Here's a nice passage from Edmund Burke, on the idea of society as a contract across generations, though he doesn't do enough I think to distinguish society from the state.  I found the passage from the e-TOC of a weird journal I get, Population and Development Review, it's about demographics, I recognize that's not everybody's cup of tea but...

Reading Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, and I come across this:

It must be confessed that though the plague was chiefly among the poor, yet were the poor the most venturous and fearless of it, and went about their employment with a sort of brutal courage; I must call it so, for it was founded neither on religion or prudence; scarce did they use any caution, but run into any business which they could get employment in, though it was the most hazardous. Such was that of tending the sick, watching houses shut up, carrying infected persons...

Often you hear people on the right arguing for the existence of a cultural crisis, a crisis of the family, a crisis of moral anomie and nihilism, and arguing that this crisis exists because of cultural liberalism.

In this piece, from last year, Thomas Edsall gathers together some actual data that shows, reasonably convincingly, that no such "crisis" exists, and insofar as there are data...

Part of our problem with this virus is that it works on a time scale different than any that we've been used to. Actions we take today only show up as having an effect on the virus about three weeks from now. But we live in a zero-time society, where instantaneous events are the norm. This is probably especially so in politics, so political leaders are hyper-chipmunk like in their velocities. And they expect the other realities in their world to work on the same time scale. Nothing coming at them slowly looks like a danger. So our sensibilities are designed for threats very different...

More links.

Interesting—is the pandemic revealing that Americans don’t need as much health care as we’ve been getting? 

Found this article...

Got a lot of these.  Gotta get 'em out there. 

“If we are to understand how politics and markets work at the moment, we need to pay attention to how algorithms work, and how the economy is being remade from the ground up by these new forms of information processing.” Well this is a bit hyperbolic, isn’t it, but Henry Farrell is a political scientist, and they’re not...

No real reason to say these are for Father's Day.  But it is Father's Day!  And here are some links.

My UVA colleague and friend Gregory Fairchild has published a piece on his family and the Tulsa "race riot," which was actually an attempt by whites to annihilate a successful black...

There's just a lot of good stuff out there.

A careful analysis of why rural areas in the US have a greater susceptibility to harm from COVID-19.  Key factors are: a significantly larger number of older people, and significantly fewer hospitals, and...

Just to while away the hours.

A good backgrounder on Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the economists (really we should call them by the older and more honorable title of “political economists” at this point) behind the rising attention over the past few years to “deaths of despair” in the white working class. This piece is worth reading only to see how they...