Category: Current Affairs
In case you wish to comment on very recent events
Comments are open…
Who needs robots?, China fact of the day
A hotel in southwestern China’s megacity of Chongqing has come under fire for using red pandas to deliver morning wake-up calls to guests, sparking controversy and raising fresh concerns about the welfare of endangered wildlife and customer safety.
Located near the Chongqing Wild Animal World, the hotel offers a so-called “red panda morning call” service, where staff lead red pandas into guests’ rooms to greet them in the morning. Guests can feed, stroke, and take photos with the animals — some of whom were filmed exploring the hotel rooms and wandering across beds.
In addition to red panda-themed rooms, the hotel features accommodation with up-close contact with ring-tailed lemurs, albeit this time outdoors.
Here is the full story, via Jonathan Cheng.
Of Course We Should Privatize Some Federal Land (but probably won’t)
The Federal government controls a ridiculous amount of land in the West including more than half of Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Alaska and nearly half of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming. See the map (PDF). The vast majority of this land is NOT parks!!! It is time for a sale to raise some funds and improve the efficiency of land allocation.
The conservative Mike Lee has a bill that would allow some sales. Great! The only problem with the bill is that it is loaded down with restrictions and qualifications. For example, there is a cap of 0.75% on total sales–that’s right, the land sales are capped at less than 1% of the total Federal land and that is a high cap because most of the rules prohibit any sale. The sales that are allowed have to be nominated by state or local governments, must be adjacent to developed areas and close to infrastructure. Moreover, the land can only be use for housing. Lyman Stone has a thread going into even more detail. The very modest goal–as you can see at right–is to rationalize some checkerboard land patterns.
Even so, the bill is probably doomed. Just mentioning federal land sales triggers a moral panic, as if someone proposed auctioning off Yellowstone. Supposed conservatives like Lomez are fueling this hysteria (e.g. here, here and here). It’s nonsense. Here and here is the type of land we are actually talking about—notice the difference?
As Matt Darling pointed out, this is Everything Bagel Liberalism from Conservatives—a bloated mess of proceduralism that empowers special interests and kneecaps supply.
If we can’t even sell Federal scraps then we’ve abandoned any pretense of governing in the public interest. We should be building entirely new cities–freedom cities!–not whining about fishing and hunting on scraps of scrub. This is exactly the same as urban NIMBYs who lobby to save “historic” parking lots. Pathetic. The federal land monopoly is not sacred. Let it go. This is where the rubber hits the road: if MAGA means anything beyond vibes and grievance, it should mean cutting red tape and unlocking land for Americans to own and build upon.
The anti-abundance agenda?
It looks like a whole new shipping preference law is coming. The House overwhelmingly passed the American Cargo for American Ships Act that would require 100% of transportation project [DOT related] materials to go on US ships, driving up infrastructure costs.
Here is the Judge Glock tweet, here is the legislation itself. Appears to be worse than the Jones Act?
A Skeptical View of the NSF’s Role in Economic Research
Tyler and myself from 2016 but newly relevant on how to reform the National Science Foundation (NSF) especially as related to economics:
We can imagine a plausible case for government support of science based on traditional economic reasons of externalities and public goods. Yet when it comes to government support of grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for economic research, our sense is that many economists avoid critical questions, skimp on analysis, and move straight to advocacy. In this essay, we take a more skeptical attitude toward the efforts of the NSF to subsidize economic research. We offer two main sets of arguments. First, a key question is not whether NSF funding is justified relative to laissez-faire, but rather, what is the marginal value of NSF funding given already existing government and nongovernment support for economic research? Second, we consider whether NSF funding might more productively be shifted in various directions that remain within the legal and traditional purview of the NSF. Such alternative focuses might include data availability, prizes rather than grants, broader dissemination of economic insights, and more. Given these critiques, we suggest some possible ways in which the pattern of NSF funding, and the arguments for such funding, might be improved.
The tech right and the MAGA right
The contrasts there are the theme of my latest column for The Free Press. Excerpt:
The MAGA crowd, starting with Trump and including J.D. Vance, Stephen Miller, and Steve Bannon, has a different set of beliefs. Again, the actual views here are diverse. (After all, Trump himself can hold multiple views in the course of a single paragraph.) But if I had to summarize the doctrine, I would take the slogan “Make America Great Again” very literally—with an emphasis on again.
Their desire is to bring back an America that was more nationalistic, had a more cohesive elite, was less infatuated with globalization, was more masculine and less feminized, and had a stronger manufacturing base, among other things. That also means fewer immigrants—especially immigrants who don’t come from Europe, which the MAGA crowd views as the font of American civilization.
It is not my purpose to debate these views one by one, but I will note that these have not been the natural trends of our time. Due to birth control, the influence of feminization has risen, because women are taking on increasingly important roles in the workplace, politics, and education. Due to automation and foreign competition, manufacturing employment has declined. The rise of Asia has propelled globalization, and many of the most talented students at U.S. universities are no longer Americans. And because of proximity, mobility, and instability in many Latin American countries, immigration, both legal and illegal, has been rising.
The MAGA recipe thus requires ongoing and quite serious government intervention, in both the economic realm and in culture. Otherwise MAGA is doomed to fail, as its desired ends will be swept aside by the broader currents of history, which favor the tech right. Since the America of earlier times had a much smaller government than today, MAGA advocates, if they are to implement their desired ends, have to war against libertarian tendencies, and thus MAGA is unlikely to end up evolving in libertarian directions.
So whereas the tech right wants freedom to build, MAGA wants the government to manage the building in some very specific directions—like rekindling manufacturing as a core part of the economy, for instance—and to prevent some kinds of globalized building altogether.
Recommended.
My Conversation with the excellent Chris Arnade
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Chris discuss how Beijing and Shanghai reveal different forms of authoritarian control through urban design, why Seoul’s functional dysfunction makes it more appealing than Tokyo’s efficiency, favorite McDonald’s locations around the world, the dimensions for properly assessing a city’s walkability, what Chris packs for long urban jaunts, why he’s not interested in walking the countryside, what travel has taught him about people and culture, what makes the Faroe Islands and El Paso so special, where he has no desire to go, the good and bad of working on Wall Street, the role of pigeons and snapping turtles in his life, finding his 1,000 true fans on Substack, whether museums are interesting, what set him on this current journey, and more.
COWEN: That’s okay. What’s your nomination for the least walkable city?
ARNADE: Phoenix is pretty bad. In the rest of the world, what was the lowest ranked of mine?
COWEN: I think Dakar is your lowest ranked.
ARNADE: Dakar is low.
COWEN: I don’t find that so bad.
ARNADE: [laughs] It was partially the heat. Also, there was a safety issue, which is not actual violence. It’s just the risk of a miscommunication going very badly because when you’re in a neighborhood where they have a slum basically, where you’re one of few white people, it’s not that I feel threatened by being robbed. I feel threatened that there can be miscommunication, like, “Why are you here? What are you doing here?” That can spiral out of control if you don’t speak the language. Dakar was really tough. Kampala was really tough to walk.
COWEN: Why’s that? I’ve never been there.
ARNADE: Again, these are cities that are not meant to be walked. Locals don’t walk them. People would look at me like I’m crazy. Part of the reason, first of all, you can jump on a hack bus, so why would you walk? The boda-bodas, which are . . . you just jump on the back of a motorcycle, which I won’t do. I did it once, and I’m like, “I’m not doing this. This is a really dumb risk.”
COWEN: Yes, I wouldn’t do that.
ARNADE: I almost got killed the first time I did it, but they do it. Consequently, there’s no walking infrastructure and when you do walk, you’re at risk of being hit by a boda-boda. People will walk out of necessity but there’s just no infrastructure. Absolutely none. Then you can get hit by a car. You can get hit by a car or a motorcycle.
COWEN: Rio, for me, would be the least walkable. It’s very dangerous but on top of that, there are so many places where walks end. There’re mountains, there’re tunnels.
And this:
COWEN: What is it you think you learn least well traveling the way you do?
ARNADE: It’s interesting. I used to be a macro-type trader. I used to be very top-down. I think I, in some sense, have thrown too much of that away. I’ve gone in too blind. I could do a little bit more background reading in terms of the political situation.
One of the things I’ve learned from my project is, most people don’t talk about politics. It’s because I only talk about what other people want to talk about. No one talks about politics. Being in Beijing and Shanghai — maybe it’s not the best example because people would say there’s a reason they don’t want to talk about it. I don’t think that’s it.
COWEN: No, I agree. Most of the world. Even Idaho.
ARNADE: Yes, 98 percent of the people aren’t political and they don’t talk about politics. I got beat up on social media when people were talking about, “Oh my God, Trump’s going to be elected. The world hates us.” No, they don’t. [laughs] When that person said that, I was actually in a bar in Kampala with a woman telling me how much she loved Trump. That was a rare political conversation. Most people don’t talk about politics.
In that sense, I could probably do more reading outside of the conversations about politics because I go to a lot of these countries, I don’t know what’s going on politically because people don’t talk about it.
COWEN: What other macro views of the world have you revised due to your walking, visiting, traveling? Obviously, particular views about any individual place, but on the whole, humanity.
And I am very happy to recommend Chris’s Substack, which covers his fascinating travels around the world.
An addendum to the German fiscal austerity debates
“There is a significant risk that France will be passed by neighbouring countries like Germany and Poland, who are working hard to increase military spending quickly,” said Tenenbaum.
That is from the FT. I am far from convinced that Germany will use its fiscal freedom wisely to protect its national and also European security. Still, I am glad they have this option, and in a pinch probably they would do what is necessary.
We can all agree that fiscal policy should be relatively tight in good times, all expected values taken into account, and looser in bad times. The underdiscussed issue is exactly which times are “the good ones,” and perhaps the next ten years is when the fiscal space truly will be needed. Such an on line, pile it on, dogmatic critical slaughter of Germany and Merkel was attempted when the eurocrisis hit, and so I fear many people will be reluctant to recognize the possible truth of this point. But war is so, so much worse than the other bad world-states, and that is the one you really need to be prepared for. Of course the ideal thing would have been for Merkel to boost defense spending back then, but only rarely was that the demand.
Annie Lowrey on ranked choice voting as a form of democracy
Seeing a no-name upstart attempt to upset a brand-name heavyweight is thrilling. But the system has warped the political calculus of the mayoral campaign. Candidates who might have dropped out are staying in. Candidates who might be attacking one another on their platforms or records are instead considering cross-endorsing. Voters used to choosing one contender are plotting out how to rank their choices. Moreover, they are doing so in a closed primary held in the June of an odd year, meaning most city residents will not show up at the polls anyway. If this is democracy, it’s a funny form of it…
Whether Cuomo or Mamdani wins this month, New Yorkers might have another chance to decide between them. After this annoyingly chaotic primary, we could have an annoyingly chaotic election: If Mamdani loses, he might run in the general on the Working Families Party ticket. If Cuomo loses, he might run in the general as an independent, as will the disgraced incumbent, Eric Adams. At least, in that election, voters won’t be asked to rank their favorite, just to pick one.
Here is the full piece. I do not myself see a big advantage from this system.
Rebuild the Elites
Nature’s list of the top research universities in the world.
The U.S. seems intent on tearing down its own elites. Yes, they’ve been smug shits at times and deserve a rap on the knuckles—but our elites compete on the world stage. Gutting top universities rewards with a momentary dopamine hit, but unless we rebuild stronger institutions, we’re weakening ourselves globally. While we fight culture wars, China builds capacity. The goal shouldn’t be to destroy American elites, but to bring them back into the populist fold—to make Harvard and MIT feel like engines of American greatness again, not alien fortresses.
See yesterday’s post on the American Model for a case in point.
FYI, other sources do not rank Chinese universities quite so highly but they all acknowledge rising quality.
Hat tip: Matthew Yglesias.
My 2018 Politico piece on whether we are descending into fascism
In 2018 I published an article in Politico, arguing that fascism would not come to America. In part that is because of our very long democratic traditions (much longer than Weimar!), and in part because American bureaucracy has become unmanageable, thus limiting the power of the executive. DOGE in particular has been a quite vivid representation of the latter point, as I made it in 2018 — “The net result is they simply can’t control enough of the modern state to steer it in a fascist direction.”
A few people have asked me to revisit that prediction, and frankly I think it is looking great. (I do not doubt, however, that the Trump administration represents a major increase in blatant corruption, and a deterioration of norms of governance, most of all in the areas of public health and science but not only. I think of America as evolving back to some of its 19th century norms, and often bad ones, not fascism.)
Noah Smith wrote recently:
Trump is cosplaying as a dictator. But so far he’s backed down on: * tariffs * ICE sweeps * Abrego Garcia * Greenland/Canada/Panama * Ukraine aid * DOGE He does care about public opinion, a lot.
Here is Noah’s longer essay.
Here is a recent NYT headline: “Trump Loses Another Battle in His War Against Elite Law Firms.” The judiciary has stood up to Trump firmly, and he has backed down. The Army parade, by the way, was mostly pathetic and hardly served as a call to fascist arms. The Kennedy Center is not the new Haus der Kunst.
It was some while back that Trump pulled the nomination of Stefanik to be UN ambassador, on the grounds that the Republican margin in the House was extremely thin. All I can say is that Hitler would have done it differently.
Updating our views of nuclear deterrence, a short essay by o3 pro
I asked o3 pro how very recent events should update our perspectives on Schelling’s work on nuclear deterrence. I asked for roughly 800 words, here is one excerpt from what I received:
…Deterrence models that ignore domestic legitimacy under‑predict risk‑taking.
6. The United States is both referee and participant
American destroyers shooting down Iranian missiles create a blended deterrence model: extended defense. That blurs the line between the traditional “nuclear umbrella” and kinetic participation. It also complicates escalation ladders; Tehran now weighs the prospect of an inadvertent clash with the U.S. Fifth Fleet every time it loads a Shahab‑3. The war thus updates Schelling’s idea of “commitment” for the 21st‑century alliance network: digital sensors, shared early‑warning data, and distributed interceptors knit allies into a single strategic organism, reducing the freedom of any one capital to de‑escalate unilaterally.
7. Lessons for non‑combatant nuclear states
New Delhi and Islamabad will notice that an opaque Israeli arsenal backed by high‑end defenses delivered more bargaining power than Iran’s half‑finished program. Pyongyang may conclude the opposite: only a tested, miniaturized warhead guarantees respect. Meanwhile European leaders should ponder how much of their own deterrent posture rests on aging U.S. missiles whose effectiveness presumes no adversary fielding Israel‑grade intercept layers. The Israeli‑Iranian conflict is therefore less a regional exception than a harbinger.
Here is the full “column.”
Which countries won’t exist in the 22nd century?
Or sooner, that is the topic of my latest essay for The Free Press. Excerpt:
The most radical redefinition of the nation-state may be coming from Haiti, where preexisting forms of government appear to have collapsed altogether. Haiti has been a troubled place for a long time, but when I used to visit in the 1990s you could come and go intact—at least if you exercised commonsense precautions.
But since 2023, there have been no elected officials of any kind present in Haiti. That is highly unusual for what was supposed to be a democracy. Circa mid-2025, criminal gangs took control of most of Port-au-Prince, the capital and most populous city of the country. Murder rates are skyrocketing, and if somehow I were foolish enough to show my face in the country (by the way, the main airport is not usually open) it is likely I would be kidnapped almost immediately.
The remaining fragments of the government have taken to carrying out drone attacks on the criminal gangs, but without making much if any progress in reestablishing their rule. Mainly it is the warlords who are left, and who also run the country.
Various U.S. interventions, most notably under President Clinton in the 1990s, and UN-backed troop deployments have failed to prevent Haiti from falling to pieces. You can say the world has not tried hard enough, but you cannot say the world has not tried. There is still a Kenyan-led, UN-affiliated force in Haiti, but it does not appear to exert any significant influence.
One possibility is that a dominant gang emerges and becomes the new government, albeit a highly oppressive one. Yet it is far from obvious that consolidation is in the works, as in many situations we observe multiple, warring drug gangs as a persistent outcome. Most likely, Haiti will have ceased to be a sustainable nation-state with an identifiable government. It would better be described as a state of Hobbesian anarchy.
Worth a ponder.
One or two game theoretic observations
So far the campaign is a major “win” for (non-LLM) AI, though that is not yet a story. There is a reason why Palantir was priced at 300x earnings.
If you are one of those Iranian leaders, or nuclear scientists, your calculus has to be that you can never step outside again, at least not anytime soon. I believe that situation is unprecedented in the history of wartime? It remains to be seen how much that will shape the logic of deterrence and in turn outcomes, but I will be pondering this and observing.
Japan facts of the day
Japan must stop being overly optimistic about how quickly its population is going to shrink, economists have warned, as births plunge at a pace far ahead of core estimates.
Japan this month said there were a total of 686,000 Japanese births in 2024, falling below 700,000 for the first time since records began in the 19th century and defying years of policy efforts to halt population decline.
The total represented the ninth straight year of decline and pushed the country’s total fertility rate — the average number of children born per woman over her lifetime — to a record low of 1.15…
The median forecast produced by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (IPSS) in 2023 did not foresee the number of annual births — which does not include children born to non-Japanese people — dropping into the 680,000 range until 2039.
Here is more from Leo Lewis at the FT.