Month: May 2025
A report from inside DOGE
The reality was setting in: DOGE was more like having McKinsey volunteers embedded in agencies rather than the revolutionary force I’d imagined. It was Elon (in the White House), Steven Davis (coordinating), and everyone else scattered across agencies.
Meanwhile, the public was seeing news reports of mass firings that seemed cruel and heartless, many assuming DOGE was directly responsible.
In reality, DOGE had no direct authority. The real decisions came from the agency heads appointed by President Trump, who were wise to let DOGE act as the ‘fall guy’ for unpopular decisions.
Here is more from Sahil Lavingia. There is much debate over DOGE, but very few inside accounts and so I pass this one along.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Will we underinvest in gene therapies?
2. Han Song and Chinese science fiction (NYT).
3. Survey of the should you short the market AI doom debate? And Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker. And why is it hard for conservatives to make AI policy.
4. TFP profile of Michael Anton.
6. Contact lenses that provide infrared vision?
The Bank of Starbucks
Connor Tabarrok points out that Starbucks is also a bit of a bank:
In 2011, Starbucks rolled out the ability to load money onto a virtual card via their mobile app. purchases made with these pre-loaded dollars earned extra rewards points, which could eventually be redeemed for free drinks. According to their quarterly report from this March, through the app pre-payment system and physical gift cards, Starbucks owes almost $2 billion in coffee to it’s customers.
…The company can treat this money as a 0% interest loan, and with about 10% of funds eventually being forgotten, it’s actually a negative interest loan.
Starbucks can make money on the float and it makes more money as interest rates rise. At $2 billion and 4% they can earn about $80 million annually on the float. Moreover, breakage (some money on the cards is never redeemed) is running at about 10% so that’s another $200 million a year for a grand total of $280 million or a little over 5% of the $5 billion in operating profit. Not a game changer but also not bad for free money.
As interest rates rise, the value to Starbucks of pre-loaded cards increases. So does the cost to users but I suspect supply incentives will dominate here so you can expect to see Starbuck’s pushing these cards.
Are the kids reading less? And does that matter?
This Substack piece surveys the debate. Rather than weigh in on the evidence, I think the more important debates are slightly different, and harder to stake out a coherent position on. It is easy enough to say “reading is declining, and I think this is quite bad.” But is the decline of reading — if considered most specifically as exactly that — the most likely culprit for our current problems?
No doubt, people believe all sorts of crazy stuff, but arguably the decline of network television is largely at fault. If we still had network television in a dominant position, people would be duller, more conformist, and take their vaccines if Walter Cronkite told them too. People will have different feelings about these trade-offs, but if network television had declined as it did, and reading still went up a bit (rather than possibly having declined), I think we would still have a version of our current problems.
Obviously, it is less noble to mourn the salience of network television.
Another way of putting the nuttiness problem is to note that the importance of oral culture has risen. YouTube and TikTok for instance are extremely influential communications media. I am by no means a “video opponent,” yet I realize the rise of video may have created some of the problems that are periodically attributed to “the decline of reading.” Again, we might have most of those problems whether or not reading has gone done by some amount, or if it instead might have risen.
Maybe the decline of reading — whether or not the phenomena is real — just doesn’t matter that much. And of course only some reading has declined. The reading of texts presumably continues to rise.
How to fight Harvard
You could support institutions of higher education that deviate from the standard orthodoxy, such as the University of Austin, the departments of economics and law at George Mason University, or Francisco Marroquín University in Guatemala (disclaimer: I have affiliations with all three).
Or how about right-leaning podcasts and YouTube channels? They too compete with Harvard, and very often they have more influence on how people actually think. Comedy is another institution that often is right-leaning. I’ve also spent significant time with the leading AI models, and find they are considerably more centrist and objective than our institutions of higher education.
It is far from obvious that the ideas of Harvard will play such a dominant role in shaping the future of America. And given that is the case, why choose a destructive “solution” that will impose so much collateral damage on America’s future?
In other words, this is not necessarily a losing battle, and thus you do not need to try to burn Harvard to the ground. Nor must you despair that true reform is impossible. True reform can occur elsewhere, most likely on the internet. There is indeed something to be said for getting back at Harvard. But it can’t be about them losing—you too have to win. Like it or not, it’s time to start building.
The Ohio Adam Smith mandate
For inspiration they might look to Ohio, where next month, the recently signed Senate Bill 1 (The Advance Ohio Higher Education Act) will take effect, mandating, among other things, that every state institution of higher education require its bachelor’s students to pass a course in “the subject area of American civic literacy.” At a minimum, no student will graduate without demonstrating proficiency in the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and (for the sake of understanding the free market) selections from the writings of Adam Smith.
Personnel is policy I say! That is from Solveig Lucia Gold at The Free Press.
That was then, this is now, Robin Hanson edition
Robin Hanson, who joined the movement and later became renowned for creating prediction markets, described attending multilevel Extropian parties at big houses in Palo Alto at the time. “And I was energized by them, because they were talking about all these interesting ideas. And my wife was put off because they were not very well presented, and a little weird,” he said. “We all thought of ourselves as people who were seeing where the future was going to be, and other people didn’t get it. Eventually — eventually — we’d be right, but who knows exactly when.”
That is from Keach Hagey’s The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future, which I very much enjoyed. I am not sure Robin’s supply of parties has been increasing out here in northern Virginia…
The military culture that is German
Strict data protection laws are hindering Germany’s efforts to swell the ranks of the armed forces of Europe’s largest nation, its reservists’ association has warned.
Patrick Sensburg, head of the Reservist Association of the German Armed Forces, said tough German and EU privacy rules meant it could not keep in contact with close to a million people who might help boost the country’s reserve forces as it seeks a stronger role in European defence and security.
Sensburg said that when Germany suspended conscription in 2011, it also stopped keeping track of former conscripts.
“We have lost their contacts,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times. “It’s crazy.”
…He said it was absurd that the body responsible for collecting Germany’s annual television fee could contact citizens a few weeks after they had moved house, while he had no way of tracking down people whose names were in the association’s records.
Here is more from the FT, via Shruti.
Affordable Housing Is Almost Pointless
What is the most important feature of affordable housing? Simple! It’s right there in the name, right? Affordable. But no. When the Illinois Housing Development Authority (IHDA) evaluates housing projects for tax credits it gives out points for desirable projects. Quoting Richard Day:
For the general scoring track, 10% of points are awarded for extra accessibility features, 13% are awarded for additional energy efficiency criteria, 15% are awarded based on the makeup of the development team, and an extra 4% are headed out to non-profit developers. Only 3% of scorecard points are awarded based on project cost.
Thus, when you look at what the affordable housing authority actually does it awards more than four times as many points to energy efficiency than cost which ultimately determines affordability and availability. “Development team” includes some mandatory requirements for experience, which makes sense, but also:
(a) incentivizing Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (“BIPOC”) and minority participation on the development team,
Indeed, a for-profit “certified” BIPOC-led business can earn up to 11 points (and a BIPOC-led non-profit up to 7 points) and you can get a few more points if you go the intersectionality route and have a certified female headed BIPOC team. Cost Containment in Project Design & Construction tops out at only 3 points (plus there are 8 more potential points for targeting to extremely poor residents which presumably also gets you some cost control).
Thus, rather than affordable housing what is actually being incentivized is some combination of:
- Racial equity goals
- Environmental sustainability
- Community development
- Supporting vulnerable populations
- Universal design for accessibility (7 points for going beyond code)
This is what Ezra Klein calls Everything Bagel Liberalism and what I called in one of my favorite posts the Happy Meal Fallacy.
The icing on the cake, by the way, is that Day argues that the IHDA is a better system than the even more convoluted and expensive system for affordable housing promoted by Chicago’s Department of Housing.
Hat tip: Ben Krauss writing at Slow Boring.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Berlin cybermarkets in everything ugh.
2. o3 list of nuanced, rigorous thinkers.
4. How much does overconfidence drive conspiracy theorizing?
5. Are the Nordics backpedling on their plans for a cashless society?
7. UAE will offer free ChatGPTPlus to all of its citizens. And Korea fact of the day: “ChatGPT’s growth here has been off the charts—weekly users grew over 4.5x last year, and Korea is now our top country for paid subscribers after the US!”
8. Marina von Neumann Whitman, RIP.
9. MIE: audiobook for Reasons and Persons (!).
USA employment facts of the day
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the college majors with the lowest unemployment rates for the calendar year 2023 were nutrition sciences, construction services, and animal/plant sciences. Each of these majors had unemployment rates of 1% or lower among college graduates ages 22 to 27. Art history had an unemployment rate of 3% and philosophy of 3.2%…
Meanwhile, college majors in computer science, chemistry, and physics had much higher unemployment rates of 6% or higher post-graduation. Computer science and computer engineering students had unemployment rates of 6.1% and 7.5%, respectively…
Here is the full story. Why is this? Are the art history majors so employable? Or are their options so limited they don’t engage in much search and just take a job right away?
Via Rich Dewey.
Monday assorted links
1. Lydia Laurenson.
3. “But the lawsuit claimed the NYT’s original story had “portrayed the Marubo people as a community unable to handle basic exposure to the internet, highlighting allegations that their youth had become consumed by pornography”.” Link here. This likely means the tribe is overall happy to have the internet connection, right?
4. “His primary message for those people, he told me, is that “theocracy” isn’t a scary concept.”
5. “Canada has more measles cases right now than any other country in the Americas.”
7. A veo 3 video.
New data on the political slant of AI models
By Sean J. Westwood, Justin Grimmer, and Andrew B. Hall:
We develop a new approach that puts users in the role of evaluator, using ecologically valid prompts on 30 political topics and paired comparisons of outputs from 24 LLMs. With 180,126 assessments from 10,007 U.S. respondents, we find that nearly all models are perceived as significantly left-leaning—even by many Democrats—and that one widely used model leans left on 24 of 30 topics. Moreover, we show that when models are prompted to take a neutral stance, they offer more ambivalence, and users perceive the output as more neutral. In turn, Republican users report modestly increased interest in using the models in the future. Because the topics we study tend to focus on value-laden tradeoffs that cannot be resolved with facts, and because we find that members of both parties and independents see evidence of slant across many topics, we do not believe our results reflect a dynamic in which users perceive objective, factual information as having a political slant; nonetheless, we caution that measuring perceptions of political slant is only one among a variety of criteria policymakers and companies may wish to use to evaluate the political content of LLMs. To this end, our framework generalizes across users, topics, and model types, allowing future research to examine many other politically relevant outcomes.
Here is a relevant dashboard with results.
China espionage and the Fed
Prosecutors say Rogers was a logical target for Chinese espionage, with an important-sounding title at the Fed and a growing affection for China. In 2018, he married a Shanghainese woman whom he met through a Chinese matchmaking service. FBI agents would later find a note on his iPad, dated December 2018 and addressed to “Dear Chinese People,” in which he expressed admiration for China.
“I love your kindness, your generosity, and your humbly hard working, high-achieving society,” the note said. “I love you unconditionally, Shanghai.”
…In one case in 2019, Chinese authorities allegedly held a Fed economist in a hotel room during a trip to Shanghai and threatened to imprison him unless he agreed to provide nonpublic economic data, according to the Senate committee report. Chinese officials allegedly told him they had been monitoring his phones, including conversations about his divorce, and would publicly humiliate him if he didn’t cooperate. The economist reported the incident to Fed officials after being released, the report said.
China’s Foreign Ministry denounced the report, calling it “political disinformation.”
Here is more from the WSJ. While I do in general have a high opinion of Fed staff, China…I really do not think you can learn very much from these people! Perhaps they can tell you about the Lucas critique.
My visit at Universidad Francisco Marroquin
Again, I had a great time, here is the background I posted not long ago. My hosts sent me these links, note the first two speeches are quite short:
- Speech during the ceremony for honor graduates
- Speech during the graduation ceremony
- Interview: Exploring Free Markets, Innovation, and the Future of Knowledge
- Lecture | The Economics of Artificial Intelligence | Tyler Cowen
- Lecture | The Freedom to Grow: Purpose-Driven Youth in the Age of Ethical Entrepreneurship