Wednesday assorted links
1. Semantic search for all CWTs.
2. Job postings for Ph.D economists are down.
4. Krugman’s last NYT column (though he is not retiring more generally he says).
5. Thread on quantum computing. And Scott Aaronson on Google Willow.
Tabarrok on Bail
I appeared on the Bail in the Midwest Podcast (Apple) to talk about crime and bail. Here is one bit:
I’ve talked about capturing these people and recapturing them and that of course is what you see on television. That’s the sexy part of it but actually a lot of what is going on, as you well know, is that the bail bondsmen understand the system much better than the the clients do. So what they’re often doing is helping their clients to navigate the system and to remind them that “you have a court date”. They call them up and send them a text, “don’t forget you have to be at court at this time in this place,” you know these these people are not necessarily putting it on their Google Calendar right? So the bail bondsmen they really perform a social service in helping people to navigate the intricacies of the criminal justice system at a time of high stress.
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7dwB1NX43CEqNzBA2crSDp
Podcast Index: https://podcastindex.org/podcast/5314589?episode=30862010733
*A Boy’s Own Story*
By Edmund White, I enjoyed this paragraph from the preface:
In A Boy’s Own Story I touched on all the themes of my youth: the exaggerated consolations of the imagination; the sexy but crushing teenage culture of the 1950s; the importance of Buddhism, books and psychoanalysis to my development; my first contacts with bohemianism, the sole milieu where homosexuality was tolerated; and finally my cult of physical beauty. In recent years politically correct gay critics have taken me to task for my *looksism.” I never respond, but if I were to I’d say “Put the blame on Plato, who originated the seductive if unwholesome idea that physical beauty is a promise of Beauty, indistinguishable from Truth and Goodness.” All artists are responsive to beauty in any form it appears.
How did “looksism” get turned into “lookism“?
Should crypto receive a tax exemption?
Probably not, or so I argue in my latest Bloomberg column. Excerpt:
The most obvious argument against the proposal is simply that uniform taxation is better than selective tax exemptions. If a lower capital gains tax rate is preferable, then the goal should be to make a smaller cut that applies to all assets. Exempting a single kind of asset is likely to lead to abuses. You might think that boosting crypto is important now, but which sector or asset will be selected next for special treatment? It may be one you don’t think deserves it.
And:
Another problem is that tax exemption is probably not the best route to crypto normalization. What crypto assets and institutions require is predictable treatment, and on that score the nomination of Paul Atkins to lead the SEC is a good sign. Is a capital gains tax rate of zero even sustainable? A future Democratic president could raise the rate back to standard levels, or higher yet. The crypto industry would still be whipsawed by politics.
A tax exemption for crypto also would skew the population of crypto investors, and not necessarily in a beneficial fashion. The US economy offers a variety of options for tax-free savings, ranging from 401(k) plans to IRAs to pension funds. These vehicles make the most sense for investors who are liquid enough to put aside some money and lose immediate access to their funds.
It would be unfortunate if crypto became a preferred tax-free savings vehicle for lower-income groups. Crypto prices may well remain volatile in the future, and crypto investments are still more likely to be associated with scams and questionable business practices. This is obviously true even if you, like me, see plenty of legitimate uses for crypto assets and institutions.
And:
Another issue is one of tax arbitrage. If crypto assets truly are not taxed on their capital gains, many other investment vehicles might, over time, be repackaged in crypto form. Rather than holding some equity in a company, why not hold a crypto token backed by that same company? That is hard to do under today’s laws and regulations, but it may well become easier under a Trump administration, which seems committed to the normalization of crypto. That normalization, however beneficial it may eventually prove, should not be allowed to serve as a way to dodge taxes.
“Be careful what you wish for, you might get it…”
Science and religious dogmatism
Today’s leading historians of science have “debunked” the notion that religious dogmatism and science were largely in conflict in Western history: conflict was rare and inconsequential, the relationship between religion and science was constructive overall. This view stands in sharp contrast to that of a group of economists, who are beginning to report empirical evidence suggesting pervasive conflict, either in the present or during various historical settings. Who is right? This article provides quantitative evidence—from the continental level down to the personal one—suggesting that religious dogmatism has been indeed detrimental to science on balance. Beginning with Europe as a whole, it shows that the religious revival associated with the Reformations coincides with scientific deceleration, while the secularization of science during the Enlightenment coincides with scientific re-acceleration. It then discusses how regional- and city-level dynamics further support a causal interpretation running from religious dogmatism to diminished science. Finally, it presents person-level statistical evidence suggesting that—throughout modern Western history, and within a given city and time period—scientists who doubted God and the scriptures have been considerably more productive than those with dogmatic beliefs.
That is from a new paper by Matías Cabello. Of course you can believe those results, and still think Christianity was a necessary institutional background, even if being Christian did not help the individual scientist.
Tuesday assorted links
1. What is Russia losing in Syria?
2. Saloni on five medical breakthroughs from 2024.
3. The U.S. tax system has become more redistributive.
4. Open access book on the socialist calculation debate.
5. El Salvador to scale back Bitcoin plans due to IMF pressure (FT).
6. The new Google quantum chip. “It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse…”
The Nobel Prize lectures in economics
Trump City
Donald Trump wants to create Freedom Cities. It’s a good idea. As I wrote in 2008, the Federal Government owns more than half of Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Alaska and it owns nearly half of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming. See the map (PDF) for more [N.B. the vast majority of this land is NOT parks]. Thus, there is plenty of land to build new cities that could be adopted to new technologies such as driverless cars and drones.
Mark Lutter review the history and motivation and has a good suggestion:
Our favorite possibility is Presidio National Park. Though much smaller than Guantanamo Bay or Lowry Range, its location is ideal. San Francisco is the world’s tech capital, despite its many problems. The federal government can help San Francisco unleash its full potential by developing Presidio. With Paris-level density and six-story apartment buildings, a developed Presidio would add 120,000 residents, increasing San Francisco’s population by 15 percent. Further, given the city’s existing talent density, a Presidio featuring a liberalized biotechnology regime would quickly become a world innovation leader in this sector. America deserves a Bay Area that can compete; turning Presidio into a Freedom City could be an important step in that direction.
I would add only one suggestion let’s call this Trump City.
La ciudad lineal
When does it make sense to organize most of your urban activity on a (more or less) straight line?
If land transport is very costly, as in much earlier times, and a river is available, you might build much of the town right on the river bank. You can see remnants of this if you travel along the Rhine, though those developments have since expanded in other directions. Volgograd partially matches this description as well, or so I am told. But since river transport has declined in importance, such modes of urban organization have fallen out of favor and for obvious reasons.
Might some new technology resurrect the relevance of linear spatial organization?
Perhaps a very rapid airport people mover can make linear organization non-crazy, but I do not see that it would privilege linear organization. Does not Istanbul airport have a fairly linear structure? But how scalable is that?
The Saudi plans for Neom attempt to resurrect a very strong and strict linear model, based on a new mode of transport. From Wikipedia:
The Line is eventually planned to be 170 kilometres (110 miles) long. It could stretch from the Red Sea approximately to the city of Tabuk and could have nine million residents, resulting in an average population density of 260,000 per square kilometre (670,000/sq mi)…Early plans proposed an underground railway with 510-kilometre-per-hour (317 mph) trains that could travel from one end of The Line to the other in 20 minutes.
Supposedly all the shops and sites would be within a five-minute walk of line stops.
Of course this plan may not happen. But the 317-mph train is essential to the idea. Just hop on, and travel at super-rapid speeds to where you want to go. Presumably there are enough tracks with enough stops, like those newish programmable elevators, that you won’t have to accelerate and decelerate too many times. But, as the number of desirable stops proliferates, that ends up translating into an impractical number of separate individual train tracks.
The core problem seems to be that a linear city requires both super-rapid transport and not too many desirable stops. It is hard to pull off that combination in the modern world.
Is Conakry the closest the world has to a truly linear city?
Probably that map is a bear sign for the idea.
To read about this topic, you might try:
von Thunen, The Isolated City.
Arturo Soria y Puig, La Ciudad Lineal.
Cerda, The Five Bases of the General Theory of Urbanization, edited by Arturo Soria y Puig.
N.A. Miliutin, Sotsgorod: The Problem of Building Socialist Cities.
And ask your local GPT.
Monday assorted links
Buenos Aires
Recommendations?
52 things Tom Whitwell learned in 2024
Here is one of them:
In the 2020s, over 16% of movies have colons in the title (Like Superman: Man of Steel), up almost 300% since the 1990s.
And:
The Telugu-language action film Devara: Part 1 made more money ($5.5m) in US cinemas than Francis Ford Coppola’s $120m Megalopolis in its first week ($5m).
And:
In 2024, around 10% of Anguilla’s GDP will come from fees for its .ai domain name.
And:
In 1800, 1 in 3 people on earth were Chinese. Today, it’s less than 1 in 5.
Here is the link. Via Sridhar Prasad.
Austin Vernon on drones (from my email)
The offensive vs. defensive framing seems wrong, at least temporarily. It should be motivated vs. unmotivated, with drones favoring the motivated.
A competent drone capability requires building a supply chain, setting up a small manufacturing/assembly operation, and training skilled operators. They need to manage frequencies and adjust to jamming. Tight integration of these functions is a necessity. That favors highly motivated groups with broad popularity (recruiting skilled talent!) even if they are nominally weak.
Conversely, it can be challenging for overly corrupt or complacent organizations to counter. They are also more likely to fracture and lose cohesion when under attack.
We’ve seen HTS, Burmese rebels, and Azerbaijan all have a lot of success with drones. Ukraine went from hopelessly behind in drone tech to leading Russia in innovation in many niches.
It seems reasonable that the barriers to entry for a motivated drone “startup” will go up. The US military has effective, expensive interceptors like Coyote Block II to counter small attacks in locations like Syria. Fighting larger entities requires pretty absurd scaling to match enemy numbers and the low per-flight success rate – Ukraine claims they might produce millions of drones this year. Hamas had initial success attacking Israel on Oct. 7 but didn’t have the magazine depth to defend themselves.
AI targeting, the necessity of specialized components to defeat electronic warfare, and cheaper drone interceptors are all factors that could upset this balance. Entities that have the scale to deploy an AI stack, true factories, and specialized components should gain the advantage if the rate of change slows.
*Land Between the Rivers*
The author is Bartle Bull, and the subtitle is A 5,000-Year History of Iraq. Excerpt:
Another is the extraordinary length of what might be called an East-West conflict in Iraq. The Roman-Persian wars lasted from 54 BC until 628 AD. Nine centuries later a version of the conflict resumed, when the Ottoman Turks made Constantinople again the capital of a strong empire, taking on much of the organization of the Second Rome; and when Iran’s Safavid Empire saw Persia at least whole and imperial once more for the first time since the Muslim invasions of the seventh century AD. The Ottoman-Persian wars, adding an additional layer of Sunni versus Shia, lasted from 1507 until 1823. More than anywhere else, these conflicts took place in Iraq. An expansive view would have them beginning on Iraq’s soil with Alexander the Great in 331 BC and continuing well into the twenty-first century.
A good book I thought.
Sunday assorted links
2. A new paper on the diminishing returns to research.
3. Those new service sector jobs: “How to Make $100 an Hour Scratching Someone’s Back.” (WSJ)
4. Shruti podcast with Pravin Krishna on trade.
5. Jennifer Doleac on what we get wrong about crime (NYT).
6. “Eyeballing the results, something like >80 of the top 100 scorers on the Putnam are at MIT“