The chess culture that is India
Sarwagya Singh Kushwaha has become the youngest player in chess history to earn an official FIDE rating at the age of three years, seven months and 20 days.
Born in 2022, Sarwagya — from Sagar in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh — has been rated by FIDE, the international governing body of chess, which requires a player to score points against at least five rated opponents in official events.
The toddler’s first rating of 1572 is considerably above the minimum rating of 1,400, having won five of his eight rated matches. As detailed by chess.com, Sarwagya’s victories have come against opponents including 22-year-old Abhijeet Awasthi (FIDE-rated 1542), 29-year-old Shubham Chourasiya (1559) and 20-year-old Yogesh Namdev (1696).
Sarwagya has broken the record held by another Indian child, Anish Sarkar, who set it at three years, eight months and 19 days old, in November 2024.
Here is more from the NYT, via the excellent Samir Varma.
Sunday assorted links
1. The fight over Romansh (New Yorker).
3. Kelsey Piper responds on Mississippi. She is probably correct.
4. Future VP?
5. Is the political allocation of gay representatives skewed?
6. If Arnold Kling taught conservative thought.
7. Noah is right.
My 2011 Review of Contagion
I happened to come across my 2011 review of the Steven Soderberg movie, Contagion and was surprised at how much I was thinking about pandemics prior to COVID. In the review, I was too optimistic about the CDC but got the sequencing gains right. I continue to like the conclusion even if it is a bit too clever by half. Here’s the review (no indent):
Contagion, the Steven Soderberg film about a lethal virus that goes pandemic, succeeds well as a movie and very well as a warning. The movie is particularly good at explaining the science of contagion: how a virus can spread from hand to cup to lip, from Kowloon to Minneapolis to Calcutta, within a matter of days.
One of the few silver linings from the 9/11 and anthrax attacks is that we have invested some $50 billion in preparing for bio-terrorism. The headline project, Project Bioshield, was supposed to produce vaccines and treatments for anthrax, botulinum toxin, Ebola, and plague but that has not gone well. An unintended consequence of greater fear of bio-terrorism, however, has been a significant improvement in our ability to deal with natural attacks. In Contagion a U.S. general asks Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) of the CDC whether they could be looking at a weaponized agent. Cheever responds:
Someone doesn’t has to weaponize the bird flu. The birds are doing that.
That is exactly right. Fortunately, under the umbrella of bio-terrorism, we have invested in the public health system by building more bio-safety level 3 and 4 laboratories including the latest BSL3 at George Mason University, we have expanded the CDC and built up epidemic centers at the WHO and elsewhere and we have improved some local public health centers. Most importantly, a network of experts at the department of defense, the CDC, universities and private firms has been created. All of this has increased the speed at which we can respond to a natural or unnatural pandemic.
In 2009, as H1N1 was spreading rapidly, the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency asked Professor Ian Lipkin, the director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, to sequence the virus. Working non-stop and updating other geneticists hourly, Lipkin and his team were able to sequence the virus in 31 hours. (Professor Ian Sussman, played in the movie by Elliott Gould, is based on Lipkin.) As the movie explains, however, sequencing a virus is only the first step to developing a drug or vaccine and the latter steps are more difficult and more filled with paperwork and delay. In the case of H1N1 it took months to even get going on animal studies, in part because of the massive amount of paperwork that is required to work on animals. (Contagion also hints at the problems of bureaucracy which are notably solved in the movie by bravely ignoring the law.)
It’s common to hear today that the dangers of avian flu were exaggerated. I think that is a mistake. Keep in mind that H1N1 infected 15 to 30 percent of the U.S. population (including one of my sons). Fortunately, the death rate for H1N1 was much lower than feared. In contrast, H5N1 has killed more than half the people who have contracted it. Fortunately, the transmission rate for H5N1 was much lower than feared. In other words, we have been lucky not virtuous.
We are not wired to rationally prepare for small probability events, even when such events can be devastating on a world-wide scale. Contagion reminds us, visually and emotionally, that the most dangerous bird may be the black swan.
Planning sentences to ponder
Planning assistance caused municipalities to build 20% fewer housing units per decade over the 50 years that followed.
Here is the full abstract:
We study how the federal Urban Planning Assistance Program, which subsidized growing communities in the 1960s to hire urban planners to draft land-use plans, affected housing supply. Using newly digitized records merged with panel data across municipalities on housing and zoning outcomes, we exploit eligibility thresholds and capacity to approve funds across state agencies to identify effects. Planning assistance caused municipalities to build 20% fewer housing units per decade over the 50 years that followed. Regulatory innovation steered construction in assisted areas away from apartments and toward larger single-family homes. Textual evidence related to zoning and development politics further shows that, since the 1980s, assisted communities have disincentivized housing supply by passing on development costs to developers. These findings suggest that federal intervention in planning helped institutionalize practices that complicate community growth, with subsequent consequences for national housing affordability.
Hail Martin Anderson! The above paper is by Tom Cui and Beau Bressler, via Brad, and also Yonah Freemark.
The EU production function
The central puzzle of the EU is its extraordinary productivity. Grand coalitions, like the government recently formed in Germany, typically produce paralysis. The EU’s governing coalition is even grander, spanning the center-right EPP, the Socialists, the Liberals, and often the Greens, yet between 2019 and 2024, the EU passed around 13,000 acts, about seven per day. The U.S. Congress, over the same period, produced roughly 3,500 pieces of legislation and 2,000 resolutions.1
Not only is the coalition broad, but encompasses huge national and regional diversity. In Brussels, the Parliament has 705 members from roughly 200 national parties. The Council represents 27 sovereign governments with conflicting interests. A law faces a double hurdle, where a qualified majority of member states and of members of parliament must support it. The system should produce gridlock, more still than the paralysis commonly associated with the American federal government. Yet it works fast and produces a lot, both good and bad. The reason lies in the incentives: every actor in the system is rewarded for producing legislation, and not for exercising their vetoes…
Formally, the EU is a multi-actor system with many veto points (Commission, Parliament, Council, national governments, etc.), which should require broad agreement and hence slow decision making. In practice, consensus is manufactured in advance rather than reached through deliberation.
By the time any proposal comes up for an official vote, most alternatives have been eliminated behind closed doors. A small team of rapporteurs agrees among themselves; the committee endorses their bargain; the plenary, in turn, ratifies the committee deal; and the Council Presidency, pressed for time, accepts the compromise (with both Council and Parliament influenced along the way by the Commission’s mediation and drafting). Each actor can thus claim a victory and no one’s incentive is to apply the brakes.
That is from an excellent piece by Luis Garicano. What would Buchanan and Tullock say?
A Ukrainian mathematician requests mathematical assistance
…an expert in general relativity or a mathematical physicist familiar with PPN methods, weak-field gravitational tests, and variational principles…
For the two technical appendices (ψ-preconditioning and χ-flattening), I would need:
• a quantum algorithms researcher (QSP/QSVT/QLSA/QAE) to assess the correctness of the operator transformations and the potential complexity gains;
• a quantum control or pulse-level compilation engineer (pulse-level, virtual-Z) to evaluate whether the phase-drift compensation algorithm can be implemented realistically on actual hardware.
Please email me if you think you might be of assistance.
Saturday assorted links
What Tom Whitwell learned in 2025
52 things, here is one of them:
Most characters in the film Idiocracy wear Crocs because the film’s wardrobe director thought they were too horrible-looking to ever become popular. [Alex Kasprak]
Here is the full list.
Two things that really matter
When analyzing the macro situations of countries or regions, I place more stress than many people do on the following two factors:
1. Human capital: How much active, ambitious talent is there? And how high are the averages and medians?
2. Matching market demands: Are you geared up to produce what the market really wants, export markets or otherwise?
Those may sound trivial, but in relative terms they remain undervalued. They are, for instance, the biggest reasons why I do not buy “the housing theory of everything.”
They are also, in my view, the biggest reasons why the UK currently is in economic trouble. Both #1 (brain drain) and #2 have taken a hit in recent times. The UK continues to deindustrialize, business consulting is not the future, and London as a financial centre was hurt by 2008, Brexit, and superior innovations elsewhere. More and more smart Brits are leaving for the US or Dubai.
You also will notice that #1 and #2, when they are in trouble, are not always easily fixed. That is why reforms, while often a good idea, are by no means an easy or automatic way out of trouble.
These two factors also are consistent with the stylized fact that growth rates from the previous decade are not so predictive of growth rates for the next decades. Human capital often drives levels more than growth rates. And matching market demands often has to do with luck, or with shifting patterns of demand that the supplying country simply cannot match. Once people abandon Toyotas for Chinese electric cars, Japan does not have an easy pivot to make up the loss.
Most other theories of growth rates, for instance those that assign a predominant weight to institutions, predict much more serial correlation of growth rates than we find in the data. That said, institutions do indeed matter, and in addition to their usual effects they will shape both #1 and #2 over the longer run.
Overall, I believe conclusions would be less pat and economic understandings would be more effective if people paid greater attention to these factors #1 and #2. Not putting enough weight on #1 and #2 is one of the biggest mistakes I see smart people — and indeed very smart people — making.
Addendum: You will note the contributions of Fischer Black here. Apart from his contributions to options pricing theory, which are widely known, he remains one of the most underrated modern economists.
Classical music of 2025
These are the releases that I kept on listening to, in no particular order:
Aart Bergwerff, Bach, Six Trio Sonatas for Organ.
Jonathan Ferrucci, Bach Toccatas.
Tom Hicks, Chopin Nocturnes. So little rubato, this one took time getting used to but now I love it.
Linos-Ensemble, Schoenberg-Webern-Berg, The Waltz Arrangements. I am surprised I like this one at all, it brings together the two main strands of Viennese music at the time.
Yuja Wang, Shostakovich Piano Concerti and pieces from Op.87.
Cuarteto Casals, Shostakovich, complete String Quartets.
i am selecting these based on a) are they truly great and important pieces of classical music, and b) does this particular recording add something to the interpretations already out there?
Friday assorted links
1. Best DC art works? (FT) Surely Manet’s The Railway should be on the list? Does Dulles Airport count? The Iwo Jima Memorial or Vietnam Memorial? Maybe even the Air Force Memorial?
2. The raccoon culture that was Virginia and I suppose still is a little bit?
3. Stoppard’s liberal individualism.
4. Jerry Z Muller on conservatism.
5. SPEAK, new organization for free speech in the UK.
Welcome to the Crazy CAFE
To let Americans buy smaller cars, Trump had to weaken fuel-efficiency standards. Does that sound crazy? Small cars, of course, have much higher fuel efficiency. Yet this is exactly how the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards work.
Since 2011, fuel-economy targets scale with a vehicle’s “footprint” (wheelbase × track width). Big vehicles get lenient targets; small vehicles face demanding ones. A microcar that gets 40 MPG might be judged against a target of 50-60 MPG, while a full-size truck doing 20 MPG can satisfy a 22 MPG requirement.. The small car is clearly more efficient, yet it fails the rule that the truck passes.
The policy was meant to be fair to producers of large vehicles, but it rewards bloat. Make a car bigger and compliance gets easier. Add crash standards built around heavier vehicles and it’s obvious why the US market produces crossovers and trucks while smaller and much less expensive city-cars, familiar in Europe and Asia, never show up. At a press conference rolling back CAFE standards, Trump noted he’d seen small “kei” cars on his Asia trip—”very small, really cute”—and directed the Transportation Secretary to clear regulatory barriers so they could be built and sold in America.
Trump’s rollback—cutting the projected 2031 fleet average from roughly 50.4 MPG to 34.5 MPG—relaxes the math enough that microcars could comply again. Only Kafka would appreciate a fuel-economy system that makes small fuel-efficient cars hard to sell and giant trucks easy. Yet the looser rules remove a barrier to greener vehicles while also handing a windfall to big truck makers. A little less Kafka, a little more Tullock.
Political pressure on the Fed
From a forthcoming paper by Thomas Drechsel:
This paper combines new data and a narrative approach to identify variation in political pressure on the Federal Reserve. From archival records, I build a data set of personal interactions between U.S. Presidents and Fed officials between 1933 and 2016. Since personal interactions do not necessarily reflect political pressure, I develop a narrative identification strategy based on President Nixon’s pressure on Fed Chair Burns. I exploit this narrative through restrictions on a structural vector autoregression that includes the President-Fed interaction data. I find that political pressure to ease monetary policy (i) increases the price level strongly and persistently, (ii) does not lead to positive effects on real economic activity, (iii) contributed to inflationary episodes outside of the Nixon era, and (iv) transmits differently from a typical monetary policy easing, by having a stronger effect on inflation expectations. Quantitatively, increasing political pressure by half as much as Nixon, for six months, raises the price level by about 7% over the following decade.
That is not entirely a positive omen for the current day.
Emergent Ventures winners, 50th cohort
Geby Jaff, Berkeley, publication medium for AI-generated science.
Laura Ryan, London, data for the AIs.
Tara Rezaei, MIT, general career support/AI/o1.
Mihir Rao, Princeton, bio and AI.
Lorna MacLean, London, AI medical diagnosis of endometriosis.
David Yu, Waterloo, Ontario/Taiwan, fellowship program for agentic Taiwanese college students.
Aniket Panjwani, Lombard, Illinois, EconNow, AI-based software for economics.
Zixuan (Eric) Ma, GMU, to write about China.
Ivan Khalamendyk, Lviv, “I’m an independent Ukrainian physicist developing a ψ-field model of the universe – a single real wave ψ(x,t) that reproduces quantum matter, forces and gravity.”
José Luis Sabau, Mexico City, Perpetuo, Substack for Mexico.
Soleil Wizman, Yale University, longevity.
Abu Dhabi fact of the day
International Holding Company has been growing:
IHC’s $240bn market capitalisation makes it by far the biggest constituent of the Abu Dhabi stock exchange, taking up 41.5 per cent of the FTSE ADX General Index — a figure that rises still further when listed subsidiaries such as Alpha Dhabi and 2PointZero are included.
First Abu Dhabi Bank, the country’s largest lender and runner-up at a 10 per cent weighting, is also chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon. Because IHC is ultimately controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon, who is also the UAE’s national security adviser and chairs two of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth funds, academics classify it as a “state-related entity”.
IHC in turn consists of about 1500 firms, though consolidation is promised. Here is the full FT article.