Why the 5 thousand years of zero growth?

According to the same book, it’s because not long after people adopted Neolithic technologies, which involved animal herding, farming, and sedentary life, then diseases could spread more widely among the crops, the animals, and the people. Many an early archeological site from this era shows signs of sudden abandonment of a town or village of some thousands of souls. Some of the ruins were burned, some not. Most plagues that kill fast such as typhoid, influenzas, yellow fever, malaria, plague, mumps, measles, and so on don’t leave marks on human skeletons, and are transmitted between humans and our herd animals. In all likelihood, populations would rise and then get wiped out by a plague of some sort affecting themselves, their animals, or their crops.

In other words, it probably was not a time of linear growth of human population (the 180 net new human beings average that I estimated in my last post). But, rather, a period when local human populations would rise and then fall, unpredictably. Apparently, hunter-gatherers limit their births, in part because a mother will carry and nurse a baby until it is a few years old; people who eat a sedentary grain diet are much more fertile. But their surroundings were more shitty (as in, covered with human and animal dung), so, as these settled Neolithic people procreated, lived close together, and had absolutely no defenses against mysterious pests, diseases and such, they also would occasionally die in droves — becasue NOBODY had resistance to any of those diseases.

Any survivors who had heard anything about plagues would learn to leave the town as fast as possible; and if they *ever* returned, would be totally justified in burning to the ground whatever remained.

Apparently it took five thousand years, or about 20 generations, for enough of our susceptible ancestors – the unlucky ones — to be weeded out, and the lucky ones, who just happened to have some genetic feature that provided immunity, to survive and pass along those lucky genes. All of us today are descendants of the lucky ones that survived plague after plague!

After that time, population increased remarkably. Let’s look at those figures

10,000 BC human population about 4 million

5,000 BC human population about 5 million (a rise of about 5 percent per millennium)

0 BC human population about 180 million (a rise of 35 percent per millennium)

2,000 AD human population about 6 Billion – which is about 33 times (not 33 percent, but 33 times) as many people as were present near the birth of Christ. So per milllennium, that is a much faster increase than ever before!

Humans had ZPG for 5,000 years!!!

I’m listening to “Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States”, a new book exploring recent findings on the 97% of our past as human beings before writing, tax collectors, cities, and modern states.

One surprising finding: from ten thousand BC to five thousand BC, the total population of us human beings (homo sapiens sapiens) world wide went from about 4 million souls to 5 million — according to one estimate by Macevedy & Jones. (There are other estimates: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/international-programs/historical-est-worldpop.html )

That was rather slow growth, the author noted. But *how* slow, this retired math teacher wondered?

So I got out a pencil and my notebook and wrote an equation. I used G for the annual growth factor, and wanted to see how close to 1.0000000 it was.

(Note: If G is exactly 1, then the population never changes; if G is less than 1, the population shrinks with exponential decay. If G=2.0, then the population doubles every year, which obviously can’t happen in any human population anywhere nor at any time. Though it certainly can for some of our commensal pests like mice…)

So, Macevedy & Jones’ initial population estimate of 4,000,000 (assuming smooth exponential growth over five millennia — a useful mathematical fiction) gets multiplied by G, whatever that might be, five thousand times (ie by G raised to the 5,000th power) to produce 5,000,000 people.

Or, 4000000*G^5000 = 5000000

Dividing both sides by four million I get

G^5000 = 1.25

The only way I know to solve that is to take the logarithm of both sides. Doing that with base ten and using the special laws of logs, I get

5000*log (G) = log (1.25)

Then I divide both sides by 5000 and I get

Log(G) = log(1.25) /5000

Then I exponentiate both sides using the original log base (ten), and I get

G =10^( log(1.25) / 5000)

At this point I use a calculator on my phone, typing in exactly the stuff on the RH side of the equals sign. And I get

10^(log10(1.25)/5000) = 1.00004463

Which is very, very close to unity. How close? Let us subtract one from that. We get

0.0000463 or 4.463e-05 in scientific notation. Or roughly 45 parts in a million. Mind you, there were a grand total of four million of our ancestors on the planet then, so we can multiply that 45 by four, and we get 180.

But what does that mean?

It means that on average, out of the ENTIRE HUMAN POPULATION ON THE PLANET AT THAT TIME, there was a net increase of people of only 180 souls per year.

That’s all.

On the whole planet!!!!

They had nearly achieved zero population growth!

But during the next five thousand years our population really exploded, to some hundreds of millions of people. Doinfg the same calculation, I found that the annual growth rate was about 1.00074, or 0.074%, or 74 additional net humans per year per hundred thousand, or about 74 thousand net new humans per year total, world-wide, once they got up to about a hundred million people.

That’s just up to the year 0 BC/AD.

Let us remember always that this planet right here is the only one we humans can possibly live on or get to in any numbers. We are as a species have done incalculable damage. Here in North America, think of the thoughtless and greedy extermination (or near-extermination) of the passenger pigeon; the American chestnut, elm, hemlock and ash; the buffalo; almost all of old-growth forests; most anadromous Atlantic fish; and Chesapeake bay oysters — all of which used to be plentiful beyond belief.

Some species are now recovering, such as deer, beavers, skunks, rabbits, foxes and coyotes.. Why is that? If you look at photos of Virginia countryside from 90 to 150 years ago, you see very, very few trees. Lumber companies and plantation owners and small farmers had cut them all down to plant grain and cash crops. Plowed land erodes quickly from both wind and rain. Those formerly fertile fields became uneconomical to farm, and so field after field (including ones I played or worked or hunted on as a kid and young man) have been allowed to regrow brush and then trees or housing developments, shopping centers, and pavement. So East of the Mississippi, there has been a dramatic increase in percentage of tree canopy over the last century.

However, some countries are repeating America’s mistakes and are cutting down primeval firsts as fast as they can…

As a 7th grader, could you have solved these? And how about now?

Do you realize how DIFFICULT the problems are on today’s 7th-grade PARCC-style standardized tests?

Take a look at this handful of questions, and feel free to look at others. If you compare these to the typical 7th-grade standardized test items from 30 or 40 years ago, you will have to conclude that these items asked these days are **much** more difficult than the ones from the past.

I strongly doubt that the folks who wrote these items, and those who are putting these items on the tests that nearly every 7th grader in the USA has to take, could have solved these when they were 7th graders?

And how many of my readers can solve these now, as adults?

Here are just a few:

Most of us have already had a case of COVID

From the Johns Hopkins daily health newsletter:

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US SEROPREVALENCE 

A study published April 26 in the US CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) estimates that 58% of the US population, including 75% of children, have been infected with SARS-CoV-2. Many of those infections occurred during the winter’s Omicron surge. The study reports on data from national commercial laboratories across all 50 states, Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico. Between September 2021 and February 2022, labs conducted convenience samples on blood specimens that were submitted for clinical testing in their labs, excluding samples that were testing for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies upon initial receipt. The median sample size for the group of labs was 73,869 each month, with a drop in the number of tests to 45,810 in February 2022, likely caused by disruptions from the surge in domestic infections fueled by the Omicron variant. The research team weighted samples by demographic data to produce estimates of seroprevalence. 

The team saw a slight, but steady, increase in seroprevalence between September and December 2021, increasing between 0.9-1.9% every 4 weeks. At the end of this collection period, the seroprevalence across the US sample was estimated to be 33.5%. Between December 2021 and February 2022, at the height of the Omicron surge, the team observed a spike in national seroprevalence, rising from 33.5% to 57.7%. Notably, during this period, children aged 0-11 saw an increase from 44.2% to 75.2% and those aged 12-17 saw a similar increase from 45.6% to 74.2%. Adult populations saw spikes in seroprevalence from 36.5% to 63.7% for individuals aged 18-49, 28.8% to 49.8% for those 50-64, and 19.1% to 33.2% among those aged 65 and older. The researchers noted several limitations in their study design, including restrictions of applicability tied to convenience sampling; limited race and ethnicity data; the potential for sampling bias due to the setting of sample collection; and the possibility that infection following vaccination resulted in reduced antibody titers.  

SARS-CoV-2 testing is only able to catch a fraction of cases occurring in the country, so serosurveys present an opportunity to better understand the scale of infections. Still, the study may not represent a full picture of COVID-19 in the country, nor does it indicate whether or not individuals with SARS-CoV-2 antibodies have persistent immunity to new infections. CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky noted the study’s results and vaccine uptake show an increased level of community protection from SARS-CoV-2. She added that vaccination remains key in creating a more resilient population, urging those who remain unvaccinated, including those previously infected, to get vaccinated. 

Unbelievable Progress in Compressing Data

I just got in the mail a small shiny object, about as long as a packet of cigarettes (remember those?) but much less wide or thick, that holds 2 Terabytes of data.

It weighs about 43 grams (or one and a half ounces).

(I am neither a Luddite nor an early adopter! I like my technology to be cheap!)

It’s an external hard drive, which I will use to transfer data from my old (10-year old) laptop to a new one. It only cost me 40 bucks.

See the photo for scale:

my very first 2-TB external hard drive (Not SSD)

It holds 2 Terabytes of data.

It is not solid state, because (a) I’m not an early adopter and (b) I’m frugal. Heck, I even build my own telescopes!)

I looked at the little device, and decided to compare its memory capacity to the biggest library I know of, the Library of Congress.

(By the way, when I was younger, I many hours in various sections of the LOC, researching all sorts of stuff. The halls and stacks of the LOC have a very old-fashioned atmosphere, totally different from this little gizmo.)

How big is the LOC? If you look it up, you will find that the estimates made by different people are not very close to each other. Obviously the degree of compression would matter a lot and would vary from work to work, and whether you are including all the videos and songs and other recordings.

If you leave out all the digital material, some estimates (like here) found that the printed part of the LOC, (books, newspapers, magazines, maps, menus, and so on) if scanned from the printed page into digital versions of those would add up to somewhere between 8 and 200 Terabytes of data.

8 to 200 Terabytes.

And my cheap little gizmo holds 2 Terabytes.

In other words, anywhere between 4 and 100 of these cheap little metal-and-plastic boxes would hold ALL of the useful information in ALL of the printed material in the world’s largest library ever.

LOC says their printed collections fill over 500 linear miles of shelving. Or maybe ‘only’ 100 miles of shelving if you stack your shelves 5 units high.

(Yes, I’m leaving out the electronic material.)

For a hundred to a few thousand dollars, depending on whose estimate is correct, and if someone were to digitize all that material, you could theoretically hold the biggest print library in the world – one that holds a copy or two of every single copyrighted book published in the US and most of the world.

That’s just incredible. Yes, we had microfilm when I was young, and it appears it may stay with us for the forseeable future, but the the compression factor for microfilm or microfiche is nothing like what we get now, electronically For example, a single roll of microfilm might hold a month or so of a daily newspaper – and that roll of film occupies roughly the same volume, and weighs close to the same as, one of these little external hard drives.

But my little drive can hold anywhere from 1/4 to 1% of the entire Library of Congress!

A shoe box could hold all of the printed data in the world!

And have room for lots of the film, video, recordings as well!

Amazing.

Now let’s see if it actually works!

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ON THE OTHER HAND:

There is a lot of meta-information in each and every physical, printed object, and much of the time, the scanned copy of a printed map, painting or photograph is way less satisfactory than original, and harder to use. Plus, there is no guarantee that an electromagnetic pulse won’t wipe out all of your data in a microsecond. Plus, we can’t guarantee that our smart electronics devices will always be able to read this data — have you ever tried to get old data program from a 5.25″ floppy or a large reel-to-reel tape or an 8-track tape? Not easy!

Newspapers from the mid-1700s are often in very good, readable shape.
But where are all the photos you took on your very first cell phone?

So don’t scrap old important documents just because you have a digital copy. Back it all up! Your hand-written diary, or a paperback book, will probably survive much longer than your cell phone. And they don’t need any batteries.

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‘Beatings Must Continue Until Morale Improves’

The ‘Value-Added Measurement’ movement in American education, implemented in part by the now-disgraced Michelle Rhee here in DC, has been a complete and utter failure, even as measured by its own yardsticks, as you will see below

Yet, the same corporate ‘reformers’ who were its major cheerleaders do not conclude from this that the idea was a bad one. Instead, they claim that it wasn’t tried with enough rigor and fidelity.

From “Schools Matter“:

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How to Learn Nothing from the Failure of VAM-Based Teacher Evaluation

The Annenberg Institute for School Reform is a most exclusive academic club lavishly funded and outfitted at Brown U. for the advancement of corporate education in America. 

The Institute is headed by Susanna Loeb, who has a whole slew of degrees from prestigious universities, none of which has anything to do with the science and art of schooling, teaching, or learning.  

Researchers at the Institute are circulating a working paper that, at first glance, would suggest that school reformers might have learned something about the failure of teacher evaluation based on value-added models applied to student test scores. The abstract:

Starting in 2009, the U.S. public education system undertook a massive effort to institute new high-stakes teacher evaluation systems. We examine the effects of these reforms on student achievement and attainment at a national scale by exploiting the staggered timing of implementation across states. We find precisely estimated null effects, on average, that rule out impacts as small as 1.5 percent of a standard deviation for achievement and 1 percentage point for high school graduation and college enrollment. We also find little evidence of heterogeneous effects across an index measuring system design rigor, specific design features, and district characteristics. [my emphasis – GFB]

So could this mean that the national failure of VAM applied to teacher evaluation might translate to decreasing the brutalization of teachers and the waste of student learning time that resulted from the implementation of VAM beginning in 2009?

No such luck.   

The conclusion of the paper, in fact, clearly shows that the Annenbergers have concluded that the failure to raise test scores by corporate accountability means (VAM) resulted from laggard states and districts that did not adhere strictly to the VAM’s mad methods.  In short, the corporate-led failure of VAM in education happened as a result of schools not being corporate enough:

Firms in the private sector often fail to implement best management practices and performance evaluation systems because of imperfectly competitive markets and the costs of implementing such policies and practices (Bloom and Van Reenen 2007). These same factors are likely to have influenced the design and implementation of teacher evaluation reforms. Unlike firms in a perfectly competitive market with incentives to implement management and evaluation systems that increase productivity, school districts and states face less competitive pressure to innovate. Similarly, adopting evaluation systems like the one implemented in Washington D.C. requires a significant investment of time, money, and political capital. Many states may have believed that the costs of these investments outweighed the benefits. Consequently, the evaluation systems adopted by many states were not meaningfully different from the status quo and subsequently failed to improve student outcomes.

So the Gates-Duncan RTTT corporate plan for teacher evaluation failed not because it was a corporate model but because it was not corporate enough!  In short, there were way too many small carrots and not enough big sticks.

What are the Big US Banks and the 1% Really Doing?

Michael Hudson explains, among other things, why we have high inflation: it is a way for the 1%, the ruling class, to get wealthier at the expense of the rest of us.

I don’t pretend to understand economics — after all, I’m just a lowly retired math teacher. But Hudson’s arguments are really chilling and extremely wide-ranging, but not easy to digest.

Here is one excerpt from a long interview. The full link: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/01/michael-hudson-what-is-causing-so-much-inflation.html

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[Interviewer: W]hy do you think central banks are are shifting to gold?

MICHAEL HUDSON: They’re protecting themselves against US political aggression. The big story last year was – if a country keeps its reserves and US dollars, that means they’re holding US Treasury securities. The US Treasury can simply say, “We’re not going to pay you.”

And even when a country like Venezuela tried to protect itself by holding its money in gold, where is it going to hold it? It held it at the Bank of England. And the Bank of England said, “Well, we’ve just been told by the White House that that they’ve elected a new president of Venezuela, Mr. Guaidó. And we don’t recognize the president that the Venezuelans elect[ed], because Venezuela is not part of the US orbit.”

So they grabbed all of Venezuela’s gold and gave it to the basically fascist opposition, to the ultra right-winger. The Americans say, “We’re going to recognize an opposition leader; we’re going to pick him out of thin air and take all the money away from Venezuela.”

Countries all over, from Russia to China to the Third World, think the United States is going to just grab [their] money, any time at all. The dollar is a hot potato, because the US, basically, it looks like, is prepping for war over the Ukraine; it’s prepping for war with Russia; it’s prepping for war with China.

It has declared war on almost the entire world that does not agree to follow the policies that the State Department and the military dictate to it.

So other countries are just scared, absolutely scared of what the United States is doing. Of course, they’re getting rid of dollars.

The United States said, “Well, you know, if we don’t like what Russia does, we’re going to cut off the banking contact with the SWIFT, the interbank money transfer system.” So if you do hold your money in dollars, you can’t get it.

I guess the classic example is with Iran. When the Shah was overthrown. Iran’s bank was Chase Manhattan Bank, which I was working for, as a balance-of-payments analyst.

And Iran had foreign debt that it paid promptly every three months, and so it [the new regime] sent a note to the bank, “Please pay our bondholders.” And Chase got a note from the State Department saying, “Don’t do what Iran wants; don’t pay.”

So Chase just sat on the money. It didn’t pay the bondholders. The US government and the IMF declared Iran in default of paying, even though it had all the money to pay the bondholders.

And all of a sudden, they said now Iran owes the entire balance that’s due, on the theory that if you miss one payment, then you default, and we’re going to make Iran do what the Fed didn’t make Chase Manhattan, and Citibank, and Goldman Sachs do. They couldn’t pay and transfer, but they weren’t pushed under bankruptcy.

So by holding your money in the US bank, the US bank does whatever the government tells it to, and it can drive any country bankrupt at any point.

If other countries pass a tariff against US goods that the US doesn’t like, it can just essentially not pay them on whatever they hold in the United States, whether they hold reserves in American banks, or whether they hold reserves in the Treasury or the Fed, the United States can just grab their money.

And so the United States has broken every rule in the financial book, and it’s a renegade; it’s a pirate.

And other countries are freeing themselves from piracy by saying, “The dollar is a hot potato. There is no way that we can believe them. You can’t make a contract with the American government.”

Ever since the Native Americans tried to make land contracts in the 19th century with them, the United States doesn’t pay any attention to the contracts signed. And President Putin says it’s “not agreement capable.”

So how can you make a financial arrangement with a country whose banks and State Department and financial department are not agreement capable? They’re bailing out.

And what’s the alternative? Well, the only alternative is to hold each other’s currencies, and to do something that, for the last 2,000 years, the world has liked gold and silver, and so they’re putting their money into gold because it’s an asset that doesn’t have a liability behind it.

It’s an asset that, if you’re holding it, not England, not the New York Fed – the German government has told the New York Fed, “Send us back to the gold that we have on deposit there for safekeeping. It’s not safekeeping anymore.

Planeload after planeload of gold is being flown back to Germany from the U.S., because even Germany – satellite as it is – is afraid that the United States may not like something Germany does, like if Germany imports gas from Russia, will America just grab all its gold and say, “You can’t have it anymore; we’re fining you.”

The United States has become lawless. And so of course you can’t trust it; it’s like a wild cat bank in the the 19th century.

Another Unsuccessful ‘Reformer’ to head NYC Public Schools

Someone named David Banks will most likely be the next head of New York City’s public school system. Gary Rubinstein, a math teacher and prolific blogger at Stuyvesant HS there, had never heard of the fellow, even though Banks had founded and led a network of nearly a dozen NYC public schools called the Eagle Academy for Young Men. So Rubinstein looked at the public record, and found that on just about all measures that Reformsters use, those schools are mostly failures. However, none of the local news outlets (NY Times, NY Post, etc) appears to have examined that record.

The record is not good. Read Rubinstein’s post for details.

I followed the links he gave, and found the following graphics for a number of the schools in that network. Feel free to explore some on your own by going here and then typing the word “eagle” and choosing any one of the schools.

Note the dark blue dots in the right hand graph in each case that I copied and pasted; they all, without exception, showed that the schools in that ensemble of schools, showed that they had both low average performance by the students AND had a low impact (meaning, they didn’t raise the academic performance of their students) by comparison with all of the other public schools in New York City.

Why do ‘reformers’ get a pass from the media, even though they never succeed at pulling off what they so boldly promise?

Of course you have problems!

Vaccines Save Lives. (Duh.)

This graph from today’s NYT shows why.