""

"Despite our relevance being so great, there was one huge red flag: engineers at Inktomi were starting to use Google as our search engine. Our executives tried to stop us from doing it, just like Bill Gates reportedly banned his kids from using Apple products.
"

In The Size of the Economy and the Distribution of Income in the Roman Empire, a careful paper published in the Journal of Roman Studies in 2009, Walter Scheidel and Steven Friesen estimate the size and distribution of the Roman economy at its demographic peak around the middle of the 2nd century c.e.

We conclude that in the Roman Empire as a whole, a ‘middling’ sector of somewhere around 6 to 12 per cent
of the population, defined by a real income of between 2.4 and 10 times ‘bare bones’
subsistence or 1 to 4 times ‘respectable’ consumption levels, would have occupied a fairly
narrow middle ground between an élite segment of perhaps 1.5 per cent of the population and a vast majority close to subsistence level of around 90 per cent. In this system, some 1.5 per cent of households controlled 15 to 25 per cent of total income, while close to
10 per cent took in another 15 to 25 per cent, leaving not much more than half of all income for all remaining households.

Thus, in Rome the top 1.5% controlled 15-25% of income while in the United States around 2007 the top 1% controlled 23.5% of income thus suggesting slightly more inequality in the United States. Scheidel and Friesen calculate a Roman Empire gini coefficient of .42-.44 again perhaps slightly less than the U.S. coefficient of around .4-.45 depending on source.

Interestingly, the Roman State did not manage to collect that much:

Given a GDP of somewhere
around HS17–19bn, annual state expenditure of approximately HS900m would have
represented an effective tax rate of approximately 5 per cent of GDP, which is the same as
for France in 1700. This finding confirms Hopkins’s claim that the imperial government
did not capture more than 5 to 7 per cent of GDP and that Roman taxes were fairly low.
The overall public sector share of GDP was somewhat larger depending on the scale of
municipal spending, while the overall nominal tax rate had to be higher still in order to
accommodate taxpayer non-compliance, tax amnesties, and rent-seeking behaviour by
tax-collectors and other intermediaries. Moreover, we must not forget that Italy’s immunity from output and poll taxes required the public sector share in the provinces to exceed
the empire-wide average. These various adjustments allow us to reconcile our GDP estimate with reported nominal taxes of around 10 per cent of farm output on private land
reported in Roman Egypt and somewhat higher rates in less developed regions where
enforcement may have been more difficult.

(Thus, despite the aqueducts Rome may not have done that much for the people after all.)

Hat tip to Tim De Chant at Per Square Mile who has further discussion.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, job market candidate from Harvard, has an interesting paper on this question:

Abstract: Traditional surveys struggle to capture socially unacceptable attitudes such as racial animus. This paper uses Google searches including racially charged language as a proxy for a local area’s racial animus. I use the Google-search proxy, available for roughly 200 media markets in the United States, to reassess the impact of racial attitudes on voting for a black candidate in the United States. I compare an area’s racially charged search volume to its votes for Barack Obama, the 2008 black Democratic presidential candidate, controlling for its votes for John Kerry, the 2004 white Democratic presidential candidate. Other studies using a similar empirical specification and standard state-level survey measures of racial attitudes yield little evidence that racial animus had a major impact in recent U.S. elections. Using the Google-search proxy, I find significant and robust effects in the 2008 presidential election. The estimates imply that racial animus in the United States cost Obama three to five percentage points in the national popular vote in the 2008 election.

The question and method of this paper are excellent.  I cannot in polite company reproduce the Google key word used to proxy for negative attitudes about Obama.  What Google key word might you try if you were looking for districts were the race factor boosted his vote total?  Laredo, Texas is the area with the least interest in the negative search word, but I am not sure that is the best proxy for “support because of race.”  (See the author’s p.19 for a discussion of related topics.)  How about searches for the title of his autobiography?

Page 29 ranks the states by their interest in “racially charged searches.”  West Virginia is the worst, Utah is the best, and Pennsylvania and Michigan and New Jersey are the worst northern states, coming in at #3, #6 and #10, respectively.  The graphs and charts at the end of the paper are all interesting, including p.36.

Addendum: You might think I got the pointer from @RovingBandit, but actually the paper led me to him rather than vice versa.

How compromises happen in pursuit of adoption. Sometimes the grand vision is realized and sometimes it is lost.

Pride pushed people to make maple a refined sugar replacement, so now we pay extra for grade A.D.

"ClipMenu can manage clipboard history. You can record 8 clipboard types, from plain text to image.<br />
<br />
To paste a recorded item, you just pop up menu by invoking the shortcut key, and select a menu item from the menu."

This I had not known, but apparently it is old news:

The symbolic kingpin of interchangeable parts production fell in 1960 when Robert S. Woodbury published his essay “The Legend of Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts”…Woodbury convincingly argued that the parts of Whitney’s guns were not in fact constructed with interchangeable parts…

With Eli Whitney reinterpreted as a promoter rather than as a pioneer of machine-made interchangeable parts manufacture, it remained for Merritt Roe Smith to identify conclusively the personnel and the circumstances of this fundamental step in the development of mass production.  Smith demonstrated that the United States Ordnance Department was the prime mover in bringing about machine-made interchangeable parts production of small arms.  The national armory at Springfield, Massachusetts, played a major role in this process, especially in its efforts to coordinate its operations with those of the Harpers Ferry Armory and John Hall’s experimental rifle factory, also at Harpers Ferry.

That is from David A. Hounshell’s excellent From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932.  Here is a related article, possibly gated, here is another.

Bryan Caplan writes:

The more populous periods of human history–most obviously the last few centuries–clearly produced more scientific, technological, and cultural innovations than earlier, less populous periods. More populous countries today produce many more scientific, technological, and cultural innovations that less populous countries… Here’s a challenge for you: Name the most credible measure of idea production that isn’t at least moderately positively correlated with population.

Is this about the absolute number of ideas generated or ideas as a percentage contributor to economic growth?  If we are estimating the costs and benefits of greater population, or the future of economic growth rates, the latter is arguably the more important variable.  In any case, most plausible theories of economic growth imply that higher populations should lead to higher rates of ideas generation, as measured in terms of value.  Ideas are non-rival and can be enjoyed by the entire group, thus yielding a higher social rate of return.  There are also larger markets to pay for the ideas or award more fame to the inventors.

Here is a famous Michael Kremer paper arguing for a version of Caplan’s position.  That all said, it is far from obvious that Caplan is correct:

1. The measured rate of technological progress, as it contributes to gdp, seems to have peaked in the 1930s.  At that time total population, including the population of scientists, was much lower than today.  “Effective” total population was yet lower, given the backward nature of transportation and communications and trade at the time, compared to today.

2. A recent paper by Ashraf and Galor (it’s also worth reading for other reasons) concludes: “…population density in pre-industrial times was on average higher at latitudinal bands closer to the equator.”  Yet the countries closer to the equator did not end up being the drivers of industrial progress, even though they sometimes had higher rates of progress in agricultural times.  Northern Europe, with the exception of the Dutch Republic, was never the star for population density.  This paper also indicates that technology drives population growth — more than vice versa — and that “time elapsed since a region’s neolithic breakthrough” predicts later technological progress fairly well.

If you add an extra baby to most societies, ceteris paribus, the rate of expected idea generation does indeed go up in theory.  But how important a factor is that, compared to other influences on ideas generation?

Or: at very gross time scales (“the last few hundred years” vs. “the dark ages”) a positive relationship holds between population and ideas production, or at very gross numerical comparisons (“one million people” vs. “ten people”).  But viewed at finer granulations (by the way, the evidence in the Kremer paper is quite gross; e.g., pp. 710-712), the relationship isn’t nearly as strong as one might expect.  In the time series, it’s been largely a negative relationship for the last eighty years or so, as mentioned above.

What model might give you a positive relationship between population and innovation at grosser scales but not finer scales?  Let’s say there are various technological “platforms,” such as “fire,” “agriculture,” and “fossil fuels,” and maybe someday “uploads.”  At any point in time, growth rates depend on how much a region has exhausted the potential of its current platform.  This is largely independent of current population.  That said, larger population areas may have a greater chance of progressing to the next platform, so there is a long-term, gross correlation between population size and levels of technology.  Furthermore, if all regions have more or less exhausted the current platform, the larger region has a greater chance of leading the next breakthrough and thus being first to have the new and higher growth rate, even if most of the time it doesn’t have a higher growth rate for technological progress.  That view is hardly anti-population, but it explains why you will find screwy population-innovation correlations all over the place.  Finally, further breeding, as a recipe for progress, is an extreme lottery ticket and it only works at some special margins.

"Using this data, the Allies were able to create a mathematical model to determine the rate of German tank production, and estimated that, during the same summer 1940 to fall 1942 time period, the Germans produced 255 tanks per month -- a fraction of the 1,400 estimate produced by conventional intelligence.  (Want to see the math?  Click here.)  And it turns out, this method worked best: after the War, internal German data put the number at 256 tanks per month. "

Json history

"By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto pyramid scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth. So they invested in new Internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the Internet was worth investing in. When I realized this one day, sitting in my cubicle, I jumped up like Archimedes in his bathtub, except instead of "Eureka!" I was shouting "Sell!""

"SepiaTown lets you view and share thousands of mapped historical images from around the globe. Search the map to view images"

"Cutler and his colleagues also surveyed cooking patterns across several cultures and found that obesity rates are inversely correlated with the amount of time spent on food preparation. The more time a nation devotes to food preparation at home, the lower its rate of obesity. In fact, the amount of time spent cooking predicts obesity rates more reliably than female participation in the labor force or income. Other research supports the idea that cooking is a better predictor of a healthful diet than social class: a 1992 study in The Journal of the American Dietetic Association found that poor women who routinely cooked were more likely to eat a more healthful diet than well-to-do women who did not."

insightful commentary

"The story of John Harrison the "lone genius" who solved the problem of finding longitude at sea is in urgent need of a rewrite. Discoveries made during repairs to Harrison's first successful "sea clock" – completed in 1735 – suggest that others contributed to his pioneering timepieces. "Harrison is always cast as a self-taught lone genius pitted against the establishment. The truth is, that is a great over-simplification," says horologist Jonathan Betts of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, London. Betts dismantled the device – called H1 – after it stopped last year when a connection between a spring and a swinging balance broke. "It's only when you take it apart and have it in your hands that it comes home to you: the story isn't quite the one that's told.""

"they found that postcards often contained fewer than 150 characters." " harness a secondary radio channel that already existed on mobile networks. This smaller data lane had been used only to alert a cellphone about reception strength and to supply it with bits of information regarding incoming calls. Voice communication itself had taken place via a separate signal. "We were looking to a cheap implementation," Hillebrand said on the phone from Bonn. "Most of the time, nothing happens on this control link. So, it was free capacity on the system.""

"The women who originally celebrated Mother's Day conceived of it as an occasion to use their status as mothers to protest injustice and war. In 1858, Anna Reeves Jarvis organized Mother's Work Days in West Appalachian communities to protest the lack of sanitation that caused disease-bearing insects and polluted water to sicken or even kill poor workers. In 1870, after witnessing the bloody Civil War, Julia Ward Howe—a Boston pacifist, poet, and suffragist who wrote the "Battle Hymn of the Republic"—proclaimed a special day for mothers to oppose war. Committed to ending all armed conflict, Howe wrote, "Our husbands shall not come to us reeking with carnage. … Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience." "

"Behind the counter of an abandoned McDonalds lie 48,000 lbs of 70mm tape the only copy of extremely high-resolution images of the moon. Forty years ago, unmanned lunar orbiters circled the moon taking extremely high-res photos of the surface to plan landing spots for Apollo 11 onward... In this McDonalds, the only copy of that data is about to be resurrected. These tapes were recorded 40 years ago as part of the Apollo program to map the lunar surface to plan landing spots for Apollo 11 onward. They have never been seen by the public because at the time, they were classified as they reveal the extreme precision of our spy satellites. Instead, all we have ever seen are the grainy photo-of-a-photo images that were released to the public. "

"life in the United States offered personal liberties and opportunities to a degree unmatched by any other country in history" via:timoreilly on twitter

infographic of how the fields interrelate

"The most fascinating abandoned man-made creations + Their story & location"

"Preoccupied with her own history, Otsuka’s digitally manipulated photographs exemplify her understated artistry and elegantly articulated histrionics. Images of Otsuka as an adult are craftily combined with snaps of the artist as a child, pinched from the family photo album. The resultant composite snapshots are both glaringly literal and astoundingly subtle musings on the contemporary relevance of the self-portrait."

"The early R.F.C.’s ranged from grand visions to mundane details, although the latter quickly became the most common. Less important than the content of those first documents was that they were available free of charge and anyone could write one. Instead of authority-based decision-making, we relied on a process we called “rough consensus and running code.” Everyone was welcome to propose ideas, and if enough people liked it and used it, the design became a standard."

"One of the most important archæological digs in the world, Gobekli Tepe in Turkey has revolutionised our understanding of hunter-gatherer culture. But could it also be the site of the Garden of Eden?"

"several financial crises in the 1980s, like the Texas real estate bust, had been the result of private investors taking advantage of the government. The investors had borrowed huge amounts of money, made big profits when times were good and then left the government holding the bag for their eventual (and predictable) losses. In a word, the investors looted. Someone trying to make an honest profit, Professors Akerlof and Romer said, would have operated in a completely different manner. The investors displayed a “total disregard for even the most basic principles of lending,” failing to verify standard information about their borrowers or, in some cases, even to ask for that information. The investors “acted as if future losses were somebody else’s problem,” the economists wrote. “They were right.”"

The three main innovations are HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol); URLs (universal resource locators, which Tim originally referred to as URIs, for universal resource indicators); and HTML (hypertext markup language). HTTP allows you to click on a link and be brought to that document or Web page. URLs serve as an address for finding that document or page. And HTML gives you the ability to put links in documents and pages so they connect. Tim created all three of these pieces of software code from October to December of 1990.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem

"Bell’s biographers have gone to heroic lengths to explain away all the evidence. Refusing credit for the telephone just showed Bell’s humility; not being involved in the corporation showed his dedication to pure research. The fact that both patents were filed on the same day is a grand historic coincidence — or perhaps Gray stole the idea from Bell. As a result, Gray is forgotten and Bell is remembered as one of history’s great inventors — not as he should be: a hobbyist and a fraud, forced by love into stealing one of the greatest inventions of all time."

"In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, Khaitovich explained, thereby freeing up calories for our brains. "Instead of growing even larger (which would have made birth even more problematic), the human brain most likely used the additional calories to grease the wheels of its internal functioning."

History, after all, reveals how dangerous it can be for a president to surround himself with like-minded people. Lincoln’s predecessor, James Buchanan, deliberately chose men for his cabinet who thought as he did and, with the agreement of those around hi

on the strange possibilty of how European physics, like smallpox, infected the new world

"Historian George Dyson tells stories from the birth of the modern computer -- from its 16th-century origins to the hilarious notebooks of the first computer engineers."

survival tips in case I am unexpectedly transported to a random location in Europe in the year 1000 AD (+/-200)... such transportation would leave me with what I am wearing, what I know, and nothing else.

a chronological list of particularly important or significant technological inventions.

love it!

More than 150,000 digitized items — including photographs, documents, newspaper pages, political cartoons, works of art, diaries, transcribed oral histories, advertising, and other unique cultural artifacts — reveal the diverse history and culture of

not sure how i forgot to tag this earlier. a riff on how today's sitcom is the social lubricant that gin was in the industrial revolution

The Three Princes of Serendip, referring to a set of characters who “were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”

many firms and households over-extended themselves, and are laden with debts that ultimately cannot be repaid. This is a crisis of insolvency.

from selectron tubes to C64 cassettes

The story behind Dean Kamen's Segway scooter, and his combustive meeting with the kingpins of Apple and Amazon.

Analyzing Da Vinci's work gives clues about what he looks like. Looks like a puzzle solved to me...

Ahh, so this is how you can easily find the Google Group contributions you've made...

Piece on Wikipedia's origins and what it's like to edit

what the people in the book have done since the book was published.

on the events leading up to and the birth of the EFF

Out of print (and a bit subjective!)--shows the rise and fall of civilizations and calls out some events.

cracked open the carrier-centric structure of the wireless industry and unlocked a host of benefits for consumers, developers, manufacturers — and potentially the carriers themselves

Sociology and biology are curiously akin

"On a May evening in 1864, several British politicians were disturbed by a knock at the door and the delivery of a telegram—a most unusual occurrence at such a late hour."

Though similar in many ways to modern tennis, Jeu de Paume is a far more complex and technical sport. Played on an indoor court featuring angled walls and netted windows, the game favors precision ball-placement and mental strategies akin to a fast-paced

"Without innovations, no entrepreneurs; without entrepreneurial achievement, no capitalist ... propulsion. The atmosphere of industrial revolutions ... is the only one in which capitalism can survive."

facts about the development of early photography, famous and "first" photos, weird cameras, and more

a physician, pharmaceutical merchant and visionary land developer (my relatives on wikipedia, my great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather)

charts a history of violence from Biblical times through the present, and says modern society has a little less to feel guilty about.

Man takes photos and throws them out years later. Pics are found in a dumpster, posted to Flickr, man tracked down. Man comments on Flickr pics!

another thoughtful lecture from Lessig. He's on a new track, about the influence of money on politics, scholarship, and science (reason a la Gore)

historical point of view can provide context, motivation and direction to mathematics courses.

Photographs preserve information. They record data. They present evidence. Not because of our intentions but often in spite of them.

5x10^9 (about 5 billion years ago) the birth of the earth 5x10^8 - the first fish 5x10^7 - the first monkeys 5x10^6 - the first humans [...]

The US government is on a ‘burning platform’ of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon, the country’s

500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art

The cyanobacteria were a struggling minority at first, but scientists believe that these new microbes began to dominate with the help of meltwater from a few glaciers scattered across the young continents. These glaciers spent centuries scraping across th

1. Multicellularity 2. The eye 3. The brain 4. Language 5. Photosynthesis 6. Sex 7. Death 8. Parasitism 9. Superorganism 10. Symbiosis

the history of Great Britain, divided into interactive data blocks

Good design: is innovative; makes a product useful; is aesthetic; helps us to understand a product; is unobtrusive; is honest; is durable; is consequent to the last detail; is concerned with the environment; is as little design as possible.