- Gen Z-variety socialism, via Economist: “Plenty of the grievances that animate Gen-Z socialists do stem from real issues. Inflation has been too high, rent in big cities is now often unaffordable and AI could upend the labour market. Dismissing these worries would be foolish. Yet Gen-Z socialism is wrong about how to fix the problems of capitalism. It must be resisted, because it is a profound threat to prosperity.”
- On the American middle class in NYT, by Stephen Rose and Scott Winship of AEI: “In a recent report, we measured class using constant, inflation-adjusted thresholds. The “core” middle class shrank, but so did the classes below the middle — the poor, the near-poor and the lower middle class.”
- Mary Beard’s book on the importance of ancient classics, reviewed: ‘The unlikely image of the future Cambridge don drilling Latin conjugations under the revolutionary eye of Davis is suggestive of what is lost if we allow discourse around the subject to be dominated by what Beard refers to as the “Column Crowd” on the one hand (which celebrates the ancient world as a bastion of the tradition, power and authority it sees embodied in classical architecture), and the “Burn It Down Crowd” (which sees classics as irredeemably tainted by its appropriation for various racist, fascist and imperialist ends) on the other. … “The good news,” Beard tells us, “is that it has always proved hard to corral the ancient world to support convincingly any single modern ideology.”‘
- Toward theories of altruism in psychology: “Despite psychology’s near-universal buy-in to self-interest as the prime mover of prosocial (and other) behaviors, there are well-conceived arguments and growing evidence to suggest that humans are also other-directed—that is, deeply interested in the welfare of others.”
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