You hear 'ancient wisdom' on how to lead the good life all the time. These ancient aphorisms came from a time before the scientific method and the idea of testing your hypotheses. Tradition has acted a sort of pre-conscious filter on the advice we get, so we can expect it to hold some value. But now, we can do better.

Haidt is a psychologist who read a large collection of the ancient texts of Western and Eastern religion and philosophy, highlighting all the 'psychological' statements. He organized a list of 'happiness hypotheses' from the ancients and then looked at the modern scientific literature to see if they hold water.

What he finds is they were often partially right, but that we know more. By the end of the book, you have some concrete suggestions on how to lead a happier life and you'll know to the studies that will convince you they work.

Haidt writes with that pop science long windedness that these books always have. Within that structure, he's an entertaining writer so I didn't mind.

It's useful to note the title of the paper: What’s your (sur)name? Intergenerational mobility over six centuries. This paper is not tracking wealth, it's tracking income via tax records. It notes things like people who are lawyers or bankers now were more likely to share surnames with people in similar professions in the 15th century. It is not tracking inter-generation transfers of wealth.

In fact, qz even drops the most interesting conclusion in the article, which is their measurement of changing intergenerational income mobility overtime. They measure inelasticity at > .8 in Renaissance Florence and a generally static society until the industrial revolution, with inelasticity coming down starting in the 20th century.

The article isn't about secret trusts set up by the Medici, but the more prosaic fact that if you father and grandfather were lawyers, you're more likely to be one too. Still interesting, but it's not evidence that families were "able to maintain their wealth" through revolutions at all.

Yet remember that active mutual funds manager fees are close to 1%. If you pay $60M on $900B, we're talking about paying less than 1 bp! So if you have an average active mutual fund manager running your $900B fund for $60M, you might hope to beat the market by a few basis points.

That this should cause the CEO, who was several layers up the org chart from the person who came up with a bad retail bank employee performance metric, to go to jail is madness.

Just like in politics, people are people. If your solution to political problems is for politicians to start always acting ethically in the interests of the greater good, you've already lost. The challenge is to design institutions that can take in people as they are and still function.

Scientists are people. They are going to have confirmation bias when they look at results. If they've worked on something for forty years, they (probably) aren't going to change their minds. Luckily, physics doesn't care what Gross thinks. It moves on. The journals start preferring other papers, young scientists don't look to make their careers in the same old stuff.

I think the institution of physics is fine. Well, except for the fact that the LHC hasn't found anything new yet and everyone is left hoping they build that really big accelerator in China.

In the _Wandering God_ by Morris Berman, there is a story of a story of a girl (maybe 19th or early 20th century?) in a nomadic society in Africa. Her mother got pregnant again and was going to kill the baby, but the three year old child protested and agreed to go with being breast fed to try to save her newborn sibling. It wasn't possible to breastfeed two children at once, so her mother was going to kill the infant.

Miraculously the child managed to survive, but it was by no means guaranteed and she had to figure out to be self sufficient to some degree. It was considered such an odd occurrence that the relevant anthropologist reported the story.

I think we forget that infanticide wasn't uncommon that long ago. It was one of the major 'moral' victories of Christianity to make infanticide uncommon. And it could only do that because it wasn't necessary anymore.

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This isn't to say that that state of the world is worse. It might be better! Certainly we shouldn't discount the burden it places on people to feel guilty over their debts. That's real cost to them and to society generally. But if the social norms around debt changed, they wouldn't change in a vacuum. Probably rates would go up and that's a real cost as well.

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