Category: Uncategorized
Why we stopped making land
From Zigmund Forrest and Maxwell Tabarrok in Works in Progress:
In total, around eight percent of the land in America’s major coastal cities was underwater in the 1890s and has since been reclaimed. This includes the land under several major airports, like Newark, Logan, and SFO, as well as neighborhoods like the Financial District in San Francisco, the Back Bay in Boston, and Camden in Philadelphia. Some cities, like Boston and Charleston, have doubled in size by reclaiming land.
Today, reclamation should be more common than ever. Land values in some cities are thirty times what they were in 1950, and high-tide flooding is four to eight times as frequent. Reclamation could extend and protect our coastal cities as it has for centuries. But rather than reclaim more land, we have virtually ceased to reclaim any at all. Since the completion of Battery Park City in 1976, there has not been a single major urban land reclamation project in the United States and only a handful of port expansions.
…Reclamation stopped abruptly in the 1970s when a wave of environmental regulations made it enormously expensive to reshape the landscape. And it halted at the same time in every other country that passed similar laws.
Recommended.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Survey of AI security issues for USG and potential responses.
2. Vacancy tax elasticity of resident supply.
3. Will Substack save philosophy?
4. AI firms hiring philosophers (NYT).
5. Podcast with Jonathan Ross.
6. Some reasons why doctors will not give you probabilities, of course those are not the only reasons.
7. Pending AI nationalism from China? And a possible correction? There are disputes surrounding these claims.
8. Is China arresting economics professors who speak the truth?
Wiesbaden notes
Who goes to Wiesbaden these days? The era of Russian nobles taking the cure here and gambling is long since gone. And yet here we are. The proximate cause of this trip is the desire to see Grigory Sokolov, one of the world’s great pianists and a cult figure of sorts. He rarely tours North America, maybe these days never as he is 76. The current program includes Beethoven’s fourth piano sonata, Beethoven’s Op.126 Bagetelles, and Schubert’s last piano sonata. How can one say no? Sokolov also was a favorite of Tom Schelling, I might add, especially his recording of The Art of the Fugue, in my view one of the best classical music recordings of all time.
Besides, I have long been a believer in semi-random excursions to mid-size, slightly neglected German cities. There remains a strong cultural federalism in Germany, and so you might see and hear wonderful things in many different parts of the country.
I perceived two difficult Wiesbadens. In one, if you walk through the cheaper part of the pedestrian zone in the evening, the city seems mostly Muslim. But if you walk around during the morning, the city seems mostly German. I might add that some of the younger Muslim women show signs of assimilating, at least based on how they dress and present themselves. The older women tend to stick with the headscarves.
Over the last twenty years, inflation-adjusted real estate prices in Wiesbaden have gone up about forty percent, an OK performance. At times the city “does not feel like Germany any more,” but I think it is holding on. The proportion of new building is roughly equal to the population growth, so I do not think this price effect is a NIMBY effect. Rather it reflects the fact that Wiesbaden is still a pretty nice place to live. that said, in some significant ways Germany in the traditional sense is failing to reproduce itself.
It was stunning to me to discover how hard it is, in most of the downtown, to find plain, ordinary German food. At any price level. There is no current equivalent of Wienerwald or Nordsee to be seen, never mind a decent Wiener Schnitzel.
Much of Wiesbaden was destroyed and rebuilt, but the best fifteen or twenty buildings show the previous wealth and splendor to good effect. You will see these gems walking around, though only periodically. There is also an old Roman wall and a moving, more recent Holocaust memorial.
Most German ice cream just isn’t that good, so try L’Art Sucre for something French.
Museum Reinhard Ernst is the new institution in town, and it specializes in color field abstract art. The building is impressive, but the collection is weak except for a few Stellas. Why organize a museum around that basis unless the underlying collection is super strong in that area? This one is not. I can forgive the absence of the expensive American Ellsworth Kelly, but no Blinky Palermo or Günther Förg?
Nonetheless their restrooms might forestall this kind of Larry David conflict:
(At Museum Ludwig in Köln, by the way, you get the discount for being disabled only if you have “fifty degrees of disability,” however they might measure that. Slight disabilities are not enough, you must be truly “schwerbehinderte,” as judged by the state, heaven forbid the museum rely on the honor system.)
Museum Wiesbaden in contrast was an unexpected delight. Although it is mainly a natural history museum, they have one of the world’s best collections of Art Nouveau and the single best Jawlensky collection, and you can have these all to yourself. Very few people seem to go there.
As for the economy, here are some Germany facts of the day. Yet Germany continues, and visits remain a source of pleasure and interest.
Sokolov, by the way, played six encores. Where should the Germany trip target next year?
Monday assorted links
*What Makes a Great Composer?: A Data-Driven Exploration of Music History*
A very good book, forthcoming, by Karol J. Borowiecki and Marc Lawx, here is the Amazon link, here is the Princeton University Press page.
Sunday assorted links
1. The family keeping watch over a 52-year-old pot of soup (WSJ). I guessed the country wrong.
2. The rise of grocery tourism.
3. PEPFAR interview. Much of this is substantive, and interesting. But some of Mike’s claims are absurd, for instance: “Elon Musk, on his own, if he paid his taxes, could end world hunger.” Can he really believe that?
4. David Brooks on who benefits from AI (Atlantic).
5. Michael Polanyi’s book The Contempt of Freedom is now reissued. Amazon link here.
6. Falling fertility on the political left is the key driver of U.S. birth rate decline. Do note that political views are somewhat heritable. That said, other demographics are moving America to the left economically.
What should I ask Michael Moritz?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him, based around his new book Ausländer: One Family’s Story of Escape and Exile. Mike of course was a pioneering venture capitalist through Sequoia, and before that had a distinguished career as a journalist, which included books on Chrysler, Apple (the first such book I believe?), and soccer coach Alex Ferguson of Manchester United. Here is his Wikipedia page.
So what should I ask him?
Tyler, Nabeel, and Jackson on French thinkers
Nabeel: (57:47) …For example, there’s a French thinker called Jacques Derrida. I probably should go and read him at some point, but I’m not entirely convinced there is a there there, and I don’t know anyone who swears by it. If Tyler told me, “Nabeel, you are missing a big piece of your life by not reading him,” I would go read him tomorrow. But I don’t have any of those people.
Tyler: (58:44) Lacan is my marginal case of “no there there.” So Derrida, I put in a fair amount of effort and did conclude, rightly or wrongly, that there’s no there there. So you can, in my opinion, write him off. Lacan, I keep on wondering. Smart people still will say, “This is amazing.” I’ve tried a bunch of times, but I haven’t given up. There’s a new Lacan book coming out later this summer and I’ll try it again. We’ll see. That’s my marginal “is there a there there” figure.
Nabeel: (59:13) Yeah. I think modern French thinkers put too much of a premium on sounding cool, or postmodern philosophy generally. I think it repays some effort to kind of grasp the core ideas, but it doesn’t repay making it your life’s reading or something.
Tyler: (59:26) Baudrillard is quite good and Foucault is extremely interesting. So I’m not against “the French” in this period, but if they keep on not making sense, I feel I’m educated well enough.
Jackson: (59:37) You have a lot of context.
Tyler: (59:38) That at some point I can strike the ledger.
Nabeel: (59:41) I do—Nowadays, I just put Foucault through GPT and I just have GPT explain it to me, and that’s going to be good enough for now.
Tyler: (59:50) The problem with Foucault, I think, is so much of the history is wrong in a quite mundane way, so there’s something very problematic about it. But the stuff—I think it’s in a way quite simple, almost too simple. And the fact that the current right has so latched on to Foucault is a sign that it’s simple. I don’t mean necessarily bad, but there are these structures and they’re trying to tell you what to do. And there’s something anonymous about that as well. It’s not just the individuals who form the conspiracy. It’s how a lot of the world thinks today.
Here is the longer discussion, already linked to.
Saturday assorted links
1. The pending evolution of Chile’s school age population.
2. Markets in everything those new service sector jobs.
3. Survey on the economics of caste.
4. J.D. Vance on Milton Friedman. And Mamdani on Hayek.
5. “Firms that adopt AI heavily grow headcount 10% over two years following adoption.”
6. Browse all Criterion films.
7. Does a damage accumulation model explain different aging rates across the species?
A scientific benefit (and cost) of AI innovation
What changed was that the cost of preliminary exploration collapsed. I could sketch an argument, identify the first serious objections, test whether they were fatal, and reach a provisional verdict in an afternoon rather than a fortnight. This sounds like a simple acceleration, and the more profound effect was on what I was willing to abandon. Dropping a question after an afternoon’s work feels nothing like dropping one after three weeks. When the exploration costs are low, the sunk cost attachment disappears, and you find yourself dropping bad questions earlier and more often, which means the questions you keep are better. I explored far more ideas, and my working portfolio became both larger and better curated. I arrived at this outcome not through any deliberate plan but simply through sustained engagement with a tool that changed what exploration cost.
The skill that improved most, and the one I would never have thought to look for, was something I can only describe as question-identification – the ability to find problems that are both tractable and important. This is the thing an academic career is substantially built on and which nobody, so far as I know, has ever tried to teach directly.
I want to be honest about the costs. My ability to hold together a complex position verbally, under pressure, in a seminar or a conversation, has probably not improved and may have declined somewhat. When preliminary exploration is cheap, you spend less time grinding through arguments from first principles, a grinding that builds fluency that shows up in live exchange. Friends have pressed me on this, and they are right to worry.
That is from Carlo Cordasco, and there is more, via Conor Friedersdorf.
The most profitable crypto investors and firms
Here is the source. Here is from the editors at The Free Press. Here is more from Mene Ukueberuwa.
Do falling birth rates boost per capita income?
The secular decline in birth rates across the globe over the past seven decades has slowed population growth, raised average ages, and reshaped labor markets and the macroeconomy. Contrary to the widespread expectation that these trends hamper economic growth, we find lower birth rates are associated with higher growth in GDP per working-age adult across countries and higher wage growth across US commuting zones, with no negative impact on aggregate GDP or earnings. These patterns are not explained by educational upgrading, rising female labor force participation, the declining importance of agriculture, or neoclassical-Solow mechanisms. We argue that they reflect the endogenous, labor-saving response of technology to the scarcity of younger workers. Consistent with this interpretation, countries and regions with lower birth rates exhibit more labor-saving patents and growing high-tech activity. There is also higher TFP growth across countries and industries. Exploiting cross-country variation in WWII military and civilian deaths, we find that declines in younger population, rather than population size per se, drive our results.
Here is the full paper by Acemoglu, Autor, Beirne, and Scott. Via Philip Heimburger.
Friday assorted links
1. Rohit is solving for the AI equilibrium.
2. Robin Hanson explains his political evolution.
3. Restoring the Book of Kells.
4. More Scott Sumner movie reviews.
5. Peter Howitt YouTube talk on golf? (I have not heard)
6. “Academics need to change, not the AI.”
7. I answer questions about AI for Berkman Klein Center.
8. On late Dylan.
How will AI and the fertility crisis interact?
That is from my latest Free Press column, here is one excerpt:
Each individual will be seen as something special by the other humans. Public spaces will be emptier, so anyone out in public will attract more notice. If you are waiting in line at the movie theater, you will be more likely to start talking to the person next to you. After all, you already have had the option of talking to the AIs all day long.
It has long been the norm in American small towns that you say hi to the people you pass on the sidewalk, or perhaps start chatting with customers in your store who appear to be outsiders. Those kinds of practices will spread to the large cities of today, which will become like smaller towns due to lower population density.
Many of these humans will invest heavily in their appearances, in their charisma, and in their “vibes.” After all, the AIs will, and already do, perform so many useful informational functions. If you, as a human, wish to draw attention to yourself and be seen as noteworthy, you will have to specialize in the remaining human functions. That may include “touching grass,” giving warm and appropriate hugs, looking good or at least looking interesting, and having some kind of unique identity that either is visible upon meeting or which AI smart glasses will communicate during social interactions. (“This guy has sailed around the world three times and punched a shark on the nose.”)
The YouTube celebrity Clavicular has attracted a lot of ridicule for his “looksmaxxing,” which involves a lot of manipulation of his appearance and some plastic surgery. Like it or not, that is a harbinger of how some aspects of this future will operate. Clavicular has achieved nothing of note, except for being immediately recognizable for how he looks. For similar reasons, people are likely to pay more attention to how they dress, what kind of makeup they wear, and other aspects of their appearance, such as how tall they are and how much they weigh. Plastic surgery and the successor drugs to GLP-1s are likely to command even more interest than today.
If a person comes across as extremely nondescript, you might feel there is no reason to speak with that person instead of chatting with your AI. A lot of ordinary social interactions will become more like a gala, where everyone shows up wanting to look a very particular way to draw attention.
To inhabitants of 2026, that might sound stupid, undesirable, and ridiculous. I do not love the thought myself. Yet people today care much more about how they look, and can do much more about it, than could people in medieval times. We are used to those differences, and few of us wish to go back to earlier times. People in this future may well feel the same way.
There are other interesting points at the link.
Noah Smith on negative emotional contagion
Every movement in 2020s America is defined not by what they want, but by who they hate.
Rightists: Immigrants
Leftists: Israel
Intellectual liberals: Rich techbros
Here is the link, in the last six months or so I have noticed all these trends getting worse. Praise goes to all those who avoid negative emotional contagion, you will prove the saviors of our civilization.