On how the Indian economy after independence came to be influenced by one statistician in "... an academic institute in the quiet outskirts of a city far away from the capital...". Excerpted from the book "Planning Democracy: How a Professor, an Institute and an Idea Shaped India", by Nikhil Menon. (Link for story here.)
Good sentences:
Ultimately, the impact of planning on statistics led to a statistician shaping the Plan.
and
The Professor left India in order to be relevant in India.
From 'The cultural evolution of love in literary history' [Bamaurd et al. 2022, Nature Human Behavior]. (Link to paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01292-z)
Abstract
Since the late nineteenth century, cultural historians have noted that the importance of love increased during the Medieval and Early Modern European period (a phenomenon that was once referred to as the emergence of ‘courtly love’). However, more recent works have shown a similar increase in Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Indian and Japanese cultures. Why such a convergent evolution in very different cultures? Using qualitative and quantitative approaches, we leverage literary history and build a database of ancient literary fiction for 19 geographical areas and 77 historical periods covering 3,800 years, from the Middle Bronze Age to the Early Modern period. We first confirm that romantic elements have increased in Eurasian literary fiction over the past millennium, and that similar increases also occurred earlier, in Ancient Greece, Rome and Classical India. We then explore the ecological determinants of this increase. Consistent with hypotheses from cultural history and behavioural ecology, we show that a higher level of economic development is strongly associated with a greater incidence of love in narrative fiction (our proxy for the importance of love in a culture). To further test the causal role of economic development, we used a difference-in-difference method that exploits exogenous regional variations in economic development resulting from the adoption of the heavy plough in medieval Europe. Finally, we used probabilistic generative models to reconstruct the latent evolution of love and to assess the respective role of cultural diffusion and economic development.
Admirable. Though Robin Williams from Dead Poets Society would likely ejaculate: 'Excrement'.
From the pen of the peerless Slate Star Codex:
The Pax Americana playbook for international norm violations is: the US slaps sanctions on the offender. The EU expresses “concern”. The UN proposes a resolution condemning it, which gets vetoed by whichever Security Council member is most complicit. And the CIA secretly gives Stinger missiles to everyone involved.
