Category: Law
Why is Singapore no longer “cool”?
To be clear, I am not blaming Singapore on this one. But it is striking to me how much Americans do not talk about Singapore any more. They are much, much more likely to talk about Europe or England, for instance. I see several reasons for this:
1. Much of the Singapore fascination came from the right-wing, as the country offered (according to some) a right-wing version of what a technocracy could look like. Yet today’s American political right is not very interested in technocracy.
2. Singapore willingly takes in large numbers of immigrants (in percentage terms), and tries to make that recipe work through a careful balancing act. That approach still is popular with segments of the right-wing intelligentsia, but it is hardly on the agenda today. For the time being, it is viewed as something “better not to talk about.” Especially in light of some of the burgeoning anti-Asian sentiment, for instance from Helen Andrews and some others. It is much more common that Americans talk about foreign countries mismanaging their immigration policies, for instance the UK and Sweden.
3. Singaporean government looks and feels a bit like a “deep state.” I consider that terminology misleading as applied to Singapore, but still it makes it harder for many people to praise the place.
4. Singapore is a much more democratic country than most outsiders realize, though they do have an extreme form of gerrymandering. Whatever you think of their system, these days it no longer feels transgressive, compared to alternatives being put into practice or at least being discussed. Those alternatives range from more gerrymandering (USA) to various abrogations of democracy (potentially all over). In this regard Singapore, without budging much on its own terms, seems like much more of a mainstream country than before. That means there is less to talk about.
4b. Singapore’s free speech restrictions, whatever you think of them, no longer seem so far outside the box. Trump is suing plenty of people. The UK is sending police to knock on people’s doors for social media posts, and so on. That too makes Singapore more of a “normal country,” for better or worse (I would say worse).
5. The notion of an FDI-driven, MNE-driven growth strategy seems less exciting in an era of major tech advances, most of all AI. Singapore seems further from the frontier than a few years ago. People are wishing to talk about pending changes, not predictability, with predictability being a central feature of many Singaporean service exports.
6. If you want to talk about unusual, well-run small countries, UAE is these days a more novel case to consider, with more new news coming out of it.
Sorry Singapore, we are just not talking about you so much right now! But perhaps, in some significant ways, that is a blessing in disguise. At least temporarily. I wrote this post in part because I realize I have not much blogged about Singapore for some years, and I was trying to figure out why.
Addendum, from Ricardo in the comments:
Bryan Caplan on immigration backlash
Tyler tries to cure my immigration backlash confusion, but not to my satisfaction. The overarching flaw: He equivocates between two different versions of “backlash to immigration.”
Version 1: Letting in more immigrants leads to more resistance to immigration.
Version 2: Letting in more immigrants leads to so much resistance to immigration that the total stock of immigration ultimately ends ups lower than it would have been.
Backlash in the first sense is common, but no reason for immigration advocates to moderate. Backlash in the second sense is a solid reason for immigration advocates to moderate, but Tyler provides little evidence that backlash in this sense is a real phenomenon.
Do read the whole thing, but I feel I am obviously right here. Bryan should read newspapers more! If I did not provide much evidence that backlash is a significant phenomenon, it is because I thought it was pretty obvious. A few points:
1. I (and Bryan all the more so) want more immigration than most voters want. But I recognize that if you strongly deny voters their preferences, they will turn to bad politicians to limit migration. So politics should respect voter preferences to a reasonable degree, even though at the margin people such as myself will prefer more immigration, and also better immigration rules and systems.
2. The anti-immigrant politicians who get elected are very often toxic. And across a wide variety of issues. The backlash costs range far wider than just immigration policies. (I do recognize this does not apply in every case, for instance Meloni in Italy seems OK enough and is not a destructive force. She also has not succeeded in limiting migration, and probably cannot do so without becoming toxic. So maybe that story is not over yet. In any case, consider how many of the other populist right groups have a significant pro-Russia element, Russia being right now probably the most evil country in the world.)
3. If immigration runs “out of control” (as voters perceive it) in your country, there will be anti-immigrant backlash in other countries too. For instance in Japan and Poland. Bryan considers only backlash in the single country of origin. In Japan, for instance, voters just handed their PM a new and powerful mandate, in large part because of the immigration issue. The message was “what is happening in other countries, we do not want that happening here.” The globalization of communications and debate increases the scope and power of the backlash effect considerably.
Most of all, it is simply a mistake to let populist right parties become the dominant force in Europe, and sometimes elsewhere as well. You might think it is not a mistake because we need them to limit migration. Well, that is not my view, but I am arguing it is a mistake to get to that margin to begin with.
In short, we need to limit migration to prevent various democracies from going askew. Nothing in that argument contradicts the usual economic (and other) arguments for a lot of immigration being a good thing. And still it is a good thing to try to sell one’s fellow citizens on the case for more immigration. Nonetheless we are optimizing subject to a constraint, namely voter opinion. Why start off an intertemporal bargaining game by trying to seize as much surplus (immigration) as possible? That to me is obvious, more obvious every day I might add.
Can government coerce women into having more babies?
To illustrate this challenge of measurement and inference, Figure 7 presents Romanian birth rates before, during, and after the imposition of an infamously coercive policy aimed at raising births. In 1966, a dictatorial government imposed Decree 770, which banned abortion and made modern contraception effectively inaccessible. The figure extends an idea from Sobotka, Matysiak, and Brzozowska (2019), which compares cohort and period fertility rates in Romania over a similar evaluation window. We add data from Bulgaria, Romania’s neighbor that was also communist during the time of the policy and that might plausibly serve as a control, shedding light on what course Romanian fertility might have followed after 1967 if not for the policy. Panel A plots period birth rates in the two countries and shows that Romania and Bulgaria had substantially similar trends and levels in period total fertility rates before and after the Romanian policy window. Focusing on panel A of Figure 7, it is clear that birth rates in Romania changed dramatically following the start of the policy, as families were taken by surprise. TFR nearly doubled in the year that followed. The sharp timing of this apparent impact following the policy change, together with the availability of data from neighboring Bulgaria to serve as a control, suggests the possibility of a difference-in-differences analysis comparing birth rates pre– and post–Decree 770 in Romania and Bulgaria.
But while such an analysis could answer the narrow question of the causal effect of Decree 770 on the total fertility rate in 1967, it may nonetheless reveal little in terms of the impact of the policy on the number of children Romanian women had over their lifetimes. After the initial rise in TFR, birth rates soon began falling quickly in Romania, as behavior adapted to the new policy regime. If, for example, an unexpected pregnancy results in a birth at a young age in 1968, a woman may choose and succeed at reducing the probability of a pregnancy in subsequent years, and still achieve the same lifetime count of children.
For a discussion of the theoretically ambiguous impact of abortion restrictions on birth rates, see Lawson and Spears (2025). Of course, the extent of persistence from period fertility to completed fertility depends on the details: A shock that encourages earlier-than-desired births, as Romania’s might have, allows for adjustment later in life. But it may be harder, later in life, to adjust for a policy or event shock that leads to fewer births early in life.Panel B of Figure 7 plots completed cohort fertility. As in earlier figures, cohorts are plotted along the horizontal axis according to the year in which they turned 30. Although Romanian completed cohort fertility began at a higher level than in Bulgaria over the available data series, completed cohort fertility in Romania did not maintain a sizable upward trend relative Bulgaria during the period that Decree 770 was in force.
That is from the recent Geruso and Spears JEP survey piece on whether we can expect fertility rates to rebound in the future. By the way, after Hungary’s subsidy-driven baby boom, the country is now having a baby bust, it is possible that similar mechanisms are operating.
Trump’s Pharmaceutical Plan
Pharmaceuticals have high fixed costs of R&D and low marginal costs. The first pill costs a billion dollars; the second costs 50 cents. That cost structure makes price discrimination—charging different customers different prices based on willingness to pay—common.
Price discrimination is why poorer countries get lower prices. Not because firms are charitable, but because a high price means poorer countries buy nothing, while any price above marginal cost is still profit. This type of price discrimination is good for poorer countries, good for pharma, and (indirectly) good for the United States: more profits mean more R&D and, over time, more drugs.
The political problem, however, is that Americans look abroad, see lower prices for branded drugs, and conclude that they’re being ripped off. Riding that grievance, Trump has demanded that U.S. prices be no higher than the lowest level paid in other developed countries.
One immediate effect is to help pharma in negotiations abroad: they can now credibly say, “We can’t sell to you at that discount, because you’ll export your price back into the U.S.” But two big issues follow.
First, this won’t lower U.S. prices on current drugs. Firms are already profit-maximizing in the U.S. If they manage to raise prices in France, they don’t then announce, “Great news—now we’ll charge less in America.” The potential upside of the Trump plan isn’t lower prices but higher pharma profits, which strengthens incentives to invest in R&D. If profits rise, we may get more drugs in the long run. But try telling the American voter that higher pharma profits are good.
The second issue is that the plan can backfire.
In our textbook, Modern Principles, Tyler and I discuss almost exactly this scenario: suppose policy effectively forces a single price across countries. Which price do firms choose—the low one abroad or the high one in the U.S.? Since a large share of profits comes from the U.S., they’re likely to choose the high price:
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla was even more direct, saying it is time for countries such as France to pay more or go without new drugs. If forced to choose between reducing U.S. prices to France’s level or stopping supply to France, Pfizer would choose the latter, Bourla told reporters at a pharma-industry conference.
So the real question is: will other countries pay?
If France tried to force Americans to pay more to subsidize French price controls, U.S. voters would explode. Yet that’s essentially what other countries are being told but in reverse: “You must pay more so Americans can pay less.” Other countries are already stingier than the U.S., and they already bear costs for it—new drugs arrive more slowly abroad than here. Some governments may decide—foolishly, but understandably—that paying U.S.-level prices is politically impossible. If so, they won’t “harmonize upward.” They’ll follow the European way: ration, delay and go without.
In that case, nobody wins. Pharma profits fall, R&D declines, U.S. prices don’t magically drop, and patients abroad get fewer new drugs and worse care. Lose-lose-lose.
We don’t know the equilibrium, but lose-lose-lose is entirely plausible. Switzerland, for example, does not seem willing to pay more:
Yet Switzerland has shown little political willingness to pay more—threatening both the availability of medications in the country and its role as a global leader in developing therapies. Drug prices are the primary driver of the increasing cost of mandatory health coverage, and the topic generates heated debate during the annual reappraisal of insurance rates. “The Swiss cannot and must not pay for price reductions in the USA with their health insurance premiums,” says Elisabeth Baume-Schneider, Switzerland’s home affairs minister.
If many countries respond like Switzerland—and Trump’s unpopularity abroad doesn’t help—the sector ends up less profitable and innovation slows. Voters may feel less “ripped off,” but they’ll be buying that feeling with fewer drugs and sicker bodies.
Regulating a Monopolist without Subsidy
We study monopoly regulation under asymmetric information about costs when subsidies are infeasible. A monopolist with privately known marginal cost serves a single product market and sets a price. The regulator maximizes a weighted welfare function using unit taxes as sole policy instrument. We identify a sufficient and necessary condition for when laissez-faire is optimal. When intervention is desired, we provide simple sufficient conditions under which the optimal policy is a progressive price cap: prices below a benchmark face no tax, while higher prices are taxed at increasing and potentially prohibitive rates. This policy combines delegation at low prices with taxation at high prices, balancing access, affordability, and profitability. Our results clarify when taxes act as complements to subsidies and when they serve only as imperfect substitutes, illuminating how feasible policy instruments shape optimal regulatory design.
That is from a new paper by Jiaming Wei and Dihan Zou. Via the excellent Samir Varma.
Effective tax rates for billionaires
Here is the tweet, here is the source data.
The Australian government is overreaching already
The social media ban for the young applies to Substack:
The process was more painful for users of newer platforms that collect far less behavioural data—like Substack. Again, this is something I didn’t predict. In the circles I move in, Substack’s sudden requirement that users upload ID has caused significant ire. But this reaction misunderstands how the eSafety Commissioner’s powers work in relation to the under‑16 ban—or perhaps reflects a hope that Substack would have shown more backbone than it did…
Many people assume that if a platform isn’t on the “banned” list, it doesn’t need to comply with the regulations. This is not true. Only platforms expressly excluded are exempt. Everything else is treated as prohibited for under‑16s unless specifically allowed—a distinct departure from the traditional English liberties approach that everything is legal unless expressly made illegal. This approach is to prevent young users from migrating from a banned platform to an unlisted alternative.
That is by Dara Macdonald on Quillette, via Arnold Kling. I am hoping that consistent advocates of free speech will speak up and repudiate this ban…
The Effects of Ransomware Attacks on Hospitals and Patients
As cybercriminals increasingly target health care, hospitals face the growing threat of ransomware attacks. Ransomware is a type of malicious software that prevents users from accessing electronic systems and demands a ransom to restore access. We create and link a database of hospital ransomware attacks to Medicare claims data. We quantify the effects of ransomware attacks on hospital operations and patient outcomes. Ransomware attacks decrease hospital volume by 17–24 percent during the initial attack week, with recovery occurring within 3 weeks. Among patients already admitted to the hospital when a ransomware attack begins, in-hospital mortality increases by 34–38 percent.
That is by Hannah Neprash, Claire McGlave, and Sayeh Nikpay, recently published in American Economic Journal: Economic Policy.
The United States as an Active Industrial Policy Nation
We document and characterize a new history of U.S. federal-level industrial policies by scanning all 12,167 Congressional Acts and 6,030 Presidential Orders from 1973 through 2022. We find several interesting patterns. First, contrary to a common perception, the United States has always been an active industrial policy nation throughout the period, regardless of which party is in power, with 5.4 laws and 3.4 Presidential Orders per year on average containing new industrial policies. Second, we identify roughly 300% more instances of industrial policies than those in the Global Trade Alert (GTA) database during 2008-2022, despite using essentially the same definition. Third, industrial policies in practice are as likely to be justified by national security as by economic competitiveness. Fourth, many U.S. industrial policies incorporate design features that help mitigate potential drawbacks, such as explicit expiration dates and pilot programs for emerging technologies. Finally, based on stock market reactions and firm performance, the identified policies are recognized as economically significant in shifting resource allocations.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
So if I were designing an “industrial policy” for America, my first priority would be to improve and “unstick” its procurement cycles. There may well be bureaucratic reasons that this is difficult to do. But if it can’t be done, then perhaps the U.S. shouldn’t be setting its sights on a more ambitious industrial policy.
A second form of American industrial policy is the biomedical grants and subsidies associated with the National Institutes of Health.
Published in 2019, but still relevant today.
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.