Tweet [1]
Connor Vasile asks: “What Happens When You Google ‘Capitalism Fights Racism.’” [3] A slice:
Sears revolutionized [4]the buyer’s experience with the use of catalogs, allowing consumers to mail-order goods to their homes. This put the company at an enormous advantage by expanding their market, serving many thousands more customers than a typical brick-and-mortar shop could. Taken for granted today, the idea of ordering and receiving your product without leaving your house was a novel—and potentially life saving—invention for 20th Century families.
This innovation allowed southern blacks to order items otherwise unavailable at their segregated stores. With mail-order, black customers also didn’t have to experience the racism and inhumanity they experienced during some public outings; they could order what they wanted when they wanted, just like the average white at the time. Capitalist innovation not only worked to benefit the companies involved, but also served to bring value to diverse communities; in this case, it acted as an escape for so many black consumers constrained by Jim Crow.
Here’s Marian Tupy on the world’s human population reaching eight billion [5]. A slice:
Every new human being comes to the world not only with an empty stomach, but also a pair of hands, and, more importantly, a brain capable of intelligent thought and new knowledge creation.
In the process of economic development, human beings cause environmental damage, but the new wealth and knowledge that we create also allow us to become better stewards of the planet. That is why all environmental ranking tables are dominated by developed nations.
Doomsayers concerned about population growth are right to note that the world is constituted of a finite number of atoms – be they of copper or of zinc. But the finitude of atoms (i.e., resources) is largely irrelevant to human well‐being. What matters is our ability to create new knowledge that combines and recombines those atoms in ever more valuable ways.
On Twitter, Martin Kulldorff exposes an error committed by Paul Krugman [8]:
Children with bigger feet are better at mathematics, ….. because they are older.
Florida has higher mortality, because they are older.
Nobel laureate @paulkrugman could learn a thing or two from children with big feet.
Bill Hayton asks if the Chinese state can let go of zero covid [10]. A slice:
More fundamentally, Zero Covid is an opportunity for the Communist Party to do what it loves doing most. As John Culver, former US National Intelligence Officer for East Asia, has noted [11], this is a chance for the Party to return to its old ways. The economic reforms of the Nineties that drove the country’s rapid economic growth also brought about the end of the Party’s “work unit” system, which had been the foundation of its control over the population throughout the post-revolutionary period.