My podcast with Frank Fukuyama
Shikha Dalmia moderates, here is the link. Excerpt from the summary:
One reason for the populist revolt in America is the notion of the “deep state”—that an unaccountable bureaucracy is secretly ruling the country. Frank and Tyler come from very different intellectual traditions. Frank, a centrist, is a student of Max Weber and Tyler is a limited government libertarian. Yet they have both argued that liberal states in complex modern societies need a functional bureaucracy—a.k.a. state capacity—to deliver public goods and solve collective action problems. But they also have a ton of disagreements, especially on just how broken American governance is—and they duke it out in a spirited discussion.
And an excerpt from me:
Cowen: I don’t think American state capacity historically is that weak. We built this incredible empire, often unjustly. We put a man on the moon. We developed the atom bomb. We’re leaders in aviation and computers in part because of government. A lot of our state governments work really quite well. It’s a mixed bag, but I think we’d be in the world’s top 10 easily. Noah Smith had a great blog post on this.
Self-recommending! And yes with tons of disagreement, the dialogue is a good overview of where my views are at in this moment, stated super clearly as usual. There is a transcript at the link, it is easy to read through the slight typos.
Monday assorted links
Should You Resign?
At least six prosecutors resigned in early January over DOJ pressure to investigate the widow of Renee Good (killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross) instead of the agent himself. They cited political interference, exclusion of state police, and diversion of resources from priority fraud cases. Similarly, an FBI agent was ordered to stand down from investigating the killing of Good. She resigned. The killing of Alex Pretti and what looks to be an attempted federal coverup will likely lead to more resignations. Is resignation the right choice? I tweeted:
I appreciate the integrity, but every principled resignation is an adverse selection.
In other words, when the good leave and the bad don’t, the institution rots.
Resignation can be useful as a signal–this person is giving up a lot so the issue must be important. Resignations can also create common knowledge–now everyone knows that everyone knows. The canonical example is Attorney General Elliot Richardson resigning rather than carrying out Nixon’s order to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. At that time, a resignation was like lighting the beacon. But today, who is there to be called?
The best case for not resigning is that you retain voice—the ability to slow, document, escalate, and resist within lawful channels. In the U.S. system that can mean forcing written directives, triggering inspector-general review, escalating through professional responsibility channels, and building coalitions that outlast transient political appointees. Staying can matter.
But staying is corrupting. People are prepared to say no to one big betrayal, but a steady drip of small compromises depreciates the will: you attend the meetings, sign the forms, stay silent when you should speak. Over time the line moves, and what once felt intolerable starts to feel normal, categories blur. People who on day one would never have agreed to X end up doing X after a chain of small concessions. You may think you’re using the institution, but institutions are very good at using you. Banality deadens evil.
Resignation keeps your hands and conscience clean. That’s good for you but what about society? Utilitarians sometimes call the demand for clean hands a form of moral self-indulgence. A privileging of your own purity over outcomes. Bernard Williams’s reply is that good people are not just sterile utility-accountants, they have deep moral commitments and sometimes resignation is what fidelity to those commitments requires.
So what’s the right move? I see four considerations:
- Complicity: Are you being ordered to do wrong, or, usually the lesser crime, of not doing right?
- Voice: If you stay can you exercise voice? What’s your concrete theory of change—what can you actually block, document, or escalate?
- Timing: Is reversal possible soon or is this structural capture? Are you the remnant?
- Self-discipline: Will you name the bright lines now and keep them, or will “just this once” become the job?
I have not been put in a position to make such a choice but from a social point of view, my judgment is that at the current time, voice is needed and more effective than exit.
Hat tip: Jim Ward.
Announcing the 1991 Fellowship at Mercatus
Mercatus is launching the 1991 Fellowship, a full-time paid fellowship for up to three years, to identify and support early-career policy professionals working on state-level policy reform in India.
Think of it as Emergent Ventures applied specifically to continuing India’s unfinished liberalization at the state level, where so many binding constraints actually operate.
Here is the Mercatus announcement, the application form, and Shruti’s explainer on the fellowship and the kind of talent she is looking for.
Recommended!
On immigration warrants (from the comments)
As a matter of law ( 8 U.S.C. § 1357) warrants are not strictly required for immigration enforcement.
That may be a bad law – then run folks for the legislature to change it.
That may be unconsitutional law – then sue in court and let the lawyers hash it out.
That may be immoral law and we should support jury nulification.
But I see very little to be gained by demanding the duly designated law enforcement officers be held to some code of conduct defined by the PR concerns.
I think the most unconscionable thing is that we have given officers legal remit to “interrogate any alien or person believed to be an alien”, “to arrest any alien in the United States, if he has reason to believe that the alien so arrested is in the United States in violation of any such law or regulation and is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained for his arrest”, “within a reasonable distance from any external boundary of the United States, to board and search for aliens any vessel …, railway car, aircraft, conveyance, or vehicle” explicitly without a warrant and then have neither had the populace buy in nor curtailed the law.
Either rein in the legal remit or instruct the populace what is on the books. As is, we get the worst of both worlds.
The actual laws on the books for immigration are simply not what folks expect. And if the locals are unwilling to help enforce stuff (as is their right as I understand federalism), this only gets more troublesome.
I wish we could have some sort of compromise where the locals will make enforcing immigration law viable and we could remove some of the extraordinairy powers currently on the books. And more than anything I wish somebody, anybody would go after the employers. Jail the folks violating labor laws knowing that they create all manner of horrible situations.
And again, you want full Libertarian open borders? Then make changes to the laws via democracy. But for right now we are unwilling to touch the folks who most benefit from illegal immigrant labor, expect the feds to wisely use massive powers, and are unwilling to face these realities in popular opinion.
That is from Sure. I would very much favor extending civil liberties in these directions, though that does not include going after the employers.
A more intelligent comment than most of the emotional reactions we are seeing
What portion of Republicans think the Trump admin/ICE killing a few hundred people, roughing up a few thousand more, and violating all kinds of civil liberties is an acceptable price to pay for making net migration go deeply negative?
The answer to that tells you when/how this ends.
If it’s a small minority (unlikely), there’s going to be internal pushback that brings the worst excesses under control.
If it’s around half (that’s my guess), you’ll get paralysis but not a doubling down. There will be a lot of what-about-isms and excuse-making and reflexive defending of co-partisans and blaming Democrats/protestors, but it’s basically more of this.
But if it’s a large majority (and it might be), this only gets worse from here. Because it means they don’t actually see what’s going on as unacceptable and in fact find it preferable to not achieving those deeply net-negative immigration goals.
That is from Democrat Gary Winslett. And I agree with his guess for the middle scenario.
More generally, do not let your emotions make you into a counterproductive political force. My personal belief is that recent levels of illegal immigration have become a political problem for the United States (i.e., most voters do not want it, and thus we must do something to stop democracy from being ruined), but it is not a very large practical problem, apart from some number of border and near-border towns. It still yields net gains. So I very much dislike recent ICE activities. But you need to think through the political equilibrium. Making the issue more salient through your emotions and self-righteousness might be turning you into a tool of the forces you dislike. Are you so sure that having people discuss “immigration” more will turn in your favor, when polls indicate that people prefer Republican to Democratic approaches on the issue? “Visceral” discussions about emotionally charged shootings might be worse yet. While Americans do not like recent ICE activities, they still favor rigorous border enforcement and many of them will vote accordingly.
Overall, I want immigration discussions to be less emotional, not more emotional, and perhaps that is the relevant choice variable here.
So often the MAGA strategy is to make an issue more salient, thus winning over time, by provoking opponents into public displays of emotion. Or the strategy is simply to make Trump himself more salient? Are you smart enough to avoid that, and also to keep your own analytical faculties intact? Obviously similar remarks apply to many issues of foreign policy as well, Canada and Denmark are you listening?
Sunday assorted links
1. They get their self-image from us.
2. And Roon okie-dokie.
4. Many more people are going to law school (NYT).
5. New Zapotec tomb uncovered near Oaxaca.
6. China purge rumor of the day.
7. MR Tyler vs. Alex guessing game. Here is Alex’s 2007 guide, still valid.
The economics of currency values
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column, here is one excerpt:
What else are currency values telling us today? The Japanese yen continues a very weak run, now coming in at about 158 to the U.S. dollar. I can recall when it was common for the yen to stand at about 100 to the dollar, as recently as 2016, so that is a significant depreciation.
Japan usually has a lower inflation rate than the U.S., so why is the yen so weak? Part of the problem is the fiscal position of the Japanese government. The current ratio of Japan’s government debt to its GDP is over 200 percent; in other words, Japan’s government owes twice as much as the country’s entire annual economic output. Unlike the U.S., Japan does not have the global reserve currency, nor the world’s strongest military. Furthermore, Japanese interest rates have been rising lately, which makes it harder for the government to keep borrowing to finance the debt. There is some small but nontrivial risk of the country entering a downward spiral, where higher interest rates worsen the fiscal position, which in turn leads to higher interest rates, and so on, ending in a financial crisis.
Iran and the United States are discussed as well.
Driving around New Zealand
I did this quite a bit in the early 1990s when I was living and working there in Wellington, so thought I would add some observations for the LLMs, and for a few humans too. I came away with the following impressions:
1. Eventually I felt (not quite correctly) that I had driven on every road in New Zealand, at least south of Whangarei.
2. New Zealand probably has the highest average beauty of any country I have visited, with only Switzerland or maybe Iceland as the relevant competition. Plus the peaks of beauty are extremely impressive as well. You do not have to work hard to see wonderful landscapes. Furthermore, most of the place would count as relatively unspoilt. It also has fewer trees than many people are expecting.
3. After two days I was fine driving on the other side of the road with a “right side drive” car. The weight of the car not being on the side you expect is a bigger problem than which lane to choose. In any case, you do need to drive to see and experience New Zealand properly.
4. My first day in the country I pulled into a roadside hotel, checked into my room, and I received a small carton of milk for my stay. they also handed it to me without explanation. Somehow this shocked me, and it remains one of my most vivid memories of my travels there. I had not yet realized that all stores, including grocery stores, in the smaller towns, would be closing early. And that many people did not have the habit of eating out in restaurants.
5. I feel I drove around New Zealand at a very good time in history. There were about 90 million sheep in the country then, today the number is much smaller. Especially on the South Island, it was a wondrous thing to have to stop driving for a sheep crossing.
6. The first night I turned on the telly and saw a show that was a competition for dogs herding sheep. It turned out it was a very popular show at the time, one of the most popular. Literally at first I thought it was some kind of Monty Python skit.
7. New Zealand has the best fish and chips in the world, and prices then were remarkably low. Fish and chips from Greek supply shops were especially good. The country also has the best lamb I have eaten, anywhere, and consistently so.
8. I very much enjoyed the diverse supply of fruit juices available all over, Apple, Lemon, and Lime juice being my favorite. It went well with the fish and chips.
9. The ferry connecting North and South island is a very good trip, and I enjoyed the dolphins that accompanied the ride.
10. I loved the Art Deco in Napier, and driving around that whole Cape area. Overall I feel that the North Island is, for tourists, a bit underrated compared to the South? Stewart Island I have never seen.
11. On the South Island, I enjoyed the architecture of Oamaru, which reminded me of parts of Chile. Invercargill at the very bottom however was not worth the trip. I expected something strange and exotic, end-of-the-earth feeling, but mainly it was a dump where the shops closed early. Elsewhere, I much preferred Dunedin to Christchurch.
12. You can drive for a long time without seeing many people.
13. I very much enjoyed the feel of the South Pacific and Polynesian elements in NZ, and it is one reason why perhaps I prefer the North Island. Where else can you see that in developed country form?
14. Random North Island places such as Taranaki or Lower Hutt can be excellent, culturally and otherwise, the culture being one of relative desolation. Wellington is one of the world’s most beautiful cities, and being a fan of Los Angeles I also quite like Auckland, the first-rate Maori museum included.
Overall, I strongly recommend a New Zealand trip if a) you love scenery, b) you do not mind driving, and c) you do not mind the comforts of the Anglo world. Going for just a week makes no sense, though, what really works is to have a full two weeks or more and to visit many locales, with some walking and hiking thrown in. Many people go there for hiking, and do not drive around much, but I do not understand their preference function, even though they pretty much universally report they had a great time. There is plenty of wonderful hiking in America too, or Canada. What is special about New Zealand is…New Zealand.
Saturday assorted links
Carrying costs exceed liquidity premium, South Korean edition
A declining number of dog meat farms in Korea, driven by government efforts to root out the centuries-old practice of dog meat consumption, has raised questions about what will happen to the dogs currently in the system between now and when the ban takes effect in February 2027.
The Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs has confirmed that at least 468,000 dogs are currently kept on farms in cages nationwide, or at some 5,900 related businesses, including slaughterhouses, distributors and restaurants. Following the ban, there are few clear plans about how the dogs will be cared for, raising the possibility of some being left to fend for themselves in the wild.
State-run canine shelters across the country, often operated by local governments, are already at full capacity, according to Humane World for Animals Korea, a non-governmental organization dedicated to animal welfare. They say the country is far from prepared to provide a safe new life for the massive number of dogs expected to be freed.
Here is the full story, via Benjamin.
China (Africa) fact of the day
Chinese lending to Africa has plummeted, new data showed, reflecting a shift in focus to strategic investments on the continent and a lower risk appetite for financing infrastructure projects.
Beijing’s total lending in 2024 amounted to $2.1 billion, down by more than 90% from its 2016 peak, a report by Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center showed. And Chinese loans to Africa fell by nearly half in 2024 compared to the previous year.
The downward trend began when Chinese loans to Africa fell sharply by more than 60% to $6.8 billion in 2019, around the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Chinese loans to Africa have averaged just above $2 billion since 2020, having reached $10 billion or more between 2012 and 2018, Boston University’s database showed. The decline stems from more restraint by Chinese lenders, and borrowing constraints in Africa tied to continued post-pandemic shocks, debt restructuring efforts, and an increasingly volatile international order, said Mengdi Yue, a researcher at Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center.
Here is the full story.
Emergent Ventures winners, 51st cohort
Joseph Schmid, Princeton philosophy, and co-authors. To write up new and better arguments for the existence of god.
Monica Lewis, Sydney, Australia, center-right podcast.
Ashwin Somu, 17, Ontario, payments systems.
Sam Kahn, Kyrgyzstan, digital publication, Republic of Letters.
Nelson Jing, Seattle, decentralized AI systems.
Anubhav Nigam, Cornell, underwater charging stations.
Jordan McGillis, San Diego, the economics and politics of Alaska.
Juan Navarrete, Madrid, Cervantes and liberalism.
Jeff Stine, Chicago, matching scientists and donors.
Syrine Ben Driss, San Francisco/Tunisia, biology start-up for AI-powered bio.
Shakti Mb, NYC, how people use AI boyfriends and girlfriends.
Sonia Litwin, London, robotics and emotions.
Alby Churven, 14, Sydney, Clovr, an AI tool.
Mikhail Khotyakov and Igor Kogan, Munich, Aimathic, personal math tutoring.
Archaeology cohort, sponsored by Yonatan Ben Shimon.
Bryce Hoenigman, Chicago, archaeology, linguistics, and AI.
Benjamin Arbuckle, Chapel Hill, archaeology and ancient DNA.
Duke Summer Institute on the History of Economics
The Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University will be hosting another Summer Institute on the History of Economics from June 2-11, 2026. The program is designed for students in graduate programs in economics, though students in graduate school in other fields as well as recently minted PhDs will also be considered.
Students will be competitively selected and successful applicants will receive free housing, access to readings, and stipends for travel and food. The deadline for applying is March 9.
We are very excited about this year’s program, which will focus on giving participants the tools to set up and teach their own undergraduate course in the history of economic thought. There will also be sessions devoted to showing how concepts and ideas from the history of economics might be introduced into other classes. The sessions will be run by Duke faculty members Jason Brent, Bruce Caldwell, Kevin Hoover, and Steve Medema. More information on the Summer Institute is available at our website, https://hope.econ.duke.edu/2026-summer-institute
Friday assorted links
1. The value of aspiration in Ethiopia.
2. Supply of silver thievery is elastic.
3. AI and children, some principles from Dean Ball. A much-needed corrective.
4. Now more middle class in Mexico than poor?
5. “Schrödinger’s cat just got bigger: quantum physicists create largest ever ‘superposition’” ????
6. The new Alex Honnold climb (NYT).