Category: Uncategorized
Wednesday assorted links
1. Roon visits DC.
2. The UK is outlawing ticket scalping?
3. How the internet made the far right.
4. NYT on Solvej Balle. And from The New Yorker.
5. Claims about risk and prediction markets.
6. On the dropping non-binary rates.
7. Some art prices, including one golden toilet arbitrage result (NYT).
Cyprus and multiple state sovereignties
I am struck by how many layers of sovereignty there are in Cyprus, sometimes but not always conflicting. There is Greek Cyprus, Turkish Cyprus (the Turkish interpretation), Republic of Cyprus under Turkish occupation (the Greek interpretation), unified Cyprus (recognized by the EU and also many Cypriot citizens, though the Turkish part is exempt from EU laws and obligations, in any case not recognized by Turkey), the EU, and last but not least Britain claims and possesses, as full sovereign, three percent of Cyprus territory, an arrangement contested by no one.
Arguably you could add “Turkey” to that list. The Turkish government does not claim sovereignty over any part of Cyprus, but they put the flag everywhere, they guarantee defense, the currency is the Turkish lira, and they have a de facto veto over major decisions. It is Turkey in everything but name, though there is a passport check when visitors fly in from Istanbul. Keep in mind that the earlier 1974 Turkish invasion deprived what is now Greek Cyprus of its then main cargo port and main airport.
While matters have been peaceful for some while now, I fear these political arrangements limit the ability of Cyprus to exploit scale. The island has only about 1.3 million people, so complications do not help their ability to attract high-productivity investment.
Is the AI sector currently a bubble?
Possibly, but do not jump to that conclusion too quickly, as I argued in my latest Free Press column. Excerpt:
Nvidia is often considered a bellwether AI stock. That’s because much of its revenue comes from selling graphics processing units to power advanced AI systems, meaning that its success gives investors insight into the health of the sector overall. Currently, Nvidia’s stock-price-to-earnings ratio is in the 54 to 55 range, roughly twice the typical market average. That means the market expects great things from this stock. Those projections may or may not be validated, but it’s hard to conclude they’re entirely divorced from reality…
Keep in mind that the tech sector as a whole is still earning more than it is shelling out in capital expenditures. The current AI boom is being financed by earnings more than by new issuance of debt, which makes it less prone to a sudden crash. By one estimate, capital expenditures in Big Tech are about 94 percent of cash flow in 2025. You could imagine that number moving into unstable territory, but so far, the U.S. tech sector is managing to pay its bills without going into debt.
You may recall we are coming off a period when everyone complained that the big tech companies were sitting on trillions of dollars in cash and capital. Now, they are spending it, and complaints are heating up once again. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.
In fact, what we are seeing right now is a shortage in the AI sector’s capacity to meet demand. Major tech companies are investing in more computing capacity, but they still cannot serve all the customers who want access to AI systems. That augurs well for the future of the sector, even if there are dips and spills along the way.
As usual, we will see, but if you are calling it a bubble after an initial price dip or corporate shake-out, that is exactly the fallacy you are not supposed to be slipping into.
Tuesday assorted links
1. “Underrated reason for this [relative non-politicization] being true is not that econ has more political diversity (though it does) but instead a more *international* faculty than humanities and other social sciences. Like literally 2/3rd. Domestic politics and identity fights necessarily play a smaller role.” From Kevin A. Bryan.
3. Ruxandra on IVF (NYT).
4. And more from Gavin Leech, this time on Chinese AI models.
5. Has there been upward genetic drift for the British?
6. New J.S: Bach music discovered and now recorded. Starts at 15:30. Decent but not great.
Comparing health outcomes across countries (from the comments)
I think it has come up repeatedly on MR that comparing international statistics in health outcomes is nearly impossible — definitions of live-birth, infant mortality, maternal mortality, cancer survival, cause of death, etc etc are simply too different between countries. Patterns of driving behavior, military service and violence affect life expectancy independently of health care, as do patterns of immigration.
The US tends to compare quite well on life-expectancy in later life, which is the point at which quality of health care (rather than e.g. traffic accidents) is a key factor in survival.
That is from Marie. I take this understanding, and most of all its absence, as one of the key markers of whether a person is actually trying to think things through.
Do (human) readers prefer AI writers?
It seems so, do read through the whole abstract:
The use of copyrighted books for training AI models has led to numerous lawsuits from authors concerned about AI’s ability to generate derivative content. Yet it’s unclear whether these models can generate high quality literary text while emulating authors’ styles/voices. To answer this we conducted a preregistered study comparing MFA-trained expert writers with three frontier AI models: ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini in writing up to 450 word excerpts emulating 50 awardwinning authors’ (including Nobel laureates, Booker Prize winners, and young emerging National Book Award finalists) diverse styles. In blind pairwise evaluations by 159 representative expert (MFA-trained writers from top U.S. writing programs) and lay readers (recruited via Prolific), AI-generated text from in-context prompting was strongly disfavored by experts for both stylistic fidelity (odds ratio [OR]=0.16, p < 10^-8) and writing quality (OR=0.13, p< 10^-7) but showed mixed results with lay readers. However, fine-tuning ChatGPT on individual author’s complete works completely reversed these findings: experts now favored AI-generated text for stylistic fidelity (OR=8.16, p < 10^-13) and writing quality (OR=1.87, p=0.010), with lay readers showing similar shifts. These effects are robust under cluster-robust inference and generalize across authors and styles in author-level heterogeneity analyses. The fine-tuned outputs were rarely flagged as AI-generated (3% rate versus 97% for incontext prompting) by state-of-the-art AI detectors. Mediation analysis reveals this reversal occurs because fine-tuning eliminates detectable AI stylistic quirks (e.g., cliché density) that penalize incontext outputs, altering the relationship between AI detectability and reader preference. While we do not account for additional costs of human effort required to transform raw AI output into cohesive, publishable novel length prose, the median fine-tuning and inference cost of $81 per author represents a dramatic 99.7% reduction compared to typical professional writer compensation. Author-specific fine-tuning thus enables non-verbatim AI writing that readers prefer to expert human writing, thereby providing empirical evidence directly relevant to copyright’s fourth fair-use factor, the “effect upon the potential market or value” of the source works.
That is from a new paper by Tuhin Chakrabarty, Jane C. Ginsburg, and Paramveer Dhillon. For the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis. I recall an earlier piece showing that LLMs also prefer LLM outputs?
Monday assorted links
1. Andrej: “Software 1.0 easily automates what you can specify. Software 2.0 easily automates what you can verify.”
2. Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance.
3. “The national [cow] herd is now the smallest since the 1950s.” (FT)
4. California housing remains stalled.
There is no great stagnation (not any more — really!)
A remote-controlled robot the size of a grain of sand can swim through blood vessels to deliver drugs before dissolving into the body. The technology could allow doctors to administer small amounts of drugs to specific sites, avoiding the toxic side effects of body-wide therapies.
…The system has yet to be trialled in people, but it shows promise because it works in a roughly human-sized body, and because all its components have already been shown to be biocompatible, says Bradley Nelson, a mechanical engineer at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, who co-led the work.
We will see, but it is wonderful that such an idea is even in the running. Here is the full article, via A.J.
“May I meet you?”
Bill Ackman suggests that opener as a way for men to meet women, and notes it worked for him when he was younger and unmarried. Like this: “I would ask: “May I meet you?” before engaging further in a conversation. I almost never got a No. It inevitably enabled the opportunity for a further conversation. I met a lot of really interesting people this way. I think the combination of proper grammar and politeness was the key to its effectiveness. You might give it a try.”
In response, a bunch of people have shrieked that he is a billionaire (he was not then, though perhaps he had Aristotelian billionaire potentiality?), that he is six foot three (he probably was tall back then too), and that he is good looking. Or perhaps effective meeting and dating strategies have changed?
I readily admit I am well below average in this and all related areas concerning either meeting strangers or chatting up women, whether it concerns knowledge or praxis. But I have an opinion nonetheless.
I observe that so many young men these days just do not make much effort at all. They do not approach women with any sort of opening line, whether in person or through apps. If this gets them off the zero point, it is almost certainly a good thing. Maybe it is bad tactics for some people, if only because you are too nerdy and cannot deliver the words with the right charming tone. So be it. The young men with that problem can then adjust and try it some other way. It is still a plus to get them thinking about opening lines at all, and to think about meeting women at all. So I am fully on board with Bill’s suggestion. He never said that is all you should be doing, or to make that your main thing. It is unlikely that his suggestion is the best thing you could be doing, think of it simply as pressing the “activation button” on seeking a partner.
It is a bit like my advice on writing. Your big enemy is not “I did not get enough written today.” Rather it is “I did not write today at all.” That point applies to so many different aspects of life. Discrete choice econometrics!
Addendum: Bill adds that it works better when you are moving. Let’s avoid this equilibrium. And here are some other comments, I am not sure of the proper attribution.
Sunday assorted links
1. Julia Steinberg on Solano County.
2. Mentorship advice from Avital Balwit.
3. Orcas are attacking boats in coordinated fashion. And more.
4. James Brown, Night Train, live.
6. Why don’t people return their shopping carts? (Often I am not sure it is my obligation to? In that context non-return might be Coasean.)
7. From Eliezer.
Best fiction of 2025
Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I, Volume II. Volume III is due out in English late this year I have read it already in German. A very strong series, reading ahead in German is a good demonstration of how much I like them.
Suat Dervis, The Prisoner of Ankara. A Turkish novel from mid-century, in English for the first time.
Emmanuel Carrere, V13: Chronicle of a Trial. Non-fiction but it is more likely reading fiction, it just happens to be true (supposedly).
Alain Mabanckou, Dealing with the Dead. Most African fiction does not connect with me, and there is a tendency for the reviews to be untrustworthy. This “cemetery memoir,” from the Congo (via UCLA), held my interest throughout.
Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.
Eça de Queiros, Adam and Eve in Paradise. Originally from the 19th century, but translated into English only this year. A 60 pp. novella about exactly what the title indicates, noting that matters are not as simple as the first telling of that story might have suggested.
The Poems of Seamus Heaney. Not yet received, but obviously this is a winner.
Overall, the Balle, Desai, and Heaney make for very strong entries, so this was a good year for fiction.
The Effect of Video Watching on Children’s Skills
This paper documents video consumption among school-aged children in the U.S. and explores its impact on human capital development. Video watching is common across all segments of society, yet surprisingly little is known about its developmental consequences. With a bunching identification strategy, we find that an additional hour of daily video consumption has a negative impact on children’s noncognitive skills, with harmful effects on both internalizing behaviors (e.g., depression) and externalizing behaviors (e.g., social difficulties). We find a positive effect on math skills, though the effect on an aggregate measure of cognitive skills is smaller and not statistically significant. These findings are robust and largely stable across most demographics and different ways of measuring skills and video watching. We find evidence that for Hispanic children, video watching has positive effects on both cognitive and noncognitive skills—potentially reflecting its role in supporting cultural assimilation. Interestingly, the marginal effects of video watching remain relatively stable regardless of how much time children spend on the activity, with similar incremental impacts observed among those who watch very little and those who watch for many hours.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
Saturday assorted links
1. John Brennan clarifies on UAPs.
2. “For the rest of the world, including Europe, wide adoption of US dollar stablecoins for payment purposes would be equivalent to the privatization of seigniorage by global actors,” notes Hélène Rey, an economist, who fears rising “tax evasion” and “lower demand for non-US government bonds”. FT link here.
3. “Puffins have been seen on the Isle of Muck in County Antrim for the first time in years, after a major scheme to remove invasive brown rats.” Link here.
5. Is there some economic recovery in Nigeria?
6. Charles Murray on finding religion.
7. Ross Douthat with Paul Kingsnorth (NYT).
The spatial construction of Incan monies?
Money can be many things, but this to me is a new one. Or is it?
Stretching for 1.5km and consisting of approximately 5200 precisely aligned holes, Monte Sierpe in southern Peru is a remarkable construction that likely dates to at least the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000–1400) and saw continued use by the Inca (AD 1400–1532). Yet its function remains uncertain. Here, the authors report on new analyses of drone imagery and sediment samples that reveal numerical patterns in layout, potential parallels with Inca knotted-string records and the presence of crops and wild plants. All this, the authors argue, suggests that Monte Sierpe functioned as a local, Indigenous system of accounting and exchange.
That is newly published research from Jacob L. Bongers, et.al. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
*The Science of Second Chances*
The author is economist Jennifer Doleac, and the subtitle is A Revolution in Criminal Justice. Excerpt:
We found that adding anyone charged with a felony to the law enforcement DNA database in Denmark reduced future criminal convictions by over 40 percent. Again, people responded to the higher probability of getting caught by committing fewer crimes. Being added to the database also increased enrollment in school and rates of employment — signs that folks really were on a better path. This effect was largest for the youngest men, those ages eighteen to twenty-four.
Incentives matter. An excellent book, recommended, due out next year.