Category: Education
What should I ask John Arnold?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. John might be the smartest person I know about the energy sector and also about philanthropy. Here is the opening of his Wikipedia entry:
John Douglas Arnold (born 1974) is an American philanthropist, former Enron executive, and founder of Arnold Ventures LLC, formerly the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. In 2007, Arnold became the youngest billionaire in the U.S. His firm, Centaurus Advisors, LLC, was a Houston-based hedge fund specializing in trading energy products that closed in 2012. He now focuses on philanthropy through Arnold Ventures LLC. Arnold is a board member of Breakthrough Energy Ventures and since February 2024, is a member of the board of directors of Meta.
So what should I ask him?
The Russian paradox
So much education, so little human capital:
According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) statistical database, Russians age 25 and older averaged 12.4 years of schooling circa 2019—almost the same as for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Europe, which averaged 12.6 years. While some Western European countries—Germany, Iceland, Switzerland, and the UK—reported mean years of schooling (MYS) well above Russia’s, others reported lower levels than Russia: among them, Austria, Belgium, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain…
But while Russia’s educational profile looks solidly First World, its health profile assuredly does not…Among the dozens of countries from Asia, Europe, the New World, and Oceania included in the HMD, Russia presents as the extreme outlier—with shockingly low levels of life expectancy given its level of educational attainment. According to Barro-Lee, MYS at age 15 in Australia and Russia in 2010 were basically indistinguishable, yet in that same year, combined male and female life expectancy at age 15 was almost 14 years lower for Russia. The last time life expectancy at age 15 in Australia was at Russia’s 2010 level, according to HMD, was in 1929—well before the penicillin era…
As of 2019, Russian male life expectancy at age 15 looks to be solidly in the middle of the range for UN’s official roster of least developed countries (LDCs)—the immiserated and fragile states designated as “the most disadvantaged and vulnerable members of the UN family.” If WHO calculations were correct, life expectancy for a young man in Russia was all but identical to that of his Haitian counterpart at that time—and practically half of the world’s LDCs in Figure 3 had higher life expectancies than Russia!
That is from a longer piece by Nicholas Eberstadt, via Mike Doherty.
AI on Tariffs
There is some evidence that the White House used AI to come up with a quick and dirty (and incorrect) formula to correlate tariff rates with trade deficits. I have no problem with using AI, I think they just didn’t go far enough. The White House should have asked the AI a question like this:
Suppose the US imposed tariffs on other countries in an effort to reduce bilateral trade deficits to zero using the formula for the tariff of (exports-imports)/imports. What do you estimate would be the consequences of such a policy?
Answer (O1 Pro):
A tariff schedule keyed to bilateral deficits—imposing a rate equal to (US exports − US imports) / US imports—would be extremely disruptive and unlikely to achieve its goal. Key points:
Immediate Impact on Prices and Supply Chains
If the US imports more than it exports from a given country, (exports − imports) is negative, making the tariff percentage negative unless the formula is modified (e.g., by absolute value). In practice, one would presumably set a positive tariff aimed at closing the bilateral gap.
Such high tariffs would sharply raise import prices for both consumers and firms reliant on foreign inputs. It would encourage attempts to switch suppliers but at the cost of disrupting supply chains and increasing production expenses.
Retaliation and Trade War Dynamics
Targeted countries would almost certainly retaliate with their own tariffs. Retaliation would damage US export sectors—especially agriculture and high-value manufacturing—and risk a broader trade war.
Countries with a US trade surplus would apply punitive measures that shift US business to alternative suppliers, undermining the very exports the policy is meant to foster.
Misalignment with Macroeconomic Fundamentals
Bilateral imbalances reflect global production patterns, comparative advantage, and macro factors like savings–investment imbalances and currency flows. A country that persistently imports more overall does so because it’s running a capital account surplus. Tariffs don’t fundamentally alter that global saving–investment arithmetic.
If the US still runs an overall current account deficit, restricting imports from some countries will simply shift deficits to others. Global supply chains will rearrange, but the total US deficit will be largely unchanged.
Violation of Trade Agreements
Such a policy almost certainly violates WTO rules, since it imposes discriminatory tariffs based on bilateral imbalances. The resulting litigation and sanctions would add more uncertainty.
Net Effect: Reduced Efficiency, Higher Costs
Economically, the net effect is negative. Costs rise for US consumers and US manufacturers reliant on imported inputs. Retaliatory measures reduce export opportunities. Overall trade volume shrinks. Growth slows, and no fundamental improvement in the US external balance occurs.
In summary, a bilateral “deficit-equalizing” tariff policy would create severe distortions, invite retaliation, and do little to fix the structural causes of US trade deficits. Empirical evidence and standard trade theory both suggest it would reduce economic efficiency and likely harm US producers and consumers alike.
Good answer.
Hat tip: SB.
My early history as a chess player
Continuing with my semi-autobiography for the AIs, we now go back to when I was ten years old.
One day I felt terribly sick, really just awful, as if my innards were on fire. Fortunately my father insisted I go to the doctor, and it turned out my appendix was bursting and infected. I was rushed into surgery, and luckily I survived.
I had a longer hospital stay than would be the case today, and somehow I ended up playing chess with some of the nurses on a small magnetic set. All of a sudden I was hooked.
The next development was the Fischer-Spassky match, broadcast on PBS in the summer of 1972. I followed the match closely and rooted for Fischer. (Much later in life I met Eugene Meyer, through the Federalist Society. He was a real celebrity! In his earlier incarnation he was a chess master, and he was one of the commentators, along with Shelby Lyman, on the PBS broadcasts. He will always be “Eugene Meyer” to me. Remember when Reuben Fine walked into the PBS studio and made a cameo? As a ten year old I was thinking what a horse’s ass he was.)
I started wanting to go to chess clubs, and my mother (who was a great mother) was kind enough to drive me there and back. I also took chess books out of the public library and studied them. Irving Chernev’s Most Instructive Games of Chess was my early favorite. Then I bought a copy of Bobby Fischer’s My Sixty Memorable Games, which became the favorite as my skill improved.
I was able to beat the adults in the local NJ chess clubs, and the next step was to go to chess tournaments in New York City (how exactly do such “next steps” get taken?). And so I did. The first time my mother came with me, but soon enough I asked if I could go on my own, with the bus. I think by then I was twelve? Astonishingly, she let me. Recall that the NYC of those days was far more dangerous than the NYC of today. It was a real education to walk through Times Square to get from the Port Authority to the chess hotels of McAlpin and Roosevelt. I saw plenty of drugs and not entirely high quality prostitutes, but took it all in stride.
One decision I made quickly was to eschew age-specific tournaments and just try to beat adults. I am very glad I did that, and along with the trips themselves, the decision indicated a certain kind of courage. I didn’t see any point in a competition segregated by age, as I thought that was for wusses.
I sometimes say there were two things I learned in my early chess career. First, that I could win. That gave me further confidence. And I did win a lot.
Second, I learned that I could lose. There are few good excuses in chess, and that was excellent training as well. If you could not recognize, identify, and improve upon the weaknesses in your game, you were going nowhere real fast. Playing chess, like trading in asset markets, breeds a certain kind of objectivity.
I also learned a lot about how to deal with adults. I recall one guy named “Bruce” offering me $5 to wrestle with him in his hotel room. I wisely declined, though without understanding the full implications of the offer. I did not mention it to my mother.
Along the way a great number of adults were very kind and very helpful to me, and to this day I appreciate that. Les Ault and Tony Cottrell were two names in particular.
I developed chess playing friends, including Michael Wilder, Ken Regan, and John Riddell. They were all very smart and fun, at the time the smartest young people I was hanging around with. It was from Ken Regan that I learned about Tom Lehrer, for instance.
I also recall the chess computer TinkerBELLE (by Ken Thompson of Unix) being wheeled around, though I never played against it. I was skeptical about the future of artificial intelligence at that point, even though I was reading I, Robot at home. (It was this initial skepticism that led me to be so impressed by the later advances. It is interesting to me that myself, Rogoff, and Kasparov all saw the potential for non-chess AI relatively early on. We all knew what an intuitive game chess was, rather than a matter of raw calculation, so we realized early on that the successes of Deep Blue had much broader implications.)
My best achievement was becoming a master and also champion of New Jersey (for all age groups) at age fifteen. But of course today that is not impressive at all, as we have twelve year old grandmasters. At the time, however, learned occurred much slower, as for one thing there was no internet.
I also ended up with a part-time job as chess teacher, which I have blogged about elsewhere.
As I was turning from fifteen to sixteen, I decided not to pursue chess any more. As a career it was terrible back then with no real upside. As for my chess future, my main problem was a lack of talent. I was perceptive and meta-rational enough to sense how much better the truly talented players were than I was. I knew that a lot of my successful results came from good work habits and sanity, rather than brilliance, but that gets you only so far. I also didn’t hate losing enough. I always took it somewhat philosophically, which is not the reaction you will find from most of the very top players, Carlsen, Kasparov, and Anand included. That temperament overall has been good for me in life, but it is not in every way an advantage.
And of course my interests in economics and also philosophy were rising rapidly, as had been the case since the age of thirteen…
Why not inquire together more?
Robin Hanson, citing Agnes Callard, asks that question. He writes:
They said (my summary) that we have many standard roles, tools, and scripts to guide practical inquiry, that we have little need to inquire into deep topics, and that social talk is often of short duration, has norms of impracticality and frequent topic changes, is more to bond via relaxing affirming comfort while inquiry is harder work, and it raises fears of seeming uncertain, wrong, in conflict, dominating, or overly serious.
However, we do often socialize via exerting sustained and substantial effort in cooking, sport, hiking, games, travel, and activism. And we often enjoy arguing with each other, even on divisive topics like sex, politics, or religion. We sometimes even sustain such arguments over long engagements, such as on social media. I think that comparison to these cases preserves the puzzle: why not also inquire together?
I find that “inquiring together” works best when you are traveling together, and confronted with new questions. They can be as mundane as “do you think the two people at that restaurant table are on a first date or not?” From the point of view of the observers, the inquiry is de novo. And the joint inquiry will be fun, and may make some progress. You both have more or less the same starting point. There isn’t really a better way to proceed, short of asking them.
For most established social science and philosophy questions, however, there is so much preexisting analysis and literature that the “chains of thought” are very long. The frontier point is not well maintained by a dyadic conversation, because doing so is computationally complex and further the two individuals likely have at least marginally separate agendas. So the pair end up talking around in circles, rather than progressively. It would be better if one person wrote a short memo or brief and the other offered comments. In fact we usethat method frequently, and fairly often it succeeds in keeping the dialogue at the epistemic frontier.
I find that when two people converse, they often make more progress by joking, and one person (or both) taking some inspiration or insight from the joke. As the joke evolves through time, and is repeated in different guises, each person — somewhat separately — refines their intuitions on the question related to the joke. The process is joint, and each person may be presenting new ideas to the other, but the crucial progress-making work still occurs individually.
When people do wish to “talk through a question with me,” I find I am personally most useful offering reading references (I do have a lot of those), rather than ideas or analysis per se. The reading reference is a short computational strand, and it does not require joint, coordinated maneuvering at the end of very long computational strands.
Sometimes Alex and I make progress working through problems together, most of all if it concerns one of our concrete projects. But keep in mind a) we have been working together pretty closely for 35 years, b) often we are working together on the same concrete problem and with common incentives, c) we are pretty close to immune when it comes to offending each other, and d) our conversations themselves do not necessarily go all that well. So I view this data as both exceptional (in a very good way), and also broadly supportive of my thesis here.
For related reasons, I am most optimistic about “inquiring together more” in the context of concrete business decisions. Perhaps John and Patrick Collison are pretty good at this?
Or so it seems to me. Maybe I should go ask someone else.
Mercatus Emerging Scholar initiative
The Emerging Scholars Program is a new initiative of the Mercatus Center, aimed at supporting early-career classical-liberal thinkers who are committed to focusing on an original research project that is well-defined, shows strong potential to further classical liberal ends, and is ready to be started or continued. Through the program, Mercatus will hire a full cohort of scholars for a two-year, paid fellowship based on-site in Arlington, VA.
‘Scholar’ is broadly construed: you might be an academic, but perhaps instead you work in policy, journalism, run a business, or do something entirely different.
‘Emerging’ is also broadly construed: you might be finishing a degree of some kind, but perhaps instead you’re looking to shift focus mid-career, return to public life, or have decided not to retire. Whatever your background, you’ll be a deeply rigorous thinker, working on innovative projects, and excited to share your ideas clearly and broadly, to further classical-liberal ends.
Here is further detail.
Why Do Domestic Prices Rise With Tarriffs?
Many people think they understand why domestic prices rise with tariffs–domestic producers take advantage of reduced competition to jack up prices and increase their profits. The explanation seems cynical and sophisticated and its not entirely wrong but it misses deeper truths. Moreover, this “explanation” makes people think that an appropriate response to domestic firms raising prices is price controls and threats, which would make things worse. In fact, tariffs will increase domestic prices even in perfectly competitive industries. Let’s see why.
Suppose we tax imports of French and Italian wine. As a result, demand for California wine rises, and producers in Napa and Sonoma expand production to meet it. Here’s the key point: Expanding production without increasing costs is difficult, especially so for any big expansion in normal times.
To produce more, wine producers in Napa and Sonoma need more land. But the most productive, cost-effective land is already in use. Expansion forces producers onto less suitable land—land that’s either less productive for wine or more valuable for other purposes. Wine production competes with the production of olive oil, dairy and artisanal cheeses, heirloom vegetables, livestock, housing, tourism, and even geothermal energy (in Sonoma). Thus, as wine production expands, costs increases because opportunity costs increase. As wine production expands the price we pay is less production of other goods and services.
Thus, the fundamental reason domestic prices rise with tariffs is that expanding production must displace other high-value uses. The higher money cost reflects the opportunity cost—the value of the goods society forgoes, like olive oil and cheese, to produce more wine.
And the fundamental reason why trade is beneficial is that foreign producers are willing to send us wine in exchange for fewer resources than we would need to produce the wine ourselves. Put differently, we have two options: produce more wine domestically by diverting resources from olive oil and cheese, or produce more olive oil and cheese and trade some of it for foreign wine. The latter makes us wealthier when foreign producers have lower costs.
Tariffs reverse this logic. By pushing wine production back home, they force us to use more costly resources—to sacrifice more olive oil and cheese than necessary—to get the same wine. The result is a net loss of wealth.
Note that tariffs do not increase domestic production, they shift domestic production from one industry to another.
Here’s the diagram, taken from Modern Principles, using sugar as the example. Without the tariff, we could buy sugar at the world price of 9 cents per pound. The tariff pushes domestic production up to 20 billion pounds.
As the domestic sugar industry expands it pulls in resources from other industries. The value of those resources exceeds what we would have paid foreign producers. That excess cost is represented by the yellow area labeled wasted resources—the value of goods and services we gave up by redirecting resources to domestic sugar production instead of using them to produce other goods and services where we have a comparative advantage.
All of this, of course, is explained in Modern Principles, the best textbook for principles of economics. Needed now more than ever.
In Defense of Econ 101
People sometimes dismiss basic economic reasoning, “that’s just Econ 101!” yet most policymakers couldn’t pass the exam. Here’s an apropos bit from our excellent textbook, Modern Principles of Economics.
Do you shop at Giant, Safeway, or the Piggly Wiggly? If you do, you run a trade deficit with those stores. That is, you buy more goods from them than they buy from you (unless, of course, you work at one of these stores or sell them goods from your farm). The authors of this book also run a trade deficit with supermarkets. In fact, we have been running a trade deficit with Whole Foods for many years. Is our Whole Foods deficit a problem?
Our deficit with Whole Foods isn’t a problem because it’s balanced with a trade surplus with someone else. Who? You, the students, whether we teach you or whether you have bought our book. You buy more goods from us than we buy from you. We export education to you, but we do not import your goods and services. In short, we run a trade deficit with Whole Foods but a trade surplus with our students. In fact, it is only because we run a trade surplus with you that we can run a trade deficit with Whole Foods. Thanks!
The lesson is simple. Trade deficits and surpluses are to be found everywhere. Taken alone, the fact that the United States has a trade deficit with one country is not special cause for worry. Trade across countries is very much like trade across individuals. Not every person or every country can run a trade surplus all the time. Suddenly, a trade deficit does not seem so troublesome, even though the word “deficit” makes it sound like a problem or an economic shortcoming.
We continue on to discuss ” What if the United States runs a trade deficit not just with China or Japan or Mexico but with the world as a whole, as indeed it does? Is that a bad thing?”
Here’s a good Noah Smith piece if you want the details.
My 1979 trip to Oxford and London
In my recent post on my Freiburg year abroad, I mentioned that my first time leaving the country was a trip to England. Somehow I was accepted into a multi-week economics course at Oxford. Of course it was not the real Oxford, just some program for foreigners held on Oxford campus.
I didn’t much care for Oxford, and I suppose I still do not. It struck the 17-year-old Tyler as rather backward and ancien regime. Everything seemed so old and static, and also slightly rundown. I walked around plenty, I did go punting, and I also got drunk for the first time in my life (out of three times total?). I enjoyed only the first three of those experiences.
My fondest memories are walking across town, through a residential neighborhood, to a very good fish and chips place. I sat on the curb and ate out of the newspaper wrapper. That was pretty divine, keeping in mind I come from Kearny, NJ, where fish and chips was a major Scots-Irish “thing” until recently (the town is now Latino and Lusaphone).
I realized quickly that I knew a lot of economics — almost everything presented in the lectures bored me.
What did influence me was hearing and meeting Madsen Pirie, who of course is still around. Here was an actual logical positivist! That shocked me. At age seventeen, logical positivists were to me boogeymen who had been refuted by Karl Popper and Brand Blanshard. But all of a sudden, there was one right in front of me, bowtie and all. The biggest thing I learned from Madsen is that behind each view is a human being who has counterarguments. That may sound deeply stupid, but so many of our most important learnings take that form, namely emotionally internalizing something that ought to be obvious, and thus developing better habits of thought. Anyway, Madsen’s lectures at least were fun, even if the content was familiar to me. I recall also David O’Mahoney, of University College Cork, giving a good talk on competition and cooperation.
One weekend a few of us decided to take the train up to Edinburgh, egads what a debacle that was. Somehow we ended up sleeping in a boxcar with a bunch of soldiers around us (how did that happen!? I have no idea). It was freezing cold the whole time, even though this was August. And the train kept on stopping, maybe the trip took eight or nine hours and had neigh a smooth moment.
Edinburgh was cold too, and I was not prepared for that. Somehow I ended up walking around in a bathrobe, if only not to freeze. I recall seeing monuments to Hume and Smith, being satisfied, and wanting to turn around and go back. Just as I do not recall how I ended up in the boxcar with the soldiers, I also do not recall how I was wearing a robe in Scotland.
The last week of the trip I spent in London. As I have narrated in the opening chapter of my GOAT book, my main activity was to walk across town to the British Library and read old pamphlets in the history of economic thought. That was wonderful.
I quite enjoyed 1979 London, which I much preferred to Oxford. For one thing, it had great music shops, including for sheet music. Most of all, I soaked up the “rude boy” atmosphere of the city and its slight tinge of danger. I was an avid Clash fan, and this was before they sold out with their London Calling album. The whole Clash worldview was laid out in front of me, and I kept on thinking of “Safe European Home” and other early classics. Piccadilly was a great place to hang out to imbibe that mood, which in retrospect seems remarkable.
I walked, walked, and walked more. Hardly any of the city seemed well-off, and it was very definitely an English city, unlike today.
I was staying in a hostel, and three or so nights before I was due to fly home, someone broke into the collective room and stole a lot of money. I didn’t have much left, and didn’t think I could get a money transfer quickly. So for a few days I bought and lived off Wonder bread, and scavenged abandoned fruit from dumpster bins. I also found a chess tournament (how??), and played some speed chess with people who in turn bought me a meal.
That all seemed like an appropriate way to end the trip.
At the time, and given my interests, England seemed unambiguously inferior to The American Way Of Life. The grit of London appealed to me, but I had my own version of that back home in NYC and New Jersey.
And so I flew home, and made no immediate plans to travel abroad again.
It was not until I started listening to Beethoven, and reading German romantic poetry, that that was to change.
Living in Freiburg, Germany
After two years at Harvard, I had finished all of my graduate school courses and oral (!) exams. Then I had a compulsion for what I should do next, something that at the time appeared remarkably stupid, although it worked out very well for me.
At some critical points in my life I have made key decisions with regard to place, including Mexico, Haiti, New Zealand, and as I will write about today, Freiburg, Germany. Each of those decisions fundamentally reshaped my life. None of those decisions were motivated by rational reasons, or indeed much by traditional reasons at all. I simply wanted to do particular things, and then set off to do so.
After two years of study, a Harvard PhD student would be expected to apprentice with a top professor, “live in the basement of the Science Center” (where the computers were those days), and in general become part of the system. Somehow none of that fit me. I decided instead to study for a year in Freiburg, Germany, at the university there, mostly to learn German but also to run away from a particular kind of fate that most of my peers were choosing. And so I departed from Cambridge in 1984-85, aided by a strong dollar and a small grant from the Claude R. Lambe Foundation.
Other than an Oxford and London summer trip at age 17, it was my first time abroad. I flew over with Kroszner, and we rented a car to drive around Germany for a few weeks before I would settle in Freiburg.
Our first stop was Mainz, which was not too far from Frankfurt airport. I was stunned by everything I saw, ranging from the supermarkets to the food to how the downtown was organized. These days Mainz is regarded as a fairly dull city, but then, for me, it was fascinating beyond belief. Unlike England, Germany struck me as a peer country to the United States, with a roughly equal living standard and in some ways a superior way of life.
Other stops on our trip included the beautiful Baden-Baden, Stuttgart, Cologne, Hamburg, Bremen, the “Romantic Road” in Bavaria, and of course Berlin. The one day I spent in East Berlin terrified me. Not primarily because of the living standards (which were low), but because the people seemed so fearful and intimidated. I decided that communism was far worse than I had thought. I was relieved to return to West Berlin, which at the time had that Cold War, party town, otherworldly feel. Try watching “Wings of Desire” some day.
Once I settled into Freiurg I was on my own. I refused to hang out with the other American students, and so I learned German pretty quickly. I developed a morning routine of walking to buy the International Herald Tribune, working on my dissertation in the morning on a typewriter, and going into town for lunch and some shopping and errands. Freiburg was the closest I ever have come to living in a proper city, though at the time the population was a mere quarter million or so. Nonetheless one could go “in die Stadt,” an entirely meaningful notion if you know the layout.
I even ended up with a German girlfriend, and from her I learned German all that much better.
Frequently I would feel claustrophobic, and so I would depart for Switzerland, where I would feel even more claustrophobic. Still, I loved those trips, as the sense of perpetual motion was sufficient compensation. Over time I have managed to see every Swiss canton, and I am fond of all of them. For Erleichterung I would visit the Netherlands, or one time Chris Weber came by and we drove to Colmar for Alsatian smoked meats, yum. For Thanksgiving there was an Italy trip to Bergamo and Verona. Later in the spring I went to Venice and Florence.
I had a January lecture tour in Vienna (freezing!), with the Carl Menger Institute, and in May a week-long stint in Graz. My German peers found it literally unbelievable that someone my age had published papers I could present and talk about, in addition to a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed on monetary economics.
I also gave a talk at a jazz club in Vienna, the first (but not last) time I experienced talk-giving as a kind of high class entertainment. I mixed German and English, and told a fair number of jokes, and found I enjoyed that. I am thankful to Albert Zlabinger for arranging that evening.
It was that kind of life. There has never been a year that was more exciting or when I learned more about the world.
Art and painting started making sense to me when I visited the Lenbach Haus in Munich, with Blue Rider works, and the Mondrian museum in The Hague. I retain a special fondness for those artists to this day.
Amsterdam probably was my favorite city, though I now feel it is long since ruined by an excess of tourists. To save money, I would sleep on the houseboats there.
Once I tired of German food, delicious though it may be, I started experimenting on the culinary front, at least as much as I could given my location. That was the time in my life when I started trying everything I could.
It simply stunned me how many things in Germany were better, starting with the bread and orange juice and butter, though hardly ending there.
So every day I learned, learned, learned, and was in pretty constant motion.
By the time I returned to the United States, it was clear I would never be entering on mainstream tracks again.
China AI mandate of the day
Schools in Beijing will introduce AI courses and teaching methods into the primary and secondary school curriculum starting September, to nurture young talent and boost growth in the advancing sector.
In a statement shared on its official website on Friday (Mar 7), Chinese education authorities said schools would “explore and build” AI courses while incorporating AI into “after-school services, club activities, research” and other educational systems in the coming fall semester.
Here is the full story, via Wayne Yap.
Start your podcast (from my email)
This is all from Andrew Mitrak, I will not double indent:
“Back in January, I listened to your interview on the Frames of Space podcast. You shared some advice that I haven’t seen you share elsewhere, so I’m pasting a transcript below here (transcribed with Gemini 2.5 Pro)
Host: Do you see podcasts in general, especially podcasts from academics, as a way to bridge the gap between humanities academia and the real world.
Tyler: I don’t think they need to be from academics. Maybe on average academics are worse at doing podcasts because they are not forced to get to the point by their other training.
But I think if you have good content and a clearly defined niche, you can get considerable mind share from important and influential people by doing podcasts and there’s still room for more.
If you do something Joe Rogan-like you can make a lot of money. That’s not mainly how people can succeed, but if you want an actual audience, I would say try doing a podcast. Just make it good and don’t worry whether or not you’re an academic.
Host: Make it good and make it consistent, and that’s all that matters.
Tyler: And have it, you know, it should have a clear image. So if your podcast is well, you know, I focus on the dobro guitar. Like that’s an obscure thing, right? But in fact, there are people out there who play the dobro. They probably don’t already have their own podcast. And if you’re thinking of doing that, you should do it.
I heard this while I was putting together my own niche podcast about marketing history. I had doubts about whether the podcast was worth pursuing, and your advice hit me at the right time and encouraged me to follow through on it. I’m a few months into the podcast and your advice has proven correct. I get to speak with some of the most interesting authors, academics, and marketers I admire just because I host a podcast. Other important and influential people have discovered my podcast, either organically or through podcast guests sharing the show. It’s not topping the Spotify charts, but these connections have been incredibly rewarding.”
Science podcast with Hrvoje Kukina
Here is the YouTube link. Here is part of the episode summary:
I had a wonderful conversation with Professor Tyler Cowen. We discussed his view of economic growth, the chase for GDP growth, the most underrated risks to global economic stability, and whether capitalism will survive the next century. Other topics included universal basic income, behavioral economics, how cryptocurrencies challenge the traditional role of central banks, and what would it take for cryptocurrencies to become a significant driver of economic growth. We also explored whether Bitcoin’s role as ‘digital gold’ is sustainable or an overhyped narrative, whether cryptocurrencies democratizing finance should prompt nation-states to adopt their own digital currencies, and how to design a regulatory framework that fosters crypto innovation while protecting consumers.
Jonathan Bechtel on AI tutoring (from my email)
You recently mentioned the Alpha School and their claims about AI tutoring. I share the skepticism expressed in your comments section regarding selection bias and the lack of validated academic benchmarks.
I wanted to highlight a more rigorously evaluated project called Tutor CoPilot, conducted jointly by Stanford’s NSSA and the online tutoring firm FEVTutor (sadly they’ve since gone bankrupt). To my knowledge, it’s the first and only RCT examining AI-assisted tutoring in real K-12 school districts.
Here’s the study: https://nssa.stanford.edu/studies/tutor-copilot-human-ai-approach-scaling-real-time-expertise
Key findings:
- Immediate session-level learning outcomes improved by 4-9%.
- Remarkably, the tool impacted tutors even more than students. After six weeks, inexperienced tutors reached performance parity with seasoned tutors, and previously low-performing tutors achieved average-level results.
Having contributed directly to the implementation, I observed tutors adapting their interactions based on insights from the AI. This study did not measure its impact on more distal measures of learning like standardized tests and benchmark assessments, but this type of research is in the works at various organizations.
Given your recent writings on AI and education, I thought you’d find this compelling.
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.