Category: Political Science
Political Organization in Pre-Colonial Africa
We provide an overview of the explanations for the relative lack of state formation historically in Africa. In doing so we systematically document for the first time the extent to which Africa was politically decentralized, calculating that in 1880 there were probably 45,000 independent polities which were rarely organized on ethnic lines. At most 2% of these could be classified as states. [emphasis added by TC] We advance a new argument for this extreme political decentralization positing that African societies were deliberately organized to stop centralization emerging. In this they were successful. We point out some key aspects of African societies that helped them to manage this equilibrium. We also emphasize how the organization of the economy was subservient to these political goals.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Soeren J. Henn and James A. Robinson.
The EU production function
The central puzzle of the EU is its extraordinary productivity. Grand coalitions, like the government recently formed in Germany, typically produce paralysis. The EU’s governing coalition is even grander, spanning the center-right EPP, the Socialists, the Liberals, and often the Greens, yet between 2019 and 2024, the EU passed around 13,000 acts, about seven per day. The U.S. Congress, over the same period, produced roughly 3,500 pieces of legislation and 2,000 resolutions.1
Not only is the coalition broad, but encompasses huge national and regional diversity. In Brussels, the Parliament has 705 members from roughly 200 national parties. The Council represents 27 sovereign governments with conflicting interests. A law faces a double hurdle, where a qualified majority of member states and of members of parliament must support it. The system should produce gridlock, more still than the paralysis commonly associated with the American federal government. Yet it works fast and produces a lot, both good and bad. The reason lies in the incentives: every actor in the system is rewarded for producing legislation, and not for exercising their vetoes…
Formally, the EU is a multi-actor system with many veto points (Commission, Parliament, Council, national governments, etc.), which should require broad agreement and hence slow decision making. In practice, consensus is manufactured in advance rather than reached through deliberation.
By the time any proposal comes up for an official vote, most alternatives have been eliminated behind closed doors. A small team of rapporteurs agrees among themselves; the committee endorses their bargain; the plenary, in turn, ratifies the committee deal; and the Council Presidency, pressed for time, accepts the compromise (with both Council and Parliament influenced along the way by the Commission’s mediation and drafting). Each actor can thus claim a victory and no one’s incentive is to apply the brakes.
That is from an excellent piece by Luis Garicano. What would Buchanan and Tullock say?
Welcome to the Crazy CAFE
To let Americans buy smaller cars, Trump had to weaken fuel-efficiency standards. Does that sound crazy? Small cars, of course, have much higher fuel efficiency. Yet this is exactly how the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards work.
Since 2011, fuel-economy targets scale with a vehicle’s “footprint” (wheelbase × track width). Big vehicles get lenient targets; small vehicles face demanding ones. A microcar that gets 40 MPG might be judged against a target of 50-60 MPG, while a full-size truck doing 20 MPG can satisfy a 22 MPG requirement.. The small car is clearly more efficient, yet it fails the rule that the truck passes.
The policy was meant to be fair to producers of large vehicles, but it rewards bloat. Make a car bigger and compliance gets easier. Add crash standards built around heavier vehicles and it’s obvious why the US market produces crossovers and trucks while smaller and much less expensive city-cars, familiar in Europe and Asia, never show up. At a press conference rolling back CAFE standards, Trump noted he’d seen small “kei” cars on his Asia trip—”very small, really cute”—and directed the Transportation Secretary to clear regulatory barriers so they could be built and sold in America.
Trump’s rollback—cutting the projected 2031 fleet average from roughly 50.4 MPG to 34.5 MPG—relaxes the math enough that microcars could comply again. Only Kafka would appreciate a fuel-economy system that makes small fuel-efficient cars hard to sell and giant trucks easy. Yet the looser rules remove a barrier to greener vehicles while also handing a windfall to big truck makers. A little less Kafka, a little more Tullock.
Political pressure on the Fed
From a forthcoming paper by Thomas Drechsel:
This paper combines new data and a narrative approach to identify variation in political pressure on the Federal Reserve. From archival records, I build a data set of personal interactions between U.S. Presidents and Fed officials between 1933 and 2016. Since personal interactions do not necessarily reflect political pressure, I develop a narrative identification strategy based on President Nixon’s pressure on Fed Chair Burns. I exploit this narrative through restrictions on a structural vector autoregression that includes the President-Fed interaction data. I find that political pressure to ease monetary policy (i) increases the price level strongly and persistently, (ii) does not lead to positive effects on real economic activity, (iii) contributed to inflationary episodes outside of the Nixon era, and (iv) transmits differently from a typical monetary policy easing, by having a stronger effect on inflation expectations. Quantitatively, increasing political pressure by half as much as Nixon, for six months, raises the price level by about 7% over the following decade.
That is not entirely a positive omen for the current day.
My Conversation with the excellent Dan Wang
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Dan debate whether American infrastructure is actually broken or just differently optimized, why health care spending should reach 35% of GDP, how lawyerly influences shaped East Asian development differently than China, China’s lack of a liberal tradition and why it won’t democratize like South Korea or Taiwan did, its economic dysfunction despite its manufacturing superstars, Chinese pragmatism and bureaucratic incentives, a 10-day itinerary for Yunnan, James C. Scott’s work on Zomia, whether Beijing or Shanghai is the better city, Liu Cixin and why volume one of The Three-Body Problem is the best, why contemporary Chinese music and film have declined under Xi, Chinese marriage markets and what it’s like to be elderly in China, the Dan Wang production function, why Stendhal is his favorite novelist and Rossini’s Comte Ory moves him, what Dan wants to learn next, whether LLMs will make Tyler’s hyper-specific podcast questions obsolete, what flavor of drama their conversation turned out to be, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: When will Chinese suburbs be really attractive?
WANG: What are Chinese suburbs? You use this term, Tyler, and I’m not sure what exactly they mean.
COWEN: You have a yard and a dog and a car, right?
WANG: Yes.
COWEN: You control your school district with the other parents. That’s a suburb.
WANG: How about never? I’m not expecting that China will have American-style suburbs anytime soon, in part because of the social engineering projects that are pretty extensive in China. I think there is a sense in which Chinese cities are not especially dense. Indian cities are much, much more dense. I think that Chinese cities, the streets are not necessarily terribly full of people all the time. They just sprawl quite extensively.
They sprawl in ways that I think the edges of the city still look somewhat like the center of the city, which there’s too many high-rises. There’s probably fewer parks. There’s probably fewer restaurants. Almost nobody has a yard and a dog in their home. That’s in part because the Communist Party has organized most people to live in apartment compounds in which it is much easier to control them.
We saw this really extensively in the pandemic, in which people were unable to leave their Shanghai apartment compounds for anything other than getting their noses and mouths swabbed. I write a little bit about how, if you take the rail outside of major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, you hit farmland really, really quickly. That is in part because the Communist Party assesses governors as well as mayors on their degree of food self-sufficiency.
Cities like Shanghai and Beijing have to produce a lot of their own crops, both grains as well as vegetables, as well as fruits, as well as livestock, within a certain radius so that in case there’s ever a major devastating war, they don’t have to rely on strawberries from Mexico or strawberries from Cambodia, or Thailand. There’s a lot of farmland allocated outside of major cities. I think that will prevent suburban sprawl. You can’t control people if they all have a yard as well as a dog. I think the Communist Party will not allow it.
COWEN: Whether the variable of engineers matters, I went and I looked at the history of other East Asian economies, which have done very well in manufacturing, built out generally excellent infrastructure. None of these problems with the Second Avenue line in New York. Taiwan, like the presidents, at least if we believe GPT-5, three of them were lawyers and none of them were engineers. South Korea, you have actually some economists, a lot of bureaucrats.
WANG: Wow. Imagine that. Economists in charge, Tyler.
COWEN: I wouldn’t think it could work. A few lawyers, one engineer. Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, he’s a lawyer. He thinks in a very lawyerly manner. Singapore has arguably done the best of all those countries. Much richer than China, inspired China. Why should I think engineers rather than just East Asia, and a bunch of other accompanying facts about these places are what matter?
WANG: Japan, a lot of lawyers in the top leadership. What exactly was the leadership of Hong Kong? A bunch of British civil servants.
COWEN: Some of whom are probably lawyers or legal-type minds, right? Not in general engineers.
WANG: PPE grads. I think that we can understand the engineering variable mostly because of how much more China has done relative to Japan and South Korea and Taiwan.
COWEN: It’s much, much poorer. Per capita manufacturing output is gone much better in these other countries.
And:
WANG: Tyler, what does it say about us that you and I have generally a lot of similar interests in terms of, let’s call it books, music, all sorts of things, but when it comes to particular categories of things, we oppose each other diametrically. I much prefer Anna Karenina to War and Peace. I prefer Buddenbrooks to Magic Mountain. Here again, you oppose me. What’s the deal?
COWEN: I don’t think the differences are that big. For instance, if we ask ourselves, what’s the relative ranking of Chengdu plus Chongqing compared to the rest of the world? We’re 98.5% in agreement compared to almost anyone else. When you get to the micro level, the so-called narcissism of petty differences, obviously, you’re born in China. I grew up in New Jersey. It’s going to shape our perspectives.
Anything in China, you have been there in a much more full-time way, and you speak and read Chinese, and none of that applies to me. I’m popping in and out as a tourist. Then, I think the differences make much more sense. It’s possible I would prefer to live in Shanghai for essentially the reasons you mentioned. If I’m somewhere for a week, I’m definitely going to pick Beijing. I’ll go around to the galleries. The things that are terrible about the city just don’t bother me that much, because I know I’ll be gone.
WANG: 98.5% agreement. I’ll take that, Tyler. It’s you and me against the rest of the world, but then we’ll save our best disagreements for each other.
COWEN: Let’s see if you can pass an intellectual Turing test. Why is it that I think Yunnan is the single best place in the world to visit? Just flat out the best if you had to pick one region. Not why you think it is, but why I think it is.
Strongly recommended, Dan and I had so much fun we kept going for about an hour and forty minutes. And of course you should buy and read Dan’s bestselling book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.
Congressional leadership is corrupt
Using transaction-level data on US congressional stock trades, we find that lawmakers who later ascend to leadership positions perform similarly to matched peers beforehand but outperform them by 47 percentage points annually after ascension. Leaders’ superior performance arises through two mechanisms. The political influence channel is reflected in higher returns when their party controls the chamber, sales of stocks preceding regulatory actions, and purchase of stocks whose firms receiving more government contracts and favorable party support on bills. The corporate access channel is reflected in stock trades that predict subsequent corporate news and greater returns on donor-owned or home-state firms.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Shang-Jin Wei and Yifan Zhou. Of course Alex T. has been on this issue for a long time now.
*Liberal Worlds: James Bryce and the Democratic Intellect*
By H.S. Jones, an excellent book. For all the resurgence of interest in government and its problems, Bryce has received remarkably little attention. But his theory of low-quality, careerist politcians, combined with imperfectly informed voters, seems highly relevant to our current day. Public opinion is slow, and largely reactive, but potent once mobilized. Leadership can truly matter, and he stresses national character and civic education. In other words, Bryce’s The American Commonwealth is a book still worth reading.
I had not known that Bryce was born in Belfast, or that he was so opposed to women’s suffrage. Or that he was so interested in Armenia, climbed Mount Ararat, and was fascinated by the inevitability of interracial marriage and its consequences (no, not in the usual racist way). He was an expert on Roman law.
Recommended, and also very well written.
Meta-analytical effect of economic inequality on well-being or mental health
Some of us have known this for some time:
Exposure to economic inequality is widely thought to erode subjective well-being and mental health, which carries important societal implications. However, existing studies face reproducibility issues, and theory suggests that inequality only affects individuals in disadvantaged contexts. Here we present a meta-analysis of 168 studies using multilevel data (11,389,871 participants from 38,335 geographical units) identified across 10 bibliographical databases (2000–2022). Contrary to popular narratives, random-effects models showed that individuals in more unequal areas do not report lower subjective well-being (standardized odds ratio (OR+0.05) = 0.979, 95% confidence interval = 0.951–1.008). Moreover, although inequality initially seemed to undermine mental health, the publication-bias-corrected association was null (OR+0.05 = 1.019; 0.990–1.049)17. Meta-analytical effects were smaller than the smallest effect of interest, and specification curve analyses confirmed these results across ≈95% of 768 alternative models. When assessing study quality and certainty of evidence using ROBINS-E and GRADE criteria, ROBINS-E rated 80% of studies at high risk of bias, and GRADE assigned greater certainty to the null effects than to the negative effects. Meta-regressions revealed that the adverse association between inequality and mental health was confined to low-income samples. Moreover, machine-learning analyses19 indicated that the association with well-being was negative in high-inflation contexts but positive in low-inflation contexts. These moderation effects were replicated using Gallup World Poll data (up to 2 million participants). These findings challenge the view that economic inequality universally harms psychological health and can inform public health policy.
That is now published in Nature, by Nicholas Sommet, et.al., via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
What should I ask Harvey Mansfield?
I will be doing a Conversation with him. So what should I ask?
Note he has a new book coming out early next year, namely
Against We
I propose a moratorium on the generalized first-person plural for all blog posts, social media comments, opinion writing, headline writers, for all of December. No “we, “us,” or “our,” unless the “we” is made explicit.
No more “we’re living in a golden age,” “we need to talk about,” “we can’t stop talking about,” “we need to wise up.” They’re endless. “We’ve never seen numbers like this.” “We are not likely to forget.” “We need not mourn for the past.” “What exactly are we trying to fix?” “How are we raising our children?” “I hate that these are our choices.”
…“We” is what linguists call a deictic word. It has no meaning without context. It is a pointer. If I say “here,” it means nothing unless you can see where I am standing. If I say “we,” it means nothing unless you know who is standing next to me.
…in a headline like “Do we need to ban phones in schools?” the “we” is slippery. The linguist Norman Fairclough called this way of speaking to a mass audience as if they were close friends synthetic personalization. The “we” creates fake intimacy and fake equality.
Nietzsche thought a lot about how language is psychology. He would look askance at the “we” in posts like “should we ban ugly buildings?” He might ask: who are you that you do not put yourself in the role of the doer or the doing? Are you a lion or a lamb?
Perhaps you are simply a coward hiding in the herd, Martin Heidegger might say, with das Man. Don’t be an LLM. Be like Carol!
Hannah Arendt would say you’re dodging the blame. “Where all are guilty, nobody is.” Did you have a hand in the policy you are now critiquing? Own up to your role.
Perhaps you are confusing your privileged perch with the broader human condition. Roland Barthes called this ex-nomination. You don’t really want to admit that you are in a distinct pundit class, so you see your views as universal laws.
Adorno would say you are selling a fake membership with your “jargon of authenticity,” offering the reader membership in your club. As E. Nelson Bridwell in the old Mad Magazine had it: What do you mean We?
…If you are speaking for a very specific we, then say so. As Mark Twain is said to have said, “only presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms ought to have the right to use we.”
I could go on. But you get the drift. The bottom line is that “we” is squishy. I is the brave pronoun. I is the hardier pronoun. I is the—dare I say it—manly pronoun.
I agree.
My excellent Conversation with Cass Sunstein
Cass was in top form, and so we went on for almost two hours. In his Substack he described it as “The most fun interview I have ever done.” Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Cass discuss whether liberalism is self-undermining or simply vulnerable to illiberal forces, the tensions in how a liberal immigration regime would work, whether new generations of liberal thinkers are emerging, if Derek Parfit counts as a liberal, Mill’s liberal wokeism, the allure of Mises’ “cranky enthusiasm for freedom,” whether the central claim of The Road to Serfdom holds up, how to blend indigenous rights with liberal thought, whether AIs should have First Amendment protections, the argument for establishing a right not to be manipulated, better remedies for low-grade libel, whether we should have trials run by AI, how Bob Dylan embodies liberal freedom, Cass’ next book about animal rights, and more.
I will reproduce the section Cass pulled for his own Substack:
COWEN: Now, we started with the topic of liberalism. How is it you think about or characterize the liberalism of Bob Dylan?
SUNSTEIN: Bob Dylan is a liberal. His liberalism is captured in the line, “He not busy being born is busy dying.” I hope he’s immortal, but if anything is on his epigraph, that would be a good candidate.
The notion of self-invention, of freedom, is central to basically everything. His refusal to keep singing the same song — you can hear him talking about it in some of the interviews. He said, “I could do that. I could just do that forever. I knew how they’d react.” He said, “What’s that about?” He said, “I needed to do something else.” But of course, the line, “I needed to do something else” — that’s my line. How he would put it would be much more vivid and surprising than that.
His “Like a Rolling Stone” is an anthem of freedom. I heard it, actually, in concert a few years ago. It was a great performance. It wasn’t young, but it was a great performance. The audience went wild when he did “Like a Rolling Stone.” That was the final song. It was the encore. It wasn’t just because it was the greatest rock song ever written. It was because of how he did it. I thought, “What’s going on in this song? Why is everyone exhilarated?” The song, which he described when he wrote it as vomit, hatred directed at somewhere that was real — it wasn’t that, or it was a little bit that, but it was a song of liberty.
“How does it feel to be on your own with no direction home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone?” Everyone felt like they were flying. He makes that — “Like a Rolling Stone” — be a song of freedom. If you look at his angry songs — “Positively 4th Street” — there’s a freedom in being, of course, uninhibited, able to say things, but also a freedom of disconnection.
When he’s asked why did he change his name, I have an account of why he actually did. I think he gave it exactly once, but in his more characteristic way, he said, “This is America. You can change your name.” Then he said, “I was born. I didn’t think I was born with the right name. I could make it up. I could say that sounds more like I was.”
Making rootlessness not be a curse, but instead something that is . . . the word joy is too clichéd for Dylan. If you look at his love songs, like “If You See Her, Say Hello,” which isn’t one of my favorites, but it’s good. There’s a connection with the one he loved, who got away, but you can feel the sense of freedom.
COWEN: “Visions of Johanna”?
SUNSTEIN: Yes, completely. He’s torn. That has the great opening line. “Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks When you’re trying to be so quiet?” Did Yeats write better lines than that? Probably, but he was Yeats.
COWEN: Blood on the Tracks — a liberal album?
SUNSTEIN: Oh, yes.
COWEN: How would you express that?
SUNSTEIN: Well, I’m thinking “Buckets of Rain” is the closing song. Right before that, there’s a song, “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” That’s it, which is, I think, one of his greatest songs. That’s a liberal song of freedom and separation, that she’s going, but he’s going to see her everywhere, and there’s smiling at impermanence. That is a big liberal theme — smiling at impermanence — because impermanence makes things not routine and also makes for freedom.
COWEN: “Idiot Wind” is the angry song of the batch, right?
SUNSTEIN: Yes, it’s pretty mad. He said about that song, “I don’t know why people like it. There’s so much sadness and distress in it.”
COWEN: Do you see your own liberalism or just yourself in the liberalism of Bob Dylan?
SUNSTEIN: I think so.
COWEN: Reinventing yourself, not quite wanting to be pinned down, doing a lot of stuff.
SUNSTEIN: He likes, I think, abandoning and going on to something that’s very different. I wish I’d gone electric or had some equivalent of that. But doing something quite different — I do share a little bit with him. I like it when I think something I thought was wrong. I now am very enthusiastic about the Austrian economists and Hayek. I’ve always admired them, of course, but I didn’t feel that they were on my team. Now I feel I’ve gone to their team. I don’t feel ashamed that I was wrong before. I feel excited that I’m less wrong now.
Definitely recommended, I could have pulled out many other parts as well. Again, I am happy to recommend Cass’s new book Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom.
“Why ‘Humane’ Immigration Policy Ends in Cruelty”
That is the title of my latest Free Press column, which is interesting throughout. Here is one bit from it:
Behind any immigration debate is an uncomfortable truth: In rich, successful democracies, every workable immigration policy, over enough time, offends liberal instincts or public opinion—often both. We oscillate between compassion and coercive control, and the more we do of one, the more we seem to need some of the other.
The dilemma: Due to the ever-rising numbers of migration to the United States, the enforcement of immigration restrictions has to become more oppressive and more unpleasant as time passes. The alternative course, which is equally unpleasant, is that immigration increases to levels that voters find unacceptable, and we fall under the rule of anti-immigrant parties—which are illiberal on many other issues as well.
The news gets worse. The more pro-immigration you are and the more you allow some foreigners to enter this country, the more others on the outside will wish to come too. Unless you are going to open the border entirely (not a good idea), you will end up having to impose increasingly harsh measures on illegal arrivals, and tougher and tougher restrictions on potentially legal applicants. The liberals in essence become the illiberals.
So I mourn our ongoing and intensifying moral dilemma. At the margin, there are so many people who want to come here (a sign of American success, of course) that there is no kind and gentle way to limit their numbers to a level the public finds acceptable.
And this:
A third alternative is to slow the intake. Keep it fast enough for America to remain “a nation of migrants,” but slow enough to avoid major backlash or to asymptotically approach open borders.
That sounds pretty good, right? But here is the illiberal catch: Given the growing attractiveness of migration to America, penalties and enforcement have to get tougher each year. There are no ways to send large numbers of people back that are not cruel and coercive. There are also few ways to keep people out that do not involve the extensive presence of coercive police, border arrests, imprisonment, and other unpleasant measures.
We might decide to let in more migrants, but still we will end up being cruel to the would-be migrants at the margin. And as demand to migrate continues to rise, we have to be increasingly coercive over time.
That does not have to mean masked ICE men grabbing people randomly off the streets (which leads to violating the constitutional rights of mistakenly identified citizens), but one way or another it is going to involve threats of violence against actual human bodies. That can mean turning away boats full of desperate people, flying people back home, putting them in interim jails, and in general treating them in ways I find deeply unpleasant and disturbing. It is no accident that the Biden administration could not completely avoid the Trumpian policy of separating illegal migrants from the children that accompany them.
Definitely recommended, one of my more interesting pieces this year.
Enlightenment ideas and the belief in progress leading up to the Industrial Revolution
Using textual analysis of 173,031 works printed in England between 1500 and 1900, we test whether British culture evolved to manifest a heightened belief in progress associated with science and industry. Our analysis yields three main findings. First, there was a separation in the language of science and religion beginning in the 17th century. Second, scientific volumes became more progress-oriented during the Enlightenment. Third, industrial works—especially those at the science-political economy nexus—were more progress-oriented beginning in the 17th century. It was therefore the more pragmatic, industrial works which reflected the cultural values cited as important for Britain’s takeoff.
That is from a paper by Ali Almelhem, Murat Iyigun, Austin Kennedy, and Jared Rubin. Now forthcoming at the QJE.
My very fun Conversation with Blake Scholl
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. This was at a live event (the excellent Roots of Progress conference), so it is only about forty minutes, shorter than usual. Here is the episode summary:
Blake Scholl is one of the leading figures working to bring back civilian supersonic flight. As the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, he’s building a new generation of supersonic aircraft and pushing for the policies needed to make commercial supersonic travel viable again. But he’s equally as impressive as someone who thinks systematically about improving dysfunction—whether it’s airport design, traffic congestion, or defense procurement—and sees creative solutions to problems everyone else has learned to accept.
Tyler and Blake discuss why airport terminals should be underground, why every road needs a toll, what’s wrong with how we board planes, the contrasting cultures of Amazon and Groupon, why Concorde and Apollo were impressive tech demos but terrible products, what Ayn Rand understood about supersonic transport in 1957, what’s wrong with aerospace manufacturing, his heuristic when confronting evident stupidity, his technique for mastering new domains, how LLMs are revolutionizing regulatory paperwork, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: There’s plenty about Boom online and in your interviews, so I’d like to take some different tacks here. This general notion of having things move more quickly, I’m a big fan of that. Do you have a plan for how we could make moving through an airport happen more quickly? You’re in charge. You’re the dictator. You don’t have to worry about bureaucratic obstacles. You just do it.
SCHOLL: I think about this in the shower like every day. There is a much better airport design that, as best I can tell, has never been built. Here’s the idea: You should put the terminals underground. Airside is above ground. Terminals are below ground. Imagine a design with two runways. There’s an arrival runway, departure runway. Traffic flows from arrival runway to departure runway. You don’t need tugs. You can delete a whole bunch of airport infrastructure.
Imagine you pull into a gate. The jetway is actually an escalator that comes up from underneath the ground. Then you pull forward, so you can delete a whole bunch of claptrap that is just unnecessary. The terminal underground should have skylights so it can still be incredibly beautiful. If you model fundamentally the thing on a crossbar switch, there are a whole bunch of insights for how to make it radically more efficient. Sorry. This is a blog post I want to write one day. Actually, it’s an airport I want to build.
And;
COWEN: I’m at the United desk. I have some kind of question. There’s only two or three people in front of me, but it takes forever. I notice they’re just talking back and forth to the assistant. They’re discussing the weather or the future prospects for progress, total factor productivity. I don’t know. I’m frustrated. How can we make that process faster? What’s going wrong there?
SCHOLL: The thing I most don’t understand is why it requires so many keystrokes to check into a hotel room. What are they writing?
What are they writing?
American democracy is very much alive, though not in all regards well
The Democrats who won in the November elections are all going to assume office without incident or controversy.
The Supreme Court is likely to rule against at least major parts of the Trump tariff plan, his signature initiative. Trump already has complained vocally on social media about this. He also preemptively announced that some of the food tariffs would be reversed, in the interests of “affordability.”
National Guard troops have been removed from Chicago and Portland, in part due to court challenges. The troops in WDC have turned out to be a nothingburger from a civil liberties point of view.
Here is an account of November 18 and all that happened that day:
* House votes 427-1 to release the Epstein files, a veto-proof+ majority
* A federal judge blocked GOP redistricting map in Texas, meaning net net with CA measure passed, Democrats could pick up seats for 2026, KARMA!
* A federal appeals court, including two Trump appointed judges, rejected Trump’s defamation lawsuit against CNN over the term “Big Lie,” finding the case meritless
* Corporate Public Broadcasting agree to fulfill its $36 million annual contract with NPR, after a judge told Trump appointees at CPB that their defense was not credible
* A NY judge dismissed Trump’s calling of New York’s law barring immigration arrests in state and local courthouses.
The Senate also sided with the House on the Epstein files. Nate Silver and many others write about how Trump is now quite possibly a lame duck President.
I do not doubt that there are many bad policies, and also much more corruption, and a more transparent form of corruption, which is corrosive in its own right. But it was never the case that American democracy was going to disappear. That view was one of the biggest boo-boos held by (some) American elites in recent times, and I hope we will start seeing people repudiating it.
I think the causes of this error have been:
1. Extreme dislike of the Trump administration, leading to emotional reactions when a bit more analysis would have done better.
2. Pessimism bias in the general sense.
3. Recency bias — for the earlier part of the term, Congress was relatively quiescent.
4. Cognitive and emotional inability to admit the simple truth of “democracy itself can lead to pretty bad outcomes,” thus the need to paint the status quo as something other than democracy.
5. The (largely incorrect) theory of good things happening in politics is “good people will them,” so from that starting point if you see bad people willing bad things you freak out. The understanding was never “spontaneous order” enough to begin with.
Any other?