Martin Sustrik

'Inventing the Renaissance' Review

r/dataisbeautiful - [OC] What do Europeans feel most attached to - their region, their country, or Europe?

With the weakening of the trans-Atlantic alliance, the debate over European integration has entered a new phase. Mario Draghi warns that Europe risks becoming “merely a large market, subject to the priorities of others,” a collection of middling states in a world where the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Facing the U.S. that views European fragmentation as advantageous and a China willing to exploit its supply chain dominance, Draghi calls for adopting a pragmatic federalist stance.

Similarly, in this article, Ricardo Hausmann draws on XIX. century history to argue that Europe faces the same challenge Italian and German nationalists once did: building a political community across... (read 1478 more words →)

Replying to'Inventing the Renaissance' Review

Martin Sustrik9d

One point that Palmer makes in the book is that being an atheist during the renaissance was akin of being a conspiracy theorist today. Religion had moderately good explanations for things. Why are animals adapted to their way of living? Because God made them so. Atheism, on the other hand, had no good explanations.

But also check out this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cheese_and_the_Worms

Replying toAda Palmer: Inventing the Renaissance

Martin Sustrik17d

Ada Palmer: Inventing the Renaissance

I've been planning to do a Seldon joke, then forgot about it :facepalm:

Ada Palmer: Inventing the Renaissance

18d

This is a cross-post from https://www.250bpm.com/p/ada-palmer-inventing-the-renaissance.

For over a decade, Ada Palmer, a history professor at University of Chicago (and a science-fiction writer!), struggled to teach Machiavelli. “I kept changing my approach, trying new things: which texts, what combinations, expanding how many class sessions he got…” The problem, she explains, is that “Machiavelli doesn’t unpack his contemporary examples, he assumes that you lived through it and know, so sometimes he just says things like: Some princes don’t have to work to maintain their power, like the Duke of Ferrara, period end of chapter. He doesn’t explain, so modern readers can’t get it.”

Palmer’s solution was to make her students live through the run-up to... (read 3603 more words →)

207

Replying toEU explained in 10 minutes

Martin Sustrik2mo

Not tied to a particular party. "Non-partisan" would have been better wording.

Replying toParanoia: A Beginner's Guide

Paranoia: A Beginner's Guide

Yet another approach: A dictator surrounds himself with the people he used to know before he became the dictator, i.e. people, trust in whom was built in an environment where there was yet not much point in lying to him.

Replying toErasmus: Social Engineering at Scale

Yup. Median voter theorem already barely works in a vanilla setup (voters directly electing decisionmakers) because of issue bundling. Add couple of layers of indirection (voters electing local MPs, who elect the local govts, who then choose the Commission) and there's little, if anything, left.

Replying toErasmus: Social Engineering at Scale

I assume you are against. And you likely have majority of the European population on your side. Now it's interesting to contemplate why median voter theorem does not work in EU.

Replying toErasmus: Social Engineering at Scale

Fair enough. I am 50, so may anectodes are from several decades ago and are probably badly outdated.

3mo

Sofia Corradi, a.k.a. Mamma Erasmus (2020)

When Sofia Corradi died on October 17th, the press was full of obituaries for the spiritual mother of Erasmus, the European student exchange programme, or, in the words of Umberto Eco, “that thing where a Catalan boy goes to study in Belgium, meets a Flemish girl, falls in love with her, marries her, and starts a European family.”

Yet none of the obituaries I’ve seen stressed the most important and interesting aspect of the project: its unprecedented scale.

The second-largest comparable programme, the Fulbright in the United States, sends around nine thousand students abroad each year. Erasmus sends 1.3 million.

So far, approximately sixteen million people have taken part in... (read 1152 more words →)

110

Replying toEU explained in 10 minutes

Jut stumbled upon a writeup about the EU's Common Agricultural Policy which gives more details about the current state of affairs: https://elaine.mayoris.com/go/x5u4ooluse0aaauiok2lg063hjgfz7kqjvjwcsgwsoi2/2866

Replying toEU explained in 10 minutes

Martin Sustrik4mo

I get your argument. But the same one can be made about anything. French government subsidizing French cinema? Not fair, because it puts German cinema at a disadvantage. Better housing policies in Poland? Shouldn't be allowed, because lower rents mean lower salaries, which means cheaper industrial goods, which, again, puts Germany at a disadvantage. And so on. But in a federal state, the members should compete on at least something. If they don't, if they are forced to behave exactly the same in all regards, what's the point of having a federal state in the first place? A centralized one would do.

4mo

This is a cross-post from https://www.250bpm.com/p/eu-explained-in-10-minutes.

If you want to understand a country, you should pick a similar country that you are already familiar with, research the differences between the two and there you go, you are now an expert.

But this approach doesn’t quite work for the European Union. You might start, for instance, by comparing it to the United States, assuming that EU member countries are roughly equivalent to U.S. states. But that analogy quickly breaks down. The deeper you dig, the more confused you become.

You try with other federal states. Germany. Switzerland. But it doesn’t work either.

Finally, you try with the United Nations. After all, the EU is an international organization,... (read 2328 more words →)

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Gnashing of Teeth

4mo

Tajná história slniečkárstva — Jacques Callot, “The Hanging”, from “The Miseries and Misfortunes of War”, 1633

I’d like to tell you a bedtime story. It’s not one of those enchanting and weird fairy tales in the vein of the Brothers Grimm, but rather one of those synthetic ones with a moral at the end. Children hate those, but up to certain age they’re still too young to recognize the trick. Here’s how it goes.

***

There were good people in the empire, living peacefully side by side. Then, one day, a new religion emerged. Those who embraced it believed that the old faith, once good and just, had been corrupted by the devil, and that its followers would inevitably... (read 920 more words →)

Emil the Moose

Notes from European Progress Conference

4mo

The travels of Emil the Moose since he entered Czechia in mid-June.

Moose became extinct in most of Germany around 1000 CE, and in Bohemia, Moravia, Austria, most of southern Poland, and Hungary by the XV. century.

It’s not clear where exactly Emil comes from, but most likely from Poland, which has a large moose population in the northeast. In early summer 2025, he crossed the Czech border and wandered south through Moravia into Austria. He swam across the Danube near Vienna, then turned west. Along the way, he frightened the monks at Melk Abbey, and by the end of September he had passed Linz in Upper Austria. Much of his journey took him... (read 240 more words →)

EU and Monopoly on Violence

4mo

Facade detail from Maison les Hiboux, Brussels. By Andrea Jašková.

Last year, after the first Progress Conference was held in Berkeley, I wrote a blog post suggesting that we need a similar conference in Europe, perhaps even more than it is needed in America. Then, a couple of months ago, I got a message from Bahadir Sirin of GPRG letting me know that such a conference is actually going to happen.

How cool is it when people have the same idea and make it happen, without you having to lift a finger! Huge thanks to Bahadir and everyone involved!

The conference took place in Brussels on September 26th, and what follows are a few... (read 1096 more words →)

The Dutch are Working Four Days a Week

5mo

The shape of Europe’s future political system is being decided right now.

Cross post from https://www.250bpm.com/p/eu-and-monopoly-on-violence

Ben Landau-Taylor’s article in UnHerd makes a simple argument: simple, easy-to-use military technologies beget democracies. Complex ones concentrate military power in the hands of state militaries and favor aristocracies or bureaucracies.

One of the examples he gives is how “the rise of the European Union has disempowered elected legislatures de jure as well as de facto.”

Now, that’s just plain wrong. EU has no military and no police force (except maybe Frontex, but even that is far from clear-cut). The monopoly on violence remains firmly in the hands of the member states. Even coordination at the European level is not... (read 1390 more words →)

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•••

5mo

Famously, a hundred years ago Keynes predicted that by now people would be working just fifteen hours a week. That hasn’t quite happened, but the Dutch are already down to four-day weeks.

And this isn’t because bad actors are gaming the system or because the government is somehow stopping people from working more. Rather, it’s the result of people increasingly choosing to work part-time.

Part-time employment as % of total employment.

Interestingly, this is one of the issues where libertarians and progress studies people, who usually get along well, would disagree. Libertarians would say that if you can afford it, by all means, work just one day a week. Progress studies people would point out... (read more)

Immigration to Poland