Ordinary World for 1/3
History:
[Hi1] Sears: Civil Rights Pioneers
[Hi2] Did the US throw the space race?
[Hi3] The American Revolution was perhaps saved by raiding Bermuda.
[Hi4] 400 years is a really long time.
[Hi5] A look at Japanese fireworks and artwork thereof from yesteryear.
Housing:
[Ho1] Megan Garber says down with lawns! They certainly are a hassle, but my childhood wouldn’t have been the same without them.
[Ho2] Right on. It won’t help with the places where costs are highest, but it will help just about everywhere else.
Religion:
[Re1] How would a universe designed for humans even work?
[Re2]
Cool, important paper by Mohamed Saleh in JEH:
Q: why do (non-Muslim) Copts tend to have higher socio-economic status than Muslims?
A: historical self-selection by low-SES Copts into Islam to avoid poll taxes –> better-off remained Copts in long runhttps://t.co/CkFIEmQWT4 pic.twitter.com/yCY3mCWpfK
— Jared Rubin (@jaredcrubin) July 16, 2018
Ho1: I am very much a fan of the communal lawn my home in WA shares. I don’t have to care for it, and all the neighborhood kids play in it together.Report
Hi5: Lacks a link, although I assume that the picture at the top is from this.Report
Hi1–another in a long line of “free markets won’t tolerate discrimination because it leaves money on the table and, therefore, in the long run, they will do the job” that falters out of the gate because the driving force was the Rural Free Delivery Act, a damn gummint program.Report
RFD wasn’t a government program meant to combat segregation, etc. It was just a program to make it easier to get mail to farmers who couldn’t get to town regularly for mail pickup.
The fact that Sears could deliver to black families without having a white person interrupting the commerce is what created the condition of “leaving money on the table”.
The government could have also done something like charging anyone who interfered with mail delivery to black families with a felony, but that would have been a lot more work that just taking those people out of the loop.Report
True, it wasn’t an anti-discrimination law, but it was a government program, which just happened to make it possible to sell to anyone who had money without bigoted customer pushback. . So which of these other government programs would propertarians, er, libertarians, have endorsed?Report
Depends on how anti-government a person is. For me, RFD was a good extension of the postal system that happened to be unexpectedly useful to both a private capitalist venture and toward allowing a minority to circumvent racist laws* and attitudes.
*It is important to remember that the ‘money on the table’ idea works best when it’s only working against personal, or social bigotry**. When the bigotry is enshrined in law in the way Jim Crow was, then it’s going to be considerably tougher for profit seeking to overcome bigotry. And since ‘tougher’ translates to ‘much longer time horizons’, there is an argument for government intervention to undo the legal support.
That said, Sears still deserves a nod for resisting the social pressures, and for utilizing a legal workaround to bypass the legal issues.
**This is why I can’t be too worked up over bakers and florists and photographers not wanting to work gay weddings. Even in the most remote locations of the country, you will likely find someone willing to take on that refused customer.Report
**This is why I can’t be too worked up over bakers and florists and photographers not wanting to work gay weddings. Even in the most remote locations of the country, you will likely find someone willing to take on that refused customer.
Me neither, and the majority of LGBT folk and their allies probably feel the same. But since socialcons generally seek to define artistic and religious objections to various things to encompass basically anything that any socialcon anywhere might choose to find employment in from county clerk to pharmacist to wedding singer; conflict is pretty unavoidable on the subject.Report
Concurred. I’d also point out that most other businesses did not follow suit until the government forced desegregation. They seemed to have survived just fine despite Sears. Sears provided relief for some but not nearly the majority of African-American households. The article is cheerleading without evidence.Report
Hi2- I remember seeing this space race article on the twiiters around when it came out. I remain deeply skeptical of the narrative. Especially that we gave so much sway to a legal precedent *and* we let the Soviets set that precendent.Report