Category: Uncategorized
Canada fact of the day
Since 2015, Canada has tripled its Indigenous spending – paying more than on national defense. Over those same years, Indigenous people have suffered a catastrophic collapse in health and well-being: on average almost a full decade of lost life expectancy.
That is from David Frum.
Sunday assorted links
2. Ryan Briggs: “Prediction: in the short-to-medium term LLMs will make the reputation of the researcher matter more for whether or not we view results as credible because it will become too hard to read everything and people will want shortcuts for filtering. Again, this hits juniors hardest.”
3. Brian Greene and Ed Witten discuss string theory.
4. Short video of the Grand Egyptian Museum. Go, go, go!
5. Why Israel recognized Somaliland? Many things going on, risk of war in East Africa is now heightened, here is some speculation. Big story for 2026?
6. Gary Graffman, RIP (NYT).
More Saturday assorted links
1. Turning a pdf into a short class.
2. Those mid-Atlantics love to fly to Tokyo. Mexico City not good enough for you?
3. Major AI researchers are rapidly turning more bullish for instance here is Roon. And here is Andrej.
4. The boom in Mexican trade (WSJ).
5. Thailand says its bombings in Cambodia are targeting the scam industry (NYT). Here is some commentary, the whole matter is deeply weird. Consider this a new take on Clausewitz!
Saturday assorted links
1. Some observations on immigration and wage effects. The spread of immigrants to incipient high-wage areas may be one rise why the geographic mobility of resident Americans has gone down.
2. No good explanation for why more boys than girls are born after wars.
3. Slides on ticket resale, by Eric Budish.
4. Steven Durlauf recommends five 2025 books in economics.
5. The ongoing rise of YouTube (FT). “The creator economy advertising market is expected to reach $37bn this year, up 26 per cent from a year ago, according to the estimates by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. The group expects the market to rise another 18 per cent in 2026.”
Friday assorted links
1. David Brooks offers some Sidney awards, including to Works in Progress (NYT).
2. If you are the Lakers, of course you should have traded for the new superstar, namely Luka. But by now it is clear the trade actually will not work out so well, and Dallas is better off with Cooper Flagg.
3. “The threat to German auto producers isn’t from Chinese cars flooding Germany. It’s from Chinese cars flooding to emerging markets (red), where they’re killing the market for German cars. That’s not something EU tariffs on China are going to be able to fix.” Link here.
5. The brother Megan McArdle lost.
6. “Our Archivara Math Research Agent (in alpha) just became the first AI system to fully solve an Erdős problem on its own (zero human input or literature online).” Link here.
Cayman (U.S.) fact of the day
Over the past four years, hedge funds have doubled their footprint in the U.S. debt market, making the Cayman Islands — where many hedge funds are officially based — the place where the most U.S. debt outside the United States is held, according to the Fed. Typically, people flock to Treasuries for safety in times of crisis. Yet, driven in large part by hedge fund activity, the Treasury market went through unusual turbulence during recent shocks, including the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020 and President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement in April 2025.
And this:
By the early 2010s, these foreign governments made up over 40 percent of Treasury holdings, excluding those the Federal Reserve held. That was up from just over 10 percent in the mid-1990s…Foreign governments now make up less than 15 percent of the overall Treasury market.
Christmas assorted links
2. India is prepping for major economic reforms (FT).
3. One view on why computers cannot be conscious.
4. “America’s six largest banks added $600bn in market value in 2025, spurred on by the Trump administration’s push to deregulate the industry and a revival in investment banking.” (FT) This is one reason why gdp growth has been robust. Whatever you think of bank regulation more generally, in 2025 we needed less of it, not more.
5. Inmates could escape jail on drones (Times of London).
6. What do soccer tickets cost in New Jersey?
7. The origins of European thought on new discoveries.
8. Titanic, Hagen, 33-minute Guatemalan/Mexican musical avant-garde creation. Here is some background (NYT). I am growing increasingly bullish on Latin American and also Spanish-language music. I will be following it more closely in 2026.
Merry Christmas
Christmas Eve assorted links
Year end CWT retrospective episode with Jeff Holmes
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. In this episode we look back on the year in CWT podcast space, excerpt:
HOLMES: Yes. All right. Next question from Jumfrey Tuckins: “When was the last time you had uncontrollable laughter, and what caused it?”
COWEN: Probably the correct answer is never. Literally never in my life.
HOLMES: Aw, Tyler.
COWEN: Why should it be uncontrollable? Things just aren’t that funny. How good can something taste? Take the best sushi I’ve ever had, which was quite good. Things can taste a bit better than that, but not much. Funniness is a maximum. It does not bring me to uncontrollable laughter. That’s just the equilibrium.
HOLMES: This is consistent with how you presented yourself before, where you’ve talked about how you feel like you don’t have the extreme highs and lows of other people. You’re much more of a steady middle kind of person. Either displeasureor pleasure, you don’t get the extremes as much.
COWEN: Isn’t uncontrollable laughter in some ways a kind of displeasure? I don’t know, since I’ve never had it.
HOLMES: In the sense that sometimes, if you get tickled, sometimes you’re laughing, but you want it to stop.
COWEN: Right.
HOLMES: No, I think what that’s getting at is those times where something has just so metaphorically tickled you that you — usually, it’s with another person.
COWEN: Not going to happen. Sorry.
HOLMES: That makes me a little sad.
COWEN: Maybe just you’re not funny enough. Have you considered that?
HOLMES: Oh, shots fired, Tyler. Oh, my gosh.
COWEN: I don’t mean you, but you, collective humanity.
HOLMES: Okay, collective you. All right.
COWEN: I heard Louis C.K. live, which is the funniest show I’ve ever heard. I laughed quite a bit, but I was not close to uncontrollably laughing.
HOLMES: Do you have any theory as to why that is? When that happens, again, there’s something that you and another person are experiencing together, that you’ve realized you’ve had the same thought or same experience, and it’s just —
COWEN: I suspect it’s heritable, with apologies to Alison Gopnik.
Rrecommended, and of course this year there will be much more to come.
Which published results can you trust?
That is the theme of my latest Free Press column, starting with the recent Oliver Sacks debacle. Here is one excerpt:
…as my George Mason University colleague Bryan Caplan suggests, trust literatures, not individual research studies. By a “literature,” I mean the collective work conducted by many researchers, acting in decentralized fashion, to publish and circulate the results that will best persuade other researchers.
Second, treat research articles, or their popular media coverage, as possibilities to put in your mental toolbox rather than settled truths.
Literatures are more trustworthy than individual articles because they reflect a collective effort to establish reliable results. A supposed correlation gets refereed and scrutinized dozens of times, or maybe hundreds of times. If you have a new hypothesis, other researchers have a chance to make their names by knocking it down. There are also more eyes watching, in case real-world experience delivers results at odds with what a particular theory had been postulating. Or maybe there was a simple mistake in writing the computer code behind the paper’s result. Literatures contain a variety of different ways to come to a particular conclusion, and you can see whether they end up pointing in the same general direction.
You may not have time or the background to master a complete literature on a research topic, but these days you can send well-written prompts to GPT 5.2 Pro, Claude Opus 4.5, or Gemini 3.0 for some very good summaries of any literature you want. Furthermore, you can cross-check across these different AI models for additional reliability.
This is useful advice which is rarely heeded, and learning how to interpret a research literature is one of the most important skills in intellectual life.
What should I ask Kim Bowes?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. Here is Wikipedia:
Kimberly D. Bowes (born 1970) is an American archaeologist who is a professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in archeology, material culture and economics of the Roman and the later Roman world. She was the Director of the American Academy in Rome from 2014–2017.[2] She is the author of three monographs…
While she is continuously focused on the archaeology and material culture of the Roman and later Roman worlds, her research interests have shifted from late antiquity and the archeologies of religion and elite space to historical economies with a distinct focus on poverty and the lived experience of the poor. Her forthcoming study on Roman peasants in Italy reflects a greater attention to non-elites in the studies of Roman archaeology and economic history and a shift in her methodology, integrating archaeological and scientific data, anthropological theory and historical economics become.
I am a big fan of her new book Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent. So what should I ask her?
Tuesday assorted links
1. Does AI weaken the Lucas critique? And a comment from Benjamin Manning.
3. Heritage Foundation is falling apart.
4. Kalshi Research, new arm of the company devoted to research on prediction markets.
5. Travel notes from a visit to Mecca.
6. Palmer Luckey on UAPs. I am not persuaded by his explanation, but clearly he (unlike most of you) has seen the data.
7. Russian billionaire has at least one hundred children (WSJ).
8. Jason Furman on the new economic data (NYT).
Muscat, Oman travel notes
Oman feels more relaxed than much of the Middle East or Gulf, and vistas in Muscat can include the sea, white alabaster buildings, mountains in the backdrop, and some older castles.
There are plenty of foreigners around, but unlike in much of the Gulf most of the people you see are natives not migrants. English is spoken widely, and is present on most of the signs and menus. Women wear headscarves, but they are not usually veiled. The vibes are friendly and everything feels extremely safe.
Muscat is not quite “the linear city,” but most activity is located on or near one main road which stretches east-west. There is no center of town, and you find yourself going back and forth on that road multiple times a day. The plus is that you see the water and the mountains often. Nonetheless there is a monotony to getting around, and much of the town does not feel walkable.
Frequently you will see a poster of the current Sultan, next to a photograph of the previous Sultan, who ruled for fifty years. Does this dual presentation enhance or limit the credibility of the current Sultan? Was it the intent of the current Sultan, or was he somehow locked into that presentation by the interest groups and supporters of the previous Sultan?
The National Museum is very good, and shows that Oman historically, along with Yemen, has held the role of a great civilization. In fact, Oman drove out the Portuguese and then ruled Zanzibar from 1698 to 1856. That explains why the island has so many Arabic doors and motifs.
Per capita income, PPP-adjusted, clocks in at about 45k, but distribution is uneven and the country does not feel that wealthy. I cannot find a single number for median income, but I suspect it would underrate actual living standards. Even deep into the countryside you will find high-quality homes and roads, indicating that public funds are spent with some efficiency, at least relative to some comparison countries.
Misfat al Abriyeen is a small village, largely vertical, where they still use water and irrigation systems from at least two thousand years ago.
Nizwa is a town of about 80,000, about two hours from Muscat, with a much older and more traditional souk.
When driving around Oman, the Peter Gabriel soundtrack “Passion,” from The Last Temptation of Christ, is effective.
For food, try Persian at Shandiz or grilled fish at Turkish House, or Yemeni or Afghan offerings. There are several restaurants with “Omani food,” but the problem is that they are authentic, not that they are insufficiently authentic. You should try some, much of it is not bad but it is also not the best food in town. At one place they flat outright refused to bring me the dried, salted shark dish. Nor did I wish to order camel meat, which is supposed to be gamey. The soups with meat and barley are good, but basically for Omani food you wish to keep returning to the grilled fish.
Overall, Oman is an underrated travel destination. It is exotic and beautiful and comfortable, all at the same time. The further reaches of the country are renowned for hiking and birdwatching, but perhaps two days in Oman and a one day trip to the countryside is the optimal dose here?
For U.S: and many other citizens, it is easy to enter the country without a visa.
*38 Londres Street*
The author is Philippe Sands and the subtitle is
So recommended, and added to my own list. And yes I did buy another book by Philippe Sands, the acid test of whether I really liked something.