ARNOLD KLING
August 14, 2011
The Top Political Contributors
August 11, 2011
Gender and the New Commanding Heights
August 11, 2011
Jamie Galbraith Makes an Assumption
August 11, 2011
Macroeconometrics: The Science of Hubris
August 10, 2011
Real and Nominal Bond Yields
BRYAN CAPLAN
August 14, 2011
The Effect of Thumb Sucking on Income
August 12, 2011
The Voice of Cold, Hard Truth to All Would-Be Educators
August 12, 2011
Ability, Morality, and Prosperity: A Paper and a Report
August 11, 2011
The Theory of Time and Frittering
August 10, 2011
Male Variance and the Remnants of the Gender Gap
DAVID HENDERSON
August 9, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken", Part Two
August 8, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken"
August 5, 2011
James Bovard on the Peace Corps
August 4, 2011
Summers Way Off on FDR and 1941
August 3, 2011
The "Amazon" Tax
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one of my favorite books of all time.
re: linguistic innovation, i thought the spread of literacy resulted in the slowing down of linguistic evolution and change? so purely oral languages evolve and diversify much faster.
This sounds like a job for Language Log!
Broadly speaking, it's very hard to do anything useful with lexeme counts. For one thing, an existing lexeme can acquire a new meaning: the word "bank" is attested in written English since 1200, but only acquires the meaning "a money-dealer's shop" in 1567 (according to the Oxford English Dictionary).
Whether anyone has done it -- whether it's even meaningful to try -- it would be interesting to see a plot of lexeme count vs. GDP.
Razib:
A counterexample: the Pirahã have no written language, and a small lexicon; while English has had a written form for hundreds of years, yet has changed substantially.
Ray Kurzweil's Singularity book has dozens of charts showing hockey sticks, not just for technology invention, but also technology adoption. iPods have been adopted faster than VCR's which were faster than TV's which were faster than telephones.
Kurzweil's point is that technology is accelerating all kinds of change, including social and linguistic.
isn't using the Pirahã as one half of a dyad render the observation irrelevant for generalization? but you might right on the general point, i'm passing along muddled recollections.
Yes, it's a good book. The subject matter tends to be economics-without-money: e.g., how many calories can be generated per acre from a given terrain/topography combination.