Category: Uncategorized

Which countries won’t exist in the 22nd century?

Or sooner, that is the topic of my latest essay for The Free Press.  Excerpt:

The most radical redefinition of the nation-state may be coming from Haiti, where preexisting forms of government appear to have collapsed altogether. Haiti has been a troubled place for a long time, but when I used to visit in the 1990s you could come and go intact—at least if you exercised commonsense precautions.

But since 2023, there have been no elected officials of any kind present in Haiti. That is highly unusual for what was supposed to be a democracy. Circa mid-2025, criminal gangs took control of most of Port-au-Prince, the capital and most populous city of the country. Murder rates are skyrocketing, and if somehow I were foolish enough to show my face in the country (by the way, the main airport is not usually open) it is likely I would be kidnapped almost immediately.

The remaining fragments of the government have taken to carrying out drone attacks on the criminal gangs, but without making much if any progress in reestablishing their rule. Mainly it is the warlords who are left, and who also run the country.

Various U.S. interventions, most notably under President Clinton in the 1990s, and UN-backed troop deployments have failed to prevent Haiti from falling to pieces. You can say the world has not tried hard enough, but you cannot say the world has not tried. There is still a Kenyan-led, UN-affiliated force in Haiti, but it does not appear to exert any significant influence.

One possibility is that a dominant gang emerges and becomes the new government, albeit a highly oppressive one. Yet it is far from obvious that consolidation is in the works, as in many situations we observe multiple, warring drug gangs as a persistent outcome. Most likely, Haiti will have ceased to be a sustainable nation-state with an identifiable government. It would better be described as a state of Hobbesian anarchy.

Worth a ponder.

One or two game theoretic observations

So far the campaign is a major “win” for (non-LLM) AI, though that is not yet a story.  There is a reason why Palantir was priced at 300x earnings.

If you are one of those Iranian leaders, or nuclear scientists, your calculus has to be that you can never step outside again, at least not anytime soon.  I believe that situation is unprecedented in the history of wartime?  It remains to be seen how much that will shape the logic of deterrence and in turn outcomes, but I will be pondering this and observing.

POTMR.

How New Zealand invented inflation targeting

…the very next day, [Roger] Douglas appeared on TV declaring his intention to reduce inflation to ‘around 0 or 0 to 1 percent’ over the next couple of years, and then went on to make several similar comments in the following days.

Douglas would soften his stance on specific timelines but ask the Reserve Bank and Treasury to develop public inflation goals for the next few years that would support his earlier statements. The Bank added 1 percentage point to Douglas’s upper range to account for the measurement bias in inflation data at that time, arriving at a target range of 0–2 percent. Michael Reddell, head of the Reserve Bank’s monetary policy unit, said it was settled on ‘more by osmosis than by ministerial sign-off’.

This development led officials to entertain the idea of making inflation targets part of the Bank’s monetary policy framework. David J. Archer, a former Assistant Governor, said inflation targets were eventually chosen ‘as the least bad of the alternatives available’.

…A new Reserve Bank Act was passed in December 1989 and came into effect in February 1990. Governor Don Brash was tasked with reaching the 0–2 percent target by the end of 1992. To the great surprise of many, it was achieved a year ahead of schedule in December 1991.

Here is much more from Oscar Skyes at Works in Progress.

What happened when Spain brought back the wealth tax?

From the Journal of Public Economics Twitter feed:

What happened when Spain brought back the Wealth Tax in 2011? Using variation in exposure, this paper finds: – No drop in savings, but drop in taxable wealth—mainly via legal avoidance – Asset shifting caused most revenue loss – Estimated revenue loss was 2.75x initial 2011 rev.

Here is the full paper by Mariona Mas-Montserrat, José María Durán-Cabré, and Alejandro Esteller-Moré.  Via Jerusalem Demsas.

Wednesday assorted links

1. Jon Hartley on inferring multipliers from share price data.

2. Kevin Kelly’s calendar of Asian festivals.

3. Whale vowels are like human vowels? This link too.

4. Economic task replacement potential.  And I asked o3 pro to do an 800-word column as I would write it.  Not perfect, for instance there is one clear error about unemployment rates, but in general very good and with some touch-up better than what I would have written.  It is not hard to do additional rounds and edit/improve, but that is the one shot result.

5. Is Bhattacharya really this dense about autism and autism research?

Are LLMs overconfident? (just like humans)

Can LLMs accurately adjust their confidence when facing opposition? Building on previous studies measuring calibration on static fact-based question-answering tasks, we evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) in a dynamic, adversarial debate setting, uniquely combining two realistic factors: (a) a multi-turn format requiring models to update beliefs as new information emerges, and (b) a zero-sum structure to control for task-related uncertainty, since mutual high-confidence claims imply systematic overconfidence. We organized 60 three-round policy debates among ten state-of-the-art LLMs, with models privately rating their confidence (0-100) in winning after each round. We observed five concerning patterns: (1) Systematic overconfidence: models began debates with average initial confidence of 72.9% vs. a rational 50% baseline. (2) Confidence escalation: rather than reducing confidence as debates progressed, debaters increased their win probabilities, averaging 83% by the final round. (3) Mutual overestimation: in 61.7% of debates, both sides simultaneously claimed >=75% probability of victory, a logical impossibility. (4) Persistent self-debate bias: models debating identical copies increased confidence from 64.1% to 75.2%; even when explicitly informed their chance of winning was exactly 50%, confidence still rose (from 50.0% to 57.1%). (5) Misaligned private reasoning: models’ private scratchpad thoughts sometimes differed from their public confidence ratings, raising concerns about faithfulness of chain-of-thought reasoning. These results suggest LLMs lack the ability to accurately self-assess or update their beliefs in dynamic, multi-turn tasks; a major concern as LLMs are now increasingly deployed without careful review in assistant and agentic roles.

That is by Pradyumna Shyama Prasad and Minh Nhat Nguyen.  Here is the associated X thread.  Here is my earlier paper with Robin Hanson.

Tuesday assorted links

1. Mapping the power elite in Greenland.

2. Did “tanking” work for the 76ers?

3. Scott Sumner on the demise of the penny.

4. Claims from Nievas and Piketty: “A 20% increase in commodities prices from 1970 to 2025 period – very moderate compared to the very low market exchange rates of many global South countries – could turn Sub-Saharan Africa into a larger creditor than East Asia by 2025.”  Here are some comments.

5. Extremely life-like dolls in the culture that is Brazil (NYT).  Ross Douthat, telephone!

6. Justin Sandefur estimates the foreign lives costs of proposed budgetary changes to foreign aid.  Here is a redux of my 2023 column on PEPFAR.

Racial Disparities in Mortality by Sex, Age, and Cause of Death

Racial differences in mortality are large, persistent and likely caused, at least in part, by racism. While the causal pathways linking racism to mortality are conceptually well defined, empirical evidence to support causal claims related to its effect on health is incomplete. In this study, we provide a unique set of facts about racial disparities in mortality that all theories of racism and health need to confront to be convincing. We measure racial disparities in mortality between ages 40 and 80 for both males and females and for several causes of death and, measure how those disparities change with age. Estimates indicate that racial disparities in mortality grow with age but at a decreasing rate. Estimates also indicate that the source of racial disparities in mortality changes with age, sex and cause of death. For men in their fifties, racial disparities in mortality are primarily caused by disparities in deaths due to external causes. For both sexes, it is racial disparities in death from healthcare amenable causes that are the main cause of racial disparities in mortality between ages 55 and 75. Notably, racial disparities in cancer and other causes of death are relatively small even though these causes of death account for over half of all deaths. Adjusting for economic resources and health largely eliminate racial disparities in mortality at all ages and the mediating effect of these factors grows with age. The pattern of results suggests that, to the extent that racism influences health, it is primarily through racism’s effect on investments to treat healthcare amenable diseases that cause racial disparities in mortality.

In other words, much of the discourse on this topic is quite off.  That is from a new NBER working paper by Robert Kaestner, Anuj Gangopadhyaya, and Cuiping Schiman.

Monday assorted links

1. The motherhood mental health advantage.

2. “Cape Town residential property prices have risen by 160% since the start of 2010.” (FT)

3. Can taking photos impair your memories of events? (2021)

4. Short Greg Brockman video on the checks and balances in our AI future.

5. Criticism of the capabilities of AI reasoning models.  And Kevin Bryan responds.  And from Rohit.

6. Privatize archaeology.

7. Jennifer Burns reviews the new William F. Buckley biography (NYT).