The AI arms race
That is the topic of my latest column for The Free Press, here is the closing tag:
The biggest risk is not from the AI companies, but rather that the government with the most powerful AI systems becomes the bad guy itself. The U.S., on the world stage, is not always a force for good, and we might become worse to the extent we can act without constraint. The Vietnam War is perhaps the least politically controversial way of demonstrating that point.
So today we need an odd and complex mix of not entirely consistent ideologies for the current arms race to go well. How about some tech accelerationism mixed with capitalism, and then a prudent technocratic approach to military procurement, to make sure those advances serve national security ends? On the precautionary side, we need a dash of the 1960s and ’70s New Left and libertarian anti-war ideologies, skeptical of Uncle Sam himself. We do not want to become the bad guys.
Do you think we can pull that off? The new American challenge is underway.
Worth a ponder.
Claims about grade inflation
Average grades continue to rise in the United States, raising the question of how grade inflation impacts students. We provide comprehensive evidence on how teacher grading practices affect students’ long-run success. Using administrative high school data from Los Angeles and from Maryland that is linked to postsecondary and earnings records, we develop and validate two teacher-level measures of grade inflation: one measuring average grade inflation and another measuring a teacher’s propensity to give a passing grade. These measures of grade inflation are distinct from teacher value-added, with grade inflating teachers having moderately lower cognitive value-added and slightly higher noncognitive value-added. These twomeasuresalso differentially impact students’ long-term outcomes. Being assigned a higher average grade inflating teacher reduces a student’s future test scores, the likelihood of graduating from high school, college enrollment, and ultimately earnings. In contrast, passing grade inflation reduces the likelihood of being held back and increases high school graduation, with limited long-run effects. The cumulative impact is economically significant: a teacher with one standard deviation higher average grade inflation reduces the present discounted value of lifetime earnings of their students by $213,872 per year.
That is from a recent paper by Jeffrey T. Denning, Rachel Nesbit, Nolan Pope, and Merrill Warnick. Via Séb Krier.
The hyper-NIMBY of earlier Cape Town and South Africa
The most controversial of the forced removals occurred in the second half of the 1960s, with the expulsion of 65,000 coloureds from District Six, a vibrant inner-city ward of Cape Town, where whites, many of the slumlords, owned 56% of the property. Against their will, District Six residents were moved out to the sandy townships of the Cape Flats. In Johannesburg, the inner-city suburb of Sophiatown, where blacks could own freehold property, was another notorious site of forced removals. Often long-established community institutions such as churches and schools had to be abandoned.
That is from the very good book by Hermann Giliomee The Afrikaners: A Concise History.
Monday assorted links
Why you should work much harder RIGHT NOW
If strong AI will lower the value of your human capital, your current wage is relatively high compared to your future wage. That is an argument for working harder now, at least if your current and pending pay can rise with greater effort (not true for all jobs).
If strong AI can at least potentially boost the value of your human capital, you should be investing in learning AI skills right now. No need to fall behind on something so important. You also might have the chance to use that money and buy into the proper capital and land assets.
So…WORK HARDER!
Addendum: From Ricardo in the comments:
Suppose you are the best maker of horse carriages in Belgium around the time the automobile is invented. You might want to take on as many orders as possible for new carriages because you know your future is precarious. Or, maybe you get your hands on one of these new-fangled automobiles as soon as possible and learn how fix them. Both options require you to WORK HARDER but these seem to be the two best options available. Paradoxical but true.
Who is a victim?
Moral disagreement across politics revolves around the key question, “Who is a victim?” Twelve studies explain moral conflict with assumptions of vulnerability (AoVs): liberals and conservatives disagree about who is especially vulnerable to victimization, harm, and mistreatment. AoVs predict moral judgments, implicit attitudes, and charitable behavior—and explain the link between ideology and moral judgment (usually better than moral foundations). Four clusters of targets—the Environment, the Othered, the Powerful, and the Divine—explain many political debates, from immigration and policing to religion and racism. In general, liberals see vulnerability as group-based, dividing the moral world into groups of vulnerable victims and invulnerable oppressors. Conservatives downplay group-based differences, seeing vulnerability as more individual and evenly distributed. AoVs can be experimentally manipulated and causally impact moral evaluations. These results support a universal harm-based moral mind (Theory of Dyadic Morality): moral disagreement reflects different understandings of harm, not different foundations.
That is from a recent paper by Jake Womick, Emily Kubin, and Kurt Gray. Via the excellent, non-victimized Kevin Lewis.
What should I ask Toby Wilkinson?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. He is one of the leading historians of ancient Egypt, and he has a recent book out on Ptolemaic Egypt, namely The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra.
Here is his Wikipedia page, he also has served as Vice Chancellor of Fiji National University, and worked extensively as a development director for Cambridge. Here is his personal home page.
So what should I ask him?
Sunday assorted links
1. Henry Oliver has further thoughts on his CWT.
4. The post-Christian condition. One of the most interesting essays of this year. I am glad I started paying for his Substack.
6. Scott Sumner on the fiscal theory of the price level.
7. Thiel does Rome.
Robert Trivers, RIP
The greats have been falling…
Tracing the Genetic Footprints of the UK National Health Service
The establishment of the UK National Health Service (NHS) in July 1948 was one of the most consequential health policy interventions of the twentieth century, providing universal and free access to medical care and substantially expanding maternal and infant health services. In this paper, we estimate the causal effect of the NHS introduction on early-life mortality and we test whether survival is selective. We adopt a regression discontinuity design under local randomization, comparing individuals born just before and just after July 1948. Leveraging newly digitized weekly death records, we document a significant decline in stillbirths and infant mortality following the introduction of the NHS, the latter driven primarily by reductions in deaths from congenital conditions and diarrhea. We then use polygenic indexes (PGIs), fixed at conception, to track changes in population composition, showing that cohorts born at or after the NHS introduction exhibit higher PGIs associated with contextually-adverse traits (e.g., depression, COPD, and preterm birth) and lower PGIs associated with contextually-valued traits (e.g., educational attainment, self-rated health, and pregnancy length), with effect sizes as large as 7.5% of a standard deviation. These results based on the UK Biobank data are robust to family-based designs and replicate in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing and the UK Household Longitudinal Study. Effects are strongest in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas and among males. This novel evidence on the existence and magnitude of selective survival highlights how large-scale public policies can leave a persistent imprint on population composition and generate long-term survival biases.
Here is the link, via S.
Is Germany actually that good at research?
Jannik Reigl writes:
Germany’s remaining research strengths are disproportionately concentrated in fields with limited commercial value. Consider climate science. German institutions co-lead with the United States. The Max Planck Institute in Hamburg, the UK Met Office Hadley Centre, ECMWF in Reading: these are world-class operations. Klaus Hasselmann won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics for climate modeling. Genuine excellence. But climate research doesn’t directly generate economic returns. The value lies in technology. And yes, while some of the most important assets of the near future are subsumed under “climate technologies”, they are essentially the product of other research fields. Batteries, solar cells, carbon capture, and grid technology are all technologies stemming from engineering and materials science. These require strength in chemistry, materials science, and engineering. The fields where Germany is losing ground.
The Max Planck Society is Germany’s highest-performing research body in the Nature Index. Its ranking fell from 4th place globally in 2021 to 11th in 2025, an “unusually large” decline according to Nature. Chemistry tells the starkest tale: Max Planck consistently ranked in the top 5 from 2015 to 2021, then dropped to 10th in 2022, and sits at 14th in 2025. Physical sciences show a similar pattern: Max Planck held 2nd place from 2015 to 2022 before falling to 4th, where it has remained.
German patents were cited 14 percent less than comparable US patents in the 1980s, and that this gap widened to 41 percent by the 2000s. This represented a steeper decline than that observed for both the United Kingdom and Japan. More recent studies do not use the same dataset or methodology, but they point in a similar direction.
One reason might be that the top research institutes disincentivise high-risk high-reward R&D by denying young talent scientific independence. In the United States, the system is built on the ‘flat’ Principal Investigator (PI) model. A talented scientist in their early 30s can secure a tenure-track Assistant Professorship, win their own NIH or NSF grants, and run a fully independent lab. They succeed or fail on their own scientific agenda.
Germany, by contrast, operates on a hierarchical ‘fiefdom’ model.
Here is the full essay, via Emma.
Christopher Sims, RIP
Here is one notice. Here are previous MR posts on Sims, with a survey of his Nobel contributions at the top.
Tricameralism in apartheid South Africa
Yes. South Africa really did have a tricameral Parliament under the 1983 Constitution, in force from 1984 until the democratic transition. But the phrase can mislead, because it sounds more pluralistic than it really was. The system created three racially separate parliamentary chambers: a House of Assembly for whites, a House of Representatives for Coloured South Africans, and a House of Delegates for Indian South Africans. The black African majority was excluded altogether from this Parliament.
The key to how it worked was the distinction between “own affairs” and “general affairs.” Each chamber could legislate for the “own affairs” of the racial group it represented; these included areas such as education, housing, welfare, local government, culture, and recreation. But the central levers of power—“general affairs”—remained matters such as defence, finance, foreign policy, justice, law and order, commerce, internal affairs, and agriculture. Those were handled at the center, not by the separate chambers acting independently.
Formally, then, it was a three-house legislature. In practice, it was a system of segregated representation plus retained white dominance. The constitutional text itself says Parliament consisted of the three Houses. But the white chamber was far larger and more institutionally powerful: the House of Assembly had 178 members, while the House of Representatives had 85 and the House of Delegates 45. The Constitution also vested executive authority in the State President, with different advisory structures for “own affairs” and “general affairs,” which further centralized power above the chambers themselves.
Here is the full GPT discussion, with links as well. As Harrison points out to me, in history tricameralism of any form is extremely rare.
Jürgen Habermas, RIP
Here is one obituary. My favorite book of his was