According to William Rosen in "Justinian's Flea," this plague also led to an agricultural revolution and population explosion in Western Europe.
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One cannot, of course, “know” this in the same way that one can know the date of the battle of Poitiers; applying economic analysis to the spotty record of commerce during late antiquity is a tricky business. However, as can be seen in a subtly reasoned 2003 paper by two development economists, Ronald Findlay of Columbia and Mats Lundahl of the University of Stockholm, it is compelling, as well, despite its reliance on a number of simplifications.
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Hey, I hear you, but the age cutoff could also be on holding office.
As someone just hitting the 60 yr old mark, and looking at my parents who are still pretty sharp in their late 80s, -- so definitely talking about myself and my capacity here,
No-one over 70 has any business in a high ranking government office. The mental flexibility isn't there.
Which means no one over 66 should be allowed to run office (yes, I know this puts senators in office until 72, and kicks out representatives at 68, but it also gives a single number which is easier to understand).
It's also a question of accountability. A 40 year old politician will expect/have to live with their choices for another 40 years.
It’s not just mental ability it’s a set of perverse incentives: the old robbing the future of the young, instead of planting trees whose shade the old will never personally enjoy.
That's a response to an opinion I don't hold, but I could have been more clear. The claim I'm making is about the fitness to hold office. Specifically: septo/octogenarians belong at the ballot box, but not on the ballot. If you'd like to dissuade me of something, that's the meat of it.
> My observation living in an area that has a mix of 70+ WASPs and younger black and hispanic people is that the WASPs are the ones who are by far the most incensed by Trump. They don't just dislike his policies. They hate the way he talks.
A lot of minorities in America like the tough on crime talk because they're often the ones most affected by it.
I think that's exactly what OP meant? While Trump's policies take the long term gerontocratic/anarcho-capitalist dynamics strangling of our society and crank them to 11, a lot of younger people ended up buying into his "burn it all down" messaging imagining it would result in some principled evenly-applied reform that might get the boot off their own necks. And that level of foolishness seems straight from the naive rashness of youth.
There is too much to unpack here. Perhaps you'd like to make your point in something other than identity politics anecdotes and personal attacks?
If you don't like my phrasing of "boot on their necks", feel free to substitute your own when constructively responding to the point. The frustrations that have led to Trumpism are certainly palpable and understandable, so don't feign like I'm using hyperbolic language out of nowhere.
But no, in general I am comfortable modeling Trump's second term as a complete self-own on the part of voters - regardless of whether they've realized it yet, or ever will. As a libertarian who partook in both red and blue tribe media and was both sidesing through 2020, I have not come to this conclusion lightly. There has simply been no way I've been able to steelman it.
> through the perspective of some 1930s West Virginia mine worker like you do.
That was the personal attack I was referring to. I was referring to the dynamic of the obvious frustrations seemingly driving much of Trumpism, and yet you're imparting that back onto me. That's called shooting the messenger.
> You’re starting from the values that you think should matter to people, then faulting them for not making decisions you think are rational according to those assumed values.
No, you're assuming here. As I said, I've been trying to steelman Trumpism in terms of any kind of constructive policy for some time and I can no longer find anything that fits.
> Your dismissal of “identity politics” is a good illustration of that
No, that dismissal is based on the red tribe making a good show of dismissing identity politics for the past ~16 years - aka stated preferences. Would you say that my assertion that people should be honest about their preferences is imparting too much of my own opinion about what should matter? The alternative of course, which seems to have good predictive power, is straight up hypocrisy.
> value different ends than what you think they should value
Solving for these values is exactly what I have been doing, as I have been saying. For example in 2016, I was the weirdo telling my blue tribe friends that Trump was likely to win as he was resonating with a lot of frustrations people have that the blue tribe just did not understand. Maybe from that you can see that I am capable of seeing, respecting, and even sympathizing with others' values even if there may be other values I prioritize instead?
Or alternatively you could just come out and state those values! This should be easy right? Rather than beating around the bush?
I would only insist that they be constructive values that aim to be beneficial rather than merely making some spectacle of hurting others. So for example "deport illegal immigrants" doesn't qualify as it's a destructive framing - the constructive framing would be something like "fix the labor market for blue collar citizens". But if this movement truly has some substance making our country better and is not merely just lashing out about our problems, this should be easy.
And of course since we're talking about continued support for Trump, those values should be congruent to the policies he is actually enacting.
You keep attributing straw man points to me, and then dutifully knocking them down.
A recognition that many people feel disenfranchised and preyed upon by our system, which is why they turn to [what I consider] extremist fantasies like communism or Trumpism, does not represent "my analytical perspective".
More germane to our "conversation", I merely threw out "fix the labor market for blue collar citizens" as an example, reflecting a context of arguments that most people make.
So no, I am not "taking cultural relativism as axiomatic" - that's merely your strawman pigeonholing of my position. An example of constructively stating your point about culture could be something like "re-popularize values that made our culture successful".
Of course culture in the abstract has the same vague generality as "values" or "policy", and so I would ask the analogous thing about which specific constructive aspects of culture you see Trump and Trumpism as improving. For example simply "deport people from other cultures" is not constructive as it's framed on the negative dynamic rather than as a constructive outcome to be achieved. I'm not going to give a constructive example this time lest you make another straw man out of my attempting to fill in the blanks of your argument. Rather as it's your argument, you should make it!
Also note that it is necessary to talk in terms of objective cultural values rather than handwaving about a previously dominant culture because, love it or hate it, our society is intrinsically multicultural. And I know that M-word can be triggering for a whole host of negative talking points, hence the need to focus on the positive/constructive.
> You're overlooking that the geriatric people are carrying on the traditional liberal/conservative debate on both sides of the aisle.
Workers skew young, capital skews old. When politics is money literally the only thing the left / right actually agree on is fucking over young people.
That's what it takes to collectively focus on inflating real-estate / stocks that the youth is locked out of, while ignoring the labor market, and the cost of education, and periodically blowing up the economy on behalf of interest groups, with outsourcing or the like previously, next with AI. We've probably been in a job recession for years, and we only just noticed.
"The default setting on phones is to save storage by only using 12 megapixels, so unless you've changed settings, the 200 megapixel phone loses 94% of its megapixels as soon as you press the shutter. Bad deal!"
The final picture is the result of digital processing of the 200 megapixels, which is quite different from losing the data, all other things being the same. His point is right, but this paragraph isn't worthy of the rest of the essay.
Venice was run by very old men. It was common for the Doge to be in their 80s. Meanwhile, many of their neighbors had kings who were very young, sometimes teenage boys.
Venice was the longest lasting, most stable state in Europe.
That might have as much to do with their insane system for choosing a Doge, which many historians think did a lot to force compromise and reduce corruption.
They took the full council, selected a random subset, had that group choose another group from the full council by voting, then repeat that random selection followed by voting another few times ending with a final group who voted to select a Doge.
It may have been stable and dominant in spite of that, like America, currently being run by senile old men. The human mind is a biological computer and it isn’t pretty the older it gets.
Average is probably not what you need to worry about: I'd bet David Attenborough and Mel Brooks still have IQs considerably higher than the average 25-year old. And I'm not convinced IQ is as important as that elusive factor called character.
But you may be right. Maybe what the US really needs is a lagoon.
Well at the times of Doges the world hardly revolutionized. Nowadays a person in their 80s has lived through the rise of at least three different medias (radio, TV, internet) and the world has never changed so fast.
>Venice was run by very old men. It was common for the Doge to be in their 80s. Meanwhile, many of their neighbors had kings who were very young, sometimes teenage boys.
But those kings were (legally) absolute monarchs, while Venice was (somewhat) a republic. This isn't a trivial distinction. The young kings of the various Carolignian successors also tended to inherit their titles when their fathers were killed, while Venice occupied a highly defensible geographic location (a swamp) which supported institutional continuity.
Welcome to my rathole: Venetian history. To expand on your thesis, the Council of Ten was the executive power in Venice, but the Doge and minor council attended the Council of Ten meetings and the Doge often chaired those meetings. And even if he was powerless, the Council was made up of other old men. I don't want to push this whole argument, I'm not recommending we adopt the Venetian constitution. But I don't think you can blame current chaos on age.
Can you explain how is the example of Venetian republic relevant for something like a massive multi-cultural, multi-racial federation in 21st century? One that's led by 100s of old people not just ten rich family heads?
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