Tuesday, July 25, 2017

War Requires Material Capacity and Lack of Institutional Constraint

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In Never at War, Spencer Weart shows that in the modern era, democracies are extremely unlikely to fight other democracies , but that non-de...
Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Education Ratings by State

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This is from Education Week . No Bad Stripe visible here, but the Northeast sure does stand out. Looks like those Puritans and Midlan...
Thursday, May 25, 2017

Per Capita Income and the Bad Stripe

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The Bad Stripe runs southwest from extreme SW Pennsylvania through West Virgina, turning westward through Kentucky and part of Tennessee, cr...
Wednesday, May 3, 2017

U.S. Presidents, Quality and Remembrance by Experts vs. Popular Opinion

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Previously I measured the prominence of U.S. Presidents , using a quantitative measure (mentions in print as indexed by Google N-gram; a per...
Thursday, April 27, 2017

The Grammar of Rock Singers and Dictators

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I once asked a friend to translate Van Halen's Standing on Top of the World into Japanese, so I could sing it at a karaoke bar in Japant...
Thursday, March 30, 2017

Predictions from the Clash of Civilizations: and Let's Start Promoting Liberal Democracy

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Aside from the lesson contained in its title, Samuel Huntington makes the worrisome (and probably true) prediction that religion will re-em...
Friday, March 24, 2017

Some Historical Analogies for This Point in American History

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Several of these analogies have been lucidly argued elsewhere, and I've provided relevant links. Whether history rhymes or repeats, the...