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Syria is the Economist’s country of the year for 2025

This year’s choice was last year’s runner-up:

Then, in early December 2024, the tyrant was himself forced to flee as rebels seized power. When we were choosing that year’s country of the year, it was too soon to have an idea of how the new Syria might look. Its ruler, Ahmed al-Sharaa, was a jihadist. Many feared he would impose a grim Islamist theocracy, or that Syria would collapse into chaos. In fact, neither has happened. Women are not obliged to cover up or stay at home. Entertainment and, yes, alcohol are allowed. Mr Sharaa has brought about a series of positive surprises, holding the country together and forging good relations with America and the Gulf states. As Western sanctions are relaxed, the economy is starting to recover, too.

Huge problems remain. Militias carried out two atrocious local massacres of minorities, in which 2,000 people died. Mr Sharaa rules in a clannish way, and in such a fragile country much could still go wrong.

Nonetheless, Syria in 2025 is far happier and more peaceful than it was in 2024. Fear is no longer universal. Life is not easy, but it is more or less normal for most people. Voting with their feet, some 3m Syrians have returned home. Our choice goes to Syria, too.

The shortlist also included Canada, Moldova, South Korea, Brazil, and Argentina (the 2025 runner-up and a 2024 podium finisher – maybe next year?).

I updated the list of winners (which is still one of the most popular pages of this blog).

Bangladesh is the Economist’s country of the year for 2024

The shortlist also included Poland (featured on 2023’s podium), South Africa, Argentina, and Syria (the runner-up).

Bangladesh has a history of vengeful violence when power changes hands. The main opposition party, the BNP, is venal. Islamic extremism is a threat. Yet the transition has so far been encouraging. A temporary technocratic government, led by Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel peace prizewinner, is backed by students, the army, business and civil society. It has restored order and stabilised the economy. In 2025 it will need to repair ties with India and decide when to hold elections—first ensuring that the courts are neutral and the opposition has time to organise. None of this will be easy. But for toppling a despot and taking strides towards a more liberal government, Bangladesh is our country of the year.

I updated the list of winners (which is still one of the most popular pages of this blog).

Greece is the Economist’s country of the year for 2023

Brazil and Poland also reached the podium:

But after years of painful restructuring, Greece topped our annual ranking of rich-world economies in 2023. Its centre-right government was re-elected in June. Its foreign policy is pro-America, pro-eu and wary of Russia. Greece shows that from the verge of collapse it is possible to enact tough, sensible economic reforms, rebuild the social contract, exhibit restrained patriotism—and still win elections. With half the world due to vote in 2024, democrats everywhere should pay heed.

I updated the list of winners (which is still one of the most popular pages of this blog).

And, well, maybe I should update this blog more frequently.

Ukraine is the Economist’s country of the year for 2022

And it was an easy choice:

In normal times, picking The Economist’s country of the year is hard. Our writers and editors usually begin with a freewheeling debate in which they spar over the rival claims of half a dozen shortlisted nations. But this year, for the first time since we started naming countries of the year in 2013, the choice is obvious. It can only be Ukraine.

I updated the list of winners (which is one of the most popular pages of this blog).

What is Linus Torvalds’s MacBook model?

Linux 5.19 is out, and Linus Torvalds did the release on an “arm64 laptop” from Apple.

On a personal note, the most interesting part here is that I did the release (and am writing this) on an arm64 laptop. It’s something I’ve been waiting for for a _loong_ time, and it’s finally reality, thanks to the Asahi team. We’ve had arm64 hardware around running Linux for a long time, but none of it has really been usable as a development platform until now.

It’s the third time I’m using Apple hardware for Linux development – I did it many years ago for powerpc development on a ppc970 machine. And then a decade+ ago when the Macbook Air was the only real thin-and-lite around. And now as an arm64 platform.

Not that I’ve used it for any real work, I literally have only been doing test builds and boots and now the actual release tagging. But I’m trying to make sure that the next time I travel, I can travel with this as a laptop and finally dogfooding the arm64 side too

Although Torvalds doesn’t mention the model, the Asahi Linux team says it’s an M2 MacBook Air. But I’ve seen some saying it could be an M1 model. And it could even be a MacBook Pro – which would be a surprise, since he seems to value portability.

So I asked Torvalds, and he confirmed: it’s a MacBook Air with M2 chip, 16GB RAM, and 512GB SSD, “Space Gray”.

The fleas in Yuval Noah Harari’s ‘Sapiens’

Many scholars know that Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is full of errors and inaccuracies, but from time to time I stumble upon smart people – academics, researchers, public intellectuals – praising the book. They should read some reviews first.

Actually, one may be enough. Charles C. Mann did a great job exposing some of the problems in the book in 2015, for the Wall Street Journal.

Nobody can be an expert about everything, and it’s not exactly surprising that Mr. Harari’s sweeping summations are studded with errors—there are always fleas on the lion, as a teacher of mine once told me. The question is whether there is a lion under the fleas. “Sapiens” is learned, thought-provoking and crisply written. It has plenty of confidence and swagger. But some of its fleas are awfully big.

[…]

There’s a whiff of dorm-room bull sessions about the author’s stimulating but often unsourced assertions. Or perhaps I should use a more contemporary simile: “Sapiens” reminded me occasionally of a discussions on Reddit, where users sound off about supposed iron laws of history. This book is what these Reddit threads would be like if they were written not by adolescent autodidacts but by learned academics with impish senses of humor. As I write, my daughter is glumly making flashcards full of names and dates for an AP Euro exam. I bet she wishes she had a textbook like “Sapiens.” Me? I’m not so sure. I like the book’s verve and pop but wish it didn’t have all those fleas.

His examples are great.

There is more here, from Max Roser (Twitter, Our World in Data):

A good example how ‘Sapiens’ works.

Harari makes his readers believe that a 20-year life expectancy for 45-year-olds means that foragers enjoyed good health.

In fact that suggests worse health than England in 1850 (when health there was by any standard absolutely miserable).

And:

Some popular books suggest that hunter-gatherers were healthy.

This historical study finds that 49% of children in the studied hunter-gatherer societies died during childhood:
https://sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513812001237

Is there competing evidence that suggests that the popular books are right?

Paul Graham:

The idea that hunter-gatherers lived wonderful lives and that we got cheated when we switched to agriculture is one of the dumbest ideas believed by smart people. I opened Sapiens, saw that, and immediately put it down.

Branko Milanovic on the boring lives of social scientists

In 2019, on his blog:

Recently I read, rather by accident than design, short lives of several contemporary economists. What struck me was their bareness. The lives sounded like CVs. Actually, there was hardly any difference between their CVs and their lives (to the extent that I could tell).

[…]

Can you have a boring life and be a first-rate social scientist? To some extent, probably yes. […] But I think it is unlikely: because it in human nature, however smart we may be, to understand certain things or to look at different and new aspects of an issue, only when we face the problem ourselves.

[…]

Orderly and boring lives are a privilege of rich and orderly societies. We all (perhaps except when we are 25) wish to lead such lives. But they are also very limited lives: the range of emotions and choices that we experience is narrow.

[…]

But if our life is a CV, can we understand human choices and human nature—a precondition for being a great social scientist? By asking that question, are we not asking whether well-behaved individuals in orderly and rich societies can really produce breakthroughs in social sciences. Or will their lessons remain circumscribed to orderly and rich societies only and to orderly and boring people, and not carry over to the rest of the world?

Slate Star Codex and the ‘New York Times’

Back in February, the New York Times published a story about Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex). This generated some interesting comments, and my plan was to read all – or at least most – of them and publish some bits here. Unfortunately (or not – it probably wouldn’t be a good use of my time), things happened, and I didn’t have time to do so. Nonetheless, I’m posting a few quotes from three articles here.

Matthew Yglesias, “In defense of interesting writing on controversial topics” (Slow Boring):

But in progressive circles, it is common to observe the norm that because the struggle against racism and misogyny is important, it is impolite to dissent from an anti-racist claim or argument unless you have some overwhelmingly important reason for doing so.

[…]

In the (liberal, coastal, urban, very political) circles that I travel, everyone (especially parents) knows and acknowledges that men and women are, on average, different in ways that end up mattering for the distribution of outcomes. But everyone also believes that sexism and misogyny are significant problems in the world, and that the people struggling against those problems are worthy of admiration and praise. So to leap into a conversation about sexism and misogyny yelling “WELL ACTUALLY GIOLLA AND KAJONIUS FIND THAT SEX DIFFERENCES IN PERSONALITY ARE LARGER IN COUNTRIES WITH MORE GENDER EQUALITY” would be considered a rude and undermining thing to do. This is just to say that most people are not rationalists — they believe that statements can be evaluated on grounds beyond truth and falsity. There is suspicion of the guy who is “just asking questions.”

[…]

The pure vision of the rationalists and the belief that statements could or should be read devoid of context or purely literally strikes me as untenable. But I think that in the Trump era, journalism as a whole has tilted too far in Lowrey’s direction, with too much room-reading and groupthink and not enough appreciation of the value of annoying people with inconvenient observations.

[…]

I think contemporary society is willing itself into a state of incredible stupidity by wanting to evaluate the worthwhileness of reading something purely on the basis of whether or not it’s correct.

[…]

But even more so, social media incentivizes the wrong kind of reading. Today you read someone from a rival school of thought in order to find the paragraph or sentence that, when pulled out of context and paired with a witty Twitter quip, will garner you lots of little hearts.

[…]

That said, the way you learn things and get smarter is to read strong writers and try to understand what they’re saying — not by trying to pick it apart for clout or finding ways to caricature and snark about it. Instead, try to understand what it is the writer is saying and why people believe that.

Will Wilkinson, “Grey Lady Steel Man” (Model Citizen):

The level of contempt for the New York Times is unwarranted, ideological, and totally out of control. Yeah, the place has plenty of problems. It’s a massive bureaucratic institution that is, thanks to its incredible reach and the nature of its mission, inevitably at the center of the national and global conversation about issues that people are literally killing each other over. (That’s often the story!) It gathers and publishes an epic amount of information at a furious pace in a way that requires thousands of thorny judgment calls every single day. So yeah, it’s gonna fuck up. Because it is massively influential, people are going to be pissed off by those fuck-ups — all the time.

This can lead to a radically distorted picture, since the astonishing amount of stellar, expert reportorial and editorial judgment embodied in each and every edition is completely invisible. The New York Times (and the Post and the Journal) nails difficult judgment calls like Stephon Curry nails threes. But just imagine if ESPN only ever showed clips of the superhuman, laser-guided mayor of downtown shooting airballs and clanking it off the side of the backboard. It happens! Well, that’s what’s going on here. So I’m going to pound the table and insist, once again, that the New York Times ranks among our best and most valuable institutions devoted to the rapid discovery and dissemination of relevant and/or interesting truths about the human world — news.

Believe it or not (but you should believe it), the culture of the Times (and similar outfits) is profoundly committed to objectivity, verifiable fact and unbiased reporting. (When I write fact-heavy opinion pieces for the Times, they get fact-checked, which is not pretty rare.) Does it suffer from bias? Of course it does! It is produced by humans. Is it hampered by a lack of viewpoint diversity? Of course it is! Sorting and self-selection dynamics push all sorts of professions in the direction of cultural and ideological homogeneity. However, the same dynamic affects informal, leisure-time affinity groups, like the SSC community, in spades.

The professional culture of New York Times is _far _more concerned to correct for the biases of self-selection than the culture that’s evolved around Scott Siskind’s blogs, for the simple and obvious reason that it has a powerful rubber-hitting-the-road incentive to care.

[…]

Reporting is a hard job devoted in large measure to ferreting out truths that the subjects of the story you are writing are actively trying to conceal. I think it’s important to emphasize that there is simply no sense — none! — in which people who like to talk about epistemology on the Internet are more committed to objectivity and truth than experienced reporters who, in the service of truth, navigate mazes of lies, gaslighting, spin, bullshit and threats for a living.

Good points. It’s interesting how wrong Scott Alexander and some of his fans can get when they talk about journalism.

And one funny bit by Scott Sumner, “Understanding middlebrow” (The Money Illusion):

The NYT has 7.5 million subscribers, mostly progressives in the 90-99% range. These people feel very smart, and they are in fact smarter than 90% of the population. So there’s no point bemoaning the fact that the NYT is not about to tell it’s readers that, “Actually, we provide middlebrow news analysis, and if you want brilliant inspired analysis you need to read blogs like SlateStarCodex.”

Yes, the NYT story is awful in all the ways that are currently being discussed by its critics, but the fundamental problem is inescapable. Any time a powerful middlebrow entity (which wrongly thinks it’s highbrow) evaluates an actual highbrow entity, you will end up with a mixture of resentment and incomprehension. This case is no different. It’s just how things work.

Scott Alexander should view this story as a badge of honor. “My insights are so subtle that even the NYT was in over its head trying to figure me out.”

That reminded me of Bertrand Russell in A History of Western Philosophy:

A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand. I would rather be reported by my bitterest enemy among philosophers than by a friend innocent of philosophy.

Previously:

California is ‘symbolically liberal, but operationally conservative’

Ezra Klein, in the New York Times:

California has the highest poverty rate in the nation, when you factor in housing costs, and vies for the top spot in income inequality, too. […] California is dominated by Democrats, but many of the people Democrats claim to care about most can’t afford to live there.

There is an old finding in political science that Americans are “symbolically conservative” but “operationally liberal.” Americans talk like conservatives but want to be governed like liberals. In California, the same split political personality exists, but in reverse: We’re often symbolically liberal, but operationally conservative.

[…]

This is a crisis that reveals California’s conservatism — not the political conservatism that privatizes Medicare, but the temperamental conservatism that stands athwart change and yells “Stop!” In much of San Francisco, you can’t walk 20 feet without seeing a multicolored sign declaring that Black lives matter, kindness is everything and no human being is illegal. Those signs sit in yards zoned for single families, in communities that organize against efforts to add the new homes that would bring those values closer to reality. Poorer families — disproportionately nonwhite and immigrant — are pushed into long commutes, overcrowded housing and homelessness. Those inequalities have turned deadly during the pandemic.

“If you’re living eight or 10 people to a home, it’s hard to protect yourself from the virus,” Senator Wiener told me. “Yet what we see at times is people with a Bernie Sanders sign and a ‘Black Lives Matter’ sign in their window, but they’re opposing an affordable housing project or an apartment complex down the street.”

[…]

There is a danger — not just in California, but everywhere — that politics becomes an aesthetic rather than a program. It’s a danger on the right, where Donald Trump modeled a presidency that cared more about retweets than bills. But it’s also a danger on the left, where the symbols of progressivism are often preferred to the sacrifices and risks those ideals demand.

Sam Altman on being right and misunderstood

“The strength of being misunderstood”:

The most impressive people I know care a lot about what people think, even people whose opinions they really shouldn’t value […]. But what makes them unusual is that they generally care about other people’s opinions on a very long time horizon—as long as the history books get it right, they take some pride in letting the newspapers get it wrong.

You should trade being short-term low-status for being long-term high-status, which most people seem unwilling to do. A common way this happens is by eventually being right about an important but deeply non-consensus bet. But there are lots of other ways–the key observation is that as long as you are right, being misunderstood by most people is a strength not a weakness. You and a small group of rebels get the space to solve an important problem that might otherwise not get solved.