Over the past three decades, scholars have identified a massive, unexplained gap in the timeline between the first domestication of crops and the emergence of the first agrarian states, complicating the narrative popularized by authors like Harari and Diamond.
Well, they raised the status of merchants very high. This was particularly a problem in the Chinese world. It wasn't so much in the Christian or the Muslim world, but certainly in the Chinese world, where merchants were considered extremely low. And all of a sudden he raises them up above scholars.
I'm much more comfortable with the fox paradigm. Yeah. So yeah, I like looking for analogies, narratives. I spend a lot of time… If there's a result, I see it in one field, and I like the result, it's a cool result, but I don't like the proof, it uses types of mathematics that I'm not super familiar with, I often try to re-prove it myself using the tools that I favor.
As scholars like Nicolas van de Walle have pointed out, aid can also foster an unhealthy dependency—in his coinage, many African states live in a state of “permanent crisis”, where aid is large enough to reshape (and warp) the political economy around it, but not large enough to be fundamentally transform countries’ economies.
They were not ruling justly. They were ruling by force. And that can only go on so long before revolution happens. The Inca Empire, I think that would’ve gone on forever.
There were a bunch of bad trends: Tribalism was flaring up everywhere, mass shaming campaigns were roaring back into fashion, politicians were increasingly clown-like, public discourse had become a battle of one-dimensional narratives.
Parfit himself said that The Methods of Ethics contains more true statements about ethics than any other work: it builds on the work of other great scholars, but it contains more truth than other works. I do think it is a wonderful work, and if it is not the best book written on ethics, I'd like to know what is.
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