Category: Uncategorized
What should I ask Bob Spitz?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him, Wikipedia here. I very much enjoyed his new book on the Rolling Stones, plus he has many older books of note, including on the 1969-1970 Knicks, Woodstock, Ronald Reagan, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Julia Child. All good books! He also for a while worked as manager to both Bruce Springsteen and Elton John.
So what should I ask him?
Friday assorted links
1. Trump’s focus on cultural issues (NYT).
2. Claims about Mythos (speculations). And a claim that the power of Mythos is being exaggerated.
3. The wage returns on industry credentials.
4. 2026 Roots of Progress blog-building intensive program.
5. Brian Albrecht reviews The Marginal Revolution.
6. Those new service sector jobs.
7. Harvard Crimson on Ludwig Straub.
8. How and why the Democratic Party has been evolving? Less interest in predistribution?
Cape Town estimate of the day
From young professionals to the working poor, many Cape Town residents complain that out-of-control housing prices have forced them to live far from the jobs, affluent schools and healthy supermarkets available in the city center. They blame deep-pocketed tourists for occupying housing in prime locations and developers for pricing them out.
Some 70 percent of the downtown residential housing stock is dedicated to hotel rooms or short-term rentals, according to a report the city released last year.
“The city’s actually being upgraded for tourists,” said Lizanne Domingo, a telemarketer. She takes a daily two-hour commute to work each way because she can’t afford to live close to the city, she said. “It’s not for our own people because the cost of living is ridiculously expensive.”
…housing prices in the city have surged 38 percent over the past six years.
Here is more from the NYT. It is one of the very best places in the world to visit right now.
South African discussions
These days South Africa is one of the best places to go to have interesting conversations. Obviously an English-fluent country does have many people following Trump, Islam in Europe, and so on. But you can have so many conversations about quite different topics, topics that are hardly covered in other parts of the world.
Like South Africa. But not only. The southern part of Africa too. People who live there are on the whole quite historically aware, since their history remains so influential on a day-to-day basis. I recall being introduced to one person who is a “Huguenot,” as his ancestors came over with the 100 or so Huguenots who came to South Africa in the 1680s. He is in fact a Huguenot.
Since the Gini coefficient of South Africa is about the same as the Gini coefficient of the world, South Africans are typically thinking about problems that are pretty close to the problems of the world as a whole. That is not usually the case for say Americans or Brits.
Few South Africans will underrate the importance of Africa for the world’s future.
It is easy to get into conversations with people from Zimbabwe, Malawi, Congo, and sometimes Nigeria. There are also readily accessible Jewish and Muslim communities, yet with perspectives different from what you might find elsewhere.
There is plenty of religion, if that is your interest. Plenty of good music too, sometimes on the street. An excellent arts scene, and past Kentridge probably you have not heard of any of the creators. The art too gives you a lot to talk about.
All sorts of tribes and languages, many of which I had never heard of before.
The European parts of the citizenry have some pre-Enlightenment origins and overall do not seem incredibly Woke. Your mileage there may vary, but again it is different from the educated classes in many other parts of the west.
Again for better or worse, but the “trad wife” phenomenon seems quite normal there, they might just use the word “wife.”
In some parts of the country, you can watch gentrification in reverse.
Most of all, South Africans have a finely-tuned sense of contingency. Things for them could go pretty well, or they could go pretty badly. Most people know that, and perhaps that is the greatest wisdom yet? Many of the rest of us try to deny that.
Visiting South Africa makes so many things transparent, or at least less opaque. Go!
Thursday assorted links
1. The “estrangement” from philosophy of economics.
2. Investing in scientific instruments.
3. New book coming on Carlsen vs. Niemann.
4. Houston economy growing at more than ten percent (and that is even without moving forward on bike paths).
LDS fact of the day
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has grown 66% this century, fueled in part by a record-breaking number of convert baptisms in 2025.
The church had 10,752,986 members at the end of 1999. The church had 17,887,212 at the end of 2025, according to an annual statistical report released Saturday during the church’s 196th Annual General Conference.
Furthermore the growth is coming in every part of the world (as a qualifier I am not sure what the outflow is). Here is the full article, via Tyler Ransom.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Waymo rollout in NYC is halted.
2. Back “plus” is the better answer (NYT). I am glad this is now settled, Alex T. can attest I have been insisting on this for a while. Note my earlier prediction.
3. Nicholas Decker on Ludwig Straub.
4. Crypto and quantum computing. Likely an important piece, here is GPT Pro on that paper.
5. “The Suno upgrade for song generation seems quite good as well.” So much is new!
6. Hollinger on NBA tanking (NYT).
7. Is there an evolving Iran bargain with China? (speculative, mostly we still do not know what is going on, you should discount most of what you are reading on this topic).
Mythos assorted links
Here is Dean Ball on Mythos. And now more from Dean. Here is John Loeber. While I am seeing some likely overstatement, probably this is a real turning point nonetheless, and we need to think further about what is best to do. No b.s. on data center slowdowns and algorithmic discrimination, rather actual thought on how to regulate something that actually will matter. And be glad we got there first. But how long will it be before an open source version, even if somewhat inferior, is available? Will OpenAI and Google soon be showing similar capabilities? (And how will that shift the equilibrium?) Should we upgrade our estimates of the returns to investing in compute? How will the willingness of attackers to pay for tokens evolve, relative to the willingness of defenders to pay for tokens? Which are our softest targets? As a side effect, will this also lead to higher economic concentration, as perhaps only the larger institutions can invest in quality patches rapidly enough? How many things will be taken offline altogether? It was the government of Singapore that started moving in that direction in 2016 with their Internet Surfing Separation. Which of the pending hacks and leaks will embarrass you the most?
And if nothing else, this is proof we are not all going to be jobless, albeit for reasons that are not entirely positive.
Two assorted links
1. Claims about the role of China, and its economics. And there is a lot of remaining uncertainty, but here is one of the saner Iran war takes.
Andy Hall advice on AI and economic research
Here is the document, excerpt:
In January, I released the results of an experiment showing how Claude Code could helpfully extend old papers “automagically.” It was pretty astonishing to me. Claude was able to come up with a plan, scrape the web, write code, run regressions, create tables and figures, and write a whole memo on what it had found—all in about 45 minutes.
Are AI tools perfect? No. Claude made some interesting mistakes in that extension, and since then, I’ve seen it make a whole bunch more. Are human researchers perfect, though? Hell no.
The evidence that AI tools should now be an essential part of your toolkit is overwhelming—look at the recent work that my Stanford colleague Yiqing Xu has put out, for example, which allows for the automated verification of empirical research. This is so clearly valuable. When it comes to empirical work, we’re never going back to the pre-AI world.
Here is a thread on the paper, heedworthy throughout. If you do not have some kind of decent plan here, other economists will leave you in the dust. Even if it is only a minority of “other economists” their total leverage and impact will be extreme.
Tuesday assorted links
Interpreting Polygenic Prediction of Cognitive Ability
The subtitle is Evidence for Direct, Reliable, and Portable Genetic Effects, and the authors are Tobias Wolfam, et.al. The abstract:
The interpretation of polygenic scores (PGS) for general cognitive ability (GCA) remains contested, with concerns about indirect genetic effects, environmental confounding, cross-ancestry portability, and the gap between PGS prediction and twin heritability estimates. Relying on a newly constructed PGS using within-family designs in two independent sibling cohorts (UK Biobank, N=4,642 pairs; ABCD, N=736 pairs), we demonstrate that direct genetic effects account for the large majority of PGS prediction (within-family attenuation Correcting for measurement error in brief cognitive assessments, the within-family association with latent general ability is approximately 0.45, substantially higher than observed-scale estimates. Cross-ancestry portability follows theoretical expectations (66% effect retention in African Americans). Within families, higher PGS predicts greater educational attainment, occupational status, and reduced cardiometabolic disease risk, with no evidence for gene-environment interactions or substantial adverse pleiotropy. These findings replicate using a benchmark predictor based on publicly available data, confirming they reflect properties of cognitive genetic architecture rather than idiosyncrasies of a particular score.
I expect results like this will hold up. Here is commentary from GPT Pro.
Monday assorted links
Does this have implications for higher ed in particular?
Declining fertility and population loss pose significant challenges for state and federal local governments responsible for providing a range of services to citizens, including education, health care, and infrastructure. Indeed, many areas are already experiencing outright population decline, with roughly half of U.S. counties losing population between 2010 and 2020. This paper examines how shrinking and aging populations affect the operations and fiscal sustainability of state and local governments. Preliminary evidence presented in this paper suggests that scaling down educational services is considerably more difficult than scaling up. The estimated per-enrollee cost increases associated with a 10 percent enrollment decline are four times larger than the cost decreases associated with a 10 percent enrollment increase. Regions with contracting populations will face additional challenges as a smaller working-age population bears the burden of funding pensions and retiree health plans for larger aging cohorts. While lower fertility can create a short run fiscal dividend as local governments serve fewer children, that dividend will only be realized if state and local public officials make efficient retrenchment a priority.
From Jeffrey Clemens, via the excellent Kevin Lewis. As I think JFV mentioned lately, we have not done enough thinking about what a society with low TFR really is going to look like after a while.
Auden on Iceland
If you have no particular intellectual interests or ambitions and are content with the company of your family and friends, then life on Iceland must be very pleasant, because the inhabitants are friendly, tolerant, and sane. They are genuinely proud of their country and its history, but without the least trace of hysterical nationalism. I always found that they welcome criticism. But I had the feeling, also, that for myself it was already too late. We are all too deeply involved Europe to be able, or even to wish to escape. Though I am sure you would enjoy a visit as much as I did, I think that, in the long run, the Scandinavian sanity would be too much for you, as it is for me. The truth is, we are both only really happy living among lunatics.
That is from W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland, from 1937, which is one of the better travel books, if indeed that is what it is.