How D.C. densified

DC’s relative success can be traced to a few decisions made decades ago. In the 1970s, policymakers in Arlington County made a decision to adopt what’s known as ‘transit-oriented development planning’ ahead of the opening of DC’s Metro Orange Line, which runs between Arlington and Prince George County, Maryland (via DC). Arlington policymakers identified that zoning for apartment construction in commercial areas could bring in property taxes and help balance the budget without the level of controversy of changing zoning in existing residential areas. Some nearby jurisdictions followed suit, learning from Arlington’s example, helping the DC region stay more affordable than the country’s other superstar cities.

Here is the full essay by Emily Hamilton of Mercatus, serving up a very good short economic history of Arlington.  And this on the District:

The District itself has permitted extensive redevelopment of formerly industrial neighborhoods when they received new Metro stations, including Navy Yard and NoMA. In the years since the 2010 financial crisis, DC has permitted thousands of apartments each year, a high rate compared to peer cities. As in Arlington, they’ve primarily been permitted on land that previously housed industrial or low-value commercial development where there are few or no existing residents to oppose new construction.

Interesting throughout.  I am pleased to live in the land of partial YIMBY.

That is all from the new and excellent issue of Works in Progress.

*The Lost Album of the Beatles*

The author is Daniel Rachel, and the subtitle is What if The Beatles Hadn’t Split Up?  This is perfectly fine as a music book (for Beatle fans, it won’t convince the unconverted), but I couldn’t stop thinking of the Lucas critique.

For the author, the Beatles “final last album” is a double album of the best cuts from Beatle early solo careers, and that is an impressive assemblage indeed.  McCartney’s “Back Seat of My Car,” for instance, was written in 1968, or at least started in that year, so surely it would have ended up on the last album.  Or would it have?  It didn’t end up on Let It Be or Abbey Road, so who knows?  As long as the end of The Beatles was in sight, perhaps each Beatle would have hoarded his best potential solo material.  Or maybe the other Beatles would have vetoed some of those songs, just as Paul in 1968 had decided that George’s “Isn’t a Pity?” wasn’t suitable as a Beatles song.  Or maybe John and Paul would have had to give more songs to George and Ringo, to keep the group together, but arguably to the detriment of the final album.  Most of the songs on All Things Must Pass are very good, but best suited to their own little walled garden.

In contrast, this economist believes that an additional album would have fallen somewhere between Let It Be and The White Album, with an overall sound somewhat akin to “Free as a Bird,” or perhaps also Ringo’s “I’m the Greatest,” penned by John and cut with George as well.  Good stuff, but I’m still glad they split.  Get that Q up, especially given that market power was present!

And don’t assume that Beatle behavior remains invariant across different policy regimes.  Lucas truly was a universal economist.

Wednesday assorted links

1. There are now some direct flights from NYC to the Faroe Islands.

2. Ezra Klein with Lisa Damour on teenage mental health (NYT).

3. Dwarkesh podcasts with Richard Rhodes.  Martin Amis on Richard Rhodes.  Is he the man with the highest variance of quality across different books?  Or is it all good?

4. The economics of rental housing in Vienna (NYT).

5. NBA signaling game theory, Kyrie Irving edition.

6. Return of the Zombies, AGI edition.

*The Soul of Civility*

The subtitle is Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves, and the author is the still-on-the-rise Alexandra Hudson.  Most of all this is a sane and healthy book!  And it indicates a direction for the future evolution of classical liberalism.  Here is one short excerpt:

In Rituals of Dinner, Margaret Visser notes the dark side to hospitality.  she argues that hosting others can be a power play.  The host has the opportunity to be the guest of honor, the center of all praise and attention in the comfort of their own home.  Guests must fawn and thank them whether or not the hospitality or food is any good, and often feel obligated to reciprocate whether they want to or not.  While cynical, I’ve come to see some wisdom in her insight.

I am very glad this book now exists, you can pre-order it here.

ChatGPT as marketing triumph

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

Consider the name itself, ChatGPT. Many successful tech products have happy, shiny, memorable names: Instagram, Roblox, TikTok. Someone comes up with the name, perhaps in a brainstorming session, and then it is taken to the broader world. With luck, it will prove sticky and continue to invoke a warm glow.

ChatGPT, as a name, does not have a comparably simple history. Originally the service was GPT-2, then GPT-3. GPT-3.5 was then released, and ChatGPT was announced in November 2022. ChatGPT-3.5 was cumbersome, and by that point it was running the risk of becoming obsolete numerically. So ChatGPT became the popular moniker. When GPT-4 was released in March, there was the chance to switch to just GPT-4 and treat ChatGPT as a kind of interim brand, connected with the 3.5 edition, but no — ChatGPT it is.

I still prefer to call it GPT-4, to make it clear which version of the service I am using. GPT-3.5 remains available for free and is widely used, and so my inner persnickety nag feels the two should not be confused. But they are confused, and almost everyone (present company excluded) just says ChatGPT. Again, this is not textbook marketing, but users seem fine with it.

At this point, you might be wondering what that GPT stands for. It is “Generative Pre-Trained Transformer.” How many of its users could tell you that? How many of its users could explain what it means? I can imagine a marketing team sitting around a conference table insisting that GPT is too opaque and just won’t do.

But at OpenAI, software engineers and neural net experts are the dominant influences. So Americans get a name that has not been heavily market-tested and does not necessarily fit well into an advertising slogan. Maybe they like it, especially if they are sick of more and more of the economy being run by marketers.

There is more at the link.  The part of GPT-4 that comes across as “focus group tested” — the neutering of Sydney and the like — is also the part that is not entirely popular, even if it is politically wise.

Tuesday assorted links

1. Adding world models to language models.

2. The new post-rationalist movement?

3. Katherine Dee visits Saudi Arabia.

4. The new Bernanke and Blanchard study of recent inflation (WSJ), paper should be coming out at some point today.

5. Jolly Swagman 4.5 hour podcast with former Australian Treasury Secretary Ken Henry.

6. Excerpt from “Stranger Love,” the new six-hour opera showing in Los Angeles.  Here is NYT coverage.

Nigeria fact of the day

In Nigeria debt service, mostly domestic, took up a staggering 96% of government revenues last year.

That is from The Economist, in an article focused on Africa’s resurgent fiscal troubles.  Here is a bit more:

Part of the problem is that the government has collected little money from oil recently due to rampant oil theft, low production and the cost of fuel subsidies, which are deducted before oil proceeds reach the treasury. Bola Tinubu, Nigeria’s incoming president, promises to fix the oily mess, but so have many past presidents of his country. Even in better-run places, debt service is chewing up government revenue. In Ivory Coast and Senegal it accounts for about one-quarter of revenue.

And this:

Ideally, economic growth would allow Africa to escape the squeeze. But the outlook is gloomy. In April the imf cut its growth forecast for sub-Saharan Africa in 2023 to 3.6%, only about one percentage point higher than population growth.

I wonder what the de-growthers think of this.

The Student-Loan Payment Pause Led Borrowers to Take on More Debt

In 2020 payments on student loans were paused, initially for 3 months but then extended via executive action until June 30, 2023. This was a big program, at the time there were approximately 45 million student loan borrowers, with an outstanding balance of over $1.7 trillion. The main results of the program were that borrowers used the pause to take on more debt. From a new paper by Dinerstein, Yannelis and Chen:

We evaluate the effects of the 2020 student debt moratorium that paused payments for student loan borrowers. Using administrative credit panel data, we show that the payment pause led to a sharp drop in student loan payments and delinquencies for borrowers subject to the debt moratorium, as well as an increase in credit scores. We find a large stimulus effect, as borrowers substitute increased private debt for paused public debt. Comparing borrowers whose loans were frozen with borrowers whose loans were not frozen due to differences in whether the government owned the loans, we show that borrowers used the new liquidity to increase borrowing on credit cards, mortgages, and auto loans rather than avoid delinquencies. The effects are concentrated among borrowers without prior delinquencies, who saw no change in credit scores, and we see little effects following student loan forgiveness announcements. The results highlight an important complementarity between liquidity and credit, as liquidity increases the demand for credit even as the supply of credit is fixed.

This is good news for debt pauses as stimulus payments but it’s bad news if you think that debt pauses are just the nudge some people need to get their financial house in order. Although the COVID scenario makes generalization somewhat difficult, the story is consistent with borrowers who have difficulty restraining spending regardless of wealth, the so-called wealthy hand to mouth consumers (see here for a now classic example). For this group, a debt pause is just a debt pause.

Ho hum

And trained on The New Testament, I might add, a text which exists in a great number of languages.

How effective was the IAEA?

Here is the Open AI call for international regulation, most of all along the lines of the International Atomic Energy Agency.  I am not in general opposed to this approach, but I think it requires very strong bilateral supplements, from the United States of course.  Which in turn requires U.S. supremacy in the area, as was the case with nuclear weapons.  From a 564 pp. official work on the topic:

For nearly forty years after its birth in 1957 the IAEA remained essentially irrelevant to the nuclear arms race. (p.22)

There is also this:

However, in the late 1950s and early 1960s it was not the failure of the IAEA’s functions as a ‘pool’ or ‘bank’ or supplier of nuclear material that inflicted the most serious blow on the organization, on its safeguards operation and eventually on Cole himself. For a variety of reasons, the Agency’s chief patron, the USA, chose to arrange nuclear supplies bilaterally rather than through the IAEA. One reason was that the IAEA had been unable to develop an effective safeguards system. Another was that in a bilateral arrangement it was the US Administration, under the watchful eyes of Congress, that chose the bilateral partner rather than leaving the choice to an international organization that would have to respond to the needs of any Member State whatever its political system, persuasion or alliance. But the most serious setback came in 1958 when, for overriding political reasons, the USA chose the bilateral route in accepting the safeguards of EURATOM as equivalent to — in other words as an acceptable substitute for — those of the IAEA.

It is frequently suggested that the IAEA has been partially captured by the nuclear sector itself.  I do not consider that bad news, but it is a sobering thought for those expecting too much from this approach.  Do note that it took years to set up the agency, and furthermore when North Korea wanted to acquire nuclear weapons the country simply left the agency and broke its earlier agreement.  Perhaps the greatest gain from this approach is that the non-crazy nations have a systematic multilateral framework to work within, should they decide to defer to the external, bilateral pressure from the United States?

On the other side, my fear is that the international agreement will lead to excess regulation at the domestic level.

There is also this:

The fact that Iraq’s nuclear weapon programme had been under way for several years, perhaps a decade, without being detected by the IAEA, led to sharp criticism of the Agency and posed the most serious threat to the credibility of its safeguards since they had first been applied some 30 years earlier.

All of these issues could use much more intelligent discussion.

Undervalued talent in the NBA playoffs

With the underdog Miami Heat ahead of the Celtics 3-0, and the Denver Nuggets ahead of the Lakers 3-0, it is time to assess a lesson or two.

As for Miami, four of their key players — Gabe Vincent, Max Strus, Caleb Martin and Duncan Robinson — were undrafted altogether.  This is not only a lesson in talent spotting, it is a lesson of talent development.  Those four players have accounted for about forty percent (ESPN gate) of Miami’s points this season.  No one on Miami made the All-Star team in 2023.

How about Denver?  Jokic, if he proves durable, could end up as one of the top ten players of all time.  He was a second-round draft pick (#41), snagged perceptively by Denver and then given a chance to develop, which took a few years.  Only Jokic made the All-Star team this year.  KCP, a key player for Denver, was let go by the Lakers two years ago and then the Wizards a year ago.  Now he is an essential contributor, most of all against the Lakers.  (Who even remembers who Denver gave up to get him?)  The second best Denver player, Jamal Murray, was picked #7 in 2016.  If Philadelphia had deployed their number one pick on him, instead of Ben Simmons, who basically refused to play, they probably would be winning a title right now.

So the potential gains to being good at talent selection are very real indeed.  Not every major contributors starts off as a Lebron James or a Victor Wembanyama.

Monday assorted links

1. Why do many people find slow motion appealing?

2. Canine markets in everything, Austin edition.  And the hotel version (NYT).

3. News stripped of all hype and emotion, by AI.  And new tool for co-authoring long form articles with AI.

4. “We find that because of default risk, the welfare cost of the pandemic is about a third higher than it is in a version of the model with perfect financial markets.”

5. Everleigh?  Nova?  Good to see that “Tyler” is dropping in popularity.  Rising and falling baby names.

6. Why you should visit Ravenna.

7. The Straussian that is Magnus Carlsen (WSJ).  Thanos!

The Promising Pathway Act

The evident failures of the FDA and CDC during COVID have opened up new opportunities for reform. One of the most interesting is the Promising Pathway Act, sponsored by Sens. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.). As Bart Madden and I write, the Act would create a new form of approval, provisional approval.

The Hill: Here’s how the current version of the bill works: A new drug could secure provisional approval for serious or life-threatening health conditions via early-stage clinical investigations indicating that the new drug’s safety and efficacy compare favorably to approved drugs.

Importantly, provisional approval requires establishing patient registries for all such treatments and is not simply a matter of faster approval. Third-party, independent entities would manage these registries, tracking safety and effectiveness.

In order to speed up the use of this new knowledge, the de-identified, disaggregated databases would be accessible to approved researchers, medical professionals for public health research and biopharmaceutical industry researchers. Drug sponsors or the government would fund the registries, and the FDA would submit an annual report to Congress on provisionally approved drugs.

Thus, provisional approval would allow earlier access to not yet approved drugs but would require the creation of a patient registry and database that could be used by anyone to evaluate the drug. An interesting and important idea.