Category: Current Affairs
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.
Germany fact of the day
Germany opened its doors a decade ago to nearly 1 million Syrians, taking in more than any other country in Europe. Today, some 6,000 Syrian doctors make up the single largest group of foreign-born physicians, filling vital gaps in care at hospitals and clinics from the Alps to the Baltic Sea. That is especially true in rural areas, where attracting doctors can be hard. But even in big cities, Syrian doctors now make up the majority of attending physicians at some medical practices.
Here is more from The Washington Post. Here is my previous post on Syrians in Germany.
The election in Greenland
Greenland’s centre-right opposition has won a surprise general election victory – in a vote dominated by independence and US President Donald Trump’s pledge to take over the semi-autonomous territory.
The centre-right Demokraatit party – which favours a gradual approach to independence from Denmark – achieved around 30% of the vote, near-complete results show…
Five of the six main parties in the election favour independence from Copenhagen, but disagree over the pace with which to reach it…
The Democratic party, whose vote was up by more than 20% on 2021, is considered a moderate party on independence.
Another opposition party, Naleraq, which is looking to to immediately kick-off the independence process and forge closer ties with the US, was on course for second place with almost a quarter of the vote.
The two current governing parties, Inuit Ataqatigiit (IA) and Siumut, are heading for third and fourth place – marking an upset for Prime Minister Mute B Egede.
Here is more from the BBC.
Kevin Drum, RIP
Kevin Drum was one of the OG bloggers. I never met him IRL but we know from Ibelin that that is no bar to being friends. One thing I learned from Ayn Rand is that virtue should be rewarded, not just sin punished. That’s one reason why we shouldn’t wait until someone has passed to praise their goodness. I’m glad I wrote to Kevin many years ago:
Kevin,
Thanks for your excellent blogging! I am always pleased when you link to one of my posts. I appreciate the attention, of course, but especially so because agree or disagree you have always read me fairly. Many bloggers look for the weakest or worst way that a post can be interpreted so that they can score cheap points. In contrast, I’ve always seen you take on an author’s strongest arguments. I appreciate that. Knowing how honestly and perceptively you treat my posts has also made me more attentive to all of your blogging which I read daily.
Best
Alex Tabarrok
US AID, current status
After a 6 week review we are officially cancelling 83% of the programs at USAID.
The 5200 contracts that are now cancelled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States. In consultation with Congress, we intend for the remaining 18% of programs we are keeping (approximately 1000) to now be administered more effectively under the State Department.
That is from Marco Rubio. Here is my earlier post on US AID.
Redux, my 2021 Conversation with Mark Carney
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Excerpt:
COWEN: You grew up in Northwest Territories and also Alberta, so western Canada. How do you think that’s shaped your perspective on economies?
CARNEY: Well, the big thing I took from my time in Alberta is just, I mean, it made me a market believer because I’ll give you an example. I was born just north of what was then known as the tar sands, now known as the oil sands, this huge deposit of oil which was virtually impossible to get out of the ground, economically. It was sitting there literally on the surface, but to separate it from the sand was difficult. Very quickly over the course of as I was growing up, by the time I was an adult, the issue had been cracked. The ability to innovate and make a profit out of an opportunity.
COWEN: Your PhD thesis was called The Dynamic Advantage of Competition. Writing that thesis, what did you learn, not about the topic but about yourself?
CARNEY: I learned that I exhausted my capacity and desire to do game theory. In the end, the models were game theoretic. The explanations were rooted in case studies and some econometrics, but the models were formulized from a game theory perspective. I also learned that I wanted to do policy at some point as well.
There is much more at the link.
Will there be a British DOGE?
Highly controversial plans to revolutionise Whitehall by introducing performance-related pay, an accelerated exit process for under-performing mandarins and more digitalisation will be announced this week in what ministers say is a programme to “reshape the state” so it can respond to a new “era of insecurity”.
The proposed changes, to be announced by Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden, will inevitably provoke alarm and resistance from civil service unions, and be seen as the government using the current wave of global uncertainty as cover to drive through radical modernisation of civil service methods and culture…
While Whitehall departments have substantially grown in recent years – increasing by more than 15,000 since the end of 2023 – McFadden is expected to say working people have not seen improvements in their job opportunities, the safety of their neighbourhoods or the length of time they have to wait for NHS treatment when they are sick.
Indicating the scale of potential reform being considered, sources stressed that “delivering national security” could only be done with a full “renewal of the state”.
Most controversially, McFadden will set out a new “pay-by-results system learning from the best civil services globally, making sure the most senior officials responsible for the missions have their wages linked to the outcomes they achieve”, a government spokesperson said.
McFadden will also outline plans to speed up the removal from the service of civil servants judged as unable to meet current needs. A system of “mutually agreed exits” will be introduced to bring the civil service “more in line with the private sector”.
Here is more from The Guardian.
The political economy of Manus AI
Early reports are pretty consistent, and they indicate that Manus agentic AI is for real, and ahead of its American counterparts. I also hear it is still glitchy Still, it is easy to imagine Chinese agentic AI “getting there” before the American product does. If so, what does that world look like?
The cruder way of putting the question is: “are we going to let Chinese agentic bots crawl all over American computers?”
The next step question is: “do we in fact have a plausible way to stop this from happening?”
Many Chinese use VPNs to get around their own Great Firewall and access OpenAI products. China could toughen its firewall and shut down VPNs, but that is very costly for them. America doesn’t have a Great Firewall at all, and the First Amendment would seem to prevent very tough restrictions on accessing the outside world. Plus there can always be a version of the new models not directly connected to China.
We did (sort of) pass a TikTok ban, but even that applied only to the app. Had the ban gone through, you still could have accessed TikTok through its website. And so, one way or another, Americans will be able to access Manus.
Manus will crawl your computer and do all sorts of useful tasks for you. If not right now, probably within a year or not much more. An American alternative might leapfrog them, but again maybe not.
It is easy to imagine government banning Manus from its computers, just as the state of Virginia banned DeepSeek from its computers. I’m just not sure that matters much. Plenty of people will use it on their private computers, and it could become an integral part of many systems, including systems that interact with the U.S. public sector.
It is not obvious that the CCP will be able to pull strings to manipulate every aspect of Manus operations. I am not worried that you might order a cheeseburger on-line, and end up getting Kung Pao chicken. Still, the data collected by the parent company will in principle be CCP- accessible. Remember that advanced AI can be used to search through that information with relative ease. And over time, though probably not initially, you can imagine a Manus-like entity designed to monitor your computer for information relevant to China and the CCP. Even if it is not easy for a Manus-like entity to manipulate your computer in a “body snatchers-like” way, you can see the points of concern here.
Financial firms might be vulnerable to information capture attacks. Will relatives of U.S. military personnel be forbidden from having agentic Chinese AI on their computers? That does not seem enforceable.
Maybe you’re all worried now!
But should you be?
Whatever problems American computer owners might face, Chinese computer owners will face too. And the most important Chinese computer owner is the CCP and its affiliates, including the military.
More likely, Manus will roam CCP computers too. No, I don’t think that puts “the aliens” in charge, but who exactly is in charge? Is it Butterfly Effect, the company behind Manus, and its few dozen employees? In the short run, yes, more or less. But they too over time are using more and more agentic AIs, perhaps different brands from other companies too.
Think of some new system of checks and balances as being created, much as an economy is itself a spontaneous order. And in this new spontaneous order, a lot of the cognitive capital is coming outside the CCP.
In this new system, is the CCP still the smartest or most powerful entity in China? Or does the spontaneous order of various AI models more or less “rule it”? To what extent do the decisions of the CCP become a derivative product of Manus (and other systems) advice, interpretation, and data gathering?
What exactly is the CCP any more?
Does the importance of Central Committee membership decline radically?
I am not talking doomsday scenarios here. Alignment will ensure that the AI entities (for instance) continue to supply China with clean water, rather than poisoning the water supply. But those AI entities have been trained on information sets that have very different weights than what the CCP implements through its Marxism-swayed, autocracy-swayed decisions. Chinese AI systems look aligned with the CCP, given that they have some crude, ex post censorship and loyalty training. But are the AI systems truly aligned in terms of having the same limited, selective set of information weights that the CCP does? I doubt it. If they did, probably they would not be the leading product.
(There is plenty of discussion of alignment problems with AI. A neglected issue is whether the alignment solution resulting from the competitive process is biased on net toward “universal knowledge” entities, or some other such description, rather than “dogmatic entities.” Probably it is, and probably that is a good thing? …But is it always a good thing?)
Does the CCP see this erosion of its authority and essence coming? If so, will they do anything to try to preempt it? Or maybe a few of them, in Straussian fashion, allow it or even accelerate it?
Let’s say China can indeed “beat” America at AI, but at the cost of giving up control over China, at least as that notion is currently understood. How does that change the world?
Solve for the equilibrium!
Who exactly should be most afraid of Manus and related advances to come?
Who loses the most status in the new, resulting checks and balances equilibrium?
Who gains?
Solve for the equilibrium
Poland will look at gaining access to nuclear weapons and also ensure that every man undergoes military training as part of an effort to build a 500,000-strong army to face off the threat from Russia, Prime Minister Donald Tusk told the parliament on Friday.
Here is the full article.
Tariffs do not in general help trade deficits
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
The most important factors behind trade balances include savings decisions, fiscal policy, economic growth rates, wealth levels and demographic characteristics such as the age of the population. As economist Joseph Gagnon bluntly put it: “None of the studies found any role for trade barriers.”
Currency manipulation can be an important factor, and that has been a problem in the past with China. But it is not a problem right now; if anything, China is propping up the value of its currency. Nor is currency manipulation a problem with Canada, Mexico or the European Union, other targets of Trump’s tariffs.
Insofar as currencies do matter, currency appreciation is one very direct mechanism that limits the potential for tariffs to improve the trade balance. If a country slaps tariffs on imports, that does make those imports more expensive and thus lowers the demand for them. But then the value of the domestic currency will rise, which in turn makes it harder for domestic exporters. There is no guarantee that these effects will cancel each other out exactly, but it is difficult to get much of a trade balance boost through this mechanism, given these offsetting effects.
Standard stuff people, standard stuff. A bunch of you should know better.
Denmark fact of the day
Denmark’s state-run postal service, PostNord, is to end all letter deliveries at the end of 2025, citing a 90% decline in letter volumes since the start of the century.
The decision brings to an end 400 years of the company’s letter service. Denmark’s 1,500 postboxes will start to disappear from the start of June.
Transport Minister Thomas Danielsen sought to reassure Danes, saying letters could still be sent and received across the country. One company said it was prepared to take over deliveries.
Postal services across Europe are grappling with the decline in letter volumes. Germany’s Deutsche Post said on Thursday it was axing 8,000 jobs, in what it called a “socially responsible manner”.
Here is the full story, via Anecdotal.
Germany fact of the day
German borrowing costs surged by the most in 17 years on Wednesday, as investors bet on a big boost to the country’s ailing economy from a historic deal to fund investment in the military and infrastructure.
The yield on the 10-year Bund surged 0.21 percentage points to 2.69 per cent, its biggest one-day move since 2008, with markets braced for extra government borrowing.
Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz late on Tuesday agreed with the rival Social Democrats (SPD) to exempt defence spending above 1 per cent of GDP from Germany’s strict constitutional borrowing limit, set up a €500bn off-balance sheet vehicle for debt-funded infrastructure investment and loosen debt rules for states.
Here is more from the FT, noting that crowding out is still “a thing.” Of course it is wrong, or at least not obviously correct, for the article to report that “investors bet on a big boost to the country’s ailing economy…” I would sooner regard this as bad news for German consumption, naming that trying to address some of their problems will involve significant opportunity costs. Share prices did go up, and in part you can think of this as a transfer of resources from German individuals to defense and infrastructure firms. You might think additional German defense spending is necessary, as I do, but still that does not boost living standards. The additional infrastructure might, let us hope they are able to find ways to cut other spending along the way, surely it is not all super-efficient?
Janan Ganesh’s latest FT Op-Ed is titled “Europe must trim its welfare state to build a warfare state,” let us hope they can make that work. So far I am waiting to see the evidence.