Longhorn Orange and Chelsea Blue, #txlege Politics and I Love You
Austin, Texas
Joined February 2011
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12 films to know me
Giant
2001: A Space Odyssey
Apocalypse Now Redux
The Godfather
The Razor's Edge
Lawrence of Arabia
The Matrix
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
25th Hour
Dazed and Confused
When Harry Met Sally
Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas
@EvanAutry
Matt Burgin retweeted
President Theodore Roosevelt addresses a crowd in Fort Worth on April 8, 1905. His entire speech was great, but I loved his last words about Texas. I bolded the best part:
"Texas has such an enormous extent of territory, a territory so widely diversified that almost all the things which culminate in some particular State come to the front in Texas, and, therefore, we have a right to expect that, more than almost any other State, Texas shall contribute to the aggregate of our national wealth; and let me repeat here what I have said to various audiences, and I mean it literally, every word of it. I did not need to come here in order to be a good citizen, and a good American, but if I had needed it, I would have got what I needed here. AND, ALTHOUGH I CAME TO TEXAS A PRETTY GOOD AMERICAN, I WANT YOU TO UNDERSTAND THAT I FEEL THAT NO PRESIDENT, NO MATTER WHO HE MAY BE, WHILE HE IS PRESIDENT, CAN AFFORD NOT TO COME TO TEXAS, FOR HE WILL LEAVE A BETTER AMERICAN THAN HE WAS WHEN HE CAME."
Indeed, Teddy, indeed. Myself? I feel more infinitely more virtuous when I cross from from other states into Texas --- particularly when I cross into Texas from Oklahoma. 😃😊😊😉
Photo courtesy UTA Special Collections
Matt Burgin retweeted
CBO just released its latest "Distribution of Household Income" report (for year 2023), and the findings are - as usual - a narrative violation.
Real incomes up across the board.
Income inequality basically flat for decades.
Taxes falling for everyone except the rich.
Matt Burgin retweeted
On this morning 250 years ago, the British hanged a 21-year-old American schoolteacher as a spy, and in trying to make him disappear quietly, they accidentally made him immortal. His name was Nathan Hale, and it is worth sitting with just the last few hours of his life.
He had been caught the night before, behind British lines on Long Island, carrying notes on enemy positions hidden in his shoes. There was no real trial. A man out of uniform with military intelligence on him was a spy by the rules of war, and the sentence for spying was death by hanging, no ceremony, no honor. General Howe ordered it done in the morning.
What we know of that morning comes mostly from the enemy, from British officers who were there, and it is the small human cruelties that stay with you. Hale asked for a clergyman to attend him in his final hours. The request was refused. He asked for a Bible. That too was denied. He was a devout young man about to die, and they would not give him even that comfort. A British officer named Montresor, watching, was troubled enough by the young man's composure to later make sure his story was told.
In his last moments Hale was allowed to write a couple of letters, one to his mother, one to a fellow officer. He wrote them, and then the British provost marshal, a notoriously brutal man named Cunningham, took those letters and destroyed them in front of him. The reason given was chilling in its pettiness: so that the rebels should not know they had a man in their ranks who could die with such firmness. They did not just want to kill him. They wanted to erase him.
Then they marched him to the gallows, and there, according to the accounts that survived, this young schoolteacher who had failed at the one dangerous mission he ever attempted, stood calmly and spoke about duty and country with a steadiness that unnerved the men sent to kill him. The famous words attributed to him, that he only regretted having but one life to lose for his country, may be polished or borrowed from a play he loved. But everyone who was there agreed on the essential truth beneath the wording: he met his death without flinching, and he made even his executioners remember him.
And that is the irony that redeems the whole sad morning. Cunningham burned the letters so no one would know how bravely Hale died. It did not work. The story got out anyway, carried by the very enemies who watched it, and a young man the British tried to erase became one of the most enduring symbols of the Revolution, honored two and a half centuries later, on this exact day, as the first American to die spying for his country. They denied him a Bible and a chaplain and burned his last words, and still they could not make him small.
Matt Burgin retweeted
The rich world’s climate distraction: The World Bank and other institutions lose their focus on the best ways to help the poor, write @IndermitGill and @BjornLomborg
on.wsj.com/4iH2oup
Matt Burgin retweeted
In my last two posts, I emphasized the enormous gains in material wealth and life expectancy that humanity has experienced over the past couple of centuries.
But those improvements are nothing compared with the monumental gains in what I call moral autonomy and self-determination. Two centuries ago, in 1826, the vast majority of people were far less free and far less able to shape their own futures or their communities’ futures.
Let me start with labor. One striking feature of economic history is that, for most of the human past, much labor has not been free but coerced through violence, ranging from the worst forms of chattel slavery to serfdom, peonage, and feudal tenancy. In 1826, for example, around 30% of workers worldwide were subject to some form of violent coercion and to legal limits on the work they may do (this is different from, and more restrictive than, economic limits, such as being a landless laborer with little choice of employer). If you are born in 1826, you stand a strong chance of being born to an enslaved mother in the Americas or to a serf in Russia. Today, the ILO computes that fewer than 1% of workers are coerced in this way.
Let me continue with gender. If you are a woman in 1826, your freedom to choose a husband, an education, an occupation, how many children to have, and to own property is severely limited nearly everywhere. If you are an enslaved or coerced woman, you face a very high chance of sexual assault during your lifetime. Free women suffer these attacks too, with next to no recourse.
Let me move to religion and ideology. If you belong to the “wrong” religion, denomination, or ideology, or if you simply love someone you “should not love,” you risk severe punishment. Even in the U.S., Massachusetts still has an established church and will keep it until 1833 (the First Amendment applied only to the federal government until Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947)). In the U.K., we are three years away from the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829 and forty-five years away from the abolition of religious tests at Oxford and Cambridge.
In education and culture, 88% of people are illiterate, and fewer than 2% hold the equivalent of a high school degree. For most, the great works of art and literature play no part in daily life, beyond perhaps a religious image or text seen in the local temple.
Finally, almost nobody outside a small elite participates in political life. In 1826, only the U.S. can be called a democracy, and that stretches the word. With very few exceptions, only white adult men can vote, and even among them, several states, such as Virginia, restrict the franchise to about 50% of white adult males. Some Swiss cantons (but not all!) do better, and Norway, then in union with Sweden, has a relatively broad franchise for men. The United Kingdom (before the 1832 reform), France, and the Netherlands have very restricted franchises. And that is pretty much it. Nothing resembling democracy or the rule of law exists in all of Asia and Africa, most of the Americas, and the rest of Europe. In nearly all the world, you could be arrested at the whim of your ruler, and there was little you could do about it.
I do not want to paint too rosy a picture of 2026. Workers are still coerced. Gender inequalities remain large. In many parts of the world, you still cannot think what you want to think or choose your own romantic life. Democracy has badly backslid over the last two decades. And I am increasingly forced to remind people that due process is the twin sister of liberty.
But if I ask you, behind a veil of ignorance, whether you want to live in 1826 or 2026 (that is, you do not know whether you will be born a king or an enslaved woman, only that the probabilities match the proportions in the global population), you would be crazy to pick 1826. Your life will be short. You will probably be very poor. You will be illiterate, told what to do for a living, who to pray to, and whom to marry, and no one will give a penny for your input into the running of your community. And, you can be arrested at will.
And this absence of moral autonomy and self-determination is worth ten, one hundred, or even one thousand times more than all the extra income that modern economic growth has given you.
My post on life spans:
teapawt.org/JesusFerna7026/status/…
My post on prosperity:
teapawt.org/JesusFerna7026/status/…
In 2028, the median person on Earth will live on more than $10 a day for the first time in history (figures adjusted for inflation and for differences in purchasing power across countries).
In the last decade alone, the share of people above this threshold has risen from 41.3% in 2016 (3.11 billion) to 48.7% in 2026 (4.03 billion). Think about that for a second: we have pushed nearly 900 million people over this threshold in ten years, around 90 million people a year (slightly above the population of Turkey).
At the very bottom, we have also seen progress, though slower. In 2016, 12.6% of the world lived below $3 a day (947 million people). In 2026, the figure fell to 10.0% (826 million). This fall is harder to achieve because the poorest countries also have fast population growth. As fertility falls there, and I think it is already falling, we will cut poverty much faster.
You are probably thinking that $10 a day is not a demanding threshold. True. But in 1990, yesterday in historical terms, only 1.42 billion people lived above it. And this is not just China: 2.6 billion people have crossed the $10 line. On the other hand, in 1990, 2.20 billion people lived below $3 a day.
I checked these figures today because I start teaching Global Economic History at Penn this Wednesday, and I wanted to update the numbers I use. As Joel Mokyr instructs us:
“The responsibility of economic historians is to remind the world what things were like before 1800. Growth was imperceptibly slow, and the vast bulk of the population was so poor that a harvest failure would kill millions. Almost half the babies born died before reaching age 5, and those who made it to adulthood were often stunted, ill and illiterate.”
(“What Today's Economic Gloomsayers Are Missing,” 2014.)
This will be my first lesson to the students on Wednesday: we live in times of historically unprecedented prosperity, and, by and large, things are getting much better every year.
Austin under stars at St. Stephen's!
givecampus.com/schools/StSte…
Matt Burgin retweeted
Young democrats being +22 on “Free market economy” and -31 on “Capitalism” is both funny and bleak
Matt Burgin retweeted
Almost every argument about energy comes down to one number: energy density.
How much energy is stored per kilogram of fuel or material.
The numbers in MJ/kg:
• Wood: 15
• Coal: 24
• Crude oil: 44
• Natural gas: 54
• Hydrogen (compressed): 120
• Lithium-ion battery: 0.7
• Uranium (fission): 80,000,000
• Hydrogen (fusion): 690,000,000
Read those last two again.
A kilogram of uranium contains more energy than 3,000 tonnes of coal.
A kilogram of hydrogen fusion fuel contains 45 million times more energy than a kilogram of oil.
This is why:
• Batteries struggle to replace liquid fuels in aviation and shipping. Energy density is 60x lower.
• Nuclear submarines can run for 25 years without refuelling.
• Fusion, if cracked, ends energy scarcity permanently – not just for decades, but for the lifetime of the Sun.
The energy transition debate isn't about ideology.
It's about physics.
Every energy source is competing against millions of years of chemistry packed into fossil fuels – and, eventually, against the nucleus itself.
Know the numbers. The debate becomes clearer.
The Selfie Generation Is the Baby Boomers’ Mistake by @ScottAtlas_IT wsj.com/opinion/the-selfie-g… via @WSJopinion
Matt Burgin retweeted
It’s an iron rule of political journalism. What the left does is never the real story. The real story is the right’s response to what the left does, writes @MattHennessey
on.wsj.com/3T5DDxg
Matt Burgin retweeted
Believing that "people wouldn't do crimes if their basic needs were met" while also believing that "greedy rich people are stealing from everyone" never registers to the people who say this shit as inherently contradictory.
Matt Burgin retweeted
The oldest known photograph in Texas history. Taken in 1849, it shows the Alamo Mission just 13 years after the famous battle in which James Bowie, Davy Crockett, and William B. Travis were killed.
The Alamo Mission was originally founded as a Spanish mission in the early 18th century before becoming the site of one of the most famous battles in American history. From February 23 to March 6, 1836, a small Texian force defended the mission against a much larger Mexican army led by Antonio López de Santa Anna. After a 13-day siege, the defenders were overwhelmed, and nearly all were killed.
The battle soon became a powerful rallying cry for the Texas Revolution. Just six weeks later, Texian forces led by Sam Houston defeated Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto, securing Texas independence.
By 1849, when this photograph was taken, the Alamo had already become a symbol of Texas identity. The building looked noticeably different from how it appears today, as the iconic curved parapet above the chapel façade had not yet been added. That feature was constructed later in the 1850s by the U.S. Army.
The image is especially remarkable because it was captured just 10 years after the invention of practical photography and only 13 years after the battle itself. Some people who fought at the Alamo, survived the Texas Revolution, or personally knew Davy Crockett and William B. Travis were still alive when this photograph was taken, creating an unusually short connection between a defining historical event and the earliest era of photography.
