Links - 3rd January 2020 (1)

BBC World Service - The World This Week, Saudi oil industry attacked - "‘Mankind is making huge strides in one particular area of development, namely, child mortality. Reports from the World Health Organization and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation released this week have shown that in almost all countries of the world, the number of children dying before the age of five has fallen over the past 20 years. In the year 2000, the figure was nearly 10 million child deaths. By 2017. That figure was almost halved even as the world's total population continued to grow. A story to celebrate, but not apparently covered by most news organizations’...
‘One expert used to quiz people about big trends and compare their answers to the random guesses of chimpanzees. The chimps won every time. Educated audiences were systematically wrong. You've got to ask where we get our information? Well, from the news, which overlooks big trends in favor of sudden events, shapes perceptions with famine and disaster. And so we miss one of the most colossal changes in human welfare ever’"

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Who Will Lead Israel? - "[On the disadvantages of proportional representation] The Israeli electoral system of proportional representation guarantees coalition governments, especially if the result is close as it was this month, the vote is followed by a decision by the President about who’s asked to try to form a government. Then there's weeks of horse trading about which party gets what. It is never a pretty process. Promises are elastic or expendable. The leaders of smaller parties can become kingmakers...
You might think that after President Trump's travel ban, ever increasing sanctions and threats of war against Iran, Iranians in America would unite against the president. But in the Farsi cafe, my dining companions are quick to disabuse me of the notion of a unified Persian front. We’re settling into a traditional lunch of *something*, in the heart of what has become known as Terangeles, the district of Los Angeles, that is home to the largest population of Iranians anywhere outside Iran. There were some Iranians here who voted for Trump, and actually want America to go to war with Iran... Those people see it as a fast route to regime change… but it would be a disaster for Iran. It would end up as another Syria. Fred and Susie both came to the US in the late 70s and watched Iran's Islamic Revolution unfold from afar. They were soon followed by thousands of their countrymen and women escaping the new regime. American-Iranian relations had been cordial under the Shah and LA, with its Mediterranean climate, car culture, and proximity to mountains felt familiar to those fleeing Tehran. It didn't take long for an Iranian quarter to spring up in West LA, and the new arrivals were generally welcomed by the American people. But on the fourth of November 1979, that all changed when a group of Iranian students stormed the US Embassy in Tehran, and took 52 Americans hostage. Iranians were suddenly public enemy number 1. 40 years later, the hostage crisis is viewed as an embarrassing episode by most American Iranians, or Persian Americans, as some insist, keen to distance themselves from the country today. And they’re keen to point out how well they've done too. Iranians are the most successful immigrant population in the whole of the US, Mo bellows enthusiastically at me. He’s a restauranteur and casino owner, a fast talking hyperbolic advert for the American dream. We’re in top positions in tech, in government, in business. We're creating jobs, he brags. And he's not too bothered by the president’s stance on Iran. Trump has been good for the economy. Business has never been better… The monarchists voted for [Trump]. Of course, the monarchists, they come up a lot in conversation here. They're the Iranian immigrants who had connections to the Shah and loathe the current regime. The one man I speak to of this persuasion is in favor of the US attack on Iran, despite still having friends and family living there. As he puts it, what do you want? A slow death, or a quick one?… Obama was too soft on Iran she says. And when pressed on her voting intentions for next year's election, she doesn't rule out voting for Donald Trump... most Iranians in LA agree on one thing - they want an end to the Islamic Republic. But how that should be achieved is up for discussion. An awful lot of discussion"

Orlando Figes On The Transformation Of Europe | History Extra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "We think of opera now as a sort of rarefied, elite art form, but in the 19th century it was very popular and in Italy, in particular, there were several hundred opera houses, it was a genuinely popular art form. And if a new say Verdi opera came out, within days of the premiere, there were organ grinders playing the music, you could hear it being played by bands on a bandstand. It was being sung by cafe performers. It was that quick, the dissemination of opera, right down to, yeah, the cafe concert, the tavern, the music hall, and so on. So the way we think today of this sort of great bifurcation between high culture and mass culture didn't really exist at that time, in the sense that they were both then feeding off each other. It was really only with the conscious creation of a canon of classical music, the idea of classical music was an invention of the 1830s 40s and 50s. It's only at that point that this divide begins to develop. But even after that, high culture remains popular"

Episode 126: Art History BB: Caravaggio's The Calling of St. Matthew — The Art History Babes - "'[Baroque] literally means misshapen pearl and denotes the twisting helix shape often seen in Baroque art. Baroque compositions also tend to include more movement [than Renaissance Art]. Beginning in the 17th century, the Baroque built on Renaissance foundations of rationality and illusionism, but they added more drama, because who doesn't want more drama? I want more drama...
Baroque adds an intense and emotionally charged spiritualism into what the Renaissance artists were already creating. Artists were much more interested in representing important transitions or the moment right before something important happens.’
‘So a good kind of predecessor to this idea would be like Michelangelo's David, where he decided to sculpt the moment, right before David flings the rock and kills Goliath. So it's that moment of contemplation, like that moment of calm before the storm, and then that's something that you really see in Baroque art... He would lie and cheat to get what he wanted, and even face slander charges for making up a dirty poem about a rival'…
‘He was also an artichoke slinger... He also challenged viewers of the time, in mixing high and low subjects within his art, which it wasn't uncommon to see paintings of biblical scenes where people were in contemporary clothing. But it was kind of the level of unsavoryness that he would include that really would get people upset’...
‘I’ve been known to tell people like you're too interesting to be interested in the Renaissance. Let's move on to the Baroque... You think you like the Renaissance, but you don't even know yet’
‘Like that's such a snobby art historian moment.’"

Episode 133: Art History BB: Taj Mahal — The Art History Babes - "Traditionally, Akbar is considered the Emperor that made the Mughal Empire great for support and spread of religious tolerance. Alternatively, his grandson, Aurangzeb gets the blame for implementing more strict Islamic rules and essentially setting up the empire’s eventual decline…
This idea that we like to align history with our current ideology. And we want to find patterns and things that make sense to us based on where we're at now, which we've talked about in the podcast, like in terms of not, you know, imposing our views on historical figures, people and kind of having period eye in that way that we understand or like period thought, I guess that would be we're like understanding where a person was in time. But he gets into like, people like to make Akbar the hero for being tolerant and Aurangzeb the villain for being intolerant. But he also points out that might not have had anything to do with why the Mughal Empire fell, and maybe like a warning not to moralize it in a way. Because we tend to do that and want to be like, see, like religious tolerance would have saved the Mughal Empire...
‘We love to do the good versus evil argument. The fact that like, the Marvel movies are so popular right now is like proof that people want a good guy and a bad guy, you want a hero, you want a villain, you want it, you just want it clean, you know, this guy was right, this guy was wrong. And you want history to fit into a neat black and white diagram... And it's like, man, that's just like, not the way it works the vast majority of the time’...
'History is written often according to a contemporary narrative'"

The Economics of Sports Gambling (Ep. 388) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "MATHESON: For an economist, “black market” doesn’t mean “bad things.” Black market for an economist simply means that this is something that’s not recorded, and the government doesn’t know about. So when I ask my students what sort of black-market activities are out there? They’ll tell me, “Drugs, prostitution, gambling, running guns,” and I will come right back, and I’ll tell them “Oh yeah — and babysitting and mowing lawns.”...
The oldest organized sports that we have a good date on is the Olympics. The Olympics came about in 776 B.C. We have good evidence of that. We have fairly good evidence that the first gambling on the Olympics occurred in about 775 B.C. So as soon as they started playing games, someone started gambling on it...
Gambling certainly does have the possibility to undermine the integrity of sports. And it has particularly the worry to undermine college sports — again, because college athletes are generating huge amounts of money for the N.C.A.A. while not getting paid.  The obvious solution is: pay the athletes what they’re worth. But we’re not going to see that anytime soon, so— they’re going to maintain their integrity by policing their athletes rather than, by actually giving them a living wage.
DUBNER: Right. Meaning the more you’re paid, the less incentive you have to throw a game. Or to participate at all, collaborate with gamblers.
MATHESON: Historically, one of the most corrupt sports is cricket. And that’s because until about 20 years ago, the only cricket out there were national team games. So India playing Pakistan or England playing Australia. The problem is, you didn’t have any free agency, because it’s very hard for an Australian to become an Indian. And so players were stuck on their teams. And because players were stuck on their teams, they didn’t make much money. Even though cricket was wildly popular in places like India. So here you have a sport where there are literally hundreds of millions of people watching. But the athletes themselves weren’t making any money. That is pretty much the prime recipe for corruption. And again, massive corruption in cricket, both known and suspected.  But guess what — about 10 years ago, they started actually playing some professional club cricket called the I.P.L., the Indian Premier League. And now you actually have cricket players making some decent money. There’s evidence that suggests that the number of suspicious matches in cricket has gone down since cricketers started actually making some real money and have something to lose if they get caught...
DUBNER: Is spending on sports gambling regressive?
MATHESON: I don’t think we have nearly enough data to answer that question. We certainly know that gambling on, for example, lottery tickets — highly regressive, especially scratch-off tickets. Super regressive. We do know that gambling is associated with lots of bad social effects. We know that introduction of state lotteries and casinos into neighborhoods increases crime. It increases bankruptcy. A huge portion of consumer bankruptcies involve at least some amount of gambling that occurs. And there’s reason to believe that sports gambling puts a particular group at specific risk. Think of all those sports fans who say, ‘“You know, I would never buy a lottery ticket. That’s just luck. But I know everything about sports. I should be able to win this.” And guess what? You can’t beat the casino. These amateurs who think they’re experts don’t stand a chance, but do stand a chance of really getting sucked in. And the question is how quickly can they extricate themselves and realize that “Yeah, I’m actually not any good at this.”... the one sports gamble that we know has a long-run payoff is actually betting on the horse races and betting heavy favorites to show. So what that means is you’re taking a horse that everyone thinks is going to win the race, and you bet on them to at least come in no worse than third. It turns out that that is a winning bet, dollar-wise."

How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Ep. 386) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "HAMILTON: The 1957 Supermarket U.S.A. exhibit in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, which was then a communist country, was a fully operational 10,000-square foot American supermarket filled with frozen foods and breakfast cereals and everything else. They airlifted in fresh produce from the U.S. because they didn’t think Yugoslavian produce was attractive enough. It was about this display of affordable abundance available to American consumers.
For anyone who didn’t get the message, there was also a sign touting, quote, “the knowledge of science and technology available to this age.” In other words: “if you like our breakfast cereal, just think how much you’ll like the rest of our capitalism.”
HAMILTON: There were quite a few people who thought that if you showed that American consumers could access affordable food — strawberries in December — without having to wait in line, that that might actually cause the whole communist system to collapse.
The Supermarket U.S.A. exhibit proved tremendously popular. More than 1 million Yugoslavs visited; some received free bags of American food.
HAMILTON: Immediately after seeing it, Marshal Tito, the leader of the country at the time, ordered the whole thing to be purchased and it was bought wholesale from the United States exhibitors and used as a model. They hired a consultant from an Atlanta supermarket firm to come over and teach them how to build their own chain of socialist supermarkets...
In the early 1930s, when the U.S. government guaranteed farmers 80 cents per bushel of wheat, the government wound up buying, and storing, more than 250 million bushels... If you ever wonder why the U.S.D.A.’s old “food pyramid” — the diagram of recommended servings of different foods — why the biggest category, at the bottom of the pyramid, was “bread, cereal, rice, and pasta,” well, the U.S. had an awful lot of all those foods. And if you ate as the U.S.D.A. instructed, there’s a good chance you put on a few pounds. You can’t think about nutrition without thinking about agriculture policy...
TIMMER: High-fructose corn syrup. Yep. You’ve got surplus corn and you’ve got a demand for easy, convenient sweetener in the food sector. And that was just a perfect storm. That syrup revolutionizes food processing because instead of a powdery sweet thing, it’s a liquid, and liquids are way easier to handle in food processing...
I used to ask my class, I’m talking 1985, “Where is the world’s largest supercomputer?” And the correct answer was, “It’s at the Pentagon.” Okay. “Where is the world’s second largest supercomputer?” Bentonville, Ark. Home of Walmart. They used that computer to track every single item on every single Walmart shelf. That information technology is what revolutionized food marketing. And it was pretty much invented by Walmart...
Another consequence of the scaling-up of American agriculture: more standardization and less variety.
HAMILTON: So apples — in the early 20th century, consumers in say, New York state would have access to literally hundreds of varieties, even in mass retail markets. By the mid-20th century, it’s down to just a handful. Red Delicious really dominates the whole market. And apples became remarkably tasteless by the mid-20th century, so certain qualities were given up in order to gain that advantage of price and abundance.
TIMMER: Well, we clearly won the food wars in terms of supply and abundance. We won the abundance war. What we may be in the process of losing is the health and quality dimensions going forward."