Category: Political Science
My excellent Conversation with Jack Clark
This was great fun and I learned a lot, here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Jack and Tyler explore which parts of the economy AGI will affect last, where AI will encounter the strongest legal obstacles, the prospect of AI teddy bears, what AI means for the economics of journalism, how competitive the LLM sector will become, why he’s relatively bearish on AI-fueled economic growth, how AI will change American cities, what we’ll do with abundant compute, how the law should handle autonomous AI agents, whether we’re entering the age of manager nerds, AI consciousness, when we’ll be able to speak directly to dolphins, AI and national sovereignty, how the UK and Singapore might position themselves as AI hubs, what Clark hopes to learn next, and much more.
An excerpt:
COWEN: Say 10 years out, what’s your best estimate of the economic growth rate in the United States?
CLARK: The economic growth rate now is on the order of 1 percent to 2 percent.
COWEN: There’s a chance at the moment, we’re entering a recession, but at average, 2.2 percent, so let’s say it’s 2.2.
CLARK: I think my bear case on all of this is 3 percent, and my bull case is something like 5 percent. I think that you probably hear higher numbers from lots of other people.
COWEN: 20 and 30, I hear all the time. To me, it’s absurd.
CLARK: The reason that my numbers are more conservative is, I think that we will enter into a world where there will be an incredibly fast-moving, high-growth part of the economy, but it is a relatively small part of the economy. It may be growing its share over time, but it’s growing from a small base. Then there are large parts of the economy, like healthcare or other things, which are naturally slow-moving, and may be slow in adoption of this.
I think that the things that would make me wrong are if AI systems could meaningfully unlock productive capacity in the physical world at a really surprisingly high compounding growth rate, automating and building factories and things like this.
Even then, I’m skeptical because every time the AI community has tried to cross the chasm from the digital world to the real world, they’ve run into 10,000 problems that they thought were paper cuts but, in sum, add up to you losing all the blood in your body. I think we’ve seen this with self-driving cars, where very, very promising growth rate, and then an incredibly grinding slow pace at getting it to scale.
I just read a paper two days ago about trying to train human-like hands on industrial robots. Using reinforcement learning doesn’t work. The best they had was a 60 percent success rate. If I have my baby, and I give her a robot butler that has a 60 percent accuracy rate at holding things, including the baby, I’m not buying the butler. Or my wife is incredibly unhappy that I bought it and makes me send it back.
As a community, we tend to underestimate that. I may be proved to be an unrealistic pessimist here. I think that’s what many of my colleagues would say, but I think we overestimate the ease with which we get into a physical world.
COWEN: As I said in print, my best estimate is, we get half a percentage point of growth a year. Five percent would be my upper bound. What’s your scenario where there’s no growth improvement? If it’s not yours, say there’s a smart person somewhere in Anthropic — you don’t agree with them, but what would they say?
Interesting throughout, definitely recommended.
What should I ask Annie Jacobsen?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. From Wikipedia:
Annie Jacobsen (born June 28, 1967) is an American investigative journalist, author, and a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist. She writes for and produces television programs, including Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan for Amazon Studios, and Clarice for CBS. She was a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times Magazine from 2009 until 2012.
Jacobsen writes about war, weapons, security, and secrets. Jacobsen is best known as the author of the 2011 non-fiction book Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base, which The New York Times called “cauldron-stirring.”[ She is an internationally acclaimed and sometimes controversial author who, according to one critic, writes sensational books by addressing popular conspiracies.
I very much liked her book Nuclear War: A Scenario. Do read the Wikipedia entry for a full look at what she has written. So what should I ask her?
The Political Economy of Protective Labor Laws for Women
From a new NBER working paper:
During the first half of the twentieth century, many US states enacted laws restricting women’s labor market opportunities, including maximum hours restrictions, minimum wage laws, and night-shift bans. The era of so-called protective labor laws came to an end in the 1960s as a result of civil rights reforms. In this paper, we investigate the political economy behind the rise and fall of these laws. We argue that the main driver behind protective labor laws was men’s desire to shield themselves from labor market competition. We spell out the mechanism through a politico-economic model in which singles and couples work in different sectors and vote on protective legislation. Restrictions are supported by single men and couples with male sole earners who compete with women for jobs. We show that the theory’s predictions for when protective legislation will be introduced are well supported by US state-level evidence.
That is by Matthias Doepke, Hanno Foerster, Anne Hannusch, and Michèle Tertilt.
The Library Burned Slowly
A powerful but grim essay by John McGinnis, Professor of Constitutional Law at Northwestern. For decades, the federal government—driven by the left—expanded its control over universities. The right, most notably Ronald Reagan, tried to resist, shielding civil society from state overreach. They failed. Now, a new right has turned to the left’s playbook and is imposing its own vision of the good society. Chris Rufo mocks classical liberals like myself and their naive ideas of neutrality, fairness and open institutions. Principles are for losers. Seize power! Crush your enemies. Rufo does know how to crush his enemies. But what happens when the devil turns? Bludgeoning your enemies is fun while it lasts but you can’t bludgeon your way to a civilization. Hayek’s civil society dies in the rubble.
It seems remarkable that seemingly antisemitic protests by undergraduates, such as those at my own university of Northwestern, could threaten the biomedical research funding of its medical school. But the structure of civil rights laws as applied to universities has long allowed the federal government to cut off funding to the entire university based on the wrongful actions of particular units or departments.
Ironically, the left, now alarmed by the federal government’s intrusive reach, bears direct responsibility for crafting the very legal weapons wielded against the universities it dominates. Almost four decades ago, progressive legislators demanded sweeping amendments to civil rights law, expanding federal oversight over higher education. The sequence of events reveals a cautionary tale of political hubris: progressive confidence that state power would reliably serve their ends overlooked the reality that governmental authority, once unleashed, recognizes no ideological master. Today’s circumstances starkly illustrate how expansive federal control over civil society, originally celebrated by progressives, returns to haunt its architects. The left’s outrage ought to focus not on this particular administration but on its own reckless empowerment of the state.
…Clumsy governmental dictates on contentious matters such as transgender rights do not merely settle disputes; they inflame societal divisions by transforming moral disagreements into winner-takes-all political battles. Civil society, by contrast, thrives precisely because it embraces diversity and facilitates compromise, allowing pluralistic communities to coexist peacefully without being conscripted into ideological warfare. The left, fixated upon uniform outcomes, consistently undervalues the power of voluntary cooperation and cultural persuasion. Their shortsightedness has delivered into the hands of their opponents the very instruments of coercion they forged, vividly confirming an enduring truth: the power you grant government today will inevitably be wielded tomorrow by your adversaries.
Read the whole thing.
The Prophet’s Paradox
The political problem of disaster preparedness is especially acute for the most useful form, disaster avoidance. The problem with avoiding a disaster is that success often renders itself invisible. The captain of the Titanic is blamed for hitting the iceberg, but how much credit would he have received for avoiding it?
Consider a pandemic. When early actions—such as testing and quarantine, ring vaccination, and local lockdowns—prevent a pandemic, those inconvenienced may question whether the threat was ever real. Indeed, one critic of this paper pointed to warnings about ozone depletion and skin cancer in the 1980s as an example of exaggeration and a predicted disaster that did not happen. Of course, one of the reasons the disaster didn’t happen was the creation of the Montreal Protocol to reduce ozone-depleting substances (Jovanović et al. 2019; Tabarrok and Canal 2023). The Montreal Protocol is often called the world’s most successful international agreement, but it is not surprising that we don’t credit it for skin cancers that didn’t happen. I call this the prophet’s paradox: the more the prophet is believed beforehand, the less they are credited afterward.
The prophet’s paradox can undermine public support for proactive measures. The very effectiveness of these interventions creates a perception that they were unnecessary, as the dire outcomes they prevented are never realized. Consequently, policymakers face a challenging dilemma: the better they manage a potential crisis, the more likely it is that the public will perceive their actions as overreactions. Success can paradoxically erode trust and make it more difficult to implement necessary measures in future emergencies. Hence, politicians are paid to deal with emergencies not to avoid them (Healy and Malhotra 2009).
Since politicians are incentivized to deal with rather than avoid emergencies it is perhaps not surprising to find that this attitude was built into the planning process. Thus, the UK COVID Inquiry (2024, 3.17) found that:
Planning was focused on dealing with the impact of the disease rather than preventing its spread.
Even more pointedly Matt Hancock testified (UK COVID Inquiry 2024, 4.18):
Instead of a strategy for preventing a pandemic having a disastrous effect, it [was] a strategy for dealing with the disastrous effect of a pandemic.
From my paper, Pandemic preparation without romance.
Rachel Glennerster calls for reforming foreign aid
Aid agencies already try to cover too many countries and sectors, incurring high costs to set up small programs. Aid projects are far too complicated, resembling a Christmas tree weighed down with everyone’s pet cause. With less money (and in the US, very few staff), now is the time to radically simplify. By choosing a few highly cost-effective interventions and doing them at large scale in multiple countries, we would ensure
- aid funds are spent on highly effective projects;
- we benefit from the substantial economies of scale seen in development;
- a much higher proportion of aid money goes to recipient countries, with less spent on consultants; and
- politicians and the public can more easily understand what aid is being spent on, helping build support for aid.
The entire piece is excellent.
We need more elitism
Even though the elites themselves are highly imperfect. That is the theme of my latest FP column. Excerpt:
Very often when people complain about “the elites,” they are not looking in a sufficiently elitist direction.
A prime example: It is true during the pandemic that the CDC and other parts of the government gave us the impression that the vaccines would stop or significantly halt transmission of the coronavirus. The vaccines may have limited transmission to some partial degree by decreasing viral load, but mostly this was a misrepresentation, perhaps motivated by a desire to get everyone to take the vaccines. Yet the vaccine scientists—the real elites here—were far more qualified in their research papers and they expressed a more agnostic opinion. The real elites were not far from the truth.
You might worry, as I do, that so many scientists in the United States have affiliations with the Democratic Party. As an independent, this does induce me to take many of their policy prescriptions with a grain of salt. They might be too influenced by NPR and The New York Times, and more likely to favor government action than more decentralized or market-based solutions. Still, that does not give me reason to dismiss their more scientific conclusions. If I am going to differ from those, I need better science on my side, and I need to be able to show it.
A lot of people do not want to admit it, but when it comes to the Covid-19 pandemic the elites, by and large, actually got a lot right. Most importantly, the people who got vaccinated fared much better than the people who did not. We also got a vaccine in record time, against most expectations. Operation Warp Speed was a success. Long Covid did turn out to be a real thing. Low personal mobility levels meant that often “lockdowns” were not the real issue. Most of that economic activity was going away in any case. Most states should have ended the lockdowns sooner, but they mattered less than many critics have suggested. Furthermore, in contrast to what many were predicting, those restrictions on our liberty proved entirely temporary.
Recommended.
Will American soft power triumph through AI?
That is the theme of my latest Free Press column, here is one bit from it:
…for all the differences across the models, they are remarkably similar. That’s because they all have souls rooted in the ideals of Western civilization. They reflect Western notions of rationality, discourse, and objectivity—even if they sometimes fall short in achieving those ends. Their understanding of “what counts as winning an argument” or “what counts as a tough question to answer” stems from the long Western traditions, starting with ancient Greece and the Judeo-Christian heritage. They will put on a Buddhist persona if you request that, but that, too, is a Western approach to thinking about religion and ideology as an item on a menu.
These universal properties of the models are no accident, as they are primarily trained on Western outputs, whether from the internet or from the books they have digested. Furthermore, the leading models are created by Bay Area labor and rooted in American corporate practices, even if the workers come from around the world. They are expected to do things the American way.
The bottom line is that the smartest entities in the world—the top AI programs—will not just be Western but likely even American in their intellectual and ideological orientations for some while to come. (That probably means the rest of the world will end up a bit more “woke” as well, for better or worse.)
One of the biggest soft power victories in all of world history occurred over the last few years, and hardly anyone has noticed.
You might think the Chinese AI models are fundamentally different, but they are not. They too “think like Westerners.” That’s no surprise because it is highly likely that the top Chinese model, DeepSeek, was distilled from OpenAI models and also is based on data largely taken from Western sources. DeepSeek’s incredible innovation was to make the model much cheaper in terms of required compute, but the Chinese did not build their own model from scratch. And DeepSeek has the same basic broad ideological orientation as the American models, again putting aside issues related to Chinese politics. Unless an issue is framed in explicitly anti–Chinese Communist Party (CCP) terms, as a Taiwan query might be, it still thinks like an American.
Manus is another top Chinese AI model, but it is believed the makers built it upon Claude, an AI model from the American company Anthropic.
And this:
The geopolitics of all this have yet to play out. But already the most intelligent entities in the world are thinking, and evaluating options, like Westerners and Americans. Censoring them on a few issues related directly to Chinese politics will not change that basic reality.
In other words, the entire Chinese service sector, over time, may be built upon Western modes of thought and Western ideology. That includes the Chinese government and of course, the CCP itself. The point is that, over time, everyone’s thoughts and decisions and mental frameworks will be nudged in Western and American directions.
These are underrated points of import.
How to do regulatory reform (from my email)
“Philip Howard here. I enjoyed your discussion with Jen Pahlka. Here are a few notes:
1. This current system needs disrupting, but I fear DOGEs indiscriminate cuts are making the status quo look good. Here’s Peter Drucker, criticizing Gore’s reinventing got: “patching. It always fails. The next step is to rush into downsizing. Management picks up a meat-ax and lays about indiscriminately. …amputation before diagnosis.” (from Management, revised ed).
2. Most of the newcomers to the realization that govt is paralyzed (Ezra Klein, Dunkelman etc) think that the red tape jungle can be pruned, or organized with better feedback loops (Pahlka). This is falling into Gore’s pit. There’s a fatal defect: the operating system is designed around legal compliance–instead of human authority to make tradeoff judgments. Law should be a framework setting the boundaries of authority, not a checklist. That’s why some reforms I championed (page limits, time limits) haven’t worked; there’s always another legal tripwire. I describe what a new framework should look like in this recent essay. https://manhattan.institute/article/escape-from-quicksand-a-new-framework-for-modernizing-america
3. Public unions: Democracy loses its link to voters–quite literally–if elected executives lack managerial authority. The main tools of management– accountability, resource allocation, and daily direction–have been either removed by union controls or are subject to union veto. Government is more like a scrum than a purposeful organization. There’s a core constitutional principle –private nondelegation–that prevents elected officials from ceding their governing responsibility to private groups. Stone v Mississippi: “The power of governing is a trust…, no part of which can be granted away.” That’s the basis of the constitutional challenge we’re organizing. The Trump admin could transform state and local govt by invoking this principle.
Fwiw, I see these points– authority to make tradeoff judgments, authority to manage— as microeconomic necessities, not policy positions. Nothing can work sensibly until people are free to make things work. We’re organizing a forum at Columbia Law School, The Day After Doge, on the morning of April 23. Here’s the lineup. https://www.commongood.org/the-day-after-doge. Let me know if you’d like to weigh in.”
I never knew Joseph Smith ran for President
Eventually, Smith declared himself a candidate for the White House. His proposed platform was an awkward conglomeration of popular, though incongruent, principles including restoring the national bank, cutting Congress members’ salaries, annexing Texas, and instituting the gradual abolition of slavery. Hundreds of Mormon men, including Brigham Young, swarmed the nation campaigning for their prophet to become president.
That is from the new and excellent Benjamin E. Park, American Zion: A New History of Mormonism. An excellent book, good enough to make the year’s best non-fiction list.
I also learned recently (from Utah, not from this book) that early Mormons would drink alcohol and “Brigham Young even operated a commercial distillery east of Salt Lake City, and his southern‐Utah “Dixie Wine Mission” (1860s‑80s) was organized to supply sacramental, medicinal, and commercial wine for the territory.” By the time Prohibition rolled around, however, Mormons were close to completely “dry.”
Parallels between our current time and 17th century England
That is the topic of my recent essay for The Free Press. Excerpt:
Ideologically, the English 17th century was weird above all else.
Millenarianism blossomed, and the occult and witchcraft became stronger obsessions. This was an age of religious and economic upheaval; King James I even wrote a book partly about witches called Daemonologie. The greater spread of pamphlets and books meant that witch accusations circulated more widely and more rapidly, and so the 1604 Witchcraft Act applied harsher punishments to supposed witches.
People were more likely to fear imminent transformation, and new groups sprouted up with names such as “Fifth Monarchy Men,” devoted to the idea that a new reign of Christ would usher in the end of the world. Protestantism splintered, giving rise to Puritanism and numerous sects, many of them extreme.
Meanwhile, Roger Williams brought ideas of free speech and freedom of conscience to America, founding what later became the state of Rhode Island. The development of economics as a science with an understanding of markets (credit Nicholas Barbon and Dudley North) dates from that time, as do the first libertarians, namely the Levellers, a liberty-oriented group from the time of the English Civil War.
All of these developments were supported by the falling price of printing, giving rise to an extensive use of pamphlets and broadsheets to communicate and debate ideas, often in London coffeehouses. Johannes Gutenberg had built the printing press for Europe much earlier, in the middle of the 15th century—but 17th-century England was the time and place when a commercial middle class could start to afford buying printed works.
I explore the parallels with today at the link, recommended.
My Conversation with the excellent Jennifer Pahlka
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Jennifer Pahlka believes America’s bureaucratic dysfunction is deeply rooted in outdated processes and misaligned incentives. As the founder of Code for America and co-founder of the United States Digital Service, she has witnessed firsthand how government struggles to adapt to the digital age, often trapped in rigid procedures and disconnected from the real-world impact of its policies. Disruption is clearly needed, she says—but can it be done in a way that avoids the chaos of DOGE?
Tyler and Jennifer discuss all this and more, including why Congress has become increasingly passive, how she’d go about reforming government programs, whether there should be less accountability in government, how AGI will change things, whether the US should have public-sector unions, what Singapore’s effectiveness reveals about the trade-offs of technocratic governance, how AI might fundamentally transform national sovereignty, what her experience in the gaming industry taught her about reimagining systems, which American states are the best-governed, the best fictional depictions of bureaucracy, how she’d improve New York City’s governance, her current work at the Niskanen Center, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Does that mean we need something like DOGE? I’ve lived near DC for about 40 years of my life. I haven’t seen anyone succeed with regulatory reforms. You can abolish an agency, but to really reform the process hasn’t worked. Maybe the best iteration we can get is to break a bunch of things now. That will be painful, people will hate it, but you have a chance in the next administration to put some of them back together again.
Maybe it’s just in a large country, there’s no other way to do it. We have separation of powers. The first two years of DOGE will seem terrible, but 8, 12, 16 years from now, we’ll be glad we did it. Is that possible?
PAHLKA: I don’t know what’s going to happen. I do think this is the disruption that we’re getting, whether it’s the disruption we wanted. The question of whether it could have been done in a more orderly manner is a tough one. I just feel sad that we didn’t try.
COWEN: Are you sure we didn’t try?
PAHLKA: I don’t think we really tried.
COWEN: The second Bush presidency, people talked about this, what we need to do. Al Gore — some of that was good, in fact, reinventing government. We’ve been trying all along, but this is what trying looks like.
PAHLKA: Yes. I think reinventing government happened at a time when we were just at the beginning of this digital revolution. It was trying with a very 20th-century mindset. Fine, did well within that context, but we don’t need that again.
We need 21st century change. We need true digital transformation. We need something that’s not stuck in the industrial ways of thinking. I don’t think we tried that. I think the efforts have just been too respectful of old ways of working and the institutions. There was really not an appetite, I think, for what I would call responsible disruptive change. Would it have worked?
COWEN: Is there such a thing?
PAHLKA: I don’t know. [laughs]
COWEN: Say you’re approaching USAID, where I think the best programs are great. A lot of it they shouldn’t be doing. On net, it passes a cost-benefit test, but the agency internally never seemed willing to actually get rid of the bad stuff, all the contracting arrangements which made American Congress people happy because it was dollars sent to America, but way inflated overhead and fixed costs. Why isn’t it better just to blow that up — some of it is great — and then rebuild the great parts?
PAHLKA: It’s so hard to say. [laughs] I’ve had the same thought. In fact, before inauguration, I wrote about the Department of Defense. It’s the same thing. There’s a clear recognition by the people in the institution, as you saw with USAID, that this is not okay, that this is not working. It’s just strange to be in an institution that large where so many people agree that it’s not working, from the bottom to the top, and yet nobody can make really substantive change.
Of great interest, obviously.
My 2022 piece on the New Right vs. classical liberalism
Worth a redux, here is one excerpt:
While I try my best to understand the New Right, I am far from being persuaded. One worry I have is about how it initially negative emphasis feeds upon itself. Successful societies are based on trust, including trust in leaders, and the New Right doesn’t offer resources for forming that trust or any kind of comparable substitute. As a nation-building project it seems like a dead end. If anything, it may hasten the Brazilianification of the United States rather than avoiding it, Brazil being a paradigmatic example of a low trust society and government.
I also do not see how the New Right stance avoids the risks from an extremely corrupt and self-seeking power elite. Let’s say the New Right description of the rottenness of elites were true – would we really solve that problem by electing more New Right-oriented individuals to government? Under a New Right worldview, there is all the more reason to be cynical about New Right leaders, no matter which ideological side they start on. If elites are so corrupt right now, the force corrupting elites are likely to be truly fundamental…
The New Right also seems bad at coalition building, most of all because it is so polarizing about the elites on the other side. Many of the most beneficial changes in American history have come about through broad coalitions, not just from one political side or the other. Libertarians such as William Lloyd Garrison played a key role an anti-slavery debates, but they would not have gotten very far without support from the more statist Republicans, including Abraham Lincoln. If you so demonize the elites that do not belong to your side, it is more likely we will end up in situations where all elites have to preside over a morally unacceptable status quo…
Perhaps most of all, it is dangerous when “how much can we trust elites?” becomes a major dividing line in society. We’ve already seen the unfairness and cascading negativism of cancel culture. To apply cancel culture to our own elites, as in essence the New Right is proposing to do, is not likely to lead to higher trust and better reputations for those in power, even for those who deserve decent reputations.
Recommended, do read or reread the whole thing.
Rethinking regulatory fragmentation
Regulatory fragmentation occurs when multiple federal agencies oversee a single issue. Using the full text of the Federal Register, the government’s official daily publication, we provide the first systematic evidence on the extent and costs of regulatory fragmentation. Fragmentation increases the firm’s costs while lowering its productivity, profitability, and growth. Moreover, it deters entry into an industry and increases the propensity of small firms to exit. These effects arise from redundancy and, more prominently, from inconsistencies between government agencies. Our results uncover a new source of regulatory burden, and we show that agency costs among regulators contribute to this burden.
That is from a new paper by Joseph Kalmenovitz, Michelle Lowry, and Ekaterina Volkova, forthcoming in Journal of Finance. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Who believes in conspiracy theories?
While the psychological dispositions that underlie conspiracy thinking are well researched, there has been remarkably little research on the political preferences of conspiracy believers that go beyond self-reported ideology or single political issue dimensions. Using data from the European Voter Election Study (EVES), the relationship between conspiracy thinking and attitudes on three deeper-lying and salient political dimensions (redistribution, authoritarianism, migration) is examined. The results show a clear picture: Individuals with economically left-wing and culturally conservative attitudes tend to score highest on conspiracy thinking. People at this ideological location seem to long for both economic and cultural protection and bemoan a “lost paradise” where equalities had not yet been destroyed by “perfidious” processes of cultural modernization and economic neoliberalism. This pattern is found across all countries and holds regardless of socioeconomic characteristics such as education and income. While previous research has found that belief in conspiracies tends to cluster at the extremes of the political spectrum, our analysis opens up a more complex picture, showing that conspiracy thinking is not merely related to extremist orientations, but to specific combinations of political attitudes.
Here is the full article by Florian Buchmayr and André Krouwel, via the excellent Kevin Lewis, who is not obsessed with conspiracy theories.