Hello! I am Lars E. Schonander, a writer for MediaFile and a blogger on international affairs, tech, and general wonkery. Happy Tuesday! Here is my weekly newsletter with a weekly analysis with interesting data, along with links related to things I found particularly interesting that week. Any Questions? Send me a message or just respond to this email!
The Weekly Data:
Science Direct recently had a article on a dataset regarding monasteries in Europe from 1000 to 1600 AD.
To begin, I was curious on the construction of monasteries in Europe, so I first via fct_collapse organized the countries in the dataset by region, and then plotted it out by area.
So How many?
Another question I had was what countries had the most monasteries overall, along with what was the most common range per country their creation? A boxplot manages to answer this question. As seen below, Italy out of all European countries had the most monasteries in the dataset, with Slovenia having the least. Their are some intresting things to note. For example, most of the UK’s monasteries were founded before the 1300’s, but their was a uptick in founding around the end of the 15th century.
EuroStat
To map out monasteries on a local level, there is a slightly easier way of getting the Shapefiles in R and then merging them with the dataset. Using the EuroStat package, one can download the shapefiles of Europe from the national level, increasingly granular provinces. In this case, I downloaded the 2nd administrative level, and filtered it to just be Italian provinces.
As seen above, the Marche region in Italy has one the highest concentrations of monasteries in all of Europe with Tuscany, Lazio (the province where Rome is located) and Sicily also having many monasteries contained within them as well.
Now, some links…
Byrne Hobart: “Learn to Code” is Strictly Better Than “Tech Bros Should Learn Humanities”
Tech people, in my experience, do in fact have more exposure to high culture than the average person. Toting around a copy of The Power Broker is practically de rigueur in some circles; Zuck fired up the FB team after Google+ launched by quoting Cato; Bill Gates always took stacks of books with him when he went on vacation while running Microsoft; every designer knows who Charles Joseph Minard was; Paul Graham’s e-commerce startup was a pivot from his career pivot away from painting; Andreessen “often coded alone at night as he listened to opera at full blast”; Marcus Aurelius and René Girard are trendy enough that people reflexively roll their eyes; Google put basically every book published at least a century ago on the Internet for free; and Amazon started out by making every other book available on the Internet for cheap.
Paul Biggar (Dark Lang): Compiling Dark to SQL
One of the premises of Dark is that it breaks down the wall between the datastore and the language. We want to significantly reduce complexity, and one source of that complexity is that databases (whether SQL or NoSQL) have different semantics from our code. This means to use them, you need to understand the code and the DB really well, but you also need to understand the mapping (often an ORM like ActiveRecord) really well.
Instead, we want datastores with the same semantics as our language: the same types and the same code to query and update them. At the same time, developers expect the same sort of performance in Dark that they’re able to get from writing SQL and managing a database themselves. How can we get the best of both worlds?
Stephen Nuñez (Phenomenal World): UBI and the City
Skeptics of guaranteed income tend to worry about the policy’s inflationary effects; absent rent regulation, for instance, one might expect housing costs to rise in proportion to the increase in disposable income generated by the policy. In a new working paper supported by JFI, “Universal Basic Income and the City,” Khalil Esmkhani, Jack Favilukis and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh explore the effects of a UBI implemented at the city-level in New York City. The paper finds that, when financed through a progressive income tax, a UBI increases general welfare and—perhaps most notably—does not lead to housing market inflation. Their research sheds new light on the possible inflationary effects of basic income policies, and also suggests that the financing of a guaranteed income has significant implications for the policy’s outcomes. While the results are tentative, the paper already represents a major advance in the study cash transfer policy. In this post, I present an overview of the macroeconomic literature on basic income before turning back to the authors’ model, its findings, and a path for future work.
Adam Elkus: Lift Up The Receiver, I'll Make You A Believer
As far as I am concerned, the game was up when Joseph Weizenbaum programmed ELIZA in 1966. ELIZA, a deceptively simple chatbot, convinced counterparties it was human through scripts that generated canned responses. ELIZA reflects back what people type to it, producing a simulacrum of an active listener. ELIZA works technically by re-ordering the user’s inputs in the form of a question. Its conversational script detects the most important components of the input sentence – for example, the “love to fly kites” part of “I love to fly kites” – and then transforms them into a question with slightly altered pronouns and verbs to get “so, you love to fly kites. What do you feel about that?” Weizenbaum was horrified that people treated the chatbot as if it was a real human therapist, and even more horrified that real doctors started to recommend automated therapy as the “technology of the future.” For tech critics, ELIZA is a parable about the dangers of technological dehumanization or more narrowly the dangers of producing machines that can fool humans. Naturally I have a different perspective.
Thomas Meaney (Harpers Magazine): Trumpism After Trump
I had come to Washington to witness either the birth of an ideology or what may turn out to be the passing of a kidney stone through the Republican Party. There was a new movement afoot: National Conservatives, they called themselves, and they were gathering here, at the Ritz-Carlton, at 22nd Street and M. Disparate tribes had posted up for the potlatch: reformacons, blood-and-soilers, curious liberal nationalists, “Austrians,” repentant neocons, evangelical Christians, corporate raiders, cattle ranchers, Silicon Valley dissidents, Buckleyites, Straussians, Orthodox Jews, Catholics, Mormons, Tories, dark-web spiders, tradcons, Lone Conservatives, Fed-Socs, Young Republicans, Reaganites in amber. Most straddled more than one category.
What I’m Reading
I have started reading Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddimah. Just from the start, it’s a fascinating book that goes even before actual historical events, the various pitfalls that historians face when dealing with information from the past. This ranges from not actually thinking critically of the material that one is being presented, to taking estimates of people in armies or figures of growth at face value, as in practice the actual value may be much smaller.
Thanks!
Thanks for taking the time to read this, I will be back next Monday. In the meantime, you can follow me on Twitter or reach out via email.