Here are some things that I found interesting online last month.
Confidence Level: Hard to judge because they’re not my ideas.
Astral Codex Ten has been having a book review contest. Here are the winners !
First place went to an excellent review of Progress and Poverty by Henry George (1879).
George argues:
- Land is sufficiently different that it should treated separately from Capital. Land can neither be created nor destroyed, while Capital can.
- Our normal justification for why we can own something is because we own the fruits of our labor. This argument doesn’t really work for land.
- The value of land is determined by what’s around it: Location, Location, Location. This is created by the surrounding community, not the land owner itself. Improvements to the land (like buildings) count as Capital, not Land.
- Landowners raise the rent as much as possible and so get a large share of income without contributing to productivity. Land speculators are particularly bad because they do not try to improve the land and may leave it vacant.
- Land value taxes are the best form of taxes. This incentivizes people to be productive with the land and discourages vacant lots, helping to revitalize urban areas (in particular).
I also really liked the third place winner, a review of On the Natural Faculties by Galen of Pergamon (129-210). Galen was the greatest of the ancient doctors and dominated medical theory for more than a thousand years after his death. Modern sources often describe him as an non-empirical thinker committed to defending and establishing tradition, which is completely wrong.
Along with the finalists, there were also over 100 non-finalists, which you can find here (A-R) and here (S-Z). My favorite of these reviews (not including my own) is the review of The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien (1977), which approaches the book from the perspective of the problem of evil and eschatology.
Trees aren’t related to each other. Not even close:
https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-tree/
In 1989, some ecoterrorists in California released a large number of destructive insects into California’s fruit orchards to protest insecticide spraying:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_California_medfly_attack
The FBI was unable to identify who did it and California did decide to stop aerial spraying of insecticides for that particular problem.
A megachurch in Nigeria with hundreds of thousands / millions of members is building a town outside of Lagos:
A scholarly article on the legal status of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints during the 1800s:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3835265
After the American Revolution, churches were disestablished in the new states. However, in most states, churches were supposed to be legally registered. The registration for churches contained Protestant assumptions: there was a maximum amount of property that churches could own and the local leadership was subject to democracy of the congregation. These requirements conflicted both with Mormonism’s hierarchical leadership and with attempts to build Zion. During Joseph Smith’s life, the church had questionable legal status in the different states where Mormons settled and most of the church’s property was legally owned by individual leaders. This predictably caused problems, especially when Joseph Smith died and his inheritance had to be divided.
Once in Utah, the church was able to construct its own rules for how churches are established. Unsurprisingly, this looked very different from what was expected of churches in the rest of the country. This was a major cause of conflict with federally appointed governors of Utah Territory. As the conflicts between the church and federal government heated up in the later 1800s, the church legally devolved much of its property to local wards or stakes, which made it legally look more like a Protestant Church and so provided more protection. These fears were realized in 1887 when the Edmunds-Tucker Act legally dissolved the church and seized its property.
After Utah became a state, the church again had more control over it’s legal status, but was still cautious. By this point, corporate law in the US had developed much more flexibility, while religious law still had not. The church established itself as two corporations sole: the Corporation of the Presiding Bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Corporation of the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. These corporations were not merged into a religious institution until 2020.