Sunday assorted links
1. False claims about China and Japan, but still worth pondering.
2. False claims about birth rates and utility.
3. Can management consultants be literary heroes? (FT)
4. JFV on equilibrium in economics.
5. When does low fertility shatter the social contract?
6. Naturally occurring furin cleavage sites.
7. If somehow you do not know the works of Tom Stoppard you should, RIP, here is the NYT obituary.
What should I ask Harvey Mansfield?
I will be doing a Conversation with him. So what should I ask?
Note he has a new book coming out early next year, namely
Europe’s first elephant sanctuary
Portugal’s Alentejo region is set to become home to a groundbreaking project – Europe’s first sanctuary for elephants that have lived in captivity.
Set across 402 hectares between Vila Viçosa and Alandroal, the vast refuge will welcome its first residents – elephants from zoos and circuses across Europe – in early 2026. The initiative is led by the non-profit organisation Pangea, registered in Portugal and the UK, with support from local councils and national environmental authorities such as Directorate-General for Food and Veterinary (DGAV) and the Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests (ICNF).
The land was purchased in 2023 by the non-profit, which has been busy preparing it for the elephants…
In a statement, Pangea explained that the project consists of creating a natural space for “elephants in a vulnerable situation”, so that the animals can “move freely, feed and socialise, just as they would in their wild habitat”.
Here is the full story. About thirty elephants are slated to end up there. Henry Mance at the FT notes:
The elephants will have 850 acres to roam — more than 200 times the size of Tierpark Berlin zoo’s elephant enclosure or 28 times that of the UK’s Whipsnade Zoo.
And:
The median lifespan for African elephants in a Kenyan national park was three times that of those in European zoos.
Will this prove financially sustainable? Replicable? Finding an area with enough water was one of the major constraints.
*FDR: A New Political Life*
From historian David T. Beito, here is one excerpt:
FDR gave unquestioning support to President Wilson’s crackdown on free speech during World War I, including his enforcement of the Sedition and Espionage Acts. According to Kenneth S. Davis, Roosevelt “went along with prevailing trends in the realm of the national spirit, uninhibited by any strong ideological commitment to the Bill of Rights.” After reading about the conviction of the publisher of an antiwar socialist pamphlet, for example, he sent a congratulatory letter to the federal prosecutor…
There is much more here than just the standard market-oriented “Roosevelt had bad economic policies” line, and the more left-leaning critique of Roosevelt on segregation and the southern coalition. For instance, Roosevelt supported policies that required the telegram companies to keep copies of all telegrams sent, and he used the FCC licensing process to help keep radio in his corner politically.
There is more. It can be said that this book offers a very negative view of FDR.
Emergent Ventures Africa and the Caribbean, 7th cohort
Leila Character, Assistant Prof. at Texas A&M, for a project using hyperspectral-imaging drones for archaeological research in Belize.
Nour Bou Malhab, Lebanon, for promoting classical liberal thought throughout Lebanon and across the Maghreb.
Isaac Akintaro, Nigeria/England, computer science PhD Candidate, for travel to San Francisco
Nikita Greenidge, St. Lucia/England, PhD in Surgical Robotics, for a startup using AI to improve surgical techniques in the Caribbean.
Michael Konu, Ghana/USA, for bioengineering research on virtual cells and for career development.
Waldo Krugell, South Africa, Prof. at North West University, for a project improving economics education for South African high-school students.
Edmund Trueman, to develop a digital archive to showcase Congolese comics.
Justin Sooknanan, Trinidad & Tobago, undergrad electrical engineering, travel grant to UK and for career development.
Temitope Johnson, Nigeria/South Africa, for designing a phototherapy device for neonatal jaundice treatment.Mmesomachi Nwachukwu, Nigeria, for running a national training program preparing students for the International Mathematical Olympiad.
Jibrin Jaafaru, Nigeria, PhD candidate, for travel to the United States to pursue a bioinformatics fellowship
Ollie Sayeed, PhD UPenn, historical linguist, for research evaluating the effectiveness of malaria interventions in Africa
Shreya Hegde, for drone-mapping and route-optimization work in Kenya.
Jan Grzymski, Assistant Professor at Lazarski University, to run a summer program introducing Caribbean scholars to Poland’s transition from communist rule to a market-driven economy.
Arun Shanmuganathan, Rwanda, to support mathematics training at the African Olympiad Academy.
Samiya Allen, Barbados, undergrad electronics, travel grant to UK for robotics training and career development.
Rose Mutiso, Kenya, PhD UPenn in materials science, to create the African Tech Futures Lab, to improve policymaking on energy technologies.
Darren Ramsook, Trinidad & Tobago, Postdoc at Trinity College Dublin, for research on AI-driven video compression.
Cheyenne Polius, St. Lucia, for work on astro-tourism and space education in the Caribbean.
I thank Rasheed Griffith for his excellent work on this, and again Nabeel has created excellent software to help organize the list of winners, using AI.
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV African and the Caribbean announcement is here and you can see previous cohorts here. If you are interested in supporting this tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Rasheed.
Does drug interdiction work?
From GPT 5.1 Pro:
“In the economic literature, the dominant story is:
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Prohibition and enforcement do make illegal drugs much more expensive than they would be in a legal market.
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But marginal increases in interdiction (seizing shipments, crop eradication, etc.), especially in the Andes, have not produced sustained higher prices or lower quantities in consumer markets.
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Instead, retail, purity‑adjusted prices for cocaine and heroin show large long‑run declines (1980s–2000s) and then roughly flat or drifting patterns at historically low levels, while global production and consumption reach record highs. Reuters+4whitehouse.gov+4whitehouse.gov+4
So between your two stylized options—“successfully limit quantity and raise prices” vs. “long‑run steady decline in prices”—the long‑run price data look a lot more like the second story, with only temporary interruptions from big interdiction pushes.”
There is much more at the link. Blowing up a few boats is not going to change that logic.
Saturday assorted links
Education Signaling and Employer Learning Heterogeneity
An interesting paper based on an idea:
We investigate the implications of heterogeneous employer learning on education signaling and workers sorting across industries. In the equilibrium of our model, higher-ability workers join industries with faster employer learning speeds, resulting in a matching distortion of workers and industries. In addition, our results are robust to varying degrees of asymmetric employer learning, and establish that industry choice itself serves as a signal of worker ability. Finally, our theoretical approach suggests a novel perspective on a heretofore neglected labor market puzzle, i.e., why few of the richest individuals have obtained higher degrees of education.
That is from Yuhan Chen, Thomas Jungbauer, and Michael Waldman. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Best movies of 2025
This was one of the weakest years in my lifetime for movies, and with few that would count as truly great. Here are the ones I liked:
Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat
Flow
I’m Still Here
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Gazer
The Shrouds
Warfare
Oh, Hi
Weapons
Sorry, Baby
Red Rooms (actually 2023 but it deserves a mention anyway)
Hamnet
What else?
I hope this is stupid and bad enough to change some things
Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all…As two men clung to a stricken, burning ship targeted by SEAL Team 6, the Joint Special Operations commander followed the defense secretary’s order to leave no survivors.
Here is the full article, of course that is a war crime.
*Policing on Drugs*
The author is Aileen Teague, and the subtitle is The United States, Mexico, and the Origins of the Modern Drug War, 1969-2000. I had been wanting to read a book on this topic, and this manuscript covered exactly the ground I was hoping for. Excerpt:
…in 1965, only 4.8 percent of college students in the Northeast had ever tried marijuana. By 1970, that figure jmped to 48 percent of college students from Northeast schools having used marijuana within the last year.
Jim Buchanan was right? Blame the Beatles? Remember when so much of the drug trade was a Turkish-French thing?
If you are wondering, the Mexican drug cartels emerged during the 1970s. Perhaps the author blames more of this on U.S. policy than I think is correct? If Nixon had never cracked down and militarized the issue, I suspect the evolution of the matter would not be so different from current status quo? Unless of course you wish to go the Walmart route.
In any case a good book on a topic of vital importance.
Friday assorted links
Against We
I propose a moratorium on the generalized first-person plural for all blog posts, social media comments, opinion writing, headline writers, for all of December. No “we, “us,” or “our,” unless the “we” is made explicit.
No more “we’re living in a golden age,” “we need to talk about,” “we can’t stop talking about,” “we need to wise up.” They’re endless. “We’ve never seen numbers like this.” “We are not likely to forget.” “We need not mourn for the past.” “What exactly are we trying to fix?” “How are we raising our children?” “I hate that these are our choices.”
…“We” is what linguists call a deictic word. It has no meaning without context. It is a pointer. If I say “here,” it means nothing unless you can see where I am standing. If I say “we,” it means nothing unless you know who is standing next to me.
…in a headline like “Do we need to ban phones in schools?” the “we” is slippery. The linguist Norman Fairclough called this way of speaking to a mass audience as if they were close friends synthetic personalization. The “we” creates fake intimacy and fake equality.
Nietzsche thought a lot about how language is psychology. He would look askance at the “we” in posts like “should we ban ugly buildings?” He might ask: who are you that you do not put yourself in the role of the doer or the doing? Are you a lion or a lamb?
Perhaps you are simply a coward hiding in the herd, Martin Heidegger might say, with das Man. Don’t be an LLM. Be like Carol!
Hannah Arendt would say you’re dodging the blame. “Where all are guilty, nobody is.” Did you have a hand in the policy you are now critiquing? Own up to your role.
Perhaps you are confusing your privileged perch with the broader human condition. Roland Barthes called this ex-nomination. You don’t really want to admit that you are in a distinct pundit class, so you see your views as universal laws.
Adorno would say you are selling a fake membership with your “jargon of authenticity,” offering the reader membership in your club. As E. Nelson Bridwell in the old Mad Magazine had it: What do you mean We?
…If you are speaking for a very specific we, then say so. As Mark Twain is said to have said, “only presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms ought to have the right to use we.”
I could go on. But you get the drift. The bottom line is that “we” is squishy. I is the brave pronoun. I is the hardier pronoun. I is the—dare I say it—manly pronoun.
I agree.
What I’ve been reading
1. Thomas Meyer-Wieser, Cairo: Architectural Guide. A picture book, sort of. Reading a book on the architectural history of a place, while intrinsically interesting, is also usually the best way to learn the non-architectural history of that same place. Recommended.
2. Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney. A late 18th English fictional memoir, still underrated and fairly short to boot. Very interesting on Enlightenment culture, what it meant to grow up in a reading culture, and the power of early feminism.
3. Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. Usually journals bore me after the first fifty pages. But this lengthy volume is fascinating throughout, and arguably her greatest achievement? At the very least worth a try. She maintained an impossibly high level of writing across these years, plus you see (close up) the shifts in how her life was going, electroshock therapy and all. Recommended.
4. Somerset Maugham, Up at the Villa. Great fun at first, and very short. It ends up “overinvesting” in plot, but still for me a worthwhile read. It is best when at its most psychological.
5. Joel J. Miller, The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Out Future. A paean to reading and its importance, comprised of many historical anecdotes. I wish each part went into more detail, nonetheless this is an important book about a cultural transmission method that is in some unfortunate ways diminishing in its cultural centrality.
6. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas. Why do so few people talk about this piece? It is Woolf writing on feminization and the prevention of war. The argument is dense, and I will give it a reread. She seems to attributing some of the worst aspects of militarized society to the approbational propensities of educated women? She also considers — well ahead of her time — how male and female philanthropy are likely to differ. In any case, there is more here than at first meets the eye.
There is also Keija Wu’s A Modern History of China’s Art Market.
What we’re grateful for
Here is the Free Press symposium, here is my contribution:
Tyler Cowen, columnist
I am grateful for how many parts of the world I can visit freely. I have been to roughly 105 countries and have not had serious problems getting to them, entering them, or leaving them. Nor have I contracted any serious illnesses abroad.
I do feel some recent growth in restrictions. For instance, I cannot go to Russia and be assured of my safety, nor would I feel comfortable visiting Ukraine at the current moment, given the ongoing Russian attacks. Nonetheless, so very much of the world is accessible to us, whenever we wish to be there.
This is an unparalleled opportunity, without precedent in the history of mankind.