Daily Reading: June 27, 2012

Today's best from around the web.

Edmund Burke: beast.

Today's must-read:


Nate Silver provides a concise account of the state of prediction in the social sciences, full of fascinating links. Can't wait for his book. 


More good stuff:


Beauty supplies are a counter cyclical asset. Why?

While economic recessions are a recent development in human history, fluctuations in prosperity and resource availability are not. Human ancestors regularly went through cycles of abundance and famine, each of which favorsdifferent reproductive strategies. While periods of abundance favor strategies associated with postponing reproduction in favor of one’s own development (e.g., by pursuing an education), periods of scarcity favor more immediate reproduction. The latter strategy is more successful during times of resource scarcity because it decreases the likelihood that one will perish before having the chance to reproduce. For women, periods of scarcity also decrease the availability of quality mates, as women’s mate preferences reliably prioritize resource access. This preference stems from the important role that mates’ resources have played in women’s reproductive success. Because economic recessions are associated with higher unemployment and minimal or negative returns on investments, news of a recession may therefore signal to women that financially secure men—those able to invest resources in rearing offspring—are becoming scarce.

I'm a big Edmund Burke fan. This piece (warning: it's long), via Arts and Letters Daily, is terribly overwritten but has tons of fascinating tidbits about the man:

Everyone claims Edmund Burke as his patron saint, political forefather, lodestar and compass point, ancestral bulwark against the tide of whatever seething modern ill he despises. The right wing trumpets Burke, who excoriated the murderous rebellion in France; the left wing salutes Burke, who excoriated his imperial colleagues for their overweening and rapacious greed in India and America; Christians celebrate Burke, who considered religion a crucial and indispensable pillar of civic life; the Irish savor a native son who became, as Hazlitt noted, “the chief boast and ornament of the English House of Commons”; the English honor the writer and orator of “transcendant greatness,” as Coleridge wrote, with his usual casual attention to spelling. But Edmund Burke the actual man is faded away—the man his wife called Ned, fond of vulgar puns and lewd jokes, an ample man, thin as a lad and then never again; the chatterbox “never unwilling to begin to talk, nor in haste to leave off,” as Samuel Johnson said...

Ezra Klein on the irony of the mandate: 

There are many ironies in the furor around the individual mandate. The fact that it was originally a Republican idea tends to get the most attention. But here’s another: There is no better deal in the legislation — and there has perhaps never been a better deal in the individual health-care market — than to go without insurance and pay the mandate’s penalty.

Chait, master of cynical liberal snark, destroys "luncheon" accounts of bipartisanship: 

The bipartisanship cargo cult is a belief system in Washington which attributes the decline of bipartisanship in Washington not to the larger structural changes that actually caused it but to the lack of collegial bipartisan get-togethers. 

Yglesias with some interesting points on the economics of software-hardware integration.