History

The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 stands as one of the most spectacular vindications of free market principles in modern American history. Before deregulation, the Civil Aeronautics Board controlled every aspect of commercial aviation: routes, schedules, and most critically,… pic.twitter.com/thdjhS7uQv

— Handre (@Handre) April 19, 2026

 

An Insight

Yale’s long-anticipated report: Elite universities, including Yale, played major roles in degrading themselves. It urges Yale to recommit itself to protecting free speech zealously, but also cautions that fixing academia’s toxic culture will be neither easy nor quick (Clip: NYT). pic.twitter.com/rWMbFW7jGg

— Timur Kuran (@timurkuran) April 15, 2026

 

If everybody must be equally well-off all the time, there can be no significant movement up or down.

Reeves has declared war on inequality – but it is the engine that drives success by Janet Daley.  

Written in the context of the evils the British Labor government but pertinent generally.  Emphasis added.  

The great social evil now is relative poverty. Having succeeded in eliminating the mass hunger and life-threatening conditions in which so many once struggled to survive, we must finish the job and go on to abolish inequality which is the great injustice of our own age. The inference is that some people being relatively less well off than others is the precise moral equivalent of people starving to death while others feast.

Ironically, it is the great success of free market economics and the unprecedented mass prosperity it has produced which brings this reckoning. The economic system that has delivered more people from poverty than any previous one in human history is now attacked for failing to bring everyone’s lifestyle to the same standard all at once. There are some real problems with this. If everybody must be equally well-off all the time, there can be no significant movement up or down. That would rule out what might be seen as a natural trajectory from less successful to more successful, or from early struggle to affluent independence, perhaps involving personal resourcefulness or a climb up a professional ladder.

Relative poverty, so long as it is not permanent, is the obverse – the other side of the same coin – of social mobility. If there is a political guarantee of economic equality, as there was supposed to be in the old Soviet societies, the possibility of individual self-improvement is lost. For some people to be better off than others is not, in itself, morally unacceptable: their affluence may be a reward for talent, effort and risk-taking. (The argument that such traits are themselves unfair advantages is beyond ridiculous: it is positively pernicious.) Of course, they might have achieved their success through unscrupulous means, but that is the kind of moral affront which laws and social disapproval are intended to prevent.

The idea that anyone who is significantly better off must be, by definition, immoral is what lies behind the logic of a wealth tax – which is, in effect, a success tax. This is the real crux of the matter. Personal achievement and self-improvement are among the greatest satisfactions life has to offer. The possibility of moral agency and the scope for taking individual responsibility are probably the defining attributes of emotional maturity. We have spent a generation or so arguing about whether the government should guarantee equality of opportunity – which would provide as many people as possible with the chance to experience these things – or equality of outcome which would, by definition, eliminate them.

Relative poverty – which is to say, being less well off than some other people – is not, in itself, a bad thing, so long as it is temporary and remediable. It should be something that you can escape, leave behind, look back on as a formative time. (You may have guessed that I speak from experience here.) But the possibility of it must exist.

The emphasized text gets to the point I harp on - All systems need variance in order to evolve.  You can only have zero variance in contexts of zero change.  If the environment or context is itself subject to change, then your system within that environment needs variance to allow the evolution of the system to adapt to the changes in the environment.  Darwin's theory of evolution has application beyond the biological world.

Any ideology which insists on removing variance between individuals in order to achieve "equality" are guaranteed to fail.  Social systems are subject to exogenous change and therefore there needs to be variance (inequality) within the system to allow it to evolve in the context of those exogenous changes.  By disposing of differences, you guarantee the eventual collapse of the system.  

I see wonderful things

Only one chance in this lifetime…

Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those… pic.twitter.com/8aWnaFJ69c

— Reid Wiseman (@astro_reid) April 19, 2026

 

Offbeat Humor

This is a bit like my wife and me meeting to discuss the unsuitability of a particular lunar landing location. https://t.co/OYM8Avtb54

— George MF Washington (@GMFWashington) April 17, 2026

 

Data Talks

For the 2025 Math SAT, 189,177 students scored 700-800. Of those test-takers, 63% were boys (118,890) and 37% were girls (70,287). Stated differently, there were 169 boys scoring 700-800 on the Math SAT for every 100 girls.

The male math advantage has persisted for generations… pic.twitter.com/OHYwo266il

— Mark J. Perry (@Mark_J_Perry) April 16, 2026

 

It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffeehouse, for the voice of the kingdom.

The Conduct of the Allies (1711) by Jonathan Swift. 

It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffeehouse, for the voice of the kingdom. The city coffeehouses have been for some years filled with people, whose fortunes depend upon the Bank, East-India, or some other stock. Every new fund to these, is like a new mortgage to a usurer, whose compassion for a young heir, is exactly the same with that of a stockjobber to the landed gentry. At the court end of the town, the like places of resort are frequented either by men out of place, and consequently enemies to the present ministry, or by officers of the army: no wonder then if the general cry, in all such meetings, be against any peace, either with Spain or without; which, in other words, is no more than this; that discontented men desire another change of ministry; that soldiers would be glad to keep their commissions; and that the creditors have money still, and would have the debtors borrow on at the old extorting rate, while they have any security to give.

For all that we bemoan fake news, press release journalism, rank propaganda and the gulf between the chattering class and most ordinary citizens, it has ever been so as evidenced by Swift.

315 years ago and he might as well be speaking of X/Twitter.

It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffeehouse, for the voice of the kingdom.

We keep discovering, age by age, that the loudest, most persistent, grating and annoying voices, whether in the London coffehouse or on X, are unrepresentative of the vox populi.  The NGOs, 501(c)(3)'s, Think Tanks and academia do their advocacy press releases; legacy media fills their column inches and social media regurgitate for likes, all fueled by self-interest; and all that noise correlates poorly with the interests and opinions of the great bulk of the nation.

Data Talks

今日のセミナーで紹介されていた論文。「親になると良い人間になるのか？」母親だけでなく父親も、妊娠が分かってから有意に犯罪率が下がって、生まれた後も低い水準に留まる。セミナーでは、SNSの投稿も減って、より良いことを投稿するようになっていると報告。子育てから人間学ぶことも多いらしい。 pic.twitter.com/agetu5Ejay

— Kosuke Uetake (@Chanman_ECON) April 16, 2026

 

Sun, Sea and Sky: a Summer Phantasy, 1892 by John Atkinson Grimshaw

Sun, Sea and Sky: a Summer Phantasy, 1892 by John Atkinson Grimshaw (England, 1836-1893)

Click to enlarge.

History

Like just to show how insane this was--British garrisons in Sierra Leone had a 40% annual death rate. This is *twice as bad as Dachau*; it's about the same as the first-year mortality rates of newly-arrived slaves in Haiti. Getting stationed here was basically a death sentence! https://t.co/Gm1Ie2kRId pic.twitter.com/ZxC35RzOLz

— Aminadad Mercilesse Butcher (@OttokarHochman) April 17, 2026