Category: Uncategorized
*In the Realm of the Last Man*
As Mark Lilla, a recovering Straussian, once remarked, they [the Straussians] were like craftsmen building a house brick by brick on a foundation that Leo Strauss had laid. But they would never become architects of that house, or decide that the house was too small for them to comfortably live in. Moreoever, Strauss disparaged social science and what he considered naive forms of positivism prevalent in American universities. This led some of his followers to disdain merely empirical accounts of current events. If you are more of a Hegelian, you need to pay attention to actual history if you are to give an account of how ideas play out in the real world.
That is from Frank Fukuyama’s forthcoming memoir, recommended of course.
Friday assorted links
1. One reason why child care is so expensive in the U.S.
2. “For the first time in decades, new and recent graduates with at least a bachelor’s degree have consistently higher unemployment rates than the overall American workforce, according to data on 22-to-27-year-olds compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.” Link here.
3. Redux of my 2021 Bloomberg column on the ideal university.
4. 15-minute weird Brazilian album.
5. History of social science funding at the NSF.
6. Furman and Laibson on Harvard grade inflation (NYT).
7. Who gets laid off first? The measurers?
8. Work from home may be the problem for young workers, not AI.
The archaeology tranche at Emergent Ventures
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- Benjamin Arbuckle is combining archaeology and ancient DNA analysis to reconstruct entire ecosystems of ancient cities, aiming to show how human societies can thrive in balance with their environments.
- Jesse Casana, an archaeology professor at Dartmouth, is developing drone-based radar imaging methods to detect and map buried archaeological sites beneath desert sands, combining advanced remote sensing technologies to preserve endangered cultural landscapes and transform archaeological discovery in arid regions.
- Leila Character is developing drone-based imaging and AI tools to detect hidden archaeological sites, aiming to make discovery faster, cheaper, and more accessible for researchers worldwide.
- Bryce Hoenigman is developing an AI tool to help date ancient cuneiform tablets by analyzing how written symbols evolved over time, aiming to make archaeological research faster and more accurate.
Again, I am very grateful to Yonatan Ben Shimon for making this support possible. And there remains a modest amount of money left in the fund.
Is space warfare offense-dominant or defense-dominant?
The third type of weapons are invasion ships – this is the classic science fiction trope, however actual invasion ships have one fundamental weakness – they need to slow down at the destination galaxy. This has two effects. Firstly, energetically getting invasion ships to the opponents galaxy is substantially less efficient than sending RKVs there. This is because of the tyranny of the rocket equation. While the invasion ships can be accelerated to relativistic velocities at origin galaxy, to slow down, it cannot be assumed there is an equivalent infrastructure at the destination. Instead, the invasion ships must carry their own braking fuel with them, which must then also be accelerated and so on.
The second fundamental problem is lack of stealth. When accelerating your exhaust points away from your target, when decellerating your exhaust points towards it. Essentially your are deliberately dissipating all your kinetic energy as a gigantic beacon screaming ‘I am here come kill me’. The decelleration burns of large-scale invasion fleet would both likely last thousands of years and also be immensely noticeable to any reasonable civilization in the target galaxy let alone a paranoid K3. Even if you don’t try to decellerate by rockets but instead by e.g. drag on magnetic sails, this drag causes friction which then radiates uniformly in all directions, again serving as a beacon.
That is from a very interesting and much longer 2025 piece by Beren’s Blog. Via S.
Fertility and financial risk-taking
We examine how fertility expectations influence financial risk-taking using nationally representative data from three countries. Our results indicate that childless adults who do not expect children are 21-36% more likely to invest in stocks than those who expect children, controlling for personal characteristics. This effect persists also when medical infertility instruments expectations. We find no similar effects for other savings categories, nor differences in self-reported risk tolerance. Households expecting children report shorter financial planning horizons, which may explain their lower risk-taking. These results suggest declining fertility can increase young adults’ stock market participation through childbearing expectations.
That is from a recent paper by Judith Bohnenkamp, Ville Rantala, and Melina Murren Vosse. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Thursday assorted links
1. What the university is now for?
3. No, they were never voting for libertarian Republicans.
4. Minnesota bans prediction markets, the federal government pushes back (NYT).
5. Joe Francis on smart phone timing and fertility changes.
6. The surrender arrives. Here are responses from human mathematicians, see for instance Gowers.
7. U.S. to Award Quantum Computing Firms $2 Billion and Take Equity Stakes (WSJ).
Wednesday assorted links
1. AI robot is now a Buddhist monk.
2. Roon.
3. Do economics and finance assessment for AI models at Mercor.
4. Are we underestimating health care sector productivity?
5. Can AI replace human counselors at scale?
6. Nan on nascent philanthropy. Recommended, very important. It focuses on what an additional $50 billion in philanthropic spending might look like, and asks where the talent will come from.
7. Chennai has the only surviving handwritten newspaper in the world?
Old space policy vs. new space policy
The emergence of firms like SpaceX and Blue Origin has made space a leading example of how private enterprise drives innovation, marking what many see as a sharp break between Old Space and New Space. Yet little systematic evidence documents when the transition to this new phase of space innovation occurred and which firms drove it. We use patent data to provide this measurement and find that the largest surge in space innovation occurred in the 1990s, coinciding with demand-side market creation, and preceding the entry of high-profile startups after 2005. Throughout this period and since, incumbent aerospace firms account for most of the space-related patenting, with entrants contributing a growing but minority share. The same geographic regions that dominated space innovation during the post-Apollo era remain dominant today. These patterns are consistent with directed technical change: incumbents direct R&D toward policy-created markets accessible from existing capabilities, while entrants bring science-based insights into domains requiring new paradigms. Our findings suggest that New Space is more closely connected to Old Space than prevailing narratives imply, and that government’s most consequential role in space innovation may lie in constructing appropriable markets. We make patent data on space-related technologies available for future research.
That is from a recent NBER working paper by
Tuesday assorted links
1. AI-written story published in Granta, wins major literary prize.
2. JFV on smart phones as accelerators of fertility declines.
3. Maryland markets in everything.
4. Polling Chinese on a top one hundred books.
5. From the excellent Samir Varma, could alien drone probes decelerate in time? And here is analysis from GPT.
6. “I am thrilled to announce the launch of Totei.com. Totei is a magazine devoted to craft and craftsmanship in all its forms. The name Totei comes from the ancient Japanese word for apprentice.” From Gaurav Kapadia.
Monday assorted links
Sunday assorted links
1. University of Vermont enrollments expected to fall fifteen percent this year.
2, New NSF initiative, which seems set to bypass universities?
3. Are firms migrating from the US to Europe, or vice versa?
4. Soft tissue star injuries in the NBA are getting worse.
5. NY high school has 21 valedictorians all with A+ averages.
Saturday assorted links
Detroit notes
It remains one of America’s most interesting cities, and now it is seeing a continuing comeback. Downtown remains mostly empty of foot traffic, but I was stunned to see new office buildings and signs of budding prosperity. It did not feel abandoned or hopeless.
Detroit Institute of Art is one of America’s best art museums, showing impeccable taste, though it is notable how much the picture donations simply disappear after some point in time. This is a temple for those are skeptical about modern art, as you will not find it reprensented much here. The American art, the Rembrandt Visitation, the Poussin Holy Family, the Breughel, and the huge Diego Rivera murals are all to die for. The average quality of painting is high as well.
Baobab Fare, not too far from the museum, is a good Burundian (!) restaurant in town.
I was lucky enough to visit the General Motors research and development complex in Cranbrook, mostly designed by Eero Saarinen, due to the ingenuity of Dan Wang (it is mostly not open to the public). Around 20,000 people work there, and it remains a temple of modernist architecture, perhaps anachronistic in effect but beautiful nonetheless. I had not realized how strong the colors were, as that does not come through in the photos.
The Saarinen (papa Saarinen!) house in the Cranbrook Art Museum is perhaps the best Art Deco design I have seen. The museum itself has excellent architecture, sculptures, and gardens, rather than being much of an art museum proper.
Here are good NYT photos of that part of the joy ride.
Overall a trip to the Detroit area is one of the very best American visits you can do, highly recommended, automobile required of course that is why they call it the Motor City.
Friday assorted links
1. Chinese modular innovation.
2. “Are you an emerging scholar passionate about scientific discovery and innovation, and interested in joining a community of classical liberal scholars for a year? We’d love to hear from you. Apply below…” New Mercatus program.
3. State media control influences large language models.
4. The best intellectual biographies of the last twenty-five years. An excellent thread, though it will induce you to spend some money.
5. An undervalued Jack Butler Yeats. Up for auction, I have seen many worse paintings priced in seven figures. Elsewhere, here are some major works up for auction.