#GDP Data

[trader-sg112]

Key Economic Events and Data Releases for June 27, 2024

Stay updated with today's major economic events including Fed Bank Stress Test Results, Continuing Jobless Claims, GDP Data, and more. Find detailed insights and forecasts.

[newbussinessideas]

FPIs investment hit 9-month high at Rs 43,838 crore in May on strong domestic macro-outlook, reasonable valuation - Times of India

NEW DELHI: Foreign Portfolio Investors (FPIs) pumped in Rs 43,838 crore in Indian equities in May, the highest level in nine months, supported by strong macroeconomic fundamentals, and reasonable valuations.FPIs continued the buying stance in June too, and invested Rs 6,490 crore in just two trading sessions of the month, data with the repositories showed.VK Vijayakumar, Chief Investment…

[creator-of-calm-queer-chaos]

My first thought when I saw this was wondering how it lines up to wealth distributions (like the 'owning a horse makes you live longer' thing) so I went and found this map from reddit

For the US, it kind of lines up, with California, Washington, a chunk of New England, and Colorado having the highest life expectancy and GDP per capita, and you have the southern Appalachian states having the lowest. But the rest of it is kind of all over the place, and in Canada it's pretty much flipped (this I would guess has to do with how expensive most things are there, coupled with healthcare access).

Would love to hear others' thoughts on this!!

Life Expectancy in the USA and Canada

[allaboutforexworld]

Dow Jones Index in a Nutshell

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), commonly referred to as the Dow Jones Index, is one of the most well-known and widely followed stock market indices in the world. This article delves into the history, significance, components, and impact of the Index on the financial markets. History of the Dow Jones Index The Dow Jones Index was created by Charles Dow, co-founder of Dow Jones & Company,…

[tradermade]

Did you know about the types of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and how it is calculated? https://tradermade.com/forex. Our carousel reveals the surprising facts about GDP! Choose us as your data partner to get reliable and accurate Forex data.

[reasonsforhope]

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is, by some measures, the most popular leader in the world. Prior to the 2024 election, his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) held an outright majority in the Lok Sabha (India’s Parliament) — one that was widely projected to grow after the vote count. The party regularly boasted that it would win 400 Lok Sabha seats, easily enough to amend India’s constitution along the party's preferred Hindu nationalist lines.

But when the results were announced on Tuesday, the BJP held just 240 seats. They not only underperformed expectations, they actually lost their parliamentary majority. While Modi will remain prime minister, he will do so at the helm of a coalition government — meaning that he will depend on other parties to stay in office, making it harder to continue his ongoing assault on Indian democracy.

So what happened? Why did Indian voters deal a devastating blow to a prime minister who, by all measures, they mostly seem to like?

India is a massive country — the most populous in the world — and one of the most diverse, making its internal politics exceedingly complicated. A definitive assessment of the election would require granular data on voter breakdown across caste, class, linguistic, religious, age, and gender divides. At present, those numbers don’t exist in sufficient detail. 

But after looking at the information that is available and speaking with several leading experts on Indian politics, there are at least three conclusions that I’m comfortable drawing.

First, voters punished Modi for putting his Hindu nationalist agenda ahead of fixing India’s unequal economy. Second, Indian voters had some real concerns about the decline of liberal democracy under BJP rule. Third, the opposition parties waged a smart campaign that took advantage of Modi’s vulnerabilities on the economy and democracy.

Understanding these factors isn’t just important for Indians. The country’s election has some universal lessons for how to beat a would-be authoritarian — ones that Americans especially might want to heed heading into its election in November.

-via Vox, June 7, 2024. Article continues below.

A new (and unequal) economy

Modi’s biggest and most surprising losses came in India’s two most populous states: Uttar Pradesh in the north and Maharashtra in the west. Both states had previously been BJP strongholds — places where the party’s core tactic of pitting the Hindu majority against the Muslim minority had seemingly cemented Hindu support for Modi and his allies.

One prominent Indian analyst, Yogendra Yadav, saw the cracks in advance. Swimming against the tide of Indian media, he correctly predicted that the BJP would fall short of a governing majority.

Traveling through the country, but especially rural Uttar Pradesh, he prophesied “the return of normal politics”: that Indian voters were no longer held spellbound by Modi’s charismatic nationalist appeals and were instead starting to worry about the way politics was affecting their lives.

Yadav’s conclusions derived in no small part from hearing voters’ concerns about the economy. The issue wasn’t GDP growth — India’s is the fastest-growing economy in the world — but rather the distribution of growth’s fruits. While some of Modi’s top allies struck it rich, many ordinary Indians suffered. Nearly half of all Indians between 20 and 24 are unemployed; Indian farmers have repeatedly protested Modi policies that they felt hurt their livelihoods.

“Everyone was talking about price rise, unemployment, the state of public services, the plight of farmers, [and] the struggles of labor,” Yadav wrote...

“We know for sure that Modi’s strongman image and brassy self-confidence were not as popular with voters as the BJP assumed,” says Sadanand Dhume, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies India. 

The lesson here isn’t that the pocketbook concerns trump identity-based appeals everywhere; recent evidence in wealthier democracies suggests the opposite is true. Rather, it’s that even entrenched reputations of populist leaders are not unshakeable. When they make errors, even some time ago, it’s possible to get voters to remember these mistakes and prioritize them over whatever culture war the populist is peddling at the moment.

Liberalism strikes back

The Indian constitution is a liberal document: It guarantees equality of all citizens and enshrines measures designed to enshrine said equality into law. The signature goal of Modi’s time in power has been to rip this liberal edifice down and replace it with a Hindu nationalist model that pushes non-Hindus to the social margins. In pursuit of this agenda, the BJP has concentrated power in Modi’s hands and undermined key pillars of Indian democracy (like a free press and independent judiciary).

Prior to the election, there was a sense that Indian voters either didn’t much care about the assault on liberal democracy or mostly agreed with it. But the BJP’s surprising underperformance suggests otherwise.

The Hindu, a leading Indian newspaper, published an essential post-election data analysis breaking down what we know about the results. One of the more striking findings is that the opposition parties surged in parliamentary seats reserved for members of “scheduled castes” — the legal term for Dalits, the lowest caste grouping in the Hindu hierarchy.

Caste has long been an essential cleavage in Indian politics, with Dalits typically favoring the left-wing Congress party over the BJP (long seen as an upper-caste party). Under Modi, the BJP had seemingly tamped down on the salience of class by elevating all Hindus — including Dalits — over Muslims. Yet now it’s looking like Dalits were flocking back to Congress and its allies. Why?

According to experts, Dalit voters feared the consequences of a BJP landslide. If Modi’s party achieved its 400-seat target, they’d have more than enough votes to amend India’s constitution. Since the constitution contains several protections designed to promote Dalit equality — including a first-in-the-world affirmative action system — that seemed like a serious threat to the community. It seems, at least based on preliminary data, that they voted accordingly.

The Dalit vote is but one example of the ways in which Modi’s brazen willingness to assail Indian institutions likely alienated voters.

Uttar Pradesh (UP), India’s largest and most electorally important state, was the site of a major BJP anti-Muslim campaign. It unofficially kicked off its campaign in the UP city of Ayodhya earlier this year, during a ceremony celebrating one of Modi’s crowning achievements: the construction of a Hindu temple on the site of a former mosque that had been torn down by Hindu nationalists in 1992. 

Yet not only did the BJP lose UP, it specifically lost the constituency — the city of Faizabad — in which the Ayodhya temple is located. It’s as direct an electoral rebuke to BJP ideology as one can imagine.

In Maharashtra, the second largest state, the BJP made a tactical alliance with a local politician, Ajit Pawar, facing serious corruption charges. Voters seemingly punished Modi’s party for turning a blind eye to Pawar’s offenses against the public trust. Across the country, Muslim voters turned out for the opposition to defend their rights against Modi’s attacks.

The global lesson here is clear: Even popular authoritarians can overreach.

By turning “400 seats” into a campaign slogan, an all-but-open signal that he intended to remake the Indian state in his illiberal image, Modi practically rang an alarm bell for constituencies worried about the consequences. So they turned out to stop him en masse.

The BJP’s electoral underperformance is, in no small part, the direct result of their leader’s zealotry going too far.

Return of the Gandhis? 

Of course, Modi’s mistakes might not have mattered had his rivals failed to capitalize. The Indian opposition, however, was far more effective than most observers anticipated.

Perhaps most importantly, the many opposition parties coordinated with each other. Forming a united bloc called INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance), they worked to make sure they weren’t stealing votes from each other in critical constituencies, positioning INDIA coalition candidates to win straight fights against BJP rivals.

The leading party in the opposition bloc — Congress — was also more put together than people thought. Its most prominent leader, Rahul Gandhi, was widely dismissed as a dilettante nepo baby: a pale imitation of his father Rajiv and grandmother Indira, both former Congress prime ministers. Now his critics are rethinking things.

“I owe Rahul Gandhi an apology because I seriously underestimated him,” says Manjari Miller, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Miller singled out Gandhi’s yatras (marches) across India as a particularly canny tactic. These physically grueling voyages across the length and breadth of India showed that he wasn’t just a privileged son of Indian political royalty, but a politician willing to take risks and meet ordinary Indians where they were. During the yatras, he would meet directly with voters from marginalized groups and rail against Modi’s politics of hate.

“The persona he’s developed — as somebody kind, caring, inclusive, [and] resolute in the face of bullying — has really worked and captured the imagination of younger India,” says Suryanarayan. “If you’ve spent any time on Instagram Reels, [you’ll see] an entire generation now waking up to Rahul Gandhi’s very appealing videos.”

This, too, has a lesson for the rest of the world: Tactical innovation from the opposition matters even in an unfair electoral context.

There is no doubt that, in the past 10 years, the BJP stacked the political deck against its opponents. They consolidated control over large chunks of the national media, changed campaign finance law to favor themselves, suborned the famously independent Indian Electoral Commission, and even intimidated the Supreme Court into letting them get away with it. 

The opposition, though, managed to find ways to compete even under unfair circumstances. Strategic coordination between them helped consolidate resources and ameliorate the BJP cash advantage. Direct voter outreach like the yatra helped circumvent BJP dominance in the national media.

To be clear, the opposition still did not win a majority. Modi will have a third term in office, likely thanks in large part to the ways he rigged the system in his favor.

Yet there is no doubt that the opposition deserves to celebrate. Modi’s power has been constrained and the myth of his invincibility wounded, perhaps mortally. Indian voters, like those in Brazil and Poland before them, have dealt a major blow to their homegrown authoritarian faction.

And that is something worth celebrating.

-via Vox, June 7, 2024.

[probablyasocialecologist]

In international development circles, most people are familiar with the World Bank’s data showing that extreme poverty has declined dramatically over the past several decades, from 43 per cent of the world’s population in 1981 to less than 10 per cent today. This narrative is based on the World Bank’s method of calculating the share of people who live on less than $1.90 per day (in 2011 “PPP” terms). But a growing body of literature argues that the World Bank’s PPP-based method suffers from a major empirical limitation, in that it does not account for the cost of meeting basic needs in any given context (see here, here and here). Having more than $1.90 PPP does not guarantee that a person can afford the specific goods and services that are necessary for survival. In recent years, scholars have developed a more accurate method for measuring extreme poverty, by comparing people’s incomes to the prices of essential goods in each country (specifically food, shelter, clothing and fuel). This approach is known as the “basic needs poverty line” (BNPL), and it more closely approximates what the original concept of “extreme poverty” was intended to measure. 

[...]

Extreme poverty is not a natural condition, but a sign of severe dislocation. Historical data on real wages since the 15th century indicates that under normal conditions, across different societies and eras, people are generally able to meet their subsistence needs except during periods of severe social displacement, such as famines, wars, and institutionalised dispossession, particularly under European colonialism. What is more, BNPL data shows that many countries have managed to keep extreme poverty very close to zero, even with low levels of GDP per capita, by using strategies such as public provisioning and price controls for basic essentials. In other words, extreme poverty can be prevented much more easily than most people assume. Indeed, it need not exist at all. The fact that it persists at such high levels today indicates that severe dislocation is institutionalised in the world economy – and that markets have failed to meet the basic needs of much of humanity. To address this problem, and to end extreme poverty – the first objective of the Sustainable Development Goals – will require public planning to prioritise the production of, and guarantee access to, the specific goods and services that people need to live decent lives.

[metamatar]

One of the world’s top arms exporters, Israel exports annually as much as $7 billion worth of military technology, or 2.2 percent of its Gross Domestic Product. An additional 1.35 percent of GDP is dedicated to military research and development, and 6.7 percent is spent on its defense budget— the world’s second largest military budget as a percentage of GDP after Saudi Arabia. All told, 10.25 percent of the Israeli economy is involved directly in arms. Comparatively, for the United States, the world’s top weapons exporter, arms account for around 3.7 percent of its economy. Israel is actually the world’s largest arms supplier per capita, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and the World Bank, at ninety-eight dollars; it is followed by a distant Russia at fifty-eight dollars, and Sweden at fifty-three dollars.

These figures do not include the contribution from natural resources exploited under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.50 They do not factor in the service sector’s revenue or general industry and construction taking place in the West Bank. Such figures are difficult to quantify, since many companies operate in the West Bank but have offices in Tel Aviv to obscure where operations take place. Nor does this account for Israeli exports into the Occupied Territories, which are 72 percent of Palestinian imports and 0.16 percent of Israeli GDP. All told, the Israeli economy is deeply involved in a web of expenditure and profit around the ongoing occupation and expansion of settlements.

American military aid supplanting open-ended government grants has had the effect of increasing arms production and diminishing the overall economic reach of the state. No longer is foreign aid and imperialist incentive directly invested in the working class. Israeli workers are now rewarded through the arms economy. This is why, despite the lack of social mobility and the economic degradation of neoliberalism, the working class remains committed as ever to Zionism.

The working class has become dependent on the education, housing, and career opportunities that their participation in the IDF affords them. They have found routes for advancement in the military-fueled high-tech industry, with over 9 percent of workers concentrated in high-tech. And as pensions and real wages are eroded, the cheaper cost of settlement living in the Occupied Territories has become essential.

[fairuzfan]

I was looking at gdp per capita of countries cuz I saw an author say "if your country has a gdp per capita less than $10000 then go ahead and pirate my book" so I was interested to see what common gdps are-- of course I looked at the middle east and compared israel and surrounding countries and this is ridiculous.

Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon have somewhat similar gdppcs, with Jordan being the highest at $4455.

Syria has the lowest ( but it's also an estimate from 2022) at $1,051:

Israel gdp in 2023 according to the world bank public data is $52,542!!!!!! That's so much!!! Not to mention, all this is gathered towards the Israeli jews rather than any Palestinians!

For context that's more than half of the gdp of the US and even bigger gdp than the uae and united kingdom!

[feminist-space]

Wear a mask (respirators like N95s or KN95s or KF94s), especially in healthcare settings, in public transportation, in crowded places. Long covid has severe consequences that, coupled with the dystopian nightmare that is everything else, can be devastating. It's worth it to at least try to take steps to stay safe by wearing a mask. For ourselves and for the people around us.

If you need help getting masks, there are mask blocs throughout the country that you can reach out to. And Project N95 also has resources for those who cannot afford N95 etc respirators.

Excerpts from article:

"About one in four Covid patients experience long-term symptoms weeks or months after getting infected, according to multiple studies published last year."

"A May study from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found that both unvaccinated and vaccinated people are at risk of long Covid. The risk is higher for the unvaccinated, but the study suggested that vaccines only reduce the risk of long Covid by 15%."

"The report estimates that 2 million to 4 million of those people are currently out of work due to long Covid."

"If 4 million long Covid patients are out of work, the lost earnings could be as high as $230 billion, the report says.

That’s nearly 1% of the country’s current-dollar gross domestic product (GDP) of $24.88 trillion."

"The condition can undeniably impact a patient’s life, work and health. Last year, the Americans with Disabilities Act labeled long Covid a disability because of how it can limit the major life activities of patients.

A July 2021 study from the Patient-Led Research Collaborative measured the condition’s effect on patients’ work over the course of seven months. Only about 27% of long Covid patients worked as many hours as they did before failing ill. Roughly 23% weren’t working at all, as a direct result of long Covid. That included being on sick leave, disability leave, quitting, being fired or being unable to find a job that would accommodate them."

[mariacallous]

MYKOLAIV, UKRAINE—Kateryna Nahorna is getting ready to find trouble.

Part of an all-female team of dog handlers, the 22-year-old is training Ukraine’s technical survey dogs—Belgian Malinois that have learned to sniff out explosives.

The job is huge. Ukraine is now estimated to be the most heavily mined country on Earth. Deminers must survey every area that saw sustained fighting for unexploded mines, missiles, artillery shells, bombs, and a host of other ordnance—almost 25 percent of the country, according to government estimates.

The dogs can cover 1,500 square meters a day. In contrast, human deminers cover 10 square meters a day on average—by quickly narrowing down the areas that manual deminers will need to tackle, the dogs save valuable time.

“This job allows me to be a warrior for my country … but without having to kill anyone,” said Nahorna. “Our men protect us at war, and we do this to protect them at home.”

A highly practical reason drove the women’s recruitment. The specialized dog training was done in Cambodia, by the nonprofit Apopo, and military-aged men are currently not allowed to leave Ukraine.

War has shaken up gender dynamics in the Ukrainian economy, with women taking up jobs traditionally held by men, such as driving trucks or welding. Now, as mobilization ramps up once more, women are becoming increasingly important in roles that are critical for national security.

In Mykolaiv, in the industrial east, Nahorna and her dogs will soon take on one of the biggest targets of Russia’s military strategy when they start to demine the country’s energy infrastructure. Here, women have been stepping in to work in large numbers in steel mills, factories, and railways serving the front line.

It’s a big shift for Ukraine. Before the war, only 48 percent of women over age 15 took part in the workforce — one of the lowest rates in Europe. War has made collecting data on the gender composition of the workforce impossible, but today, 50,000 women serve in the Ukrainian army, compared to 30,000 before the war.

The catalyst came in 2017, years before the current war began. As conflict escalated with Russia in Crimea, the Ukrainian government overturned a Soviet-era law that had previously banned women from 450 occupations.

But obstacles still remain; for example, women are not allowed jobs the government deems too physically demanding. These barriers continue to be chipped away—most recently, women have been cleared to work in underground mines, something they were prevented from doing before.

Viktoriia Avramchuk never thought she would follow her father and husband into the coal mines for DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company.

Her lifelong fear of elevators was a big factor—but there was also the fact that it was illegal for women to work underground.

Her previous job working as a nanny in a local kindergarten disappeared overnight when schools were forced to close at the beginning of the war. After a year of being unemployed, she found that she had few other options.

“I would never have taken the job if I could have afforded not to,” Avramchuk said from her home in Pokrovsk. “But I also wanted to do something to help secure victory, and this was needed.”

The demining work that Nahorna does is urgent in part because more than 55 percent of the country is farmed.

Often called “the breadbasket of Europe,” Ukraine is one of the world’s top exporters of grain. The U.K.-based Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, which has been advising the Ukrainian government on demining technology, estimates that landmines have resulted in annual GDP losses of $11 billion.

“Farmers feel the pressure to plow, which is dangerous,” said Jon Cunliffe, the Ukraine country director of Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a British nonprofit. “So we need to do as much surveying as possible to reduce the size of the possible contamination.”

The dogs can quickly clear an area of heavy vegetation, which greatly speeds up the process of releasing noncontaminated lands back to farmers. If the area is found to be unsafe, human deminers step in to clear the field manually.

“I’m not brave enough to be on the front line,” 29-year-old Iryna Manzevyta said as she slowly and diligently hovered a metal detector over a patch of farmland. “But I had to do something to help, and this seemed like a good alternative to make a difference.”

Groups like MAG are increasingly targeting women. With skilled male deminers regularly being picked up by military recruiters, recruiting women reduces the chances that expensive and time-consuming training will be invested in people who could be drafted to the front line at a moment’s notice. The demining work is expected to take decades, and women, unlike men, cannot be conscripted in Ukraine.

This urgency to recruit women is accelerating a gender shift already underway in the demining sector. Organizations like MAG have looked to recruit women as a way to empower them in local communities. Demining was once a heavily male-dominated sector, but women now make up 30 percent of workers in Vietnam and Colombia, around 40 percent in Cambodia, and more than 50 percent in Myanmar.

In Ukraine, the idea is to make demining an enterprise with “very little expat footprint,” and Cunliffe said that will only be possible by recruiting more women.

“We should not be here in 10 years. Not like in Iraq or South Sudan, where we have been for 30 years, or Vietnam, or Laos,” Cunliffe said. “It’s common sense that we bring in as many women as we can to do that. In five to 10 years, a lot of these women are going to end up being technical field managers, the jobs that are currently being done by old former British military guys, and it will change the face of demining worldwide because they can take those skills across the world.”

Manzevyta is one of the many women whose new job has turned her family dynamics on their head. She has handed over her previous life, running a small online beauty retail site, to her husband, who—though he gripes—stays at home while she is out demining.

“Life is completely different now,” she said, giggling. “I had to teach him how to use the washing machine, which settings to use, everything around the house because I’m mostly absent now.”

More seriously, Manzevyta said that the war has likely changed many women’s career trajectories.

“I can’t imagine people who have done work like this going back and working as florists once the war is over,” she laughed.

[centrally-unplanned]

remember when the trump admin/paul ryan tried doing entitlement reform and it went nowhere? that was pretty funny

Oh yeah, I remember! Voters didn't, obviously, sucks for them I guess. I currently lean towards Trump having "learned his lesson" combined with him being economically illiterate such that the current admin won't repeat that mistake - they will keep middle class welfare, and instead just cut taxes anyway and expand the deficit, while using cuts in aid to the poor and tariffs to "plug the revenue gap" in at least a branding sort of way. Bad for the country obviously, but maybe it will be easier electorally.

Paul Ryan is always amusing to me as a deeply pathetic political figure. The dumb man's smart guy, he was culmination of Bush-era Republicanism right as it was dying away - still fanatically devoted to tax cuts as the north star of all political ambition, still interested in the veneer of being a responsible elder statesman, but now part of a party that absolutely could not be bothered with the actual requirements of the latter. So he would go through all of this rigmarole of making "serious" budget proposals that were built on completely fabricated data like massively inflated GDP growth or magical efficiency gains in spending to show how his proposals would be deficit neutral, just for them to be shot down.

Then first the tea party, and later Trump comes along and goes "my dude, no one gives a shit about any of that. What are you doing? Even your lies reek of nerdy loserdom", and over time he is simply discarded. Now he does all the non-jobs retired politicos get; board member here, non-profit senior advisor there, etc. Fake responsibilities for a fake man; someone who wore the mask so long he can't even remember his face.

Hilarious that, relative to the current crop, I kinda miss him.

[mapsontheweb]

GDP nominal per capita (in US dollars) in Europe (2021) compared to its percentage change from 2020 to 2021, data from World Bank

Source is here: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?most_recent_value_desc=true&view=map

by GeographerJX3/reddit

[self-loving-vampire]

You've posted about LLMs a few times recently and I wanted to ask you about my own case where the tool is abstract and should be whatever, but what if the entire tech industry is filled with misanthropic fast talking nerds whose entire industry is fueled by convincing finance ghouls to keep betting the gdp of Yemen that there will be new and interesting ways to exploit personal data, and that will be driven by the greasiest LinkedIn guy in the universe? Correct me if I'm wrong, but would it not be a decent heuristic to think "If Elon Musk likes something, I should at least entertain reviling it"? Moreover: "E=MC^2+AI" screenshot

Like-- we need to kill this kind of guy, right? We need to break their little nerd toys and make them feel bad, for the sake of the world we love so dear?

I get annoyed with moralizing dumbdumbs who are aesthetically driven too, so it is with heavy heart that giving these vile insects any quarter into my intellectual workings is too much to bear. I hope you understand me better.

I think you're giving people like Elon Musk too much influence over your thoughts if you use them as some kind of metric for what you should like, whether it's by agreeing with him or by doing the opposite and making his positive opinions of something (which may not even be sincere or significant) into a reason to dislike that thing. It's best to evaluate these things on their own merits based on the consequences they have.

I personally don't base my goals around making nerds feel bad either. I am literally dating an electrical engineer doing a PhD.

What I care about here is very simple: I think copyright law is harmful. I don't want copyright law to be expanded or strengthened. I don't want people to feel any kind of respect for it. I don't want people to figuratively break their toes punting a boulder out of spite towards "techbros". That's putting immediate emotional satisfaction over good outcomes, which goes against my principles and is unlikely to lead to the best possible world.

[radicalfacts]

radical facts - short feminist facts

#patriarchy

Women's unpaid Labour

Worldwide, women and girls perform 12.5 billion hours of unpaid labor every day. This work adds $10.8 trillion to the economy every year.

With this unpaid "shadow-labour" alone, women contribute as much as 6.6 percent to the global GDP.

It exceeds the combined revenue of the 50 largest companies on last year’s , including Walmart, Apple and Amazon.

(Data via Oxfam & ILO)

[max1461]

A feature I don't like that is present to varying degrees in textbooks in basically every field besides pure math is that they don't feel very "skeptical". A math book doesn't just claim things, it also includes proofs, i.e. it tells you how we know that those things are true. My experience with textbooks in e.g. biology is that they don't even attempt this; they just assert shit about how the cell works or whatever. I really don't like this. Obviously it would be impossible to convince the reader of your claims in a biology text the same way a math text can, but I'd appreciate if these books at least gave me some direction in looking into the evidence for the claim.

Actually, linguistics books are pretty good about this too. I'll give credit to the Chomskyans and add that generative syntax books tend to do this especially well. I think this is because the basic methodological tool of generative syntax is the native speaker grammaticality judgement, and (unfortunate as it may be) a large proportion of generativist work has been on English. The upshot is that if you're a native speaker of English and you read a syntax claim, you can just test out a couple example sentences yourself to see if it holds up. Even when the language under discussion isn't English, it's convention to include example sentences from the object language which illustrate the analysis. The result is that you get to see the exact data, or at least illustrative examples of the data, that the given syntactic hypothesis is trying to model. So you know roughly how that hypothesis was arrived at, you know why somebody would think that.

My problem reading econ texts and even physics text in the past has been that they posit all these abstractions, they posit things like "real GDP" or "force" or whatever, and they don't do a good job of grounding these things concretely—that is to say, framing them in terms of things I have immediate access to, like my reasoning faculties or my powers of observation. I just have to take their word that there's a thing called "force" and it obeys this law, and what is it exactly? Don't worry about that.

Note that I don't have this problem with "mass" because the concept of a scale (like an old school scale, with the lever and the two plates) is familiar to me; I can conceptualize what mass is in terms of a straightforward empirical comparison between objects that I could do, even if I have to take the book's word for e.g. the mass of a baseball or whatever. Same with size, because I know about rulers.

I think physics books could do this better, they could be more skeptical, concrete, and grounded, but they mostly aren't. I've talked before about how most people consider math very abstract, but it feels concrete to me in this sense. A mathematician can tell me exactly what an abelian group is in a way that I can write down and work with, but it's harder for a physicist to tell me exactly what a field is (even in terms of a purely empirical operational definition).

I've made this whole post before, and better. But I'm making it again.