Zimbabwe facts of the day
Zimbabwe, often considered an economic basket-case because of its history of farm seizures and hyperinflation, is enjoying an idiosyncratic boom. High prices for the metal and other commodities have led to a surge of cash through its highly informal economy. They have made it easier for authorities to stop printing money and meddling in currency markets; inflation is at its lowest in about 30 years. The IMF has repeatedly revised upwards estimates for economic growth, most recently to at least 7.5% for 2025, almost double the African average…
Gold is not the only source of growth. The current tobacco crop will be the largest on record. Lithium, chrome and platinum miners, many of them Chinese, have raised production. Zimbabwe’s diaspora, mainly in South Africa, sent back $2.5bn last year. So overall demand is higher than ever, says a banker.
Here is more from The Economist. We are told that the private vault sector is booming too.
Monday assorted links
1. Sindarov profile. And: “I know this GM who made 2600 at 19 without reading a chess book in his life.” And Magnus on Sindarov vs. Gukesh.
2. Inflation-adjusted book prices over time.
3. On the Amanat Iran book and its excellence.
4. More on the wet market hypothesis. We should all be uncertain, but it is mood affiliation (with conspiracy theorizing, for one thing) to be convinced of Lab Leak. It is contributing to negative emotional contagion.
5. Review of the new Knausgaard series. By Max Norman: “(I’d rather read Knausgaard on defecation than predestination, let alone whether machines can think or trees can feel.)”‘
6. AI and the arts, a short Instagram video.
7. AI and the pancreatic vaccine. More testing is needed, but there is a reasonable chance that we have a good treatment for pancreatic cancer, and AI was instrumental in that. It is mRNA as well, so a double burn on the haters.
Eight Rules to Regain Public Trust in Academia
The Yale Report was quite good but for concision I prefer Kevin Bryan’s Eight Rules:
1. Produce and Teach Useful Knowledge
Universities exist to generate and teach useful knowledge. This knowledge is grounded in skeptical inquiry, empirical evidence, and logical deduction. “Useful” includes not only practical applications but also fundamental discoveries that expand our understanding of the world, even if their benefits are long-term.
2. Be Useful to All of Society
Universities are subsidized only if society at large finds them valuable. Research may take time to bear fruit, but its insights should ultimately serve the public good, communicated openly and accessibly, and presented with epistemic humility. Teaching should be done with care and draw on up-to-date research.
3. Attract Talent from All of Society
Useful knowledge can be created by people from any social or economic background. Do not waste talent. Do not select talent based on who knows “how to play the game”. Avoid insular language or norms that deter people from entering research.
4. Neutral, Objective Research Produces Useful Knowledge
Research must be neutral and objective. It is true that everyone has their individual background and preferences; nonetheless, unbiased research is still possible. Tradition, folk knowledge, and storytelling all play an important roles in society, but they are not the purpose of universities. There is no “Western science” or culturally-determined “ways of knowing”. Rather, research is open to all and can be performed identically regardless of background.
5. Hire, Promote, and Cite Based on Knowledge Contribution
Hiring, promotion, and citation must be based on an individual’s contribution to knowledge. Nepotism, group preferences, and adherence to specific “schools of thought” corrupt this process. When advancement is not based on merit, the public rightly questions our integrity and the objectivity of our findings.
6. Keep Personal Views Out of Research and Teaching
A scholar’s personal politics should be invisible in their research and teaching. If a finding is predictable based on the author’s identity or known views, the process has failed. Objectivity is the hallmark of credible science. Academics may hold private beliefs like anyone else, but their academic work must stand apart from them.
7. Research Fraud is Unacceptable
Fraud destroys trust. Misrepresentation of results, selective reporting, or methods designed to publish rather than to discover are also harmful. Proven fraud must bring immediate dismissal, as it violates the core purpose of academia.
8. Scientific Institutions Should Be Apolitical
Universities, journals, and scientific societies must remain non-partisan. Their public statements must be rare, restricted to issues of direct expert consensus, and made only when silence would be a greater threat to their integrity than speaking. Activism sacrifices credibility for influence – or worse yet, sacrifices credibility and influence alike.
I would add 9) Grades must be objective and useful discriminators of talent.
How long should a college degree take?
It takes most college students at least four years to earn a bachelor’s degree. Christie Williams finished in three months.
The North Carolina human resources executive spent two months racking up credits through web tutorials after work in 2024, then raced through 11 online classes at the University of Maine at Presque Isle in four weeks. Later that year, she went back to earn her master’s — in just five weeks. The two degrees cost a total of just over $4,000.
Since then, she has coached a thousand other students on how to speed through the state college, shaving off years and thousands of dollars from the usual cost of a degree.
Here is the full story, via Anecdotal.
Will college get fixed?
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column. Here is one excerpt:
So schools will respond to cost pressures by letting quality deteriorate. More instruction will be of the inferior online variety. There are very good online experiences, but schools are too bureaucratic and not run well enough to deliver them. Fewer professors will be full-salaried, tenure-track professors. Administrators and staff will grow at much slower rates than over the last 20 years, a positive development.
That overall picture may sound grim, but adjustments will kick in to limit the costs. A global market will ensure that adjunct faculty are smarter and better than before. Students will get better at using AI to teach themselves, filling in the gaps left by university budget shortages.
At the same time, colleges and universities will get better at marketing and fundraising. Schools with famous football and basketball teams will be just fine. Schools will intensively market a few academic superstars and let the quality of their median tenured faculty decline. Every possible profit center in a university will be mined for extra revenue, whether extra housekeeping service for dormitory living or renting out the swimming pool and university library to nearby retirees.
And this:
Perhaps you commonly hear it said that “college is what you make of it.” That may sound like a cliché, but it is a truth that helps us understand this new world to come. A lot of students just flat out want to go to college. If they have to put more into the social side of learning to make it worthwhile, they will do so.
In sum, there will be a lot of painful adjustment, but the major institutions will not come close to disappearing.
That was then, this is now
At the advent of a more aggressive Persian Gulf policy on the part of Iran during the interwar years, the resilience of these symbols was watched like a kind of barometer that attested to Britain’s levell of commitment to the maintenance of security in the Persian Gulf. Britainäs abstention from the use of force against Iran, dictated by its will to protect its interests in Iran, was at times perceived as weakness by the shaykhs and merchants of the Arabian littoral. During the period of heightened tension that accompanied Reza Shah’s rise, a perpetual cause of excitement among the Arabs inhabiting the southern littoral was the persistence of rumors that Iran would soon effect the complete withdrawal of the British from the area of the Persian Gulf waterway.
That is from the very useful The Origins of the Arab-Iranian Conflict: Nationalism and Sovereignty in the Gulf between the World Wars, by Chelsi Mueller.
By the way, on the eve of WWI, the population of Dubai was about 2,075 people, and about 500 of them were Iranian merchants.
Sunday assorted links
1. Religion and business economics Substack.
2. WDC crime is way down. Alex T. was right, POTMR.
3. Movie theaters are making an economic comeback?
5. Has the fight against inflation stalled in Argentina? (FT)
6. The case against off-shore processing.
7. Harry Law on alignment. And do AI-written plays have too little conflict?
On the impact of Trump’s tariffs
In 2025, the U.S. raised average tariff duties from 2.4% to 9.6%, bringing protectionism to its highest level in eighty years. We explore the structure of these tariffs, estimate their short-run impacts, and summarize the growing literature on their effects. Across trade partners, the tariffs are correlated with trade deficits but not with geopolitical or strategic industrial goals, other than targeting China. In our baseline estimate, 90% of the tariffs are passed through to tariff-inclusive prices paid by U.S. importers. Incorporating the estimated price and trade responses into a static trade framework, we find an overall welfare impact ranging from a loss of 0.13% of GDP to a gain of 0.10%. These small net welfare impacts reflect sizable consumption losses roughly offset by income and revenue gains, with their sign hinging on whether U.S. terms-of-trade adjusted (on which the data are inconclusive). Among their stated rationales, the tariffs have been effective at raising federal revenue and diverting trade from China. However, it remains uncertain whether they will reduce the trade deficit, lower prices set by foreign exporters, promote manufacturing jobs, increase “friend-shoring” among aligned countries, or reshore key sectors; evidence from 2018-19 and 2025 indicators suggests a narrow path towards achieving these goals.
That is from
The Chinese Current Account Imbalances
The subtitle of the paper is Puzzles, Patterns, and Possible Causes. Here is the abstract:
China’s large current account surplus has been an irritant to its trading partners. While industrial and trade policies often lead to sector-level imbalances, they play a relatively limited role in the economy-wide surplus. Structural factors such as an unbalanced sex ratio and uneven access to financing by state-owned and non-state firms are more important determinants of the current account imbalance. While macroeconomic stimulus can boost imports and reduce the surplus in the short run, any long-term solution would need to involve reforms aiming at addressing the structural problems.
By . I think not everyone will be persuaded, but the paper has numerous points of interest, including on the quality of the data. On the gender imbalance, the authors write this:
As the marriage market becomes increasingly competitive for young men, parents with a son raise their savings to improve their son’s relative standing in the relative market. At the same time, parents with a daughters face conflicting incentives on savings. On the one hand, they can reduce their savings to take advantage of the increased probability of marriage of their daughters. On the other hand, they may wish to raise their savings to preserve their daughters’ bargaining power within marriage…In the data, Wei and Zhang find strong evidence that a combination of having a son at home and living in a region with a skewed sex ratio greatly pushes up the household savings rate.
And on state-owned firms:
Since the banking system favors state-owned firms, many non-state-owned but highproductivity firms have difficulty with access to finance and therefore save for their own investment. This leads to a higher level of corporate savings.
Those points make sense to me, but perhaps industrial policy matters too because so many Chinese laborers have been underemployed, due to their (earlier) rural locations, thus limiting the applicability of Lerner Symmetry?
That was then, this is not now?
The 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion destroyed Reza Shah — but not the Pahlavi state. The two Allies — joined by the United States in December 1941 — realized that the Iranian state could be useful in achieving the two goals for which they had invaded the country: physical control over oil — the British nightmare in World War II, even more so than in World War I, was loss of these vital supplies: and a land “corridor” to the Soviet Union…To facilitate the flow of both oil to Britain and supplies to the Soviet Union, the Allies found it expedient to remove Reza Shah but to preserve his state…the Allies kept his state but engineered his removal in part to curry much-needed favor among Iranians. “The Persians,” he wrote, “expect that we should at least save them from the Shah’s tyranny as compensation for invading their country.”
That is from Ervand Abrahamian’s A History of Modern Iran.
Saturday assorted links
1. Cato Handbook on affordability.
2. Are first-generation college students overrated?
3. No Detectable Economic Effect of Extreme Heat After Correcting for Dependence. Here is analysis from Claude 4.7, link now fixed.
5. AI and the early history of electricity. Good claims.
6. Betting on how well various pundits predict the future.
7. On Jensen.
Reading bleg
What is the best and most sophisticated defense of architectural modernism, both from an aesthetic and a social point of view?
I thank you all in advance for your wisdom.
Birthright Citizenship and Youth Crime
This paper studies the impact of birthright citizenship on youth crime. We leverage a German reform which automatically granted birthright citizenship to eligible immigrant children born in Germany after January 1, 2000 and administrative crime data from three federal states. We find that immigrant youth who acquired citizenship at birth are substantially less likely to engage in criminal activity, with estimates indicating a 70% reduction in crime. These results are particularly relevant in light of ongoing debates in the U.S. about abolishing birthright citizenship. Our findings suggest that inclusive citizenship policies can reduce crime and its associated costs, which in turn could strengthen social cohesion.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
Emergent Ventures India, 16th cohort
Roumak Das, a grade 11 student from West Bengal, and Samik Goyal, a 12th grader from Patiala, received their grants to travel to the International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence 2025 in Beijing, where Roumak won a gold medal and Samik a silver medal. Roumak’s grant also supports his college applications, and Samik’s grant supports SPOI, dedicated to teaching informatics to school students.
Ishaan Gangwani, 17, received his grant to develop InkVell, an AI-native LaTeX editor, and to support his travel to the International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence 2025 in Beijing.
Ronald Abraham received a career development grant for Veeraa, to build a crowdfunding and growth platform for India’s community leaders.
Tristan Wagner received his grant to explore low-cost autoinjectors for treating anaphylaxis and snakebite envenoming in India.
Michael Grasa received his grant to test a transparent, falsifiability-first approach to decoding the Indus Valley script, releasing versioned overlays and open datasets for replication or refutation.
Jasraj Budigam, 16, received his grant to develop CapNav-Lite, an adaptive AI navigation system that personalizes power-wheelchair control to each user within minutes on everyday hardware.
Mannat Kaur, 17, freshman at Stanford University, received her grant to continue developing research on wastewater recycling and its integration into the built environment and low-carbon housing.
Vineela Upadhyayula, Hari Krishna Upadhyayula, and Phani Madhav Upadhyayula received their grant for NeuraEase, to build a wearable-driven AI detection and management of acute dysregulation events in neurodivergence and neurological disorders, including autistic meltdowns.
Arnav Kumar and Gavneesh, cofounders of Vyobha Aerospace, received their grant to build regional eVTOL aircraft with fractional ownership at the cost of a car.
Aditya Raj Chopra, a high school senior, received a general career development grant.
Ansh Mishra, 17, received his grant to build reliable and accessible bionic prosthetic hands.
Vasu Dubey, 22, received his grant to build a machine-learning-based medical device for speech restoration in laryngectomy patients.
Snehadeep Kumar, 21, received his grant for Nebula Space Organisation, to build ultra-low-cost Earth-imaging CubeSats and a global imagery platform that makes space data accessible to everyone.
Uttam Singh and Ayush Das received their grant for Nakshatra Maps, to help people navigate indoor and outdoor public spaces with dynamic hyperlocal interactive maps, AR navigation, and smart emergency evacuation.
Mankaran Singh received his grant to build frictionless human-robot interaction for machines operating in human-centric environments.
Sommaiya Angrish, 21, an alt Hindi-pop musician, received his grant to work on his third album, rooted in his personal healing journey.
Achyut Tiwari, 24, received his grant for GeoLiquefy, an AI system forecasting earthquake-related soil liquefaction from geotechnical data for engineers, insurers, and risk assessors.
Devayan Das, 19, a biotech undergraduate, received his grant to develop dissolvable tissue culture nutrient blocks that simplify lab workflows and turn lab prep into a plug-and-play process.
Ayush Kale, a materials engineer, received his grant for EarthSprint Solutions, to transform agricultural waste into low-carbon, high-performance cement blocks.
Mohd Fahad Eqbal, 24, received his grant for Chakraswap, to scale an affordable battery swap network for e-rickshaw drivers.
Satyamedh Hulyalkar received his grant to develop a LoRa-based self-healing mesh network for agricultural and monitoring use cases.
Shivam Parashar received his grant for GreenScore, to build an industrial effluent monitoring system combining machine learning and IoT to keep Indian rivers clean.
Anand Unni received his grant for Nayaneethi Policy Collective, to develop a public policy curriculum and a community of public policy thinkers and analysts in Kerala, and strengthen the demand side of public policy.
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV India announcement is here. More about the winners of EV India second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth cohorts. To apply for EV India, use the EV application, click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.
And here is Nabeel’s AI engine for other EV winners. Here are the other EV cohorts.
If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at [email protected].
TC: This post is from Shruti, and I thank her for her amazing work on this!
That was then, this is now
From 1857:
The Persians were great sticklers for ceremony, it turned out, and now that the treaty was ratified, they expected an exchange of gifts to mark the important occasion. At Spence’s [a leading diplomat of the time] insistence, the United States spent $10,000 (close to $1 million in today’s money) on diamond-studded snuffboxes and weapons for the shah. The State Department protested bitterly, as it was not in the habit of spending such outrageous sums, but Spence put his foot down, knowing that these gifts paled in comparison with what Persia had received from Napoleon and others. Spence’s brother Charles was dispatched to Tehran to deliver the gifts in person — a gesture the shah appreciated so much that he decorates the young man with the Order of the Lion and the Sun, the country’s highest honor.
That is from John Ghazvinian America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present, a very good book.