In lots of US cities, violent crime peaked in the 1990s and has been falling ever since. Freakonomics says it was because lots of would-be crims got aborted instead. Others say it was because of broken-windows crime fighting policies like those of ex-NY mayor Rudy Giuliani. This Mother Jones article says it was actually due to mass lead poisoning, largely from leaded petrol. (via Marco)
Feels like a sign of the times: the Aussie Bureau of Meteorology had to add a couple of new colours to its forecasting map to represent previously unreached temperatures of over 50ºC.
Hirschman argued that the rise of capitalism could not have occurred simply as a result of changes in underlying material conditions, as both Marxists and contemporary neo-classical economists believe. The very idea that it was morally legitimate to rationally maximize one’s income, far from being a universal postulate of human behavior, was something that took hold only during the 17th and 18th centuries. Earlier aristocratic societies had moral systems grounded in honor rather than gain, that were contemptuous of money-making and the calculating bourgeois way of life. Virtue lay rather in risk and glory in battle. The theorists that Hirschman covered, like Montesquieu, James Steuart, John Millar, and Adam Smith made political rather than economic arguments in favor of capitalism. They maintained that a commercial society would soften manners and morals, and in contrast to warrior societies would lead to greater international peace. Hirschman pointed out that these arguments have triumphed so completely in the modern world that we do not even perceive their historical contingency.
Robot of the day
An eschatological vision — the world a few millennia from now http://bit.ly/WqR29k
