How Much Bigger is the State Really Getting?

It's pretty well accepted that government grows significantly with development. There's an actual theory behind this, though I can't remember whose it was. Anyway, what I've been musing on is whether the state has actually enlarged that much if you think of it in terms of disposable income rather than total GDP. After reading Braudel, something that really struck me is how much of income used to be devoted to simply staying alive. This percentage has declined massively with time and is continuing to do so. So if you think of the cost of government only in relation to the percentage of GDP left after the cost of the food, clothing, and shelter necessary for survival are taken out, is the state that much bigger of a slice of GDP than it was in earlier times when the simple cost of staying alive was a significant portion of GDP? Maybe the state actually occupies a fairly constant share of disposable income and it is disposable income that is expanding as we develop?

I'm sure someone has done these numbers, though I haven't seen them. Just something I've been musing on. Though if you really wanted to set about calculating this you'd need some way to deal with the changed role of medicine in daily life from the past and longer life expectancies. Still, might be an interesting angle to look at the state's size from.

Why the Scientific Revolution Took So Long to Happen.

This is probably some unfair sniping. But if anyone is wondering why the scientific method is so essential to science, as well as why it took so long to happen, this article on the apparent "discovery" of Noah's Ark by a team of archaeologists, they're 99.9% certain they're right, shows something that probably closely resembles what quasi-scientific research may have looked like before modern methods. Without the scientific method you can still get progress through rigorous analysis, as this group does seem to be performing though from a scientifically flawed starting point, but without the method of scientific inquiry outside, unrelated concepts will prevent knowledge from being able to accumulate in a regular fashion and data cannot be analyzed in a meaningful way. This is just fun to point out as a modern example of what research probably used to look like before we had science. It also points out why we need science and these methods are a dead end.

We need a happy news site that doesn't feature wombat stories

I read this in the NY Times. It rather cheered me up. Also, after reading it, I really had a strong desire to try not to read any news for the next week or so in hopes I'd convince myself it's right.

Since I'm a news junky and couldn't do this, I instead searched for happy news. What I found featured Madonna and a waving wombat so I was left thinking we really need a news agglomeration service that would feature only positive news that also took itself seriously.

Maybe if I can ever find enough spare time I'll start a second blog devoted to this.