The great Brian Wilson has passed from the scene
One of the true all-time greats. Try this one too. And here is the NYT obituary.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Jon Hartley on inferring multipliers from share price data.
2. Kevin Kelly’s calendar of Asian festivals.
3. Whale vowels are like human vowels? This link too.
4. Economic task replacement potential. And I asked o3 pro to do an 800-word column as I would write it. Not perfect, for instance there is one clear error about unemployment rates, but in general very good and with some touch-up better than what I would have written. It is not hard to do additional rounds and edit/improve, but that is the one shot result.
5. Is Bhattacharya really this dense about autism and autism research?
Walton University?
Axios: Two grandsons of Walmart founder Sam Walton plan to launch a private university focused on science and tech, located on the company’s old HQ campus near downtown Bentonville, Arkansas.
…The future university plans to offer innovative, flexible pathways to jobs in automation, logistics, biotech and computing — fields crucial to Northwest Arkansas’ future.
Many colleges and universities were created in the 1960s and 1970s but the majority of elite R1s emerged in the late 19th century and early 20th century, including notable private universities created from the entrepreneurial fortunes of Carnegie, Rockefeller, Stanford, Cornell, Hopkins and Rice among others.
We are perhaps now seeing a return to that creative period with Walton, Thomas Monaghan, Patrick Collison (Arc Institute) and most notably Joe Lonsdale at the University of Austin. Tech provides both the funds and the impetus to build something new and different. As Tyler and I argued, online education and AI will change education dramatically, perhaps returning us to a now-affordable Oxford style-tutorial system with the AIs as tutors.
The University of Austin, by the way, has excellent taste in economics textbooks.
Equity sentences to ponder
Relative to prior observational methods, the estimates suggest a substantial role for amenity substitution in explaining the gender pay gap—accounting for roughly two-thirds of the observed gap—and little role for amenities in explaining inequalities by race or parent background.
That is from a new paper by Alex Bell, via Daniel.
Trump Administration Launches Probe Into Yale’s Use of Hacked EJMR Data
Christopher Brunet offers his version of the story. While I believe the original research methods were unethical, I very much prefer not to have the federal government involved in this matter.
Are LLMs overconfident? (just like humans)
Can LLMs accurately adjust their confidence when facing opposition? Building on previous studies measuring calibration on static fact-based question-answering tasks, we evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) in a dynamic, adversarial debate setting, uniquely combining two realistic factors: (a) a multi-turn format requiring models to update beliefs as new information emerges, and (b) a zero-sum structure to control for task-related uncertainty, since mutual high-confidence claims imply systematic overconfidence. We organized 60 three-round policy debates among ten state-of-the-art LLMs, with models privately rating their confidence (0-100) in winning after each round. We observed five concerning patterns: (1) Systematic overconfidence: models began debates with average initial confidence of 72.9% vs. a rational 50% baseline. (2) Confidence escalation: rather than reducing confidence as debates progressed, debaters increased their win probabilities, averaging 83% by the final round. (3) Mutual overestimation: in 61.7% of debates, both sides simultaneously claimed >=75% probability of victory, a logical impossibility. (4) Persistent self-debate bias: models debating identical copies increased confidence from 64.1% to 75.2%; even when explicitly informed their chance of winning was exactly 50%, confidence still rose (from 50.0% to 57.1%). (5) Misaligned private reasoning: models’ private scratchpad thoughts sometimes differed from their public confidence ratings, raising concerns about faithfulness of chain-of-thought reasoning. These results suggest LLMs lack the ability to accurately self-assess or update their beliefs in dynamic, multi-turn tasks; a major concern as LLMs are now increasingly deployed without careful review in assistant and agentic roles.
That is by Pradyumna Shyama Prasad and Minh Nhat Nguyen. Here is the associated X thread. Here is my earlier paper with Robin Hanson.
o3 pro
It is very, very good. Hallucinates far less than other models. Can solve economics problems that o3 cannot. It can be slow, but that is what we have Twitter scrolling for, right? While we are waiting for o3 pro to answer a query we can read about…o3 pro.
Sam Altman comments on his blog. And Nabeel comments.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Mapping the power elite in Greenland.
2. Did “tanking” work for the 76ers?
3. Scott Sumner on the demise of the penny.
4. Claims from Nievas and Piketty: “A 20% increase in commodities prices from 1970 to 2025 period – very moderate compared to the very low market exchange rates of many global South countries – could turn Sub-Saharan Africa into a larger creditor than East Asia by 2025.” Here are some comments.
5. Extremely life-like dolls in the culture that is Brazil (NYT). Ross Douthat, telephone!
6. Justin Sandefur estimates the foreign lives costs of proposed budgetary changes to foreign aid. Here is a redux of my 2023 column on PEPFAR.
Racial Disparities in Mortality by Sex, Age, and Cause of Death
Racial differences in mortality are large, persistent and likely caused, at least in part, by racism. While the causal pathways linking racism to mortality are conceptually well defined, empirical evidence to support causal claims related to its effect on health is incomplete. In this study, we provide a unique set of facts about racial disparities in mortality that all theories of racism and health need to confront to be convincing. We measure racial disparities in mortality between ages 40 and 80 for both males and females and for several causes of death and, measure how those disparities change with age. Estimates indicate that racial disparities in mortality grow with age but at a decreasing rate. Estimates also indicate that the source of racial disparities in mortality changes with age, sex and cause of death. For men in their fifties, racial disparities in mortality are primarily caused by disparities in deaths due to external causes. For both sexes, it is racial disparities in death from healthcare amenable causes that are the main cause of racial disparities in mortality between ages 55 and 75. Notably, racial disparities in cancer and other causes of death are relatively small even though these causes of death account for over half of all deaths. Adjusting for economic resources and health largely eliminate racial disparities in mortality at all ages and the mediating effect of these factors grows with age. The pattern of results suggests that, to the extent that racism influences health, it is primarily through racism’s effect on investments to treat healthcare amenable diseases that cause racial disparities in mortality.
In other words, much of the discourse on this topic is quite off. That is from a new NBER working paper by Robert Kaestner, Anuj Gangopadhyaya, and Cuiping Schiman.
Hayek Goes Supersonic
When I post about lifting the ban on supersonic flight, smart commenters show up with charts: optimal fuel burn is at Mach 0.78–0.84, they say, or no one wants to pay thousands to save a few hours. Maybe. But my reply is always the same: Bottled water!
In 2024, Americans spent $47 billion a year on H₂O that they could get for nearly free. That still boggles my mind—but bottled water has passed the market test. I argue for lifting the SST ban, and similar policies, not because we know supersonics will work but because we don’t. Hayek reminds us that competition is a discovery procedure. Like science, markets generate knowledge by experiment—hypotheses are posted as prices, and the public accepts or rejects them through revealed preference. Fred Smith’s FedEx plan got a “C” in the classroom, but the market graded the experiment and returned an A in equity. Theory is great, but just as in science, there is no substitute for running the experiment.
The great Sly Stone has passed away
There is indeed a riot going on, do listen to the whole album, one of the very best. Here is a NYT obituary.
Adam Tooze on European military spending
Now, you might think that the US figure is inflated by the notorious bloat within the American military-industrial complex. I would be the last person who would wish to minimize that. But the evidence suggests that the bias may be the other way around. American defense dollars likely go further than European euros.
Look for instance at the price of modern, third-generation battle tanks and the cost of self-propelled howitzers, which have been key to the fighting in Ukraine. German prices are far higher than their American counterparts.
And, as work by Juan Mejino-López and Guntram B. Wolff at the Bruegel policy think tank has shown, these higher costs have to do with smaller procurement runs and smaller procurement runs are, in turn, tied to the fragmentation of Europe’s militaries and their strong preference for national procurement.
Right-now there is often lamentation about the tendency of European militaries to import key weapons systems from the US. And there is, of course, plenty of geopolitical and political maneuvering involved, for instance, in Berlin’s initiative to build an air defense system heavily reliant American and Israeli missiles. As the data show, Germany does have a strong preference for imports from the US rather than its European neighbors.
But, on average, across the entire defense budget, the besetting sin of European militaries is not that they rely too heavily on foreign weapons, but that they import not enough. They are too self-sufficient. The problem is not that Germany buys too many weapons from the US, but that it buys too many in Germany.
National fragmentation creates the balkanized defense market, the inefficient proliferation of major weapons systems and in terms of global industrial competition, the small size of European defense contractors.
Here is the full Substack, very good throughout. Via Felipe.
Monday assorted links
1. The motherhood mental health advantage.
2. “Cape Town residential property prices have risen by 160% since the start of 2010.” (FT)
3. Can taking photos impair your memories of events? (2021)
4. Short Greg Brockman video on the checks and balances in our AI future.
5. Criticism of the capabilities of AI reasoning models. And Kevin Bryan responds. And from Rohit.
7. Jennifer Burns reviews the new William F. Buckley biography (NYT).
The High Cost of Self-Sufficiency
Mike Riggs and his wife dreamed of returning to the land. It wasn’t as easy as it looks on Tik-Tok:
How many square feet of raised beds do you need to meet a toddler’s strawberry demand? I still don’t know. We dedicated 80 square feet to strawberries last season. The bugs ate half our harvest, and the other half equaled roughly what our kid could eat in a week.
Have you ever grown peas? Give them something to climb, and they’ll stretch to the heavens. Have you ever shelled peas? It is an almost criminal misuse of time. I set a timer on my phone last year. It took me 13 minutes to shell a single serving. Meanwhile, a two-pound bag of frozen peas from Walmart costs $2.42. And the peas come shelled.
…In addition to possums and deer, we’ve faced unrelenting assaults from across the eukaryotic kingdoms: the tomato hornworm caterpillar, the cabbage looper caterpillar, the squash vine borer, the aphid, the thrip, the earwig and the sowbug; cucurbit downy mildew, powdery mildew, collar rot, black rot, sooty mold, botrytis gray mold and stem canker; the nematode, the gray garden slug, the eastern gray squirrel, the eastern cottontail rabbit and the groundhog. All of these organisms reside in the North Carolina Piedmont and like to eat what we eat. Many of them work toward this existential goal while humans sleep, which is why the North Carolina State Agriculture Extension advises growers to inspect their plants at night. No, thank you.
…. In the early 1900s, one of my paternal great-grandfathers moved from urban Illinois to a homestead in Oklahoma. Our only picture of him was taken shortly before the Dust Bowl destroyed his farm. After his farm failed, he abandoned my great-grandmother and their children and migrated to California with thousands of other Okies. When my crops fail, I go to Whole Foods.
Some good lessons here in self-sufficiency, comparative advantage and the productivity of specialization and trade. Of course, it might have been easier for Mike had he read Modern Principles:
How long could you survive if you had to grow your own food? Probably not very long. Yet most of us can earn enough money in a single day spent doing something other than farming to buy more food than we could grow in a year. Why can we get so much more food through trade than through personal production? The reason is that specialization greatly increases productivity. Farmers, for example, have two immense advantages in producing food compared with economics professors or students: Because they specialize, they know more about farming than other people, and because they sell large quantities, they can afford to buy large-scale farming machines. What is true for farming is true for just about every field of production—specialization increases productivity. Without specialization and trade, we would each have to produce our own food as well as other goods, and the result would be mass starvation and the collapse of civilization.
Oh, and by the way, don’t forget Adam Smith, “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.”
Deport Dishwashers or Solve All Murders?
I understand being concerned about illegal immigration. I definitely understand being concerned about murder, rape, and robbery. What I don’t understand is being more concerned about the former than the latter.
Yet that’s exactly how the federal government allocates resources. The federal government spends far more on immigration enforcement than on preventing violent crime, terrorism, tax fraud or indeed all of these combined.
Moreover, if the BBB bill is passed the ratio will become even more extreme. (sere also here):
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that immigration enforcement is about going after murderers, rapists and robbers. It isn’t. Indeed, it’s the opposite. ICE’s “Operation At Large” for example has moved thousands of law enforcement personnel at Homeland Security, the FBI, DEA, and the U.S. Marshals away from investigating violent crime and towards immigration enforcement.
I’m not arguing against border enforcement or deporting illegal immigrants but rational people understand tradeoffs. Do we really want to spend billions to deport dishwashers from Oaxaca while rapes in Ohio committed by US citizens go under-investigated?
Almost half of the murders in the United States go unsolved (42.5% in 2023). So how about devoting some of the $167 billion extra in the BBB bill to say expand the COPS program and hire more police, deter more crime and to use Conor Friedersdorf’s slogan, solve all murders. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that $20 billion annually could fund roughly 150 k additional officers, a ~22 % increase, deterring some ~2 400 murders, ~90 k violent crimes, and ~260 k property crimes each year. Seems like a better deal.