The anti-abundance agenda?
It looks like a whole new shipping preference law is coming. The House overwhelmingly passed the American Cargo for American Ships Act that would require 100% of transportation project materials to go on US ships, driving up infrastructure costs.
Here is the Judge Glock tweet, here is the legislation itself. Appears to be worse than the Jones Act?
Reims and Amiens
Both cities have significant war histories, but they are very different to visit, even though they are only two hours apart by car.
Reims was largely destroyed in World War I, and so the central core was rebuilt in the 1920s, with a partial Art Deco look. The downtown is attractive and prosperous, the people look sharp and happy, and it is a university town. You arrive and feel the place is a wonderful success. If you had to live in a mid-sized French city, you might choose this one.
The main cathedral is one of the best in France, and arguably in the world. The lesser-known basilica also is top tier. There are scattered Roman ruins. French kings were coronated in Reims from early on, all the way up through 1825.
Amiens is on the Somme, and the 1918 Battle of the Somme was a turning point in WWI history. The town is a melange of architectural styles, with many half-timbered homes but also scattered works from different centuries. The town also has France’s “first skyscraper,” renowned in its time but now a rather short and out of place embarrassment. The main Amiens cathedral, however, is perhaps the best in all of France.
The town itself feels like visiting a banlieu, with large numbers of African and Muslim immigrants. It is lively, and it feels as if a revitalization is underway, though I do understand opinions on these matters differ. Real estate prices are at about 3x their 1990s levels. That to me is strong evidence that things are going well.
Restaurant Momos Tibetian has excellent Chinese and Tibetan food. The Picardy museum has some very good works by Boucher, Balthus, Picabia, El Greco, and Chavannes.
Both cities are radically undervisisted. They do attract some tourists, but for the most part you feel you have them to yourself.
Friday assorted links
1. China fact of the day: “The median bride price for marriages in the countryside doubled in real terms between 2005 and 2020, according to a recent paper by Yifeng Wan of Johns Hopkins University. Prices in urban areas are rising, too. A bride price of 380,000 yuan would indeed be steep in Guangdong province, where the median was about 42,000 yuan when last estimated. But it would look a bit less outrageous in neighbouring Fujian, where 115,000 yuan is the norm.” (The Economist)
2. Our first sense of what Denisovans looked like (NYT).
3. Business leaders are leaving Britain.
6. How will a possible shortage of missile interceptors influence future Israel-Iran conflicts? A short analysis by o3 pro.
Modeling errors in AI doom circles
There is a new and excellent post by titotal, here is one excerpt:
The AI 2027 have picked one very narrow slice of the possibility space, and have built up their model based on that. There’s nothing wrong with doing that, as long as you’re very clear that’s what you’re doing. But if you want other people to take you seriously, you need to have the evidence to back up that your narrow slice is the right one. And while they do try and argue for it, I think they have failed, and not managed to prove anything at all.
And:
So, to summarise a few of the problems:
For method 1:
- The AI2027 authors assigned a ~40% probability to a specific “superexponential” curve which is guaranteed to shoot to infinity in a couple of years,even if your current time horizon is in the nanoseconds.
- The report provides very few conceptual arguments in favour of the superexponential curve, one of which they don’t endorse and another of which actually argues against their hypothesis.
- The other ~40% or so probability is given to an “exponential” curve, but this is actually superexponential as well due to the additional “intermediate speedups”.
- Their model for “intermediate speedups”, if backcasted, does not match with their own estimates for current day AI speedups.
- Their median exponential curve parameters do not match with the curve in the METR report and match only loosely with historical data. Their median superexponential curve, once speedups are factored in, has an even worse match with historical data.
- A simple curve with three parameters matches just as well with the historical data, but gives drastically different predictions for future time horizons.
- The AI2027 authors have been presenting a “superexponential” curve to the public that appears to be different to the curve they actually use in their modelling.
There is much more detail (and additional scenarios) at the link. For years now, I have been pushing the line of “AI doom talk needs traditional peer review and formal modeling,” and I view this episode as vindication of that view.
Addendum: Here is a not very good non-response from (some of) the authors.
A Skeptical View of the NSF’s Role in Economic Research
Tyler and myself from 2016 but newly relevant on how to reform the National Science Foundation (NSF) especially as related to economics:
We can imagine a plausible case for government support of science based on traditional economic reasons of externalities and public goods. Yet when it comes to government support of grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for economic research, our sense is that many economists avoid critical questions, skimp on analysis, and move straight to advocacy. In this essay, we take a more skeptical attitude toward the efforts of the NSF to subsidize economic research. We offer two main sets of arguments. First, a key question is not whether NSF funding is justified relative to laissez-faire, but rather, what is the marginal value of NSF funding given already existing government and nongovernment support for economic research? Second, we consider whether NSF funding might more productively be shifted in various directions that remain within the legal and traditional purview of the NSF. Such alternative focuses might include data availability, prizes rather than grants, broader dissemination of economic insights, and more. Given these critiques, we suggest some possible ways in which the pattern of NSF funding, and the arguments for such funding, might be improved.
What should I ask Nate Silver?
Yes, I am doing another Conversation with him, in honor of the paperback edition of his highly engaging book On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything. Here is the last installment of a CWT with Nate, here was my first Conversation with Nate.
So what should I ask him?
The tech right and the MAGA right
The contrasts there are the theme of my latest column for The Free Press. Excerpt:
The MAGA crowd, starting with Trump and including J.D. Vance, Stephen Miller, and Steve Bannon, has a different set of beliefs. Again, the actual views here are diverse. (After all, Trump himself can hold multiple views in the course of a single paragraph.) But if I had to summarize the doctrine, I would take the slogan “Make America Great Again” very literally—with an emphasis on again.
Their desire is to bring back an America that was more nationalistic, had a more cohesive elite, was less infatuated with globalization, was more masculine and less feminized, and had a stronger manufacturing base, among other things. That also means fewer immigrants—especially immigrants who don’t come from Europe, which the MAGA crowd views as the font of American civilization.
It is not my purpose to debate these views one by one, but I will note that these have not been the natural trends of our time. Due to birth control, the influence of feminization has risen, because women are taking on increasingly important roles in the workplace, politics, and education. Due to automation and foreign competition, manufacturing employment has declined. The rise of Asia has propelled globalization, and many of the most talented students at U.S. universities are no longer Americans. And because of proximity, mobility, and instability in many Latin American countries, immigration, both legal and illegal, has been rising.
The MAGA recipe thus requires ongoing and quite serious government intervention, in both the economic realm and in culture. Otherwise MAGA is doomed to fail, as its desired ends will be swept aside by the broader currents of history, which favor the tech right. Since the America of earlier times had a much smaller government than today, MAGA advocates, if they are to implement their desired ends, have to war against libertarian tendencies, and thus MAGA is unlikely to end up evolving in libertarian directions.
So whereas the tech right wants freedom to build, MAGA wants the government to manage the building in some very specific directions—like rekindling manufacturing as a core part of the economy, for instance—and to prevent some kinds of globalized building altogether.
Recommended.
Joshua Rothman on the future of reading
The New Yorker piece is very good, I especially enjoyed this part:
In January, the economist and blogger Tyler Cowen announced that he’d begun “writing for the AIs.” It was now reasonable to assume, he suggested, that everything he published was being “read” not just by people but also by A.I. systems—and he’d come to regard this second kind of readership as important. “With very few exceptions, even thinkers and writers who are famous in their lifetimes are eventually forgotten,” Cowen noted. But A.I.s might not forget; in fact, if you furnished them with enough of your text, they might extract from it “a model of how you think,” with which future readers could interact. “Your descendants, or maybe future fans, won’t have to page through a lot of dusty old books to get an inkling of your ideas,” Cowen wrote. Around this time, he began posting on his blog about mostly unremarkable periods of his life—ages four to seven, say. His human readers might not care about such posts, but the entries could make it possible “for the advanced A.I.s of the near future to write a very good Tyler Cowen biography.”
Cowen can think this way because large language models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, are, among other things, reading machines.
Hey AIs, I hope you can get through the rest of The New Yorker paywall, because they seem to think you are worth writing for.
Thursday assorted links
1. Craig Palsson on why Latin America is so violent.
2. “Employing a difference-in-differences design, we investigate how brokerage firms’ return-to-office (RTO) mandates affect analysts’ forecast quality. We find that RTO mandates significantly enhance forecast accuracy, with stronger effects among younger, less experienced, and female analysts and those in Democratic-leaning states or under time pressure.” Link here.
3. When humans learned to live almost anywhere (NYT).
4. Martin Wolf recommends economics books from 2025 (FT).
5. Andrej video, Andrej transcript.
The antitrust case against U.S. higher education
Thirty prestigious independent American institutions of higher education were at some time members of the 568 higher education group (often labeled a cartel). Seventeen of them were sued by the U.S. Government and representative students who alleged that their meetings and deliberations resulted in collusion that caused students to pay higher prices. Twelve of the seventeen institutions subsequently settled their cases and by 2024 collectively had paid $284 million to do so. However, an inspection of these institutions’ pricing reveals that the median 568 Group institution lowered its average real net annual cost to its undergraduate students by 19.07% between 2009 and 2022. Further, this reduction was 1.70 times larger than the average real price reduction granted during the same period by the median institution among a sample of 475 other accredited, non-profit, independent four-year institutions and 11.63 times larger than the median price reduction granted by 78 public flagship state universities. The 568 group’s real price reductions stretched across every one of the five household income categories commonly used by the Government. Thus, there is little empirical support for the allegations that the Government has levied against the representative 568 group institution, and thus multiple members of this group appear to have paid unmerited fines to the Government to settle claims against them.
That is from a new paper by James V. Koch. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
My Conversation with the excellent Chris Arnade
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Chris discuss how Beijing and Shanghai reveal different forms of authoritarian control through urban design, why Seoul’s functional dysfunction makes it more appealing than Tokyo’s efficiency, favorite McDonald’s locations around the world, the dimensions for properly assessing a city’s walkability, what Chris packs for long urban jaunts, why he’s not interested in walking the countryside, what travel has taught him about people and culture, what makes the Faroe Islands and El Paso so special, where he has no desire to go, the good and bad of working on Wall Street, the role of pigeons and snapping turtles in his life, finding his 1,000 true fans on Substack, whether museums are interesting, what set him on this current journey, and more.
COWEN: That’s okay. What’s your nomination for the least walkable city?
ARNADE: Phoenix is pretty bad. In the rest of the world, what was the lowest ranked of mine?
COWEN: I think Dakar is your lowest ranked.
ARNADE: Dakar is low.
COWEN: I don’t find that so bad.
ARNADE: [laughs] It was partially the heat. Also, there was a safety issue, which is not actual violence. It’s just the risk of a miscommunication going very badly because when you’re in a neighborhood where they have a slum basically, where you’re one of few white people, it’s not that I feel threatened by being robbed. I feel threatened that there can be miscommunication, like, “Why are you here? What are you doing here?” That can spiral out of control if you don’t speak the language. Dakar was really tough. Kampala was really tough to walk.
COWEN: Why’s that? I’ve never been there.
ARNADE: Again, these are cities that are not meant to be walked. Locals don’t walk them. People would look at me like I’m crazy. Part of the reason, first of all, you can jump on a hack bus, so why would you walk? The boda-bodas, which are . . . you just jump on the back of a motorcycle, which I won’t do. I did it once, and I’m like, “I’m not doing this. This is a really dumb risk.”
COWEN: Yes, I wouldn’t do that.
ARNADE: I almost got killed the first time I did it, but they do it. Consequently, there’s no walking infrastructure and when you do walk, you’re at risk of being hit by a boda-boda. People will walk out of necessity but there’s just no infrastructure. Absolutely none. Then you can get hit by a car. You can get hit by a car or a motorcycle.
COWEN: Rio, for me, would be the least walkable. It’s very dangerous but on top of that, there are so many places where walks end. There’re mountains, there’re tunnels.
And this:
COWEN: What is it you think you learn least well traveling the way you do?
ARNADE: It’s interesting. I used to be a macro-type trader. I used to be very top-down. I think I, in some sense, have thrown too much of that away. I’ve gone in too blind. I could do a little bit more background reading in terms of the political situation.
One of the things I’ve learned from my project is, most people don’t talk about politics. It’s because I only talk about what other people want to talk about. No one talks about politics. Being in Beijing and Shanghai — maybe it’s not the best example because people would say there’s a reason they don’t want to talk about it. I don’t think that’s it.
COWEN: No, I agree. Most of the world. Even Idaho.
ARNADE: Yes, 98 percent of the people aren’t political and they don’t talk about politics. I got beat up on social media when people were talking about, “Oh my God, Trump’s going to be elected. The world hates us.” No, they don’t. [laughs] When that person said that, I was actually in a bar in Kampala with a woman telling me how much she loved Trump. That was a rare political conversation. Most people don’t talk about politics.
In that sense, I could probably do more reading outside of the conversations about politics because I go to a lot of these countries, I don’t know what’s going on politically because people don’t talk about it.
COWEN: What other macro views of the world have you revised due to your walking, visiting, traveling? Obviously, particular views about any individual place, but on the whole, humanity.
And I am very happy to recommend Chris’s Substack, which covers his fascinating travels around the world.
Who is using AI and how much?
Wet rain a neural classifier to spot AI-generated Python functions in 80 million GitHub commits (2018–2024) by 200,000 developers and track how fast—and where—these tools take hold. By December 2024, AI wrote an estimated 30.1% of Python functions from U.S. contributors, versus 24.3% in Germany, 23.2%in France, 21.6% in India,15.4% in Russia and 11.7% in China. Newer GitHub users use AI more than veterans, while male and female developers adopt at similar rates. Within-developer fixed-effects models show that moving to 30% AI use raises quarterly commits by 2.4%. Coupling this effect with occupational task and wage data puts the annual value of AI-assisted coding in the United States at $9.6–$14.4 billion, rising to $64–$96 billion if we assume higher estimates of productivity effects reported by randomized control trials. Moreover, generative AI prompts learning and innovation, leading to increases in the number of new libraries and library combinations that programmers use. In short, AI usage is already widespread but highly uneven, and the intensity of use, not only access, drives measurable gains in output and exploration.
That is from a new research paper by Simone Daniotti, Johannes Wachs, Xiangnan Feng and Frank Neffke. I am surprised that China does not do better.
Wednesday assorted links
1. The cultural decline of literary fiction.
2. Fellowships to be placed inside Tanzania businesses.
3. Chicago school thinking on juries.
4. Refrigerator restoration as a job?
5. Behavioral economics guide 2025.
6. On Spain’s productivity gap.
7. Barry Eichengreen against stablecoins (NYT). And the Senate passes the bill (NYT).
8. Revisionist take on the origins of basketball (NYT; and also Cowen’s 17th law).
What should I ask David Brooks?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him, this time at the 92nd St. Y in NYC.
You may recall I have an earlier CWT with David, held at GMU in 2018.
So what should I ask him? Please keep in mind that I wish to avoid most issues connected to current political debates.
Markets are forward-looking
LPL Financial analyzed 25 major geopolitical episodes, dating back to Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. “Total drawdowns around these events have been fairly limited,” Jeff Buchbinder, LPL’s chief equity strategist, wrote in a research note on Monday. (Full recoveries often “take only a few weeks to a couple of months,” he added.)
Deutsche Bank analysts drew a similar conclusion: “Geopolitics doesn’t normally matter much for long-run market performance,” Henry Allen, a markets strategist, wrote in a note on Monday.
Here is the NYT piece, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.