What we’re reading (9/14)
“Democrats Release Details Of Proposed Tax Increase” (Wall Street Journal). “House Democrats spelled out their proposed tax increases on Monday, pushing higher rates on corporations, investors and high-income business owners as they try to piece together enough votes for legislation to expand the social safety net and combat climate change. The plan would increase the top corporate tax rate to 26.5% from 21%, impose a 3-percentage-point surtax on people making over $5 million and raise capital-gains taxes—but without the changes to taxation at death sought by the Biden administration.”
“Harvard Says It Will Not Invest In Fossil Fuels” (New York Times). “The announcement, sent out on Thursday, is a major victory for the climate change movement, given Harvard’s $42 billion endowment and prestigious reputation, and a striking change in tone for the school, which has resisted putting its full weight behind such a declaration during years of lobbying by student, faculty and alumni activists.”
“Meritocracy's Cost” (Charles Murray in the Claremont Review of Books). “As Young predicted, far too many members of today’s elites really do believe that they deserve their place in the world. They have gotten too big for their britches. They are unseemly, albeit in different ways. The billionaire’s 30,000-square-foot home is visibly unseemly. But so is a faculty lounge of academics making snide remarks about rednecks—meaning the people without whom the academics would have no working mechanical transportation, be in the dark after sundown, have to use chamber pots, and, literally, starve. Today’s elites have a remarkable obliviousness about the lives and contributions of ordinary people that bespeaks an unseemly indifference—not to mention disdain—for those people.”
“Pandemics Initially Spread Among People Of Higher (Not Lower) Social Status: Evidence From COVID-19 And The Spanish Flu” (Social Psychological and Personality Science). “According to a staple in the social sciences, pandemics particularly spread among people of lower social status. Challenging this staple, we hypothesize that it holds true in later phases of pandemics only. In the initial phases, by contrast, people of higher social status should be at the center of the spread. We tested our phase-sensitive hypothesis in two studies. In Study 1, we analyzed region-level COVID-19 infection data from 3,132 U.S. regions, 299 English regions, and 400 German regions. In Study 2, we analyzed historical data from 1,159,920 U.S. residents who witnessed the 1918/1919 Spanish Flu pandemic. For both pandemics, we found that the virus initially spread more rapidly among people of higher social status. In later phases, that effect reversed; people of lower social status were most exposed. Our results provide novel insights into the center of the spread during the critical initial phases of pandemics.”
“9,000 Years Ago, Funerals In China Involved A Lot Of Beer” (Ars Technica). “At a 9,000-year-old burial site in China called Qiaotou, archaeologists recently unearthed a number of ceramic vessels. Some of the vessels were shaped like the long-necked, round-bellied bronze pots that people used for alcoholic drinks millennia later. And that made Dartmouth College anthropologist Jiajing Wang and his colleagues wonder whether these earlier clay versions might have once held beer, too. Bits of the residue left inside eight of the 13 pots turned out to contain phytoliths (fossilized plant remains) from rice, tubers, and a plant called Job’s tears. Starch molecules in the residue showed signs of being heated and fermented. Wang and his colleagues also found yeast and mold, key ingredients in fermentation.”
