Friday, March 18, 2016

Links, 18th March, 2016 mostly Todd related

No one knows why TYrumpi winning, Here's what a conitive scientist says by Geore Lakoff:
"What do social issues and the politics have to do with the family? We are first governed in our families, and so we grow up understanding governing institutions in terms of the governing systems of families."
That was via a David Brin post Political Delusions- Do we rationalize our emotional decisions?
That reminded me of Emmanuel Todd work. Here is a very recent article on Todd which has been in a preprint form for some time and linked before:
Testing Todd and matching Murdoch: Global data of historical family characteristics:
" Abstract:
This paper investigates the possibilities for the creation of a global dataset on family and household characteristics. This is done by scrutinizing and comparing two prominent data sources on family system classifications. We first focus on historical data, by comparing Emmanuel Todd's classification of countries by family systems with ethnographic data compiled in George Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas. Qualitative and quantitative tests show that the two datasets frequently agree about family traits. Nonetheless, substantial differences exist that are mostly attributable to the focus of the datasets on different regions, and the difficulties in translating local, descriptive studies to hard data. We therefore emphasize that it is important to know the strengths and weaknesses of the two datasets and emphasize that robustness checks are necessary in empirical research into family characteristics. We also compare these historical data with present-day data. This comparison suggests that family characteristics and the values associated with them can persist over long periods."
A 1995 article on Emmanuel Todd Keeping it in the family by Suzi Feay

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