Links for August 2025
Babies, books, bones, crime, wages, sex, orcas
Welcome to my monthly collection of links to interesting items. Consider becoming a paid subscriber for full access to the archives and my eternal gratitude.
Babies
Students of the Great Baby Bust might be interested in Kazakhstan’s “Sustained and Universal Fertility Recuperation.” After fertility rates bottomed out in the 90s — during the rough transition from Soviet central planning to market economy — they started rising again.
The pattern occurred in both ethnic Kazakhs and ethnic Russians, but the ongoing increase is greatest among Kazakhs. Both groups have similar likelihood of having a first child, but Kazakh women are more likely to have a second and way more likely to have a third and fourth. Notably, though more educated women still have fewer children, the upward trend for third and fourth births occurs among them as well.
H/t https://x.com/TothGCsaba by way of Robin Hanson.
At World of Edrith we have “We Too Are Elves: Reflections on Falling Birthrates and the ‘Little Golden Age.” The title reflects Tolkien’s depiction of elves as a dwindling race:
At current birthrates, every 100 South Koreans will have 13 grandchildren. This is a nation vanishing before our eyes, in the space of a single human lifespan.
Similarly, every 100 Taiwanese can expect 19 grandchildren between them; every 100 Puerto Ricans 22 grandchildren and every 100 Italians just 36 grandchildren.
The article becomes a bit of pessimism stew, reflecting on various bad trends of the early 21st century, before returning to fertility:
But even if it may help on the margins, we should be cautious about believing that our own pet political project will save the day - simply because in every case there are so many counter-examples. As demographer Paul Morland documents in ‘No One Left’, birthrates are falling rapidly in countries with generous childcare and parental leave (Scandinavia), cheaper houses (parts of Europe, Latin America) and more traditional societies (Japan, South Korea).
I’m not sure I would characterize South Korea as traditional. Younger Koreans strike me as very presentist and modernist, and their culture as rapidly changing. I have been advised against watching 15-year-old Korean TV shows for my language listening practice, because the Korean they speak is now outdated. My wife recently suggested throwing out some hand-me-down Korean children’s books for the same reason.
Edrith thinks fertility is mostly driven by culture — people will have more babies when their culture encourages them to want them. It’s more an orienting statement — a direction about where to go looking for an explanation — than an explanation as such.
One cultural impediment could be ridiculous standards for what it takes to be a parent. Thus, on the topic of having babies, Drunk Wisconsin writes of how “Non-Parents Think Having Kids is Harder Than It Is.” (h/t Blackshoe)
In a world of declining fertility, the remaining high-fertility subcultures will rapidly grow relative to the rest of us. This heralds changes for everyone as they go from small minority to large minority to (at least local) majority. At Medium, Akhivae writes about “How the Amish Quietly Transformed an Entire School District.”
Their explosive growth contrasts strongly with mainstream rural America which has seen its population stagnate and even decline due to generations of low birth rates and migration to the cities. In Holmes County the Amish grew from 7,400 (19% of the county population) in 2000 to 19,800 (45% of the county population) in 2020. The emergence of Amish majority counties marks a new phase in the evolution of the Amish community. One that comes with new opportunities and challenges.
Local school districts, keen to shore up their declining enrollment, enthusiastically court the Amish relying on strategies like the establishment of Amishcentric schooling or offering grade seven and eight classes in elementary schools to appease Amish parents reluctant to enroll their children into middle school.
The claim is that Amish now have sufficient pull to get public schools to become something closer to Amish schools, with morning prayers and no homework to interfere with farm chores.
And that Amish are even attending state-run schools shows that the changes run both ways. Considering the future of the Amish, I think one analogy might be how early Christianity changed as the faith spread throughout the Roman Empire. You can be strict pacifists when it only means the occasional martyrdom of a prominent person refusing military service; you can’t be when it makes a national military impossible.
Bones
In Northeastern France, sometime between 4,300 and 4,150 BC, people dug two pits and filled them with bodies. One group was buried intact; the other group had their left arms cut off. The amputees also had their legs broken and piercings that suggest they may have been tortured and mutilated before being killed. Chemical analysis suggests the mutilated dead were from elsewhere — likely a raiding force that the locals stopped at the cost of their own pit of dead.
Even farther back, in 10,000 BC, a man in what’s now Vietnam took a quartz-tipped arrow in the ribs. From the journal article:
On the basis of the evidence, a narrow penetrative impact is the only feasible cause of fracturing… The evidence of infection on the cervical rib is consistent with septic arthritis and demonstrates that TBH1 survived the initial injury, perhaps by a few months.
I don’t know if there’s anyone still clinging to Noble Savage myth of our peaceful past of hippie bonobo matriarchy, but if so, they do it in spite of a steady stream of such findings.
The advent of states did change the scale of violence, and civilizations were able to bring new technology to bear on the problem of kill or be killed. Consider the 3,200 year old armor recently unearthed in the Czech Republic, or Robin Alington Maguire’s delightful overview of “Ancient Artillery.”
Books
I’m working on my next Books post, on a rather long book. In the meantime, I suggest Michael Hannon on Walter Lippman’s classic Public Opinion: “The Myth of the Informed Citizen.” One sociological observation:
In the village, people really did know one another and participate in most affairs. There, the idea of a citizen who could competently weigh in on every public matter was not a myth but a workable reality. The problem arose when this democratic stereotype, forged in the township, was exported wholesale to the scale of the nation-state or international politics. What worked in the village could not work for modern democracy.
And a lesson that many modern institutions, including the university, should have paid more heed:
Expertise, in Lippmann’s vision, depends on neutrality. The expert must not be identified with a particular “side.” If fact-finders adopt policies, they lose their distinctive value: instead of counteracting prejudice, they become part of it.
H/t sociologist Jesse Smith, who posted the link on X with the comment:
This 1922 book offers a far more sophisticated perspective on modern American social conflict than most of what circulates even among the "thinking classes."
We often operate in a mode of naive realism, i.e., assuming reality is obvious, so any disagreement with it (that is, with us) is a pathology to be explained. The equation changes substantially if we acknowledge that reality is complex and nobody has full, direct access to it.
Tracing Woodgrains has a review of Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, which he describes as “half of a serious, important book” that is hobbled by the missing half. The book is on housing policy and racial segregation in the US, and he compares it unfavorably to Alyssa Katz’s Our Lot:
Katz’s book is a serious, layered look at policy that lets nobody off the hook—not lenders, not the government, and not the liberal activists she’s sympathetic to. Her story begins right where Rothstein’s book mostly leaves off.
But Trace highlights some tidbits he finds interesting:
Rothstein’s accounts of the phenomenon known as blockbusting struck me most. In the mid–twentieth century, speculators would sell properties to black families, persuade white families that the neighborhoods were on the verge of turning into slums, then buy the white families’ homes at bargain prices. Sometimes this went to absurd lengths, with one agent claiming to have arranged burglaries to convince white families their neighborhoods were unsafe.
Similarly striking were Rothstein’s accounts of the conflicts around public housing. He tells of repeated battles over whether to integrate public housing or keep it segregated. When one New Deal–era Detroit project was built, Rothstein notes, white residents rioted, leading to a hundred arrests and thirty-eight hospitalizations (almost all black people).
For a different sort of book: I’ve previously recommended Carl Barks’s Scrooge McDuck and Donald Duck books as artful and kid-friendly comics. Along the same lines, comic great Mike Baron has a recent post on “The Genius of Uncle Scrooge.”
I consume a lot of audiobooks on my drives or if I’m having trouble sleeping. Recent ones include:
The Wars of the Roses, by Dan Jones, is about a period of civil war in English history. I can often follow and retain things pretty well in audio format, but I had trouble keeping this messy game of thrones straight. I had to back up and relisten to a few chapters, and I’ll probably need to sit down with a print copy to really digest it. In my defense, Jones makes it sound like French contemporaries also had trouble keeping up with the political situation across the channel.
On Christian Doctrine, by Augustine of Hippo. A lot isn’t about doctrine as such but interpretation of scripture and rules of inference. Ancients had different ideas about the world, but they weren’t stupid: Sociologists might be surprised that he recommends Latin translations of the Bible based on intercoder reliability.
I still haven’t read the book, but I liked this lecture by Eric Cline summarizing his book on the Bronze Age Collapse.
Labor Laws
My students are often surprised to learn of the maximum wage laws of post-Black Death England. With the plague creating inflation and labor shortage, the state reacted with draconian measures to try to cap the wages of those greedy price-gouging workers. At Age of Invention, Anton Howes gives a detailed account:
In order to prevent workers holding out for the best-possible wages, Edward III’s 1349 ordinance decreed that “every man and woman of our realm of England, of what condition he be, free or bond, able in body” should be forced to work for the first employer who attempted to hire them, and at the old wages too.
The 1351 Statute of Labourers forbade workers from leaving their home towns or villages in search of better-paid work during harvest-time. It forbade most agricultural workers from serving by the day, pushing them into longer and ideally annual contracts. And it ramped up enforcement.
Howes, contrary to many historians, thinks that the enforcement was effective well beyond the second wave of plague in the 1360s. And further legislation to combat shortages of farm workers in the later 1300s and early 1400s also tightened the reins on labor — which was less free in the 1400s than in the 1200s. While it’s easy to notice the injustice of workers getting squeezed out of money and freedoms, Howes points to the larger consequences of this great market distortion:
The populations of most other regions, like France, the Low Countries, or Italy, recovered fairly quickly to their pre-Black Death levels. Even neighbouring Scotland’s appears to have bounced back. But England’s, even as late as 1500, still languished at less than half.
….If the labour laws actually did continue to bite throughout the fifteenth century….then they would have been a major and highly unusual factor in suppressing wages, and thus on restraining population growth.
….every part of England’s political and economic consensus prevented its population growing: the price caps prevented the growth of economic activity, restricting opportunities for employment; the wage caps and other restrictions prevented people from amassing the resources to marry and start families; and even when the wage and price caps weren’t under any especial pressure, the unwillingness to weaken the currency often left the country desperately short of circulating cash, exacerbating bouts of deflation and under-employment.
Criminals
You might know that criminality, like pretty much everything else, follows a power law distribution, where something like five percent of the population commits about half the crimes. But how many people are criminals? Inquisitive Bird answers:
Yes, a few repeat offenders account for a large share of crime, but there are many more criminals who each have a small number of offenses under their belt.
To address the question head on, consider the proportion of men in the United States who eventually end up in prison
As the figure above shows, one in four to one in three black men eventually end up in prison. The same is true for one in seven Hispanic men, and about one in fifteen (non-Hispanic) white men.
Keep in mind he’s talking about prison, where people are serving sentences measured in years for serious crimes, and not jail, where people might be held for a night or a few days pending arraignment, or else serve sentences measured in months for lesser offenses.
I know a couple guys who’ve gotten in drunk trouble and spent a night in jail, and one who served a short sentence piecemeal on weekends. I don’t have any personal acquaintances who’ve been to prison. I imagine serious criminality is a bit less widely distributed, which is why those of us distant from such networks are surprised to learn how common it is.
The Bird has more, including comparative data.
Sex and Intimacy
Sociologist Frank Furedi discusses a curious contradiction of how the Anglosphere now treats sex:
Outwardly it appears that anything goes. Bonnie Blue can boast about her feat of having sex with 1057 men in the same day. At the same time spontaneous expressions of desire are in many instances treated as an heinous act deserving some form of punishment.
He thinks both are aspects of a kind of retreat from intimacy with other people:
Bonnie Blue, like the moral entrepreneurs who advocate consent classes and the Me Too zealots share one important impulse: hostility to the world of intimacy. In the contemporary western world, the private sphere in longer regarded as a haven from a heartless world. Intimate relations are regarded as potentially dangerous.
Later:
One casualty of the breached boundary between public and private is the valued status of intimacy. During one interview, Andrew McMillan, competing to be an Oxford Professor of Poetry, boasted that ‘retired women at literary festivals will come up and tell me the most intimate details about their husbands or their sex lives’. His interviewer appeared to take the view that this was an admirable accomplishment
Intimacy has become the victim of a relentless drive towards public exposure.
I’m reminded of Donald Black’s theory that as society becomes more atomized and the baseline of intimacy between people goes down, acts of interpersonal intimacy become more deviant. Black considers exposure a dimension of intimacy, but Furedi seems to understand mass exposure of formerly intimate acts as something that reduces their closeness or at least is a symptom of their reduced closeness. Secrets bond us, and publicizing them reduces our bond.
Social “Science”
It’s from a couple years ago, but I just found this absolutely scathing take by Adam Mastroianni on fraud in psychology. After going over the case of two researchers accused of fraud, he notes:
This whole debacle matters a lot socially: careers ruined, reputations in tatters, lawsuits flying. But strangely, it doesn't seem to matter much scientifically. That is, our understanding of psychology remains unchanged. If you think of psychology as a forest, we haven't felled a tree or even broken a branch. We've lost a few apples.
That might sound like a dunk on Gino and Ariely, or like a claim about how experimental psychology is wonderfully robust. It is, unfortunately, neither. It is actually a terrifying fact that you can reveal whole swaths of a scientific field to be fraudulent and it doesn't make a difference.
I can’t exactly throw stones, being in a field where, as a graduate teaching assistant, I taught students Marx’s labor theory of value.
On the dysfunction of sociology, Jukka Savolainen has a new article in Theory and Society arguing that “The Methodological Stagnation of Sociology is Related to Its Left-Wing Skew.”
Descriptive results support the expectation that: (a) sociology is politically far more skewed than its peer disciplines, and that (b) sociology lags far behind in terms of transparency, openness, and standards of causal rigor. I conclude by suggesting that the observed patterns reflect a two-stage process. First, when truth-seeking becomes secondary to advocacy, methodological rigor becomes devalued. Second, the resulting loss of scientific credibility makes the field less attractive to scholars who prioritize evidence over ideology, creating a self-reinforcing cycle.
Life’s full of vicious cycles. Ask a bartender.
Orcas
Young mammals play as a way to practice skills they’ll need to make a living: Kittens pounce, dogs chase, and young orcas pretend to drown each other. Much like I taught my kids to play hide-and-seek, mama orcas teach their young to play the drowning game. The orcas need drowning skills since it’s part of how the prey on other whales.
One of those prey species is the humpback. Humpbacks recognize orcas as enemies, and will intervene to stop orca attacks on other mammal species like seals.
According to experts, humpbacks react to killer whale predation vocalizations and intervene to defend the targeted prey even before they know which species is being threatened. This means they likely notice that the victim is not of their own species only after having travelled to the scene, though they generally continue their intervention all the same.
It’s not a behavior unique to humpbacks: Other prey species will “mob” predators when they have the advantage of numbers. Geese, for instance, will follow around and harass a fox on the hunt, making it nigh impossible for it to score a kill without leaving the area.
This whale talk reminds me of the 1977 film Orca. It’s typically classed as a Jaws rip-off, but several critics have pointed out that it’s more like Death Wish with the whale as an avenging vigilante. Which makes the main character played by Richard Harris a villain protagonist. The Wiki page on the movie gives this bit of Harris trivia:
According to Vincenzoni, Richard Harris had begun to drink heavily on set after reading a tabloid magazine and seeing a photograph of his wife Ann Turkel on a beach with a younger man. He reportedly intended to stop performing and fly to Malibu in order to kill them, relenting only after getting into a brawl which resulted in Vincenzoni getting a black eye.
English Bob is definitely Fighting Irish.
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