Saturday Night Links

• I live just down the street from the Mormon temple in NYC. I can see the Mormon families coming down Columbus Ave. from many blocks away, the husband in a suit, the wife in a skirt, and several well-behaved children and often a stroller in tow. Sometimes you can see waves of them coming along, one right after another. In their own way they stick out as much as Hasidic Jews. In 2011 a hard core feminist writer at Slate posted that she couldn’t stop reading Mormon housewife blogs, asking, “I’m a young, feminist atheist who can’t bake a cupcake. Why am I addicted to the shiny, happy lives of these women?” [Aaron M. Renn]
• Let me set the stage for how we ended up in suburbia in the first place. In 2016, Doug and I neared the end of a one-year lease on 63rd and 2nd Avenue in New York City. We secured the junior four, as they call it, for its large dining nook that we used as a nursery, but the apartment was plagued with unfixable problems from the day we moved in. Couple these issues with my postpartum epiphany that I didn’t want to raise kids in the city at all, not even for one minute (a dramatic pivot from how I thought I’d feel), and suddenly, our weekends filled up with open houses all around New Jersey, baby in tow. [The Joint Account]
• Easterlin’s explanation rests on the idea that the decisions individuals make in terms of whether and how many children they will have are strongly influenced by the difference between what they had expected their adult income to be while growing up, their ‘expected income’, and what it actuallyis once they join the labour market, which he called ‘relative income’. He argued that people form an expectation of their income based on a range of social and economic signals, primarily those they receive growing up: the current average standard of living; the standard of living they experienced during their childhood; their sense of their own prospects. [Works in Progress]
• Shortly after moving into his Senate office, Romney had hung a large rectangular map on the wall. First printed in 1931 by Rand McNally, the “histomap” attempted to chart the rise and fall of the world’s most powerful civilizations through 4,000 years of human history. When Romney first acquired the map, he saw it as a curiosity. After January 6, he became obsessed with it. He showed the map to visitors, brought it up in conversations and speeches. More than once, he found himself staring at it alone in his office at night. The Egyptian empire had reigned for some 900 years before it was overtaken by the Assyrians. Then the Persians, the Romans, the Mongolians, the Turks—each civilization had its turn, and eventu­ally collapsed in on itself. Maybe the falls were inevitable. [The Atlantic]
• In Monday’s note, I shared Judd Arnold’s tweet from last week’s Barclay’s Energy conference in New York with a picture of the Transocean CEO presenting to an almost empty conference hall. Transocean is an offshore sector favorite, and the stock is up over 120% in the past 12 months. That was the moment that my concerns about publishing an idea in an already ‘crowded’ theme were more than overblown. Clearly a very small echo chamber! Us offshore fans may have been enjoying the proverbial ‘party for one’! [Blind Squirrel Macro]
• In reference to established dyslipidemia criteria, this study showed that higher TC and LDL-C were independently and paradoxically associated with lower risk of all-cause mortality and longer survival time in men. Along with previous reports, these novel findings support a rigorous reevaluation of evidence on dyslipidemia and health risks. [PLOS]
• There is a positive correlation between infant vaccines and infant mortality rates. This relationship is most pronounced in analyses of the most highly developed homogenous nations but is attenuated in background noise in analyses of nations with heterogeneous socioeconomic variables. Health authorities in all nations have an obligation to determine whether their immunization schedules are achieving desired goals. More investigations into the health outcomes of vaccinated vs. unvaccinated populations and the effect of vaccinations on all-cause mortality are imperative. [NLM]