Invented in the High Middle Ages

Some say that the modern world started in Enlightenment of arounnd 1750 AD or so, but here I list the much more important advances of the European High Middle Ages, 1000-1300 AD.

Clocks. Mechanical clocks were invented, and society started running according to schedules.

Universities. Knowledge was advanced by group efforts building on the work of others. The first universities were in Italy, France, and England.

Nuclear family. This was driven by primogeniture, Catholic bans on cousin marriage, and the economics of small farms. The nuclear family became the unit of Western Civilization.

Market economy. The High Middle Ages saw the beginnings of a market economy, with the growth of towns, trade networks (e.g., the Hanseatic League), and guilds.

Individualism, as made possible by the nuclear family and markets.

Agricultural innovations, like the the heavy plow, three-field crop rotation, horse-drawn plows (using horse collars), three-field rotation.

Architecture, like gothic cathedrals, wind mills, and water mills.

English common law.

Banks, double entry bookkeeping. Started in Venice and other cities.

Military technology like stirrups and crossbows.

Navigation technology, like the compass and shipbuilding.

This is what made the modern world possible, not the Enlightment that came centuries later.

Just compare Europe to the rest of the world. There were great civilizations in China, India, and Persia, but they lacked the above innovations, and fell far behind Europe.

I did not mention Christianity, as it started much earlier. However it was crucial to most of these developments, and to Europe leaping ahead.

Here is a more typical view:

In Enlightenment Now, psychologist Steven Pinker argues that 17th- and 18th-century Enlightenment values and modernization have contributed to gradually improving the world on “every single measure of human well-being.”

Further explained:

The Age of Enlightenment refers to a historical period in the 17th and 18th centuries when European intellectuals and philosophers were concerned with re-thinking social values and moving toward a more “progressive” vision for humanity. This included thinking about the most rational ways to go about organizing and governing society to maximize human well-being, including discussions of freedom, equality, and empirical truth.

Pinker says modern prosperity is the result of 17-18C philosophers discovering rational thinking. No, those thinkers were of no consequence, compared to the above innovations.

I have posted other theories Explaining the Great Divergence, and you can find more in Wikipedia:

The Great Divergence or European miracle is the socioeconomic shift in which the Western world (i.e. Western Europe along with its settler offshoots in Northern America and Australasia[2]) overcame pre-modern growth constraints and emerged during the 19th century as the most powerful and wealthy world civilizations, eclipsing previously dominant or comparable civilizations from Asia such as Qing China, Mughal India, the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Iran, and Tokugawa Japan, among others.[3]

Scholars have proposed a wide variety of theories to explain why the Great Divergence happened, including geography, culture, institutions, and luck.[4] ...

"Why do the Christian nations, which were so weak in the past compared with Muslim nations begin to dominate so many lands in modern times and even defeat the once victorious Ottoman armies?"..."Because they have laws and rules invented by reason."
Ibrahim Muteferrika, Rational basis for the Politics of Nations (1731)[29]

As you can see, people want to credit reason, but not credit genes, religion, and the middle ages.

Illegal to Sell Tasmanian Rocks

News from 2017:

A police raid in Sydney has netted more than 150 stolen Aboriginal artefacts which were being illegally offered for sale online.

The Tasmanian department of primary industries said the raid was prompted by reports the items were on the verge of being sold.

"It is very concerning that these culturally significant items are just being treated as a commodity," natural and cultural heritage division chief enforcement officer Luke Bond told AAP.

The items are believed to have been taken from a number of locations around Tasmania.

They look like simple rocks to me. How culturally significant could they be?

The Great AI Unemployment has Begun

A lot of people do not believe that AI will kill jobs. It is already happening.

A new video explains:

Why Tech Companies Are Pulling Job Listings

In 2025, the tech job market is undergoing a major shift. Tech job postings have dropped by nearly 40% in a month, and software engineer openings are down over 33% in five years. Companies like Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are freezing hiring, cutting staff, and eliminating roles—despite rising revenues.

Automation and AI have increased productivity, reducing the need for large teams. Meanwhile, 48% of companies prioritize internal training, and 56% of hiring managers are loosening requirements. Although there are still 476,000 tech openings, mismatches persist. The sector is evolving rapidly, favoring flexible roles and AI expertise over traditional tech jobs.

These are the companies that are rapidly growing, and have always hired thousands of software engineers in growth spurts. Not now. Microsoft is even laying off programmers who can be replaced by AI bots.

Remember the big push to import Indian programmers? Demand is drying up, as most can be replaced by AI.

Update: See also Why “Learn to Code” Failed. Colleges are cranking out more computer science graduates than anything, but software jobs are declining.

Update: More bad news for coders: Why Coding will make you Poor.

Apply the Free Market to Citizenship

From an online argument about deporting a pro-terrorist alien:

Why must citizenship in the United States be a limited resource? We have a much lower population density than many other advanced economies, e.g. Japan and South Korea. And if were genuinely to start to get too many people, the supply vs demand problem should take care of itself. Surely citizenship is not the one domain where free market principles should be ignored?

My own feeling is that all states have a moral obligation to offer citizenship on an equal basis to all comers (at least those willing to make some minimal demonstration of loyalty) regardless of background or where they happen to be born, and that these should be treated no differently than any other citizen. Anything less is unacceptably illiberal.

There are many things wrong with this. Japan and South Korea are overcrowded countries, and not self-sufficient.

If you want to apply free market principles to citizenship, then sell it for $5 million per person. Americans do not want more immigrants, and are burdened by them. Immigrants profit by coming to the USA. Market principles would say that the immigrants should pay the citizens enough money to be willing to accept them. Those principles certainly do not say to give away a resource for free until it is worthless.

States have moral obligations to their own citizens, and not to foreigners. To say foreigners should have the same rights as citizens is leftist madness. If the USA pursued the suggested policy, it would become a dumping ground for countries with out-of-control population growth. As it becomes more like India and Nigeria, fewer people would want to come. No, that is not a sensible market solution to excess immigration.

Whites Need Not Apply

Bloomberg reports:

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission requires companies with 100 or more employees to report their workforce demographics every year. Bloomberg obtained 2020 and 2021 data for 88 S&P 100 companies and calculated overall US job growth at those firms.

In total, they increased their US workforces by 323,094 people in 2021, ...

In 2021, Hispanic, Asian and Black people made up a vast majority of the added workers ...

The biggest shifts happened in less-senior job categories. White people held fewer of those roles in 2021 than they did in 2020, whereas thousands of people of color were added to the ranks.

But the trend continued up the job ladder in top, high-paid jobs, too: Companies increased their racial diversity among executives, managers and professionals.

So apparently all our big companies have become anti-White, and discriminated against Whites in employment.

There are federal laws against racial discrimination in hiring, and the US EEOC is supposed to enforced those laws. But it has collected evidence on the top 100 companies, found they are all violating the law, and has done nothing.

Electric Vehicles still not Economical

The Texas Public Policy Foundation released this report:

Setting aside some of the questionable assumptions used in deriving such favorable economics for EVs, no one has attempted to calculate the full financial benefit of the wide array of direct subsidies, regulatory credits, and subsidized infrastructure that contribute to the economic viability of EVs. In this paper, we show that the average model year (MY) 2021 EV would cost $48,698 more to own over a 10-year period without $22 billion in government favors given to EV manufacturers and owners.

EV advocates claim that the cost of electricity for EV owners is equal to $1.21 per gallon of gasoline (Edison Electric Institute, 2021), but the cost of charging equipment and charging losses, averaged out over 10 years and 120,000 miles, is $1.38 per gallon equivalent on top of that. Adding the costs of the subsidies to the true cost of fueling an EV would equate to an EV owner paying $17.33 per gallon of gasoline.

If this is true, electric vehicles (EV) are being propped up by subsidies.

The EVs continue to be a big disappointment for Detroit car makers. They are nowhere close to making their sales estimates.

Aristotle rationalized slavery

Ferdinand Bardamu writes:

In the ancient world, slavery was hardly a moral dilemma. It raised no ethical issues worthy of examination, nor was it ever considered a source of embarrassment. That most of mankind could be forcibly enslaved without injustice was a truism that was seldom debated, even among philosophers. Nature had assigned some men the role of master and others the role of slave. This was so obvious it required no elaborate rational explanation; for centuries, the belief that the stronger had a right to dominate the weaker was always regarded as true, but trivially so. The great exception to this universal indifference was Aristotle, the only classical writer to develop a fully-fledged theory of natural slavery.

In Aristotle’s Politics, the “natural slave,” the man who could be enslaved without injustice, differed from the free man in certain fundamental respects. Nature had designed the slave for servile labor; he was brawny, but filled with humility because of the shabbiness of his appearance; in contrast, the free man, because of his “upright posture,” had a commanding presence or an air of dignity about him that made him ill-suited to working with his hands. Instead, Nature had designed him for the civic life of the polis. The slave shared “in reason to the extent of understanding it, but does not have it himself”; compared to the free man, he was deficient in reason. By this, Aristotle did not mean that the slave was necessarily deficient in technical rationality; rather, he lacked the autonomous practical rationality or deliberative choice needed to achieve eudaimonia or happiness.

Natural slavery had an ethnic component. Aristotle divided humanity into three main branches; northern Europeans, who were spirited or full of energy, but “deficient in intelligence and craft knowledge”; Asians, the Persians and other Near Eastern peoples, who were both intelligent and possessed craft knowledge, but lacked spiritedness, and; the Greeks, who possessed both intelligence and spiritedness because of their geographically intermediate position between Northern Europe and Asia; ergo, non-Greeks were barbarians who could be enslaved without injustice. Although the barbarians of Northern Europe were “comparatively free,” this didn’t mean they weren’t natural slaves; true freedom requires the capacity for autonomous practical rationality, which the barbarian clearly lacked.

Nobody in the West would defend slavery today.

We have a system today that is better than slavery for the elites. Companies can fire workers for almost any reason. Companies can also cut back hours, and require unusual working conditions. Companies don't have to train workers, or pay their health insurance, or contribute to their retirement.

Slaveowners had to do all of those things.

The trend is toward companies like Uber not employing anyone directly, but making them all independent contractors. Then employers have almost no responsibility for anything.

Most workers get saddled with enormous debt, from student loans, mortgages, and credit cards. They are enslaved by debt. But we have figured out a way to say that it is all voluntary, so it is all okay.

Sell the Moon rocks

AP reports:

A woman who tried to sell what she said was a rare piece of moon rock for $1.7 million was detained when her would-be buyer turned out to be an undercover NASA agent, officials said Friday.

The gray rocks, which are considered national treasures and are illegal to sell, were given to each U.S. state and 136 countries by then-President Richard Nixon after U.S. moon missions and can sell for millions of dollars on the black market.

That is what is wrong with NASA. It is unamerican to prosecute someone for owning a Moon rock.

NASA should have auctioned off 10% of its Moon rocks to private collectors back in 1972. The Russians have a better attitude. Soviet and now Russian cosmonauts have carried firearms in space for decades and continue to do so.

More evidence that copyright is broken

From an unofficial Google watcher:

The truth is difficult to find if those that know it have a lot to lose when it's revealed. Three years after Viacom sued YouTube for 1 billion dollars, some pieces of truth are revealed:

"For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. " ...

"... The team told senior Google execs that YouTube was a "rogue enabler" of content theft, that its content is all free, and much of it is highly sought after pirated clips and that YouTube's business model is completely sustained by pirated content. " ...

Google will probably have to pay millions of dollars, because YouTube would have never taken off without that pirated content. And yet hardly anyone sees anything wrong with it.

Publishers reject cold submissions

The WSJ reports:

In 1991, a book editor at Random House pulled from the heaps of unsolicited manuscripts a novel about a murder that roils a Baltimore suburb. Written by a first-time author and mother named Mary Cahill, "Carpool" was published to fanfare. Ms. Cahill was interviewed on the "Today" show. "Carpool" was a best seller.

That was the last time Random House, the largest publisher in the U.S., remembers publishing anything found in a slush pile. Today, Random House and most of its major counterparts refuse to accept unsolicited material. ...

It used to be that you could bang out a screenplay on your typewriter, then mail it in to a studio with a self-addressed stamped envelope and a prayer. Studios already were reluctant to read because of plagiarism concerns, but they became even more skittish in 1990 when humorist Art Buchwald sued Paramount, alleging that the studio stole an idea from him and turned it into the Eddie Murphy vehicle, "Coming to America." (Mr. Buchwald received an undisclosed settlement from Paramount.)

She makes it sound as if Paramount got burned by a chance similarity to an unsolicited manuscript. In fact, Paramount had a signed contract with Buchwald, made the movie with his plot, and cheated him out of his share of the $288M in earnings.

No American science grad shortage

A new Nature mag article addresses the myth that the USA has a shortage of skilled scientists and engineers:

In absolute numbers, the U.S. has more top-scoring kids in math and science than any other country studied–by far. ...

The answer, of course, is that the groups that stand to benefit from a public perception of an S&E shortage–the tech industry (who want an expanded H-1B work visa program for its cheap labor), the immigration lawyers (who want an expanded H-1B for obvious reasons), the education lobby (”Give us more money so we can remedy the shortage”) and so on hire the slickest PR people money can buy. They’ve been at it for years, to the point at which many people in Congress, the press and the public at large simply take it for granted that “Johnnie can’t do math.”

We are producing as many college grads in science and engineering as we can use. We do not need to import cheap labor from elsewhere.

Letting rich people use their money

Freakonomics blogger Daniel Hamermesh writes:

On the demand side, however, allowing people to bid for organs seems repugnant to me. (I do not want livers — except perhaps foie gras — on eBay!) Ethically, it seems wrong to let richer people move to the front of queues for scarce organs (to let the market implicitly value their lives more than those of poorer people).

Wrong? The rich people move to the front of every other line. I think that it is a little strange when people say that rich people can use their wealth to buy almost all goods and services, but not certain others.

Look at spending, not income

A NY Times op-ed says:

The top fifth of American households earned an average of $149,963 a year in 2006. As shown in the first accompanying chart, they spent $69,863 on food, clothing, shelter, utilities, transportation, health care and other categories of consumption. The rest of their income went largely to taxes and savings.

The bottom fifth earned just $9,974, but spent nearly twice that — an average of $18,153 a year. ...

So, bearing this in mind, if we compare the incomes of the top and bottom fifths, we see a ratio of 15 to 1. If we turn to consumption, the gap declines to around 4 to 1.

Europeans consider paying organ donors

William Saletan writes:

Twice in the past two weeks, transplant experts from around the world have convened in Europe to discuss the emerging global market in human organs. Two maps presented at the meetings tell the story. One shows countries from which patients have traveled for organs in the past three years: Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Taiwan. The other shows countries from which organs have been sold: China, Colombia, Pakistan and the Philippines.

The numbers on the maps add up to thousands. According to the World Health Organization, the annual tally of international kidney transactions is about 6,000. ...

Politicians have tried to rein in this market. The United States banned organ sales two decades ago. India did the same in 1994, and China followed last year. But when lives are at stake, rules get bent. To procure more organs, doctors have discarded brain-death standards, donor age limits and recipient health requirements. States have let transplant agencies put patients on life support, contrary to their living wills, to preserve their organs. ...

Some reformers think they can solve the organ shortage and tame the market by legalizing sales. Their latest proposal, presented at one of the European meetings last week by Arthur Matas of the University of Minnesota, is a single-payer system for organs. It is half-libertarian and half-socialist. On the one hand, Matas says markets for eggs and sperm are harmless, kidney purchases can save countries money and offering poor people cash for organs is no more coercive than offering them money to work in mines or join the army. On the other hand, he thinks the government can fix kidney prices and determine who gets them.

But studies reviewed at the meetings in Europe show that flooding the market with purchased organs reduces the incentive to donate.

I believe that reducing the incentive to donate would be a good thing. The organ donors are being exploited the most.