Brown does best: he takes an effect from the mentalism repertoire and generates from it an escalating series of climaxes that forces you to rethink everything you’ve just seen. Rather than diminish the mystery, Brown’s revelation of his ostensible methods reasserts and deepens it. He has always maintained that he neither has nor believes in any kind of psychic power, and his emphasis on manipulating people with techniques from the outer frontiers of psychology gives an audience too sophisticated to believe in the paranormal something scientific-seeming to hold on to. Often, the explanations end up being even more perplexing than the feat itself. Whether one believes that he’s actually doing what he claims or that he’s simply cloaking sleight of hand and the like in brilliant theatrics, he seems to be drawing back the curtain and offering a glimpse into some uncanny realm. As Brown once told me, “People feel that they understand something about what I’m up to but not everything, which satisfies their rational side but leaves room for something more playful and subterranean.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/07/how-derren-brown-remade-mind-reading-for-skeptics

How well do you understand Republicans’ beliefs on various issues? How about Democrats’ beliefs? This short quiz is a good way to find out!

Do you have a yawning Perception Gap, or are you in sync with the American public? Our study explores how Americans tend to have a distorted understanding of people on the other side of the aisle, what causes it, and why it matters.

https://perceptiongap.us/the-perception-gap-quiz/

A theory for how to win the 2020 presidential election has quickly become conventional wisdom among Democratic campaign strategists and many prominent pundits. It goes like this: The country has become so polarized that swing voters barely exist anymore. Elections are now decided by which side better manages to mobilize its base. So Democrats need to stop worrying about winning over moderates—and confidently move to the left.

Proponents of this “progressive mobilization theory” can point to a few important pieces of evidence. Plenty of liberal policies, for instance, are popular with voters across the political spectrum. As I’ve argued in the past, this makes it possible for Democratic presidential candidates to develop an ambitious agenda on issues from health care to gun control without jeopardizing their chances of ousting Donald Trump.

But the theory is nonetheless wrong in three crucial respects. A significant number of swing voters do exist, and in close-run elections, they matter. While Democrats do need to mobilize their base to win in 2020, it is far from obvious that moving to the left will help them do so. And to cure America of Trumpism, they need to persuade voters who aren’t already consistent progressives to turn their back on his brand of politics.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/problem-mobilization-theory/599236/

Review of James C Scott’s Against the Grain (Scott is the author of Seeing Like a State):

Sumer just before the dawn of civilization was in many ways an idyllic place. Forget your vision of stark Middle Eastern deserts; in the Paleolithic the area where the first cities would one day arise was a great swamp. Foragers roamed the landscape, eating everything from fishes to gazelles to shellfish to wild plants. There was more than enough for everyone; “as Jack Harlan famously showed, one could gather enough [wild] grain with a flint sickle in three weeks to feed a family for a year”. Foragers alternated short periods of frenetic activity (eg catching as many gazelles as possible during their weeklong migration through the area) with longer periods of rest and recreation.

Intensive cereal cultivation is miserable work requiring constant toil with little guarantee of a good harvest. Why would anyone leave this wilderness Eden for a 100% wheat diet?

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/14/book-review-against-the-grain/

Many of the recent articles in the popular media on hunter-gatherer societies have failed to represent these societies accurately. The picture you get from reading articles in publications like the New Yorker and the Guardian, or from anthropologists like Douglas Fry and James Suzman, is often quite different from what a deep dive into the ethnographic record reveals. The excessive reliance on a single paper published 50 years ago has contributed to some severe misconceptions about hunter-gatherer ‘affluence,’ and their relative freedom from scarcity and disease. There is a tendency to downplay the benefits of modern medicine, institutions, and infrastructure – as well as the very real costs of not having access to them – in these discussions. And, despite what some may wish to believe, the hunter-gatherer way of life is not a solution to the social problems found in modern nation states.

https://quillette.com/2017/12/16/romanticizing-hunter-gatherer/

The danger of such extreme right-wing partisanship is its endless capacity to turn standard political grudges—against Democrats’ hypocrisy on executive overreach, for example, or the media’s liberal bias—into an apologia for more egregious rule-breaking. Partisan Republicans accuse their opponents of doing the same thing, and offer examples to prove it. But just as the right has played an outsized role in driving partisanship generally (a dynamic termed “asymmetric polarisation”), so its rule-breaking is more conspicuous and arguably worse. The Democrats’ record on gerrymandering is dire; Republican attempts to suppress non-white voter turnout are a terrible stain. They also hint at a gloomily defensive apprehension, which has no counterpart on the ascendant left, that a Republican Party backed by a shrinking minority of mostly white voters cannot win power by fair means.

It seems many Republican voters have already settled on that conclusion—though they would put it slightly differently. Shortly after Mr Trump’s election, two in three agreed with the statement that America needed a leader “willing to break some rules if that’s what it takes to set things right.” Mr Trump’s current standing with his party suggests even more would agree with it now. When articles of impeachment against Mr Trump are presented to them, Republican senators will essentially be asked whether they do, too. Their answer will decide more than the president’s fate. It will determine whether theirs is now the party of rule-breaking.

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/10/10/institutional-conservatives-would-condemn-donald-trump