Top MR Posts of 2024!
The number one post this year was Tyler’s The changes in vibes — why did they happen? A prescient post and worth a re-read. Lots of quotable content that has become conventional wisdom after the election:
The ongoing feminization of society has driven more and more men, including black and Latino men, into the Republican camp. The Democratic Party became too much the party of unmarried women.
The Democrats made a big mistake going after “Big Tech.” It didn’t cost them many votes, rather money and social capital. Big Tech (most of all Facebook) was the Girardian sacrifice for the Trump victory in 2016, and all the Democrats achieved from that was a hollowing out of their own elite base.
Biden’s recent troubles, and the realization that he and his team had been running a con at least as big as the Trump one. It has become a trust issue, not only an age or cognition issue.
I would also pair this with two other top Tyler posts, I’m kind of tired of this in which Tyler bemoans the endless gaslighting. Tyler is (notoriously!) open-minded and reluctant to criticize others, so this was a telling signal. See also How we should update our views on immigration in which Tyler notes that serious studies on the benefits and costs of immigration are quite positive but:
…voters dislike immigration much, much more than they used to. The size of this effect has been surprising, and also the extent of its spread…Versions of this are happening in many countries, not just a few, and often these are countries that previously were fairly well governed.
…Politics is stupider and less ethical than before, including when it comes immigration…We need to take that into account, and so all sorts of pro-migration dreams need to be set aside for the time being
In short if you were reading MR and Tyler you would have a very good idea of what was really going on in the country.
The second biggest post of the year was my post, Equality Act 2010 on Britain’s descent into the Orwellian madness of equal pay for “equal” work. It’s a very good post but it wrote itself since the laws are so ridiculous. Britain has not recovered from woke. Relatedly, Britain’s authoritarian turn on free speech remains an under-reported story. I worry about this.
Third, was my post The US Has Low Prices for Most Prescription Drugs a good narrative violation. Don’t fail the marshmallow test!
Fourth was another from me, No One’s Name Was Changed at Ellis Island.
Fifth, the sad Jake Seliger is Dead.
Sixth, I’m kind of tired of this, as already discussed.
Seventh was What is the Best-Case Scenario for a Trump Presidency? Rhetorically Trump isn’t following the script I laid out but in terms of actual policy? Still room for optimism.
Eighth was Tyler’s post Taxing unrealized capital gains is a terrible idea; pairs well with my post Taxing Unrealized Capital Gains and Interest Rate Policy.
Ninth, Venezuela under “Brutal Capitalism”, my post on the insane NYTimes piece arguing that Venezuela is now governed by “brutal capitalism” under Maduro’s United Socialist Party!
Tenth, Tyler’s post Who are currently the most influential thinkers/intellectuals on the Left? More than one person on this list now looks likes a fraud.
Your favorite posts of the year?
Argentina facts of the day
Argentina’s bonds have already rallied dramatically. One gauge of the nation’s hard-currency debt, the ICE BofA US Dollar Argentina Sovereign Index, has generated a total return of about 90% this year.
Meanwhile, the S&P Merval Index has risen more than 160% this year through Monday, far outpacing stock benchmarks in developed, emerging and frontier markets alike. Adjusting for currency differences, the index is still up more than 100% in U.S. dollar terms. For comparison, the S&P 500 is up 25% over the same period.
Here is more from the WSJ. The chance of Milei succeeding is now above fifty percent.
India is having its moment
Perhaps you have noticed that India and Indians are receiving far more abuse on social media, most of all on X (Twitter). This was spurred by a number of recent debates in the Republican Party. All of a sudden, a new target was generated.
Of course this is highly unfortunate and should be condemned. Nonetheless there is a silver lining to this cloud. America as a whole has woken up to the fact that India, and Indians, are a big, big deal. Duh!
And when everyone wakes up and pays attention, a lot of abuse follows. I believe we will look back and see this last week as a watershed moment in how America thinks about India and Indians. Mostly for the better (I hope), even if it doesn’t always feel that way at the moment. Many of us will slowly start to have real opinions about these matters.
I should add that for the Republican Party there is a lot at stake. Individuals of Indian origin are a prime source of talent for the party, both today and looking forward. But how welcome will they feel? That is very much a story in the works.
When should DOGE scream in public and push for maximum transparency?
Here is a tweet from Elon, I won’t reproduce it directly on MR. Suffice to say it is strongly worded on the visas issue. Here is a summary of that debate. Much of it is about who should rise or fall in status (duh).
I have some simple, to the point free advice for the DOGERs — the public is not always with you. Making your fight more public, and putting it more on social media, is no guarantee of victory, and indeed it often boosts the chance you will lose or be stymied.
Right now there is an anti-immigration mood, for better or worse, in many countries. But how many voters (former immigrants aside) know what these different types of visas mean, or how many o1s are given out in a year? Yet a lot of influential tech people, and tech donors, know this information pretty well.
So in a non-public fight, you have a big advantage. Trump could maintain or up the number of o1 visas, or make other changes to please the tech people, and few MAGA voters would be very aware of this. But when you scream about this issue, and make it A BATTLE, suddenly it becomes “your pro-immigration sentiment vs. the anti-immigration sentiment of the voters.”
And that is a fight which is very easy to lose. It becomes “The Current Thing,” and everyone is paying attention to the new status game.
So please develop a better sense of when to keep your mouths shut and work behind the scenes.
Saturday assorted links
1. Very good Arun Rao reading list.
2. Data on AI improving the performance of human chess players. And o1 vs. Stockfish.
3. The Nat Friedman plastics report.
4. South Korea poll of the day: “South Koreans now overwhelmingly support developing nuclear weapons, with 73% in favor, reports FristPost”
5. An app to turn economics papers into podcasts.
How Socio-Economic Background Shapes Academia
We explore how socio-economic background shapes academia, collecting the largest dataset of U.S. academics’ backgrounds and research output. Individuals from poorer backgrounds have been severely underrepresented for seven decades, especially in humanities and elite universities. Father’s occupation predicts professors’ discipline choice and, thus, the direction of research. While we find no differences in the average number of publications, academics from poorer backgrounds are both more likely to not publish and to have outstanding publication records. Academics from poorer backgrounds introduce more novel scientific concepts, but are less likely to receive recognition, as measured by citations, Nobel Prize nominations, and awards.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
Is there an intermediate position on immigration?
It is a common view, especially on the political right, that we should be quite open to highly skilled immigrants, and much less open to less skilled immigrants. Increasingly I am wondering whether this is a stable ideological equilibrium.
To an economist, it is easy to see the difference between skilled and less skilled migrants. Their wages are different, resulting tax revenues are different, and social outcomes are different, among other factors. Economists can take this position and hold it in their minds consistently and rather easily (to be clear, I have greater sympathies for letting in more less skilled immigrants than this argument might suggest, but for the time being that is not the point).
The fact that economists’ intuitions can sustain that distinction does not mean that public discourse can sustain that distinction. For instance, perhaps “how much sympathy do you have for foreigners?” is the main carrier of the immigration sympathies of the public. If they have more sympathies for foreigners, they will be relatively pro-immigrant for both the skilled and unskilled groups. If they have fewer sympathies for foreigners, they will be less sympathetic to immigration of all kinds. Do not forget the logic of negative contagion.
You also can run a version of this argument with “legal vs. illegal immigration” being the distinction at hand.
Increasingly, I have the fear that “general sympathies toward foreigners” is doing much of the load of the work here. This is one reason, but not the only one, why I am uncomfortable with a lot of the rhetoric against less skilled immigrants. It may also be the path toward a tougher immigration policy more generally.
I hope I am wrong about this. Right now the stakes are very high.
In the meantime, speak and write about other people nicely! Even if you think they are damaging your country in some significant respects. You want your principles here to remain quite circumscribed, and not to turn into anti-foreigner sentiment more generally.
Friday assorted links
1. Which parts of America, apart from the coasts, will benefit from AI? (NYT) Chattanooga!
2. DeepSeek on the move. Here is the report. For ease of use and interface this is very high quality. Remember when “they” told us China had no interest in doing this?
And Nathan sends me these links:
https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1hmxjbn/deepseek_is_better_than_4o_on_most_benchmarks_at/
https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1hmm8v9/psa_deepseek_v3_outperforms_sonnet_at_53x_cheaper/
https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1hmk1hg/deepseek_v3_chat_version_weights_has_been/
https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1hmn55p/deepseekv3_officially_released/
I would say the final story here is not yet in, do not leap to any particular conclusion.
4. Ruxandra on San Francisco and civilizational greatness.
5. Justin Chang reviews The Brutalist (New Yorker).
6. David Brooks picks his Sidney Awards (NYT).
Patrick Collison on classic novels
Read it here. Recommended. Excerpt:
For me the clear standouts are Middlemarch, Bleak House, Karenina, and Life and Fate. I would enthusiastically reread any of them. If I had to choose just one to go to again, I would probably select Middlemarch. There’s something memorably compelling in Eliot’s affection and empathy for almost all of her characters. If Succession is a show with no likable personalities, Middlemarch is the opposite. Bleak House is a close second. Life and Fate is quite different to the others: it’s not exactly entertaining (or even notably well-written), but it is true and profound.
And this:
Today’s scientific papers are far harder to read, and jargon-replete, than those of 1960. However, the novels of the 19th century use significantly more sophisticated construction (and vocabulary) than those of today. What should we make of the countervailing trends? To me, both seem suboptimal.
Do go and digest the whole thing.
Steve Davis, Elon Musk’s Go-To Cost-Cutter Is Working for DOGE
A Bloomberg profile of the excellent Steve Davis:
Elon Musk’s deputy Steve Davis has spent more than 20 years helping the billionaire cut costs at businesses like SpaceX, the Boring Company and Twitter ….[now] Davis is helping recruit staff at DOGE, Musk’s effort to reduce government waste, in addition to his day job as president of Musk’s tunneling startup, the Boring Company.
At Boring, Davis has a reputation for frugality, signing off on costs as low as a few hundred dollars, according to people familiar with the conversations — unusual for a company that has raised about $800 million in capital. He also drives hard bargains with suppliers of products like raw steel, sensors, or even items as small as hose fittings, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.
His favorite directive for staff doing the negotiations: “Go back and ask again.”
…Davis started working for Musk in 2003, when he joined SpaceX, at the time a new company. He had just earned a master’s degree in aerospace engineering from Stanford University, and distinguished himself at the startup by solving hard engineering problems. At one point, Musk tasked the engineer with finding a cheaper alternative to a part that cost $120,000. Davis spent weeks on the challenge and figured out how to do it for $3,900, according to a biography of Musk. (Musk emailed back one word: “Thanks.”)
…Multitasking has proved a Davis signature, dating back to his student days. While he was working on his doctorate in economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, Davis was working full time at SpaceX and owned a frozen-yogurt shop called Mr. Yogato in Washington’s Dupont Circle. Alex Tabarrok, one of Davis’ professors, remembers him juggling the multiple roles.
“I told him, ‘Look, you’re getting a Ph.D., you can’t be having a job and running a business at the same time,” Tabarrok recalls. “Focus on getting your Ph.D.”
But Davis declined to give up any of his pursuits, at one time incorporating business trends at Mr. Yogato into an academic paper and bringing some yogurt into class for sampling. Tabarrok can’t recall Davis’ grades, but says he stood out anyway. He “had so much energy, and was so entrepreneurial,” Tabarrok says. “It’s been kind of exciting to see him become one of Elon’s most trusted right-hand men.”
Davis’s GMU training in political economy will serve him very well in Washington.
See also my previous post, an MR classic, Why We Can’t Have Nice Things–Elon Musk and the Subways.
Addendum: 2013 profile of Steve and another of his businesses, Thomas Foolery a bar in DC where you paid for drinks according to plinko. Hat tip: Kevin Lewis.
Shruti pays tribute to Zakir Hussain
An excellent appreciation, might this be the best thing written on him? Here is one excerpt:
It is hard to explain the aura of Zakir to someone who has not sat in the audience and felt it. You can try to break it down—rationalists will call it genius, the sort of brilliance that defies analysis. Others might invoke his charisma, his ability to connect with any audience, that mischief dancing in his eyes. The spiritually inclined go a step further, claiming his rhythms channel something divine, as though the tabla becomes a vessel for forces we cannot name. I have heard Zakir live at least 25-30 times—concerts scattered across cities, years, moods—and I can tell you it is all of the above. Still, I will try to describe these moments as best as I can articulate, where Zakir speaks to every audience member in their language.
Do read the whole thing, a very impressive piece.
The future of the scientist in a world with advanced AI
AI will know almost all of the academic literature, and will be better at modeling and solving most of the quantitative problems. It will be better at specifying the model and running through the actual statistical exercises. Humans likely will oversee these functions, but most of that will consist of nodding, or trying out some different prompts.
The humans will gather the data. They will do the lab work, or approach the companies (or the IRS?) to access new data. They will be the ones who pledge confidentiality and negotiate terms of data access. (Though an LLM might write the contract.) They will know someone, somewhere, using a telescope to track a particular quasar. They may (or may not) know that the AI’s suggestion to sample the blood of a different kind of gila monster is worth pursuing. They will decide whether we should be filming dolphins or whales, so that we may talk to them using LLMs, though they will ask the LLMs for cost estimates in each case.
At least in economics, this will be continuing trends that were present before current high-quality AI. The scarce input behind a quality paper is, more and more, access to some new and interesting data source. More and more people can do the requisite follow-up technical work, though quality variations have by no means been eliminated.
“Science as an employment program for scientists” will fall all the more out of favor. It remains to be seen how much that will disfavor serendipitous human discovery.
On any given day, on the quest for more data, a scientist will have to think quite creatively about what he or she should be doing.
Manmohan Singh, RIP
I am sad to hear about the passing of Manmohan Singh at age 92.
Singh was perhaps the most influential Indian policymaker in the last five decades. An Oxbridge educated trade economist, he became India’s most important technocrat in the 1980s and 1990s – occupying every top position in economic policy – finance secretary; deputy chairman of the planning commission; governor of the RBI, and chief economic adviser. And as finance minister in 1991, when he brought the Indian economy out of socialism to embrace markets and global trade. After Modi and Nehru, he is also India’s longest continuously serving prime minister over two terms from 2004-2014.
For more about his work and long career in economic policy read Changing India – a five volume collection on Singh’s work as an academic, policymaker, politician and on the family man, Strictly Personal by his daughter Daman Singh. And to learn more about India’s liberalization and economic reforms, follow the 1991 Project at the Mercatus Center led by Shruti Rajagopalan and her team.
Thursday assorted links
1. Why didn’t we get Ozempic sooner? (NYT)
2. An episode of the Aarthi and Sriram podcast.
3. David Cramer has questions for me. Lots of them.
4. China fact of the day so much of the stimulus is in fact bank recapitalization.
5. The torture of an unphilosophical life.
6. Dean Ball on the Romantic piano.
7. Will AI’s future run through the Gulf?
8. Jason Furman on a new rules-based framework for the Fed (WSJ).
Full-length documentary on the life and legacy of Rene Girard
Very well done.