Wednesday assorted links
1. Under Australia’s social media ban, it will be harder for museums to reach young audiences.
2. The influence of Claremont Institute fellows.
4. The philosophy of Solvej Balle.
5. “Persuasion of humans in the bottleneck.”
6. Scott Sumner movie reviews. And more.
7. Bela Tarr, RIP (NYT).
8. David Zipper says “Europe Doesn’t Need Driverless Cars.” (FT)
A final remark on AGI and taxation
I’ve noted repeatedly in the past that the notion of AGI, as it is batted around these days, is not so well-defined. But that said, just imagine that any meaningful version of AGI is going to contain the concept “a lot more stuff gets produced.”
So say AGI comes along, what does that mean for taxation? There have been all these recent debates, some of them surveyed here, on labor, capital, perfect substitutability, and so on. But surely the most important first order answer is: “With AGI, we don’t need to raise taxes!”
Because otherwise we do need to raise taxes, given the state of American indebtedness, even with significant cuts to the trajectory of spending.
So the AGI types should in fact be going further and calling for tax cuts. Even if you think AGI is going to do us all in someday — all the more reason to have more consumption now. Of course that will include tax cuts for the rich, since they pay such a large share of America’s tax burden. (Effective Altruists, are you listening?”)
The rest of us can be more circumspect, and say “let’s wait and see.”
Yes, Western Europe will survive recent waves of migration
Over 1.2mn people came to the EU seeking protection in 2015, many displaced by worsening conflict in Syria. There were bitter political feuds in Brussels over asylum, border and relocation policies. January 2016 set a grim record for the number of migrants dying while attempting to cross the Mediterranean.
Now things have changed, as European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen made clear in December when she took the stage at a conference on migrant smuggling. After a major policy overhaul over the past two years, “Europe is managing migration responsibly,” she said. “The figures speak for themselves.”
Irregular arrivals of migrants to the EU recorded by its border agency Frontex dropped by 25 per cent in the 11 months to November 2024, and have been continuously declining since a recent peak of 380,000 arrivals registered in 2023.
New asylum applications have also decreased by around 26 per cent in the first nine months of last year, according to Eurostat data, as fewer Syrians are applying for protection since the fall of the authoritarian regime of Bashar al-Assad in late 2024.
The Venezuelan stock market
Venezuela’s stock market is now up +73% since President Maduro was captured. Since December 23rd, as President Trump ramped up pressure on Maduro’s government, Venezuela’s stock market is up +148%.
Here is the link and chart. And up seventeen percent in the last day, and now some more on top of that. Note the bolivar is down only a small amount since December 23.
I see the reality as such:
a) Immoral actions were taken, leading up to the removal of Maduro, and immoral measures are likely to continue, both from the United States and from various Venezuelan replacement governments.
b) Trump’s actions have been some mix of unlawful and unconstitutional, to what degree you can debate.
c) In expected value terms, the people of Venezuela are now much better off.
It can and should be debated how much a) and b) should be weighted against c). But to deny c), or even to fail to mention it, is, I think, quite delusional.
Effective Altruists, are you paying attention?
Tuesday assorted links
1. 54 observations about Mexico.
2. What do economists mean when they say identification?
3. “Is the European Union now the world’s most underrated libertarian project?”
4. LLAMAS LLAMAS LLAMAS (music from Mexico).
5. Christina Cacioppo reading from 2026. And here is Klara Feenstra.
6. Scott Sumner on neoconservatism.
7. Long-term Treasuries have been losing their safe haven status.
The US Leads the World in Robots (Once You Count Correctly)
If you search for data on robots you will quickly find data from the International Federation of Robotics which places South Korea in the lead with ~818 robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers, followed by China, Japan, Germany and finally at 10th place the US at ~304 robots per 10,000. The IFR, however, misses the most sophisticated, impressive and versatile robots, namely Teslas with FSD capability. Teslas see the world, navigate complex environments, move tons of metal at high speeds and must perform at very high levels of tolerance and safety. If you included Teslas as robots, as you should, the US leaps to the top.
Moreover, once you understand Teslas as robots, Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot division, stops being a quixotic Elon side-project and becomes the obvious continuation of Tesla’s core work.
Why Care About Debt-to-GDP?
Here is another piece for “contrarian Tuesday,” like it or not:
We construct an international panel data set comprising three distinct yet plausible measures of government indebtedness: the debt-to-GDP, the interest-to-GDP, and the debt-to-equity ratios. Our analysis reveals that these measures yield differing conclusions about recent trends in government indebtedness. While the debt-to-GDP ratio has reached historically high levels, the other two indicators show either no clear trend or a declining pattern over recent decades. We argue for the development of stronger theoretical foundations for the measures employed in the literature, suggesting that, without such grounding, assertions about debt (un)sustainability may be premature.
That is from a new NBER working paper by , it is worth repeating this basic idea. And here is my earlier podcast with Alex on similar themes.
The puzzle of Pakistan’s poverty?
Until 2009, India was poorer than Pakistan on a per capita basis. India truly became richer than Pakistan after 2009 and since then it hasn’t looked back. If trends continue for a decade, India will be more than twice as rich as Pakistan soon…
So why has India pulled ahead in GDP per capita? The reason is simple. Pakistan’s high fertility has driven population growth faster than India’s. In 1952 Pakistan had about one-tenth of India’s population; by 2025 it had grown to nearly one-seventh.
In other words, many of the added Pakistanis have not started working yet, but they are on the books to lower the per capita esstimate. There is much in this Rohit Shinde essay I disagree with, but it is a useful corrective to those who simply wish to sing “policy, policy, policy.” Putting aside its per capita lag, Pakistan has done a better job keeping up with India than you might think at first.
In any case, I am not predicting that trend will continue in the future, I do not think so. So someday this essay might look especially “off,” nonetheless it is worth a moment of ponder.
O-Ring Automation
We study automation when tasks are quality complements rather than separable. Production requires numerous tasks whose qualities multiply as in an O-ring technology. A worker allocates a fixed endowment of time across the tasks performed; machines can replace tasks with given quality, and time is allocated across the remaining manual tasks. This “focus” mechanism generates three results. First, task-by-task substitution logic is incomplete because automating one task changes the return to automating others. Second, automation decisions are discrete and can require bundled adoption even when automation quality improves smoothly. Third, labour income can rise under partial automation because automation scales the value of remaining bottleneck tasks. These results imply that widely-used exposure indices, which aggregate task-level automation risk using linear formulas, will overstate displacement when tasks are complements. The relevant object is not average task exposure but the structure of bottlenecks and how automation reshapes worker time around them.
That is from a new paper by Joshua S. Gans and Avi Goldfarb. Once again people, the share of labor is unlikely to collapse…
Monday assorted links
1. Séb Krier.
2. Institute for Progress class in the economics of innovation.
3. It’s over, people. Alternately, here is Joshua Gans using AI for research.
6. The year in Neanderthals (NYT).
The wisdom of Garett Jones
Two cases for capital share going to zero in a strong AGI world: 1. Capital and labor are more like perfect complements than perfect substitutes, always will be as long as the economy is for humans, and so astronomical increases in capital shrink the capital share to zero.
Why capital share goes to zero in a strong AGI world: 2. Capital & labor are more like perfect substitutes than complements because AGI de facto replicates free humans. Astronomical increases in capital make capital so abundant it’s unpriced like air, so capital share is zero.
The link has a bit more. Of course this is a thought experiment and a reductio, not a prediction. (It seems people in the rationalist community systematically misunderstand how economists communicate? Maybe that is partly the fault of the economists, but they should not so dogmatically believe that the economists are wrong.) And here are very good comments from Basil Halperin.
The bottom line is that it is premature, to say the least, to expect that the share of labor falls to zero or near-zero.
Africa possibility of the day
Call it a statistical quirk if you must. But this year, with a bit of luck, Africa will grow faster than Asia. If the 54 African economies manage to outpace their Asian counterparts, it would be the first time in modern history that this has happened.
To achieve it, African economies will need to grow marginally faster on average than they did last year. In 2025, despite war in Sudan, insurgency in the Sahel and coups in Madagascar and Guinea Bissau, sub-Saharan Africa is expected to have mustered growth of about 4.1 per cent. The IMF expects this to notch up to 4.4 per cent as economies continue to reap the benefits of a weak dollar — good for cutting debt-service payments and easing inflationary pressure — and of high commodity prices, including for gold and copper.
At the same time, the IMF is predicting that, as the Chinese motor whirrs more slowly, the combined economies of Asia will slow in 2026 to around 4.1 per cent.
Here is more from David Pilling at the FT.
U.S. interventions in the New World, with leader removal
I can think of a few. I am not thinking of ongoing struggles, such as the funding of opposition to the Sandinistas, rather I wish to focus on cases where the key leaders actually were removed. After all, we know that is the case in Venezuela today. Maybe these efforts were rights violations, or unconstitutional, and yes that matters. But how did they fare in utilitarian terms?
Puerto Rico: 1898, a big success.
Mexican-American War: Removed Mexican leaders from what today is the American Southwest. Big utilitarian success, including for the many Mexicans who live there now.
Chile, and the coup against Allende: A utilitarian success, Chile is one of the wealthiest places in Latin America and a stable democracy today.
Grenada: Under Reagan, better than Marxism, not a huge success, but certainly an improvement.
Panama, under the first Bush, or for that matter much earlier to get the Canal built: Both times a big success.
Haiti, under Clinton, and also 1915-1934: Unclear what the counterfactuals should be, still this case has to be considered a terrible failure.
Cuba, 1906-1909: Unclear? Nor do I know enough to assess the counterfactual.
Dominican Republic, 1961-1954, starting with Trujillo. A success, as today the DR is one of the wealthiest countries in Latin America. But the positive developments took a long time.
I do not know enough about the U.S. occupation of the DR 1916-1924 to judge that instance. But not an obvious success?
Can we count the American Revolution itself? The Civil War? Both I would say were successes.
We played partial but perhaps non-decisive roles in regime changes in Ecuador 1963 and Brazil 1964, in any case I consider those results to be unclear. Maybe Nicaragua 1909-1933 counts here as well.
So the utilitarian in you, at least, should be happy about Venezuela, whether or not you should be happy on net.
You should note two things. First, the Latin interventions on the whole have gone much better than the Middle East interventions. Perhaps that is because the region has stronger ties to democracy, and also is closer to the United States, both geographically and culturally. Second, looking only at the successes, often they took a long time and/or were not exactly the exact kinds of successes the intervenors may have sought.
Absher, Grier, and Grier consider CIA activism in Latin America and find poor results. I think much of that is springing from cases where we failed to remove the actual leaders, such as Nicaragua and Cuba. Simply funding a conflict does seem to yield poor returns.
Stories Beyond Demographics
The representation theory of stories, where the protagonist must mirror my gender, race, or sexuality for me to find myself in the story, offers a cramped view of what fiction can do and a shallow account of how it actually works. Stories succeed not through mirroring but by revealing human patterns that cut across identity. Archetypes like Hero, Caregiver, Explorer, and Artist, and structures like Tragedy, Romance, and Quest are available to everyone. That is why a Japanese salaryman can love Star Wars despite never having been to space or met a Wookie and why an American teenager can recognize herself in a nineteenth-century Russian novel.
Tom Bogle makes this point well in a post on Facebook:
I have no issue with people wanting representation of historically marginalized people in stories. I understand that people want to “see themselves” in the story.
But it is more important to see the stories in ourselves than to see ourselves in the stories.
When we focus on the representation model, we recreate a character to be an outward representation of physical traits. Then the internal character traits of that individual become associated with the outward physical appearance of the character and we pigeonhole ourselves into thinking that we are supposed to relate only to the character that looks like us. Movies and TV shows have adopted the Homer Simpson model of the aloof, detached, and even imbecilic father, and I, as a middle-aged cis het white guy with seven kids could easily fall into the trap of thinking that is the only character to whom I can relate. It also forces us to change the stories and their underlying imagery in order to fit our own narrative preferences, which sort of undermines the purpose for retelling an old story in the first place.
The archetypal model, however, shifts our way of thinking. Instead of needing to adapt the story of Little Red-Cap (Red Riding Hood) to my own social and cultural norms so that I can see myself in the story, I am tasked with seeing the story play out in myself. How am I Riding Hood? How am I the Wolf? How does the grandmother figure appear in me from time to time? Who has been the Woodsman in my life? How have I been the Woodsman to myself or others? Even the themes of the story must be applied to my patterns of behavior or belief systems, not simply the characters. This model also enables us to retain the integrity of the versions of these stories that have withstood the test of time.
So if your goal is actually to affect real social change through stories, I would encourage you to consider how the archetypal approach may actually be more effective at accomplishing your aims than the representational approach alone (as they are not necessarily in conflict with one another).
Adam Smith markets in everything
Gustavo Dudamel — the Oscar L. Tang & H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Music & Artistic Director Designate — conducts the World Premiere of the wealth of nations, a highly anticipated commission from the Pulitzer Prize–winning composer David Lang. Inspired by economist Adam Smith’s 1776 magnum opus, Lang dramatizes this foundational work about economics as inspired by Handel’s treatment of Biblical texts in Messiah. “I want this work to be enjoyable and thought-provoking,” says Lang, “encouraging audiences to consider what we truly value.”
Here is the link.