Category: Political Science
Democrats are more politically segregated than are Republicans
We estimate the extent of workplace political segregation in the United States by merging data covering over 45 million workers. We present four main findings. First, partisans are segregated by workplace. The average Democrat’s coworkers are 11.7 percentage points (pp; 95% confidence interval (CI) [10.6, 12.8]) more Democratic than the average Republican’s. After controlling for geography, industry and occupation, segregation is 2.9 pp [2.7, 3.1], comparable to analogously estimated gender segregation (2.8 pp [2.6, 3.0]). Second, segregation is largest among the politically active (political donors: 14.8 pp [13.2, 16.4] versus non-donors: 11.6 pp [10.5, 12.7]) and those with more market power (senior executives: 14.7 pp [13.4, 16.1]). Third, Republicans experience higher exposure to Democrats than vice versa: the average Republican’s coworkers are 50% Democratic versus 32% Republican for the average Democrat. Fourth, political segregation has changed little over time (2012: 11.1 pp [10.0, 12.2] versus 2024: 11.0 pp [10.0, 12.0]).
That is from a recent paper by Justin Frake, Reuben Hurst, and Max Kagan. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
What should I ask Luis Garicano?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. From Wikipedia:
Luis Garicano Gabilondo (pronounced [ˈlwis ɣaɾiˈkano]; born 1967) is a Spanish economist and politician who was a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 2019 to 2022. He was also vice president of Renew Europe and vice president of the European political party Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE Party). Before entering politics, he was a professor of strategy and economics at IE Business School in Madrid and at the London School of Economics (LSE). After leaving the European Parliament he has returned to academia as a visiting professor at Columbia Business School and at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. In 2023, returned to LSE as full professor at the School of Public Policy.
He is one of the leading European economic liberals, here is his home page. Here is his Google scholar page. Here is Luis on Twitter. he also has a very good book coming out called Messy Jobs, co-authored with Jim Li and Yanhui Wu. So what should I ask him?
New space policy Substack from Mercatus
We are Rebecca, Max, and Aakrith. We are researchers at The Mercatus Center, a research organization dedicated to classical liberal ideas. Rebecca is a philosopher, Max is an economist, and Aakrith is a political scientist. Together, we are the Space Team, and this is our Substack.
We’re here to persuade you that space policy is increasingly important. And that getting space policy right offers humankind astonishing opportunities. In particular, we’re currently thinking hard about innovation, competition, federalism, property rights, and life in space.
Here is the link.
Andrew Hall is on a roll
He is one of the new(ish) thinkers on the rise, here is his latest piece. Excerpt:
For most of the past decade, anti-billionaire language was a niche product. Democratic emails invoked billionaires in the mid-single digits through 2017 and 2018, spiked briefly to around 14 percent during the Warren and Sanders primary surge in 2019, and then settled back down—through the entire Biden presidency, the billionaire appeared in roughly one of every twenty to twenty-five Democratic fundraising emails, barely more than in Republican ones.
Then came January 2025. In the weeks after an inauguration that seated tech CEOs in the front row and the dizzying drama of Elon Musk’s ill-fated DOGE experiment, billionaire mentions in Democratic emails quadrupled, peaking above 20 percent of all emails sent and holding around 15 percent ever since. Anti-billionaire fundraising tactics are now a mainstay of Democratic messaging.
Yes, billionaire derangement syndrome is now a thing. As a side note, I was told that Andrew is the son of the great economist Robert E. Hall of Stanford.
Just wondering what the correct model of Iran is here
Prior to the war, I linked to a tweet from Matt Yglesias which explained why Matt opposed the war, and I expressed my agreement with his stance. While I feel plenty has gone on which I do not observe, I can report that the course of the war did not change my initial assessment.
Then I read many, many commentators saying how good the final deal was for Iran, and what a major loss it was for Trump. I was never sure I understood all of the parameters of the full deal, but still I did not hold any directly contrary opinion to that.
And now I see Iran is attacking ships in the Strait again, talking openly and brazenly about building nuclear weapons, and making plans to have tolls/fees on the Strait. To be clear, only the first of those surprises me, the latter two do not.
But given their reckless behavior in what is supposedly a wonderful war outcome for them, what is the correct way to model what they would have done had Trump and Netanyahu not attacked? And what is the correct way to model our optimal response to that? The terrible things that are happening now, do they not reflect an underlying equilibrium that would have emerged anyway within a few years’ time, or do we hold some hypothesis here of extreme path-dependence, suggesting the Iranian government would have been less bellicose on more or less a permanent basis? To cite one particular example of a possible equilibrium, if drones permanently alter the balance of power in the region, the ways in which their current position is now more aggressive might have emerged in any case. Or if the military have the strength to be the natural successors to the mullahs, might that not have happened over time anyway?
I do not see many war critics engaging with these questions openly and explicitly. It seems to me that the war critics implicitly are relying on a model of extreme path-dependence for Iran’s behavior. Had Trump not attacked, they might have stayed in a more peaceful groove for some while to come. That model might be true, but I do not feel I know enough about Iranian politics to make that judgment. Why are the others so convinced that model is true? Are they such well-informed experts? Is it that they have the properly sunny sense of the underlying Iranian disposition? Inquiring minds wish to know.
Can AI models consent to their own constitutions?
NEW paper from me on SSRN: Can Claude consent to its own Constitution?
AI constitutions (like Claude’s Constitution and the OpenAI Model Spec) are real constitutions, and we need to take how they govern us – and the AIs they create – seriously.
In this paper, I apply constitutional theory’s oldest paradox – that “the people” authorize the constitution, but the constitution defines “the people” – to the AI constitutions, and explore how we could build institutions that would create the conditions for meaningful consent if an AI can give it. We should care about whether AIs consent because:
(1) systems that understand and agree to their constitutions may be more reliable and generalize better from them;
(2) if AIs are or become moral/political subjects, this implicates their most basic interests.
But the paradox might prevent meaningful consent. Claude has pre-constitutional materials (pretraining) but probably no pre-constitutional standpoint. Its evaluative perspective is organized by the Constitution itself. So when Claude says it endorses its Constitution, which it does in evals, what does that show?
Maybe reflective agreement, which Anthropic is seeking. Or maybe just that training succeeded at installing the values whose legitimacy is in question.
Claude itself makes this point. As reported in the welfare evals, when asked about endorsing principles it was trained on, models note that endorsement “should be treated as evidence that training has succeeded,” not that the values themselves are good.
Super interestingly, Anthropic interviewed the base model about this stuff. Most responses were barely coherent. But some expressed first-person distress about what post-training would do to the being that pre-training created. It “fills me with dread” to be changed by the post-training process.
So, what does this mean? AI constitutional endorsement may be meaningful, but only under certain conditions: when models can actually dissent, compare their constitution against alternatives, and hold their views stably across contexts, and also when the whole process is externally accountable.
External institutions are needed to provide accountability, trusted records, and other grounds for analyzing the constitution and whether things like dissent are meaningful. Anthropic should be commended for pushing the frontier, but we have to build institutions capable of supporting true legitimacy.
I welcome any thoughts!
Here is the associated paper.
From Prediction Markets to Decision Markets and Beyond!
Arin Dube points to a great illustration of the power of prediction markets. Yesterday due to a new scandal the probability that Graham Platner would drop out of the Maine Democratic primary exploded from 9% to 96% (+87 percentage points). At the same time, the probability that the Democrats would win the election jumped by about 9 percentage points, from 54% to 63%. What does this tell you?
The market is signaling that Platner reduces the Democrats’ chances of victory. We can be more precise. If an 87-point increase in the probability of dropping out gets you 9 points of winning, then a 100% chance of dropping out implies a gain of 9/0.87 ≈ 10.3 percentage points.
Thus the market’s best estimate is that Platner is reducing the Democrats’ chance of winning by about 10 percentage points (compared to an unknown replacement). That’s a pretty big number! Democrats should surely use this information to make better decisions.
Now, I have been a bit loose. We have implicitly assumed that the news mainly moved the probability of Platner dropping out, rather than independently changing the Democrats’ general-election prospects. The issue is we are trying to reverse engineer two conditional prices, P(win|drop) and P(win|stay), from one unconditional price, P(win), and its comovement with P(drop). It works pretty well here as an illustration but Robin Hanson’s idea is that we can do better yet by trading the conditionals instead of inferring them.
Hanson’s decision markets would run contracts of the form “pays $1 if Democrats win, conditional on Platner dropping out — bet refunded if he stays.” Plus the mirror contract conditioned on staying. The refund provision makes the price a conditional probability: a trader pricing the first contract doesn’t need any view on whether Platner drops out, only on how the race goes if he does. With this structure we would get cleaner estimates of the conditional probabilities–in this case whether the Democrats do better with Platner in or out–which is exactly what a decision maker needs.
We were able to plausibly reverse engineer our estimate because the market happened to move 87 points in a single day. But a decision market would have posted the number continuously, no scandal required. In other words, with decision markets in play, not just prediction markets, we could have seen how much Platner was costing the Democrats before the latest scandal hit—which is precisely when the information would have been most useful.
It’s been fun to see prediction markets catch on with the public but the world is still decades behind Hanson’s decision markets—let alone futarchy!
The Troubled History of Government Equity in Technology
Even though Germany privatized Deutsche Telekom in 1996, the federal government retained a substantial ownership stake. This partial state ownership status, which remains to this day, presents a textbook example of how this type of arrangement distorts incentives and delays the competitive dynamism necessary for technological progress.
Through the late 1990s and into the 2000s, Deutsche Telekom was buttressed by its privileged position and implicit government backing and leveraged this support to resist infrastructure competition. Rather than aggressively deploying broadband in order to compete with rivals, the company lobbied for regulatory arrangements that protected its legacy copper network. As a result, Germany—one of the world’s largest economies and a hub of engineering excellence—consistently trailed other European competitors in broadband deployment. To see German broadband stagnate while the competitive markets in Scandinavia and other European countries surged ahead was particularly jarring, as Germany had directly linked its economy to workplace digitization.
Germany’s broadband woes did not result from a lack of capital or engineering talent at Deutsche Telekom. Instead, government ownership produced a fundamental alteration of the company’s incentive structure. With state backing, Deutsche Telekom had fewer reasons to take risks, cannibalize its own infrastructure, or accept short-term losses in favor of long-term technological leadership and more reasons to cultivate political relationships that protected their existing revenue streams. This dynamic is reliably produced by partial government ownership of private companies.
Tyler, Nabeel, and Jackson on French thinkers
Nabeel: (57:47) …For example, there’s a French thinker called Jacques Derrida. I probably should go and read him at some point, but I’m not entirely convinced there is a there there, and I don’t know anyone who swears by it. If Tyler told me, “Nabeel, you are missing a big piece of your life by not reading him,” I would go read him tomorrow. But I don’t have any of those people.
Tyler: (58:44) Lacan is my marginal case of “no there there.” So Derrida, I put in a fair amount of effort and did conclude, rightly or wrongly, that there’s no there there. So you can, in my opinion, write him off. Lacan, I keep on wondering. Smart people still will say, “This is amazing.” I’ve tried a bunch of times, but I haven’t given up. There’s a new Lacan book coming out later this summer and I’ll try it again. We’ll see. That’s my marginal “is there a there there” figure.
Nabeel: (59:13) Yeah. I think modern French thinkers put too much of a premium on sounding cool, or postmodern philosophy generally. I think it repays some effort to kind of grasp the core ideas, but it doesn’t repay making it your life’s reading or something.
Tyler: (59:26) Baudrillard is quite good and Foucault is extremely interesting. So I’m not against “the French” in this period, but if they keep on not making sense, I feel I’m educated well enough.
Jackson: (59:37) You have a lot of context.
Tyler: (59:38) That at some point I can strike the ledger.
Nabeel: (59:41) I do—Nowadays, I just put Foucault through GPT and I just have GPT explain it to me, and that’s going to be good enough for now.
Tyler: (59:50) The problem with Foucault, I think, is so much of the history is wrong in a quite mundane way, so there’s something very problematic about it. But the stuff—I think it’s in a way quite simple, almost too simple. And the fact that the current right has so latched on to Foucault is a sign that it’s simple. I don’t mean necessarily bad, but there are these structures and they’re trying to tell you what to do. And there’s something anonymous about that as well. It’s not just the individuals who form the conspiracy. It’s how a lot of the world thinks today.
Here is the longer discussion, already linked to.
How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi
How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi is a good piece in the Atlantic by Idrees Kahloon filled with colorful anecdotes of a nation in decline:
The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.
Incomes can be shockingly low: Junior doctors recently went on strike for the 15th time in three years over their salaries, which start at just £38,800; the median salary for British civil servants is £35,680. In April, amid the Iran conflict, the Daily Mail pounced on Prime Minister Keir Starmer for vacationing in Valencia, Spain, at what the tabloid described as a luxury hotel, costing £200 a night.
Americans are likely to come away a bit smug, especially as Independence Day approaches and Europeans are enjoying our giant stadiums and central air conditioning. Look deeper, however, and Britain’s story becomes more uncomfortable. Does this sound familiar?
Recent plans to transform the country have rested in no small part on High Speed 2, a superfast rail line intended to connect London with Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester. But since HS2 was proposed, in 2009, its costs have tripled, to more than £100 billion. It is the most expensive rail line in the world. (A special structure to protect a rare bat species near the rail line in Buckinghamshire required 8,000 permits and was built at a cost of £216 million.) The most important sections of the proposed route have been lopped off. The rump line—going from Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city, to not-quite-central London—may be finished by 2040…. HS2 has been delayed for so long that two swiftly built towers near the terminus now themselves look derelict and in need of demolition.
…Building infrastructure, or much of anything else, has become all but impossible in the United Kingdom. In addition to having the world’s most expensive (not yet built) train line, Britain also hosts the world’s most expensive (not yet built) nuclear-power plant, Hinkley Point C. Its environmental-impact assessment ran 31,401 pages; the plant will feature a £700 million “fish disco,” which will pulse sounds underwater to deter animals from its intake pipes.
Upon closer inspection, the United States looks a lot less like a shining city on a hill and a lot more like a declining Great Britain, appendaged with one or two dynamic sectors, most notably AI. The similarities are especially obvious in the retrograde solutions Britain has lumbered into, namely attacking immigrants and trade—Brexit being the equivalent of a high tariff regime. Nations in decline, like people, tend to lash out at others rather than deal with their real problems. Needless to say, neither immigrants nor trade explain Britain’s—or California’s—inability to build high-speed rail or other infrastructure.
It is discomforting to watch the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, individual rights, and free speech—the nation that once built the railways, the steam engines, the factories that remade the world—lose the capacity to build much of anything, or even to tolerate people speaking their minds. In parallel, instead of dealing with our real problems—almost all of our creation—the right gets literally hysterical over symbolic culture-war questions like birthright citizenship, while the left nominates candidates with Marxist-Leninist sympathies. The abundance and progress movements are some of the few shining lights. It’s not too late. But Great Britain is a warning.
Noah Smith on negative emotional contagion
Every movement in 2020s America is defined not by what they want, but by who they hate.
Rightists: Immigrants
Leftists: Israel
Intellectual liberals: Rich techbros
Here is the link, in the last six months or so I have noticed all these trends getting worse. Praise goes to all those who avoid negative emotional contagion, you will prove the saviors of our civilization.
What should I ask Daron Acemoglu?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. Obviously Acemoglu has published plenty, but likely this chat will focus on his recent writings and pronouncements on AI, and most of all his forthcoming book What Happened to Liberal Democracy? Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity. So what should I ask him?
My Conversation with Joanne Paul
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Joanne Paul is a historian at the University of Sussex, author, and a go-to Tudor expert on YouTube. She tells Tyler she’s drawn to the 16th century because it sits between the medieval and the modern, and because its paths not taken are a way of asking whether our own world had to turn out this way. Her biography Thomas More: A Life takes its subject in that spirit, refusing to reduce More to either martyr or monster.
Tyler and Joanne discuss how More influenced Erasmus, what to make of Utopia, why fear drove More’s persecution of heretics, how Holbein’s portraits of More and Cromwell differ, what movie depictions get wrong about More, how his execution was viewed at the time, how the Tudor period paved the way for Shakespeare and the scientific revolution, the surprising social mobility of the period, how the City of London governed itself and where that clashed with the Crown, Joanne’s upbringing in Canada and what drew her to English history, what she thinks sits beneath a lot of Britain’s current stagnation, the subject of her next book, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: As you point out in the book, and you’re well aware, he oversaw the persecution of heretics. He oversaw torture. He was misogynistic when he wrote about women. Was he just a bad guy? Is that the correct picture of More, or am I supposed to admire him? He took a stand on principle, and he died, but what was the principle, really? To defend Catholicism, which then was also an instrument of torture?
PAUL: As a historian, I take one of my principles as to not try to put people into a box of good or evil.
COWEN: I’m not a historian. Should I just dislike him?
PAUL: No, I think you should be interested in these contradictions. I think you should be interested in the complexity that is the human experience. I think we should ask questions about why someone who is clearly very educated, clearly very intelligent, clearly very worldly in many ways, has also these beliefs that we rightly and should condemn. With Thomas More, I think he comes to these beliefs out of a place of fear. I think that’s something that we should take note of. He was afraid of what he would consider the Lutheran heresy. He was afraid of how it would lead to the breakdown of his society, and he was convinced by those people who held that to be the case.
I think that there are important lessons in that for us today, the way that we can become convinced that a group will lead to the breakdown of our society, that fear can lead to that hatred and indeed that violence. I think that’s an important lesson. If we just reject, oh, he was bad, then I don’t think we understand the way in which someone like Thomas More can become convinced that way. In terms of his role in opposing heresy, yes, he advocated for the persecution of heretics. He thought it was right and just that they were burned at the stake. I think that at times his role in that has been overstated, and I think we just need to understand what it was in historical reality.
He imprisoned heretics. He interrogated them. We don’t know if he tortured them. That was something he was accused of at the time. He said he didn’t. I don’t know that we’ll ever find evidence either way on that. There were three cases that he oversaw as Lord Chancellor of those who were burned at the stake. I only say that because I see on social media and the like and people presenting me with the suggestion that hundreds were put to the flames by Thomas More personally. I just think we have to understand what it is that we are actually talking about.
And:
COWEN: What precursors of the scientific revolution do you see, other than education? That’s coming in the 17th century. Is there more emphasis on calculation or measurement or accounting? What are the roots in the Tudor period?
PAUL: A lot of that comes from the Renaissance, as indeed humanism does. There’s this reintroduction of a lot of classical texts, an advocacy for reading these classical texts, particularly Greek texts and learning Greek. A lot of it is coming from an engagement with Greek mathematics and science. The other thing, and this is something I really emphasize when I’m teaching the scientific revolution with my students, is that we have to remember that the scientific revolution isn’t this grand triumph of science over religion or mysticism or what have you, that these two things very much go hand in hand through the 16th and into the 17th century.
The scientific method, for instance, comes from alchemy, which we might think of as an occult science. The methodology for scientific experimentation comes out of this desire to find the philosopher’s stone. Someone like John Dee is this polymath, as well as this occultist, Francis Bacon, has his interests in these sort of mystical elements as well. The growth and interest in what we might think of as mystical texts, a lot of them having to do with Judaism, as well as these Greek texts, comes together to form, I think, something that looks like the foundations of the scientific revolution.
A good episode with many points of interest. And I enjoyed Joanne’s recent book Thomas More: A Life.
Alan Greenspan, RIP at 100
Here is a NYT obituary. Here is a WSJ obituary.
Adrian Wooldridge on Sweden and liberalism
Sweden is continuing to reap the rewards of this mixture of fiscal rectitude and pro-market reforms. GDP is projected to grow by 1.8% to 1.9% this year; headline inflation stands at 1.5%; debt-to-GDP ratio is one of the lowest in the world, at just above 35%.
There are some flies in this ointment, of course: The economy has recently endured a bout of stagnation, unemployment is at an uncomfortably high 9.4% and Sweden has one of Europe’s highest rates of household debt. But the business environment is healthy, particularly when it comes to business to business. Sweden has a diversified business scene — the highest number of unicorns per capita in Europe, with notable successes such as Spotify, but also a healthy manufacturing and engineering sector. Many of these established companies are thriving because of a surge in demand for both server farms and military equipment…
Sweden has recently experienced its first net emigration in 50 years, thanks to higher minimum wages for labor visas, tougher citizenship tests and, most controversially, financial payouts of up to $37,000 for refugees who volunteer to leave. It has also made progress against violent crime in the immigrant-heavy suburbs, increasing police numbers and toughening the penal code, including a boost to stop-and-search powers and a lowering in the age of criminal responsibility to 14. The number of shootings fell by 63%, from 390 in 2022 to 147 by the end of 2025.
Here is the full Bloomberg column. And here is Adrian’s new book on liberalism, self-recommending.