Interviewing Yiyang Zhuge (Zhong Shu)
Many people are writing to me, upset that I am interviewing Ziyang Zhuge, a well-known Chinese internet intellectual, who recently was accused of plagiarism. I am keen to proceed with the interview, and am happy to explain why. A few points:
1. The relevant facts here still are being disputed, and furthermore it all happened in Chinese. If I cannot personally adjudicate the matter, I remain inclined to proceed. I am also well aware that standards in China, including for plagiarism, are very different than in the United States. If someone tells me “A person in China did [fill in the blank]” my initial reaction is still “Are they interesting to talk to?”
2. I have had on numerous CEOs and business leaders. Your opinions of each will vary, but surely some of them are guilty of something. I do not regret any of them as guests, except insofar as they were boring. You also can debate whether a former CIA head, in this case John Brennan, ever did anything wrong. He was fascinating.
3. I once had on Sam Bankman-Fried, now a convicted felon. It was an excellent episode, and I will point out my lines of questioning were more perspicacious than many people since have realized.
4. I once had on a convicted murderer, Shaka Senghor. It was an excellent episode, and if I recall only a single person wrote me to complain. I would gladly have more criminals on, and they do not all have to be repentant in the manner that Shaka is. Would not a pickpocket guest be intriguing? For Althusser however it is too late.
5. Without knowing the full story, I suspect the case of Yiyang Zhuge (neither a felon nor a murderer) is most analogous to having on the CEO of DeepSeek, Liang Wenfang. At this point it is pretty well known that DeepSeek (and other Chinese AI models) distilled a lot from Anthropic’s Claude. That is a violation of terms of service, and in economic terms it is an event and a depredation of pretty serious magnitude. I still would be delighted to have Liang Wenfang on the show, and I would do so without obsessing over the issue of distillation. How about it Liang Wenfang?
Xi Jinping is welcome too. Chairman Mao, is pork belly with red sauce over- or underrated? The world awaits your response.
Costco facts of the day
Costco sold 157.4mn rotisserie chickens worldwide last year, almost double the number of a decade ago. “It’s $4.99 and for Costco members, that’s one fantastic deal. I don’t think you can produce it for that,” said Walt Shafer, who oversaw the construction and management of the Nebraska site before he retired from Costco this year.
Roasted in ovens in the rear of the retail giant’s hundreds of cavernous stores, the birds have cost only $4.99 since 2009 even as the US retail price of chicken almost doubled. The product has become a textbook “loss leader”, buttressing the loyalty of Costco customers who pay membership fees for the right to shop there…
Rotisserie accounts for only a portion of the chicken processed in Nebraska. The plant also cuts breasts, thighs and other cuts delivered in six-pouch “saddle packs” to stores. Raw breast meat, for example, sells for $2.99 a pound, helping make up for losses on rotisserie.
Here is more from Gregory Meyer at the FT. Via Mike Rosenwald.
*Visions from San Francisco Bay*
European and American capitalism were different. The violence of human clashes in America took place on the surface, in the open. The violence in Europe became formalized, coalesced with class divions hallowed by centuries; it was interiorized, ingrained, or baked in, if one may use such an expression. American capitalism was founded on daring, resourcefulness, largesse, waste; European capitalism was founded on one powerful passion — miserliness. These patterns, which still endure, explain why America succeeded in creating a vast, new sector of the economy adapted to needs that become increasingly evident the closer we come to the twenty-first century: the sector of the universities, research institutes, laboratories, with billions of dollars invested in them. Western Europe, where education always has been the preserve of a narrow elite, failed to produce anything like it. The prodigality of private capital in America made the beginnings possible; money from taxes joined in at the next stage. Miserliness with capital in Europe effectively prevented the laying of foundations for this new sector, and it is doubtful whether the government treasuries will ever be able to over come ever-widening gap.
That is from Czeslaw Milosz’s Visions from San Francisco Bay.
Tysons Corner (Alaska) fact of the day
The centerpiece is Tysons Corner Center, today the eighth largest mall in the country, and one of the largest sub-city-sized markets for office space. It is half-owned by the Alaska Permanent Fund, which is the state-owned corporation that invests oil revenue on behalf of Alaska’s citizens, and half-owned by Macerich, a giant REIT, which is in turn owned by hundreds of large institutional investors and many individuals.
This very interesting essay by Joseph Lawler argues that liquid real estate markets, and distanced ownership, militate against beauty.
Friday assorted links
Luke Burgis interviews Patrick Collison on aesthetics
It was very fun talking to @patrickc about New Aesthetics at the @ClunyInstitute ‘s conference last month.
We talked about:
—The origin story of the New Aesthetics grants — and why he and Tyler Cowen disagree on almost everything aesthetic (1:00)
—Why culture is “stuck”: a 1926 Bauhaus building could pass for last year’s (2:30)
—Modernism’s explicit, stated mission to tear down beauty — “they weren’t hiding it” (3:30) —Solzhenitsyn: you can fake goodness and truth, but beauty “bears within it its own verification” (6:30)
—Is beauty objective? Why everyone visits Toledo, Spain and no one visits Toledo, Ohio (7:30)
—Detroit was rich for ~25 years and built the DIA. Silicon Valley’s been rich for 50. “We could do the Silicon Valley art tour in a coffee break” (14:30)
—Was Y Combinator secretly modeled on the art atelier? (18:30)
—The highest-leverage point for aesthetic renewal used to be churches. What is it now? (27:00)
—The sacred as an “endangered species”
— and Patrick’s alternative theory of WTF happened in 1971: we lost the sacred, so we can’t have nice things (28:30)
—I asked him about Vatican II and technological stagnation. He (wisely?) passed. I didn’t. (34:30)
—”Can anyone name a work of art made with AI?” Silence. (37:30)
—Why Germany is preeminent in music, literature, and philosophy — and its food is so bad. (A demand-side problem.) (41:30)
—”Biology is so ugly, man.” Physics is beautiful; biology is a tower of hacks (43:30)
—The “anti-beauty conspiracy” of the last century — and the massive latent demand waiting to be uncorked (52:30)
—Patrick reacts live to beeswax art (56:30)
Here is the link. And on YouTube, Brian Eno intro.
Polling results on capitalism and socialism
The results suggest that the public is feeling down about capitalism but is still wary of full-blown socialism. And many are deciding whether a few socialist candidates might help shake up the system. We found that:
—Just a third of Americans privately say they have a positive view of capitalism.
—Less than half of Republicans privately express a positive view of capitalism, though two-thirds support it in public.
—Almost half of women privately say they would consider voting for a socialist.
—Nearly a third of Gen Z publicly say that America would be better off as a socialist country, but only 14 percent say so in private.
—The majority of blacks publicly say capitalism is the cause of America’s social ills, but only 37 percent say so privately.
—Of people earning more than $150,000 a year, 58 percent privately say they are open to voting for a socialist, though only 42 percent say so publicly.
What should I ask Yiyang Zhuge (诸葛一杨), also known as Zhong Shu (仲树)?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her. She is best known to Western audiences for her interview with Christopher Nolan, but she has numerous other achievements:
Yiyang Zhuge is a political theorist, political columnist, and a translator of German and Greek philosophical texts. She is an instructor at Brandeis University, and a PhD Candidate at Boston College.
Yiyang is a major translator of Hannah Arendt into Chinese. She has translated The Human Condition, Life of the Mind, Men in Dark Times, collected poetry, Die verborgene Tradition, and Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess. She has given numerous lectures and published numerous public-facing articles on Arendt.
Yiyang published the first Greek-to-Chinese translation of Plutarch’s Moralia, a best-selling philosophy book in 2025.
She runs Princeton University Press’s Political Philosophy Book Club, where she interviews important Western academics for the Chinese audience.
Yiyang is a public intellectual in China. She reports on American higher ed monthly at print magazine Caixin Weekly. She is a political commenter on Hong Kong’s Phoenix TV (here and here). She hosts great books programs on vistopia and has contributed essays on Machiavelli, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Arendt at vistopia. She hosts the most popular Mandarin political philosophy podcast “Monologues of a Committed Observer” with 1m+ subscribers.
So what should I ask her?
Thursday assorted links
1. Data centers in space? Good Anton Leicht essay on the different considerations in the political economy.
2. More whales and Dr. Doolittle stuff.
3. Rohit on the AI hacks. And Peter Wilderford.
4. Is Australia the most resilient country to global catastrophic risk?
5. Dolly Parton’s philanthropy (NYT).
6. Why has New Zealand education so declined? (and other questions about the country)
Important results on economic mobility
We use more than 900 million linked employer–employee records covering the entire formal workforce of Brazil to examine when cities provide upward mobility for the initially poor. We find that upward mobility for low-wage workers is strongest in workplaces that combine low-wage individuals with high-wage workers. This association is particularly pronounced in Brazil’s southern cities, where more complex industries include workers with a wider range of skills. The association is weaker in northern cities, where formal employment is dominated by the public sector.
Here is the paper by Radu Barza, Edward Glaeser, César A. Hidalgo, and Martina Viarengo. And here is a useful thread on the paper. This is one of the best and most important economics papers I have seen in the last few years.
The least bad way to regulate AI?
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column. Excerpt:
The key is to create some basic safeguards, but without stifling broader AI progress. To do so, we must defy the conventional wisdom about public oversight and instead trust the AI labs to be their own primary regulators.
My version of the proposal starts with defining a private not-for-profit body for AI regulation. An ideal body would draw some features from FINRA (the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority): a consortium of financial firms that examines the trade practices of each and makes recommendations, helping the federal Securities and Exchange Commission with oversight and regulation. The AI version would include the major labs and would be authorized and overseen by Washington, perhaps through the now-fledgling Center for AI Standards and Innovation.
This body would periodically audit major AI companies and their models, judging their conduct and safety. In the short run at least, much of this would be focused on issues of cybersecurity, and whether the new models created more cyber risk than they help to solve. If a company passed the audit, it would be exempted from standard liability law, at least provided that it had shown basic, reasonable care, as opposed to extreme or deliberate negligence. That would free the AI labs from the fear that courts might derail their business by granting huge awards to plaintiffs for ill-defined harms that could not reasonably have been prevented. And it would give the labs a strong incentive to meet the safety standards of this body.
It is reasonable to wonder whether such a body, composed of industry players, would issue fair and equitable judgments of safety. Maybe not. Yet there are many upsides and no better alternative.
For one thing, each company knows that a dangerous model from another company could cause a harmful incident and damage the prospects for the entire industry. Consider the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979, which contributed significantly to the mothballing of the entire U.S. nuclear industry. Few people can name the company (Metropolitan Edison) behind the malfunctioning plant; the reputational penalty attached to the industry as a whole.
Another incentive for safety is that the top companies do not want too much competition from lower-price, lower-quality upstarts. That too will induce those companies to support fairly tough standards, perhaps excessively tough in some cases. Still, we are choosing from imperfect alternatives. The concrete truth, whether we like it or not, is that there is far more expertise within the companies for judging AI safety than we can expect to find in the federal government anytime soon.
I am indebted to some ideas from Dean Ball, noting that his proposal is somewhat different. And here are some comments from Brendan McCord.
Daddy’s Girl
Using Danish registry data, we study how managers’ gender attitudes shape gender inequality in the workplace by exploiting the birth of a daughter – as opposed to a son – as a plausibly exogenous shock to male managers’ gender attitudes. Comparing within-firm changes in women’s labor outcomes depending on the gender of the manager’s newborn child, we find that women’s relative earnings and employment increase by 4.4% and 2.9% respectively following the birth of the manager’s first daughter. These effects are driven by an increase in managers’ propensity to substitute male hires with female hires that have comparable education, hours worked, and earnings. Consistent with this substitution channel, we do not detect any significant effect on firm performance. Because these effects emerge rapidly and persist over time, we can rule out the need for prolonged exposure to gender issues or for personal incentives tied to improving conditions for their own daughters as prerequisites for managers to promote gender equality within their firms.
That is by Maddalena Ronchi and Nina Smith, forthcoming in Review of Economic Studies.
Wednesday assorted links
1. At least one in four NFL players, and possibly much higher, ends up with brain disease (NYT). As I read the results, probably most of them do.
2. On the LLM flooding of governmental services.
3. Joe Walker podcast with Andrew Charlton on the future of AI in Australia.
4. The bread culture that is the German regulatory state.
5. Data on the placement of economics PhDs.
6. The Nvidia thing is now under dispute. And here is a defense of the original.
Overreaching causal language in the social sciences
Across the social sciences, many studies use cross-sectional designs that reveal associations but are generally unable to support direct causal claims, yet authors of such articles may make or imply causal claims anyway. Here, to examine the prevalence of such ‘overreaching’ causal language, we analysed 194,631 cross-sectional articles using large language models. Over the period 1980–2024, an average of 46% of articles contained causal language in their titles or abstracts, where the annual rate has risen almost threefold since 2000 from 20% to 60%. To examine the effects of such language, we conducted a human-subjects experiment (N = 1, 105), finding that readers frequently indicate abstracts with this phrasing provide causal evidence but that methodological labels (β = −0.4, 95% confidence interval −0.56 to −0.19) and associational wording (β = −0.3, 95% confidence interval −0.43 to −0.07) reduce this tendency. Experiments with five LLMs revealed that model summaries of these articles (N = 100 each) can amplify causal overstatement, removing hedges and introducing causal claims where articles used strictly associational phrasing; however, prompting caution diminishes this pattern.
That is from a recent paper by Calvin Isch, Timothy Dörr, Neil Fasching, Grace Jennings & Duncan J. Watts. Note that Isch is on the job market this year, working with Tetlock and Watts.
Emergent Ventures winners, 58th cohort
Jethro Elsden, London area, to study the regulatory structure of the UK using AI.
Paula Benedetti, Buenos Aires, marine biology work in Brazil.
Nyida Gyal, 17, northern Virginia, AI and data.
Gabe Sekeres, Cornell, what if an economist just lets AI run?,
Ollie Payne, NYC, Future Aesthetics Foundation.
Jacob Watson-Howland, London, podcast on science and progress.
Cameron Monroe, UC Santa Cruz, archaeology in Ghana.
Björn O. Öste, archaeology and Peru.
Oliver Pryce, Cambridge, mathematics, AI and a unified representation of geometry and physics.
Demetre Tsiklauri, Tblisi, 16, general career support, building a student network in Georgia.
Shannon Wong, Paris/Antarctica, general career support.
Lydia Farnham, London, matching donors and projects.