Do Minimum Wages Help Workers in Poor and Low-Income Families?
We provide the first direct estimates of the effects of minimum wages on low-wage workers in families at different points of the distribution of income-to-needs, using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, which oversamples low-income families. We find adverse – rather than beneficial – effects of minimum wages on the employment, hours, and earnings of initially-employed low-wage workers in poor and low-income families. Although we do not find a gradient indicating more adverse effects on the poorest low-wage workers, the adverse effects for poor and low-income low-wage workers help explain why minimum wages do not reduce poverty.
That is from a recent paper by David Neumark and Emma Wohl.
That was then, this is now
In 1914 Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and David Ben-Gurion, the president and prime minister of Israel after 1948 respectively, were in the Ottoman capital studying law at Istanbul University. They had studied Ottoman Turkish and embarked on their legal studies in the hope of one day serving in the Assembly of Deputies as elected representatives from Jerusalem. With war on the horizon, they made their way back to Palestine, where they volunteered for military service in the Ottoman army. They also proposed the formation of a Jewish legion to fight under the Ottoman banner, but their intiative fell on deaf ears…We have no way of knowing how things might have turned out had Ben-Zvi and Ben-Gurion been allowed to suit up in Ottoman uniform…
Moshe Sharett, another future prime minister of Israel and said to have been fluent in both Arabic and Turkish, served in the Ottoman army during the Balkan Wars and all through the First World War, even beyond the announcement of the Balfour Declaration and the British occupation of Jerusalem in December 1917.
That is all from the quite good The War That Made the Middle East: World War I and the End of the Ottoman Empire, by Mustafa Aksakal.
Common sense in charge
…children are increasingly seen as interfering with the freedom of parents; views on whether mothers of young children should work have become markedly more progressive and account for a substantially larger share of the decline among the tertiary-educated; and fewer people believe that women or men need children to lead a fulfilled life. This last attitude changed most over the decade and is the largest contributor to the fall in intended fertility, above all among less-educated women.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
Monday assorted links
1. There is now a formal 150 kph (93.2 mph) speed limit in one part of Czechia.
2. Why does the Japanese prime minister spend so much time in seclusion?
3. Decker defends academia (noting I do not think the “only the peaks” defense quite works. I also worry about very high quality research that ends up being too context-specific to be very useful. That is no fault of the researchers, but…the world is not wrong to be less than totally impressed in response. Economists, when they discuss what they are up to, are far too taken in by “the quality of the work” as a relevant variable. I think they can be fairly delusional as to how much progress they actually are making, even though along the “research quality” dimension the work is much better than what people were doing say thirty years ago. In fact we train economists to make precisely this kind of mistake.)
4. Rhine Group. More European optimism.
5. Entrepreneurs in state government improve state government.
Childhood Exposure to Joint Custody Reforms and Adult Family Formation
Joint custody reforms are among the most consequential family-law changes for children, yet little is known about their long-term effects. Exploiting staggered adoption across US states and 13 million ACS observations, we show that childhood exposure reduces adult fertility by 7 percent, symmetrically for women and men and operates primarily through lower parenthood and couple formation. Effects are sub-additive within couples, while exposed individuals assortatively match. Our findings point to the formation of family preferences during childhood and align with a US fertility decline increasingly driven by rising childlessness and declining couple formation rather than smaller families among parents.
That is from a recent research paper by Daniel Fernández-Kranz and Sébastien Fontenay. Via the excellent Samir Varma.
I DJ for Rick Rubin about music and patriotism
MUSIC EPISODE: “You think you understand patriotism, you have your hands around it–it’s the simple thing, but it turns out it’s not. And maybe, music and the history of music shows us all that better than mere discourse about it.”
0:00:00 Tyler Cowen
0:00:24 Intro: Patriotism in Music
0:03:09 John Philip Sousa & Stars and Stripes Forever
0:07:38 Country Joe & the Fish: The Anti-War Song
0:16:49 Andrews Sisters & Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy
0:22:04 Liszt & Bartók: Hungarian Independence
0:36:29 Dvořák, Rossini & William Tell
0:47:24 Stockhausen, Percy Grainger & Sacred War
0:59:59 Trinidad, Congo & Brazil: Independence Songs
1:21:49 William Byrd & the Sex Pistols
1:28:00 Elgar, Charles Ives & Chuck Berry
Here is one link to the podcast itself, here is another. Recorded in Tuscany, definitely recommended, all fresh material.
Sunday assorted links
1. “Underestimating something that has an AI “accent” by reflexively dismissing it as slop rhymes curiously with underestimating someone because they have a funny accent in your native language (and it isn’t one of the accents that you think signals superiority, like the BBC British accent for English).” V. Rao.
2. Profile of Joe Lonsdale. And from the NYT, mostly on Cicero and homelessness.
3. Graceland just isn’t that impressive.
4. Mill, Hayek, and liberalism.
5. Interview with Peter McCrory, Head Economist at Anthropic.
Democracy and Caeserism
In my 2015 post discussing Joseph Heath’s excellent book Enlightenment 2.0, I had this to say:
One of the reasons that I oppose the extension of democratic politics into every aspect of modern life is precisely that in trying to do too much, democracy delivers incoherence, gridlock and frustration, forces that eventually undermine its own legitimacy. I worry about democratic legitimacy because I see democracy as a check and balance on Leviathan (while Heath sees it as a check on government by experts).
The legislature has become a sideshow. But I worry, because the more Congress is held in contempt the greater the support for a bold executive that takes charge, makes decisions and gets things done. Under these pressures, executive power has grown not just in the United States but also in Canada and Great Britain (on this theme see F.H. Buckley’s The Once and Future King.) But for all its faults, the legislature and the rule of law are more conducive to liberty than the executive and the administrative state. Legislators are satisfied with reelection and a bit of pork but executives hunger for greatness and in so doing they promote the real dangers, idolatry, the centralization of power and war.
In short, I worry that the pathologies of democracy drive the demand not for rational, technocratic government but for Caesarism.
I should note that this was before Donald Trump was a Republican presidential contender, let alone a candidate for office.
Addendum: See also my review of Enlightenment 2.0. It has some good lines!
The propagandizing messages of markets and politics are also very different. Market messages are largely inclusive and cosmopolitan. Coca-Cola advertises “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” because they’d like the world to buy a Coke. Firms do try to build brand affiliation but they rarely do so by promoting hatred of their competitors. Pepsi doesn’t tell the Pepsi Generation that Coke drinkers are stealing their jobs and spitting on their gods.
Hat tip: @kingofthecoastt who recently tweeted about the original post.
My recent visit to Anthropic
I very recently participated in a two-day session to offer guidance on rewriting the constitution for Claude. The small group invited was uniformly excellent, we received serious time with key decision-makers, and the discussions were of very high quality.
Some of the points I stressed were the following:
1. Whatever one might take a “constitution” to mean in this context, it needs to borrow more from analogs to case law and the common law.
2. Along related lines, think more in terms of “Talmud,” and not just in terms of “Torah.”
3. Work to help build out a quality secondary literature on the AI constitutions and related documents. Currently this does not exist.
4. Consider how a panel of diverse AIs, with different prompts, could help to evaluate to what extent Claude (and other AI models) were acting in accord with their constitutions.
5. Have a final board of human adjudicators, functioning in a manner analogous to an independent judiciary. To the extent the panel of diverse AIs might have concerns about Claude not following its constitution, those AIs could alert the human adjudicators to what was going on. Those human adjudicators could then have authority over potential changes and remedies.
Here a recent short post on using internal courts and the common law to help govern/self-govern AI. And on the courts.
I thank Anthropic for having us in.
The new agentic O-ring world
But because agents often require guidance or additional context as they move through their tasks, Sharma, 27, finds himself wanting to be available to them around the clock and forgoing a regular sleep schedule as a result. Until recently, he couldn’t monitor them remotely through a phone or smartwatch.
“The cost of the agents’ being blocked for eight hours is way too high,” he says. “They can be done with their work at any point of time, in the middle of the night.”
Founders have long put in punishing hours in the name of building the next big thing. But the growing capabilities of AI agents—and the speed at which the models powering them are evolving—give new meaning to working yourself to the bone…
“They just demand your attention,” he says. “Does it need anything? Can I help it in any way?”
…Pezaris, who lives in San Mateo, Calif., typically works from 7:30 a.m. to 2 a.m. He estimates Proxon, which employs six human developers, is operating 30 times faster than it would without agents. But agent work begets human work: Onboarding customers at a faster clip means needing to respond to more customer requests, for example.
There is also an agent FOMO multiplier effect. “Every minute that I’m not working, I’m missing out on not doing a week’s worth of work,” says Pezaris.
Here is more from Katherine Bindley at the WSJ. As I have been joking in some of my talks, we need to start taking bets on when the AI leisure dividend will arrive. It will, but not just yet…
Has the European turnaround finally arrived?
Europe just had its best reporting season in years. Companies in the benchmark Stoxx Europe 600 index boosted earnings per share by 18% on average in the second quarter compared with a year earlier. Earnings barely grew at all in 2025 and 2024 as the strongest companies in the index were offset by weaker players.
Growth is now widening beyond a narrow group of AI and bank stocks, according to Gerry Fowler, who leads the European equity strategy team at UBS. Government spending and private investment in priorities like infrastructure, energy security and defense are creating real opportunities.
The Stoxx Europe 600 is up 10% so far this year, a bit less than the S&P 500’s 12% gain. European stocks have underperformed the U.S. since the mid-2000s, but the gap has narrowed lately.
Here is more from the WSJ.
Saturday assorted links
1. New publication analyzing AI constitutions.
2. Niall Ferguson vs. Iain Banks, and against some other stufff too (TFP).
3. NYT obituary for Victor Niederhoffer.
5. Flypaper effect for AI safety work? A bit unfair, but not altogether wrong either. Always ponder the possible secondary consequences!
The End of Friday Nights with Friends
This study examines how Americans’ time with friends has changed over the week, focusing not on how much social interaction has declined but on when it has. Using American Time Use Survey data from 2003 to 2024 (N = 243,095), I map hourly patterns of “friend time” across the days of the week. In the early 2000s, social life followed a clear weekly rhythm: Modest weekday interaction built toward pronounced peaks on Friday and Saturday nights. Since the mid-2010s, that rhythm has collapsed. Friday night, once a central site of social activity, now looks like a typical weeknight. Saturday remains elevated but less so than before. Overall, time with friends has fallen by more than half. The mix of social activities, however, has remained stable. Americans have not replaced one form of interaction with another; they have reduced social interaction across the board. These findings point to a temporal reorganization of social life marked by the disappearance of the “night out.”
That is by Neal Caren, via the excellent Kevin Lewis. So what did you go last evening?
What should I ask Annie Lowrey?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her. She has a new and very interesting book coming out, namely The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time―and How to Fix It. More generally, from Wikipedia:
Annie M. Lowrey…is an American journalist who writes on politics and economic policy for The Atlantic. Previously, Lowrey covered economic policy for The New York Times and prior to that was the Moneybox columnist for Slate. She was also a staff writer for the Washington Independent and was on the editorial staffs of Foreign Policy and The New Yorker. She is a proponent of universal basic income.
So what should I ask her?