Hamas, The Houthis, Hezbollah, Iran, And ISIS-K

Hamas and the Houthis have provoked the responses that they predictably received with wide popular support for their actions.

The decision of Hamas to conduct the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel still had strong majority support among Gazans months after the attack when the devastating consequences of that decision were clear. 

Likewise, the Houthi attacks on shipping and U.S. warships in the Red Sea are a boost to Houthi political support and legitimacy in the parts of Southern Yemen which it controls that is home to 70% of the population of Yemen, despite the fact that the insurgency it has waged there has led to a catastrophic humanitarian disaster there.

Every bit of Israeli and Western military response in Gaza and against the Houthis was deliberately provoked and had broad popular support. In both places, large majorities actively wanted to inflict harm on the U.S. and to obliterate Israel entirely. And, Gaza also continues to keep 100 or so Israeli hostages and has done nothing to surrender.

So, in both cases, while there is clearly significant suffering and plenty of people in each place, like children did nothing to deserve it, neither population is very sympathetic. Each of them brought what they are experiencing upon themselves through deliberate provocation and evil conduct. 

Iran's Role

Of course, Iran is to blame too, for giving them firepower and intelligence that they otherwise would have lacked, and for egging them on behind the scenes. Iran has played a similar role in providing capabilities for and egging on Hezbollah which has waged war on Israel for Lebanon for decades, and Shiite Islamic militias in Iraq and Syria.

Iran's role in world affairs is complicated. 

The war in Yemen is a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia to a great extent, yet the two countries recently reached a Chinese brokered peace accord. China is also looking to strengthen its ties to the Houthis as a way to exempt its own merchants from Houthi piracy. China has previously joined naval coalitions against Somalian pirates in the same region. On the other hand, China is lukewarm toward Russia since it can't alienate its Western trading partners too badly, and has pulled back a majority of of expatriates and economic investments in Africa in the last five years or so, after having spent years trying to build economic and political influence in Africa and across the second and third worlds.

Iran is a key military supplier and source of military technology for both Russia and North Korea as a result of the military industrial capabilities it was forced to develop for itself after decades of Western sanctions. It probably has a few nuclear weapons, has proven it has long range missile capabilities, and its naval might in the Persian Gulf is rivaled upon plausible U.S. naval adversaries only by Russia, China, and North Korea. Iran has also not refrained from using its military capabilities on occasion and has designs on making Shiite majority Iraq into one of its client states.

Yet, Iran reached a treaty, from which Trump promptly withdrew, with the U.S. during President Obama's administration. Its democracy, while flawed and subject to a theoretic veto, is more of a real democracy than most of the Middle East and West Asia. While Iran presented itself to the world as a Shiite theocracy, it actually have considerable religious diversity and is almost as far along the path towards secularism as places like the U.S. and Ireland in terms of grass roots belief, even though the waning religious conservatives have the upper hand in terms of political power. Iran would be a natural place for an Islamic analog to the modernizing Protestant Reformation in Europe to emerge under the right circumstances. Iran has oil wealth, but unlike many other reasonably developed Islamic countries, also has a substantial commercial and manufacturing sector, leaving it in circumstances that have more in common with Turkey and Egypt, than with Saudi Arabia and UAE and Brunei which are dominated by oil wealth, or Yemen and Afghanistan which have little more than subsistence farming interrupted by long periods of civil war.

Israel's Overkill

Israel's response in Gaza has probably been overkill although it is also completely understandable. Hamas and kindred Islamist movements in Gaza, the West Bank, and across the Middle East have been trying to exterminate Israel and to wipe Jews from the face of the Earth almost since its inception in 1948. When Israel gave Gaza more autonomy and withdrew from direct supervision of the region, the Palestinians put Hamas in charge and Israel got terrorist bombings, endless rocket attacks, and the October 7 massacre in return.

President Biden treads the difficult path of not adding aid and comfort to those who would destroy Israel, while simultaneously trying to mitigate humanitarian suffering in Gaza. And, contrary to the views of many on the left, Israel is not just an American puppet that is compelled to do the bidding of an American President in response to an existential threat to it and its people.

About ISIS-K

As an aside, the terrorist attacked recently carried out at a concert in Moscow that killed about 144 people and seriously injured at least 100 more was the work of four Tajik terrorists affiliated with ISIS-K. ISIS-K is one of the main opponents of the Taliban in Afghanistan, although they obviously have no problem with the idea of an Islamist theocracy. 

ISIS-K stands for Islamic State - Khorasan, a reference to the 7th and 8th century CE kingdom in what is now Islamic Central Asia that included "western Afghanistan, northeastern Iran, the eastern halves of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, western Tajikistan, and portions of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan." The region was first united under the pre-Islamic Sasanian Persian empire, and then became part of the first two Sunni Islamic Caliphates:

First established in the 6th century as one of four administrative (military) divisions by the Sasanian Empire, the scope of the region has varied considerably during its nearly 1,500-year history. Initially, the Khorasan division of the Sasanian Empire covered the northeastern military gains of the empire. . . .With the rise of the Umayyad Caliphate, the designation was inherited and likewise stretched as far as their military gains in the east, starting off with the military installations at Nishapur and Merv, slowly expanding eastwards into Tokharistan and Sogdia. Under the Caliphs, Khorasan was the name of one of the three political zones under their dominion (the other two being Eraq-e Arab "Arabic Iraq" and Eraq-e Ajam "Non-Arabic Iraq or Persian Iraq"). Under the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, Khorasan was divided into four major sections or quarters (rub′), each section based on a single major city: Nishapur, Merv, Herat and Balkh.

The Abbasid Caliphate gots its start in Khorasan around 750 CE, was a high water mark of the Islamic empire in a golden age which lasted more than five centuries until 1258 CE, and persisted in some form for more than two and a half centuries after that, until the 1517 CE when the Ottoman Empire replaced them. The Ottomans, in turn, were the most powerful Islamic country in the world and expanded well into the Balkans, for centuries, but then faded in a long, slow decline, until it fell, roughly the end of World War I, when the current politics of the Middle East began when the colonial powers that won in World War I drew the boundaries of the modern Middle Eastern states and picked the rulers for those countries.

The Abbasid Caliphate or Abbasid Empire (/əˈbæsɪd/ or /ˈæbəsɪd/; Arabic: الْخِلَافَة الْعَبَّاسِيَّة, romanized: al-Khilāfa al-ʿAbbāsiyya) was the third caliphate to succeed the Islamic prophet Muhammad. It was founded by a dynasty descended from Muhammad's uncle, Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib (566–653 CE), from whom the dynasty takes its name. They ruled as caliphs for most of the caliphate from their capital in Baghdad in modern-day Iraq, after having overthrown the Umayyad Caliphate in the Abbasid Revolution of 750 CE (132 AH). The Abbasid Revolution had its origins and first successes in the easterly region of Khorasan, far from the bases of Umayyad power in Syria and Iraq. The Abbasid Caliphate first centered its government in Kufa, modern-day Iraq, but in 762 the caliph Al-Mansur founded the city of Baghdad, near the ancient Babylonian capital city of Babylon and Persian city of Ctesiphon. Baghdad became the center of science, culture, and invention in what became known as the Golden Age of Islam. This, in addition to housing several key academic institutions, including the House of Wisdom, as well as a multiethnic and multi-religious environment, garnered it an international reputation as the "Centre of Learning".

The Abbasid period was marked by dependence on Persian bureaucrats (such as the Barmakid family) for governing the territories as well as an increasing inclusion of non-Arab Muslims in the ummah (Muslim community). Persian customs were broadly adopted by the ruling elite, and they began patronage of artists and scholars. Since much support for the Abbasids came from Persian converts, it was natural for the Abbasids to take over much of the Persian tradition of government. Despite this initial cooperation, the Abbasids of the late 8th century had alienated both non-Arab mawali (clients) and Persian bureaucrats.

The political power of the caliphs was limited with the rise of the Iranian Buyids and the Seljuq Turks, who captured Baghdad in 945 and 1055, respectively. Although Abbasid leadership over the vast Islamic empire was gradually reduced to a ceremonial religious function in much of the caliphate, the dynasty retained control of its Mesopotamian domain during the rule of Caliph al-Muqtafi and extended into Iran during the reign of Caliph al-Nasir. The Abbasids' age of cultural revival and fruition ended in 1258 with the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols under Hulagu Khan and the execution of al-Musta'sim. The Abbasid line of rulers, and Muslim culture in general, re-centred themselves in the Mamluk capital of Cairo in 1261. Though lacking in political power (with the brief exception of Caliph al-Musta'in of Cairo), the dynasty continued to claim religious authority until a few years after the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517, with the last Abbasid caliph being Al-Mutawakkil III.

And, as an aside, who were the Sasanians? 

The Sasanian Empire or Sassanid Empire, also known as the Second Persian Empire or Neo-Persian Empire, was the last Iranian empire before the early Muslim conquests of the 7th to 8th centuries. Named after the House of Sasan, it endured for over four centuries, from 224 to 651, making it the second longest-lived Persian imperial dynasty after the Arsacids of the Parthian Empire.

Ireland Is Not That Well Off

It is widely known that traditional definitions of gross domestic product exaggerate the economic productivity of Ireland (and other tax shelter countries).

Of course, you may have heard that Ireland’s GDP is massively overstated. And indeed it is . . . if you look at a . . . recent graph of Irish GDP, it soars to ridiculous heights — over $100,000 per person. The country is rich, but it’s not that rich.

A recent article in The Economist explains what’s going on. Ireland’s GDP is overstated for two main reasons. First, and most importantly, Ireland is a famous tax haven — its low corporate income tax rates give multinational companies an incentive to book as much of their profit as possible at their Irish subsidiaries. For European companies, this usually required actually relocating their activities to Ireland, but the U.S. has a strange corporate tax system that allows companies like Google and Apple to engage in various other schemes to book profits in Ireland without actually doing anything substantial in the country, inflating Ireland’s GDP. A second piece of weirdness was aircraft leasing, whose statistical treatment doesn’t make a lot of sense.

From here. 

Zoning Laws Have Seriously Depressed U.K. New Home Construction

A zoning law adopted in 1947 in the U.K. has dramatically reduced the number of new homes built there since then. 

The U.K. is at the bottom of the heap in new housing construction in Europe as a result and this have been gradually and less gradually getting worse since the new zoning law was adopted in 1947. Only Ireland has fared comparably poorly. See also here discussing the same report.

The Demography Of Northern Ireland's First Century

Northern Ireland has becoming more Catholic and less opposed to union with the Republic of Ireland over the last century. 

In part, this is because Catholics had more children than Protestants for a long period of time, although this distinction has slowed to almost nothing, and was counterbalanced before that by emigration from Northern Ireland. 

In part, this is because the Irish Catholic identity has been more stable than the Irish Protestant identity which has trended towards secularism and an Irish identity.

While there are more Catholics than Protestants in Ireland, however, neither is a majority because a significant number of Northern Irish people, 17.4% (disproportionately from Protestant backgrounds), are not religious. About 46% of the non-religious people in Northern Ireland in 2021 were raised that way, while the rest were overwhelmingly raised either Protestant (in most cases) or Catholic (in a much smaller percentage of cases).

In contrast, in the United States, large numbers of people raised both as white Protestants and as white Catholics now identify as having "no religion" consistent with the maxim that a religion that protects a threatened culture thrives relative to a religion that is associated with an establishment culture.

Northern Ireland’s boundaries were drawn up with the explicit aim of creating a two-to-one Protestant majority. At the 1926 census, the first after the war ended, Catholics made up only 35.5% of the province’s population. . . . until relatively recently both groups were largely insulated from other demographic shocks like intermarriage and immigration. (As recently as 2001, Northern Ireland was >99% white, one of the highest proportions in the world; the number today is still very high, at just under 97%.) . . . The Protestant majority was relatively stable for the first forty years or so of Northern Irish history, because a higher Catholic birth rate was offset by higher rates of Catholic emigration; 60% of Northern Irish emigrants before the Troubles were Catholic. However, entering into the 1960s, Catholic emigration fell, and the balance of population began to shift: by 1971, the Catholic population had grown to about 40%. . . . As the Troubles rolled on, Catholic Northerners continued to have more children than their Protestant counterparts. And with a minor baby boom after the peace agreement in 1998, the shift in the province’s demographics has continued apace, especially as the Protestant population has declined in absolute terms. Despite their traditional dominance of Northern Irish politics, since the 2017 election unionist parties (largely supported by Protestants) have been a minority in the Northern Ireland Assembly; and a century after the establishment of Northern Ireland as a Protestant state, the 2021 census showed Catholics outnumbering Protestants for the first time. With Sinn Féin today the largest party in the Assembly . . . many are already suggesting that a united Ireland is now inevitable. . . . While Northern Catholics emigrated much more than Northern Protestants, the disparity is not so stark when we compare them with Southern Catholics, who were also leaving Ireland in droves before the 1960s (at a rate much higher than the small number of Southern Protestants). Northern Catholic emigration was part of a broader history of high levels of Irish Catholic emigration north and south, both before and after the creation of Northern Ireland in 1921; discrimination certainly did not encourage Catholic population growth, but it wasn’t the main driver of emigration. Likewise, the idea that Northern Catholic emigration slowed in the 1960s because of an imposition of welfare and minimal equality from London is hard to square with Southern emigration also declining in the late 1950s and early 1960s. . . . 

The decline in Catholic fertility has tempered the change in demographics: between 2011 and 2021, the Catholic or Catholic background share of the Northern Irish population increased by only 0.6 percentage points (from 45.1% to 45.7%). And indeed, the share of the vote given to Irish nationalist parties in Northern Ireland Assembly elections did not increase significantly over this period (it was just over 41% in 2011, and about 40% in 2022). . . . 

[T]he Alliance Party (a social liberal party which is officially neutral on a united Ireland) more than doubled its seat count in 2022 to become the third-largest party, winning 13.5% of the vote—up from 7.7% in 2011, and only 3.7% back in 2003. This has largely been driven by the affluent and by young people, groups of voters who increasingly feel disconnected from the traditional political and religious categories. Increasingly, people have begun to feel that their political goals and projects can’t be captured by either political tradition, unionism or Irish nationalism. This change is not happening symmetrically, however: the rise of the ‘others’ has eaten much more into the Protestant population than the Catholic one. Unionism is on the decline politically, with unionist parties receiving 40% of the vote in 2022 compared to nearly 47% in 2011, due in no small part to the success of the Alliance Party in affluent Protestant areas. Indeed, Alliance is much stronger east of the River Bann (a traditional dividing line between Catholic-heavy and Protestant-heavy regions), and has struggled with candidate quality in Catholic-heavy areas. And, especially in response to Brexit, more people (especially young people) from a Protestant background are identifying themselves as ‘Irish’ as well as (or instead of) ‘British’ or ‘Northern Irish’. Some of this is being driven by secularisation, which is happening in a lopsided manner in Northern Ireland. Of those who said they had no religion in 2011, a majority identified as British, and over two-thirds identified either as British or Northern Irish; only 14% thought of themselves as Irish compared to 28.4% of the general population, which suggests that those from a Protestant background are secularising more quickly than their Catholic counterparts. Or at least, secularisation in Catholic communities had less of an impact on cultural identity and political beliefs.

From here. A final footnote in the source states:

Note: this essay was written before the crosstabulations were released for the 2021 census; you can find more up-to-date data here.

The top line religion result for Northern Ireland in 2021 is as follows:

Also notably, Irish just became an official language of Northern Ireland once the relevant provision come into force, with the passage of the "Identity and Language (Northern Ireland) Act 2022" on December 6, 2022.

Corporate Taxes, Immigration, And Economic Growth In Ireland

Ireland's corporate taxes are soaring and so its economy is also surging. Recent loose immigration rules have no doubt contributed - half of the foreign born population of Ireland arrived in the last five years providing it with a surge of fit immigrants whose talents power economic growth.

But, it isn't clear how much its role has a tax haven for multinational companies seeking to shelter income from international taxes by putting "hot assets" like intellectual property upon which royalties are due distorts the GDP growth cited in this story. Ireland's government itself essentially keeps two sets of books to address this distortion for internal policy-making purposes, because the tax sheltered assets make Ireland look more affluent than it actually is even though it isn't doing horribly. But, the increased corporate tax revenues are less subject to manipulation.

The republic is enjoying a €8bn corporate tax windfall after bumper pandemic-enhanced revenues from tech and pharmaceutical companies. The tax take from companies attracted by Ireland’s 12.5 per cent corporate rate has soared since 2015 and leapt a further 30 per cent last year compared with 2020.

Ireland’s economy expanded by 6.3 per cent over the second quarter, against an EU average of just 0.6 per cent. So great was the impact from multinationals that Ireland’s numbers distorted EU figures, despite the nation of 5.1mn making up less than 3 per cent of the region’s economy.

Here is more from the FT.

From Marginal Revolution. 

The comments to the Marginal Revenue article quoting the Financial Times article note that in Ireland:

Half of corporate tax receipts of €15.3bn last year came from just 10 companies — among them Apple, Google, Intel, Meta, Amazon and Pfizer.

Wikipedia and Legal Research

A study in Ireland found that cases cited in Wikipedia were 20% more likely to be cited by trial court judges than cases not cited in Wikipedia.

Where Do People Use Top Sheets and Why?

Where do people use top sheets?

In the British Isles (i.e. Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England, plus some small islands in the vicinity) people don't use top sheets. They put a fitted sheet on a bed and a duvet with a duvet cover which is washed from time to time. This practice is pretty much universal in the British Isles from the cheapest hostel or AirBnB, to the most deluxe four star hotel, and pretty much everything in between.

This is also the predominant practice in some of Northern Europe (including all or most of Scandinavia) although I don't have detailed geographic boundaries for this practice worldwide.

In the U.S. and Australia, in contrast, people put a fitted sheet on a bed, then a matching top sheet, and then on top of the top sheet, a bedcover, a quilt, or a comforters (a.k.a. duvet) usually without a duvet cover.

If I recall correctly, they also use top sheets in New Zealand, even though parts of its are cooler than the U.S. and Australia in the summer, probably mostly out of cultural influences from the U.S. and Australia.

Why does this happen?

The key point is that summers in the British Isles and much of Northern Europe aren't very hot. The average high in July in London, near the southern end of the geographic range of this practice, is 72º F.

There is no place in Australia that is that cool in the summer (a season it experiences when it is winter in the Northern hemisphere).

There is only one major American city that is that cool in July: Anchorage, Alaska, where the average high in July is 65º F (although San Francisco has the same average high temperature in July at London, as does Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada).

Basically every major city in the continental U.S. (even in Maine and Washington State) and Hawaii and in other U.S. territories is warmer than London in July, although a few high elevation mountain towns are an exception.

In places that are warmer than London in the summer, it is frequently too hot at night for a duvet or comforter to make sense, especially if one is trying to be thrifting by not using excessive air conditioning only to warm yourself against the air conditioning with insulation at night. 

In middle latitudes of the U.S. interior in places like Denver and Cincinnati, it is frequently too hot for a comforter from sometime in May until sometime in September. Further south, the comforter season is even shorter. Further north, it is a little longer.

On the the other hand, even if it is too warm for a comforter, people in the U.S. and Australia often still like to have something over them while they sleep, both for modesty and to keep out the occasional flies, gnats and mosquitos that manages to make it into the house. Some people find that having something on top of them while they are in bed also helps them to sleep.

Often, to keep the bed pretty when it is made and not being used, people in the U.S. or Australia will also add a pretty bed cover such as quilt or thin, not very warm blanket. But, the top sheet is necessary to avoid having to clean the quilt or blanket (or in colder months the uncovered comforter or duvet) in the laundry on a regular basis because it prevents the harder to clean fabric from being exposed to sweat and smells. 

The duvet cover fills that role in cooler climates, and since it is very rarely too warm to use a duvet at night in the places where this is the common practice, they is no need to have top sheets as a substitute for duvet covers when it is warmer.

Reflections On Ireland and Wales

On the occasion of my son finishing a semester away at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, our family traveled to visit him and see sights in Ireland, and since it was close, England and Wales as well. 

* After previous raids by Vikings and earlier kings failed, the English Normans came to rule Ireland with an iron fist for about 800 years and have ruled Wales from the late 1200s (Castle Conway was built by a Norman King of England in 1282) until the present. For most of the time since then, these linguistically and culturally Celtic people were second class citizens in their own countries.

After all this time, both the English and the Welsh deeply resent this period. Particularly resented were efforts by Norman landlords and then by Victorian era public schools to eradicate Irish Gaelic and the Welsh language, the seizure of lands from the Irish and Welsh people, and the indifference of the English to the Irish potato famine.

Irish Gaelic is a mandatory subject now in public schools in the Republic of Ireland and is present on all public signs. The Welsh language is resurgent in Wales where it is a mandatory subject in public schools (in the North with Welsh as the primary language of instruction) with about 30% of the population (more than 800,000 people) who either speak it as a first language (which is common among the very old and among young people in Northern Wales) by people who are mostly bilingual with English (but may reach for an English word or two now and then) or as a fluent second language. The Republic of Ireland, of course, is now an independent country within the European Union, Northern Ireland is now an almost fully self-governing region within the United Kingdom, and Wales, while subject to generally applicable English laws, also has its own regional government. There is a community of several thousand Welsh speakers in Argentina. All signs in Wales are bilingual (and short on recognizable vowels, in part, because Y and W and some double consonant letters in Welsh are vowels). Welsh has been attested in writing since before Anglo-Saxon was.

The Republic of Ireland gained independence in its current territory formally in December of 1922 by an Anglo-Irish Treaty entered into a year earlier to end the Irish War of Independence starting in 1919 that lasted two and a half years, although in terms of national identity and consciousness, the most formative and pivotal event in the history of the modern Republic of Ireland is the Easter Uprising of 1916. There was an off again, on again military insurgency in Northern Ireland from about 1956-1997 but the Belfast Agreement also known as the Good Friday Agreement or Good Friday Accords was reached in 1998 together with subsequent agreements and legislation effectively ended the insurgency led by Catholics pushing to unite the island of Ireland into a single country.

Northern Ireland is much less racially and ethnically diverse than the rest of Ireland (although like the Republic of Ireland. most of its non-native Irish population has arrived only recently). It is only slightly more Protestant than Catholic, and has strong geographic differentiation in terms of religious affiliation. Per Wikipedia:

The population of Northern Ireland has risen yearly since 1978. The population in 2011 was 1.8 million, having grown 7.5% over the previous decade from just under 1.7 million in 2001. This constitutes just under 3% of the population of the UK (62 million) and just over 28% of the population of the island of Ireland (6.3 million). The population density is 132 inhabitants / km2. Most of the population of Northern Ireland lives concentrated in its five largest cities: Belfast (capital), Derry, Lisburn, Newtownabbey and Bangor.

The population of Northern Ireland is almost entirely white (98.2%). In 2011, 88.8% of the population were born in Northern Ireland, with 4.5% born elsewhere in the United Kingdom, and 2.9% born in the Republic of Ireland. 4.3% were born elsewhere; triple the amount there were in 2001. Most are from Eastern Europe. The largest non-white ethnic groups were Chinese (6,300) and Indian (6,200). Black people of various origins made up 0.2% of the 2011 population and people of mixed ethnicity also made up 0.2%.

At the 2011 census, 41.5% of the population identified as Protestant/non-Roman Catholic Christian, 41% as Roman Catholic, and 0.8% as non-Christian, while 17% identified with no religion or did not state one. The biggest of the Protestant/non-Roman Catholic Christian denominations were the Presbyterian Church (19%), the Church of Ireland (14%) and the Methodist Church (3%). In terms of community background (i.e. religion or religion brought up in), 48% of the population came from a Protestant background, 45% from a Catholic background, 0.9% from non-Christian backgrounds, and 5.6% from non-religious backgrounds.

Data point: at the time the Irish Republic was declared, only 5% of the land in Ireland was owned by Irish people.

Data point: the Irish potato famine a.k.a. the Great Famine (1845-1849) led to a million deaths and a million and a half emigrants from Ireland with Ireland's population not yet restored to pre-famine levels. When aid started to arrive, in the form of meager porridge from India, Irish people had to work for it by building "pity walls" on mountains made out of rock that served absolutely no purpose for a penny a week and one meal of porridge a day. Food was shipped out of Ireland by British landlords while people starved to death. Rural Ireland is full of famine houses, abandoned or ruined little cottages whose inhabitants died or emigrated leaving their homes behind. Whole counties in Western Ireland were heavily depopulated, with government promotional programs in the last four or five decades finally repopulating them, largely as vacation cottage spots. 

Ireland's population continued to decline after the famine to a low in the 1931 census of 4.21 million (including Northern Ireland), after the famine, mostly due to emigration driven by economic factors from a mostly rural country to other indusrializing countries. This was roughly a 50% decline from Ireland's true peak population which it probably reached in 1844 to 1931.

Ireland’s population was estimated to be 5.01 million in April 2021, which is the first time the population has risen above 5 million since the 1851 census, when the comparable population was 5.11 million . . .

The total population on the island of Ireland in 1851 was 6.6 million. Including today’s Northern Ireland population of 1.89 million, the island now has 6.9 million people.

As of 2021, the island of Ireland had still not recovered to its 1841 census pre-potato famine population of 8.2 million (according to the census, but the actual figure may be nearer 8.5 million), let alone its actual peak population in 1844.

The projected peak population for the island of Ireland as a whole is about 8.6-8.8 million (very close to the 1844 peak, which it may or may not ever reach), in about 2070, and its population is predicted to more or less level off with only the slightest growth after 2050, although predicting migration and fertility trends in this long timeframe is more art than science.

* Resentment in Scotland towards England is apparently not as great as the United Kingdom was formed first by the personal union of monarchs from 1603 (under King James VI of Scotland a.k.a. King James I of England) followed by a federal style merger of governments approved by the Scottish and English parliaments in 1706-1707, rather than by conquest and it has much more government autonomy in generally applicable legislation and its judicial system than Wales does, and more than Ireland had when it was ruled by England. Scotland is also less culturally distinct from England than Ireland or Wales, although it certainly has many distinctions.

On the other hand, Scottish sentiment towards independence was in the last referendum in 2014 when 44.7% of votes cast were for independence with 84.6% voter turnout (even though the franchise was expanded down to sixteen year olds) and to E.U. and Commonwealth citizens residing there who were not U.K. citizens, in a pre-Brexit vote where a desire to stay in the E.U. was a major force for the independence vote. Of course, an independence vote wouldn't have been the end of the story because the terms of a split are much less obvious than the terms of a merger of countries.

* Ireland and Northern Ireland, after a long period of free immigration (including all of the U.K.'s E.U. membership pre-Brexit and under treaties before then), and no real language barriers, is very well sorted. People who want to be in the Republican of Ireland live there. People who want to live in Northern Ireland live there. There is little pent up demand to relocate from one to the other.

* The Anglican Church was disestablished in Wales in 1916, and Wales historically had favored non-Anglican, non-Catholic churches, typically with decentralized organization, especially Methodists. The Anglican Church is likewise not the established church of Scotland.

* Only about 8% of people in the U.K. attend religious services at least weekly, and Muslim immigrants and Christian immigrants make up a disproportionate share of this 8%, even though the England has an established church.

* One Irish national treasure which we saw (at the Trinity College Old Library) is the Book of Kells, an ornately illustrated version of the four Gospels in Latin from the 800s, around the time Colorado has the last drought as severe as its current one. The re-Christianization of Europe after the fall of Roman was commenced in Ireland and is associated with Saint Patrick. Monks were a major source of European influence on Ireland prior to the Normans.

* Ireland had bears in the Mesolithic era that early Mesolithic hunter-gatherers there killed off.

* Galway, Ireland was a trading post originally run by fourteen Norman clans known as tribes that assimilated many locals until they were "more Irish than the Irish", trading with France and Spain, for example, from a fortified city.

* In Ireland, the vast majority of structures, from buildings to fences, are made of stone or metal or concrete. Wood has, at least historically been very scarce, partially due to Viking raids that used available trees as lumber for their boats until it was gone, and partially due to poor soil and/or weather conditions for forests. Most deciduous trees are protected by law, although there are some small, recent, intentionally grown pine forests that do well in acidic soils and grow quickly.

* Ireland is served quite comprehensively by transit, mostly well utilized double decker buses with heavy use even in small towns and suburbs, and an intercity rail system in railcars that runs trains many times a day on each route, with passenger cars similar to Denver's commuter rail lines (but with diesel engines) without checked luggage, cabins or food and drink service, and speeds roughly identical to travel by its biggest highways (about 52 miles per hour including time spent at stops on the line from Dublin to Galway, for example, with a peak speed of 100 miles per hjour), and very reasonable prices (equivalent to about $20 U.S. per person for a 130 mile trip, with an average of one stop roughly every 9 miles, for example). There is an addition surface tramline in Dublin on a small number of routes with cars more suited to getting people quickly on and off. Most cities have pedestrian only districts, are bike friendly, and are designed for lots of walking. Alcohol is prohibited on all forms of public transit and in transit stations. A single monopoly firm created in 1987 provides all freight and passenger service in Ireland, although it was divided into an infrastructure company and a rolling stock operations company in 2013 and private companies are permitted in theory to operate competing rolling stock operations (and perhaps some do in the freight market now).

For comparison (from a previous post at this blog):

For example, an Amtrak trip from Denver to Grand Junction, Colorado [243 miles by interstate highway] takes 7 hours and 52 minutes. Taking a Greyhound bus would take 4 hours and 20 minutes. The price for a one way trip with no special discounts is identical for Amtrak and Greyhound. Driving a car that 245 miles from rail station to rail station would take 3 hours and 55 minutes, according to Map Quest.

The only high speed intercity passenger rail system in the United States right now, is Amtrak's Acela Express service from Washington D.C. to Boston, along the Northeast corridor (the only part of Amtrak that makes an operating profit) on rail lines dedicated to passenger service. Outside the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak shares rail lines with the freight rail system which owns and maintains the lines.

A trip for the entire length of the Acela line takes six and a half hours (an average of 69 miles an hour with peak speeds of 150 miles per hour) and serves sixteen stops. The roughly 450 mile trip would take about 7 hours, 50 minutes to traverse by car (an average of about 58 miles an hour mostly on urban interstates).

Irish Rail ticket prices are similar to historical Colorado Department of Transportation FLEX and FREX intercity bus service. It is about 45% of Amtrak and Greyhound bus service for similar distances outside the Northeast Corridor at significantly slower speeds (although the dollar is currently exceptionally strong via the Euro and it would probably average closer to 50%), even though Irish rail is similar to Acela service in average speed, a U.S. service which is considerably more expensive (which is still much slower than high speed rail lines in Continental Europe, Japan and China). Also, Ireland's fastest combinations of highways for trips comparable to these rail trips are about 10-15% slower than travel by road in U.S. Also essentially all domestic trips one can take in Ireland are too short for commercial air travel to be competitive with cars, buses, and rail, because air travel has more fixed per trip time of getting to the airport, going through security, boarding, deplaning, and getting from the airport to your destination - it has no truly long haul domestic trips, and international trips must involve either a ferry ride of at least two and a half hours at 23-46 miles per hour, or air travel.

As a reference point, Ireland has a similar population density to Indiana, Georgia, Michigan, South Carolina and Tennessee (#16-#20 among U.S states). Wales has about a similar population density to Ohio and California (#10-#11 among U.S. states). England has a similar population density to Connecticut (#4 among U.S. states). Colorado ($37 among U.S. states), which is similar in land area and dimensions to Ireland has about a third of Ireland's population density. Here is a map of population density as of 2011 in Ireland and Great Britain (via Wikipedia scale is in people per square km):

* Public transit (mostly double decker buses) is also heavily used in Wales, with small towns and rural areas full of bus stops even in front of farmer's fields or isolated cottages.

* We have used almost every means of transportation on our trip: walking, pony trap, small ferry boat, gigantic roll on-roll off ferry, public city double decker bus, tour bus, airport shuttle, intercity Irish rail, commercial airliner, rental car (including via a lengthy underwater tunnel), London taxi, elevators, and escalators. We will also use the London Underground, moving sidewalks, and a London commuter rail service before we leave. We saw in use, but didn't use ourselves on  this trip: horse riding, blimps, helicopters, two wheeled electric lime scooters, handicapped transit scooters, human-powered tricycle taxis, bicycles, motorcycles, and Vespa-style scooters.

* Gasoline in Ireland and the U.K. costs about twice what it does in the U.S. (equivalent to about $8 per gallon). In the U.K. the main kinds of gasoline are E-10 (95 octane) and E-5 (99 octane). Gas taxes are high and are a percentage so they go up automatically when prices rise. Rental cars are scarce in the U.K. Most rental cars are manual transmission as are 85% of personal motor vehicles in Europe (although that percentage is falling).

* Potholes are rare in both countries where roads tend to be in good repair. Both countries have narrower roads than they U.S., especially the U.K. Roundabouts are more common than stoplights (rare roundabouts have stoplights of their own). You have to be 30 years old to rent a car at most places in the U.K.

* The first significant intercity road built in England and Wales after the fall of the Roman Empire was built in 1801 (by a Scottish engineer).

* Tipping is rare and modest in both countries where people are paid a regular decent wage and not the U.S. $2ish minimum wage for tipped employees, but some places have mandatory "service fees" of up to 12.5%.

* The value added tax in both countries is quite high but invisible since prices are quoted post-tax.

* The lack of a tip and additional sales tax makes quoted prices for Euros and British pounds more comparable to U.S. prices than you'd expect, also given the very strong dollar when we visited (a Euro was $1.04 U.S.D. and a British pound was $1.22 U.S.D.).

* Ireland has fully converted to metric (except for pints of beer). The U.K. still uses miles in its cars and for distances and speeds on roadsigns.

* Immigration is very quick, low key, and nonchalant in both the Dublin airport and the port for the Irish ferry at Holyhead. But the Dublin airport has a serious staff shortage and is not well run. Almost no one there ever answers their phones at either the airlines or the airport itself. To deal with a luggage problem there we had to call the U.S., where the call was handled from India by a person not familiar with the conditions on the ground, and the airline ticket agents couldn't call the airline baggage handling line. Incidentally, I heard ordinary people conversing in Irish Gaelic in the luggage area (this is also popular with Irish students visiting abroad to afford them privacy). 

* Many places in Ireland and the U.K. have regular sized USB charging ports (as opposed to micro-USB or USB-C) in addition to, or instead of, regular electrical outlets (of the G-type).

* A lot of water and space heating in Ireland and the U.K. is electric, rather than natural gas or heating oil based.

* Ireland generates about 48% with natural gas (96% imported by pipeline from Scotland that is part of a European network), about 14% from coal, about 7% from local peat, and the balance from renewables and other local biofuels. In England and Wales, most renewables are from giant industrial wind turbines both off shore and on land, serving utilities. In Ireland, lots of renewables are grass roots operations serving a home or business or farm.

* The Irish invented whiskey (a term that is derived from a mispronunciation of its Irish Gaelic name). Irish monks brought distillation technology from Moorish Spain. Initially it was used for "pot liquor" involving distillation of barley alone. What makes this grain alcohol into whiskey (from which you must remove the methanol produced first in the distillation process) and gives it its brownish color, is aging in barrels. Bourbon is made with never before used oak barrels in most cases. Whiskey is often made in bourbon barrels, but wine casks or sherry casks are sometimes used instead with a different color or taste. Three years of aging is the minimum for Scotland, three years and a day (to one up Scotland) is the minimum for Irish Whiskey, and more aging is used for premium whiskeys. Malted grains were originally used. Blended whiskeys were developed in response to taxes targeted at pure malted grains. Irish whiskey was originally made with three rounds of labor intensive small batch distillation, and efforts to make it with a mass produced continuously distillation process resulted in lawsuits declaring that product fraudulent to describe as whiskey until parliament legislatively redefined whiskey to allow it.

In the late 1800s, there was a whiskey (and beer brewing) boom in Ireland with hundred of small distilleries in the 1890s. But faced with cheaper Scottish mass production, a trade war with England, and prohibition in the U.S. in the 1930s, the industry collapsed to just five Irish distilleries that were united in a loose conglomerate. Bushnell's the dominant Northern Irish Whiskey was founded by a woman. Irish Whiskey recovered with the popularization of Irish Whiskey, served in Irish Coffee, a custom drink for airmen and travelers crossing the Atlantic to and from Europe invented at an airbase in Western Ireland in the 1950s, popularized it and Jamisons was chosen at the brand to market to lead the resurgence, mostly because of its distinctive logo and green bottle. None of the five historic Irish Whisky brands are now owned by Irish people. Jose Cuervo owns one. Another is owned by a Japanese company. Another is owned by a French company. Telling is the largest Irish owned Irish whisky brand.

* Hard cider (of many varieties) is almost as popular as beer in Ireland with beer bought disproportionately by men (and Guinness by far the most popular kind), and cider disproportionately preferred by their female companions, rather than hard seltzers or wine.

* Trinity College is the sole college of the University of Dublin, founded by Queen Elizabeth I in the 1570s with an intent to be home to many colleges like Oxford and Cambridge, that never materialized. The typical undergraduate degree there is a 3 year degree, as in England. Law, dentistry and medicine are all undergraduate degrees although dentistry and medicine take longer (six years if I recall correctly).

* Ireland's population is rapidly becoming more diverse due to immigration. Currently, more than 17% of the population is foreign born (higher in Dublin, lower elsewhere), with 46% of the foreign born residents having lived in Ireland less than five years. The range of places of origin for its immigrant populations is quite diverse since it is not dominated by past colonial ties. Facially, there is less racial and ethnic discrimination in Ireland than in England or the United States, in part, perhaps, due to a lack of history of bad relations, and in part, perhaps due to an Irish self-identity as an oppressed people themselves.

* Wales is also more ethnically diverse than you might expect, mostly spillover from the mix of immigrants found in greater London, despite a large share of the population having lived there for many generations.

* Rural areas in Ireland and Wales tend to be made up of dense small towns, with lots of townhouse development. Wales even has quite attractive mobile home parks (manufactured housing, not RVs).

* Homelessness isn't entirely absent in Ireland or Wales, but eyeballing it, vagrancy is less than 5% of U.S. levels. The government in both places provides housing for all.

* Ireland invests a lot in youth sports. Gaelic sports are run by a national non-profit (the GAA for Gaelic Athletics Association or something similar) that shares all of its profits from its national events with local Gaelic sports non-profits.

* Ireland and Wales both have far fewer chain businesses and big businesses than the U.S. for reasons that aren't entirely clear. There may be legally or regulatory differences, and/or, particularly in Ireland, the fact that there were so few Irish natives at the time of independence with significant net worths to invest in big businesses and an initially ill developed capital market (it is much more mature now) could be factors. I don't know if there are tax or regulatory factors discouraging direct investment in Irish enterprises to prefer local small businesses, although its European Union membership significant limits what it can do in that regard.

* Farms in Ireland are quite small relative to U.S. farms. Cattle and sheep herds per farmer are tiny. Much of the country isn't suitable to grow crops. Fishing is mostly focused on shell fish, lobsters and crabs, although some fish are also harvested.

* Dublin has the feel of a very large small town, even though it is a major metropolitan area, in large part because it has so few high rises even though it has huge sprawls of mid-rise development and fairly high residential density.

* Ireland has a shortage of skilled tradespeople as it faces a current construction boom.

* Sentiment in favor of Ukraine is very strong in Wales where Ukrainian flags are often seen and public sites light their buildings in Ukrainian flags oftentimes. In Ireland, it is even stronger. Ireland was at the forefront of welcoming Ukrainian refugees and I saw several hotels that had shut down regular operations to provide housing to Ukrainian refugees in individual acts of charity.

* Unlike Ireland which is short of trees, Wales is heavily forested. At one point it was depleted for use a lumber, although never that completely, but the English established conservation programs before it was cool for trees in Wales with an intent to build a stockpile for ship construction for military purposes when ships were still made of steel.

* The first major road project in England and Wales since the Romans was in 1801, to build a road by which Irish and Welsh MPs could travel to parliament. A Scottish engineer was hired.

* Government officials in both Ireland and Wales are very earnest although not particularly effectual, and big on propagandistic public service announcements and P.R. campaigns. We were interviewed by an Irish tourism agency official for an in depth survey of our experience before we left.

* Despite its historical reputation as a less affluent country, the Republic of Ireland has a GDP per capita of about 1/3rd more than the U.S., 6th in the world behind only Liechtenstein, Monaco, Luxembourg, Bermuda and Switzerland, at $85,268 per year per capita by World Bank measures, compared to $63,414 per year per capita for the U.S. (the U.N. also ranks it behind the Cayman Islands). It is the only decent sized country other than Switzerland to do so. The World Bank puts the U.K. at less than half its per capita GDP at $41,125 per year per capita. This defies a lot of common sense about what makes a national economy strong. Adjustments for purchasing power parity don't change the rankings or relative amounts much in these comparison. But, much of this is due to distortions associated with being tax havens of which Ireland is to a significant extent. Indeed:

In 2017, Ireland's economic data became so distorted by U.S. multinational tax avoidance strategies (see leprechaun economics), also known as BEPS actions, that Ireland effectively abandoned GDP (and GNP) statistics as credible measures of its economy, and created a replacement statistic called modified gross national income (or GNI*). Ireland is one of the world's largest corporate tax havens.

This inflates Ireland's GDP by about 62% (its modified figure is about 38% lower in a method that makes the modified calculation and GDP the same for a pool of 28 other countries of the E.U., i.e. $52,886). But, even with that adjustment Ireland is still stronger economically per capita than the U.K. and is only 17% lower than the U.S. as a whole (similar to Michigan relative to the U.S. as a whole).

Updated in various parts on May 16, 2022.

Northern Ireland v. Republic Of Ireland

The two sovereignties on the island of Ireland are very well sorted already.

one statistic stands out from a census comparison from the first decade of the twenty-first century. Just 2.1 percent of the population in Northern Ireland were born in the South, and just 1.3 percent living in the South were born in the North.

And that is with rights of free migration.

Via Marginal Revolution. 

Family History, European History, Heredity And My Weight

As part of my weight loss program with Noom.com I also purchased a weight loss focused genetic test, took it and sent it off. I got a notice that my sample was received today by Orig3n, their commercial consumer grade DNA testing affiliate. I've already had DNA testing done by 23andMe and already known my family history with respect to most of the relevant issues, and family history is really still more powerful than DNA testing for discerning hereditary influences on complex traits.

I'll compare what I know from family history and a previous genetic test to the latest appraisal.

What do I know before receiving those results?

Myself

When I graduated from high school, I had a body mass index of 23.4 right in the middle of the "normal weight" range of 18.5 to 24.9. I wasn't particularly mindful of my diet, although I had lots of home cooked family meals, but I was moderately active. 

I was on the town's reaction center's summer swim team from late elementary school until through junior high school, and was on the high school swim team in the summer of my senior year. I also played soccer for many years in elementary school. In terms of athletic performance, I was dismally bad (as in pretty much the worst on every team I participated in for both swimming and soccer), but I was a good sport and tried my best. I was Cub Scout and then a Boy Scout (ultimately earning the Eagle Scout rank my senior year in high school), with the activities and outdoor hiking, camping and boating that this implied, and was involved in every theater production at high school and many of the community theater productions. I also biked around town for transportation and as a paper boy until I could drive late in my sophomore year of high school and in in senior year in high school (I was a foreign student in New Zealand during my junior year in high school and also fairly active then).

Once I was on my own, in college and then in law school, and then as a young lawyer, I was far more sedentary, although I walked to get places around campus, and ate with abandon when I had unlimited food available at the dining halls for all three years of undergrad and my first year at law school, and wasn't a weight conscious cook for myself. I put on a lot of weight in school, and then gradually added more over time.

The DNA test I took previously noted a couple of weight related genetic risk factors noting that my "genes predispose you to weigh about 4% more than average" (based upon a risk score derived from 760 different genetic markers) and that "people of European descent with genetics like yours have an estimated 32% chance of developing type 2 diabetes at some point between the ages of 49 (your current age) and 80." My expected weight for my gender, height, and age implies a BMI of 27.8 (in the overweight, but not obese range). 

Something on the order of 46.4% of American men my age in the United States from the general population are obese (defined as BMI 30.0 or more) without regard to genetics (estimating the cross tabs, adjusting for race as well would bring it down to about 46.1%), so the median is almost surely "overweight" (BMI 25.0 to 29.9) rather than being in the "normal range". About 11.5% of Americans my age in the United States from the general population are severely obese (defined as BMI 40.0 or more), as I was for several months in late 2017 and early 2018, although severe obesity is significantly less common (about a third less) in men than women (so the rate of severe obesity for men my age is probably closer to 10%), even thought men are more likely than women to be obese at all.

Also according to the DNA test that I took previously, my "weight is likely to be similar on diets high or low in saturated fat with the same number of total calories." I am correctly predicted to be lactose tolerant, and so far as I know, all of my genetic relatives are lactose tolerant.

Indeed, I was diagnosed with Type II diabetes in the spring of 2018 although I have since returned to non-diabetic status following a bit more than sixty pounds of weight loss on what amounts to basically a paleo diet, with a low to moderate amount of low impact exercise. I gained about twenty of those pounds back in the fall of 2019 and winter of 2020, which is why I returned to a diet program again. But, I've since shed almost all of the weight that I gained back during the lockdown in March and April of 2020. I've also done, as predicted, about equally well on my previous diet, which was high in saturated fat, and my current one, which is low in saturated fat.

My father's side

My paternal grandfather, Gale, was not at all heavy, although he was a hands on farmer engaged in manual labor most of his life, primarily growing typical Northwest Ohio crops like corn on a cash crop basis in addition to having a garden for personal consumption, with animals limited to a working horse for some of the time my father and uncle were growing up, and a small number of food animals for personal consumption. He was primarily or completely Northern German in origins with his patrilineal ancestor migrating to the U.S. in 1847 (he was born in 1901) and the moving not too long after that to Ohio. His origins were with leather workers and were more urban than my mother's family, even though he ended up being a farmer in the U.S.

My paternal grandmother, Mildred (born in 1904), was on the heavy side. She has significant Irish ancestry (50%, I  think), probably from after the Irish Potato famine. So, she may have experienced selective pressure to accumulate weight to survive famine, although I know less about her background.

Neither my father nor my uncle were heavy and both had desk jobs. My father was a professor, my uncle was a treasurer for the local school district and the family's church, among other book keeping/accounting professions, although he was not a CPA. 

My uncle Lowell was slim as was his wife and his four children, although some of that may be because he and one of his daughters had Type I diabetes which caused their family to be very mindful of their diets and very careful about the added sugars in the American diets that were helping to make the rest of the nation obese. At least a couple of Lowell's children were far superior to either my brother or myself athletically. One of Lowell's children had children, and her children are also not heavy (and neither is her husband).

Both my father and his brother died of pancreatic cancer, although there is circumstantial evidence to suggest that any common cause for this had an environmental, rather than a hereditary cause.

So, phenotypically, my father and his brother don't seem to have inherited any dominant tendency towards obesity, although it is plausible that they had something recessive, or at least, phenotypically invisible genotype that might incline someone to obesity.

My brother, who is considerably taller than I am, has almost always been less heavy than me, although certainly not slim as an adult, despite the fact that he works out quite diligently (e.g. biking a considerable distance to work most days) to help him resist becoming too heavy.

My previous DNA test revealed that my father was basically a Northern European mutt. He had British/Irish ancestry more or less in line with, but a little low to reflect his Irish ancestry through Mildred (he was about 20% British/Irish with some broadly Northern European ancestry probably also traceable to Mildred's Irish parent) with a locus correctly in Ireland. My father's remaining ancestry from France and Germany in Northern Europe, and broadly Northern European ancestry with small percentages of Scandinavian and Southern European descent (less than 5% combined). 

The service's effort to localize the French-German ancestry was not very accurate, predicting, predicting Switzerland as most likely, although its second choice, the region of Hesse, Germany, wasn't too far off from my father's ancestors actual German homeland. But, given that Northern Europe has far less genetic substructure than Finland (which is very distinctive from the rest of Germany and has lots of sharp internal substructure) this isn't that serious of fault from the test's perspective.

My mother's side

My mom was not extremely heavy, but was at least overweight and probably low stage obese, and struggled with diet after diet all her life and had blood sugar deficit issues. 

Her mother, one of her sisters and two brothers were on the heavy side, as are many of my cousins on that side (her other sister, Kay, contracted M.S. in college which atypically influenced her weight). At least one of my first cousins on my mother's side who is heavy also has sleep apnea. Many of my more distant American Swede Finn relatives are also on the heavy side.

My mom's father had an extremely active lifestyle as a lumberjack and subsistence farmer that might have counteracted a tendency to be heavy. 

Both of my mothers parents were descended exclusively from Swedish speaking Finnish people from roughly the same part of Finland about midway up the Baltic Sea coast in the late 1800s. My great grandfather, if I recall correctly, was a first generation immigrant who came to the U.S. and promptly arrived in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan at the age of fifteen or so, the first in his family to do so, although multiple siblings came after him. He was motivated by economic distress in Finland.

Finland has suffered at least two famines that killed 33%+ of the population each in the last 325 years and often had lean times due to cold temperatures and limited growing seasons. Also, my ancestors in Finland were poor peasants who probably did a lot of manual labor to survive in the same small town for hundreds of years (the family on that side is now middle class by the way and some of my relatives have migrated to Helsinki, which is Finland's political and commercial capitol).

As I explain in a post at this blog's sister blog:

Swedish domination would continue for centuries, and in the Reformation, the Swedish sided with the Protestant Lutherans against the Catholics and had their own round of witch hunting in the 1600s, including as well a short lived effort to establish a Swedish colony in America near the Delaware-Pennsylvania area from 1638-1655 CE, with at least half of the colonists coming from Finland. 

Very hard times followed for the next quarter century resulting in the death of a third of the population in a four year long famine, followed by the death of half of the population in a twenty-one year long war. The population of Finland fell by about two-thirds in a single generation.

"In 1696–1699, a famine caused by climate decimated Finland. A combination of an early frost, the freezing temperatures preventing grain from reaching Finnish ports, and a lackluster response from the Swedish government saw about one-third of the population die."

"Soon afterwards, another war determining Finland's fate began (the Great Northern War of 1700–21). The Great Northern War (1700–1721) was devastating, as Sweden and Russia fought for control of the Baltic. Harsh conditions—worsening poverty and repeated crop failures—among peasants undermined support for the war, leading to Sweden's defeat. Finland was a battleground as both armies ravaged the countryside, leading to famine, epidemics, social disruption and the loss of nearly half the population. By 1721 only 250,000 remained."

Constitutional monarchy with a powerful parliament followed in Sweden, but "Finland by this time was [still] depopulated, with a population in 1749 of 427,000." Potato farming (which was a dietary staple of my ancestors) arrived after the 1750s. 

In 1809, Finland was annexed to Russia with the assent of a popular assembly. 

Mass migration to the United States in the late 19th century was also accompanied by hard times at home in Finland.

Finland secured independence in 1917, followed by a brief civil war in 1918, as a result of the Russian revolution.

It is hard to know exactly what was happening in Finland at the time, as it was part of Russia and not distinguished statistically, but the Swedish population fell by 44 percent in the twenty-year period from 1871-1890, with mass migration to the United States as one major factor in that, no doubt driven by "push factors" at home.

My previous DNA test accurately predicted my ancestor's home region about the size of a large county accurately. The previous test also revealed that despite the fact that my ancestors were Swedish speaking Finns that they have very little Swedish ancestry and were almost pure blooded Finnish. 

So, I suspect that there was some strong natural selection in favor of an ability to store calories for hard times over the last ten generations on my mom's side, which was good in a place where they did hard labor daily and had lot of food insecurity, that isn't as suited for a land of unlimited food, uninterrupted food security, and lifestyles more sedentary than any of my ancestors. 

Ireland Leads U.S. In Some Technologies

Witness A Recent Picture of a Vending Machine In Belfast, Ireland and Weep

Apple's Irish Tax Scam

The company whose name is on two of the laptop computers and three of the phones in my family pays almost no taxes, largely due to an arrangement that books most of its income to Ireland which has graciously consented to tax almost none of that income in exchange for investments that boost the local economy.  The tax rate imposed by Ireland on Apple's profits is a mere 0.005%.  The boost is not insubstantial.  Apple's European headquarters is in Ireland and it's operations there create thousands of good Irish jobs.

How big of a tax break is Apple getting?  According to the European Union which says that the tax break violates E.U. treaties, about $14.5 billion.  In other words, about $3,000 of taxes avoided for every man, woman and child in Ireland.

Ireland, meanwhile, is doing its damnedest not to collect any of it, because it knows that Apple's love for Ireland is runs no deeper than the tax break it gets.

U.S. diplomats, in turn, also wants the E.U. to back off, not because it loves the fact that Apple can park tens of billions of dollars of untaxed cash in affiliated foreign companies, but because the U.S. Treasury will get a piece of the action should Apple ever wish to repatriate the funds.

The arguably legal techniques that Apple is using to indefinitely defer its income in a foreign tax haven are not new.

When I was an intern for a Congressman on the Ways and Means Committee while I was in college, one of the projects that was perennially on the to do list in the office, but never got tackled because it was such a daunting issue to understand well enough to know how to reform it, was the indefinite deferral of taxation of income allocated to tax havens of foreign affiliates of major U.S. companies.

A quarter of a century later, the tax break is still there and it has gotten obscene.

Irish Exodus

According to BBC radio this morning, 7% of the population of Ireland has emigrated in the wake of the Irish financial crisis.  This is comparable, for example, to the demographic impact of Hurricane Katrina on the population of Louisiana.  This was facilitated largely by the laws in the European Union permitting unrestricted immigration within its boundaries.

Bad Economics, Sovereign Debt, The Irish Mortgage Crisis And More

* Ireland apparently does not have, or almost never uses, a foreclosure process to repossess homes. Instead, involuntary bankruptcy is pretty much the exclusive means of owner occupied residence repossession - at least until this month, when a new insolvency process similar to Chapter 13 bankruptcies in the United States, was put in place. About one in eight Irish mortgages are more than ninety days overdue, mostly as a result of an economic collapse including a 50% drop in housing prices when a housing bubble there collapsed.

This stark difference from the debt collection practices of other countries with a common law legal tradition is notable.  Commentators at the BBC attributed this policy to the weighted political history of unjust evictions by absentee British overlords on the Irish consciousness.   (Source: BBC radio news broadcast heard on radio.)

* The European economy is almost certainly headed into a double dip recession (and a deep one) in the wake of the sovereign debt crisis if it isn't already there. Ireland's sovereign debt crisis has mostly been worked through, but now it has a massive private debt crisis.

The hard question is whether this will slow the not yet quite complete recovery of the U.S. from its financial crisis, or worse yet, plunge the U.S. into a double dip recession. So far, this doesn't seem to be happening because domestic demand is pushing the U.S. economy back, but it is still a serious worry.

It doesn't help that China's growth is slowing dramatically.

China and the E.U. are the two biggest non-U.S. economies in the world and import-export based revenues are important to the U.S.; on the other hand, bleak investment prospects in those countries make make the U.S. more attractive to foreign investors thereby giving the U.S. economy some private stimulus.

* The academic economic study by Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff that was a main respectable justification for austerity policies in Europe and elsewhere turns out to have been deeply flawed in a manner that has created a major scandal.

The increasing consensus of informed opinion led by Krugman and others economic commentators, is that the resort to austerity measures both by U.S. states and in Europe, as well as the failure to the U.S. to take sufficiently bold stimulus measures at the federal level, has made the series of recessions that started with the U.S. financial crisis and continues into the European sovereign debt crisis, far worse.  If macroeconomists had been clear about this fact, which apart from the R&R work didn't have nearly as solid academic support, perhaps this serious misstep could have been avoided. 

Reinhart and Rogoff paper showed empircally that debt loads in excess of 90% of GDP greatly harmed long term economic growth.  But, it turns out to that they reached that conclusion based on spreadsheets that accidentally omitted key data points, mistranscribed data and because they added up the data incorrectly.  They correctly determined that austerity imposes short term pain.  But, they were wrong in concluding that the short term pain of austerity measures imposes immense penalties in terms of long term growth when economies have high public debt levels relative to their GDP.

They weren't the only economists to reach this result, but without this paper, the argument for it would have been far weaker.

If their methodology had been applied without clerical or arithmetic errors, it would have reached the opposite conclusion. The poignant question is How Much Unemployment Was Caused by Reinhart and Rogoff's Arithmetic Mistake?, by Dean Baker (via Economist's View blog):

The most important of these errors was excluding four years of growth data from New Zealand in which it was above the 90 percent debt-to-GDP threshold..., correcting this one mistake alone adds 1.5 percentage points to the average growth rate for the high debt countries. This eliminates most of the falloff in growth that R&R find from high debt levels. (HAP find several other important errors in the R&R paper, however the missing New Zealand years are the biggest part of the story.)

This is a big deal because politicians around the world have used this finding from R&R to justify austerity measures that have slowed growth and raised unemployment. In the United States many politicians have pointed to R&R's work as justification for deficit reduction even though the economy is far below full employment by any reasonable measure. In Europe, R&R's work and its derivatives have been used to justify austerity policies that have pushed the unemployment rate over 10 percent for the euro zone as a whole and above 20 percent in Greece and Spain. In other words, this is a mistake that has had enormous consequences.

This debacle has renewed the debate across a host of academic and scientific disciplines over whether published academic research should routinely include raw data and computer code, something that only rarely happens now.

It has also lead to hand wringing among economists over the sad state of empirical validation in macroeconomics and the lack of consensus in the field.

I personally believe that macroeconomics is a discipline in dire need of a transition from a narrow focus on theoretical models of monetary policy and government spending levels, in favor of a far broader descriptive orientation.

I once went so far as to take the GREs and request applications for graduate programs in economics, but did so only with trepidation because I lacked confidence in the academic discipline's serious problems (ultimately, children on the way caused me to continue practicing law instead of going to graduate school).  I was deeply dissatisfied with the quality of the scholarship in the discipline every since I took an intermediate macroeconomics class at Miami University while I was a senior in high school.

Miami University shouldn't be faulted on this score, despite the fact that the particular instructor in question wasn't very good. I considered the discipline at all, in part because of the excellent teaching I received in my honors microeconomics course the semester before from Professor Gerald E. Flueckiger (who died in 2000, far too early) and an equally able high school economics instructor my sophomore year at Talawanda High School, both of whom powerfully demonstrated the relevance and intuitive power of economic thinking and the potential breadth of the discipline even though it was rarely realized.  

The macroeconomics class I took at Miami University was typical of the discipline and graduate instruction at many institutions in macroeconomics, and a learned a lot in it about mainstream macroeconomic models even though I don't respect them very much.  We used Robert J. Barro's classic equilibrium equation market clearing model based textbook that epitomized everything that is wrong with the discipline but did so competently, albeit with a dry approach that was utterly detached from reality.  Our instructor was humorless trees for the forest kind of wonk, even worse than the textbook he taught from, who was busy fighting subdiscipline battles we were barely aware of over monetary policy in our classroom to the unseen audience of his discipinary peers.

(Full disclosure, I got in "B" in the class, but that was only because I overslept the day of the final exam and only arrived to take it a half an hour late, barely dressed, unshowered, and flustered, a reality reflected in my performance on that exam, but that didn't reflect how much I learned and absorbed from the class.)