Solve for the equilibrium
The title of the paper is “Terrorism and Voting: The Rise of Right-Wing Populism in Germany.” Here is the abstract:
We document that right-wing terrorism leads to significant increases in vote share for the right-wing, populist AfD (Alternative fur Deutschland) party in Germany. To identify causal effects, we exploit quasi-random variation between successful and failed attacks across municipalities. Using the SOEP, a longitudinal panel of individuals, we find successful terror leads individuals to prefer the AfD and worry about migration. Political parties—the AfD in particular—adjust their messaging in election manifestos in response to terror. Overall, and in contrast to previous work, we find terrorism is consequential to the rise of right-wing populism in a Western, multiparty democratic system.
Note that is “right-wing terrorism,” not Islamic terrorism. The piece is by Navid Sabet, Marius Liebald, and Guido Friebel.
Tuesday assorted links
Regulatory Complexity and Rents
Luis Garicano on the EU-US trade deal.
…The growing regulatory complexity and arbitrariness of the tariff regime provides rents to those connected with power, not to innovators. It is a recipe for the biggest enemy of growth: regulatory overkill and crony capitalism. Consider the example of importing a can of beer from Belgium into the US. There is a 10% country-specific tariff on the entire value of the product. On top of this, the aluminium can itself is treated as a completely separate product, subject to its own additional tariff of up to 50%. The level of this tariff is based on the nearly untraceable origin of the raw metal—the country where the aluminium was “smelted and cast.” The tariff rises to 200% if the country is unknown. This forces an importer to research the obscure global supply chain of a minor component and apply multiple, overlapping tax rates to a single, everyday item.
Many other interesting comments.
New data on tenure
Tenure is a defining feature of the US academic system with significant implications for research productivity and creative search. Yet the impact of tenure on faculty research trajectories remains poorly understood. We analyze the careers of 12,000 US faculty across 15 disciplines to reveal key patterns, pre- and post-tenure. Publication rates rise sharply during the tenure-track, peaking just before tenure. However, post-tenure trajectories diverge: Researchers in lab-based fields sustain high output, while those in non-lab-based fields typically exhibit a decline. After tenure, faculty produce more novel works, though fewer highly cited papers. These findings highlight tenure’s pivotal role in shaping scientific careers, offering insights into the interplay between academic incentives, creativity, and impact while informing debates about the academic system.
Here is the paper. That is by Giorgio Tripodi, Ziang Zheng, Yifan Qian, and Dashun Wang, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
What I’ve been reading
1. Hamid Keshmirshekan, Contemporary Iranian Art: New Perspectives. I get tired of reading through the same old histories of Persia/Iran, and how they tell the same old tales of the rise and fall of the Shah, etc. So how else might you try to understand contemporary Iran better? Books like this are a very good place to start, plus they are fun to page through. If anything, the works seem to get better and more original post-1979? And you can see continuing currents of the non-Islamic undergrounds strands in Iranian theology?
2. Neal Bascomb, The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less than Four Minutes to Achieve It. While the major focus is on Roger Bannister, there is plenty on the other runners of his time as well, most of all the Australian John Landy, who rapidly broke Bannister record after it was achieved. Many smart people do not read enough books about the history of sports. Yet the genre is very good, as often both the readers and the authors (!) actually really care about the content of the material. Recommended.
3. Barry Mazor, Blood Harmony: The Everly Brothers Story. I’m not going to pass this one up, as Macca once said: “The biggest influence on John and me was the Everly Brothers. To this day I just think they’re the greatest.” In addition to the very famous songs, “Roots” is an incredible and now neglected album. This book however is good not great, as it never quite brings them to life. But it is now the main biography, and in that sense is self-recommending.
4. Ian Penman, Erik Satie Three Piece Suite (Semiotext(e)/ Native Agents. A hard book to explain. A kind of devil’s dictionary of terms related to Erik Satie, interesting and witty throughout, at least if you know something of early modernism and its culture. Recommended, for those who care.
5. Alexander Ivashkin, Alfred Schnittke. “Schnittke really lies between two traditions, with German rationalism on one hand and Russian irrationalism on the other.” Lately I have been listening to the Psalms of Remembrance and the violin sonata #2. I had not known that Schnittke grew up speaking Volga German.
5. Rachel Cusk, Parade. I quite enjoyed this, described on the back cover as “a carousel of lives.” You will find an overview and spoilers here.
Bill McGowan, and Juliana Silva, Speak, Memorably: The Art of Captivating an Audience, is a good and useful book.
Jo Ann Cavallo, editor, Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism: Essays in Memory of Paul A. Cantor. There is even an essay by David Gordon (!) in here.
The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Immigration, edited by Sahar Akhtar, is the best collection on its topic.
There is Thomas Piketty, Equality is a Struggle: Bulletins from the Front Line, 2021-2025. Columns in favor of democratic socialism and higher taxes.
And there is Samuel Arbesman, The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World — and Shapes Our Future.
What is superintelligence?
The Free Press ran a symposium on that topic, I was a contributor. Here is the closing part of mine:
“I asked o3 pro, a leading AI model from OpenAI, “What is superintelligence?” Here is the opening to a much longer answer:
Superintelligence is a term most commonly used in artificial intelligence (AI) studies and the philosophy of mind to denote any intellect that greatly outperforms the best human brains in virtually every relevant domain—from scientific creativity and social skills to general wisdom and strategic reasoning.
Is that a superintelligent answer? No. Is it better than mine? The AI thinks it is a toss-up: “Cowen’s version excels at pithiness and viewpoint; mine excels at breadth and rigor. Neither is universally ‘better’; each serves different reader needs.”
I can breathe easily, at least for today.”
Monday assorted links
1. Alice Evans interviews John Burns-Murdoch on men and women.
2. China does AI for math. And more Balaji on AI.
3. Claims about Russian nuclear precommitment.
4. Graph of BLS data revisions.
5. Are U.S. securities markets moving on-chain?
6. Gender travel patterns are changing.
7. Profile of Campus Reform (NYT).
Genius, Rejected: Emergent Ventures Versus the System
Quanta Magazine has a good piece on a 17-year-old student who disproved a long-standing conjecture in harmonic analysis:
Yet a paper posted on February 10(opens a new tab) left the math world by turns stunned, delighted and ready to welcome a bold new talent into its midst. Its author was Hannah Cairo(opens a new tab), just 17 at the time. She had solved a 40-year-old mystery about how functions behave, called the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture.
“We were all shocked, absolutely. I don’t remember ever seeing anything like that,” said Itamar Oliveira (opens aof the University of Birmingham, who has spent the past two years trying to prove that the conjecture was true. In her paper, Cairo showed that it’s false. The result defies mathematicians’ usual intuitions about what functions can and cannot do.
…The proof, and its unlikely author, have energized the math community since Cairo posted it in February. “I was absolutely, ‘Wow.’ This has been my favorite problem for nigh on 40 years, and I was completely blown away,” Carbery said.
Here is the abstract to the paper:
I can’t speak to the mathematics but this is Quanta Magazine not People Magazine and Cairo is not coming out of nowhere. As the article discusses, she has been taking graduate classes in mathematics at Berkeley from people like Ruixiang Zhang. So what is the problem?
I was enraged by the following:
After completing the proof, she decided to apply straight to graduate school, skipping college (and a high school diploma) altogether. As she saw it, she was already living the life of a graduate student. Cairo applied to 10 graduate programs. Six rejected her because she didn’t have a college degree. Two admitted her, but then higher-ups in those universities’ administrations overrode those decisions.
Only the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University were willing to welcome her straight into a doctoral program.
Kudos to UMD and JHU! But what is going on at those other universities?!! Their sole mission is to identify and nurture talent. They have armies of admissions staff and tout their “holistic” approach to recognizing creativity and intellectual promise even when it follows an unconventional path. Yet they can’t make room for a genius who has been vetted by some of the top mathematicians in the world? This is institutional failure.
We saw similar failures during COVID: researchers at Yale’s School of Public Health, working on new tests, couldn’t get funding from their own billion-dollar institution and would have stalled without Tyler’s Fast Grants. But the problem isn’t just speed. Emergent Ventures isn’t about speed but about discovering talent. If you wonder why EV has been so successful look to Tyler and people like Shruti Rajagopalan and to the noble funders but look also to the fact that their competitors are so bureaucratic that they can’t recognize talent even when it is thrust upon them.
It’s a very good thing EV exists. But you know your city is broken when you need Batman to fight crime. EV will have truly succeeded when the rest of the system is inspired into raising its game.
No abundance for *Abundance*
Book clubs nationwide have been talking for months about whether you are “Abundance-pilled,” a reference to the recent book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that has made it into the lexicon of many public policy nerds.
And public policy nerds happen to be everywhere in the District of Columbia. That is why the waitlist to borrow this book at the D.C. Public Library is more than 300 people long for a hard copy, over 500-long for an eBook and more than 800-long for an audiobook.
How many copies does the D.C. library system have of this New York Times-bestseller, which was published in March? Well, from March to July, the total was just one. One hard copy, zero eBook registrations and zero audio books.
Only in August did the D.C. public library finally expand its catalogue to 51 copies, which is still little relief for the hundreds who have been waiting months.
Model that! Here is the full story, via Bruce.
Why the tariffs are bad
I am delighted to see this excellent analysis in the NYT:
Mr. Tedeschi said that future leaders in Washington, whether Republican or Democrat, may be hesitant to roll back the tariffs if that would mean a further addition to the federal debt load, which is already raising alarms on Wall Street. And replacing the tariff revenue with another type of tax increase would require Congress to act, while the tariffs would be a legacy decision made by a previous president.
“Congress may not be excited about taking such a politically risky vote when they didn’t have to vote on tariffs in the first place,” Mr. Tedeschi said.
Some in Washington are already starting to think about how they could spend the tariff revenue. Mr. Trump recently floated the possibility of sending Americans a cash rebate for the tariffs, and Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, recently introduced legislation to send $600 to many Americans. “We have so much money coming in, we’re thinking about a little rebate, but the big thing we want to do is pay down debt,” Mr. Trump said last month of the tariffs.
Democrats, once they return to power, may face a similar temptation to use the tariff revenue to fund a new social program, especially if raising taxes in Congress proves as challenging as it has in the past. As it is, Democrats have been divided over tariffs. Maintaining the status quo may be an easier political option than changing trade policy.
“That’s a hefty chunk of change,” Tyson Brody, a Democratic strategist, said of the tariffs. “The way that Democrats are starting to think about it is not that ‘these will be impossible to withdraw.’ It’s: ‘Oh look, there’s now going to be a large pot of money to use and reprogram.’”
That is from Andrew Duehren, bravo.
The Prime Minister of Sweden asks AI for advice in his job “quite often”
Here is the Reddit discussion.
Sunday assorted links
1. The conservative women who are ‘having it all’ (WSJ). I know more and more of such people.
2. Henry Mance on charisma (FT).
3. This ad was banned from UK TV? Is the Straussian read that it is actually an ad for Americans to view?
4. Ezra and Yoram Hazony (NYT). Mostly I am with Ezra here. I agree with Hazony that some notion of national centrality is important. But in a world with lots of internet, AI on its way, and declining fertility, we have to forge the new blend in very different ways than we did the old. And some form of liberalism is most likely to succeed in doing that, since, whether we like it or not, the future will involve massively more foreign influences of particular kinds than did the 1950s. There just isn’t a way back to how we did it before, whatever you may think of the various earlier versions of America.
Time Theft at the Terminal
Travel expert Gary Leff on the billions in wasted time spent at airports:
Maybe the biggest failure in air travel is something we don’t talk about at all. How is it possible that people are being told to show up at the airport 2.5 to 3 hours before their flight, and that isn’t considered a failure of massive proportions?
As Gary points out airport delay wipes out many technological advancements:
The lengthened times for showing up at the airport mean that it no longer even makes sense for many people to take shorter flights, but aircraft technology (electric, short and vertical takeoff) is changing and becoming far more viable in the coming years…The FAA is considering standards for vertiports but are we thinking creatively enough or will that conversation be too status quo-focused either because of regulator bias or because it’s entrenched interests most involved?
More and smaller airports are needed. Streamlined security, that doesn’t wait for nationwide universal rollout, is needed. We need runways and taxiways and air traffic capacity to increase throughput without stacking delays. Most of all, we need to avoid complacency that accepts the status quo as given.
By the way, Washington Dulles (IAD) has ~10.5 min security waits, among the best in the nation and the world for a big airport but it is terrible at inbound passport control. (Also, I am not a fan of the people movers.)
Accra bleg
Your suggestions would be most welcome. In addition if you have any ideas for northern Ghana, most of all Tamale and Mole national park area…
Thank you!
Emergent Ventures winners, 44th cohort
Adelya Makhanova, Stanford, AI for minerals exploration.
Gleb Razgar, London, brain emulation.
Stephen Webb, London, former civil servant, to write a book on how British government could work better.
Dima Yanovsky, MIT, robotics.
Aakarsh Vermani, Berkeley, summer support to live in Berkeley, computational biology.
Kristine Petrov Pashin, Stanford, to ease the patent process.
Eviella Sefu, 16, Congo/South Africa/Elkhart, Indiana, to attend a rationality meeting.
Aristotle Ronyak, Tucson, to explore and present what it is like to grow up with autism.
Justyna Przyborska, Limerick, to visit YC in SF.
Michael Muthukrishna, LSE/NYU, progress studies center at LSE, and also NYU.
Amrita Ghag, 16, Brampton, to attend a conference in Switzerland.
Lynetta Wang, Dublin/Imperial College London, “self-aware therapeutics.”
Ethan Glueck and Sasha Phoebe Zhang, Stanford, to spread 3-D printers in rural Taiwan.
Sofiia Lipkevych, MIT/Ukraine, translating online course material into Ukrainian.