Almost nobody has heard of Maurice Hilleman, but everyone should know his name. As Radiolab said, “his work is estimated to save about 8 million lives a year… he was the greatest scientist of the 20th century… We live longer…
Blog Archives
Guns, Toilets, and Steel: Different customs regarding humanure explain a lot of the differences in economic development.
The Humanure Handbook, by Joseph Jenkins, is a pioneering guide for people who want a simple composting toilet system. I have used toilets that were inspired by the Handbook both in Guatemala and at a community a couple hours drive…
Posted in Development
Corporations see a high-income world even though it is mainly middle-income
OpenStax is another high-quality open-source economics textbook provider and they produced a graph comparing the distribution of global income versus the distribution of global population. Hans Rosling found that most people incorrectly think that most of the world is poor,…
Posted in Development, Globalization & International
How did the printing press revolutionize the world?
Writing changed the world by allowing one author to communicate with thousands of people. Even though only a few readers could read at the same time, a writing is a memory that can be preserved without corruption for decades and…
Posted in Development
Fact checking Vox’s new product placement series. (They blew it on Pedialyte.)
Vox.com has a new series called The Goods whose first article has the kind of journalistic quality (or lack thereof) you would expect in a series that seems to be purely about product placement. The article, by Kaitlyn Tiffany, is about…
Posted in Development, Health
If there were a collapse of civilization, could people go back to hunting for survival?
I talk about some of history’s horrible famines in my economic development classes and the difficulty of getting enough food in Malthusian societies. Sometimes, some of my students ask why people starved rather than going out to hunt for food.…
Posted in Development
The biggest health achievement in the United States in the last half century?
Kristof @ NYT: Let’s break for a quiz: What was the biggest health care breakthrough in the last 40 years in the United States? Heart bypasses? CAT scans and M.R.I.’s? New cancer treatments? No, it was the cigarette tax. Every…
Posted in Health, Millionaire Superheroes
Medianism 