Category: Current Affairs
Argentina’s DOGE
Cato has a good summary of Deregulation in Argentina:
- The end of Argentina’s extensive rent controls has resulted in a tripling of the supply of rental apartments in Buenos Aires and a 30 percent drop in price.
- The new open-skies policy and the permission for small airplane owners to provide transportation services within Argentina has led to an increase in the number of airline services and routes operating within (and to and from) the country.
- Permitting Starlink and other companies to provide satellite internet services has given connectivity to large swaths of Argentina that had no such connection previously. Anecdotal evidence from a town in the remote northwestern province of Jujuy implies a 90 percent drop in the price of connectivity.
- The government repealed the “Buy Argentina” law similar to “Buy American” laws, and it repealed laws that required stores to stock their shelves according to specific rules governing which products, by which companies and which nationalities, could be displayed in which order and in which proportions.
- Over-the-counter medicines can now be sold not just by pharmacies but by other businesses as well. This has resulted in online sales and price drops.
- The elimination of an import-licensing scheme has led to a20 percent drop in the price of clothing items and a 35 percent drop in the price of home appliances.
- The government ended the requirement that public employees purchase flights on the more expensive state airline and that other airlines cannot park their airplanes overnight at one of the main airports in Buenos Aires.
- In January, Sturzenegger announced a “revolutionary deregulation” of the export and import of food. All food that has been certified by countries with high sanitary standards can now be imported without further approval from, or registration with, the Argentine state. Food exports must now comply only with the regulations of the destination country and are unencumbered by domestic regulations.
Needless to say, America’s DOGE could learn something from Argentina:
Milei’s task of turning Argentina once again into one of the freest and most prosperous countries in the world is herculean. But deregulation plays a key role in achieving that goal, and despite the reform agenda being far from complete, Milei has already exceeded most people’s expectations. His deregulations are cutting costs, increasing economic freedom, reducing opportunities for corruption, stimulating growth, and helping to overturn a failed and corrupt political system. Because of the scope, method, and extent of its deregulations, Argentina is setting an example for an overregulated world.
China fact of the day
Buried in China’s latest government budget were some numbers that add up to an alarming trend. Tax revenue is dropping.
The decline means that China’s national government has less money to address the country’s serious economic challenges, including a housing market crash and the near bankruptcy of hundreds of local governments…
Tax revenue fell further last year than ever before…Overall tax revenue fell 3.4 percent last year.
…Fitch Ratings calculates that overall revenue for the national and local governments — including taxes and land sales — totaled 29 percent of the economy’s output as recently as 2018. But this year’s budget indicates that overall revenue will be just 21.1 percent of the economy in 2025.
Roughly half of the decline comes from plummeting revenue from land sales, a well-documented problem related to the housing-market crash, but the rest comes from weakness in tax revenue, a new problem.
That adds up to a huge sum of money. If overall revenue had kept up with the economy over the past seven years, the Chinese government would have another $1.5 trillion to spend in 2025.
China announced this month that it would allow its official target for the budget deficit to increase to 4 percent this year, after trying to keep it near 3 percent ever since the global financial crisis in 2009. But analysts say the true deficit is already much larger, because China is quietly counting a lot of long-term borrowing as though it were tax revenue.
Comparing spending only with actual revenue, without the borrowing, the Finance Ministry’s budget shows a deficit equal to almost 9 percent of the economy. In 2018, it was only 3.2 percent…
Income taxes collected from individuals were 7.5 percent below expectations last year, the Finance Ministry said in its budget.
Good thing they still are growing at five percent! Here is more from Keith Bradsher at the NYT.
Carney seeks internal free trade for Canada
Carney said removing barriers to the free movement of workers, goods and services across the country would increase the size of Canada’s economy by $250 billion…
Carney said his government would table legislation by July 1 to allow goods to travel across the country barrier-free. He said his government would also remove labour mobility restrictions in federally regulated professions and eliminate duplication by recognizing provincial assessments for major projects.
Here is the full story, which has further points of interest. It is good if Canada learns that tariffs are bad! And here is a new Carney ad with Mike Myers.
Maui is Not Abundant
City Journal: A year and a half since fires devastated the historic town of Lahaina on the island of Maui, Hawaii, only six houses have been rebuilt—six out of more than 2,000.
Why is the recovery effort taking so long? Initially, the biggest hurdles were the pace of debris removal and damage litigation. Both were overcome only last month. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers cleared the final lots on February 19, while the Hawaiian Supreme Court ruled that a $4 billion settlement for victims can begin to move forward.
The main challenge now is dealing with a crushing permitting regime that slows or outright bans construction. But local political dysfunction has discouraged state and local leaders from taking emergency action to cut through this red tape.
Many of the buildings are illegal to rebuild under the current zoning laws. CA at least exempted reconstruction from California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and Coastal Waters Act review.
Not the precedent I have been looking for
The Federal Communications Commission is prepared to block mergers and acquisitions involving companies that continue promoting diversity, equity and inclusion policies, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said Friday.
The vanishing male writer
It’s easy enough to trace the decline of young white men in American letters—just browse The New York Times’s “Notable Fiction” list. In 2012 the Times included seven white American men under the age of 43 (the cut-off for a millennial today); in 2013 there were six, in 2014 there were six.
And then the doors shut.
By 2021, there was not one white male millennial on the “Notable Fiction” list. There were none again in 2022, and just one apiece in 2023 and 2024 (since 2021, just 2 of 72 millennials featured were white American men). There were no white male millennials featured in Vulture’s 2024 year-end fiction list, none in Vanity Fair’s, none in The Atlantic’s. Esquire, a magazine ostensibly geared towards male millennials, has featured 53 millennial fiction writers on its year-end book lists since 2020. Only one was a white American man.
Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down. Between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations). The past decade has seen 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize—with again, not a single straight white American millennial man. Of 14 millennial finalists for the National Book Award during that same time period, exactly zero are white men. The Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a launching pad for young writers, currently has zero white male fiction and poetry fellows (of 25 fiction fellows since 2020, just one was a white man). Perhaps most astonishingly, not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker (at least 24, and probably closer to 30, younger millennials have been published in total).
Here is more from Jacob Savage at Compact.
Thwarted arbitrage?
US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has intercepted an increasing number of eggs from Mexico, where a carton of a dozen costs about $2. For comparison, the cost in many parts of California is just under $10 per dozen, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.
Nationally, there has been a 48% increase in eggs being detained at ports of entry this fiscal year compared with the same time last fiscal year, according to CBP. In San Diego, these “egg interception” cases have increased by a whopping 158%.
Every day, more than 200,000 cars cross the border from Mexico to the United States.
…Once confiscated, the eggs are destroyed by officials in oven-sized incinerators.
Here is the full Guardian story.
Some history of higher education
To Dr. Damrosch, who has studied academic culture at colleges, the current turmoil was vaguely reminiscent of a 1940s episode at the school now known as Iowa State University.
The school’s economics department — in a paper on economic policy for wartime food production — had proposed replacing butter with margarine, said Dr. Damrosch. The dairy industry and its supporters in the state legislature “went ballistic,” he said, pressuring the school’s president to place the department under receivership.
The move triggered an immediate backlash and mass departure of faculty members.
It might have also played a small role in the reshaping of the higher education landscape: At least six professors fled to Chicago, where they helped build one of the most renowned economics departments in the world.
Here is the full NYT piece, mostly about Columbia, via Anecdotal.
Those new service sector jobs, China market of the day
A tour guide is raking in the cash by carrying fatigued females up a mountain.
Xiao Chen, 26, who works at Mount Tai in Shandong Province, China, accompanies tourists on their trek to the peak – but many of his female clients often want to be carried up the last 1,000 steps.
He starts by holding their hand along most of the route and when they become tired, Chen carries them in a fireman’s lift, across his shoulders.
The UNESCO World Heritage Site stands at an altitude of 5,029ft.
Chen reportedly earns more than CNY 300,000 – about $42,000 USD — as a ‘climbing companion’ for his clients, aged between 25 and 40 years.
He climbs the mountain twice a day, earning around CNY 600 – $83 USD – per trip during daylight hours and $54 USD at night.
Here is more from The New York Post, via Greg Roemer. Elsewhere, from the Chinese MIE scene, the excellent Samir Varma points us to “China online shops sell ‘bank soil’ from top institutions for US$120, claims it brings wealth.”
Caleb Watney on risk and science funding
Right now, DOGE is treating efficiency as a simple cost-cutting exercise. But science isn’t a procurement process; it’s an investment portfolio. If a venture capital firm measured efficiency purely by how little money it spent, rather than by the returns it generated, it wouldn’t last long. We invest in scientific research because we want returns — in knowledge, in lifesaving drugs, in technological capability. Generating those returns sometimes requires spending money on things that don’t fit neatly into a single grant proposal.
While it’s true that indirect costs serve an important function, they can also create perverse incentives: When the government promises to cover expenses, expenses tend to go up. But instead of slashing funding indiscriminately, we should be thinking about how to get the most out of every dollar we invest in science.
That means streamlining research regulations. Universities are drowning in bureaucracy. Since 1990, there have been 270 new rules that complicate how we conduct research. Institutional Review Boards, intended to protect people from being unethically experimented on in studies, now regularly review low-risk social science surveys that pose no real ethical concerns. Researchers generate reams of paperwork in legally mandated disclosures of every foreign contract and collaboration, even for countries such as the Netherlands that present no geopolitical risk.
We must also rethink how we select scientific research to fund.
Caleb is co-CEO of the Institute for Progress, here is more from the NYT.
Public Choice Outreach Conference!
The annual Public Choice Outreach Conference is a crash course in public choice. The conference is designed for undergraduates and graduates in a wide variety of fields. It’s entirely free. Indeed scholarships are available! The conference will be held Friday May 30-Sunday June 1, 2025, near Washington, DC in Arlington, VA. Lots of great speakers. More details in the poster. Please encourage your students to apply.
The Institute for Museum and Library Services is going away
Last year the agency provided $266.7m in grants to libraries, museums and related institutions across the country and its territories. Those grants ranged widely in value and purpose, such as $343,521 to support an internship and fellowship programme at the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico or $10,350 for the Art Museum of Eastern Idaho to develop new curricula for groups of visiting schoolchildren.
The Wilson Center at the Smithsonian will be gone, and:
The other agencies targeted for elimination in Trump’s executive order are the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the United States Agency for Global Media (which operates the Voice of America media network), the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, Community Development Financial Institutions Fund and the Minority Business Development Agency.
Here is the full story, I do not regard these as tragedies.
What Did We Learn From Torturing Babies?
As late as the 1980s it was widely believed that babies do not feel pain. You might think that this was an absurd thing to believe given that babies cry and exhibit all the features of pain and pain avoidance. Yet, for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the straightforward sensory evidence was dismissed as “pre-scientific” by the medical and scientific establishment. Babies were thought to be lower-evolved beings whose brains were not yet developed enough to feel pain, at least not in the way that older children and adults feel pain. Crying and pain avoidance were dismissed as simply reflexive. Indeed, babies were thought to be more like animals than reasoning beings and Descartes had told us that an animal’s cries were of no more import than the grinding of gears in a mechanical automata. There was very little evidence for this theory beyond some gesturing’s towards myelin sheathing. But anyone who doubted the theory was told that there was “no evidence” that babies feel pain (the conflation of no evidence with evidence of no effect).
Most disturbingly, the theory that babies don’t feel pain wasn’t just an error of science or philosophy—it shaped medical practice. It was routine for babies undergoing medical procedures to be medically paralyzed but not anesthetized. In one now infamous 1985 case an open heart operation was performed on a baby without any anesthesia (n.b. the link is hard reading). Parents were shocked when they discovered that this was standard practice. Publicity from the case and a key review paper in 1987 led the American Academy of Pediatrics to declare it unethical to operate on newborns without anesthesia.
In short, we tortured babies under the theory that they were not conscious of pain. What can we learn from this? One lesson is humility about consciousness. Consciousness and the capacity to suffer can exist in forms once assumed to be insensate. When assessing the consciousness of a newborn, an animal, or an intelligent machine, we should weigh observable and circumstantial evidence and not just abstract theory. If we must err, let us err on the side of compassion.
Claims that X cannot feel or think because Y should be met with skepticism—especially when X is screaming and telling you different. Theory may convince you that animals or AIs are not conscious but do you want to torture more babies? Be humble.
We should be especially humble when the beings in question are very different from ourselves. If we can be wrong about animals, if we can be wrong about other people, if we can be wrong about our own babies then we can be very wrong about AIs. The burden of proof should not fall on the suffering being to prove its pain; rather, the onus is on us to justify why we would ever withhold compassion.
Hat tip: Jim Ward for discussion.
When will Israel attack Iranian nuclear facilities?
It seems this ought to happen soon, though it is not (yet) a major news item. Iranian air defenses are severely disrupted, though not forever. The “Hezbollah counterattack” has been more than neutralized, and no alternative deterrent has been put in its place. That too may be temporary. Israeli public opinion is still close in time to October 7, and Netanyahu is not so far from the end of his reign. The countries that will get very mad at Israel for such an attack are already close to maximally mad at Israel. Trump has signaled plenty of support, yet there is no guarantee that will last forever.
Most of all, Iran is getting closer to having a workable nuclear weapon.
I also find it striking how many people discuss the Ukraine negotiations without considering the two issues may be tied to some degree. How much will Putin, if at all, shore up Iran in such a scenario?
Just a reminder that you should not forget about this issue, it could be the most important thing that happens this year.
Chad fact of the day
Chad’s PM2.5 levels were more than 18 times higher than the WHO guideline, with mineral dust in the Sahara Desert as the primary source of air pollutants.
Here is the full article, most of all noting that six of the world’s ten most polluted cities are in India. Via the excellent Samir Varma.