Week in Review: May 11 to 16

SECTION:intro] It’s Sunday, May seventeenth, and welcome to HigherIQ. This week covered a lot of ground: immigration and risk, the maps that decide elections, the tax you pay every time you fill your tank, the weapons that exist to never be used, the tiny switches that run the modern world, and why you laughed at something this week without knowing why. Here’s what to carry into Monday. We started the week with a question that came from a conversation with my cousin: why don’t first-generation immigrants take risks? The answer is straightforward. When you have no safety net, the fall is catastrophic, so you don’t jump. You pursue stability. Engineering, medicine, accounting. But the data shows something the bootstrap mythology never mentions: the single strongest predictor of entrepreneurship isn’t personality or talent. It’s having wealthy parents. Over eighty percent of startup funding comes from personal savings and family money. Bezos’s parents invested $250,000 in Amazon. Gates’s mother knew the chairman of IBM. The “self-made risk-taker” almost always had a softer landing than it appeared. Meanwhile, the first-generation immigrants who actually risked the most, the ones who put their savings into a laundromat with no backup plan, built the floor that let the next generation jump. Second-generation Americans out-earn both their parents and native-born Americans. The sacrifice pays off. Just not for the person who made it. That theme of invisible systems shaping outcomes carried through the rest of the week. We covered gerrymandering, which is how the shape of a voting district can determine who wins an election before anyone votes. Two techniques: packing (cram your opponent’s voters into a few districts so they win big but waste votes) and cracking (spread them thin so they never reach a majority anywhere). Both parties do it. Republicans used REDMAP in 2010 to lock in advantages across multiple states. Democrats gerrymandered Maryland, Illinois, and California. In Wisconsin in 2018, Democrats won fifty three percent of the statewide vote and got thirty six of ninety nine seats. In 2019, the Supreme Court said federal courts can’t do anything about partisan gerrymandering. The maps are drawn by the people who benefit from drawing them, and the court that could have intervened chose not to. We also looked at another system most people interact with constantly and never think about: how roads get paid for. The federal gas tax is 18.4 cents per gallon. It was set in 1993 and hasn’t changed since. Adjusted for inflation, it’s lost more than half its value. The Highway Trust Fund it feeds has been running deficits since 2008 and has been bailed out nine times. Both parties are now proposing to suspend the tax entirely because gas prices are high. Economists from both sides say most of the savings would go to oil companies, not drivers. Obama called a gas tax holiday a gimmick in 2008. Biden proposed one in 2022. Now Trump. Same idea, every party, same economists shaking their heads. Meanwhile, tolls that were supposed to be temporary decades ago are still there and still going up. If you’ve ever driven from the Midwest to Chicago, you know exactly what that feels like. The heaviest episode of the week was about nuclear weapons. Russia tested a new missile the same week the last arms control treaty between the US and Russia expired with no replacement. For the first time in fifty years, there are no limits on what either side can build. There are roughly twelve thousand nuclear weapons on Earth. At the Cold War peak, there were seventy thousand. The treaties that brought that number down are now gone. The most chilling detail: in 1983, a Soviet officer named Stanislav Petrov saw five incoming American missiles on his screen, decided it was a malfunction based on gut instinct, and didn’t report it. He was right. Sunlight on clouds. One person’s judgment may have prevented the deaths of hundreds of millions of people. Every country that gave up its nuclear weapons, Ukraine and Libya, was later attacked or overthrown. Every country that kept them has been left alone. That’s why Iran wants one. And if Iran gets one, Saudi Arabia and Turkey follow. We shifted gears for Saturday with something lighter: why we find things funny. The best theory of humor, called benign violation, says something is funny when it violates your sense of how the world should work but simultaneously feels safe. Tickling from a trusted person is funny. The same physical sensation from a stranger is terrifying. A joke about a tragedy works years later but not the day it happens. The violation hasn’t changed. The distance has. The most surprising finding: fewer than twenty percent of laughs in everyday conversation follow anything actually funny. Laughter is mostly a social bonding signal, not a humor response. It evolved as what one researcher called “grooming at a distance,” releasing the same endorphins as physical bonding but working across a group. Comedy didn’t create laughter. It just figured out how to use it. Looking ahead, Monday’s episode is about semiconductors: the tiny switches that run every phone, computer, and AI system on Earth. The first transistor was built in 1947 with a paperclip and gold foil. A modern chip has billions of them. One company in the Netherlands makes the only machine that can manufacture them. One company in Taiwan produces ninety percent of the world’s most advanced chips. And a company that used to make graphics cards for video games is now worth three trillion dollars because rendering explosions in Call of Duty turned out to be the same math as training an AI model. That was the week. Systems that shape your life without you seeing them: who takes risks and why, who draws the maps, who pays for the roads, who has the weapons, and why you laughed at something on Thursday. See you tomorrow. Stay informed, stay curious, and we’ll see you tomorrow.