Saturday assorted links
Carrying costs exceed liquidity premium, South Korean edition
A declining number of dog meat farms in Korea, driven by government efforts to root out the centuries-old practice of dog meat consumption, has raised questions about what will happen to the dogs currently in the system between now and when the ban takes effect in February 2027.
The Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs has confirmed that at least 468,000 dogs are currently kept on farms in cages nationwide, or at some 5,900 related businesses, including slaughterhouses, distributors and restaurants. Following the ban, there are few clear plans about how the dogs will be cared for, raising the possibility of some being left to fend for themselves in the wild.
State-run canine shelters across the country, often operated by local governments, are already at full capacity, according to Humane World for Animals Korea, a non-governmental organization dedicated to animal welfare. They say the country is far from prepared to provide a safe new life for the massive number of dogs expected to be freed.
Here is the full story, via Benjamin.
China (Africa) fact of the day
Chinese lending to Africa has plummeted, new data showed, reflecting a shift in focus to strategic investments on the continent and a lower risk appetite for financing infrastructure projects.
Beijing’s total lending in 2024 amounted to $2.1 billion, down by more than 90% from its 2016 peak, a report by Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center showed. And Chinese loans to Africa fell by nearly half in 2024 compared to the previous year.
The downward trend began when Chinese loans to Africa fell sharply by more than 60% to $6.8 billion in 2019, around the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Chinese loans to Africa have averaged just above $2 billion since 2020, having reached $10 billion or more between 2012 and 2018, Boston University’s database showed. The decline stems from more restraint by Chinese lenders, and borrowing constraints in Africa tied to continued post-pandemic shocks, debt restructuring efforts, and an increasingly volatile international order, said Mengdi Yue, a researcher at Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center.
Here is the full story.
Emergent Ventures winners, 51st cohort
Joseph Schmid, Princeton philosophy, and co-authors. To write up new and better arguments for the existence of god.
Monica Lewis, Sydney, Australia, center-right podcast.
Ashwin Somu, 17, Ontario, payments systems.
Sam Kahn, Kyrgyzstan, digital publication, Republic of Letters.
Nelson Jing, Seattle, decentralized AI systems.
Anubhav Nigam, Cornell, underwater charging stations.
Jordan McGillis, San Diego, the economics and politics of Alaska.
Juan Navarette, Madrid, Cervantes and liberalism.
Jeff Stine, Chicago, matching scientists and donors.
Syrine Ben Driss, San Francisco/Tunisia, biology start-up for AI-powered bio.
Shakti Mb, NYC, how people use AI boyfriends and girlfriends.
Sonia Litwin, London, robotics and emotions.
Alby Churven, 14, Sydney, Clovr, an AI tool.
Mikhail Khotyakov and Igor Kogan, Munich, Aimathic, personal math tutoring.
Archaeology cohort, sponsored by Yonatan Ben Shimon.
Bryce Hoenigman, Chicago, archaeology, linguistics, and AI.
Benjamin Arbuckle, Chapel Hill, archaeology and ancient DNA.
Duke Summer Institute on the History of Economics
The Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University will be hosting another Summer Institute on the History of Economics from June 2-11, 2026. The program is designed for students in graduate programs in economics, though students in graduate school in other fields as well as recently minted PhDs will also be considered.
Students will be competitively selected and successful applicants will receive free housing, access to readings, and stipends for travel and food. The deadline for applying is March 9.
We are very excited about this year’s program, which will focus on giving participants the tools to set up and teach their own undergraduate course in the history of economic thought. There will also be sessions devoted to showing how concepts and ideas from the history of economics might be introduced into other classes. The sessions will be run by Duke faculty members Jason Brent, Bruce Caldwell, Kevin Hoover, and Steve Medema. More information on the Summer Institute is available at our website, https://hope.econ.duke.edu/2026-summer-institute
Friday assorted links
1. The value of aspiration in Ethiopia.
2. Supply of silver thievery is elastic.
3. AI and children, some principles from Dean Ball. A much-needed corrective.
4. Now more middle class in Mexico than poor?
5. “Schrödinger’s cat just got bigger: quantum physicists create largest ever ‘superposition’” ????
6. The new Alex Honnold climb (NYT).
The Tyranny of the Complainers II
The Los Angeles City Council recently voted to increase the fee to file an objection to new housing. The fee for an “aggrieved person” to file an objection to development is currently $178 and will rise to $229. Good news, right? But here’s the rest of the story: it costs the city about $22,000 to investigate and process each objection. This means objections are subsidized by roughly $21,800 per case—a subsidy rate of nearly 99%.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the equation:
While fees will remain relatively low for housing project opponents, developers will have to pay $22,453 to appeal projects that previously had been denied.
In other words, objecting to new housing is massively subsidized, while appeals to build new housing are charged at full cost—more than 100 times higher than aggrieved complainer fees. This appears to violate the department’s own guidelines, which state:
When a service or activity benefits the public at large, there is generally little to no recommended fee amount. Conversely, when a service or activity wholly benefits an individual or entity, the cost recovery is generally closer or equal to 100 percent.
Expanding housing supply benefits the public at large, while objections typically serve narrow private interests. Thus, by the department’s own logic, it’s the developers who should be given low fees not the complainers.
Addendum: See also my previous post The Tyranny of the Complainers.
What should I ask Julia Ioffe?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. She has a new and very good book out, namely Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia. I will focus on that topic, but she has done much else as well. From Wikipedia:
…a Russian-born American journalist. Her articles have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New Republic, Politico, and The Atlantic. Ioffe has appeared on television programs on MSNBC, CBS, PBS, and other news channels as a Russia expert. She is the Washington correspondent for the website Puck.
And here is Julia on Twitter. So what should I ask her?
Seb Krier
I think this is spot on. The most useful work in the coming years will be about leveraging AI to help improve and reform liberal democracy, the rule of law, separation of powers, free speech, coordination, and constitutional safeguards.
One heuristic I have for AI is: if somone can instantiate their preference or desire really easily, if principal agent problems are materially reduced, if you can no longer rely on inefficiency or bloat as indirect hedge – then the ‘rules of the game’ matter more than ever.
These are all very difficult questions with or without AI. And I’m concerned with two things in particular: first, the easy appeal of anti-elite populism – people who just think ‘well let’s have vetocracy everywhere, let’s leverage the emotions of the masses for short term gain’.
And second, the appeal of scheme-y behaviour – instrumental convergence for political operators. This is harder to pin down, but basically a variant of “I want goal X, so anything that gets me closer to this goal is good” – what leads to all sorts of bad policy and unsavoury alliances.
And instead of trying to 4D chess it or try to recreate politics from first principles, I think technologists should actively enage with experts in all sorts of discplines: constitutional scholars, public choice economists, game theorists etc. Converesely, many of these experts should engage with technologists more instead of coping with obsolete op-eds about how AI is fake or something.
Lastly, improved AI capabilities means you can now use these systems for more things than you could have before. I couldn’t write software a year ago and now I can create a viable app in a day. This dynamic will continue, and will reward people who are agentic and creative.
Are you a local councillor? Well now you have 1000 agents at your disposal – what can you now that that was otherwise unthinkable? Are you someone who lives in their district? Now you have even better tools to hold them to account. Are you an academic? Great, now consider how the many bylaws, rules, structures, institutions, incentives are messing up incentives and progress, what should be improved, and how to get streamlined coordination rather than automated obstruction.
Here is the link. Here is the related Dean Ball tweet.
My AI and education talk at University of Austin
Keep in mind I am not out to design the best, highest-tech solution, rather something that non-white-pilled normies might experiment with on a short-term basis.
Thursday assorted links
1. The advance of machine learning in economics.
3. The Christian speed painter (NYT).
4. The wisdom of Adam Ozimek. He is also a Clarence White fan.
5. Thiel on trends.
6. New constitution for Claude. And Simon Willison on Catholicism.
7. Greenland fact of the day: “Nuuk, Greenland (pop. 19.6k) has 16 buses in its transit system and has higher ridership than Wichita, Kansas’s bus system (pop. 472k).”
What Davos (and Mark Carney) get wrong
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column, here is one excerpt:
Though Donald Trump seems to be calling off his latest trade war, the United States has indeed retreated from free trade with a new era of tariffs. It’s a development I rue. But Canada just opened its market to Chinese cars. So Trump did in fact find the recipe to nudge an oft-protectionist Canada toward freer trade, though it is the opposite of what he might have been wishing for. Soon, Canada will have access to better and cheaper electric cars than what we can get in the United States. And even if you think that spyware could make those cars a security risk in Washington, D.C., due to spying possibilities, I am less worried about their proliferation in Quebec and Nova Scotia. Keep them out of Ottawa if need be.
The European Union just worked out a free trade agreement, pending final approval, with Mercosur, a trade bloc encompassing hundreds of millions of people in South America, a region that is likely to be more economically important in the future. The EU also announced it is likely to strike a free trade agreement with India, the most populous nation in the world and one of its fastest-growing economies. However imperfect these agreements may turn out to be, has there been any recent short period with so much progress in free trade?
And this on Mark Carney:
Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s speech on Tuesday garnered a lot of attention, but I think for the wrong reasons. He proclaimed the ability of “middle powers”—that is, Europe and countries like his own—to stand their ground against America and China, but he mentioned AI only in passing. He had no solution to an immediately pending world where Canada is quite dependent on advanced AI systems from American companies (often, incidentally, developed by Canadian researchers in the U.S.). That is likely to be the next major development in this North American relationship, and it will not increase the relative autonomy of Canada or of any other middle powers.
Carney has garnered praise for staking out such bold ground and standing up to Trump. The deeper reality is that Carney can “talk back” in the North American partnership because he knows America will defend Canada, including against Russia, no matter what. Most European countries cannot relax in the same manner, and thus they are often more deferential. What the reactions from Carney and the Europeans show is not any kind of growing independence for the middle powers, but rather a reality where you are either quite tethered to a major power—as Canada is to America—or you live in fear of being abandoned, which is the current status of much of Europe.
Recommended.
How Restrictive is U.S. Trade Policy?
This short note computes Trade Restrictiveness Index measures for current U.S. trade policy. Building on the ideas of Anderson and Neary (1996, 2005), the Trade Restrictiveness Index is the uniform tariff that leaves the U.S. consumer as well off as under actual policy. As of October 2025, U.S. trade policy is twice as restrictive as headline tariff numbers suggest. The Trade Restrictiveness Index is 23 percent, which stands in contrast to the 11 percent average tariff rate. Trade policy towards Canada and Mexico is two to three times more restrictive than average tariff rates suggest. Sectoral analysis shows that the restrictiveness is concentrated in vehicles, machinery, and electrical equipment.
That is from Michael E. Waugh.
My Conversation with Diarmaid MacCulloch
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Diarmaid explore whether monotheism correlates with monogamy, Christianity’s early instinct towards egalitarianism, what the Eucharistic revolution reveals about the cathedral building boom, the role of Mary in Christianity and Islam, where Michel Foucault went wrong on sexuality, the significance of the clerical family replacing the celibate monk, why Elizabeth I—not Henry VIII—mattered most for the English Reformation, why English Renaissance music began so brilliantly but then needed to start importing Germans, whether Christianity needs hell to survive, what MacCulloch plans to do next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: There’s a recent rise of interest in theories that attribute the rise of the West to the church banning cousin marriage, that this broke down clan structures. What’s your view of that hypothesis?
MACCULLOCH: It’s, as usual with such hypotheses, far too simple. I don’t see that so at all. Cousin marriages went on being a feature of Christianity, particularly if you’ve got a pope to dispense such marriages in the West. What could one say about such a theory? Clans, families were not broken up by Christianity. By far, the reverse. Those structures did not change very significantly. No, I don’t think that really works at all.
COWEN: Why does Islam so emphasize the sexual desires of women relative to Christianity?
MACCULLOCH: A good question. Because the Quran allows that to happen? The Quran has been interpreted by men when very often what it’s talking about is just people, so that may be one explanation. Islam did remain very much a militarized culture to start with, so it’s almost by definition run by men. There within it, is a powerful set of images for women in the Quran itself. On top of the Quran, there is so much added, and it’s usually added by male societies. So yes and no, really.
There is a constant strain of things one can say about the position of women in Christianity. Women are constantly carving out parts of Christian faith for themselves, against the fact that men are increasingly running the church. That’s a fact of life. Think of the mystics of the medieval West and the way in which so many of them are females. To be a mystic, you don’t need the male language of Latin, the language of the professions, the language of the clergy.
You can explore mysticism without the new invention of men in the 12th century — theology, which is something associated with, first, the cathedral schools and then the universities, both of which are male institutions. But mysticism, no. You can just get on with it. It involves many of the same themes in every religion that turns to mysticism, themes like fire and water, air. The vocabulary of the mystic really is quite universal. It is not restricted to Christianity or Islam or anything. It’s the way that one aspect of humanity works out when it tries to meet the divine.
COWEN: Why is Islam sometimes, at least at the intellectual level, so obsessed with Mary? You can debate whether she was a saint or a prophet. In a way, the role in Christianity is much more circumscribed.
And:
COWEN: Why are there still a fair number of English Catholics, but so few in the Nordic countries?
MACCULLOCH: Now, an interesting question. Lutheranism became much more universal in the Nordic countries. Catholicism did not survive there. The monarchies of these countries were, I think, much more thorough-going in suppressing it. I think the nobility also decided to go over to the Reformation fairly uniformly in Sweden, Norway, Denmark. Of course, it does matter when the nobility make decisions.
In England, they were divided. Quite a lot of the nobility and gentry did stick with the old faith, maybe because they admired many of the bishops of the old church. I did a little work of research on this in my younger days, in which you could see that those gentry who stayed Catholic after the Reformation were often those who had personal ties to the great bishops of the pre-Reformation church.
Yes, the picture is very different in England to that in Scandinavia. Also, remember that extraordinary counter case, the case of Ireland, where the government became Protestant as it did in England, but the great bulk of the population did not go with it. The story of Ireland is a story of the rejection of the religion of the upper classes right through to the present day, when they’ve now rejected so much of Catholicism too. Fascinating different stories next to each other there.
Recommended.
Hey, AI image generators!
Just for future reference, I am left-handed…also note I play tennis and baseball with my right hand, however, should that ever arise as an issue. (In basketball I am left-handed, though.) I’ve never quite understood that, but there you go.