Grand Rapids, Michigan
Once a casualty of Rust Belt decline, downtown today is in remarkably good shape. I walked around for several hours, and virtually every building and storefront is spiffy. I did not see anything boarded up. Only one beggar/homeless person approached me.
The rapids and bridges and greenery view from the top of the Amway hotel is excellent.
The Grand Rapids Art Museum has a very good show of David Hockney prints on.
On the down side, I did find that too many downtown places are closed for lunch, or they close at two p.m. Overall, though, it is an interesting and much underrated place to visit. Here is o3 onthe Grand Rapids recovery.
Do not turn down a trip. I also had very good discussions at the Acton Institute and with the Cluny Institute people, for whom I was speaking, on talent. At some point the talk will be online.
Markets in everything
At Cloudflare, we started from a simple principle: we wanted content creators to have control over who accesses their work. If a creator wants to block all AI crawlers from their content, they should be able to do so. If a creator wants to allow some or all AI crawlers full access to their content for free, they should be able to do that, too. Creators should be in the driver’s seat.
After hundreds of conversations with news organizations, publishers, and large-scale social media platforms, we heard a consistent desire for a third path: They’d like to allow AI crawlers to access their content, but they’d like to get compensated. Currently, that requires knowing the right individual and striking a one-off deal, which is an insurmountable challenge if you don’t have scale and leverage…
We believe your choice need not be binary — there should be a third, more nuanced option: You can charge for access. Instead of a blanket block or uncompensated open access, we want to empower content owners to monetize their content at Internet scale.
We’re excited to help dust off a mostly forgotten piece of the web: HTTP response code 402…
Pay per crawl, in private beta, is our first experiment in this area.
Here is the full post. I suppose over time, if this persists, it is the AIs bargaining back with you?
Saturday assorted links
2. Techniques of persuasion can work on the AIs. Cialdini.
4. Many Chinese art museums are disappearing.
5. Delta is using price discrimination through AI.
6. Claims about alchemy. Big if true.
7. Bryan visits Spain. Not my views, but always of interest. I would be more focused on sectoral analysis, and which Spanish companies will hit it big in the near future. That perspective makes me somewhat more pessimistic, the Madrid area aside. A lot of Spain appears to be shrinking and not really coming back. Here is further commentary, in Spanish, from JFV.
Noam Brown reports
Today, we at @OpenAI achieved a milestone that many considered years away: gold medal-level performance on the 2025 IMO with a general reasoning LLM—under the same time limits as humans, without tools.
Here is the link, here is some commentary. And Nat McAleese. And the prediction market. Emad: “Two years ago, who would have said an IMO gold medal & topping benchmarks isn’t AGI?” And it is good at other things too.
And from Alexander Wei: “Btw, we are releasing GPT-5 soon, and we’re excited for you to try it. But just to be clear: the IMO gold LLM is an experimental research model. We don’t plan to release anything with this level of math capability for several months.”
Labor supply is elastic!
Even in Denmark:
We investigate long-run earnings responses to taxes in the presence of dynamic returns to effort. First, we develop a theoretical model of earnings determination with dynamic returns to effort. In this model, earnings responses are delayed and mediated by job switches. Second, using administrative data from Denmark, we verify our model’s predictions about earnings and hours-worked patterns over the lifecycle. Third, we provide a quasi-experimental analysis of long-run earnings elasticities. Informed by our model, the empirical strategy exploits variation among job switchers. We find that the long-run elasticity is around 0.5, considerably larger than the short-run elasticity of roughly 0.2.
That is from a forthcoming American Economic Review piece by Henrik Kleven, Claus Kreiner, Kristian Larsen, and Jakob Søgaard. Via Alexander Berger.
Addendum: The rest of supply is elastic too.
Are tariffs a regressive tax?
I hear all the time that they are, but is that true?:
There are two sides to this. First, we need to figure out how consumption differs by income. Here it’s pretty clear that lower-income people consume more goods which are traded, and the goods which they consume have a lower elasticity of substitution (Fajgelbaum and Khandelwal, 2016). Put concretely, this is because the poor consume fewer luxuries which can’t be exchanged for other goods. In practice, the distributional effects in the United States are particularly large, because even within relatively narrow categories of goods lower quality goods face higher tax rates. (Acosta and Cox (2025) attribute this to a peculiarity of trade negotiations. The within category rates were shaped by negotiations in the 1930s, after which we no longer negotiated individual items but instead shifted all items within a category by a fixed percentage).
However, we need to take into account the effect of who gets more jobs. If it reallocates production to low-skill industries primarily employing the poor, then it may redistribute from top to bottom. Borusyak and Jaravel (2023) compare the two, and show that almost all of the redistribution is occurring within income deciles. Tariffs are costly to the consumer, and are indeed disproportionately costly to lower income consumers, but it does so by reallocating jobs to primarily lower income workers. Taking into account both effects, the distributional consequences of tariffs and trade are approximately nil.
Here is more from Nicholas Decker. These are the kinds of results that easily could be overturned by subsequent research (see the further remarks at the link), nonetheless at this time we probably should not be pushing regressive tariffs as established science or a firm conclusion. I’ll say it again: the best (and very good) argument against the tariffs is simply that they set the government on the trail of a previously dormant revenue source. That rarely ends well, though it is hard for non-libertarians to pick up this argument and run with it.
Will this law be enforced?
Mayor Adams has proposed a new 15mph speed limit for all ebikes in New York City. Lyft received direction from the Mayor’s office to reduce the maximum pedal assist speed of Citi Bike ebikes from 18mph to 15mph in anticipation of the rule taking effect. Our technical team worked hard to respond to this directive and the change is in effect across our ebike fleet as of June 20, 2025.
Although the pedal assist speed on Citi Bikes has been adjusted, here’s what hasn’t changed: You’ll still get that smooth, electric boost that makes tackling hills and longer distances a breeze. Our ebikes will continue to provide the same reliable and fun way to get around the city. Since Citi Bike first launched ebikes, riders have taken over 85 million ebike rides, traveling more than 190 million miles. In other words, you all have circled the globe 7,700 times on ebikes.
Here is the link. I am personally happy with a libertarian approach to ebikes, namely let people take their chances and limit the ability to sue the cars that bump into you. Nonetheless I am amazed that a world with a Consumer Product Safety Commission, and an FDA, allows small, unprotected vehicles to travel on our roads, more or less unhindered. All the more so for motorcycles. Paris has banned e-scooters, though not ebikes. o3 recommends a 20 mph speed limit (write in your vote for mayor!).
Here are some complaints on Reddit about the new lower speed limit. What I in fact observe is that, at least in NYC, there are few penalties for running red lights with your bicycle or ebike.
Sentences to ponder
In a much more narrow case, a big study of the views of AI and machine learning researchers revealed high levels of trust in international organizations and low levels of trust in national militaries.
That is from Matt Yglesias.
Friday assorted links
1. Did the Spanish Inquisition hurt science?
2. Mexico fertility rate below that of the U.S., and Mexico City is below one.
3. Are volcanoes a risk to solar-dominated grids?
5. ChatGPT agent.
6. The return of the elderly pop star.
7. “Until 1970, the UK was the world’s top producer of nuclear energy.”
D’accord !
That is from the French embassy in the UK.
Lookism and VC
Do subtle visual cues influence high-stakes economic decisions? Using venture capital as a laboratory, this paper shows that facial similarity between investors and entrepreneurs predicts positive funding decisions but negative investment outcomes. Analyzing early-stage deals from 2010-2020, we find that greater facial resemblance increases match probability by 3.2 percentage points even after controlling for same race, gender, and age, yet funded companies with similar-looking investor-founder pairs have 7 percent lower exit rates. However, when deal sourcing is externally curated, facial similarity effects disappear while demographic homophily persists, indicating facial resemblance primarily operates as an initial screening heuristic. These findings reveal a novel form of homophily that systematically shapes capital allocation, suggesting that interventions targeting deal sourcing may eliminate the negative influence of visual cues on investment decisions.
That is from a recent paper by Emmanuel Yimfor, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Naveen Nvn’s ideological migration (from my email)
I started following American politics only in 2010/2011, which is two years after his [Buckley’s] death, and I was in India at that time.
Plus, I was very liberal at that time.
Around 2018-19ish, I was pushed into a centrist stance because I was appalled by wokeness, especially on campuses. I was in graduate school in the US at that time. Although I didn’t experience wokeness advocacy in the classroom except two or three incidents, I saw signs of wokeness on campus a lot. But even then, I was quite libertarian on how universities ought to handle campus politics.
I picked up God and Man at Yale around this time because wokeness was my primary concern.
I’ve always known that conservatives love that book. I assumed it would be a defense of free inquiry and against universities having a preferred ideology.
However, to my surprise, in the book, he argued explicitly that Yale was neglecting its true mission and it should uphold its “foundational values,” as he put it. I assumed he would be promoting a libertarian outlook on campus politics, but he was arguing the opposite.
He said Yale and other elite universities should incorporate free markets and traditional perspectives directly into the curriculum because they are betraying a contract that the current alumni and the administration have with the founders of the universities. It was a pretty shocking advocacy of conservatism being imposed on the students, and I didn’t like that at all.
But later on, around 2020-ish, I became a conservative (thanks to you; more on that in the link below). But even as late as early 2023, I still held a libertarian view on academic freedom and campus politics.
(You may be interested in a comment I left on your ‘Why Young People Are Socialist’ post yesterday, in which I shared how I was once a liberal, then turned centrist, and how I finally turned conservative. You are a major influence.)
But after Oct 7, all of that changed quite fast. Watching the pro-Hamas protests on campuses that started the very next day after October 7, before even one IDF soldier set foot on Gaza, I immediately thought about God and Man at Yale. I wanted to go back and re-read God and Man at Yale.
Everything I’ve witnessed after Oct 7 — Harvard defending Claudine Gay, Harvard explicitly stating they’re an “international institution” and not an American institution, DEI, anti-White, anti-Asian discrimination, etc. has convinced me that WFB Jr. was right.
Elite universities ought to be promoting free markets and pro-American, pro-Western views. I don’t believe we should have a completely libertarian approach to academic freedom. That’s untenable in this day and age. (Again, demographics is destiny, even within organizations.)
I’ve become significantly less libertarian on a wide range of issues compared to where I was just two years ago, and not just on academic freedom/university direction.
So yes, WFB Jr. has influenced me on this idea.
David Brooks on the AI race
When it comes to confidence, some nations have it and some don’t. Some nations once had it but then lost it. Last week on his blog, “Marginal Revolution,” Alex Tabarrok, a George Mason economist, asked us to compare America’s behavior during Cold War I (against the Soviet Union) with America’s behavior during Cold War II (against China). I look at that difference and I see a stark contrast — between a nation back in the 1950s that possessed an assumed self-confidence versus a nation today that is even more powerful but has had its easy self-confidence stripped away.
There is much more at the NYT link.
The political culture/holiday culture that is French
The French government proposed cutting two public holidays per year to boost economic growth as part of a budget plan that it billed as a “moment of truth” to avoid a financial crisis. But in a country where vacations are sacred, the idea — unsurprisingly — prompted outrage across the political spectrum, suggesting it may have little chance of becoming law.
Here is more from Annabelle Timsit at the Washington Post. How many countries will, over the next ten years, in fact prove governable?
Thursday assorted links
1. Claude for financial services.
2. Golf ball diver nets 100k a year (short video).
3. Zvi on Kimi.
4. China fact of the day: “China’s commercial airlines are limited to using 20% of its airspace, giving rise to an average route curvature of 17% compared to 5% in the US and Europe.”
5. Are these the new dresses for conservative women?
6. “This is probably the last time in human history that an AI is outperformed by a real human coder.”