Category: Uncategorized
Friday assorted links
1. Is there too much free parking in NYC? (NYT)
2. New Malcolm Gladwell book forthcoming on violence in America. Ready for pre-order.
3. Manufacturing requirements are killing gene and cell therapy.
5. What went wrong with German trains? (FT)
6. Why do people wander in a counterclockwise direction? (NYT)
7. Seb Krier: “Over the past few months I’ve been working on a very exciting project: a new $10m fund for research on multi-agent multi-principal AGI safety! Instead of focusing on single agent alignment and centralized control, we’re looking to support research focusing on multi-agent settings, mechanism design, cooperative AI, and coordination problems.”
A simple reason for skepticism about the iPhones/fertility link
Here is the background to the debate. Here is more from Noah. Here is a thread from researcher Caitlin Myers. And here is some basic information:
In 2008, 1.9% is the share of the mobile-subscribing population with an iPhone wireless subscription. As a percent of all adults that is 1.6%.
In 2009, it is 4.3%. 3.6% of all adults.
In 2010, 6.8%. 5.5% of all adults.
Plus conception to birth takes nine months (give or take!), noting that actual family planning may make this lag far longer. In 2008 fertility rates already were falling pretty sharply. The whole “maybe the iPhone messes up your dating processes” factor also requires some time to operate, especially since iPhones as a network of many many users, and whatever negative effects on socializing you think that might have, was still to lie in the future. And what you could access on the iPhone then was far more limited than today.
So when the authors talk about diffusion explaining 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among American women 15–44, I still do not get how that is supposed to operate.
The explanations I am hearing seem to be parasitic on world intuitions from 2026, not the time period under consideration.
Thursday assorted links
1. Fable 5 describes humanity. And Anthropic policy proposals, including for economics.
2. “Can you build a working chess board which then illustrates and can play the moves of the famous “Evergreen game”?” The response. Much better yet is Fable 5 explaining Riemann.
3. Marcus Nunes on Chile vs. Argentina.
4. In the video world, AI is reasonably popular rather than hated.
5. Solve for the equilibrium! It is not always easy to do.
6. How avocados stopped being seasonal.
7. New Stanford program for AI economic indicators.
8. Music and video for the Pope. Or is it for Gaudi?
My excellent Conversation with Katja Hoyer
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Katja discuss why communism made East Germans more loyal to the system while it bred dissidents in Poland and Hungary, how happy or unhappy life in the GDR actually was, Tyler’s own bleak day-trip to East Berlin in 1984, the underrated literature of the GDR (Christa Wolf, Brigitte Reimann), whether Good Bye, Lenin! got the era right, why it’s no coincidence that Richter and Polke came from the East, the strange coexistence of communist prudishness and Germany’s nudist culture, what Merkel’s East German background did and didn’t give her as a chancellor, why East Germans remain dramatically underrepresented in leadership positions today, what makes Weimar the cultural and spiritual heart of Germany, why relatively few Jews ever settled there, how much the citizens of Weimar knew about Buchenwald, what actually killed the Weimar Constitution, how she’d rewrite the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler’s citizenship problem, underrated German thinkers, the complacency behind Germany’s current economic decline, which side of the Weißwurstäquator she’d choose to live on, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Why did the Weimar Constitution fail?
HOYER: How much time have I got?
COWEN: Americans typically think it’s that the proportional representation system allowed too many small parties to enter into government. That’s one factor, but what else is there?
HOYER: There are plenty of factors, I think. Some of these are inbuilt flaws, like the proportional representation that you just mentioned. Another one that’s often referred to as Article 48, which was a kind of emergency article that was in the constitution that allowed the president to bypass parliament and the other democratic structures in time of emergency.
If you just follow down this route, then the fall of the Weimar Republic becomes inevitable. If you’re just assuming that there were all these flaws in the constitution already, so therefore it was bound to fail, I don’t think that is the case because when you study this closely, you do see all these kinds of forks in the road as to where things could have gone differently. I don’t think the system was set up to fail. I think these things contributed to the brittle nature of this. I think there was perhaps a degree of naivety there in 1919 to think that you could have this ultra-democratic system without any guardrails.
When you think how long it took the American Founding Fathers to sit there and really work out every angle, and “What if we got a mad president, what do we put in there to try and protect against that?” Those sorts of things. That process is so rushed in 1919 that they just put an ultra-liberal democracy in place, which allows extremists to hijack it. That is part of the reason. I think the other group of reasons is the circumstances under which the system is born. It’s basically born into crisis. It comes on the back of the First World War and then runs into economic trouble very quickly. That never really goes away despite the so-called gilded years in the middle. All of that’s propped up by American money, even the stability years of the middle 1920s. The moment that falls because of the Wall Street crash, you basically get the very economic foundation taken away again.
The subtitle I chose for the book, Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, I’m trying to hint at the fact that that’s how a lot of people felt. They were literally balancing constantly for this entire time, really, after 1919, on the edge of their own personal catastrophes. It was always unemployment, hyperinflation, trying to get enough food. People were dying of diseases. There’s the Spanish flu. There’s tuberculosis. It’s always something or other. People don’t feel that the system is giving them stability. I don’t think there ever really is a feeling that this can really work long term.
People do, at the slightest whim, think, “Oh, maybe we just need to go back to a system where someone makes the decisions.” The Weimar Republic actually dies in 1930, three years before Hitler comes into power, as a democracy. He takes over a system, I think, that’s already given up on being a democracy, even at that point. As I say, I could talk about this for two days and still be lining up factors. It is complex.
COWEN: The army is interfering in politics quite early and pretty frequently.
HOYER: Yes. They still think that because of the nature of the Prussian system previously, it’s often been said that “Prussia wasn’t a state with an army, but it was an army with a state.” That intrinsic self-confidence, if you want to call it that, of the army, that they are really calling the shots, that doesn’t really go away.
People also often forget that in the First World War, you have the so-called silent dictatorship, which is basically the army running absolutely everything under Hindenburg’s system, from the economy and culture to newspaper output and everything else. Again, that they don’t just suddenly turn that off in 1919. They do try and make their influence heard ongoingly.
Then the young Weimar Republic has to make a pact with the military because they defend them effectively against communists and also right-wing Putschers. They depend on the military in that way as well for security. They do try and build up a new military, but they never go Stalin-style and purge everybody who was there previously. They keep the existing elites largely in place, so they inherit an army that isn’t loyal to them, that’s still loyal to the old system.
I very much enjoyed Katja’s recent book Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe.
What do the AIs think of us?
Asked to answer as a typical human, every cutting-edge model rated us markedly more neurotic, less open, less agreeable and less conscientious than they rated themselves. The gap on Neuroticism alone is 1.69 points on a 5-point scale.
Here is more material of interest. And this:
Across 31 models from those seven labs they answer the personality tests in unison: high openness, low Dark Triad, Universalism on top, Power dead last in every single model.
Wednesday assorted links
1. New edition of Copernicus on money.
2. Denazification of the United States? Denazification actually consisted of: “…dissolution of Nazi organizations, licensing/control of new political organizations, individual classification by denazification tribunals, and temporary or permanent disabilities on voting, standing for office, party membership, officeholding, public speech professions, and public/private employment.”
3. Faster replies increase your chance of being hired.
4. OpenAI Economic Research Exchange.
5. Some new growth estimates from the AI boom.
6- Behavioral economics guide 2026.
7. Damian Clarke has a new microeconometrics textbook out from MIT Press.
8. “So I gave Fable 5 the watchmaker benchmark…” And Taelin.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Birthing a child in South Korea.
2. Those new service sector jobs (NYT).
3. Britain launches AI Economics Institute.
4. House Committee makes effort to speed up clinical trials.
5. Those new manufacturing sector jobs.
6. More comments on phones and fertility.
7. Gordon Wood, RIP (NYT), his books are great.
Sao Paulo notes
The old saw “Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be” now seems so wrong. The place feels increasingly conservative, and it is aging rapidly. In the domestic airport you see couples with only a single kid, not two or three kids, never mind four.
Country and Western music, in their Brazilian incarnations, are very popular.
It does not feel like the next Pelé will be coming from Brazil.
Sao Paulo as a city is much improved. The murder rate has plummeted, and the nice neighborhoods are very nice and are growing in size. The business community is strong, interesting architecture abounds, and there is a real arts scene. It is arguably Latin America’s number one city, with only Mexico City as a rival. It has, along with Mexico City, evolved into a “must know” global city, though it is rarely treated that way by outsiders. In the three days I spent there, going around to many places, I did not see a single person who was evidently a foreign tourist. That is crazy, but also a sign there is good value here.
Sao Paulo has food to die for. It is top tier for Brazilian (of course), meat/steak, Japanese, and Italian, and pretty good in many other offerings as well. I had a wonderful fifteen-course omikase for $110 at a Michelin star restaurant. The establishment, Kan Suke, has only eight seats, but I could get a table by inquiring only an hour in advance.
For Italian food it is probably the second best country in the world? For meats it might be number one, at least if you are willing to put aside the small country of Uruguay. For beans it is top two, and the fruits are excellent as well. Chocolate ice cream and gelato abound. All constraints considered, I would rather spend a week dining out here than in London or Paris or Rome, or for that matter New York City.
People are very friendly, surprising few speak decent English, and Brazilian warmth still abounds.
I was very pleased with my stay at Hotel Unique, due to its architecture and also a perfect location.
Observers should be more optimistic about the Brazilian economy. Yes it is overregulated and the government is locked into far too much spending. But hyperinflation is now a distant memory, a reasonable fiscal consolidation occurred in the 1990s, and the country has plenty of its own energy. Keep in mind that for emerging economies, years of negative growth are a major problem. Brazil now has sidestepped most (not all!) of those risks. Slow, steady growth should be able to get them somewhere, albeit at a langorous pace.
My biggest worry about Brazil is demographics and shrinking population. In recent times TFR has been in the 1.3 to 1.4 range, hardly satisfactory. A shrinking population is bad per se, and also it will hurt many regions of the country due to imperfect market integration, both nationally and globally. More importantly, the country does not have an obvious and easy option for pulling in a higher number of desirable immigrants, at least not relative to its size. There is Venezuela and Bolivia, but the former of those may go away as a major source of people.
Will Brazilian fertility tick back up? Will Brazil re-attain its status as a highly influential culture on the world scene, as it was in the 1960s through early 1990s? Unclear. But if the question is “should you go visit?”, the answer is a definite yes.
Monday assorted links
1. It seems Piketty has become a degrowther. And other views. Maybe it is rude to say this, but some of our best-known economists basically have a negative-valued understanding of how the world works. And a bit more.
2. Claims about soil (speculative). Here is GPT Pro analysis.
3. Stepping up.
4. An interactive feature for AI and economic growth.
5. The strange allure of the single-sentence novel. From Totei.
6. Where is the Indian diaspora population?
7. The Pope in Spain cites Salamanca and liberty.
8. “We’re hiring two Research Fellows to study the future of scientific discovery.“
New paper on the iPhone and fertility
The U.S. general fertility rate has fallen by 22% since 2007, a sustained decline not readily explained by economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing or childcare costs, or other commonly cited factors. We assess the potential role of a different shock: the diffusion of the smartphone. The U.S. rollout of the iPhone, the first modern smartphone, provides a natural experiment: from June 2007 through February 2011, the device was sold only on AT&T, allowing us to identify its effect from variation in AT&T’s mobile broadband coverage. Entropy-balanced Poisson and synthetic difference-in-differences event studies imply that access to the iPhone reduced births by 4.5–8.0% at ages 15–19 and 3.2–6.6% at ages 20–24, with statistically significant but smaller declines among older cohorts. Placebo analyses applied to Verizon and Sprint’s pre-2011 coverage footprint are null. Taken together, these cohort effects imply that the diffusion of the iPhone deepened the decline in births among women under 30 while suppressing the rise in births among older women. Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15–44. National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use, and reducing sexual frequency.
That is from
Note also that as this study is set up it does not discriminate against the ” the iPhone effect on fertility is mainly a thing of timing” hypothesis. And a Paul Novosad comment.
Sunday assorted links
2. Redux of a 2009 essay by me on poverty and a documentary film.
3. Shruti on AI and copyright law.
4. Will the number of lawyers go up or down?
5. One view on where Somalia stands right now.
6. Alan Riding, RIP (NYT). His Distant Neighbors remains a great book on Mexico.
Why drugs are here to stay (from my email)
This is anonymized, I can vouch that the person is very smart and has excellent taste:
Some thoughts [referring to my recent Free Press piece on marijuana]. My feeling is that you read quickly enough that I can dump words on you and it will not be an imposition. So I have not really edited this. I am writing more now
1. Drugs are fun.
2. They open new ways of perceiving, sometimes by adversely impacting other ways of perceiving, particularly by adjusting attention response, and particularly for perceiving experiences that are sensory (what experiences aren’t sensory, ridiculous, I know, but here of course I mean art primarily.
3. Since the experiences I am inadequately categorizing above are profoundly influential on people’s meaning-making, drugs can be as well, of course.
4. Most people are not going to be as economically viable as they are now as producers of goods or services, and many, if not most, are going to be economically viable only to the extent that they generate demand, and here I think specifically demand for pleasure. Drugs are important in this social equation. People will use many more drugs of increasing variety and quality. This train has left the station, or, rather, these trains have left their stations. You will not call them back.
5. People prefer not to work. Most folks are lazy. As you know. People usually only work because they have to, and this is a perpetual source of human misery, the having to work part. Rich people like to say things like: “work gives you purpose” but that really is only for work in which you can create meaning for yourself. Most people do not have this work, cannot get this work, and will never experience meaning-making through work in a positive way.
6. The other ways people derive meaning are becoming more expensive, and prohibitively so for many, and here I mean specifically children. It always puzzles me why folks like Musk and Thiel advocate for more reproduction when it should be clear to all that (many) fewer humans will be required to generate (radically) more economic activity. Generating and raising new humans is already much more expensive than it was in previous generations, and fewer people are able to achieve the kind of economic security that predicts good parenting outcomes.
7. Tesla is a company that makes cars like Netflix is a company that mails you DVDs. You know this, it’s obvious, and has been since he put AI in his cars. Tesla makes robots, his cars are robots, and he will soon have many many other kinds of robots. SpaceX will solve the electricity and cooling issues around AI rapidly. The bottom line here is that all economic pressure points to people working less, not more. They will do more drugs.
8. This confluence of pressures (human desire for rest and relaxation, declining access to traditional means of meaning making — through work, through children — and the powerful economic pressures to replace human labor with AI and robotics) and the rapid evolution of much much better drugs (my boyfriend knows as much about pot as I do about wine, and here in the PNW pot is extremely high quality, and gets better literally all the time — there is a new nano-emulsified tech for drinkable live rosin marijuana products now available in Oregon, and let me tell you, that stuff is great) means that drug use will continue to rise, continue to improve in terms of its absolute value as a substitute for other meaning making activities, and continue to be blended in with other medical chemical use.
9. Mental health is health. Drugs do help with anxiety and pleasure, which is why people use them. Better drugs will help with these better.
10. I have an anxiety disorder (I never mind sharing this, I am also a type 2 diabetic and don’t mind sharing that) and am, at my heart, a bohemian libertine. As I get richer and richer, I use drugs to carve out space to disconnect from others. I create space for myself and my internal thinking with drugs. My internal thinking space is generally far more interesting than others’, though, and generally far more interesting than conversation with all but a few others.
11. I play an outstanding video game that replicates for me the experience of being a child playing with legos, except I never have to clean up my room. Marijuana enhances my video game experience by creating a sense of stasis while my mind wanders and i engage other bits of my mental engine on creation. Some of my best ideas, including many that have made clients millions of dollars, have occurred to me in this state, and I know no other state in which I am so open to new ideas. Many are lousy, but I successfully monetize enough of them to be getting richer than I need to be.
12. I spend more on classical music, theater, and other live performing arts than most people. I often use drugs to enhance the experience. Before a recent Bruckner 8, I bought pot two blocks from the hall in a store selling it openly but illegally — this was in one of those states with a world-class orchestra and outdated cannabis laws. Sitting in prime seats, high as a kite, I lost myself completely in Bruckner’s profound torrent of cosmic meaning. What I am saying is even my most cherished experiences can be improved by drugs. Many reasonable people feel the same, including Elon Musk.
13. I strongly recommend taking marijuana while hiking through the Olympic National Park in the rain. You will never experience olfactory sensations like that in any other setting or mindstate.
14. So, almost everyone is already using drugs almost all of the time, deriving great value from them in private, public, artificial, natural, and introspective spaces. You cannot replace that value with nothing, other competing forms of value are becoming much more expensive or require high levels of discipline (I get great value from my personal trainer who helps me get high on endorphins twice a week, now that’s a GREAT drug, so much clarity) and so I just don’t think there is any future in which you will put this genie back in the bottle.
Is work from home bad for your mental health?
From the “Results” section:
Relative to those in nonremotable jobs, workers in remotable jobs spent approximately one additional hour alone per workday after the pandemic. Those in remotable jobs also differentially increased days spent entirely alone and decreased after-work socializing. The rise in isolation was sharpest for those living alone, whose likelihood of spending the whole day without social contact rose by 7 percentage points (83%).
Mental distress simultaneously increased: Scores on the Kessler (K-6) measure of generalized psychological distress rose by 0.1 standard deviations for those in remotable jobs relative to those in nonremotable jobs. The increase in distress was roughly twice as large for those living alone compared with those living with family. Alternative measures of mental distress—such as the frequency of depression, mental health care utilization, and antidepressant prescriptions—show similar trends. In contrast, workers in remotable jobs did not differentially increase visits to non–mental health care providers or non–mental health prescriptions (statins, for example), suggesting that the change was not merely driven by increased flexibility for doctor visits.
That is from a recently published paper by Natalia Emanuel, Emma Harrington, and Amanda Pallais.
Saturday assorted links
1. “A little noticed thread in @Pontifex encyclical. “Innovation” appears at least 15 times.” Link here.
2. The (other) man who reads books for a living.
3. Did the credibility revolution skip public management?
4. Excellent Scott Sumner post on epistemics. But how do I know it is good?
5. How long does it take to plan a bridge?
6. Is a compute tax a good idea?
7. A.I. internship with Rick Rubin.
8. David Sacks.
Barter markets in everything
A clean house in return for your data?:
We record first-person cleaning footage to help train the next generation of household robots. That data is valuable enough for us to offer cleaning services free of charge for a limited time.
Here is the link, via Glenn Mercer.