Linkfest 2017-04-14
Brazil, like many Latin American countries, has a color spectrum instead a color line, the result of not having anything like a one-drop rule defining who is black and who is not. This has interesting implications if you also want to have a binary white/black affirmative action program.
Noah Smith looks at the failures of macroeconomic models.
This is the kind of thing Razib Khan calls being a 'star-man', the result of genetic success. I am a bit non-plussed by the assertion in the article that Lindbergh was being untrue to his eugenic principles by fathering children with women who had difficulty walking due to a childhood illness. Susceptibility to infectious disease has some genetic component, but it is largely random, and so often has little impact on genetic fitness. I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of thing was more obvious to Lindbergh. On the other hand, maybe he was just a horndog.
The Library of Congress has a list of books that helped shape American culture. This is a pretty good list, and it seems about right to me. It is also much, much funnier if you read the list annotated with intersectional Pokemon points by Steve Sailer. Intersectionality is largely about status, which is also about class, which proponents would like you not to think about.
Joel Kotkin looks at the disenfranchisement and poverty of rural California.
A recent look at the research on whether videogames cause violence. [short answer, still no.]
A very clever bit of work in making a localizable font for displaying characters in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages.
Michael Anton AKA Publius Decius Mus makes an argument for a Trumpian foreign policy [one that arguably better instantiates Trump's campaign rhetoric than his actual behavior as President].
You need to be a well-educated Westerner to be surprised by this. Almost everyone else in the world is massively ethnocentric, and only cares about people like them. Notable exception, Nelson Mandela, fellow recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, who blew people up and spent years in prison for it, negotiated a political compromise that preserved the power of whites in South Africa.
Tyler Cowen riffs on Shashi Tharoor's book Inglorious Empire: What the British did to India. Some of the claims of Tharoor's book are a little odd, like that deindustrialization was a British policy in eighteenth-century India. I'm not sure traditional artisans count as "industry".
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