Thursday assorted links
1. Why it is hard to make a deal with Greenland. They don’t trust us, surprise, surprise.
2. Buying sunglasses in Brazil.
3. Fashion as a recession indicator (speculative).
4. Awesome. And is this 400 pp. USTR report written by AI?
How strong is the best case for industrial policy?
The textbook case for industrial policy is well understood: sectors with relatively large external economies of scale should be subsidized at the expense of other sectors. Little is known, however, about the magnitude of the welfare gains from such interventions. We develop an empirical strategy that leverages commonly available trade data to estimate sector-level economies of scale and, in turn, to quantify the gains from optimal industrial policy in a general equilibrium environment. Our results point toward significant economies of scale across manufacturing sectors but gains from industrial policy that are hardly transformative, even among the most open economies.
…recall that South Korea — a country often presented as an industrial policy success story — experienced gains in real GDP per capita of 6.82% a year from 1960 to 1989, as documented in Rodrik (1995). A 4.06% long-run welfare increase in nothing to spit at, but a miracle it is not.
That is from a new JPE piece by Dominick Bartelme, Arnaud Costinot, Dave Donaldson, and Andres Rodriguez-Clare. Here are less gated copies of the piece.
Yours truly on the Trump tariffs at The Free Press
In any case, we will be moving into a future with higher prices, less product choice, and much weaker foreign alliances. The tanking of the stock market, and other possible asset price repercussions, may tip America into recession and increase joblessness.
This is perhaps the worst economic own goal I have seen in my lifetime. I cannot think of any credentialed economist colleague—Democrat, Republican, or independent—who would endorse it. And I haven’t even mentioned the risk that some foreign nations will retaliate against American exporters, damaging our economy all the more.
You might think there is something to be said for a reciprocal approach to tariffs. Usually it consists of cutting off your nose to spite your face, but if it can sometimes work it requires a president (and Congress) who is predictable and trustworthy.
That is not how foreign nations view the current administration.
If you are wondering about the trade treatment of Canada and Mexico, that remains cloaked in mystery. The threatened 25 percent rate on those two nations, from earlier in Trump’s second term, violates the NAFTA redo that was negotiated by Trump himself. Why trust in reciprocity here?
There is much more at the full link. And yes we are getting government by AI (kudos to Rohit!), but someone didn’t write the proper prompt…
My Conversation with the excellent Sheilagh Ogilvie
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Sheilagh discuss the economic impacts of historical pandemics, the “happy story” of the Black Death and why it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, the history of variolation and how entrepreneurs created vaccination franchises in 18th-century England, why local communities typically managed epidemics better than central authorities, the dastardly nature of medieval guilds, the European marriage pattern and its disputed contribution to economic growth, when sustained economic growth truly began in England, why the Dutch Republic stagnated despite its early success, whether she agrees with Greg Clark’s social mobility hypothesis, her experience and conducting “anthropological fieldwork” on English social customs, the communitarian norms she encountered while living in Germany, her upcoming research project on European serfdom, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
OGILVIE: …If you were a teenager in an English village in the 18th century and you were deciding, “I’m going to move to London and get a job,” you and your friendship group from the village would all go into the nearest town and pay a commercial variolator. You’d all get smallpox together. You’d go back to your village. You’d suffer through this mild case of smallpox, and then you would be immunized for life, assuming that you hadn’t died. You would go off to London and seek your fortune. It was very much a normal teenage thing to do.
There was this incredible franchising set up in England. It was like a McDonald’s, but to get variolated. There were these entrepreneurs who advertised themselves as having lower-risk ways of getting immunized and cheaper ways of getting immunized. There was this famous family of the Suttons that started a franchise in 18th-century England in the 1750s. Then they spread into the continent of Europe and actually into North America.
COWEN: You would have done it back then?
OGILVIE: Oh, definitely.
COWEN: With enthusiasm.
And this:
COWEN: You’ve now lived in England for well over 30 years. What’s been your biggest surprise about the place, if anything has stuck?
OGILVIE: It keeps on surprising me. I’ve actually lived here for more than 46 years. I moved here as an undergraduate. I came here when I was 16, and I feel as if I’m still doing anthropological fieldwork on the behavioral patterns of these strange local tribes. There are these systematic things — they’re charming, but they’re very strange.
For instance, just to give one example, English people are very reserved. I get on with that because Canadians are fairly reserved as well. It’s okay to talk to people in your neighborhood if they have a dog with them. That’s a conversation mediator. Or if you are gardening in your front garden, but if you’re in your back garden, you’re not supposed to talk to people. It’s taken me a few decades to observe this as an empirical regularity.
Nobody ever tells you that this is how you’re supposed to behave, but if you keep your field notebooks going as an anthropologist, you begin to notice the tribal patterns of the English. I must like them, since here I still am after more than four decades.
Recommended.
Elon to retreat from DOGE
President Donald Trump has told his inner circle, including members of his Cabinet, that Elon Musk will be stepping back in the coming weeks from his current role as governing partner, ubiquitous cheerleader and Washington hatchet man…
Musk’s looming retreat comes as some Trump administration insiders and many outside allies have become frustrated with his unpredictability and increasingly view the billionaire as a political liability, a dynamic that was thrown into stark relief Tuesday when a conservative judge Musk vocally supported lost his bid for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat by 10 points.
It also represents a stark shift in the Trump-Musk relationship from a month ago, when White House officials and allies were predicting Musk was “here to stay” and that Trump would find a way to blow past the 130-day time limit.
Here is the full story. I am told frequently that fascism is coming, and recently I was criticized on Twitter (by a German, in German) for discussing DOGE without considering fascism as a kind of essential element of the project. There is plenty to complain about, but this latest development does not sound as if fascism is upon us!? Plus Stefanik is keeping her seat, rather than going to the UN, for electoral reasons, namely wanting to preserve a (slight) GOP majority in the House. So I won’t be moving to Canada, or elsewhere, anytime soon.
Wednesday assorted links
1. More on deep learning in economics.
2. A history of indirect cost in U.S. science funding.
3. Joshua Rothman on whether “we” (they!) are taking AI seriously enough (New Yorker).
4. More Scott Sumner movie reviews.
5. Martha Argerich profile (NYT).
6. The fight over Ayn Rand’s estate. Mostly about Peikoff.
Federal Judge Rejects FDA Power Grab
In Don’t Let the FDA Regulate Lab Tests! and The New FDA and the Regulation of Laboratory Developed Tests I warned that the FDA’s power grab over laboratory developed tests was both unlawful and likely to result in deadly harm (as it did during COVID). Thus, I am pleased that a Federal judge has vacated the FDA’s rule entirely, writing:
…the text, structure, and history of the FDCA and CLIA make clear that FDA lacks the authority to regulate laboratory-developed test services.
…FDA’s asserted jurisdiction over laboratory-developed test services as “devices” under the FDCA defies bedrock principles of statutory interpretation, common sense, and longstanding industry practice.
The judge also noted some of the costs that I had pointed to:
…the Fifth Circuit has made clear that district courts should generally “nullify and revoke” illegal agency action, Braidwood, 104 F.4th at 951. The Court finds that such relief is appropriate here. The final rule will initially impact nearly 80,000 existing tests offered by almost 1,200 laboratories, and it will also affect about 10,013 new tests offered every year going forward. The estimated compliance costs for laboratories across the country will total well over $1 billion per year, and over the next two decades, FDA projects that total costs associated with the rule will range from $12.57 billion to $78.99 billion. FDA acknowledges that the enormous increased costs to laboratories may cause price increases and reduce the amount of revenue a laboratory can invest in creating and modifying tests.
… For these reasons, it is ORDERED that the Laboratory Plaintiffs’ Motions for Summary Judgment, (Dkt. #20, #27), are GRANTED. The final rule is hereby SET ASIDE and VACATED.
HHS head RFK Jr. should immediately instruct the FDA to halt any further efforts to regulate laboratory developed tests.
How Good is AI at Twisting Arms? Experiments in Debt Collection
How good is AI at persuading humans to perform costly actions? We study calls made to get delinquent consumer borrowers to repay. Regression discontinuity and a randomized experiment reveal that AI is substantially less effective than human callers. Replacing AI with humans six days into delinquency closes much of the gap. But borrowers initially contacted by AI have repaid 1% less of the initial late payment one year later and are more likely to miss subsequent payments than borrowers who were always called by humans. AI’s lesser ability to extract promises that feel binding may contribute to the performance gap.
That is from a new paper by James J. Choi, Dong Huang, Zhishu Yang, and Qi Zhang. No AI asked me to run this blog post!
New issue of Econ Journal Watch
Toward Bubble Clarity: An American Economic Review article by Jianjun Miao and Pengfei Wang purports to “provide a theory of rational stock price bubbles.” Here, Tomohiro Hirano and Alexis Akira Toda argue that Miao and Wang’s ‘bubble’ talk is inapt. It is more appropriate to interpret their model as one of multiple fundamental equilibria, where all equilibrium asset prices are equal to the present discounted value of dividends. (Miao and Wang are hereby invited to reply in a future issue of this journal.)
Who Perpetrated the Maidan Massacre? Who Overthrew the Ukrainian Government in 2014? Ivan Katchanovski criticizes Atlantic Council Senior Fellow Adrian Karatnycky, particularly his claims about Maidan in his Yale University Press book Battleground Ukraine: From Independence to War with Russia (2024). (Karatnycky is hereby invited to reply in a future issue of this journal.)
“The silence of these writers is dreadfully expressive”—Burke: David Barker has published five critiques of the temperature~growth literature. None of the commented-on authors has replied (all are listed in Sounds of Silence). Here Barker reflects on the fact that none has engaged his body of work. (The invitation to reply remains open.)
Was Karl Marx’s becoming a big deal destined or adventitious? The debate over a provocative Journal of Political Economy article continues: Joseph Francis rejoins and Phillip Magness and Michael Makovi conclude with a second reply.
Mobile payment adoption and online shopping in China: Muzaffarjon Ahunov and Leo Van Hove criticize an article that found that women consumers do more online shopping expenditure if they have adopted mobile payment instruments, but the result for men was not found. Ahunov and Van Hove point out multiple weaknesses. When they redo the analysis, they find completely different results, both in terms of magnitude and where the gender effect is concerned.
Hello, I’m 1930s America, and I Have a Recovery Problem: George Selgin provides erudite consideration of hypotheses about the recovery, and the non-recovery, of Depression-era America in his book False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933-1947 (University of Chicago Press, 2025), says Jason E. Taylor in his review essay.
Classical Liberalism in Argentina, from 1884 to 2023: Following up on their previous article treating the 19th century, Alejandro Gómez and Nicolás Cachanosky now continue the story of classical liberalism in Argentina. They highlight the impact of nationalist education reforms starting in 1908, which undermined liberal foundations and contributed to the emergence of Peronism and institutional instability. They highlight key figures such as Alberto Benegas Lynch, Carlos Sánchez Sañudo, and Álvaro Alsogaray. The piece extends the Classical Liberalism in Econ, by Country series.
From Medieval Provincial Law to State Liberalism: Economic Thought in Sweden—that is the English translation of the recent title by the Swedish intellectual historian Lars Magnusson. Here in a review essay, Max Skjönsberg shares key teachings and the progression from mercantilism to a liberal nation-state.
EJW News: “Jason Briggeman, 416 Thank Yous”
EJW Audio:
Ivan Katchanovski on Maidan and Ukraine 2014
Jeffrey Sachs, An Established Anti-Establishment Economist
Nicolás Cachanosky on Liberalism in Argentina from 1816 to 1884
Tuesday assorted links
The Free Press
This is from the Free Press website, written by me, so I will not indent:
The Free Press is where I have decided to make my new intellectual home.
In a rapidly changing world, I feel The Free Press is the correct base for me, and it has the audience I wish to reach.
First, The Free Press is a start-up.
And because The Free Press is a start-up, it can fail. Many people do not like that fact about start-ups, because they do not want to be part of a possible failure. It means disruption, and also the paycheck stops coming. But I enjoy the risk appetite. It is precisely because it can fail that the people here will work harder, and likely smarter, than the competition.
That it is a start-up is not only true in fact, but you sense it the moment you walk into the newsroom, which I did for the first time recently. The place has overwhelming vibes and energy, and you can feel those in each and every person on the floor.
I think we are entering an era where “floor energy” will matter more than before. It will motivate, define, and lift some institutions well above the others.
A lot of The Free Press is charisma- and personality-based. Much of that comes from Bari Weiss, but there are numerous strong personalities on the roster, covering a wide range of topics, and I know they are keen to bring on even more. I expect the importance of charisma- and personality-based content to rise sharply in the near future.
I don’t know if The Free Press knows this yet, because they tend to be old-school, but pretty soon quality AI programs will write better columns than most of what is considered acceptable at top mainstream media outlets. Of course those columns will not be by human beings, and so those writings will not be able to contextualize themselves within the framework of what a particular individual thinks or feels. That kind of context will be all-important, as impersonal content, based on broadly available public information, will be outcompeted by the machines.
I believe The Free Press intellectual and business model is well-positioned to handle this transition. At The Free Press, and for Free Press readers, the individual writer and personality truly matters, and will continue to matter.
I have written for about 10 years for The New York Times and about eight years for Bloomberg Opinion. Both were wonderful experiences, and I worked with great people and benefited enormously from those relationships. But I am now oh, so very excited about this next step.
Stay tuned for my first official column this Thursday. Click here to make sure you get my work delivered directly to your inbox.
Last but not least: Join Bari and me for a livestream Q+A only for paid members of The Free Press. Come to our website on Thursday, April 3 at 4:30 p.m. ET to watch the conversation.
AI Discovers New Uses for Old Drugs
The NYTimes has an excellent piece by Kate Morgan on AI discovering new uses for old drugs:
A little over a year ago, Joseph Coates was told there was only one thing left to decide. Did he want to die at home, or in the hospital?
Coates, then 37 and living in Renton, Wash., was barely conscious. For months, he had been battling a rare blood disorder called POEMS syndrome, which had left him with numb hands and feet, an enlarged heart and failing kidneys. Every few days, doctors needed to drain liters of fluid from his abdomen. He became too sick to receive a stem cell transplant — one of the only treatments that could have put him into remission.
“I gave up,” he said. “I just thought the end was inevitable.”
But Coates’s girlfriend, Tara Theobald, wasn’t ready to quit. So she sent an email begging for help to a doctor in Philadelphia named David Fajgenbaum, whom the couple met a year earlier at a rare disease summit.
By the next morning, Dr. Fajgenbaum had replied, suggesting an unconventional combination of chemotherapy, immunotherapy and steroids previously untested as a treatment for Coates’s disorder.
Within a week, Coates was responding to treatment. In four months, he was healthy enough for a stem cell transplant. Today, he’s in remission.
The lifesaving drug regimen wasn’t thought up by the doctor, or any person. It had been spit out by an artificial intelligence model.
AI is excellent at combing through large amounts of data to find surprising connections.
Discovering new uses for old drugs has some big advantages and one disadvantage. A big advantage is that once a drug has been approved for some use it can be prescribed for any use–thus new uses of old drugs do not have to go through the lengthy and arduous FDA approval procedures. In essence, off-label uses have been safety-tested but not FDA efficacy-tested in the new use. I use this fact about off-label prescribing to evaluate the FDA. During COVID, for example, the British Recovery trial, discovered that the common drug, dexamethasone could reduce mortality by up to one-third in hospitalized patients on oxygen support that knowledge was immediately applied, saving millions of lives worldwide:
Within hours, the result was breaking news across the world and hospitals were adopting the drug into the standard care given to all patients with COVID-19. In the nine months following the discovery, dexamethasone saved an estimated one million lives worldwide.
New uses for old drugs are typically unpatentable, which helps keep them cheap—but the disadvantage is that this also weakens private incentives to discover them. While FDA trials for these new uses are often unnecessary, making development costs much lower, the lack of strong market protection can still deter investment. The FDA offers some limited exclusivity through programs like 505(b)(2), which grants temporary protection for new clinical trials or safety and efficacy data. These programs are hard to calibrate—balancing cost and reward is difficult—but likely provide some net benefits.
The NIH should continue prioritizing research into unpatentable treatments, as this is where the market is most challenged. More broadly, research on novel mechanisms to support non-patentable innovations is valuable. That said, I’m not overly concerned about under-investment in repurposing old drugs, especially as AI further reduces the cost of discovery.
The Research Behavior of Individual Investors
Browser data from an approximately representative sample of individual investors offers a detailed account of their search for information, including how much time they spend on stock research, which stocks they research, what categories of information they seek, and when they gather information relative to events and trades. The median individual investor spends approximately six minutes on research per trade on traded tickers, mostly just before the trade; the mean spends around half an hour. Individual investors spend the most time reviewing price charts, followed by analyst opinions, and exhibit little interest in traditional risk statistics. Aggregate research interest is highly correlated with stock size, and salient news and earnings announcements draw more attention. Individual investors have different research styles, and those that focus on short-term information are more likely to trade more speculative stocks.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Toomas Laarits and Jeffrey Wurgler.
Living in Freiburg, Germany
After two years at Harvard, I had finished all of my graduate school courses and oral (!) exams. Then I had a compulsion for what I should do next, something that at the time appeared remarkably stupid, although it worked out very well for me.
At some critical points in my life I have made key decisions with regard to place, including Mexico, Haiti, New Zealand, and as I will write about today, Freiburg, Germany. Each of those decisions fundamentally reshaped my life. None of those decisions were motivated by rational reasons, or indeed much by traditional reasons at all. I simply wanted to do particular things, and then set off to do so.
After two years of study, a Harvard PhD student would be expected to apprentice with a top professor, “live in the basement of the Science Center” (where the computers were those days), and in general become part of the system. Somehow none of that fit me. I decided instead to study for a year in Freiburg, Germany, at the university there, mostly to learn German but also to run away from a particular kind of fate that most of my peers were choosing. And so I departed from Cambridge in 1984-85, aided by a strong dollar and a small grant from the Claude R. Lambe Foundation.
Other than an Oxford and London summer trip at age 17, it was my first time abroad. I flew over with Kroszner, and we rented a car to drive around Germany for a few weeks before I would settle in Freiburg.
Our first stop was Mainz, which was not too far from Frankfurt airport. I was stunned by everything I saw, ranging from the supermarkets to the food to how the downtown was organized. These days Mainz is regarded as a fairly dull city, but then, for me, it was fascinating beyond belief. Unlike England, Germany struck me as a peer country to the United States, with a roughly equal living standard and in some ways a superior way of life.
Other stops on our trip included the beautiful Baden-Baden, Stuttgart, Cologne, Hamburg, Bremen, the “Romantic Road” in Bavaria, and of course Berlin. The one day I spent in East Berlin terrified me. Not primarily because of the living standards (which were low), but because the people seemed so fearful and intimidated. I decided that communism was far worse than I had thought. I was relieved to return to West Berlin, which at the time had that Cold War, party town, otherworldly feel. Try watching “Wings of Desire” some day.
Once I settled into Freiurg I was on my own. I refused to hang out with the other American students, and so I learned German pretty quickly. I developed a morning routine of walking to buy the International Herald Tribune, working on my dissertation in the morning on a typewriter, and going into town for lunch and some shopping and errands. Freiburg was the closest I ever have come to living in a proper city, though at the time the population was a mere quarter million or so. Nonetheless one could go “in die Stadt,” an entirely meaningful notion if you know the layout.
I even ended up with a German girlfriend, and from her I learned German all that much better.
Frequently I would feel claustrophobic, and so I would depart for Switzerland, where I would feel even more claustrophobic. Still, I loved those trips, as the sense of perpetual motion was sufficient compensation. Over time I have managed to see every Swiss canton, and I am fond of all of them. For Erleichterung I would visit the Netherlands, or one time Chris Weber came by and we drove to Colmar for Alsatian smoked meats, yum. For Thanksgiving there was an Italy trip to Bergamo and Verona. Later in the spring I went to Venice and Florence.
I had a January lecture tour in Vienna (freezing!), with the Carl Menger Institute, and in May a week-long stint in Graz. My German peers found it literally unbelievable that someone my age had published papers I could present and talk about, in addition to a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed on monetary economics.
I also gave a talk at a jazz club in Vienna, the first (but not last) time I experienced talk-giving as a kind of high class entertainment. I mixed German and English, and told a fair number of jokes, and found I enjoyed that. I am thankful to Albert Zlabinger for arranging that evening.
It was that kind of life. There has never been a year that was more exciting or when I learned more about the world.
Art and painting started making sense to me when I visited the Lenbach Haus in Munich, with Blue Rider works, and the Mondrian museum in The Hague. I retain a special fondness for those artists to this day.
Amsterdam probably was my favorite city, though I now feel it is long since ruined by an excess of tourists. To save money, I would sleep on the houseboats there.
Once I tired of German food, delicious though it may be, I started experimenting on the culinary front, at least as much as I could given my location. That was the time in my life when I started trying everything I could.
It simply stunned me how many things in Germany were better, starting with the bread and orange juice and butter, though hardly ending there.
So every day I learned, learned, learned, and was in pretty constant motion.
By the time I returned to the United States, it was clear I would never be entering on mainstream tracks again.
China AI mandate of the day
Schools in Beijing will introduce AI courses and teaching methods into the primary and secondary school curriculum starting September, to nurture young talent and boost growth in the advancing sector.
In a statement shared on its official website on Friday (Mar 7), Chinese education authorities said schools would “explore and build” AI courses while incorporating AI into “after-school services, club activities, research” and other educational systems in the coming fall semester.
Here is the full story, via Wayne Yap.