『Let's Know Things』のカバーアート

Let's Know Things

Let's Know Things

著者： Colin Wright
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2026年5月12日まで。4か月目以降は月額1,500円で自動更新します。

概要

 A calm, non-shouty, non-polemical, weekly news analysis podcast for folks of all stripes and leanings who want to know more about what's happening in the world around them. Hosted by analytic journalist Colin Wright since 2016.

letsknowthings.substack.comColin Wright 政治・政府
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  • Child Mortality

    Child Mortality
    2026/05/05
    This week we talk about industrialization, antibiotics, and child mortality rates.We also discuss corruption, instability, and progress.Recommended Book: Empire of Silence by Christopher RuocchioTranscriptDemographic transition is a social sciences theory that posits, based on all sorts of modern historical data, that societies tend to change, demographically, as they transition from a largely agrarian, low-industrial society, to that of a less-agrarian, high-industrial society.Most modern, post-hunter-gatherer societies have started out plowing the vast majority of their labor into bare subsistence, human beings spending their days, throughout their whole lives, working the land in order to produce enough food to live. All sorts of social and economic systems arose around this base-level fact, including those that tied laborers to the land, allowing for the rise of a leadership or ruling class, regional militaries, and other sorts of specialists. But until relatively recent history, the majority of people in a given society labored to produce raw essentials, and that was just the shape of things.This began to change with the dawn of the industrial revolution, and in some areas a bit before that, as precursor technologies allowed societies to produce more food and other essentials with less manual labor and using fewer foundational resources, like land. These technologies, as they became more widely distributed, more effective and efficient, and cheaper to deploy and operate, allowed more people to do more sorts of things, leading to a ballooning of industry and commerce in industrializing regions, and that allowed said regions to invest in other things, including medical knowledge, education, and so on.Life wasn’t exactly a cakewalk in these industrializing areas, and all sorts of new abuses and issues, including long hours at factories and problems related to pollution, arose and became common. But because these sorts of societies required professionals with new types of knowledge and know-how, and because they were able to sustain an increasing number of specialities beyond working the land to generate food and other bare necessities, keeping people alive, longer, and ensuring more people had the specialized knowledge required to do all those things, became more of a priority, and one that could actually be addressed because of the concomitant ability to feed and clothe and house and address more of the needs of more people.There were gobs of other spiraling forces in the mix, of course, including religion, politics, and so on, but that general tendency to shift away from raw subsistence into more complex and diverse economic systems was a driving factor behind a lot of what happened from around 1800 until, well, now.What I’d like to talk about today is a specific data point, or collection of data points, that arguably, more than any other such data points, show the benefits of the industrialized, modern society we’re living in, today, despite all the accompanying downsides.—So most societies, at this point, have undergone significant changes as a result of our widespread application of technologies that allow human beings to get more done with the same amount of effort.We’re able to generate more value, of all kinds, than our ancestors, and though it’s possible to criticize the change in priorities and focus on all the negative knock-on effects of these changes—and there are many such negative knock-on effects, like large-scale military conflicts and rampant pollution and climate change—it would be difficult to argue that there haven’t been some fairly significant upsides for humanity, as well.One key upside is related to that demographic transition I mentioned. As societies shift and it becomes better for everyone if more people know how to do more things, and it thus becomes a priority for more people to live long enough to use the knowledge and know-how they acquire, it has increasingly made more sense for governments to invest in our overall longevity and survivability.We can’t just say, I’d like everyone to live longer, and then snap our fingers and make that happen. But we can, and have, invested in technologies and systems that make longer lives more likely, and from 1800 onward that’s generally been the trend, with a huge upswing arriving in the mid-20th century, when a bunch of new tools and technologies, including things like modern antiseptics and early antibiotics, first arrived on the scene, dramatically reducing the mortality rate associated with all kinds of medical procedures.Arguably the most significant social gain during this period, though, has been the bogglingly large reduction in child mortality rates.Child mortality refers to the death of children under the age of five, and this figure is, today, usually expressed as the likelihood of a child under five dying, per 1000 children in an area. So you might say in India, the child death rate is 92 in 1000,...
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    15 分
  • Iran War Costs

    Iran War Costs
    2026/04/28
    This week we talk about the Strait of Hormuz, oil, and Russia.We also discuss Patriot missiles, expensive weapons, and peer rivals.Recommended Book: Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le CunffTranscriptDuring 2025 and early 2026, about 20 million barrels of crude oil and other petroleum products was shipped through the Strait of Hormuz every day. That’s about a quarter of the world’s total seaborne oil, and essentially all of that oil, and gas, and those other energy products that pass through this strait are from Middle Eastern suppliers like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, and Iran.Beginning at the tail-end of February 2026, however, the Iranian military has shut down the Strait by threatening to take out or capture any vessels that attempt to pass through it. This has had the practical effect of initially reducing tanker traffic through the Strait by about 70%, but in recent weeks traffic has dropped to nearly zero. As of April 2026, about 2,000 ships are stranded in the area as a result of this closure.As a result of this shutdown, though, other energy product suppliers have seen demand for their oil and gas and the like increase, and that’s led to higher prices for these products.Russia, for instance, which doesn’t rely on the Strait to get its oil and gas out to its customers, has seen its oil tax revenue double in April, and the price of one grade of oil that it sells increased by 73% from February, alone.That’s a big windfall for Russia, which has had trouble selling its oil and gas at a significant profit, due in part to heavy sanctions that have resulted from its invasion of Ukraine. It’s continued to sell to countries like China and India, but those customers have been able to pay lower prices due to the lessened demand for what Russia is selling.This increased demand has thus goosed profits for Russia at a moment in which it could really use those sorts of profits—its economy is not doing terribly well, again because of its invasion of Ukraine, which has also not been going terribly well—so while inflation caused by this gas price-spike has been near-universally not great for much of the world, because energy cost increases tend to increase the price of just about everything, Russia’s government, at least, has been pretty happy with the shutdown of the Strait, and would probably love to see it continue.Another moderate benefactor of this shutdown has been the United States government. The US is the number one exporter of liquified natural gas, and one of the top exporters of oil and petroleum products. US export numbers are poised to hit new records with the closure of the Strait, too, because, just like with Russia, fewer products of this kind available on the global market means those who have such products to sell can charge higher prices for them.There’s a good chance this disruption, even if it ended today, for good, will have permanently rewired at least some of the global petroleum industry, as companies and countries that have been left in the lurch have adjusted their risks analyses and determined that it makes more sense to buy from different suppliers, to sell to different customers, or, in some cases, to use fewer of these products and invest more enthusiastically in renewables, like solar and wind—so while the US and Russia and a few other players are somewhat pleased with how things are going, oil and gas price-wise at least, long term this could actually harm them, the most, as more of their customers decide to stop paying irregular prices for what they’re selling and to opt for less turbulent solar and wind power, instead.What I’d like to talk about today is another knock-on effect of the war in Iran that could have significant international, possibly even military implications.—Since Trump first stepped into office, winning the US presidency back in 2016, allies have openly wondered whether the US could be relied upon as a military ally, should push come to shove.Trump has repeated said that he thinks NATO is a rip-off for the US, as the US has long provided the vast majority of funding and weapons for the alliance, and he’s pushed European NATO members to step up their own investment, lest he decide to just led Russia or whomever else attack them; he’s openly speculated that he might do exactly that.As a result of the US’s pivot away from happily playing the role of world police and invasion deterrent, European governments have been hastily putting together contingency plans that don’t include the US: if Russia turns its attention away from Ukraine and starts attacking the Baltics or Poland, they want to be ready, and they don’t want to have to rely on the unreliable Trump administration for their survival.Other governments that have long assumed they would be protected, at least in part, by the overwhelming force of the US military, have also been rethinking things, based on Trump’s stated, if not always practiced, ...
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    12 分
  • 2026 Hungarian Election

    2026 Hungarian Election
    2026/04/21
    This week we talk about Orbán, Hungary, and reformers.We also discuss Fidesz, Tisza, and illiberalism.Recommended Book: I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason ParginTranscriptHungary is a Central European country that was formed in the aftermath of WWI as part of the Treaty of Trianon, which—due to it having fought on the losing side of that conflict—resulted in the loss of more than 70% of its former territory, most of its economy, nearly 60% of its population, and about 32% of ethnic Hungarians who were left scattered across land that was given to neighboring countries when what was then Austria-Hungary was broken apart, initially by Hungary declaring independence from Austria, and then by those neighbors carving it up, grabbing land at the end of and just after the war, all of them pretty pissed at Hungary for being part of the Central Powers, quadruple alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Bulgaria.Today, Hungary is surrounded on all sides by other nations, including those who gobbled up some of their territory, back in the day. They’ve got Slovakia to their north, Ukraine to their northeast, Romania is to the east, and Serbia is to the south. Croatia and Slovenia are to their southwest, and Austria, which used to be part of the same nation as Hungary, is to their west.In 2026, Hungary has a population of a little over 9.5 million people, and the vast majority of those people, around 97.7%, are ethnic Hungarians, the next-largest ethnic group is Romani, weighing in at just 2.4%.During WWII, Hungary was on the Axis side of the conflict, once again ending up on the losing side of a world war, and was eventually occupied by the Soviet Union, which converted the nation into a satellite state called the Hungarian People’s Republic. Hungarians tried to revolt their way out of the Soviet Union’s grip in 1956, but it didn’t work. In 1989, though, during the wave of other regional revolutions that tore the Soviet Union apart, Hungary peacefully transitioned into a parliamentary democracy, and it joined the EU in 2004.What I’d like to talk about today is post-Soviet, Third Republic Hungary, the country’s conversion into an ultra-conservative, ultra-corrupt state, and how a decade and a half of democratic backsliding might be eased, at least somewhat, by new leadership that just won an overwhelming majority in Hungary’s recent elections.—In the 1990s, Hungary began its transition from state-run authoritarianism under the Soviets into the type of capitalism-centered democracy that was being spread by the US and its allies during the Cold War.In Hungary, like many other post-Soviet nations, this transition wasn’t smooth, and the country experienced a severe economic recession that sparked all manner of social upsets, as well.Hungary’s Socialist Party did really well in elections for a while, in large part because of how badly capitalism seemed to doing, and all the downsides locals now associated with it, but the Socialists went back and forth with other governments, especially the liberal conservative Fidesz (FEE-dez) party, each government taking the reins for four years before being voted out, replaced by the opposition, which was then voted out four years later and replaced by their opposition.In 2006, there was a big to-do about a report that the then-Prime Minister, in charge of the Socialist Party, had admitted behind closed doors to having lied to win the last election. “We lied in the morning, we lied in the evening, and we lied at night,” he said during that closed-doors speech, and the divulgence of this led to nationwide protests and a period, which continues today, in which no left-wing party could attain power, only conservative governments standing a chance of running things in Hungary.In 2010, the Fidesz party, led by Viktor Orbán, won a supermajority in parliament, and the following year, parliament approved a new constitution that brought a huge number of significant changes to the government and the nation’s laws. This adoption was criticized for basically being a nation-defining document that enshrines the party’s Conservative Christian ideology into law, permanently, despite that ideology not reflecting the views of the country at large; just over 40% of Hungary identifies as Christian. This new constitution also significantly cut or curtailed the rights of formerly independent institutions, removing basically all checks on the government’s power, and making it nearly impossible to push back against anything they might want to do, moving forward.Under Orbán, Hungary saw significant democratic backsliding, meaning the country was converted from a functioning democracy into something that looked like a democracy from the outside, with elections and a press and such, but with actual functionality closer to that of Russia, which also holds elections, but those elections are tightly controlled by ...
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    16 分
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