Awed by the Amazing Twentieth? Is it unreasonable to ask people getting more than £80,000 a year to pay more tax?
Author: gwydionwilliams
Thinking about Troy and Homer
I’m working on a story, imagining an old Greek singer complaining about ‘Young Homer’ who has reinvented a fine old take, saying things that never happened.
In connection with this, I have completed a short essay on why the story as we have it is very unlikely to be true. Modern authors typically snip out the supernatural bits but keep the rest. But archaeology contradicts the standard version.
Priam’s Tragedy and the Wrath of Achilles is available here.
8th February 2017
Degraded Globalisation. What’s wrong with Neo-Liberalism, the dominant economics since the 1980s.
The Gap in Adam Smith’s doctrine
Why Profit Need Not Be Wealth-Creating. The flaw in Adam Smith’s arguments.
How National Economies Really Grow. The alternative system of Friedrich List, who recognised that real economics depends on nation-states.
Adam Smith’s Friends and the birth of Conspiracy Theory. His connections to several influential individuals, including James Watt and John Robison. Robison believed in a conspiracy of Freemasons behind the French Revolution. He had nothing to say about Jews, but the notion later evolved into anti-Semitic fantasies like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
My holiday in China
Doing a series of blogs on Quora about my holiday in China, see https://gwydionmw.quora.com/. More people would see it there than here, I suspect.
New historic article, May 2016
Why the sophistocated Chinese Empire could not modernise. Including details of the exceptional nature of European developments. And how Japan managed to modernise without uprooting its traditional culture. Also available as a PDF, Problems 21 – Imperial China.
2015 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 780 times in 2015. If it were a cable car, it would take about 13 trips to carry that many people.
Race, psycopahty and the internet
Dark Skin, Blue Eyes – the Original Europeans. Very different from 19th century racist notions.
Human Altruism and Psycopathy. Both are found in our genes.
The Internet as Secret Policeman’s Friend. How internet links make it remarkably easy to trace a network of dissidents, including those who have not posted.
How the Great War might have ended differently
Why You CAN Change Human Nature
Our evolution made us highly flexible. And violent aggressive behaviour is not always rewarded by Natural Selection.
Natural Selection as ‘Survival of the Grandkids’. An ‘audit of grandchildren’ is the actual way in which natural selection shapes species. Just having offspring is not enough: they in turn must have children for the genes to survive long-term. And human life includes other options: Newton left behind no children or grandchildren, but his actual legacy is immense.
Humans Work Best in Cooperative Groups. We have what’s probably the highest developed group identity. We also have what may be unique, the ability to reflect on membership of a group and maybe change it.
Why Only Some Children Bounce Back From Bad Childhoods. Kids as ‘orchids’ or ‘dandelions’: and the ‘orchids’ are often superior if properly raised.
And So Say All of Me. Unlike a computer, our brains seem to work as an ensemble, several separate centres working together, or occasionally working at cross purposes.
Gifts Close to Madness? The odd way in which we became human, and the ancestral features we still retain. Giftedness as a mental abnormality, and closely tied to things we class as maladjustment or madness. And ‘Behind every Great Man there’s a Great Ape’.
Advances Mice and Backward Humans. DNA studies show that mice have had the strongest Natural Selection pressures. Apes (including humans) are less evolved than the average mammal in terms of their DNA.
Chimp DNA Changed More Than Ours. In terms of DNA, though not appearance, chimps have had the most evolution.
Superorganisms – Ant Nests and Human Religions. Why being part of something aids your survival.
Letter About Memes. Every Tom, Dave or Sammy bears a name of Jewish origin, as indeed does every Liz, Jane or Mary. So are Jewish names must be very very good at self-replication? (Dawkins’s notion is a half-arsed theory of culture.)
Why Motherhood was Created by Natural Selection. A short review of “Love at Goon Park“.
Cooking Made Us Human. The notion that we advanced by being able to cook. And the alternative notion it might have been drying food in the hot sun, before fire was tamed.
Blond Hair Occurred at least Twice. Dark-skinned Solomon Islanders evolved their own version, using a distinct gene.
Rational Chimps, Hobbits and Starch-Eating Humans. How chimps really do behave as economists think humans should behave. Plus how the ‘Flores Hobbits’ might have crossed deep water, and the surprising truth about early human diet.
Chimps Are Never Tame. A rampaging chimp illustrates how we became less muscular and less robust as we got smarter. And able most to tolerate each others, as chimps never can.
Evolution Prevented By Competition. Most of the history of life is about changelessness, not evolution. A relentless struggle for existence produces creatures good at winning that particular struggle, not creatures that can open up new possibilities.
Should We Fear Alien Civilisations? Suggesting that if they are there, they would have seen us through telescopes much better than we have used to find thousands of exoplanets.
Gaia, daughter of Pangloss. Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis as Rehashed Religion.
Frankenstein. How none of the films have been true to Mary Shelley’s original vision.
Big fierce animals are losers. The monsters of the past mostly perished without issue.
Mammals that ate dinosaurs. (But still went extinct, with smaller mammals being our shared ancestors.)
