Here’s my weekly list of links and commentary.
1. Printing, Populism and Social Media. Razib Khan has a scathing take down on the ahistorical belief that the populism unleashed by social media is sui generis. I often think of what’s happening now with US politics as a return to normalcy. The post World War 2 era, with mass media gatekeepers and an agreed cold war enemy, was odd. Populism and tribalism were kept under check. Now the internet has once again pushed on the margin, continuing a 500 year historical trend, of making it easier to bypass gatekeepers. And with no currently agreed outside enemy, we’re back to normal. Fractious and tribal.
Khan writes with a rather dense prose style, but I greatly enjoyed this particular rant. Here’s the first two paragraphs:
The media needs clicks and people are rather myopic. This explains patently false pieces such as this in Buzzfeed, This Is How We Radicalized The World. It is a rather unorganized list of facts, but they are assembled in a way to convince and persuade the reading audience that modern information technology has facilitated the rise of political radicalism, as if it is something new and notable. So wrong it hurts.
Anyone who knows history will realize this is patently false. Anyone who is aware of the Taiping Rebellion, the October Revolution, or the unrest of 1848. Of course, that “anyone” is a small set of individuals because most people don’t know history. Their minds are devoid of most facts not having to do with the Khardashians. And journalists are not much better. Many of them are in the game of creating stories rather than interpreting the world. If public relations operatives are well paid propagandists on a short leash, many journalists are poorly paid propagandists compensated with the freedom to be fabulists.
You get the idea. Read the whole thing here.
2. Psychologists and free speech. Tanner Greer argues Psychologists fight for free speech because they are under threat in academia by proponents of critical theory (power makes truth), but not yet influenced by it so heavily they can’t fight back. Greer’s piece is Why Is the Fight for Free Speech Led by the Psychologists? Here’s one bit:
Haidt et. al. are confident they can win the debate if they are allowed to debate. For the heterodox anthropologist or sociologist the game is already over: their discipline has already been conquered. For the economist, the threat is too remote to take seriously. Behavioral science exists in that rare in-between: methodologically, it has the tools to fight back against the excesses of the activist. Socially, it provides a compelling reason for its practitioners to use them.
If you missed it, this week I wrote a related post, influenced by Greer, Why the new hoax papers on cultural studies merely confirmed everyone’s priors.
3. Shopping While Black: Past, Present and Future? Alex Tabarrok looks at how discrimination has sometimes been mitigated by new technology. Sears catalog, Uber, Amazon Go. It’s an economist’s take, so uses econ jargon. Read it here. The message is positive and I quite liked it. Especially the last sentence of this bit:
The moment a shopper enters the Amazon Go store, Amazon knows their name, address, entire shopping history, credit history and potentially much more. Moreover, a shopper’s every movement within the store is tracked to a level of detail that no store detective could ever hope to match. To the customer, especially the black customer, it may feel like they are no longer being watched but in fact they are watched more than ever before–the costs of technological monitoring, however, are mostly fixed which means that everyone is monitored equally. No need for statistical discrimination in the panopticon.
4. Life expectancy gains are mostly driven by end of child mortality. Max Roser’s charts are excellent. This is a good visualization of how most of the gains in life expectancy come from ending child mortality. Note how in 1851, >20% of children didn’t make it past 2 years of age. But that part of the curve is nearly horizontal in more recent years.
5. Review of new Apple Maps. A deep dive by Justin O’Beirne into a recent upgrade to Apple Maps. O’Beirne does an outstanding job. If you are curious about what goes into the maps used on your phone, this is the post to read. It’s filled with side by side compares of old versus new Apple maps, plus compares Apple to Google. Especially interesting is O’Beirne argues Apple is using a very human intensive method of creating maps compared to Google. Which means Apple’s results are sometimes better, but far less consistent. link
And that’s all for this week!
Praxtime by Nathan Taylor 
My understanding is that prior to 1950, the key driver in the increase in life expectancy was the reduction of childhood mortality. Post 1950, it is a reduction in mortality due to cardiovascular disease because of statins, etc, that has continued to drive improvements. I think you can see this in the graph you present.