Hello! I am Lars E. Schonander, a writer for MediaFile and a blogger on international affairs, tech, and general wonkery. Happy Monday! 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:
I recently finished Argentina, 1516-1987 From Spanish Colonization to Alphonsín by David Rock and one thing I liked about it was the liberal usage of tables throughout the book to highlight the major economic trends in the time period he is writing about. This ranges from datasets on migration from Europe to Buenos Aires, a variety of import-export statistics for many different goods, to listing the change in governments during Argentina’s period of instability in the period before the Falkland War.
Most of these datasets were grabbed from the book using Excel’s OCR, which grabs a table essentially with no mistakes. After grabbing the table, the excel sheet can then be emailed to myself, then I can open it in R to take a look at it.
To do this in the usual three graphics, I looked at one dataset from pre-independence, another in the 19th century, and a final dataset from the 20th century.
To begin, Argentina up until independence, due to its lack of gold or silver, was a unpopular place to migrate to, so migration to Argentina was rather slow during this time period. However, one group did move to Argentina, specifically the region near Paraguay, the Jesuits. For a good portion of Argentina’s colonial history, the northern portions of the country were dominated by Jesuit missions, which did grow over time.
However, the Jesuit missions were perceived to be a threat by secular authorities, due to a fusion of Jesuit success in running a state like entity, and the general attacks against the Jesuits in the mid 18th century, lead to the Jesuits eventually being expelled from their missions in Argentina, and as a result the missions declining into relative obscurity. The start of this process can be reflected in 1750 and 1768.
Next, in the 19th century, one major trend that occured in the country was Argentina transforming from a net importing of wheat, to a net exporter of wheat. Up until the late 19th century, Argentina was a net importer of wheat from Chile and the United States. It took the creation of a stable Argentine state in the early 1860’s to provide the state capacity to start the gradual processes of converting Argentina into a wheat exporting nation. For example, it was only in 1875 when Argentina established a Agronomy institute in the country. However, as seen below, due to Argentina’s rich land, once the logistics of the wheat trade were set up, Argentina became one of the most productive wheat exporters on the planet.
In Argentina history, the beef industry was a major component of Argentina’s export market and was one of the key products that Argentina exported to the United Kingdom in exchange for other goods. This is reflected even 100 years later as even in the mid 1960’s, the beef export market to the United Kingdom was larger than all the other countries listed, or even the majority of the planet.
However, this dependence on beef exports had negative externalities on the internal Argentine economy. In periods of a contracting economy, Argentine beef producers instead of selling their meat, would hold it in reserve to sell it for a higher price later, leading to a greater contraction of the Argentine economy. However, when they did finally sell, because their was so much excessive beef on the market, the price was deflated, making the producers unhappy.
Now, some links…
Wael Taji (Palladium Magazine): Inside The House Church Movement In China
The staircase of the silent apartment block is poorly lit, but the face that peers down from the gloom to check on me is a reminder that I’m on the right track. We halt outside an unmarked door where Mina—my guide on this pilgrimage—retrieves a ring of keys from his pocket, then sets to work on the heavyset door. As it swings open, the dinge gives way to the overwhelming scent of incense and brilliance of icons that mark this secret place as a house of worship.
Here in China, such places are referred to as jiātíng jiàohuì, literally meaning ‘house church.’
Peter Bloem: Transformers from Scratch
Transformers are a very exciting family of machine learning architectures. Many good tutorials exist (e.g. [1, 2]) but in the last few years, transformers have mostly become simpler, so that it is now much more straightforward to explain how modern architectures work. This post is an attempt to explain directly how modern transformers work, and why, without some of the historical baggage.
Tara Isabella Burton (The American Interest): The Neo-Paganism of Jordan Peterson
In the materialist gospel of right-wing atavism, longevity and teleology are one and the same.
One of the strangest cultural phenomena to arise out of the 2016 election and its aftermath is the growing popularity, in far-Right circles, of a purportedly chiseled Twitter provocateur named Bronze Age Pervert. A self-proclaimed “Aspiring Nudist Bodybuilder. Free speech and anti-xenoestrogen activist” with about 20,000 Twitter followers to date, BAP (as he’s known) has managed to become an unlikely symbolic figurehead for powerful corners of the far-Right Internet. Back in 2017, for example, Curtis Yarvin, aka the Neo-reactionary philosopher Mencius Moldbug, used BAP’s name as part of an elaborate troll: telling The Atlantic’s Rosie Gray that BAP was, in fact, Moldbug’s point of contact for the White House.
Nick Aspinwald (The Nation): China’s Delivery Drivers Rage Against the Algorithm
The scene has become omnipresent across China. Young men in blue and yellow uniforms sprint between high rises carrying plastic bags of food, frantically searching for directions on their phones, racing back to their motorcycles and speeding off to beat the clock in reaching their next destination. They are China’s food delivery drivers, foot soldiers for a booming industry that has rapidly changed how the country dines.
“I have five minutes,” grunted one breathless driver for the delivery giant Ele.me during a Saturday evening rush of orders in the city of Guiyang, “to drive three kilometers.”
Hadley Wickham: ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis
This is the online version of work-in-progress 3rd edition of “ggplot2: elegant graphics for data analysis”
I am tremendously grateful for the success of ggplot2. It’s one of the most commonly downloaded R packages (over a million downloads in the last year!) and has influenced the design of graphics packages for other languages. Personally, ggplot2 has bought me many exciting opportunities to travel the world and meet interesting people. I love hearing how people are using R and ggplot2 to understand the data that they care about.
What I’m Reading
As I mentioned last week, I picked up Argentina, 1516-1987 From Spanish Colonization to Alphonsín by David Rock. However, I managed to finish the 2nd half, which starts with the Argentine democratic period with the presidency of Hipólito Yrigoyen, to the election of Raúl Alfonsín, who became president of Argentina after the military dictatorship which declared the Falkland War.
A note I found interesting was contained in the chapter on the Argentine military dictatorships, the work of Argentine economist José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz.
The butt for both was the urban sectors, the unions, industry, and much of the middle class. The Army’s task, with the war against subversion in part as pretext, was to shatter their collective bargaining power and their means of resistance; Martínez de Hoz’s role was to weaken and ultimately destroy the economy which they subsisted, for example, by eliminating the state as a major source of employment and the chief agent distributing resources in urban society. (Page 369)
Two thoughts come from this. Historically in Argentina, the radical movement with mainstream support was not the anarchists or the communists, but the Radicals, which were a liberal party, and were perceived to be the party of middle class interests. They for example, stood against Peron and the various Peronist regimes that ruled Argentina during the 20th century. They also stood against and were threatened by the military regimes, due to the Radicals isistance of living in a actually democratic state.
While cruel, Martínez de Hoz’s strategy of going after the middle class in regards to political and economic power was a clever move. This is because historically, the group most likely to be a threat to the state is in practice either downwardly mobile elites, or the disgruntled middle class. By trying to remove the middle class as a recognizable entity in Argentina, Martínez de Hoz was trying to remove any effective opposition to the Argentine military dictatorship. However, as Alfonsín managed to get elected in the end, after the disaster known as the Falklands war, the military dictatorship and Martínez de Hoz’s attempts to quash the liberal middle class failed.
What I’m Working On
Started my first week of my senior year this week. I already got a positive response to a job I applied for, which is hopeful when starting my graduate job search.
If you need someone who can do data science and write, you know who to mention.
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.