Strong extended kinship ties are associated with less economic prosperity all over the world, it just in Africa but Pakistan, the Middle East, etc.
There is a plausible argument that it’s causal. Europe had weaker kinship ties—for various reasons, including the Catholic church’s ban on cousin marriage—back in the middle ages, before Europe began pulling away from the rest of the world in terms of GDP per capita. Even within the U.S., communities with weak kinship ties (e.g. Northeastern Anglo-Protestants) are more economically successful than communities with stronger kinship ties and clan structures (e.g. Appalachians).
Arguably, more atomized societies with weak kinship ties foster the development of civil institutions and governments to compensate for the social structural functions that would otherwise be performed by kinship networks.
> There is a plausible argument that it’s causal. Europe had weaker kinship ties—for various reason
Explain China[1] and its steep ascent, blowing past all European countries, and soon - the USA.
1. Or India, to a lesser extent. There's a lot of recency bias when it comes to economic outcomes, as if we're at the end of history. I'm guessing at least one 19th century British industrialist/gentleman probably praised their Anglo-Saxon heritage and the Protestant (Anglican) faith as necessary ingredients to national wealth, as opposed to the fallen Catholic empires of Spain and Portugal, or the heathens in Africa, the Indo-Pacific, the Middle and far East.
> China and its steep ascent, blowing past all European countries, and soon - the USA.
China's GDP (PPP) is somewhere around $30k, depending on whose numbers you like, which does beat such lighthouses of Western capitalism as Albania ($25k) and Ukraina ($20k but they also have a good excuse), but isn't in any obvious danger of "blowing past" the likes of Serbia ($35k) and Bulgaria ($45k), much less the USA ($90k).
Oh, my bad - I didn't realize there were so many super-powers in Europe that the US considers peer adversaries. I suppose this century will belong to the Serbians then! The Big Mac index is what truly determines a country's trajectory.
> Explain China[1] and its steep ascent, blowing past all European countries, and soon - the USA
The communist party broke down traditional family structures, and replaced kinship ties with the state. To the point of massive intervention in family formation itself, through the one child policy.
It’s not about Anglo-Protestantism per se, but about a general progression towards atomized societies with weak family bonds. Multiple different cultural changes pushed in that same direction. Protestantism was one, but before that so was the Catholic Church: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/11/roman-catholi....
Not only is this an insanely cool project, the writeup is great. I was hooked the whole way through. I particularly love this part:
> At this point, the system was trying to find a framebuffer driver so that the Mac OS X GUI could be shown. As indicated in the logs, WindowServer was not happy - to fix this, I’d need to write my own framebuffer driver.
I'm surprised by how well abstracted MacOS is (was). The I/O Kit abstraction layers seemed to actually do what they said. A little kudos to the NeXT developers for that.
I felt similarly. The learning curve was a tad steep, especially since I had never written a driver before, but once I figured out how to structure things and saw the system come alive, I grew to appreciate the approach IOKit takes.
With that said, I haven't developed drivers for any other platforms, so I really can't say if the abstraction is good compared to what's used by modern systems.
IOKit was actually built from the ground up for OS X! NeXT had a different driver model called DriverKit. I've never coded against either, but my understanding was they're pretty different beasts. (I could be wrong)
That said, indeed, the abstraction layer here is delightful! I know that some NetBSD devs managed to get PPC Darwin running under a Mach/IOKit compatibility layer back in the day, up to running Xquartz on NetBSD! With NetBSD translating IOKit calls. :-)
There’s a great video of a NeXT-era Steve Jobs keynote floating around—I think the one where he announces the x86 port as NeXT was transitioning to a software-only company—where he specifically calls out DriverKit and how great it is.
Steve was not a developer but he made it his business to care about what they cared about.
Yeah - even from the start, I remember NeXT marketing was spending a disproportionate amount of their time selling NeXT’s “object technology”, AppKit and Interface Builder, DPS as an advanced graphics model. It was good hunch from Steve, given how how modern NeXTSTEP feels in retrospect.
For some reason, though, it means that people overlook how NeXT’s hardware was _very_ far from fast. You weren’t going to get SGI level oomph from m68k and MO disks.
Yes, you're right! I'm just dolt who's never checked what a .kext on OS X actually is.
I had been under the impression that DriverKit drivers were quite a different beast, but they're really not. Here's the layout of a NS ".config" bundle:
The driver itself is a Mach-O MH_OBJECT image, flagged with MH_NOUNDEFS. (except for the _reloc images, which are MH_PRELOAD. No clue how these two files relate/interact!)
OS X added a dedicated image type (MH_KEXT_BUNDLE) and they cleaned up a bit, standardized on plists instead of the "INI-esque" .table files, but yeah, basically the same.
IOKit was almost done in Java; C++ was the engineering plan to stop that from happening.
Remember: there was a short window of time where everyone thought Java was the future and Java support was featured heavily in some of the early OS X announcements.
Also DriverKit's Objective-C model was not the same as userspace. As I recall the compiler resolved all message sends at compile time. It was much less dynamic.
Mostly because they thought Objective-C wasn't going to land well with the Object Pascal / C++ communities, given those were the languages on Mac OS previously.
To note that Android Things did indeed use Java for writing drivers, and on Android since Project Treble, and the new userspace driver model since Android 8, that drivers are a mix of C++, Rust and some Java, all talking via Android IPC with the kernel.
Yes, also the same reason why Java was originally introduced, Apple was afraid that the developer community educated in Object Pascal / C++, wasn't keen into learning Objective-C.
When those fears proved not true, and devs were actually welcoming Objective-C, it was when they dropped Java and the whole Java/Objective-C runtime interop.
And there are enough parallels to Linux's stack, I'm thinking about looking through the Linux on Wii project more and comparing how it handles fb issues in comparison. I loved reading this whole post, crazy how many OSes have now been run on the humble Wii!
I’d say it’s more about how much explanation is needed. There are cool abstractions that require explanation because they aren’t intuitive at first, and then it clicks. But usually if I find endless explanations of why indirection is better because it aligns with someone’s conceptual model, that’s to me a bad abstraction. Not because it’s leaky, but because it resists understanding.
> No more cheap borrowing, no more low interest rates, hello constant high inflation.
Do you mean that we’ll have high inflation because we’ll keep running massive deficits? Because many countries that don’t have the reserve currency also have low inflation.
I think some people think that high velocity is deflationary. So if suddenly dollars are not traded as much, it slow down the dollar velocity and this has a global inflationnary effect. This isn't a bad theory tbh, i believe at least half of it (money velocity decreasing have an inflationary effect on assets, productive or not)
It means high inflation because if we're not the reserve currency, global markets sell their dollars, which leaves more dollars unused, which makes them plentiful, which makes them less valuable. This has a knock-on effect; it makes import goods more expensive, it makes government borrowing more expensive (which raises costs for citizens), and loss of petrodollar (the main reason for us being the reserve currency) makes oil more expensive. To pay for our debt, after we no longer have all this investment (other nations buying our dollars, t-bills), we print more money. So our currency is less valuable, and everything for us becomes more expensive, thus, inflation.
> It means high inflation because if we're not the reserve currency, global markets sell their dollars, which leaves more dollars unused, which makes them plentiful, which makes them less valuable.
So why don't Japan and Germany have high inflation, since those country's currencies aren't the reserve currency either?
For reasons? You want me to tell you the entire economic history of 3 countries in a HN comment? The US has no real industry except finance (well, and healthcare, and real estate (which is/was basically finance)), and our economy is only strong because of the petrodollar-created reserve currency. Take it away and we have a gaping void where an economy used to be.
Japan may implode if the US dollar collapses, due to the weird USD<->Yen cyclical debt scheme (yen carry trade) propping them up. If the world switches to the Yen to price oil this might not be so bad. They also just started moving away from negative interest rates and ZIRP, and BoJ may reach 1% interest at the end of this month. This is good for Japan, bad for US.
Germany is not doing great but they do/did have a strong manufacturing sector.
It's not the deficit itself, it's the quantitative easing that is used to pay for most of the deficit. If the US dollar weren't a reserve currency, printing more money would have a much larger inflationary impact.
> magine only a smart part of the fraction to pay oil companies, to build the streets, all the profs at university for "ICE related" tech from the last 60 years, all the educated engineers, all the lobby institutions etc - and pour this into EE & battery research -> where could we be today?
There is a more straightforward counterfactual. If the hippies had just sat the fuck down and the developed countries had nuclearized their grid the way France did, CO2 emissions would be so much lower that we could afford to have the entire developing world increase its CO2 emissions up to the French level while remaining within the same total global emissions level as today. And we would have had a huge runway for further decarbonizing our economies because we could have done all that by the 1980s like France did.
Even then nuclear would be behind renewables etc. - costs of renewables are aleady falling exponentially, and this under this "underfunded research regime"
I can remember one guy in the small village I grew up: He put solar on his roof already in 1991 - the people where laughing at him. (and back then you got nice state subsidies to do so). Today its a nobrainer - so for me its clear: It depends on the mindset of the society if those things are funded or not
> Even then nuclear would be behind renewables etc. - costs of renewables are aleady falling exponentially, and this under this "underfunded research regime"
I can remember one guy in the small village I grew up: He put solar on his roof already in 1991
By 1991, France already generated nearly 80% of its electricity from nuclear. Pointing to the falling cost of solar today overlooks the fact that nuclear would have allowed a massive decarbonization of the developed world two generations ago. France couldn't have done that with solar back then. The current feasibility of solar and wind is the result of fundamental scientific advances in semiconductors and batteries that didn't happen until the early 2000s.
Remember, CO2 is a cumulative problem. Massive CO2 emissions reductions from solar/wind in 2026 are a lot less valuable than the massive CO2 emissions reductions we could have had using nuclear 40-50 years ago.
> This was the lowest unemployment rate since the 1950s,
This is only true if you define “unemployment” narrowly to exclude people who are in school. In 1950, you could get a job out of high school. Today, you need to spend four years in college, sometimes more.
Counting people who are in school as “not unemployed” ignores the opportunity cost of school. You’re spending 4 years in the prime of your life. And during that time you’re not earning any income, but instead paying money. So even if eventually your job prospects are as good as they were in 1950, clearly the economy isn’t as good as it was when you could hit that same rate without people making that up front investment.
It’s not at all time highs. Your chart combines the data for both genders, which causes the decline in employment to be masked by the separate trend of women working outside the home. Male prime age employment is down 10 percentage points from 1955: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LRAC25MAUSM156S
A higher percentage of prime age adults are working outside the house than almost any time in recent US history. I don’t understand why an analysis of the state of US employment should exclude women, can you please expand on your reasoning?
The analysis has to compare apples to apples. Raising families and homemaking is also work. Women going to work outside the home reflects a change in the type of work, not the employment level. But your analysis artificially treats them as having been out of work before and now employed.
How is this riskier or less “mentally sound” than what European countries do? European drug price caps are premised on the threat that, if drug companies don’t sell at those prices, that the government will bar sales of the drug in the country, or drop the drug from coverage under the public health system.
Here, there is no threat that the drugs will be banned from the market completely. The threat is that the drug companies will face high tariffs that reduce sales. That’s a much less extreme threat than what the European countries use as leverage.
> Negotiation with the government is also done in Australia. The drug is not banned here though if there's no agreement. It's just not publicly funded.
A tariff isn't a ban either. Imposing a tariff and eliminating a subsidy are both just ways of reducing a foreign drug maker's sales in a local market by making the product more expensive.
Fundamentally, neither Australia nor the U.S. can force companies located in Switzerland or Denmark to sell them drugs at a particular rate. The only leverage they have is hurting drug maker's sales by reducing the demand in the local market.
> You understand the US is the most expensive place in the world for medicine right... If you don't change your strategy this won't change.
The executive negotiating with drug manufacturers is a dramatic change in strategy from what the U.S. has done before.
The EU should abandon the stupid Commission structure and have a real Parliament that can actually draft legislation. The current one can just vote down legislation drafted by the Commission.
What they ought to do is have a process for passing EU-wide laws where they get introduced by a popularly elected legislature but to be enacted they also have to be approved by the majority of the legislatures of the member states. That gives you a good check on centralized power grabs because the member states have to approve anything that could usurp their role, but you can still pass things that make sense at that level like a common set of antitrust rules.
That’s similar to the original US model, except instead of the member state legislatures directly approving legislation, they appointed two proxies to the federal Senate. It’s a good system.
But being able to originate legislation in the directly elected legislature is important. Even the original U.S. constitutional design, which was quite anti-populist, made the directly elected House the main originator of legislation. (Either the House or Senate could do it, but only the House could introduce appropriations bills giving it primacy in the legislative process.)
The current system is new legislation has to be drafted by the Commission, which is the indirectly elected executive branch. That allows what would otherwise be popular proposals to never even be introduced. Whereas if you have legislation introduced by the directly elected body, popular proposals at least get a public debate and people get to see what they are and who is blocking them, but you still ultimately want the check on power grabs and populist nonsense before it actually gets enacted.
NO! Laws should be drafted by lawyers and professionals in those fields. An election would select lawmakers by popularity contest. Can't expect good laws from tht kind of people.
What's needed is accountability for drafted laws and removal of those who repeatedly draft laws rejected by parliament.
> and removal of those who repeatedly draft laws rejected by parliament.
While I believe I understand where you are coming from, this seems unduly broad and harsh.
What limit on time, number of attempts, etc. whould we apriori in advance place on laws like equality, climate monitoring, abortion rights, etc. before the gate is dropped on any more of that kind of thing?
Limits should not be placed on laws, but on law authors. Each one with his own count of rejected laws. Like this: author signs some drafts, drafts go to parliament, N drafts rejected -> author dismissed from Eu commision. It could even be a ratio of adopted laws vs. rejected laws. Drop below threshold -> dismissed.
And that's one of the main disadvantages of it. EU is trying to avoid those if possible, while still maintaining democracy's advantages. So far, this Commision / Parliament setup seems to be working just fine.
There is a plausible argument that it’s causal. Europe had weaker kinship ties—for various reasons, including the Catholic church’s ban on cousin marriage—back in the middle ages, before Europe began pulling away from the rest of the world in terms of GDP per capita. Even within the U.S., communities with weak kinship ties (e.g. Northeastern Anglo-Protestants) are more economically successful than communities with stronger kinship ties and clan structures (e.g. Appalachians).
Arguably, more atomized societies with weak kinship ties foster the development of civil institutions and governments to compensate for the social structural functions that would otherwise be performed by kinship networks.
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