Category: Uncategorized
Singapore fact of the day
For every Singaporean who has left Christianity, about three others have become Christians.
About 3.2 in fact, if you look at the exact numbers. Buddhism in Japan and South Korea is being depopulated, also. Here is the Pew piece on defections from religions.
Who exactly is rigid again?
In an adversarial collaboration, two preregistered U.S.-based studies (total N = 6181) tested three hypotheses regarding the relationship between political ideology and belief rigidity (operationalized as less evidence-based belief updating): rigidity-of-the-right, symmetry, and rigidity-of-extremes. Across both studies, general and social conservatism were weakly associated with rigidity (|b| ~ .05), and conservatives were more rigid than liberals (Cohen’s d ~ .05). Rigidity generally had null associations with economic conservatism, as well as social and economic political attitudes. Moreover, general extremism (but neither social nor economic extremism) predicted rigidity in Study 1, and all three extremism measures predicted rigidity in Study 2 (average |bs| ~ .07). Extreme rightists were more rigid than extreme leftists in 60% of the significant quadratic relationships. Given these very small and semi-consistent effects, broad claims about strong associations between ideology and belief updating are likely unwarranted. Rather, psychologists should turn their focus to examining the contexts where ideology strongly correlates with rigidity.
That is from a new piece by Shauna M. Bowes, Cory J. Clark, Lucian Gideon Conway III, Thomas Costello, Danny Osborne, Philip E. Tetlock, and Jan-Willem van Prooijen. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Emergent Ventures winners, 47th cohort
Vivek Kommi, 16, London, Extend healthy human lifespan by hacking the neuroimmune axis.
Adam Essemaali, northern Italy, 16, a new platform.
Rushil Kukreja and co-workers, northern Virginia, high school, devices to see through walls.
Sheehan Quirke, also known as The Cultural Tutor, London, work with David Perell, on why beauty has disappeared in the modern world.
Sambhav Baid, Singapore, measuring when antibiotics have stopped working.
Skyler Lee, Cumming, Georgia, high school, better app for language teaching.
Santiago del Solar, Waterloo, Ontario, exoskeletons.
Daniel Remler, WDC, AI and diplomacy.
Jacob Neplokh, University of Chicago, political theory and the great books.
Kyle Redlinghuys, London, AI-enhanced pre-natal testing.
Paddy Corcoran and Sean Cahill, 16 and 17, Tipperary, app for TikTok and study.
Juan David Campolargo, Illinois, to write a book on universities and how to get the most out of them.
And here is Nabeel’s semantic search for previous EV winners.
Monday assorted links
1. Costco to sell GLP-1s at a significant discount.
2. What Frederick Douglass learned in Ireland.
3. How the early Standard Oil business model worked.
4. In praise of the Faroe Islands.
5. More Scott Sumner movie reviews. When I describe Scott as the best movie reviewer in the world today, what I mean is that if you follow his recommendations you get (should get?) higher consumer surplus than by following the recommendations of anyone else. An economist’s prize!
The unraveling of Obamacare?
Paul Krugman has a recent post defending the exchange subsidies and tax credits that the Republicans wish to cut, talking with Jonathan Cohn about the “premium apocalypse” (and here). Whether or not one agrees with Krugman normatively, the arguments if anything convince me that Obamacare probably is not financially or politically stable.
To recap some history briefly:
1. Prior to passage, ACA advocates assured us that all three “legs of the stool” were necessary, most of all the mandate, to prevent adverse selection and skyrocketing premia. That argument made sense and was accepted by most economists, whether or not they favored ACA.
2. Obamacare passes by razor-thin margins, with a mandate.
3. The mandate proves extremely unpopular. Whether or not it is efficient, it puts a disproportionate share of the cost burden on other policy purchasers through the exchanges. The Republicans run against ACA and make some big gains.
4. Trump in essence “saves” Obamacare by in essence defusing enforcement of the mandate. The people who hated paying the very high premia could now back out of the system without getting into real trouble. As a result, much of the opposition to Obamacare, and the scare stories about expensive policies, dissipates.
5. Contrary to the predictions of the economists, Obamacare does not collapse. Enough people kept on signing up, perhaps because there is often a fair degree of “positive selection” into insurance coverage. Still, one has to wonder whether this will last.
6. Under the Biden administration, the Democrats support the continuation of premium support, but not with massive enthusiasm. It is expensive, though of course the Democrats did understand this is a centerpiece of Obamacare and they cannot give up on it. If you are calling the current situation a “premium apocalypse,” a lot of money has to be involved.
7. Putting aside the current Trump plans and the government shutdown and concomitant fight, how stable is this budget allocation over time? Is it possible that the economists (including Krugman and David Cutler) were right all along, albeit with a long lag, and the exchanges ultimately cannot work without a mandate? And that the premium support will just get more and more expensive?
It seems to be this scenario, while hardly proven, is really quite possible. One can blame Trump of course, but maybe the allocation no longer is sustainable over the medium term?
During the ACA debates, Megan McArdle frequently made the point that such a big policy passed by such small margins could not so easily last. A lot of people wanted to look past that observation, but was she so wrong?
Addendum: By the way, how are we supposed to pay for all of this? Repealing the recent Trump tax cuts and raising taxes on the rich doesn’t seem to come close to bringing the budget into balance. Endorse a VAT if you wish, but then do so! And let us have that debate. In the meantime everyone is just playing games with us.
Sunday assorted links
1. “Accurately accounting for that misreporting may reduce rather than increase top shares of income.”
2. Marc Rowan and the universities (NYT).
4. Insights about Singapore hawker centre signs.
5. “The economist Tyler Cowen wrote that Average Is Over. It would be a bigger threat to civic peace if even Far Above Average Is Over.” (FT)
6. How does being part of a historic district affect the value of your home?
7. By no means do I agree with all of this, but if you are looking for a different take on Fed independence…
Virginia fact of the day
Virginia saw one of the smallest increases in electricity costs in the nation this past year, per new federal data, but it could get even higher as data centers proliferate statewide…
By the numbers: Between May 2024 and May 2025, the average cost of electricity for residential customers in Virginia rose about 3%, from 14.95 cents to 15.41 cents, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The negative media bias aside, I find this encouraging. OK, “…could get even higher,” but the nationwide average was 6.5%. Here is the full story. Via Andy Masley.
Thiel and Wolfe on the Antichrist in literature
Jonathan Swift tried to exorcise Baconian Antichrist-worship from England. Gulliver’s Travels agreed with New Atlantis on one point: The ancient hunger for knowledge of God had competition from the modern thirst for knowledge of science. In this quarrel between ancients and moderns, Swift sided with the former.
Gulliver’s Travels takes us on four voyages to fictional countries bearing scandalous similarities to eighteenth-century England. In his depictions of the Lilliputians, Brobdingnagians, Laputans, and Houyhnhnms, Swift lampoons the Whig party, the Tory party, English law, the city of London, Cartesian dualism, doctors, dancers, and many other people, movements, and institutions besides. Swift’s misanthropy borders on nihilism. But as is the case with all satirists, we learn as much from whom Swift spares as from whom he scorns—and Gulliver’s Travels never criticizes Christianity. Though in 2025 we think of Gulliver’s Travels as a comedy, for Swift’s friend Alexander Pope it was the work of an “Avenging Angel of wrath.” The Anglican clergyman Swift was a comedian in one breath and a fire-and-brimstone preacher in the next.
Gulliver claims he is a good Christian. We doubt him, as we doubt Bacon’s chaplain. Gulliver’s first name, Lemuel, translates from Hebrew as “devoted to God.” But “Gulliver” sounds like “gullible.” Swift quotes Lucretius on the title page of the 1735 edition: “vulgus abhorret ab his.” In its original context, Lucretius’s quote describes the horrors of a godless cosmos, horrors to which Swift will expose us. The words “splendide mendax” appear below Gulliver’s frontispiece portrait—“nobly untruthful.” In the novel’s final chapter, Gulliver reflects on an earlier promise to “strictly adhere to Truth” and quotes Sinon from Virgil’s Aeneid. Sinon was the Greek who convinced the Trojans to open their gates to the Trojan horse: one of literature’s great liars.
Here is the full article, interesting and varied throughout.
Saturday assorted links
1. Jonathan Ross podcast. While Jonathan is doing very, very well, he remains underrated.
2. Colombia vs. “Brayan” (NYT).
5. Estate sale with beautiful Philly town home and 100,000 books.
6. Georg Friedrich Haas, innovator (NYT).
7. Learning to live with Chinese surpluses (FT).
8. This Renoir is a bargain. Overall some strong items in the sale.
New data on social media
It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline, according to an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries carried out for the FT by the digital audience insights company GWI. And this is not just the unwinding of a bump in screen time during pandemic lockdowns — usage has traced a smooth curve up and down over the past decade-plus.
Across the developed world, adults aged 16 and older spent an average of two hours and 20 minutes per day on social platforms at the end of 2024, down by almost 10 per cent since 2022. Notably, the decline is most pronounced among the erstwhile heaviest users — teens and 20-somethings…
Additional data from GWI trace the shift. The shares of people who report using social platforms to stay in touch with their friends, express themselves or meet new people have fallen by more than a quarter since 2014. Meanwhile, reflexively opening the apps to fill up spare time has risen, reflecting a broader pernicious shift from mindful to mindless browsing.
Here is more from John Burn-Murdoch in the FT. I was just doing as Aspen podcast two nights ago, where I spoke of social media as a problem that, in time, largely would solve itself. You also may recall my recent post about declining rates of depression for young adults. That said, you might wonder what exactly is the correct definition of social media (MR comments section?), and whether this study is tracking the proper conception of it.
For the pointer I thank Adrian Kelly.
Türkiye’s Homemade Crises
Türkiye’s response to post-pandemic inflation is a cautionary tale of how political pressure for low interest rates can create macroeconomic instabilities. While central banks worldwide raised interest rates to combat inflation in 2021-2023, Turkish authorities pursued the opposite strategy: cutting real rates to deeply negative levels while implementing financial engineering tools, FX interventions, and financial repression to stabilize markets. The centerpiece was a novel FX-protected deposit scheme (KKM) that guaranteed depositors against currency depreciation, shifting exchange rate risk to the government balance sheet. We provide a detailed account of this policy experiment and develop a theoretical model focusing on how KKM functions and creates vulnerabilities. Our model reveals that pressure to keep interest rates below inflation-targeting levels can lead to an interconnected destabilizing sequence. Low rates generate inflation, current account deficits, and exchange rate depreciation. KKM provides partial stabilization by effectively raising rates for savers while maintaining low rates for borrowers. However, this creates growing contingent fiscal burdens and vulnerability to self-fulfilling currency and sovereign debt crises. This explains additional policies adopted including capital flow management, financial repression, and return to orthodox monetary policy. As central banks worldwide face renewed pressure to set lower policy rates, Türkiye’s experience illustrates the consequences.
That is from a new NBER working paper by A. Hakan Kara and Alp Simsek.
Do LLMs favor outputs created by themselves?
Here is part of the abstract, I will not ask who or what wrote this:
We focus on the hiring context, where job applicants often rely on LLMs to refine resumes, while employers deploy them to screen those same resumes. Using a large-scale controlled resume correspondence experiment, we find that LLMs consistently prefer resumes generated by themselves over those written by humans or produced by alternative models, even when content quality is controlled. The bias against human-written resumes is particularly substantial, with self-preference bias ranging from 68% to 88% across major commercial and open-source models. To assess labor market impact, we simulate realistic hiring pipelines across 24 occupations. These simulations show that candidates using the same LLM as the evaluator are 23% to 60% more likely to be shortlisted than equally qualified applicants submitting human-written resumes, with the largest disadvantages observed in business-related fields such as sales and accounting. We further demonstrate that this bias can be reduced by more than 50% through simple interventions targeting LLMs’ self-recognition capabilities.
Here is the full paper by Jiannan Xu, Gujie Li, and Jane Yi Jiant, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Friday assorted links
1. How many legal moves can a reachable chess position have?
2. French guy with opinions visits the UC salaries website.
3. Sam H. on LDS.
4. The job market for economists is weakening.
5. Climate advocacy should focus more on the hard problems.
7. The AI productivity index, with Sunstein, Topol, Summers, and others.
Valuing free goods
There is a new AEJ Macro paper by Brynjolfsson, et.al. on how to value free goods. Here is one of the concrete measures:
Using this approach, we estimate the reservation price [for giving up Facebook] to be $2,152 in 2003 US dollars.
That is for the 2017 version of Facebook. Note this does not measure “whether Facebook is really good for you on net,” but it does indicate some fairly strong demand. And:
…the estimate contribution to welfare due to Facebook in the US over the period 2003-2017 is $231 billion (in 2017 dollars), which translates to $16 billion on average per year.
What I’ve been reading
Marcus Willaschek, Kant: A Revolution in Thinking. A very good book, perhaps the best introduction to Kant? Though for me it is mostly interior to my current knowledge set.
Matthew Bell, Goethe: A Life in Ideas. A beautiful book, now in English we have Nicholas Boyle’s work and also this. Bell is wise enough to understand and value Iphigenia auf Tauris, a good test for Goethe appeciation. Although I had a library copy out to read, I went ahead and bought a copy of this one to own.
Benjamin Wilson, Strange Stability: How Cold War Scientists Set Out to Control the Arms Race and Ended up Serving the Military-Industrial Complex is both interesting and has plenty of information on early Thomas Schelling and his precursors.
Very well researched is The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China, by Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li, with Claire Cousineau.
Peter Baxter, Rhodesia: A Complete History 1890-1980. The most complete history of the country I have been able to find. Many of the other books contain a few dominant, non-false narratives, but one gets tired of that? I say LLMs come especially in handy for learning this history.
Luka Ivan Jukic, Central Europe: The Death of a Civilization and the Life of an Idea. I took this sentence to encapsulate the main lesson of the book, namely that this does not usually work: “Central Europeans were, as ever, masterfully adept at rearranging polities into new configurations.”
I enjoyed Maxim Samson, Earth Shapers: How We Mapped and Mastered the World, From the Panama Canal to the Baltic Way.