Category: Current Affairs
Montana’s SB535 and a Potential Biotech Renaissance in America
In 2024, China’s NMPA approved 83 new drugs, the FDA approved 50. China’s share of new commercial clinical trials jumped from 8% globally in 2013 to 30% in 2024, just behind the US at 35%. Last year, China-based Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals overtook AstraZeneca as the top clinical trial sponsor in the world.
What’s remarkable is how China is winning: deregulation and capitalism. It’s faster and easier to set up a clinical trial in China than in the United States. China is even experimenting with the peer approval model I’ve long advocated. The Medical Tourism Pilot Zone on Hainan island lets medical institutions import and use any pharmaceutical or device approved in the EU, US, or Japan — no separate Chinese approval needed. China is using our own regulatory judgments to get treatments to its patients faster than we do.
The core problem is that our clinical trial and drug approval system is slow and expensive. Getting a new drug to market in the US takes billions of dollars and a decade or more of clinical trials — and all of that before a company earns a single dollar. The consequence is drug lag and drug loss and also learning loss. Innovation is a dynamic process. You must build to build better.
It’s not over for the United States, however. Montana’s SB535, signed into law in May 2025, is the most important regulatory innovation in drug approval in my lifetime. The law authorizes investigational drugs and therapies that have cleared Phase I trials to be prescribed and sold — bypassing the traditional FDA approval pathway. It makes Montana the first state to license experimental treatment centers, “one stop shops” for otherwise hard-to-access care.
This is a very big deal.
SB535 makes Montana the only state in the nation where firms can move more quickly from a successful Phase I trial into limited commercialization. This positions Montana as a highly attractive location for biopharma, biotherapeutics, and other life sciences companies that want to accelerate time-to-market while continuing the federal FDA approval process.
Montana’s regulatory system creates the possibility of a self-funding clinical pipeline: companies using early commercial revenues to finance the path to full FDA approval. You get treatments to patients faster, and you keep companies alive long enough to prove their treatments work. Experimental treatments are not for everyone–these treatments are cash based–no Medicaid or Medicare and probably no private insurance either–but after conventional treatments have failed experimental treatments should be available for some patients, both for their benefit and for ours.
Montana is not alone. Florida now allows non-FDA approved stem cell therapies:
A new law in Florida, CS/CS/SB 1768, allows physicians to market and administer stem cell therapies that have not been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for orthopedic conditions, wound care and pain management.
These experiments in regulatory federalism are vital and not just for patients but also for geopolitical competition. I am thrilled China is pursuing medical innovation (I predicted and applauded this in my TED talk) but I also don’t want to see America falling behind.
The Trump administration has been supportive. I would like to see HHS and the FDA working with companies operating under state right-to-try frameworks — sharing data, clarifying federal-state boundaries favorably, and treating these experiments as the biotech competitiveness infrastructure they are.
The FDA approval process has long been treated as the only legitimate path to market. The cost of that orthodoxy is measured in companies that never reached viability, innovations that never got off the ground, and patients who died when they didn’t have to. I have spent thirty years trying to get people to see the invisible graveyard. That’s hard. Most remain blind. But China’s bursting pipeline of new drugs is visible — could this be a Sputnik moment for biotech?
An American biotech renaissance — driven by AI, federalism, and regulatory innovation — is possible. The path forward is to double down on what makes America great: the laboratories of democracy are working, and in Montana and Florida, so are the labs.
AI nationalism, Europe included
Most of my Free Press column deals with Mythos, but here are some remarks on Europe:
There is yet another huge problem behind all these first-order problems. Let us say, for instance, that France’s Mistral AI develops very nicely and serves as an EU counterpart of Anthropic and OpenAI. Well, then the other European countries will become highly dependent on the French. That may seem okay today, but it will be much less fun for the Germans if the French really do have all that extra power and leverage.
As for the French themselves, they would be highly dependent on a private company. France may end up with one such company, but it is unlikely to have three of them. So Mistral will in turn have high leverage over France, French politics, and French foreign policy. Let us hope they are up to that. The simple point is that being influenced by someone in your home country, even if it sounds more appealing rhetorically, is not always better than being pushed around by foreigners. Sometimes the foreigners are less oppressive and intrusive, if only because they care less about you.
Worth a ponder. I am hearing good things about the new Mistral model, so these questions may become relevant sooner than I had thought when writing this.
The Cultural War is a Civil War
Kevin Bryan riffs on on my post The Nationalization of American Science. He is rightfully incensed:
AT is right this is a red tape-filled science policy of “losers”. If you think “cut funds from DEI-driven professors in the small departments no one cares about” is more important than “make sure the world’s strongest fundamental science continues”, you’re an idiot.
And yes, this is also the policy of “right-wing JD-brain” folks. They haven’t worked in a lab. They don’t know how we got AI, and recent cancer breakthroughs, and on and on. It’s all culture war, all the time – just the right-wing equivalent of the worst left-wing habits.
One last thing: I *hate* the term “administration priorities” or “President’s priorities”. Totally Unamerican! The President *executes* the law created by Congress, who represent the people, and who see turnover every two years. Period. “Oh, but Democrats do this too!” Grow up!
Owning the libs may feel good today but please look just one move ahead in the game tree. When AOC controls the executive branch, she will inherit every tool Trump normalized. Look a few moves further and see the damage to American institutions.
The culture war is a civil war. If we don’t end it, American science will be collateral damage.
The bullish case for Brazil
Start with the most important number in economics, even though no one on Wall Street talks about it: calories per acre. Human civilization runs on food. Ten billion people will inhabit this planet by 2050. The amount of arable land is not growing. It is shrinking, every year, to urbanization, desertification, salinization, and topsoil erosion. The countries that can grow food at scale will be the most strategically valuable territories on earth. The countries with the best apps and the most PhDs will depend on the countries with the best dirt.
Brazil has more unused arable land than any country on earth. That sentence alone should stop every allocator in their tracks. It means that Brazil can approximately double its total cultivated area, without touching a single hectare of the Amazon, simply by converting degraded pasturelands in the Cerrado and other biomes into productive cropland using technology that already exists.
No other agricultural superpower has this headroom. The United States is fully utilized. China is losing farmland to urbanization at a rate that should terrify its central planners. India’s agricultural productivity gains are hitting diminishing returns against water stress and soil degradation. Europe is hemmed in by geography and regulation. Sub-Saharan Africa has theoretical potential, but lacks the roads, the ports, the legal frameworks, and the capital to exploit it within a generation.
Brazil is already the world’s largest net food exporter. It leads the world in soybeans, coffee, sugar, orange juice, beef, and poultry. It is the second-largest exporter of corn, pork, and ethanol, and recently surpassed the United States as the largest cotton exporter. Agribusiness generates approximately 25% of GDP and more than 40% of export revenue. And the agricultural sector has been growing productivity at 3-4% per year for two decades straight, driven by Embrapa’s tropical soil science, satellite-guided precision agriculture, and the industrialization of protein supply chains that stretch from feedlots in Mato Grosso to dinner tables in Shanghai.
A single farm in Mato Grosso can be more than twice the size of the state of Rhode Island. A literal fact. The Bom Futuro Group cultivates more than 700,000 hectares (roughly 2,700 square miles) of soybeans, corn, and cotton across 35 production units. This is farming at a scale that American and European investors cannot easily conceptualize, operating with GPS-guided machinery, drone monitoring, and soil analytics that rival anything in Iowa, but across an area that dwarfs it.
The post is interesting throughout and offers further points of interest.
Sometimes it is hard to solve for the equilibrium
Probably you all know about this:
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
According to not yet confirmed but likely true reports, it was shown that model could be jailbroken. The released Mythos already restricted bio and “AI improvement” queries, rather strictly in fact, so now we are back to the model not being available.
Here are a few of the constraints on the U.S. government, not the only ones I might add:
1. It needs for the main companies to stay in business. On top of that, it wants their IPOs to go reasonably well. And it is now much harder for the top companies to recruit foreigners, which is a significant share of their highest quality workforce (Demis, Ilya, Andrej for a start). It is also much harder for the main companies to drum up foreign business in a credible and sustainble manner.
1b. How are American multinationals operating abroad supposed to use top systems, moving forward?
2. It wants to use model access as a tool of both hard and soft power, so model access has to be possible at some level. But it is very hard to control what foreign agents will do with their partial model access, when they get it in the ffuture.
3. The U.S. needs to stay ahead of China in the AI race.
4. The U.S. needs to issue restrictions that are actually enforceable, and “U.S. citizens only” does not fit that bill. Furthermore (markets in everything!) it is easy enough to hire a traitorous American to access tools of wrongdoing, or for matter it is not difficult to fake citizenship in various ways.
5. USG cannot nationalize these companies and then proceed to run them effectively.
6. Chinese and other open source models do in fact improve at some reasonable pace, even if they are right now considerably behind the best proprietary models.
Is the most likely scenario that the government hardens some of its own systems and takes some further precautions, and then allows Mythos to be rereleased? Perhaps with some additional safeguards?
Is there such a thing as a model that cannot be jailbroken at all? I doubt that.
So basically we will be replaying this scenario periodically over time, but with each time the companies and also the government in a weaker and more precarious position.
I am willing to reject the philosophy of “safetyism” and bite various associated bullets. As it stands, these actions will not succeed in making us safer, including for the reasons mentioned above. Our regulatory institutions, attitudes, and approaches simply are not well suited to an era of radical innovation.
In any case these events do not surprise me (they do surprise me in their immediate suddenness however), as this kind of approach is what governments have been about for a long time now, USG included or perhaps USG especially.
Rising in status: Leopold, Aesop, and also Mistral. AI nationalism. Proponents of slow take-off as the likely scenario. Reticent, quiet CEOs. As for China, will they rush into this opportunity, or are they at least as scared as we are?
The Nationalization of American Science
OMB, joined by some forty grantmaking agencies—NSF, HHS, DOE, NASA, DOD among them—has proposed a sweeping rewrite of the rules governing all federal grants, the Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance.
American science has long been state funded but not state directed. Since Vannevar Bush, money has flowed through many agencies to independent universities, allocated largely by peer review. The system has flaws—conformity, gerontocracy, waste—but it had one great virtue, the system was decentralized and not under state control. This rule proposes to bring science funding under top-down, state control.
Program goals must now be “aligned with administration policies and priorities” (§ 200.202). Merit review is subordinated to politics: “senior appointees must conduct these reviews,” ensuring “that discretionary awards advance the President’s policy priorities,” while “peer review remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion” (§ 200.205). And every grant becomes terminable at will, whenever it “no longer effectuates program goals, Federal agency priorities, or the national interest *as they exist at the time of the termination*” (§ 200.340, emphasis added). Universities must even ensure their subrecipients don’t “significantly damage the reputation of… the Federal Government” (§ 200.332)—a loyalty clause for scientists.
All this is sold as cutting “burdensome conditions,” a goal I would support, but sadly that is bullshit. The proposed rules add more paperwork and many more layers of bureaucratic review. Payment requests must include written justifications. Every disbursement gets screened through Treasury’s “Do Not Pay” system. Every recipient must run E-Verify. Applicants must disclose any employee who worked at the awarding agency within two years. And on top of the existing review machinery sits a new pre-issuance review committee of “senior appointees” second-guessing the experts. Fixed amount awards—pay for outputs, not inputs—an innovative reward mechanism are *eliminated*, so every award now gets routine cost monitoring and financial reporting.
Political review of every award, peer review demoted, agency review promoted, termination whenever “priorities” change. Chilling. It’s a nightmare of petty low-trust review of the kind that is already drowning science. I must deal with this kind of nonsense all the time. More is not better.
The machinery is centralized too. OMB’s guidance becomes binding regulation, effective government-wide with no agency rulemaking. One dial in the White House now turns every grant program in the country.
The new rules will be sold as getting rid of DEI but that is an excuse to bring in the commissars. The new rules don’t depoliticize science they create even more politicization with the sign flipped, and the drafters admit it:
In the previous administration, executive agencies frequently chose to subsidize and expressly prioritize projects based on their ideological alignment with the categories of activities discussed in the proposed version of § 200.300. See, for example, E.O. 13985, sec. 1, 86 FR 7009, 7009 (Jan. 25, 2021) (“It is therefore the policy of [the Biden] Administration that the Federal Government should pursue a comprehensive approach to advancing equity . . . .”). In this administration, executive agencies will continue to use their discretionary authorities in a manner consistent with current Executive Branch policy. If executive agencies were entitled to subsidize those types of activities during the previous administration, there is no constitutional basis to prevent the government from reaching a different policy determination regarding which activities to fund during this administration.
Read that twice. Tip your hat to the new constitution, take a bow for the new revolution. Will science prosper when it is whipped by political turnover? Research runs on decade timescales; administrations run on four-year ones.
A decentralized funding system is inefficient the way markets and federalism are inefficient—we give up some economies of scale and get experimentation, error correction, and robustness in return. A system in which every award advances “the President’s policy priorities” is efficient the way ministries of science are efficient. We know how that experiment ends.
America is moving in the wrong direction. We should double down on what made America great. Instead we are adopting all of the loser policies of authoritarian nations.
The Labor Share Fell. So What?
The share of Gross Domestic Income accruing to labor has been declining in recent decades while the share accruing to capital has been rising. In the graph below, I show labor compensation as a share of GDI (left axis). Labor share has indeed been trending down–some of this could be an artifact of the data, e.g. an increase in proprietor’s income (labor) mislabeled as capital income, more pass throughs and so forth—but for the purposes of this post I will accept that the labor share has declined. What does this mean?
The natural response is to think that because the share going to labor has fallen and the share going to capital has risen that there has been a transfer of income from labor to capital. That is possible but it is not the only interpretation and it does not follow mechanically from the share data.
I have also plotted total compensation to labor (in real terms) in the graph above and far from shrinking it is higher than ever and growing. Moreover the right axis is logged so you can also see that outside of recessions the growth rate of labor compensation looks quite steady (similar slope over time). (Labor compensation per member of the labor force is noisier but looks similar).
The recessions in 2008 and 2020 are worth noting because these are periods when the labor share was high and locally at a maximum! The reason, of course, is that GDI was shrinking in these periods more than labor compensation. In other words, capital takes a bigger hit than labor in a recession. This is a good reminder that a high share of GDI is not what workers most care about–a high absolute level of GDI is more important for the bottom line.
In short, the data are consistent—not proof of, but consistent with—a story in which capital has become more productive, raising output. More productive capital also raises the demand for labor, so while more of the new output goes to capital in the first instance, the pie is growing and labor’s absolute compensation has grown with it. Yes, if the shares had stayed constant and output had grown just as much, labor compensation would have been higher still. And if my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bicycle.
Sao Paulo notes
The old saw “Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be” now seems so wrong. The place feels increasingly conservative, and it is aging rapidly. In the domestic airport you see couples with only a single kid, not two or three kids, never mind four.
Country and Western music, in their Brazilian incarnations, are very popular.
It does not feel like the next Pelé will be coming from Brazil.
Sao Paulo as a city is much improved. The murder rate has plummeted, and the nice neighborhoods are very nice and are growing in size. The business community is strong, interesting architecture abounds, and there is a real arts scene. It is arguably Latin America’s number one city, with only Mexico City as a rival. It has, along with Mexico City, evolved into a “must know” global city, though it is rarely treated that way by outsiders. In the three days I spent there, going around to many places, I did not see a single person who was evidently a foreign tourist. That is crazy, but also a sign there is good value here.
Sao Paulo has food to die for. It is top tier for Brazilian (of course), meat/steak, Japanese, and Italian, and pretty good in many other offerings as well. I had a wonderful fifteen-course omikase for $110 at a Michelin star restaurant. The establishment, Kan Suke, has only eight seats, but I could get a table by inquiring only an hour in advance.
For Italian food it is probably the second best country in the world? For meats it might be number one, at least if you are willing to put aside the small country of Uruguay. For beans it is top two, and the fruits are excellent as well. Chocolate ice cream and gelato abound. All constraints considered, I would rather spend a week dining out here than in London or Paris or Rome, or for that matter New York City.
People are very friendly, surprising few speak decent English, and Brazilian warmth still abounds.
I was very pleased with my stay at Hotel Unique, due to its architecture and also a perfect location.
Observers should be more optimistic about the Brazilian economy. Yes it is overregulated and the government is locked into far too much spending. But hyperinflation is now a distant memory, a reasonable fiscal consolidation occurred in the 1990s, and the country has plenty of its own energy. Keep in mind that for emerging economies, years of negative growth are a major problem. Brazil now has sidestepped most (not all!) of those risks. Slow, steady growth should be able to get them somewhere, albeit at a langorous pace.
My biggest worry about Brazil is demographics and shrinking population. In recent times TFR has been in the 1.3 to 1.4 range, hardly satisfactory. A shrinking population is bad per se, and also it will hurt many regions of the country due to imperfect market integration, both nationally and globally. More importantly, the country does not have an obvious and easy option for pulling in a higher number of desirable immigrants, at least not relative to its size. There is Venezuela and Bolivia, but the former of those may go away as a major source of people.
Will Brazilian fertility tick back up? Will Brazil re-attain its status as a highly influential culture on the world scene, as it was in the 1960s through early 1990s? Unclear. But if the question is “should you go visit?”, the answer is a definite yes.
Should you move to Argentina? (from my email)
My name is Josh Neuman, and I’m writing from Buenos Aires, Argentina where Peter Thiel’s move is all over the news here. He lives in [redacted], only a xx minute drive from my own apartment in Recoleta.
I want to pitch a piece…arguing that Thiel is right to be in Argentina, but wrong about why. The libertarian revolution he thinks he’s found simply doesn’t exist in the way it’s being advertised in the international press. Milei has accomplished some real things since December 2023, such as lower inflation and a fiscal surplus, in part underwritten by Washington. But the effect of many of his policies has been exaggerated by both supporters and opponents alike, with widespread pessimism across all parts of society.
Much of the Argentine status quo he sought to abolish remains intact, such as retenciones on agricultural exports, union control over the labor market, while many of his reforms have had little impact beyond Buenos Aires, particularly in the northern provinces still dominated by entrenched Peronista governors. Distrust of the peso remains high, while much of the economy is still black market, with the informal sector still being around 40-50% of employment. The lines outside the Spanish and Italian consulates of Argentines reclaiming European citizenship are as long as ever, while major business figures like Marcos Galperin still live in neighboring Uruguay. Peronism as I’m sure you know has mutated several times throughout its history to each contemporary crisis, and will prove far more durable in the long run as a social identity as much as a political machine.
Argentina’s retenciones are export taxes levied on agricultural commodities like soybeans, wheat, and corn at the point of sale, before producers receive any income, which goes towards the government, and is how Argentine governments (especially Peronista ones) have historically paid for the country’s welfare state. The system also functions as a price mechanism because by taxing exports, the government keeps more supply in the domestic market, suppressing local food prices. The retenciones are deeply unpopular among the crop producers and landowners, and Milei campaigned on eliminating them. He has largely kept them, because he needs the revenue to maintain the fiscal surplus that is the centerpiece of his program.
But I think there’s a deeper cultural dynamic that I’m not sure Thiel understands. Argentine youth aspire much more towards la dolce vita than towards Weber’s protestant work ethic. They essentially want their country to be like Spain or Italy, with a chill work-life balance, high leisure and consumption, underwritten by a generous welfare state, even if that model is becoming fiscally and demographically unsustainable in Europe. I think it’s a completely reasonable and in many ways admirable goal, but companies like Paypal, Palantir, and Facebook did not come out of Spain or Italy.
Among my Argentine peers, I hardly meet anyone who aspires to move to the United States. When I tell friends that the American economy has been growing at twice the rate of Europe in recent years, I am met with genuine disbelief. I think Thiel may have been captivated by a small teleological elite in Milei’s inner circle who do not necessarily represent the country they govern. The average Argentine who voted for Milei did not vote for Austrian economics or for a libertarian revolution. They voted out of exhaustion with Peronism, as many of Milei’s supporters were former Peronists themselves, much as many Trump supporters in the American Rust Belt were former Obama voters.
Argentina’s genuine case for Thiel rests on things that have nothing to do with Milei: a younger demographic than Europe, world-class human capital, abundant lithium and rare earths, and geographic isolation from great power conflict. He may be right for entirely the wrong reasons, on a longer timeline than he expects, through considerably more turbulence than the current narrative suggests. Argentina’s laid-back mentality is precisely what makes it exciting to foreigners. But as a project for civilizational renewal? Unless you’re talking about surviving a nuclear war, absolutely not.
I’m an Argentine-American master’s student in international relations at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella…
Best,
Joshua Raoul Neuman
Tyler and Alex Speak to OpenAI
We were honored to speak to OpenAI about the economics of AI. Lots of good material here. Self-recommending.
Western hemisphere fact of the day
Overall, the Western Hemisphere now produces more oil than the Middle East did before the crisis. Canada is the world’s fourth-largest oil producer. Brazil produces four times as much oil as Venezuela; and in Guyana, where production began only seven years ago, output almost equals Venezuela’s. In Argentina’s Vaca Muerta region, shale oil production has grown sixfold since 2020. The current disruption will propel more oil and gas investment in the Western Hemisphere and Africa.
Here is more from Daniel Yergin in the WSJ.
CA Logic
In California a 17 year-old can drive a car but can’t ride alone in an Uber or a Waymo.
I long for the days when you could put a kid in the post. We have weakened as a civilization.
Should we recriminalize marijuana?
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column. Here is one excerpt:
The present and also future of mankind is a world where reasonably high levels of self-discipline are needed to do well. The journalist Daniel Akst pointed this out in his 2011 book Temptation: Finding Self-Control in an Age of Excess, and we are now living it full force.
I would rather cope with that world than face the full nanny state, backed by modern, AI-intensified surveillance techniques to boot. Concentrating more power in political authorities hardly solves the basic problem. If marijuana and sports gambling can manipulate weak individuals, so can unscrupulous political leaders. A greater realization of individual weakness does not translate into a case for more government action; if anything, it suggests the opposite. Better to allow our social problems to fester in a more decentralized fashion, rather than reinforce our social pathologies through a manipulative and dysfunctional leader at the very top.
In the longer term, we may need to look to medications, such as GLP-1 drugs and their offshoots, which seem to curb some forms of addictive behavior beyond the appetite for food. Alternatively, some individuals may choose self-surveillance, with self-imposed penalties for bad or addictive behavior. Perhaps your AI, or a hired third party, docks your bank account every time you puff on a joint. I am not convinced such services ever will become popular, but that should be taken seriously as an indicator of what people really want to do. We can at least give them better options for self-constraint. If they rarely choose such options, then perhaps for many of those people, marijuana consumption is not a matter of weakness but a very well-established preference, whether we like it or not…
In short, it is time to realize that paternalism is far less workable than in times past. Our government does not have the credibility, the control over information, or the control over our lives to pull it off.
I do understand that is in some significant ways bad news, as voluntary choice is overwhelming some of us with bad outcomes.
My response is to start by accepting some steps backward, holding paternalist tyranny at bay, and hoping some longer-run cultural and technological adjustments will make this all more workable.
If you have a better solution, I would love to hear it.
Recommended.
The US Exports Intelligence
Most Americans work in the service sector so it’s not surprising that most export-related jobs are in the service sector (The U.S. exports about $2.2 trillion of goods and $1.2 trillion of services, but services are more labor intensive than manufacturing so they support more export jobs per dollar.)
Richard Baldwin writes:
In 2022, US service exports supported 8.9 million American jobs.
US manufacturing exports supported 2.2 million.
That’s four-to-one in favour of services. Yet in the national narrative, ‘export jobs’ almost always means things done in steel mills and factories.
…When a household in Germany pays for Netflix, that is an American export. When a Brazilian retailer buys Microsoft cloud capacity, that is an American export. When JPMorgan structures a financial deal in London, or an American consulting firm advises a company in Singapore, those are American exports too.
None of these is shipped in a container. No customs official records them as they clear the customshouse. Yet they are exports since they earn foreign income for America just as surely as the ‘Boeings, Beans and Beef’ that President Trump sold on his recent China trip.
Need I remind you that when OpenAI sells intelligence to people abroad, that is a US export? N.B. this is the future.
World trade in goods expanded roughly five-fold between 1990 and 2020. Trade in digitally enabled services expanded more than eleven-fold over the same period. These are the modern services.
The trade debate is fixated on manufacturing—where America is doing fine—while largely ignoring services, where America is crushing. Increasingly, our most valuable exports travel not on container ships but at the speed of light over fiber.
UK facts of the day
At the peak, the year to March 2023, almost 1.5m immigrants came. The Office for National Statistics thinks that far fewer people left, so net migration amounted to 944,000.
…Net migration to Britain last year amounted to 171,000—the lowest level since 2012, if the pandemic years are excluded. The human haul will probably be even lower this year, largely because the number of economic migrants continues to fall fast…James Bowes of Warwick University thinks net migration might even turn negative in 2026…
The government’s attempt to filter for highly desirable immigrants is not working in practice. As expected, the number of visas given to care workers has plunged. But the number of visas given to IT professionals has also fallen, from about 28,000 in 2022 to 10,000 last year.
According to The Economist, most Britons still think immigration to the country is rising. And it seems economically productive immigrants are being restricted too?:
Regardless of whether he or she arrived with a work visa or by other means, the average India-born employee in Britain earns £32,400 a year, whereas the average Nigeria-born employee earns £34,000. British-born people lag behind both, with average earnings of £30,900…
The Migration Observatory, a think-tank, has shown that people who arrive from outside the EU often earn little at first. Yet the wages of recent migrants have quickly exceeded the national average…
One of my fears is that, for informational and public choice reasons, it is unduly hard to crack down on unproductive immigrants only.