Category: Law
Should You Resign?
At least six prosecutors resigned in early January over DOJ pressure to investigate the widow of Renee Good (killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross) instead of the agent himself. They cited political interference, exclusion of state police, and diversion of resources from priority fraud cases. Similarly, an FBI agent was ordered to stand down from investigating the killing of Good. She resigned. The killing of Alex Pretti and what looks to be an attempted federal coverup will likely lead to more resignations. Is resignation the right choice? I tweeted:
I appreciate the integrity, but every principled resignation is an adverse selection.
In other words, when the good leave and the bad don’t, the institution rots.
Resignation can be useful as a signal–this person is giving up a lot so the issue must be important. Resignations can also create common knowledge–now everyone knows that everyone knows. The canonical example is Attorney General Elliot Richardson resigning rather than carrying out Nixon’s order to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. At that time, a resignation was like lighting the beacon. But today, who is there to be called?
The best case for not resigning is that you retain voice—the ability to slow, document, escalate, and resist within lawful channels. In the U.S. system that can mean forcing written directives, triggering inspector-general review, escalating through professional responsibility channels, and building coalitions that outlast transient political appointees. Staying can matter.
But staying is corrupting. People are prepared to say no to one big betrayal, but a steady drip of small compromises depreciates the will: you attend the meetings, sign the forms, stay silent when you should speak. Over time the line moves, and what once felt intolerable starts to feel normal, categories blur. People who on day one would never have agreed to X end up doing X after a chain of small concessions. You may think you’re using the institution, but institutions are very good at using you. Banality deadens evil.
Resignation keeps your hands and conscience clean. That’s good for you but what about society? Utilitarians sometimes call the demand for clean hands a form of moral self-indulgence. A privileging of your own purity over outcomes. Bernard Williams’s reply is that good people are not just sterile utility-accountants, they have deep moral commitments and sometimes resignation is what fidelity to those commitments requires.
So what’s the right move? I see four considerations:
- Complicity: Are you being ordered to do wrong, or, usually the lesser crime, of not doing right?
- Voice: If you stay can you exercise voice? What’s your concrete theory of change—what can you actually block, document, or escalate?
- Timing: Is reversal possible soon or is this structural capture? Are you the remnant?
- Self-discipline: Will you name the bright lines now and keep them, or will “just this once” become the job?
I have not been put in a position to make such a choice but from a social point of view, my judgment is that at the current time, voice is needed and more effective than exit.
Hat tip: Jim Ward.
On immigration warrants (from the comments)
As a matter of law ( 8 U.S.C. § 1357) warrants are not strictly required for immigration enforcement.
That may be a bad law – then run folks for the legislature to change it.
That may be unconsitutional law – then sue in court and let the lawyers hash it out.
That may be immoral law and we should support jury nulification.
But I see very little to be gained by demanding the duly designated law enforcement officers be held to some code of conduct defined by the PR concerns.
I think the most unconscionable thing is that we have given officers legal remit to “interrogate any alien or person believed to be an alien”, “to arrest any alien in the United States, if he has reason to believe that the alien so arrested is in the United States in violation of any such law or regulation and is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained for his arrest”, “within a reasonable distance from any external boundary of the United States, to board and search for aliens any vessel …, railway car, aircraft, conveyance, or vehicle” explicitly without a warrant and then have neither had the populace buy in nor curtailed the law.
Either rein in the legal remit or instruct the populace what is on the books. As is, we get the worst of both worlds.
The actual laws on the books for immigration are simply not what folks expect. And if the locals are unwilling to help enforce stuff (as is their right as I understand federalism), this only gets more troublesome.
I wish we could have some sort of compromise where the locals will make enforcing immigration law viable and we could remove some of the extraordinairy powers currently on the books. And more than anything I wish somebody, anybody would go after the employers. Jail the folks violating labor laws knowing that they create all manner of horrible situations.
And again, you want full Libertarian open borders? Then make changes to the laws via democracy. But for right now we are unwilling to touch the folks who most benefit from illegal immigrant labor, expect the feds to wisely use massive powers, and are unwilling to face these realities in popular opinion.
That is from Sure. I would very much favor extending civil liberties in these directions, though that does not include going after the employers.
A more intelligent comment than most of the emotional reactions we are seeing
What portion of Republicans think the Trump admin/ICE killing a few hundred people, roughing up a few thousand more, and violating all kinds of civil liberties is an acceptable price to pay for making net migration go deeply negative?
The answer to that tells you when/how this ends.
If it’s a small minority (unlikely), there’s going to be internal pushback that brings the worst excesses under control.
If it’s around half (that’s my guess), you’ll get paralysis but not a doubling down. There will be a lot of what-about-isms and excuse-making and reflexive defending of co-partisans and blaming Democrats/protestors, but it’s basically more of this.
But if it’s a large majority (and it might be), this only gets worse from here. Because it means they don’t actually see what’s going on as unacceptable and in fact find it preferable to not achieving those deeply net-negative immigration goals.
That is from Democrat Gary Winslett. And I agree with his guess for the middle scenario.
More generally, do not let your emotions make you into a counterproductive political force. My personal belief is that recent levels of illegal immigration have become a political problem for the United States (i.e., most voters do not want it, and thus we must do something to stop democracy from being ruined), but it is not a very large practical problem, apart from some number of border and near-border towns. It still yields net gains. So I very much dislike recent ICE activities. But you need to think through the political equilibrium. Making the issue more salient through your emotions and self-righteousness might be turning you into a tool of the forces you dislike. Are you so sure that having people discuss “immigration” more will turn in your favor, when polls indicate that people prefer Republican to Democratic approaches on the issue? “Visceral” discussions about emotionally charged shootings might be worse yet. While Americans do not like recent ICE activities, they still favor rigorous border enforcement and many of them will vote accordingly.
Overall, I want immigration discussions to be less emotional, not more emotional, and perhaps that is the relevant choice variable here.
So often the MAGA strategy is to make an issue more salient, thus winning over time, by provoking opponents into public displays of emotion. Or the strategy is simply to make Trump himself more salient? Are you smart enough to avoid that, and also to keep your own analytical faculties intact? Obviously similar remarks apply to many issues of foreign policy as well, Canada and Denmark are you listening?
The Tyranny of the Complainers II
The Los Angeles City Council recently voted to increase the fee to file an objection to new housing. The fee for an “aggrieved person” to file an objection to development is currently $178 and will rise to $229. Good news, right? But here’s the rest of the story: it costs the city about $22,000 to investigate and process each objection. This means objections are subsidized by roughly $21,800 per case—a subsidy rate of nearly 99%.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the equation:
While fees will remain relatively low for housing project opponents, developers will have to pay $22,453 to appeal projects that previously had been denied.
In other words, objecting to new housing is massively subsidized, while appeals to build new housing are charged at full cost—more than 100 times higher than aggrieved complainer fees. This appears to violate the department’s own guidelines, which state:
When a service or activity benefits the public at large, there is generally little to no recommended fee amount. Conversely, when a service or activity wholly benefits an individual or entity, the cost recovery is generally closer or equal to 100 percent.
Expanding housing supply benefits the public at large, while objections typically serve narrow private interests. Thus, by the department’s own logic, it’s the developers who should be given low fees not the complainers.
Addendum: See also my previous post The Tyranny of the Complainers.
Greenland fact of the day
Greenland held a referendum on 23 February 1982 and voted to leave the European Communities / European Economic Community (EEC) (about 52–53% for leaving).
GPT link. They left in 1985.
I write this not to justify current American policy, which I consider a major mistake with extremely poor execution. Rather the point is that we are pushing the Greenlanders into the arms of the Danes, when over some longer haul it could be very different.
The FT offers many more interesting facts about Greenland, including its growing dependence on Asian foreign labor.
Why are groceries so expensive in NYC?
The lowest-hanging fruit is to simply legalize selling groceries in more of the city. The most egregious planning barrier is that grocery stores over 10,000 square feet are not generally allowed as-of-right in so-called “M” districts, which are the easiest places to find sites large enough to accommodate the large stores that national grocers are used to. Many of these districts are mapped in places that are not what people have in mind when they think “industrial” — mixed-use neighborhoods with lots of housing like stretches of Williamsburg’s Bedford Avenue and almost all of Gowanus, even post-rezoning, are in fact mapped as industrial districts.
To open a full-sized grocery store in these areas, a developer must seek a “special permit,” which requires the full City Council to get together and vote for an exception to the rules. This is a long, uncertain process, and has in the past even been an invitation to corruption.
Most famously, the City Council uses this power to keep out Walmart at the behest of unions and community groups. Thwarted in its plans to open a store in East New York — a low-income Brooklyn neighborhood that could desperately use more grocery options — the nation’s largest grocer instead serves New Yorkers with a store just beyond the Queens/Nassau line in Valley Stream, rumored to be the busiest Walmart in the country. New Yorkers with a car and the willingness to schlep beyond city limits — or pay the Instacart premium — get access to cheaper groceries; the rest get locked out.
When politicians are willing to approve a grocery store, the price can be high.
That is by Stephen Smith, via Josh Barro.
Michelle Tandler on NYC rent control
This is what I’m seeing: + 2.4 million rent-controlled apartments in a city with a massive housing shortage and 1.4% vacancy rate.
+ A huge % of these tenants are wealthy, white boomers using the units as pieds-a-terres while they spend their weekends and summers elsewhere.
+ Meanwhile, the government is using rent control to purposely drive down the value of multifamily housing, so that it can be purchased in a fire sale by the government.
+ The small-time landlords with big rent rolls of “stabilized” units are going under. Their portfolios end up in the arms of PE and foreign money (how are Progressives okay with this?) The banks will get hit by this too.
+ Because there is such a reduction in supply (~40% of units are price-controlled), leftover supply is ~33% more expensive + Because NYC gov is not friendly towards landlords, there is a lack of development –> even less supply
+ Rich and homeowners overwhelmingly support these laws b/c it drives up the value of their condos & co-ops (less supply –> higher prices for condos)
+ Big PE companies like these policies b/c they can buy buildings in fire sales and wait for rent control reform (5-10 years out)
+ Meanwhile – ~2.4 million units are rotting and won’t be brought up to code as tenants leave b/c the numbers don’t pencil –> 50k “ghost apartments” padlocked off market now, maybe 100k soon
+ Gen Z and the working class continue to vote for these policies, hoping they will be among the lucky few to win the lottery ticket of a rent-controlled apartment
+ Meanwhile, boomers hang onto their units and pass them to their children, family members, etc. –> NYC’s housing stock is rotting slowly, going offline, and becoming more expensive
Here is the link. Thoughts to ponder, whether or not you believe in all of those steps. Here is some Maryland data, not sophisticated econometrics.
AI Physicians At Last
In 2004 (!) I wrote:
Many people complain that medicine is too impersonal. I think it is not impersonal enough. I have nothing against my physician (a local magazine says he is one of the best in the area) but I would prefer to be diagnosed by a computer. A typical physician spends most of the day playing twenty questions. Where does it hurt? Do you have a cough? How high is the patient’s blood pressure? But an expert system can play twenty questions better than most people. An expert system can use the best knowledge in the field, it can stay current with the journals, and it never forgets.
It took longer than it should have, but we are finally here. Today, most people already use AI to help diagnose and manage medical conditions, and now:
Utah is letting artificial intelligence — not a doctor — renew certain medical prescriptions. No human involved.
It’s a pilot program for routine renewals but a welcome start. The AMA, of course, is not pleased.
In a statement, Dr. John Whyte, CEO and executive vice president at the American Medical Association, said: “While AI has limitless opportunity to transform medicine for the better, without physician input it also poses serious risks to patients and physicians alike.”
One concern is misuse or abuse, including the possibility that people struggling with addiction could try to game automated systems to obtain drugs inappropriately. Another concern is missing subtle clinical red flags or drug interactions that a doctor would catch.
It’s amazing that anyone can say these things with a straight face. As far as I know, AI has never run a pill mill, unlike human physicians. And the AI
“missing subtle clinical red flags or drug interactions that a doctor would catch.” Is this a joke?
The downside of NAFTA?
We study how NAFTA changed the geography of violence in Mexico. We propose that this open border policy increased trafficking profits of Mexican cartels, resulting in violent competition among them. We test this hypothesis by comparing changes in drug-related homicides after NAFTA’s introduction in 1994 across municipalities with and without drug-trafficking routes. Routes are predicted least cost paths connecting municipalities with a recent history of detected drug trafficking with U.S. land ports of entry. On these routes, homicides increase by 2.1 per 100,000 inhabitants, which is equivalent to 26% of the pre-NAFTA mean. These results cannot be explained by changes in worker’s opportunity costs of using violence resulting from the trade shock.
That is from a new JDE paper by Eduardo Hidalgo, Erik Horning, and Pablo Selaya. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Chairman Powell’s Statement
Whether an independent Fed is desirable is beside the point. The core issue is lawfare: the strategic use of legal processes to intimidate, constrain, and punish institutional actors for political ends. Lawfare is the hallmark of a failing state because it erodes not just political independence, but the capacity for independent judgment.
What sort of people will work at the whim of another? The inevitable result is toadies and ideological loyalists heading complex institutions, rather than people chosen for their knowledge and experience.
It is time to back off from Greenland
I do hope it falls eventually into U.S. hands, as I explain in my latest Free Press piece. But now is not the time and furthermore that should happen voluntarily, not coercively. Here is an excerpt:
The better approach is to let the Greenlanders choose independence on their own. They may be ready to do so. In a survey last year, 56 percent of Greenlanders favored independence from Denmark, with just 28 percent opposed. This should not be a tremendous surprise. The Danes have not always treated Greenland well; the legacy of Denmark taking away the children of Greenlanders 75 years ago still remains—and similar issues crop up to this day.
If and when Greenlanders do choose independence, the U.S. should, when conditions feel right, make a generous offer to Greenland. If they do not take the offer, we might try again later on, but we should not intimidate or coerce them. We should respect their right of independence throughout the process. That would increase the likelihood that the future partnership will be a cooperative and fruitful one.
The courtship could take 20 or 30 years, but I am pretty sure that eventually Greenlanders will see the benefits of a stronger U.S. affiliation.
I do not think that simply trying to “buy” Greenland is going to work. I am reminded of my own fieldwork, roughly 20 years ago, in a small Mexican village in the state of Guerrero. General Motors wanted to buy most of the land in and around the village, for the purpose of building a racetrack to test GM cars. It had a lot of money to offer, and at the time a family of seven in the village might have earned no more than $1,500 a year. But the negotiations never got very far. The villagers felt they were not being respected, they did not trust the terms of any deal, and they feared their ways of life would change irrevocably. The promise of better roads, schools, and doctors—in addition to whatever payments they might have negotiated—simply fell flat.
These are very important issues, so we need to get them right.
The Tyranny of the Complainers
Some years ago, Dourado and Russell pointed out a stunning fact about airport noise complaints: A very large number come from a single individual or household.
In 2015, for example, 6,852 of the 8,760 complaints submitted to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport originated from one residence in the affluent Foxhall neighborhood of northwest Washington, DC. The residents of that particular house called Reagan National to express irritation about aircraft noise an average of almost 19 times per day during 2015.
Since then, total complaint volumes have exploded—but they are still coming from a tiny number of now apparently more “productive” individuals. In 2024, for example, one individual alone submitted 20,089 complaints, accounting for 25% of all complaints! Indeed, the total number of complainants was only 188 but they complained 79,918 times (an average of 425 per individual or more than one per day.)
What I learned recently is that it’s not just airport noise complaints. We see the same pattern in data from the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights which enforces federal civil rights laws related to education funding. In 2023, for example, 5059 sexual discrimination complaints came from a single individual–from a total of 8151 complaints. Thus, one individual accounted for 68.5% of all sexual discrimination complaints in that year.
In the annual reports for 2022-2024 the OCR identifies what type of complaint the single-individual with multiple complaints was making, a sex discrimination complaint, while in previous years they just give data on the number of complaints from single individuals compared to the total of all types of complaints. I’ve collated this data in this graph which presents totals compared to multiple complaints from a single individual without regard to the type of complaint. Do note, that there are also single individuals filing hundreds of other types of complaints such as age discrimination complaints so the data from more recent years may actually be an underestimate.
In any case, it’s clear that a single individual often accounts for 10-30% of all complaints! These complaints have to be investigated so this single individual may be costing taxpayers millions. It’s as if a single individual were pulling a fire alarm thousands of times a year, mobilizing emergency services on demand, and never facing repercussions.
Does this strategy work? Probably. When complaints are summarized for Congress or reported in the media, are totals presented as-is, or adjusted for spam?
Increasingly, public institutions seem to exist to manage the obsessions of a tiny number of neurotic—and possibly malicious—complainers.
My excellent Conversation with Brendan Foody
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
At 22, Brendan Foody is both the youngest Conversations with Tyler guest ever and the youngest unicorn founder on record. His company Mercor hires the experts who train frontier AI models—from poets grading verse to economists building evaluation frameworks—and has become one of the fastest-growing startups in history.
Tyler and Brendan discuss why Mercor pays poets $150 an hour, why AI labs need rubrics more than raw text, whether we should enshrine the aesthetic standards of past eras rather than current ones, how quickly models are improving at economically valuable tasks, how long until AI can stump Cass Sunstein, the coming shift toward knowledge workers building RL environments instead of doing repetitive analysis, how to interview without falling for vibes, why nepotism might make a comeback as AI optimizes everyone’s cover letters, scaling the Thiel Fellowship 100,000X, what his 8th-grade donut empire taught him about driving out competition, the link between dyslexia and entrepreneurship, dining out and dating in San Francisco, Mercor’s next steps, and more.
And an excerpt:
COWEN: Now, I saw an ad online not too long ago from Mercor, and it said $150 an hour for a poet. Why would you pay a poet $150 an hour?
FOODY: That’s a phenomenal place to start. For background on what the company does — we hire all of the experts that teach the leading AI models. When one of the AI labs wants to teach their models how to be better at poetry, we’ll find some of the best poets in the world that can help to measure success via creating evals and examples of how the model should behave.
One of the reasons that we’re able to pay so well to attract the best talent is that when we have these phenomenal poets that teach the models how to do things once, they’re then able to apply those skills and that knowledge across billions of users, hence allowing us to pay $150 an hour for some of the best poets in the world.
COWEN: The poets grade the poetry of the models or they grade the writing? What is it they’re grading?
FOODY: It could be some combination depending on the project. An example might be similar to how a professor in English class would create a rubric to grade an essay or a poem that they might have for the students. We could have a poet that creates a rubric to grade how well is the model creating whatever poetry you would like, and a response that would be desirable to a given user.
COWEN: How do you know when you have a good poet, or a great poet?
FOODY: That’s so much of the challenge of it, especially with these very subjective domains in the liberal arts. So much of it is this question of taste, where you want some degree of consensus of different exceptional people believing that they’re each doing a good job, but you probably don’t want too much consensus because you also want to get all of these edge case scenarios of what are the models doing that might deviate a little bit from what the norm is.
COWEN: So, you want your poet graders to disagree with each other some amount.
FOODY: Some amount, exactly, but still a response that is conducive with what most users would want to see in their model responses.
COWEN: Are you ever tempted to ask the AI models, “How good are the poet graders?”
[laughter]
FOODY: We often are. We do a lot of this. It’s where we’ll have the humans create a rubric or some eval to measure success, and then have the models say their perspective. You actually can get a little bit of signal from that, especially if you have an expert — we have tens of thousands of people that are working on our platform at any given time. Oftentimes, there’ll be someone that is tired or not putting a lot of effort into their work, and the models are able to help us with catching that.
And:
COWEN: Let’s say it’s poetry. Let’s say you can get it for free, grab what you want from the known universe. What’s the data that’s going to make the models, working through your company, better at poetry?
FOODY: I think that it’s people that have phenomenal taste of what would users of the end products, users of these frontier models want to see. Someone that understands that when a prompt is given to the model, what is the type of response that people are going to be amazed with? How we define the characteristics of those responses is imperative.
Probably more than just poets that have spent a lot of time in school, we would want people that know how to write work that gets a lot of traction from readers, that gains broad popularity and interest, drives the impact, so to speak, in whatever dimension that we define it within poetry.
COWEN: But what’s the data you want concretely? Is it a tape of them sitting around a table, students come, bring their poems, the person says, “I like this one, here’s why, here’s why not.” Is it that tape or is it written reports? What’s the thing that would come in the mail when you get your wish?
FOODY: The best analog is a rubric. If you have some —
COWEN: A rubric for how to grade?
FOODY: A rubric for how to grade. If the poem evokes this idea that is inevitably going to come up in this prompt or is a characteristic of a really good response, we’ll reward the model a certain amount. If it says this thing, we’ll penalize the model. If it styles the response in this way, we’ll reward it. Those are the types of things, in many ways, very similar to the way that a professor might create a rubric to grade an essay or a poem.
Poetry is definitely a more difficult one because I feel like it’s very unbounded. With a lot of essays that you might grade from your students, it’s a relatively well-scoped prompt where you can probably create a rubric that’s easy to apply to all of them, versus I can only imagine in poetry classes how difficult it is to both create an accurate rubric as well as apply it. The people that are able to do that the best are certainly extremely valuable and exciting.
COWEN: To get all nerdy here, Immanuel Kant in his third critique, Critique of Judgment, said, in essence, taste is that which cannot be captured in a rubric. If the data you want is a rubric and taste is really important, maybe Kant was wrong, but how do I square that whole picture? Is it, by invoking taste, you’re being circular and wishing for a free lunch that comes from outside the model, in a sense?
FOODY: There are other kinds of data they could do if it can’t be captured in a rubric. Another kind is RLHF, where you could have the model generate two responses similar to what you might see in ChatGPT, and then have these people with a lot of taste choose which response they prefer, and do that many times until the model is able to understand their preferences. That could be one way of going about it as well.
Interesting throughout, and definitely recommended. Note the conversation was recorded in October (we have had a long queue), so a few parts of it sound slightly out of date. And here is Hollis Robbins on LLMs and poetry.
Yes, Western Europe will survive recent waves of migration
Over 1.2mn people came to the EU seeking protection in 2015, many displaced by worsening conflict in Syria. There were bitter political feuds in Brussels over asylum, border and relocation policies. January 2016 set a grim record for the number of migrants dying while attempting to cross the Mediterranean.
Now things have changed, as European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen made clear in December when she took the stage at a conference on migrant smuggling. After a major policy overhaul over the past two years, “Europe is managing migration responsibly,” she said. “The figures speak for themselves.”
Irregular arrivals of migrants to the EU recorded by its border agency Frontex dropped by 25 per cent in the 11 months to November 2024, and have been continuously declining since a recent peak of 380,000 arrivals registered in 2023.
New asylum applications have also decreased by around 26 per cent in the first nine months of last year, according to Eurostat data, as fewer Syrians are applying for protection since the fall of the authoritarian regime of Bashar al-Assad in late 2024.
Why Some US Indian Reservations Prosper While Others Struggle
Our colleague Thomas Stratmann writes about the political economy of Indian reservations in his excellent Substack Rules and Results.
Across 123 tribal nations in the lower 48 states, median household income for Native American residents ranges from roughly $20,000 to over $130,000—a sixfold difference. Some reservations have household incomes comparable to middle-class America. Others face persistent poverty.
Why?
The common assumption: casino revenue. The data show otherwise. Gaming, natural resources, and location explain some variation. But they don’t explain most of it. What does? Institutional quality.
The Reservation Economic Freedom Index 2.0 measures how property rights, regulatory clarity, governance, and economic freedom vary across tribal nations. The correlation with prosperity is clear, consistent, and statistically significant. A 1-point improvement in REFI—on a 0-to-13 scale—correlates with approximately $1,800 higher median household income. A 10-point improvement? Nearly $18,000 more per household.
Many low-REFI features aren’t tribal choices—they’re federal impositions. Trust status prevents land from being used as collateral. Overlapping federal-state-tribal jurisdiction creates regulatory uncertainty. BIA approval requirements add months or years to routine transactions. Complex jurisdictional frameworks can deter investment when the rules governing business activity, dispute resolution, and enforcement remain unclear.
This is an important research program. In addition to potentially improving the lives of native Americans, the 123 tribal nations are a new and interesting dataset to study institutions.
See the post for more details amd discussion of causality. A longer paper is here.