1. “But when Seema Ghulam Haider, 27, a married Pakistani Muslim, sneaked into India with her four children to be with Sachin Meena, 22, a Hindu man, their time together was brief.” (NYT)

2. John Coltrane in Italian.

3. “Many people with hoarding tendencies never face intervention.”

4. New Tablet podcast with Walter Russell Mead.

5. Libertarianism as a warning system.

6. “When leaders in the shrinking Alaskan fishing village of Karluk made a plea on social media asking two families with three to four children each to move to the Last Frontier state to save their cherished school, they did not expect thousands of responses to pour in.”

7. Solve for the San Francisco self-driving taxi equilibrium.

1. A critical history of the AI safety movement.

2. Richard Hanania on class-based affirmative action.

3. James J. Lee comment on the new Greg Clark results.

4. Emily Wilson on different Iliad translations, and her new one (NYT).

5. What happened to the global corporate tax rate deal?

6. People who make money running YouTube channels showing how much they lose by playing slot machines (WSJ).

One day after a Louisiana federal judge set limits on the Biden administration’s communications with tech firms, the State Department canceled its regular meeting Wednesday with Facebook officials to discuss 2024 election preparations and hacking threats, according to a person at the company. The move came hours before Biden’s Department of Justice filed a notice that it will appeal the ruling.

Here is the longer story.  It seems unlikely the Louisiana decision will stand, but I would apply some game theory and look at this from a different angle.  Let’s assume the Louisiana judge could prevent the federal government from communicating with the major social media companies.  The social media companies still would have to work very hard to please the federal government, given the seriousness of the regulatory stakes.  In fact, lack of communication could make the social media companies try all that much harder, since they would not know if they were meeting the standards of the federal government.

The actual solution here is not to alter the degree of communication, but rather to have the federal government surrender so many of its arbitrary regulatory powers over American business, most of all with the major tech companies.

That is the new Patrick J. Deneen book, with the subtitle Toward a Postliberal Future.  I would say that reading and trying to review this book most of all raises the question of what a review is for.  As you might expect from Deneen, the book is well-written and comes across as highly intelligent.  The question is what one should make of the actual claims and content.

The opening chapter tells us what a failure America is, but not much in the way of concrete evidence is cited (what again would an American passport auction for?). Deneen writes “A growing chorus of voices reflects on the likelihood and even desirability of civil war…”, but that I think means he simply faced some publication lags with the book.  America still seems to be gaining on most of the world.

By the end of the next chapter, we are told “Unfortunately, the current ruling class is uniquely ill equipped for reform, having become one of the worst of its kind produced in history…”

C’mon, people…C’mon, Patrick!  I don’t even have to invoke Godwin’s Law to refute that one.  I can think of a few historical elites who were slightly worse than those who go to Harvard and Yale.

The quick segment on Mill on slavery (p.82) is both wrong and deeply unfair.

Burke is closer to Mill than Deneen might wish to think, especially if one studies Burke on Ireland.

The chapter “The Wisdom of the People” is rather under-argued in a post-Bryan Caplan, post-Garett Jones intellectual era.  You don’t have to agree with Caplan or Jones to recognize they offer orders of magnitude more evidence than Deneen does.  One of the bigger lessons here is that you can no longer write such a book without seriously engaging with social science.

All this talk about creating a “mixed constitution,” but what exactly does he want to see happen?  Is “Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends” really what we need?  (Might some rather mundane changes in policy get us further?)  What exactly are we supposed to do to increase the status, influence, and reputation of the populace, as Deneen repeatedly suggests?  Where is the evidence any of that is going to work, whatever “work” might mean in this context?  This book will not tell you.

National service, tariffs, and immigration restrictions are all endorsed, but with no consideration of the rather extensive empirical literatures on these topics, mostly not supporting Deneen’s hastily presented conclusions.

Is liberalism really (p.229) “premised on the complete liberation of the individual from any limiting claims of an objective good…”?  Mill certainly didn’t think so, nor did most other classical liberals.

I would start by distinguishing the social consequences of birth control — which isn’t going to be reversed and shouldn’t be — with the social consequences of classical liberal ideas.  Is Deneen in fact willing to endorse birth control?  Inquiring minds wish to know.

If Western liberalism is “exhausted,” is he short the market?

Overall, I leave this book with the impression that it is no accident classical liberal ideals have endured as much as they have.

1. “…in contrast to funding agencies—scientists systematically prefer to fund projects with more reviewer dissensus. Rather than purely focusing on the first moment of the distribution of reviewer scores, they also value the second moment. Further, scientists with the greatest domain expertise on a proposal are more enthusiastic about dissensus, and while appetite for dissensus shrinks as budgets become tighter, it does not disappear completely.”  Link here.

2. Will AI change our memories?

3. Second-order effects of higher interest rates.

4. Wesley Clair Mitchell predicting the future of economic research.

5. Is it true that those who accuse other the most of “mercantilism” are in fact the most mercantilist themselves?  (not a link)

6. More Scott Sumner movie reviews.

7. “They promised us 140 characters, and what we got was flying cars.”