HWFO Reading List, May 2024

And a curious case against mass transit

I recently opined in a pseudointellectual online space that building more mass transit wouldn’t help commute times, because it would just mean people could commute farther, and therefore would instead increase urban sprawl. As I wondered why nobody had researched this before, one of the smarter-than-me people in this space pointed me towards Marchetti’s Constant.

Like most great ideas, mine wasn’t original. Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti, referencing transportation engineer Yacov Zahavi, developed a theory in 1994 in the academic journal “Technological Forecasting and Social Change” which basically goes like this. Ever since Neolithic times, the average time spent per day for travel is approximately the same, even though the distance may increase due to advancements in transportation. Lewis Mumford, author of Technics and Civilization says the idea was first cooked up by Bertrand Russel.

Mr. Bertrand Russell has noted that each improvement in locomotion has increased the area over which people are compelled to move: so that a person who would have had to spend half an hour to walk to work a century ago must still spend half an hour to reach his destination, because the contrivance that would have enabled him to save time had he remained in his original situation now—by driving him to a more distant residential area—effectually cancels out the gain.

This “average of one hour per day” figure crops up across the literature, and the USA follows it very closely, with an average commute time of 26.4 minutes one way. (big image alert, with credit to some intern at TitleMax Insurance)

Given this constant, if city planners want their cities to build up instead of out, then the most important thing they can do is to make traffic worse instead of better. And definitely don’t build trains.

We talk about this sort of thing in the HWFO Slack Community, and I also keep a running list of articles from our discussions. If you’d like to join the discussion, type your email in here and click the green button.

Reading List

(1) Shilling for Readers

HWFO reader, Slack member, and Mayor of Rockwall TX appears on a podcast:

(2) TERF War Updates

If you follow Jesse Singal, you know he’s a nexus in the TERF War. This piece by him for The Dispatch is very comprehensive, discussing the Cass Review in clean and not-culture-war terms, but will probably get dismissed by well-poisoning from the “trans interventions for kids” camp. The article focuses on how the youth trans debate poisoned journalism and eliminated any robust sensemaking capacity it had with regards to the issue.

Staying on topic, Jeff Maurer pointed out that the Cass report did in fact endorse youth gender transition in certain cases, but that fact was washed completely out of the discussion by both sides due to the media dynamics Jesse Singal speaks about:

Hilary Cass Endorsed Youth Gender Transition in Some Cases and We Ignored It Because It Didn’t Fit Any of Our Narratives

HWFO readers will see through both of these articles for what’s obviously going on - standard sensemaking crisis dynamics related to how the tail wags the dog in the media. It’s echo chambers feeding Egregores all the way down.

(3) University Update

The culture war scoreboard continues to shift as MIT quietly bans diversity statements, and Harvard bans taking any public position on anything not related to their core mission. All public universities in Georgia recently canned their DEI departments, but that was probably due to revisions to state law, so MIT and Harvard pivoting without being mandated to by law is an interesting canary.

Somewhat related, Tablet Magazine put together a very comprehensive dive into who’s actually funding all the Hamas protests on elite college campuses. Is it really Soros? Yeah kinda.

Washington Monthly did an analysis of public and private universities showing that the Gaza protests, and especially encampments, are almost specifically a behavior of the rich. Their visualizations are top notch. The X axis here is percentage of Pell grants, which is an indication of how many non-rich people attend the university. The richer the kids, the more likely they are to take finals week off to spend in a Soros funded camp in the quad.

In a throwback to last year, Bentham’s Bulldog did a complete breakdown of how many of the nation’s top college debate teams are winning debates with a gish gallop of woke quackery:

The National Debate Tournament as a Case Study of College Woke Debate Insanity

Nate Silver produced an amazing article talking about identity politics being not much more than “trying to fit in,” but the most eye opening thing about it is the liberal-to-conservative ratio of the student bodies. I cannot fathom a way this would be possible without some kind of admissions bias. Look at this graph:

Here’s the article:

For most people, politics is about fitting in

I may have to come back to this college thing at some point. There are almost too many threads to tie together into a single chain of thought on the topic. One thing I think a lot about, but I’m not sure yet how to quantify with any kind of robust analysis, is what sort of intergenerational cultural wealth transfer a liberal admission bias might constitute over the long term. Billions? Trillions?

(4) Eating Flesh, Eating Glue

We have two new entrants in the contest of “best article title of the year,” which were both surprisingly good articles themselves instead of just being title-bait.

Entry One:

Entry Two:

(5) Hitlerism Zeitgeist

4chan on Hiterlism:

Anarchonomicon on the same topic. These two might be related, or might just be outcrops of a new zeitgeist:

We're All Hitlerists now

(6) Covid Revisionism

Drew Holden refuses to let the media sweep their awful behavior revolving around the Lab Leak Hypothesis under the rug, by cataloguing a lot of screenshots. This could be worth bookmarking if you speak to people regularly who are trying to memory-hole their 2020 behavior.

You Can't Overstate The Covid 'Lab Leak' Media Coverage Failure

And Rav Aurora compiles a near complete takedown of Sam Harris’s own personal derangement regarding Covid-19, which reflects the derangement of the media itself on the topic.

Making Sense of Sam Harris' COVID Misinformation

(7) Esoterica

7.1

A study came out a year or two ago stating that the correlation between IQ and income plateaued at a certain point in Scandinavian countries. That appears to not be the case.

Income and IQ - Finnish Data

7.2

Some curious stuff from the Caribbean Progress Studies Institute, which is apparently a DC thinktank founded in 2023, possibly to kite money towards Caribbean investment. This article has some interesting data showing a positive correlation between colonization and economic growth.

Colonialism and Progress

7.3

New analysis in the British Journal of Political Science finds that exposure to poor people actually weakens support for redistribution among the rich, and that prior academic studies showing the opposite were tainted with selection bias.

7.4

My take on the granola moms screaming about seed oils has slowly shifted from “This is all just a bunch of freakoutery” towards “there may be something to this.” SciTech Daily recounts a recent study showing neurodegeneration of rats who were fed food that was deep fried in reheated seed oils. Several similar studies have focused on reheating the oils being the problem.

7.5

The excellent Jeff Asher takes a crack at the claims that illegal immigration increases violent crime, and can’t find a signal. For what it’s worth, if I were an illegal immigrant I’d be extra careful not to break any laws since I wouldn’t want to be deported. The idea that illegal immigrants commit less crime seems so obvious to me as to be banal.

On Crime, Immigration, and Crime Data

7.6

Voice of America, not known for being right leaning, did an interesting spot on the 2020 gun buying spree, indicating it was half women, 20% black, 20% hispanic.