Notable: December 2021

• The Sidney Awards By David Brooks, The New York Times, December 30, 2021
  
• People with sleep disorders may face higher risk of severe covid By Linda Searing, The Washington Post, December 19, 2021
  
• How to Tell When Your Country Is Past the Point of No Return By Thomas B. Edsall, The New York Times, December 15, 2021
  
• The Health Toll of Poor Sleep By Jane E. Brody, The New York Times, December 6, 2021
  
• The Elephant In The Room: Rick Perlstein On The Evolution Of The American Conservative Movement  By Jeff Weiss, The Sun, December 2021
  

Notable: November 2021

• The Gene-Synthesis Revolution By Yiren Lu, The New York Times Magazine, Nov. 24, 2021
  
• Is society coming apart? By Jill Lepore, The Guardian, November 25, 2021
  
• In Rare Show of Weakness, Modi Bows to India’s Farmers By Emily Schmall, Karan Deep Singh and Sameer Yasir, The New York Times, Nov. 18, 2021
• New England once hunted and killed humans for money. We’re descendants of the survivors By Dawn Neptune Adams, Maulian Dana and Adam Mazo, The Guardian, November 15, 2021
  
• What to do when your roof is leaking, and how to find someone to fix it By Jeanne Huber, The Washington Post, November 12, 2021
  

Notable: October 2021

• Six Exercises to Help Seniors Build Strength, Improve Balance and Prevent Falls By Jen Murphy, The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 16, 2021 
  
• How to clean and care for hardwood floors By Jeanne Huber, The Washington Post, October 8, 2021.
• Tallying the Cost of Growing Older By Paula Span, The New York Times, October 2, 2021
  

Notable: September 2021

• Our constitutional crisis is already here By Robert Kagan, The Washington Post, September 23, 2021
  

Thoughts on the eve of the formal end of America's twenty-year Afghan war

This morning I listened to a thought-provoking discussion between Robert Wright and Ezra Klein about U.S. foreign entanglements. I highly recommend it. It takes about an hour.

Here are a few of my takeaways after a first listen (I should listen again):

1. The American public doesn't pay ANY ATTENTION to any of the horrifying foreign interventions that the U.S. foreign policy establishment (or FPE; or "the blob", to use Wright's term) engineers every now and then in the name of the American people ... until American soldiers start to die in large numbers.
2. From Vietnam onward, the U.S. has had a perfect record of massive failure and massive devastation wherever it has intervened. The sheer loss of life in places like Vietnam, Kampuchea, Iraq, and Afghanistan has been ENORMOUS.
3. The suffering caused by economic sanctions -- in places like Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela -- can go on for much longer because they don't lead to U.S. soldiers dying in large numbers. The FPE never attaches a falsifiable prediction to any economic sanctions proposal. The sanctions inflict pain on ordinary people. The promised transformations never materialize. The domestic governments invariably say to their people, "The U.S. sanctions are causing your misery."
4. The people in the FPE have never been held accountable for their misjudgements, their horrendous policy advice, and their unwillingness to take responsibility for their mistakes. (McNamara was perhaps the only FPE person who expressed some contrition late in life.) So many lives have been lost all over the world but nobody in the FPE has been held accountable. (The Economist magazine trotted out Kissinger -- Kissinger! -- to attack Biden's botched withdrawal. Sure, people who make mistakes may still have something interesting to say. But why give them a forum until they accept their mistakes?)
5. The U.S. needs to find a way, urgently, to hold accountable the people in the FPE who gave bad advice and never admitted error. (Similarly, the U.S. needs to find a way to hold accountable "experts" who gave bad, say, economic advice and never admitted error.) The media needs to shine a light on the advice these people gave and the toll that their advice took, especially in other countries. Without accountability the cycle will repeat (perhaps against rising China).
6. Foreign policy interventions abroad should be subject to stringent time-bound empirical tests. (Deadlines are subject to the they'll-simply-wait-us-out criticism. But they are essential nonetheless. The alternative is an intervention that can never fail -- even if it never succeeds.)
7. Except when proven small-scale interventions exist -- see #6 above -- the U.S. needs to learn to live with countries of all kinds. Cooperation -- even when it requires the use of nose clips -- is a must, in order to deal with global problems such as terrorism, climate change, pandemics, etc.

New Paper on the expansion of Women's Inheritance Rights in India

Look at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS?locations=IN-BD-LK-NP-PK. India's female labor force participation rate (LFPR) is shockingly low, even when compared with similar South Asian countries. Moreover, unlike those other countries, India's female LFPR has been decreasing steadily since 2005. Why?

A recent paper (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2021.102714; an ungated pre-publication version is available at https://aalims.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F04%2FBahrami-Rad-Duman-Female_inheritance.pdf) argues that India's anomalous trend in female LFPR may be the result of the expansion of women's inheritance rights in 2005. The paper, although by an economist, depends heavily on ideas from anthropology. In male dominated (or, patrilineal) societies, a family does not want its land to be lost, via inheritance, to the family a daughter marries into. So, women are married off to their male cousins. And to decrease the chances of a daughter marrying a non-cousin, the daughter is pressured to not venture outside the home, say, for work.

The author uses what economists call a difference-in-difference empirical strategy to reveal the causal chain. The 2005 law expanding women's inheritance rights was an amendment to the Hindu Succession Act and did not affect non-Hindus. So, one can look at the differences in, say, cousin marriage rates or female LFPR between Hindus and non-Hindus both before the 2005 law and after (hence, difference-in-difference). If one calculates the numerical value of Hindu cousin marriage rate minus non-Hindu cousin marriage rate and sees that it increased in a statistically significant way after 2005 one can make a causal claim. Same if the numerical value of Hindu female LFPR minus non-Hindu female LFPR, decreases after 2005.

The author says women have equal inheritance rights in Islam and many Islamic countries are male dominated, which explains why cousin-marriage rates are high and female labor force participation rates are low in Islamic societies.

Of course all this is not an argument against equal inheritance rights for men and women. It only means that if the government expands women's rights in an otherwise unequal and unchanged society, women might find that the loosening of one kind of pressure can lead to the tightening of other kinds of pressure.

Another point is that the liberalization of land markets might help in such situations. With well-functioning labor markets, land becomes like any other asset. A family could buy back the land inherited by a daughter who is marrying a non-cousin. That way, the family she is marrying into could buy equivalent land elsewhere and the family she is marrying out of could keep its land holdings intact.

Notable: August 2021

• Remarks by President Biden on the End of the War in Afghanistan The White House Briefing Room, August 31, 2021
  
• In Afghanistan, an Unceremonious End, and a Shrouded Beginning By Thomas Gibbons-Neff, The New York Times, August 30, 2021
  
• Joe Biden’s Critics Lost Afghanistan By Ross Douthat, The New York Times, August 31, 2021
  
• In India, a debate over population control turns explosive By Gerry Shih, The Washington Post, August 29, 2021
  
•  So Long, Traditional Lawn. The New Turf Trends—From Wildflowers to Fescue By Kathryn O’Shea-Evans, The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 27, 2021
  
• A Guide to Sleep Apnea By Anahad O'Connor, The New York Times, August 22, 2021
  
• Why Is It So Hard to Be Rational? By Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker, August 16, 2021
  
• Adumbrations Of Aducanumab By Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten (blog), August 4, 2021
• Details Of The Infant Fish Oil Story By Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten (blog), August 6, 2021
• It’s Not Just the Medal. It’s the Payout. By James Wagner, The New York Times, Aug. 7, 2021
  
• Solving the Mystery of I.B.S. By Jane E. Brody, The New York Times, August 2, 2021
  

Notable: July 2021

• This Is What Billionaire Justice Looks Like By Patrick Radden Keefe, The New York Times, July 14, 2021
• America Punishes Only a Certain Kind of Rebel By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times, July 13, 2021
  
• The Velvet Underground’s greatest songs – ranked! By Alexis Petridis, The Guardian, July 8, 2021
  
•  Revisiting India’s Farming and Agricultural Policies: 13 Questions, 99 Articles Economic and Political Weekly
  
• A Glowing Shrine to the Printed Word By James S. Russell, The New York Times, July 4, 2021 [On the reopening of the New York Public Library on 5th Avenue and 40th Street]
  

Notable: June 2021

• Illusions of empire By Amartya Sen, The Guardian, June 29, 2021
  
• Turning to Books to Grasp the Most Ungraspable Disease By Sandeep Jauhar, The New York Times, June 17, 2021
  
• Brush up on how to care for your teeth with these tips from dentists By Allyson Chiu, The Washington Post, June 17, 2021
  
• As Dictators Target Citizens Abroad, Few Safe Spaces Remain By Max Fisher, The New York Times, June 4, 2021
  
• You Should Learn the Truth About the Tulsa Race Massacre By Tom Hanks, The New York Times, June 4, 2021
  

Notable: May 2021

• A New $260 Million Park Floats on the Hudson. It’s a Charmer. By Michael Kimmelman, Photographs and Video by Amr Alfiky, The New York Times, May 20, 2021
  
• What you need to know about research linking sleep deprivation and dementia By Angela Haupt, The Washington Post, May 8, 2021
  
• The U.S. birthrate is falling. Here’s how other countries have tried to persuade people to have more children. By Antonia Noori Farzan, The Washington Post, May 5, 2021
  

Notable: April 2021

• Machine learning, explained By Sara Brown, Ideas Made to Matter, April 21, 2021
  
• Sleeping Too Little in Middle Age May Increase Dementia Risk, Study Finds By Pam Belluck, The New York Times, April 20, 2021
  

Notable: March 2021

• For Democracy to Stay, the Filibuster Must Go By The Editorial Board, The New York Times, March 11, 2021
  
• If indoor allergies are bringing you down, you might want to look at your flooring By Laura Daily, The New York Times, March 9, 2021
  
•  What really works to help an aging brain. It’s not going to function like it did in your 20s, but there are things you can do. By Christie Aschwanden, The Washington Post, March 7, 2021
  

Notable: February 2021

• The Best States for Retirement in 2021 By Michael Kolomatsky, The New York Times, Feb. 25, 2021
  
• The Biden Team Wants to Transform the Economy. Really. By Noam Scheiber, The New York Times Magazine, Feb. 11, 2021
  
• Why Are Republican Presidents So Bad for the Economy?  By David Leonhardt, The New York Times, February 2, 2021
  

Notable: January 2021

• Make the Filibuster Difficult Again By Burt Neuborne and Erwin Chemerinsky, The New York Times, Jan. 27, 2021
  
• No Better Time to Consider Our Lungs By Riley Black, The New York Times, Jan. 19, 2021. Review of "BREATH TAKING: The Power, Fragility, and Future of Our Extraordinary Lungs" By Michael J. Stephen
  
• The Standing 7-Minute Workout By Tara Parker-Pope, The New York Times, January 22, 2021
  
•  In four years, President Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims By The Washington Post, January 20, 2021
  
• The American Abyss By Timothy Snyder, The New York Times Magazine, Jan. 9, 2021
  
• The 147 Republicans Who Voted To Overturn Election Results By Karen Yourish, Larry Buchanan and Denise Lu, The New York Times, January 7, 2021