Not the best news from Argentina…
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said “all options” are on the table for the Trump administration to support Argentina through a bout of severe market volatility, throwing a lifeline to libertarian president Javier Milei.
In comments on X, Bessent said that financial assistance could include purchases of Argentina’s currency or sovereign debt by a fund controlled by the US Treasury. Milei, a close ally of Donald Trump, is trying to contain a run on the peso and slide in asset prices after a disappointing local election result unnerved markets.
Milei and Bessent are set to meet Trump in New York on Tuesday…
He said that options for a support package “may include, but are not limited to, swap lines, direct currency purchases, and purchases of US dollar-denominated government debt from Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund”.
But that is not surprising either, not if you have been reading MR. Here is more from the FT.
H1-B visa fees and the academic job market
Assume the courts do not strike this down (perhaps they will?).
Will foreigners still be hired at the entry level with an extra 100k surcharge? I would think not,as university budgets are tight these days. I presume there is some way to turn them down legally, without courting discrimination lawsuits?
What if you ask them to accept a lower starting wage? A different deal in some other manner, such as no summer money or a higher teaching load? Is that legal? Will schools have the stomach to even try? I would guess not. Is there a way to amortize the 100k over five or six years? What if the new hire leaves the institution in year three of the deal?
In economics at least, a pretty high percentage of the graduate students at top institutions do not have green cards or citizenships.
So how exactly is this going to work? There are not so many jobs in Europe, not enough to absorb those students even if they wish to work there. Will many drop out right now? And if the flow of graduate students is not replenished, given that entry into the US job market is now tougher, how many graduate programs will close up?
Will Chinese universities suddenly hire a lot more quality talent?
Here is some related discussion on Twitter.
As they say, solve for the equilibrium…
AI and weather tracking as a very positive intervention
India’s monsoon season was unusual this year, but many farmers there had new AI weather-forecasting tools to help them ride out the storms.
Google’s open-source artificial intelligence model NeuralGCM and the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts’s AI systems are making sophisticated and granular forecasting data available to even the smallest farms in poor areas. Thanks to the open-source AI, and decades of rainfall data, the Indian government sent out forecasts to 38 million farmers to warn them about looming monsoons.
The initiative to help farmers adapt is the latest example of how companies are expanding their weather-tracking capabilities amid mounting concerns about extreme weather and climate change.
The effort is part of a growing “democratization of weather forecasting,” said Pedram Hassanzadeh, a researcher at the University of Chicago who focuses on machine learning and extreme weather. Researchers from the university partnered with the Indian government to gather and send out the monsoon predictions.
“Up until very recently, to run a weather model, you needed a 100 million-dollar supercomputer,” said Olivia Graham, a product manager at Google Research. But now, farmers in India can make better-informed agricultural decisions quickly, she said.
These projects seem to have very high benefit to cost ratios. Here is one relevant RCT, here is another. Here is more from the WSJ, via Michael Kremer. Here is a useful and informative press release.
Sunday assorted links
1. Are the super-wealthy abandoning art markets?
2. Why are Talenti gelato jars so hard to open? Hot water works for me.
3. New Mexico will offer free child care and preschool for all families.
4. How men and women rank movies differently.
5. “Unsurprisingly, she’s not planning a trip any time soon. Tourism has just never been her thing.”
7. “AI Music Artist Lands Multi-Million Dollar Record Deal.“
What to read for travel
When you land in a new destination, what should you read? It’s hard to find good material with search engines because the space is SEO’d so aggressively. A Wikipedia article is fine insofar as it goes, but inevitably misses much of the texture of a place. I think it’d be neat if there was some kind of service that collated great travel writing — especially pieces that capture something of the context of a place. (See the Davies post below.) To this end, I made guide.world.
From Patrick Collison, recommended, lots of great reading (and travel) there.
The forthcoming Joe Studwell book on Africa
How Africa Works: Success and Failure on the World’s Last Development Frontier.
Self-recommending…
A simple metric for choosing immigrants for America
I often hear the following standards suggested:
1. Use willingness to pay for entry.
2. Take people from high IQ countries.
3. Take people from high trust countries.
4. Take people from similar countries, which I suppose means Canada and Australia?
5. Take people with graduate degrees.
I will not evaluate those one-by-one, only to note they are not the very worst standards you might apply. Instead, I have a new idea, which consists of two parts. Apply strict (but not low “n”) standards for admission and then:
6. Take people from populous countries with high cognitive variance, and
7. All other things equal, prefer people from very distant countries.
That in essence suggests taking in people from China, India, and Russia, which are indeed countries with high cognitive variance. And today that is quite possibly the right thing to do. You will note that none of those countries count as especially high trust, and India at least has very mixed IQ readings, I am not sure about Russia given the rural idiocy there.
To understand that standard in more general terms, #6 gets you geniuses and the extremely ambitious. They are the ones who can fight through your immigration thicket, and will be motivated to do so. And because they are coming from screwed up countries, many of them will be quite keen to leave. They also will be used to fighting very hard to get ahead, more so than a lot of the graduate students who might come from Sweden.
#7 recognizes that a lot of people from nearby countries will come simply because it is convenient. And because of “the gravity equation.” So you should discriminate against them somewhat. Note that because borders are somewhat porous, you are going to get a lot of them anyway. That is OK, but you can then penalize them a bit in the standards process, in essence to get the same net “tax” on entry. And because their home countries are nearby, they might be a little slower to assimilate.
To be clear this is a recipe for America in 2025. A lot of other countries might do better opting for the boring Macedonian dentist, because they will not get top talent anyway. Or America in 1770, when building out a core population, might have done well with what was in essence a version of #3, with a bit of #2 and #4. Which is more or less what we did, though not by conscious design (borders were open).
Worth a ponder. These questions are underdiscussed. I am not sure this proposal is the best idea, but it occurred to me it never has been presented before.
The Industrial Revolution in the United States: 1790-1870
This chapter explores the distinctive trajectory of American industrialization up to 1870, emphasizing how the United States adapted and transformed British technologies to suit its unique economic and resource conditions. Rather than a straightforward transfer of innovations, the chapter argues that American industrial development was shaped by path-dependent processes and historical contingencies—such as the Embargo Act of 1807 and government sponsorship of firearms production—that enabled the emergence of a domestic innovation ecosystem. The chapter offers fresh insights into how high-pressure steam engines, vertically integrated textile mills, and precision manufacturing techniques evolved in response to labor scarcity, capital constraints, and abundant natural resources. A particularly novel contribution is the detailed analysis of how American manufacturers substituted mechanization and organizational innovation for skilled labor, leading to the development of technologies that were not only distinct from their British counterparts but also foundational for the Second Industrial Revolution. The chapter also highlights the democratization of invention, showing how economic incentives and institutional support fostered widespread innovation among ordinary citizens. By integrating technological, economic, and institutional perspectives, this chapter provides a compelling explanation for why the United States developed a robust manufacturing sector despite seemingly unfavorable initial conditions.
That is from a recent NBER working paper by Joshua L. Rosenbloom.
Saturday assorted links
1. Victor Haghani and Robert Aumann.
2. 2019 Cato piece on the FCC and media regulation. And one of these sentences is very wrong, the others not. None of these sentences are wrong. Ayn Rand is still underrated, it is sad that I cannot find her 1963 FCC piece online, do any of you know of a link?
3. “Local decorators offer premium pumpkin decor for upwards of $1,000.”
4. “The total fertility rate has plummeted 42 per cent over the past decade, reaching an average of 1.03 births per woman in 2024, according to Chile’s national statistics institute…The drop outpaces the decline seen over several decades in many wealthier countries, and leaves Chile’s fertility rate below Japan’s.” FT link here. Since 2013, the number of vasectomies is up 900 percent. The article is interesting throughout.
5. William MacAskill review. And related comments from Seb Krier. And yes way out of date. An Agustin sums it up.
6. “Argentina spends $1bn to defend peso as President Javier Milei’s crisis spirals.” (FT)
The United States is Starved for Talent, Re-Upped
I wrote this post in 2020. Time to re-up (no indent);
The US offers a limited number of H1-B visas annually, these are temporary 3-6 year visas that allow firms to hire high-skill workers. In many years, the demand exceeds the supply which is capped at 85,000 and in these years USCIS randomly selects which visas to approve. The random selection is key to a new NBER paper by Dimmock, Huang and Weisbenner (published here). What’s the effect on a firm of getting lucky and wining the lottery?
We find that a firm’s win rate in the H-1B visa lottery is strongly related to the firm’s outcomes over the following three years. Relative to ex ante similar firms that also applied for H-1B visas, firms with higher win rates in the lottery are more likely to receive additional external funding and have an IPO or be acquired. Firms with higher win rates also become more likely to secure funding from high-reputation VCs, and receive more patents and more patent citations. Overall, the results show that access to skilled foreign workers has a strong positive effect on firm-level measures of success.
Overall, getting (approximately) one extra high-skilled worker causes a 23% increase in the probability of a successful IPO within five years (a 1.5 percentage point increase in the baseline probability of 6.6%). That’s a huge effect. Remember, these startups have access to a labor pool of 160 million workers. For most firms, the next best worker can’t be appreciably different than the first-best worker. But for the 2000 or so tech-startups the authors examine, the difference between the world’s best and the US best is huge. Put differently on some margins the US is starved for talent.
Of course, if we play our cards right the world’s best can be the US best.
Those new service sector jobs
At least there is a religious revival for somebody:
Nelson wanted answers to these theological and spiritual questions from her Christian faith, but she was wary of mentioning them at the Congregational church she attends in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Even though the denomination is liberal, she worried someone at the church would repeat the same unsympathetic doctrine. Instead, she said, “I internalized and prayed on it.”
And she went to see an animal chaplain…
The spiritual counsel from Mikita helped lift the “horrible gray cloud” of Lucy’s death. It led Nelson to delve into scriptural references to animals: In Genesis, God calls the creation of animals “good.” In the story of Noah, God makes a covenant with “every living creature.” God personally feeds animals in the Book of Psalms.
“Ultimately, what was my relationship with Lucy? It was love. There was a love, there was a bond. And what is God? God is love,” Nelson said. “What I choose to believe is we’re all part of God’s creation. And in some way, shape or form we will all be reunited again.”
It is considered to be a growing sector, here is the Washington Post article.
From the comments
I am a high school teacher. As this study finds, banning phones hurts our best students. Unlike Tyler, I do have a problem with these policies. Studies like this dont even measure the ways that phones help our best students the most: they allow students to access real teachers, better teachers, sources of knowledge and learning that are beyond what they are stuck with in our public schools. There are many actions we could take that would boost grades. We could adopt singapore’s culture or the Japanese juku system. We could become as draconian as you like to boost grades for low-performing students. But to what end? Maybe there is one Peter Scholze who could boost his early learning by 5 pct, even 100 or more pct depending on what schhol he is in, with a phone. Is banning it from him worth boosting the algebra 1 scores of 20,000 future real estate salesman by 3 percent? Phones are new. Teachers have no idea how to use them. They are devices that contain the entire world’s knowledge and kids want to use them – and we are banning them? Any teacher who wants to ban phones is taking the easy way out.
That is from Frank. A broader but related point is that a school without smartphones probably cannot teach its students AI — one of the most useful things for a person to learn nowadays. As Frank indicates, you should be very suspicious that the smart phone banners take absolutely no interest in measuring their possible benefits. We economists call it cost-benefit analysis. If you wish to argue the costs are higher than the benefits, fine, that can be debated. If you are not trying to measure the benefits, I say you are not trying to do science or to approach the problem objectively.
And from a later post, again Frank:
The new Derek Parfit volume
He also talked about more personal matters such as his severe problems with insomnia during the recent book-writing process, saying that he was sometimes awake for thirty-six hours at a time and felt that if he had had a gun to hand he might have shot himself — not because he wanted to die, but because he was desperate to lose consciousness. He had eventually been recommended to try a sleep regime and calming drugs that had solved the problem, and when I commented that I also had problems with sleep, he immediately suggested I should try his methods too. I discovered later that whenever he came across some technique he regarded as providing a major life improvement, he would proselytize it far and wide.
That is from Janet Radcliffe Richard, the widow of Derek Parfit. Her fascinating spousal memoir is from the new and fascinating edited collection Derek Parfit: His Life and Thought, edited by Jeff McMahan. Worth the triple digit price. Derek would exercise on a stationery bike only, because that was the only form of exercise compatible with reading. And he was a big fan of Uchida playing Mozart, as all people should be.
And there is this segment, near the close of the essay:
…in the eyes of some people who were aware of it, my philosophical standing was if anything diminished, because in Derek’s circle I was merely his partner, and barely known otherwise. He did not open up new opportunities for me; on the contrary, I rather dropped out of public view when we lived togehter. He did not widen my social circle, because he did not have one; in practice (not deliberately), he severely contracted it. He was of little use for anything recreational, because we did together only what he wanted to do, and soon after I met him most possibilities of that kind were perpetually over the horizon. He did not in any way advance my career: he was neither my teacher nor my referee, and I had started to establish my terrain — very different from his — before I knew him. I learned an enormous amount from him, of course; but I did not often find it helpful to discuss my work with him. Even my eventual return to Oxford had nothing to do with him.
Recommended. Larry Temkin tells us that Parfit could not calculate a fifteen percent tip, and there is an essay by Derek’s brother as well. I have never seen a volume where the contributors evince so much fierce loyalty and attachment to their subject.
Friday assorted links
1. Turning baseball pitching into more of a science.
2. Are LLMs getting too smart for their human teachers?
3. Scott Sumner reviews Dan Wang.
4. Douthat interviews Ezra (NYT).
5. Chunk Ducks, Blatherskites, Butterballs, and Slug-toots.
6. New issue of Works in Progress.
7. Albania’s AI minister addresses parliament.
8. Agnes Gund, RIP (NYT).
German political parties remain too far from the median voter
Our estimates indicate that the AfD’s vote share would shrink by as much as 75% if the CDU adopted its immigration stance. These results suggest that the electoral success of populist parties is strongly linked to genuine policy preferences, rather than being driven solely by dissatisfaction with political elites or protest voting.
That is from a new paper (or try this link) by Laurenz Guenther and Salvatore Nunnari. A simple observation, and you may or may not like these voter attitudes, but it is the first point European elites need to recognize before they can climb out of their current political mess.
asdf wrote: