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Post a Comment On: Steve Sailer: iSteve

"Advice for economists contemplating incorporating genetic information in their theories"

15 Comments -

1 – 15 of 15
Blogger David said...

But the NYT says the world is flat.

You altitudist.

10/11/12, 5:32 PM

Anonymous DirkY said...

"The population density of northern Europe ... would have lagged substantially without this mutation that supported a dairy-centric economy."

The plague and constant wars kept population down more than lack of food production capacity. Mass starvation from crop failures etc is commonly recorded in Chinese history, as well as the more unified and densely populated France.

But Germany especially was in constant wars involving one sub-state of the Holy Roman Empire fighting another, usually with the support of differing foregin powers, who sent in troops who "lived off the land" by eating all the grain and livestock, and torturing the peasents to reveal any hidden stashes.

The worst-affected parts of modern Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republican lost 75% of their pre-war population during the hundreds of years of religious wars, which began in Luther's lifetime and only really ended after Napoleon more than 250 years later. The other all depopulation over the whole area was about 50%.

The Scandavanian states were also in an near-constant state of war, conquest, and rebellion with each other over the same period.

10/11/12, 5:59 PM

Anonymous DirkY said...

I spent a few weeks in a city at 8000ft and a few days at one at 9200ft, and I didn't have an issue with the altitude, and I am not especially "energetic, aerobically fit." In fact I did not notice any difference compared to sea level.

I guess it never hurts to flatter people who vacation in Aspen!

10/11/12, 6:05 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"You altitudist."

LOL. Yes, Steve is the equivalent of an anti-dentite.

10/11/12, 6:06 PM

Anonymous DirkY said...

Pleasent, fertile, and temperate central Mexico was constantly invaded by nomads from the deserts to the north, so the people who envolved there constantly received shots of lowland DNA.

For the same reasons it was where most of the Spanish settled, so it is one of the whiter parts of the country. The most Indian are the low-lying coastal areas.

So no, I don't think the average mestizo Mexican has great altitude adaptions.

10/11/12, 6:11 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"I spent a few weeks in a city at 8000ft and a few days at one at 9200ft, and I didn't have an issue with the altitude, and I am not especially "energetic, aerobically fit." In fact I did not notice any difference compared to sea level."

If you're relatively young and haven't been a smoker and you didn't do a lot of walking, hiking, biking, running,swimming, you wouldn't see the difference.

10/11/12, 6:20 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The worst-affected parts of modern Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republican lost 75% of their pre-war population during the hundreds of years of religious wars, which began in Luther's lifetime and only really ended after Napoleon more than 250 years later. The other all depopulation over the whole area was about 50%.

The Scandavanian (sic) states were also in an near-constant state of war, conquest, and rebellion with each other over the same period.


You have to wonder whether maybe this strife was a Darwinian mechanism of adaptation to emerging modernity.

This seems similar to the sort of degradation/high mortality/strife/plundering seen in areas of modern nations with a high density of demographics with a relatively short history of exposure to modernity.


10/11/12, 6:24 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/12/opinion/global/chinas-leftover-women.html?smid=tw-share

If you get past the sneering tone of the article, the ideas the Chinese are pushing sound very sensible for improving the 'quality' of their population.

10/11/12, 6:27 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Blood absorption of oxygen falls off exponentially with altitude. I once calculated the half-hemoglobin-saturation altitude to be 3500 meters.

Anecdote: My grandfather retired in Colorado at 5000ft or so. Due to his emphysema, he required a supplemental supply of pure oxygen from tank. At a point when we began to worry that he wouldn't last much longer, he visited my Aunt in Kansas, where he didn't need the Oxygen at all. Soon after he moved there and ended up living another 15 years.

10/11/12, 8:54 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Perhaps they can pay you for shutting up, or if writing is something you can't do without, have a private newsletter where they laugh themselves silly.

10/11/12, 10:36 PM

Anonymous jody said...

prices for leadville are (much) lower because it is an abandoned mining ghost town and nobody lives there. a couple hundred people. i go there once a year to help my friend on his run of the leadville 100. our base of operations is a condo in vail, where thouands of rich yuppies have their ski homes.

come on, steve.

by the way, the guy who organized the leadville 100 races is not from leadville or colorado or anywhere near there. he's a southerner who moved to leadville at random and decided he wanted to organize something that would put leadville back on the map. hence the 100. he even got lance armstrong to come race the mountain bike version of the race more than once.

personally i never have trouble operating at 12,000 feet, which is the highest elevations for parts of the leadville run, but some people can't handle that after a few days and get altitude sickness. but there are no big towns that high. denver is at 5000 and colorado springs is at 7000 and those are definitely not high enough to deter people.

10/11/12, 11:22 PM

Anonymous CJ said...

I read that NYT article on the "leftover women" in China. It seems almost surreal to read something so commonsensical and accurate coming out of a government agency. BTW, the same concerns about educated women not having enough children have been expressed by Singapore's politicians.

The NYT writer quotes the All-China Women’s Federation material rather extensively. It reminded me of the former East European method of transmitting forbidden thoughts by quoting evil capitalists at length while ritually denouncing them about once per page. My favorite:

"When holding out for a man, if you say he must be rich and brilliant, romantic and hardworking ... this is just being willful. Does this kind of perfect man exist? Maybe he does exist, but why on earth would he want to marry you?"

10/12/12, 3:01 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I'm having trouble imagining how this study would go. You could do a study of how altitude impacts real estate prices, but no one is going to want to read that. Other academics wouldn't be interested because the statistical techniques you'd use are totally standard, and academics are going to want to see something a little bit fancy and novel. And real estate people wouldn't be interested because your study was done on whatever data you could get cheap from public sources, whereas they can have their in house economist whip something up from their proprietary data that will be much more accurate. (This is, by the way, why the academic people expect to see some fancy statistical technique. They see their role as developing new techniques which the second stringers who end up in industry with access to serious data can then apply.)

If you try to model the genetic factor explicitly, you're probably going to get "Poor indigenous group is concentrated on cheap land no one else wants", and you don't need any kind of altitude effect to explain that one.

Now if you had a situation where say a lot of rich Mexicans of indigenous descent were immigrating to Colorado and completely transforming the market for high altitude land, that would make a good study. You could show how the low altitude premium disappears over time. But you can't get the data until it actually happens.

10/12/12, 10:52 AM

Blogger pat said...

Recent expert testimony has attested to the fact that a mere altitude of 5,000 feet can adversely affect your debate performance.

Albertosaurus

10/12/12, 4:23 PM

Anonymous Hapalong Cassidy said...

Here's a topic I've given some thought to recently: the susceptibility, or lack thereof, of different populations to alcoholism. Much ado has been made about how Native Americans are more susceptible to alcoholism. But I'm much more interested in the differences in Southern and Northern Europeans. It is my hypothesis that the slightly higher IQ of the more cold adapted Northern Europeans, was offset by their susceptibility to alcoholism. This is why it took so long for Germanic civilization to catch up to the Greeks and Romans. Alcohol would have been introduced to the Northern Europeans by the Greeks and Romans, and the Northern tribes' inability to tolerate alcohol kept them from organizing and challenging the Romans for supremacy. It took several centuries for the genetic mutation that confers resistance to alcoholism to spread throughout Northern European populations.

10/12/12, 5:54 PM

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