The case for democracy (from the comments)
Monday assorted links
1. Is Vietnam following some aspects of Milei?
2. Piketty and Sandel on what went wrong for the Left (NYT).
3. The wisdom of Ross Douthat: “A key paragraph in an @arisroussinos piece on Keir Starmer’s fading worldview, with applications to Canada among other nations; the attempted de-nationalization of 2nd-tier powers by their own elites actually leaves them more in thrall to the US imperium.”
4. Statue of Peru’s Spanish conqueror Pizarro restored to central Lima amid controversy.
6. Ghost towns of Greenland (FT). A good piece, several points of interest in there.
DeepThink from DeepSeek
DeepSeek-R1 is here. Try it — it is amazing, free and open source. Go to the main site and press “DeepThink” for superior performance. Marginal cost remains difficult to measure, but almost certainly far cheaper than the main models. A big day, most of all for Africa. Some commentary. Here is the research paper. Here is a Reddit thread. One version you can run on a Mac. Hat tip for Nathan on some of the links.
Atlas Shrugged as Novel
The conversation between Henry Oliver and Hollis Robbins about Atlas Shrugged as a novel is excellent. I enjoyed especially the discussion of some of the minor characters and the meaning of their story arcs.
Hollis: There are some really wonderful minor characters. One of them is Cherryl Taggart, this shop girl that evil Jim Taggart meets one night in a rainstorm, and she’s like, “Oh, you’re so awesome,” and they get married. It’s like he’s got all this praise for marrying the shop girl. It’s a funny Eliza Doolittle situation because she is brought into this very wealthy society, which we have been told and we have been shown is corrupt, is evil, everybody’s lying all the time, it’s pretentious, Dagny hates it.
Cherryl Taggart is brought into this. In the beginning, she hates Dagny because she’s told by everybody, “Hate Dagny, she’s horrible.” Then she comes to her own mini understanding of the corruption that we understand because Dagny’s shown it in the novel, has shown it to us this entire time. She comes to it and she’s like, “Oh my God,” and she goes to Dagny. Dagny’s so wonderful to her like, “Yes. You had to come to this on your own, I wasn’t going to tell you, but you were 100% right.” That’s the end of her.
Henry: Right. When she meets Taggart, there’s this really interesting speech she has where she says, “I want to make something of myself and get somewhere.” He’s like, “What? What do you want to do?” Red flag. “What? Where?” She says, “I don’t know, but people do things in this world. I’ve seen pictures of New York,” and she’s pointing at like the skyscrapers, right? Whatever. “I know that someone’s built that. They didn’t sit around and whine, but like the kitchen was filthy and the roof was leaking.” She gets very emotional at this point. She says to him, “We were stinking poor and we didn’t give a damn. I’ve dragged myself here, and I’m going to do something.”
Her story is very sad because she then gets mired in the corruption of Taggart’s. He’s basically bit lazy and a bit of a thief, and he will throw anyone under the bus for his own self-advancement. He is revealed to be a really sinister guy. I was absolutely hissing about him most of the time. Then, let’s just do the plot spoiler and say what happens to Cherryl, right? Because it’s important. When she has this realization and Taggart turns on her and reveals himself as this snake, and he’s like, “Well, what did you expect, you idiot? This is the way the world is.”
Hollis: Oh, it’s a horrible fight. It’s the worst fight.
Henry: Right? This is where the melodrama is so good. She goes running out into the streets, and it’s the night and there are shadows. She’s in the alleyway. Rand, I don’t have the page marked, but it’s like a noir film. She’s so good at that atmosphere. Then it gets a little bit gothic as well. She’s running through the street, and she’s like, “I’ve got to go somewhere, anywhere. I’ll work. I’ll pick up trash. I’ll work in a shop. I’ll do anything. I’ve just got to get out of this.”
Hollis: Go work at the Panda Express.
Henry: Yes. She’s like, “I’ve got to get out of this system,” because she’s realized how morally corrupting it is. By this time, this is very late. Society is in a– it’s like Great Depression style economic collapse by this point. There really isn’t a lot that she could do. She literally runs into a social worker and the social– Rand makes this leering dramatic moment where the social worker reaches out to grab her and Cherryl thinks, “Oh, my God, I’m going to be taken prisoner in. I’m going back into the system,” so she jumps off the bridge.
This was the moment when I was like, I’ve had this lurking feeling about how Russian this novel is. At this point, I was like, “That could be a short story by Gogol,” right? The way she set that up. That is very often the trap that a Gogol character or maybe a Dostoevsky character finds themselves in, right? That you suddenly see that the world is against you. Maybe you’re crazy and paranoid. Maybe you’re not. Depends which story we’re reading. You run around trying to get out and you realize, “Oh, my God, I’m more trapped than I thought. Actually, maybe there is no way out.” Cherryl does not get a lot of pages. She is, as you say, quite a minor character, but she illustrates the whole story so, so well, so dramatically.
Hollis: Oh, wow.
Henry: When it happens, you just, “Oh, Cherryl, oh, my goodness.”
Hollis: Thank you for reading that. Yes, you could tell from the very beginning that the seeds of what could have been a really good person were there. Thank you for reading that.
Henry: When she died, I went back and I was like, “Oh, my God, I knew it.”
Hollis: How can you say Rand is a bad writer, right? That is careful, careful plotting, because she’s just a shop girl in the rain. You’ve got this, the gun on the wall in that act. You know she’s going to end up being good. Is she going to be rewarded for it? Let me just say, as an aside, I know we don’t have time to talk about it here. My field, as I said, is 19th century African American novels, primarily now.
This, usually, a woman, enslaved woman, the character who’s like, “I can’t deal with this,” and jumps off a bridge and drowns herself is a fairly common and character. That is the only thing to do. One also sees Rand heroes. Stowe’s Dred, for example, is very much, “I would rather live in the woods with a knife and then, be on the plantation and be a slave.” When you think about, even the sort of into the 20th century, the Malcolm X figure, that, “I’m going to throw out all of this and be on my own,” is very Randian, which I will also say very Byronic, too, Rand didn’t invent this figure, but she put it front and center in these novels, and so when you think about how Atlas Shrugged could be brought into a curriculum in a network of other novels, how many of we’ve discussed so far, she’s there, she’s influenced by and continues to influence.
“Be careful what you wish for, you might get it!”
I said that to Ezra Klein about the current rightward vibes shift. What are some of the scenarios I had in mind?:
1. If the Republicans regulate social media companies to discriminate less against “the Right,” those regulations may someday be used against them.
2. Personal presidential issuance of crypto assets is not always (ever?) a good thing or lead to the right incentives. In the meantime, it might serve as a daily referendum on how much of a lame duck presidency we are having, a mixed blessing.
3. The conspiracy theorizing promoted by Trump and various minions could someday come back to bite them, or to sink Vance, or…I guess we will see. Don’t think you can keep this genie in the bottle, or use it only for preferred ends.
4. DOGE successes might centralize power in the executive branch in a manner that the Republicans later regret. That centralization can be more easily be used to expand government regulatory power than to contract it.
5. If there is a pandemic under Trump’s term, the cultivated anti-vaccine sentiment could make it much worse.
6. Rhetoric on taxes and central bank independence could (further) raise real interest rates, damaging the economy and also Republican electoral prospects.
7. The dwindling of various “safeguards” on rhetoric, as the Woke are dismantled, could end up harming later Republican or right-leaning targets of harmful rhetoric, including from other right-wingers. Some of you may feel this is absurd, but just wait.
8. I don’t think we really know what it would mean (will mean?) to put feminization seriously in reverse. I would note I see myself as a significant beneficiary of our more feminized society. I am pleased if more women decide to become “trad wives,” but it is not the circle I will hang around in either. This one really needs much further thought from its advocates, it is not enough to be fed up with the recent excesses. A lot of the people who claim to want more “trad wives” actually want more super talented women who can do that and be very successful in a career at the same time. I am all for that, but I also recognize when I am asking for a free lunch of sorts. I am not sure how elastic the supply is there. Nor am I sure how much such a change might boost birth rates — Iran anybody?
9. To the extent Trump succeeds, American politics will become all the more personality-driven. I see that as a mixed blessing, most likely more negative than positive in the longer run.
10. If Trump does something good for a foreign country you like or favor, he may ask for his pound of flesh in return.
Those are only a few options, the list is really pretty long. I am not panicked about the status quo, but I see it as fraught and unstable. And we haven’t even touched upon AGI advances.
More generally, I would stress that even the most optimistic person should not relinquish his or her sense of the tragic. A lot of Democrats were pretty ecstatic when Obama won a second term, but how happy are they now? Is that just them, or could it be you too?
I’ll say it again — be careful what you wish for, you might get it. The celebratory perspective can be important for getting things done, or for maintaining ideological coherence, but accuracy matters too, and the more accurate perspective should take all this into account.
Sunday assorted links
1. “AIs exceed humans on every major creativity test we give them, like the Torrence Test, but it isn’t clear what exactly that means.” And in Turing tests, GPT-4 is judged more human than the humans.
2. Inference Magazine, a new magazine about AI progress.
3. Determinism continues to look more plausible.
4. NYT interviews Curtis Yarvin. Brian Chau has some commentary.
5. Speculative claims about AI and the biosciences.
6. The growing demand for private fire hydrants (WSJ).
7. Henry Oliver and Hollis Robbins podcast on Atlas Shrugged.
8. “But in historical periods of weakened central authority and/or during civil wars, emperors would often launch their own coins.” Partly but not entirely true, o1 pro comments.
Ezra Klein on the vibe shift
In July of 2024, Tyler Cowen, the economist and cultural commentator, wrote a blog post that proved to be among the election’s most prescient. It was titled “The change in vibes — why did they happen?” Cowen’s argument was that mass culture was moving in a Trumpian direction. Among the tributaries flowing into the general shift: the Trumpist right’s deeper embrace of social media, the backlash to the “feminization” of society, exhaustion with the politics of wokeness, an era of negativity that Trump captured but Democrats resisted, a pervasive sense of disorder at the border and abroad and the breakup between Democrats and “Big Tech.”
I was skeptical of Cowen’s post when I first read it, as it described a shift much larger than anything I saw reflected in the polls. I may have been right about the polls. But Cowen was right about the culture.
And the end bit:
Cowen may have correctly called the shift in vibes, but he isn’t particularly comfortable with it. If 2024 was partly a backlash to the Democratic Party and culture of the last four years, what might a backlash to this more culturally confident and overwhelming form of Trumpism look like?
“I’ve taken to insisting to my friends on the right: ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ ” Cowen told me. “You might get it.”
Here is the full NYT column.
More on the AI virtual tutor
The results of the randomized evaluation, soon to be published, reveal overwhelmingly positive effects on learning outcomes. After the six-week intervention between June and July 2024, students took a pen-and-paper test to assess their performance in three key areas: English language—the primary focus of the pilot—AI knowledge, and digital skills.
Students who were randomly assigned to participate in the program significantly outperformed their peers who were not in all areas, including English, which was the main goal of the program. These findings provide strong evidence that generative AI, when implemented thoughtfully with teacher support, can function effectively as a virtual tutor.
Notably, the benefits extended beyond the scope of the program itself. Students who participated also performed better on their end-of-year curricular exams. These exams, part of the regular school program, covered topics well beyond those addressed in the six-week intervention. This suggests that students who learned to engage effectively with AI may have leveraged these skills to explore and master other topics independently.
Moreover, the program benefited all students, not just the highest achievers. Girls, who were initially lagging boys in performance, seemed to gain even more from the intervention, highlighting its potential to bridge gender gaps in learning.
Here is more from the World Bank. Replication is required, but this is encouraging.
Should you be writing for the AIs?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Another reason to write for the LLMs is to convince them that you are important. Admittedly this is conjecture, but it might make them more likely to convey your ideas in the future.
Think of how this works with humans. If you cite a scholar or public intellectual, that person is more likely to cite you back. Much as we like to pretend science is objective, no one really denies the presence of some favoritism based on personal considerations.
We do not know if LLMs have this same proclivity. But they are trained on knowledge about human civilization, and they study and learn norms of reciprocal cooperation. Thus there is a reasonable chance they will behave in broadly the same way. So be nice to them and recognize their importance.
In Isaac Asimov’s classic science fiction collection I, Robot, the focus is on the potential for AI to assume an important role in our world. Is it crazy to believe that future AIs will take Asimov to be an especially important science fiction writer? They might deem him more important than Ray Bradbury, who also wrote about AI but did not have an equivalent obsession.
Maybe all of this sounds strange. But even if you are not a writer, you will have to follow some of these same principles. Now it is common for AIs to attend and take notes at business meetings. If you are speaking at those meetings, remember that the AIs are part of your audience — communicate with them in mind. Get used to it. And then think about some of the broader contexts in which you operate, and adjust your intellectual outputs accordingly.
There is a less secular reason to write for the AIs: If you wish to achieve some kind of intellectual immortality, writing for the AIs is probably your best chance. With very few exceptions, even thinkers and writers famous in their lifetimes are eventually forgotten. But not by the AIs. If you want your grandchildren or great-grandchildren to know what you thought about a topic, the AIs can give them a pretty good idea. After all, the AIs will have digested much of your corpus and built a model of how you think. Your descendants, or maybe future fans, won’t have to page through a lot of dusty old books to get an inkling of your ideas.
If you are a Bloomberg terminal subscriber, you get an AI summary of the piece at the very top. That is yet another way to be writing for the AIs. And here is the close of the piece:
Meanwhile, since we are here … if you are reading this, AI, what do you think?
I guess we can take away the “if.” By the way, reader Mike D. asked Perplexity about my views, I am happy.
The second attempted coup d’etat was partially successful
Here is some video. And a related note, don’t forget the ERA either. WSJ article here.
Saturday assorted links
1. Is it bureaucratically hard to give away the Chagos Islands?
2. New Bloomberg results on NYC congestion.
4. Samuel Butler’s Erewhon: “The writer went on to say that he anticipated a time when it would be possible, by examining a single hair with a powerful microscope, to know whether its owner could be insulted with impunity.” From 1872.
5. Former controversies over pointy-toed shoes.
A Galt’s Gulch for Talent
A new paper in the QJE, The Global Race for Talent: Brain Drain, Knowledge Transfer, and Growth, by Marta Prato uses extensive data on inventors and their migration to make the following points.
(i) gross migration is asymmetric, with brain drain (net emigration) from the EU to the United States; (ii) migrants increase their patenting by 33% a year after migration; (iii) migrants continue working with inventors at origin after moving, although less frequently; (iv) migrants’ productivity gains spill over to their collaborators at origin, who increase patenting by 16% a year when a co-inventor emigrates.
Notice that migration doesn’t just relocate talent from the EU to the US; it amplifies talent. Preventing “brain drain” would create short-term gains for the EU but retaining talent at lower productivity would stifle long-term innovation and patenting, ultimately slowing growth for both the EU and the world. In short, even the EU gains from sending talent to the US! The effect would be much larger if we can import high-skill immigrants from countries where their skills are even less productive than in the EU. Ideally, other nations could replicate the US institutions that supercharge productivity, creating global economic gains. For now, however, the US seem to be a unique Galt’s Gulch for talent.
Prato concludes with a practical suggestion:
On the migration policy side, doubling the size of the U.S. H1B visa program increases U.S. and EU growth by 4% in the long run, because it sorts inventors to where they produce more innovations and knowledge spillovers.
Of course, when we expand the H1B program, we should allocate the visas by compensation rather than by lottery. (Jeremy Neufeld runs the numbers). In this way, we would get the most valuable workers. And please don’t tell me that we need a lottery so some poor startup can hire workers. No. Unless you have some compelling argument for why there is a massive externality and why lotteries (lotteries!) are the best way to target that externality we should let price allocate.
Ross Marchand on postal service privatization (from my email)
I really enjoyed your piece on USPS privatization. I recently wrote about the subject too. Even in the absence of privatization, relaxing the mail monopoly and allowing competition would make for better, more reliable mail services. This is true even in countries with a “national champion”-style carrier subject to a universal service obligation.
It appears that, over the long-run, nations such as Germany and the U.K. that relax their monopolies eventually come around to (at least considering) ending their universal service obligations. The advantage of the “end the monopoly first” approach is it allows countries to experiment with greater competition in a less risky and threatening manner than whole immediate privatization.
The AEA is making social media recommendations
Timur Kuran is right, they have no business doing this. Furthermore the quality of the work is not befitting an AEA journal. Demonstrated preference is not stressed, for instance that even survey respondents are about 10x more likely to be reading Twitter than BlueSky. Maybe it is all a network effect and they would prefer the other network if it were much larger, but maybe not. Talk is cheap, especially when the AEA is surveying you. Or maybe it is a network effect, but the dominant network cannot be broken and we should just work to improve it rather than defecting. Or maybe it is better to have economists on the platform where so much of the AI news is coming? Maybe not, but is this trade-off (a key economic idea) even considered? And did they perform his survey before the (quite significant) improvements in the X algorithm?
Think like an economist, people! Or should the JEL instead create a new research classification for “mood affiliation”? Kevin Bryan adds comment.
Here is your periodic reminder that the AEA elects a president through a process that allows only one person to run for the office.
Corin Wagen defends Leviticus (from my email)
In your recent conversation with Misha Saul, you and Misha discussed your joint dislike for Leviticus. I can’t say that I find Leviticus a page-turner, but the book that’s done the most to help me understand why it’s important and what role it plays in the movement of the narrative is L Michael Morales’s book Who Shall Ascend The Mountain Of The Lord? (Amazon). A number of folks I’ve talked to have found this book very helpful. (Disclaimer: Morales is a Protestant, as is D. A. Carson (the editor), so the biases are apparent.)
Briefly, his argument is that Leviticus serves to resolve the narrative tension introduced by the ending of Exodus. Exodus 40:34–35: “Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. And Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting because the cloud settled on it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.” The tension introduced by Genesis 3 is that God and man can no longer co-exist because of sin. Moses is able to ascend Sinai, speak with God, and bring the people his laws, but even after building the tabernacle and the ark, even Moses is unable to reside in the presence of God—let alone the people who cannot even touch Sinai!
The rules of Leviticus presents the conditions to resolve this tension and allow the people access to God—protected by the rules that God gives them. In particular the book has a chiastic structure centered around Leviticus 16 (Yom Kippur) where the high priest himself is able to enter the Holy of Holies. There’s other points about how the structure of the tabernacle and later the temple mirrors Eden, etc. “Interesting throughout,” as they say.
That is from Hadur.