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| An A-Z diagnosis of health and health care in the U.S. |
Medical economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford Medicine analyzed millions of medical records, and the factor that most correlated with increasing weight gain in the population was the number of visits to an HMO doctor. Now, that’s correlation, not causation, but you have to wonder. Back in 1970 we spent 6 percent of our GDP on healthcare, and now fifty years later we spend 17.9 percent. Yet the average American’s weight is up, health is down, and wallet is underwater.
An appropriate post-Thanksgiving insight.
Explanation in history is not a matter of establishing relationships between perceived facts, but of treating facts as thoughts which have to be grasped and understood.
An intriguing observation.
[In discussing ancient Greek culture:] What different legal decisions have in common is not justice itself but an attempt on the part of the courts that make these decisions to arrive at a just decision. Such attempts are never wholly successful, and that is why the pure form remains transcendent. If they were wholly successful, it would be immanent as well as transcendent. Because they are never wholly successful, the transcendent form remains purely transcendent, and the immanent form remains a mere ‘imitation’ or approximation.
Unlike biological organisms, societies do not grow up and do not grow senile. There is no natural life-cycle for an empire.
True, the biological metaphor for "civilizations" (or other political entities) is overused and no more than a metaphor. And neither are there "laws." But we do see patterns even within wide individual variations. Cf., Turchin, War and Peace and War. (N.B. Niall Ferguson (below) touches on Turchin's work in Doom.)
What will be the economic consequences of the pandemic? Plainly, it belongs on the list of large economic disasters. If the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is right about U.S. gross domestic product in 2020 (in June, it forecast a decline of 8 percent, though by October its projection was a less drastic minus 4.3 percent), it will be the American economy’s worst year since 1946.
Of course, what is remarkable is how quickly we've rebounded from this precipitous drop. Not entirely and not without changes, but kudos to stimulus & wise monetary policy!
Sigmund Freud, the last great defender of the Enlightenment (despite his own rediscovery of the irrational), put his finger on the neurotic origin and character of this hostility: “Against the dreaded external world one can only defend oneself by … going over to the attack against nature and subjecting her to the human will.”
Nature as the enemy. A bad attitude in my book!
Among other things, in [complex] systems small inputs can cause outputs that are disproportionate to the input by triggering a cascade of positive feedback. Or given enough time, small inputs can slowly amplify into large effects.
Societies and climates are complex entities and contain surprises. Be prepared!
The claim that the major protagonists of the distinctively modern moral causes of the modern world—I am not here speaking at all of those who seek to uphold older traditions which have somehow or other survived into some sort of coexistence with modernity—offer a rhetoric which serves to conceal behind the masks of morality what are in fact the preferences of arbitrary will and desire is not of course an original claim. For each of the contending protagonists of modernity, while for obvious reasons unwilling to concede that the claim is true in their own case, is prepared to make it about those against whom they contend.
In losing religion, man lost the concrete connection with a transcendent realm of being; he was set free to deal with this world in all its brute objectivity. But he was bound to feel homeless in such a world, which no longer answered the needs of his spirit.
