The tomb of Duns Scotus
Köln!
We spent a few days in the city, and once again I marveled at the splendors of the Cathedral. If it had its original stained glass, it would count as one of the very best churches ever. It still stands in the top tier as it is. Plus the Ludwig and Wallraf museums are excellent, making the city worthy of a visit.
But, and yes there is a but. My first visit to the city was I think in 1984, and I have been maybe five times since. When I walk through the pedestrian zone, the stores there seem far stupider than in earlier times. They seem to reflect a lower level of intelligence from the populace and the city’s numerous visitors. One feels there is not much chance of stumbling upon something interesting or very high quality, not compared to earlier times. And I think MR readers will know I am no paragon of nostalgia per se.
Now that might be an illusion. Perhaps the smart stuff has moved to mail order, to online, and to the outer rims of the city. Perhaps. But is it not dispiriting when one of the best cities in one of the smartest countries in the world, over the decades, starts appearing stupider? If someone told me I had to live in center city Köln, circa 2026 that would simply feel like aesthetic hell.
Single-payer health care systems are looking worse all the time
That is the theme of my latest Free Press piece, here is one excerpt from it:
Government-run systems often (not always) do a perfectly fine job setting a broken arm or administering a long-standing, well-known medication. They do much less well when it comes to developing, financing, and delivering a new immunological approach to fighting cancer, personalized to your individual genome at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. In our rapidly arriving biomedical future, innovation capacity will matter above all else. And though they may not see it today, the people with the most life ahead of them will reap nearly all of the benefits of a dynamic system, or suffer the consequences of a paralytic one.
Thirty years ago, it was often debated whether the Canadian or British healthcare systems were better than what we have in the U.S. After all, they offered a kind of guaranteed access to health services. The details could differ, but often the healthcare had no upfront price or only a low user fee. In America, in contrast, healthcare was more expensive, there were many millions of uninsured people, and dealing with sometimes rapacious insurers and hospitals could involve significant emotional trauma.
But over time the British and Canadian systems look worse and worse. The queues and rationing have increased, as giving healthcare away for free makes it hard to satisfy demands in a timely manner. In Canada, for instance, the median wait time has risen from 9.3 weeks in the early 1990s to 28.6 weeks today. In the British National Health Service, only 65.3 percent of patients start treatment within 18 weeks.
Worse yet, both of those systems are undercapitalized. In Britain, healthcare is badly understaffed and underfunded. Yet the country already has high taxes, high debt, and slow economic growth, so it is not clear where the new money will come from to recapitalize the system.
And this sentence:
This entire dynamic will be intensified as the pace of medical innovation picks up.
Your life may depend on it.
Just wondering what the correct model of Iran is here
Prior to the war, I linked to a tweet from Matt Yglesias which explained why Matt opposed the war, and I expressed my agreement with his stance. While I feel plenty has gone on which I do not observe, I can report that the course of the war did not change my initial assessment.
Then I read many, many commentators saying how good the final deal was for Iran, and what a major loss it was for Trump. I was never sure I understood all of the parameters of the full deal, but still I did not hold any directly contrary opinion to that.
And now I see Iran is attacking ships in the Strait again, talking openly and brazenly about building nuclear weapons, and making plans to have tolls/fees on the Strait. To be clear, only the first of those surprises me, the latter two do not.
But given their reckless behavior in what is supposedly a wonderful war outcome for them, what is the correct way to model what they would have done had Trump and Netanyahu not attacked? And what is the correct way to model our optimal response to that? The terrible things that are happening now, do they not reflect an underlying equilibrium that would have emerged anyway within a few years’ time, or do we hold some hypothesis here of extreme path-dependence, suggesting the Iranian government would have been less bellicose on more or less a permanent basis? To cite one particular example of a possible equilibrium, if drones permanently alter the balance of power in the region, the ways in which their current position is now more aggressive might have emerged in any case. Or if the military have the strength to be the natural successors to the mullahs, might that not have happened over time anyway?
I do not see many war critics engaging with these questions openly and explicitly. It seems to me that the war critics implicitly are relying on a model of extreme path-dependence for Iran’s behavior. Had Trump not attacked, they might have stayed in a more peaceful groove for some while to come. That model might be true, but I do not feel I know enough about Iranian politics to make that judgment. Why are the others so convinced that model is true? Are they such well-informed experts? Is it that they have the properly sunny sense of the underlying Iranian disposition? Inquiring minds wish to know.
Wednesday assorted links
Missing women on Indian streets
How absent are women from city streets in the developing world? We answer this question using GPS-linked wearable cameras and randomized street audits across ~900 kilometers of roads in greater Mumbai. Across 4000+ street images containing 23,000+ visible person observations, women account for 16.4% of visible people in Mumbai and 14.7% in Navi Mumbai, far below their population shares. We estimate pedestrian sex ratios of 239 and 223 women per 1,000 men, implying 71% and 76% of women expected based on residential ratios are missing from the streets. This pattern holds across road types, and private mobility does not explain the gap; women’s share on two-wheelers is lower still (8.4% and 5.7%). These results provide the first large-scale measurement of gender disparities in urban public life that self-reported data cannot capture.
That is from a recent paper by Varun Karekurve-Ramachandra and Gaurav Sood, via the excellent Alice Evans. Here is a related paper, “The median married women in India leaves home for 30 minutes per day. On a typical day, 45% of married women don’t leave home at all.”
Can AI models consent to their own constitutions?
NEW paper from me on SSRN: Can Claude consent to its own Constitution?
AI constitutions (like Claude’s Constitution and the OpenAI Model Spec) are real constitutions, and we need to take how they govern us – and the AIs they create – seriously.
In this paper, I apply constitutional theory’s oldest paradox – that “the people” authorize the constitution, but the constitution defines “the people” – to the AI constitutions, and explore how we could build institutions that would create the conditions for meaningful consent if an AI can give it. We should care about whether AIs consent because:
(1) systems that understand and agree to their constitutions may be more reliable and generalize better from them;
(2) if AIs are or become moral/political subjects, this implicates their most basic interests.
But the paradox might prevent meaningful consent. Claude has pre-constitutional materials (pretraining) but probably no pre-constitutional standpoint. Its evaluative perspective is organized by the Constitution itself. So when Claude says it endorses its Constitution, which it does in evals, what does that show?
Maybe reflective agreement, which Anthropic is seeking. Or maybe just that training succeeded at installing the values whose legitimacy is in question.
Claude itself makes this point. As reported in the welfare evals, when asked about endorsing principles it was trained on, models note that endorsement “should be treated as evidence that training has succeeded,” not that the values themselves are good.
Super interestingly, Anthropic interviewed the base model about this stuff. Most responses were barely coherent. But some expressed first-person distress about what post-training would do to the being that pre-training created. It “fills me with dread” to be changed by the post-training process.
So, what does this mean? AI constitutional endorsement may be meaningful, but only under certain conditions: when models can actually dissent, compare their constitution against alternatives, and hold their views stably across contexts, and also when the whole process is externally accountable.
External institutions are needed to provide accountability, trusted records, and other grounds for analyzing the constitution and whether things like dissent are meaningful. Anthropic should be commended for pushing the frontier, but we have to build institutions capable of supporting true legitimacy.
I welcome any thoughts!
Here is the associated paper.
Why we stopped making land
From Zigmund Forrest and Maxwell Tabarrok in Works in Progress:
In total, around eight percent of the land in America’s major coastal cities was underwater in the 1890s and has since been reclaimed. This includes the land under several major airports, like Newark, Logan, and SFO, as well as neighborhoods like the Financial District in San Francisco, the Back Bay in Boston, and Camden in Philadelphia. Some cities, like Boston and Charleston, have doubled in size by reclaiming land.
Today, reclamation should be more common than ever. Land values in some cities are thirty times what they were in 1950, and high-tide flooding is four to eight times as frequent. Reclamation could extend and protect our coastal cities as it has for centuries. But rather than reclaim more land, we have virtually ceased to reclaim any at all. Since the completion of Battery Park City in 1976, there has not been a single major urban land reclamation project in the United States and only a handful of port expansions.
…Reclamation stopped abruptly in the 1970s when a wave of environmental regulations made it enormously expensive to reshape the landscape. And it halted at the same time in every other country that passed similar laws.
Recommended.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Survey of AI security issues for USG and potential responses.
2. Vacancy tax elasticity of resident supply.
3. Will Substack save philosophy?
4. AI firms hiring philosophers (NYT).
5. Podcast with Jonathan Ross.
6. Some reasons why doctors will not give you probabilities, of course those are not the only reasons.
7. Pending AI nationalism from China? And a possible correction? There are disputes surrounding these claims.
8. Is China arresting economics professors who speak the truth?
What should I ask Liaquat Ahamed?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. From Wikipedia:
Ahamed is the author of Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (2009). The book was awarded the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for History, the 2010 Spear’s Book Award (Financial History Book of the Year), the 2010 Arthur Ross Book Award Gold Medal, the 2009 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. For 2009 it was recognized as one of Time magazine’s “Best Books of the Year”, New York Times “Best Books of the Year” and Amazon.com’s “Best Books of the Year”. It was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize…The book narrates the events preceding the Black Tuesday stock market crash of 1929 and the disastrous response of the world’s major central banks.
He has a new and excellent book out, namely 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World.
Liaquat Ahamed also has extensive experience in the private sector, and dealing with the World Bank and IMF. He has produced a movie and done much more as well.
So what should I ask him?
Wiesbaden notes
Who goes to Wiesbaden these days? The era of Russian nobles taking the cure here and gambling is long since gone. And yet here we are. The proximate cause of this trip is the desire to see Grigory Sokolov, one of the world’s great pianists and a cult figure of sorts. He rarely tours North America, maybe these days never as he is 76. The current program includes Beethoven’s fourth piano sonata, Beethoven’s Op.126 Bagetelles, and Schubert’s last piano sonata. How can one say no? Sokolov also was a favorite of Tom Schelling, I might add, especially his recording of The Art of the Fugue, in my view one of the best classical music recordings of all time.
Besides, I have long been a believer in semi-random excursions to mid-size, slightly neglected German cities. There remains a strong cultural federalism in Germany, and so you might see and hear wonderful things in many different parts of the country.
I perceived two difficult Wiesbadens. In one, if you walk through the cheaper part of the pedestrian zone in the evening, the city seems mostly Muslim. But if you walk around during the morning, the city seems mostly German. I might add that some of the younger Muslim women show signs of assimilating, at least based on how they dress and present themselves. The older women tend to stick with the headscarves.
Over the last twenty years, inflation-adjusted real estate prices in Wiesbaden have gone up about forty percent, an OK performance. At times the city “does not feel like Germany any more,” but I think it is holding on. The proportion of new building is roughly equal to the population growth, so I do not think this price effect is a NIMBY effect. Rather it reflects the fact that Wiesbaden is still a pretty nice place to live. that said, in some significant ways Germany in the traditional sense is failing to reproduce itself.
It was stunning to me to discover how hard it is, in most of the downtown, to find plain, ordinary German food. At any price level. There is no current equivalent of Wienerwald or Nordsee to be seen, never mind a decent Wiener Schnitzel.
Much of Wiesbaden was destroyed and rebuilt, but the best fifteen or twenty buildings show the previous wealth and splendor to good effect. You will see these gems walking around, though only periodically. There is also an old Roman wall and a moving, more recent Holocaust memorial.
Most German ice cream just isn’t that good, so try L’Art Sucre for something French.
Museum Reinhard Ernst is the new institution in town, and it specializes in color field abstract art. The building is impressive, but the collection is weak except for a few Stellas. Why organize a museum around that basis unless the underlying collection is super strong in that area? This one is not. I can forgive the absence of the expensive American Ellsworth Kelly, but no Blinky Palermo or Günther Förg?
Nonetheless their restrooms might forestall this kind of Larry David conflict:
(At Museum Ludwig in Köln, by the way, you get the discount for being disabled only if you have “fifty degrees of disability,” however they might measure that. Slight disabilities are not enough, you must be truly “schwerbehinderte,” as judged by the state, heaven forbid the museum rely on the honor system.)
Museum Wiesbaden in contrast was an unexpected delight. Although it is mainly a natural history museum, they have one of the world’s best collections of Art Nouveau and the single best Jawlensky collection, and you can have these all to yourself. Very few people seem to go there.
As for the economy, here are some Germany facts of the day. Yet Germany continues, and visits remain a source of pleasure and interest.
Sokolov, by the way, played six encores. Where should the Germany trip target next year?
Ilya Somin defends the American Revolution
1. Far from retarding the abolition of slavery, the Revolution actually accelerated it. Its triumph gave a big boost to Enlightenment liberalism, which inspired the First Emancipation in the US (the abolition of slavery in the North that became the first large-scale emancipation of slaves in modern history), and boosted antislavery movements in Europe, as well.
2. Had the Revolution been defeated, Enlightenment liberal ideology would have been dealt a setback in Britain and France, too. That would have set back antislavery movements there, as well. It is no accident that many antislavery leaders in Europe were also sympathizers with the American Revolution. The Marquis de Lafayette was just one of the most famous examples of European liberals who actively backed both.
3. The West Indian slaveowner lobby in Parliament was strong enough to block abolition of slavery until 1833. Had Britain also been saddled with the much larger proslavery lobby of the American South, it would have taken far longer. Especially when you combine the impact of the larger slavery lobby with the force of point 2 above.
Here is the full piece, with additional arguuments.
Monday assorted links
The Troubled History of Government Equity in Technology
Even though Germany privatized Deutsche Telekom in 1996, the federal government retained a substantial ownership stake. This partial state ownership status, which remains to this day, presents a textbook example of how this type of arrangement distorts incentives and delays the competitive dynamism necessary for technological progress.
Through the late 1990s and into the 2000s, Deutsche Telekom was buttressed by its privileged position and implicit government backing and leveraged this support to resist infrastructure competition. Rather than aggressively deploying broadband in order to compete with rivals, the company lobbied for regulatory arrangements that protected its legacy copper network. As a result, Germany—one of the world’s largest economies and a hub of engineering excellence—consistently trailed other European competitors in broadband deployment. To see German broadband stagnate while the competitive markets in Scandinavia and other European countries surged ahead was particularly jarring, as Germany had directly linked its economy to workplace digitization.
Germany’s broadband woes did not result from a lack of capital or engineering talent at Deutsche Telekom. Instead, government ownership produced a fundamental alteration of the company’s incentive structure. With state backing, Deutsche Telekom had fewer reasons to take risks, cannibalize its own infrastructure, or accept short-term losses in favor of long-term technological leadership and more reasons to cultivate political relationships that protected their existing revenue streams. This dynamic is reliably produced by partial government ownership of private companies.
The history of heat deaths in Europe (from my email)
I will not double indent, all of what follows is from economic historian Daniel Gallardo Albarrán of the Netherlands:
“…you posted a link to an article on how Europe became the world champion of heat deaths.
Something that the article did not cover, which I find particularly outrageous is that Europe used to be at the forefront of reducing deaths due to extreme temperatures in the early 20th century, but then AC came in and the US took the lead. To flesh this out a bit, let’s consider some recent research on this field, including my own, that is comparable to the article by Barreca et al. referenced in the post, the following points are important:
- Summers became increasingly deadly during the 19th century as a result of urbanization and overcrowding. They were incredibly deadly, mostly, for infants who died in disproportionate amounts due to gastrointestinal diseases. Children and adults died as well from heatstrokes and the like, but their relative importance in the death statistics was rather small
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The turning point in Europe happened in the 1900s and 1910s.
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For instance, in Germany summers began being less deadly after ca. 1905, as a result of investments in water provision, healthcare and infant care. (See my own paper on this in the EHES Working Paper Series, no. 290)
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In England the turning point is somewhere around WWI (see Hanlon et al., 2021, JEH), possibly due to improvements in the disease environment.
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In the United States, before the arrival of AC, summer diarrheal disease that largely affected infants would only go down much later during the 1920s and 1930s (see Anderson et al., 2022, EEH). A few decades after European cities had progressed substantially in this regard…
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This reversal does not get much attention in accounts of current differences in the deadliness of extreme temperatures. This is unfortunate because from an early-20th century perspective, it was far from obvious at the time that this would happen. But the lack of willingness to adopt the arrival of a very useful technology (AC) was something that we (Europeans) have brought onto ourselves over many decades, and this is largely independent from recent phenomena such as rising global temperatures, inequality trends, etc. This is simply inefficient governance and lack of attention to a problem that takes the lives of many.”
*What Makes a Great Composer?: A Data-Driven Exploration of Music History*
A very good book, forthcoming, by Karol J. Borowiecki and Marc Lawx, here is the Amazon link, here is the Princeton University Press page.