The high point of Daniel Craig’s portrait of James Bond over five movies is undoubtedly the moment in Skyfall where Bond runs through London to rescue M, portrayed by Judi Dench, as she finishes her testimony in front of a select committee—assembled to put her and her agency out to pasture—with the closing passage of Tennyson’s Ulysses. The duality of meaning embedded in this sequence is profound. In the movie itself, the depiction of the ageing and wounded, but still capable, hero encapsulates the narrative arc of James Bond, who in Skyfall has almost literally come back from the dead to save his country. In a wider context, Tennyson’s closing lines can be seen as the saplings of a post-empire English identity, in which erstwhile grandeur and power have been replaced with grit, determination, and pride—and more distantly, with common sense, decency, and respect.
Read MoreMillennials, according to the internet, are people born between 1981 and 1996. That's a bit of a gap, so it will be useful to narrow down the definition of our protagonist somewhat. This is a story about a relatively old Millennial, born in 1984. It is not at all inconceivable that this person will have a different perspective from a namesake born in the middle of the 1990s. This is a bias that we must accept such as it is. Even more specifically, this is a story about European millennial, born in Denmark, who has ended up in the United Kingdom. He is married to a Canadian woman of Guyanese, and ultimately Indian, descent, who is now a naturalised English citizen. The melting pot is real, and millennials are sizzling in its cauldron.
Read MoreThe Economist’s Free Exchange column drops in on the question of an economic motherhood penalty from childbirth. It is nice to see that the Economist correctly distinguishes between two distinct economic motherhood penalties, both of which can be traced to the interplay between evolutionary forces and modernity, where the latter in this case is defined as an environment with rapidly increasing returns to investment in human capital and education. The first, between fathers and mothers, emerge because the cost of child-rearing especially in the early part of a child’s life overwhelmingly falls on the mother, a conclusion which follows from Trivers (1972). This is true in terms of the cost during pregnancy and immediately after too. It is also true before we consider the possibility that the resource allocation trade-off for many women shifts in the wake of motherhood. The second motherhood penalty occurs between women. Put simply, in an economic structure where childless women have the ability to devote all their resources to somatic investment and take advantage of the above-mentioned increasing returns to human capital investment, the wage and wealth divergence between women who have many children and those who have none will widen significantly, at least in theory. For more on this, I cover the theory in more detail in my essay on fertility and sexual selection; see here.
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