Ned Phelps, RIP
Here is a brief appreciation from Olivier Blanchard, link now corrected.
Hayek in Jacobin
Here’s something I never expected to write: Jacobin, the magazine of the DSA-aligned left, has a good article on central planning. In an interview, Vivek Chibber lays out essentially the Mises–Hayek–Kornai critique of central planning. Information problems, incentive problems and the consequent failures are laid bare. Moreover, Chibber refuses to lay the blame at the feet of Stalin, poverty, or the Russians. Nor does he wave hopefully at supercomputers and AI, as is fashionable today on the planning-curious left:
The dilemma is this. There is a problem of information. Supercomputers will in fact help process information better. But if the information coming in is junk, and if that junk is built into the system because of the incentives that operators have in workplaces to lie, you will not have a planning system that can be put on its feet through the advent of computers or artificial intelligence or anything like that. I don’t see any reason to think that that strategic misalignment of incentives is simply there because of Russian backwardness or poverty.
Even the pedestrian is shocking coming from Jacobin:
Normally in capitalism, what do managers do? They want to make profits. The way to make a profit is by trying to sell, at the lowest price possible, the best-quality good that you can.
A vivid conclusion:
Melissa Naschek: What do you think leftists should learn from the failure of fully planned economies?
Vivek Chibber: What they should learn is that the burden of proof is on us, on the Left, if we want to continue with this slogan of replacing the market with the plan. The burden of proof is on us to show that it can work. You might say that along with this ought to come a kind of humility about facts and about the world.…it would be criminally negligent to ignore the experience of decades upon decades of planning and say to yourself, “Well, that wasn’t what my vision of socialism is, so I’m going to ignore it.” Because if you do that, I can guarantee 100 percent you will end up repeating many of the mistakes and falling into the same dilemmas that the planners did.
I could offer critiques. Stalin was not an impediment to central planning but a consequence of it. And to warn that ignoring the experience of central planning risks repeating “the same dilemmas that the planners did” is a bloodless way to describe dictatorship, famine, and mass murder. But that would be churlish. Let me end instead by saying that I agree with this:
If we’re actually serious about changing the world, people on the Left … should be the most remorseless and the most merciless when it comes to facts.
Replace “people on the Left” with “we” and the line is exactly right.
Detroit notes
It remains one of America’s most interesting cities, and now it is seeing a continuing comeback. Downtown remains mostly empty of foot traffic, but I was stunned to see new office buildings and signs of budding prosperity. It did not feel abandoned or hopeless.
Detroit Institute of Art is one of America’s best art museums, showing impeccable taste, though it is notable how much the picture donations simply disappear after some point in time. This is a temple for those are skeptical about modern art, as you will not find it reprensented much here. The American art, the Rembrandt Visitation, the Poussin Holy Family, the Breughel, and the huge Diego Rivera murals are all to die for. The average quality of painting is high as well.
Baobab Fare, not too far from the museum, is a good Burundian (!) restaurant in town.
I was lucky enough to visit the General Motors research and development complex in Cranbrook, mostly designed by Eero Saarinen, due to the ingenuity of Dan Wang (it is mostly not open to the public). Around 20,000 people work there, and it remains a temple of modernist architecture, perhaps anachronistic in effect but beautiful nonetheless. I had not realized how strong the colors were, as that does not come through in the photos.
The Saarinen (papa Saarinen!) house in the Cranbrook Art Museum is perhaps the best Art Deco design I have seen. The museum itself has excellent architecture, sculptures, and gardens, rather than being much of an art museum proper.
Here are good NYT photos of that part of the joy ride.
Overall a trip to the Detroit area is one of the very best American visits you can do, highly recommended, automobile required of course that is why they call it the Motor City.
Weapons, Wealth, and the Fates of Societies
Why do weapons sustain durable peace in some societies but provoke perpetual violence in others? We develop a theory in which the value of human life and the frequency of violence are jointly determined by weapons technology and economic conditions. Lethal weapons deter conflict but raise mortality, taxing the future returns to investing in one’s livelihood. When those returns are high, deterrence dominates and peace and investment reinforce each other. When those returns are low, the mortality tax dominates, agents divest from the future, the value of life falls, and violence deepens, a trap that deadlier weapons worsen. Whether weapons pacify or destabilize depends on the interaction between their offensive characteristics and the baseline prosperity of the society they enter. The theory illuminates four historical episodes: how Medieval Iceland (930–1262) sustained stateless order without a sovereign; why Tokugawa Japan (1603–1868) contained firearms within an institutional order that sustained two centuries of peace and growth; why firearms traded into West Africa and among Native American nations (17th–18th century) produced escalating violence and persistent underdevelopment rather than deterrence; and why the Comanche of the southern plains (c.~1750–1850) rose to regional dominance on horse and gun complementarities and then collapsed as sustained raiding into northern Mexico hollowed out the prosperity base on which their own order depended. The model also refines the logic of nuclear deterrence and generates testable predictions about urban gun violence in high-poverty neighborhoods.
That is from a new paper by Samuel Lee, Ilari Passivirta, and Alexander Zentefis, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
What I’ve been reading
1. Mikhail Fishman, The Successor: Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Putin, and the Decline of Modern Russia. One of the best books to read on how Russia moved from “had some democratic elements in place” to autocracy, on a step-by-step basis. The story is told using the career of Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated in 2014, as a lens. The author has biases of his own, but they do not detract from what is valuable here.
2. Siri Hustvedt. Ghost Stories: A Memoir. About her history with her now-deceased husband Paul Auster, and how she dealt with his death. Moving and insightful, recommended.
3. Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, a new translation by Ritchie Robertson. An imperfect, problematic work, too caught up with its own Germanness, and lacking dramatic tension. Still, an important work and this new translation is much better than the old one.
Elsewhere, here is Beeple on AI and Monet, for the terminally online only.
Friday assorted links
1. Chinese modular innovation.
2. “Are you an emerging scholar passionate about scientific discovery and innovation, and interested in joining a community of classical liberal scholars for a year? We’d love to hear from you. Apply below…” New Mercatus program.
3. State media control influences large language models.
4. The best intellectual biographies of the last twenty-five years. An excellent thread, though it will induce you to spend some money.
5. An undervalued Jack Butler Yeats. Up for auction, I have seen many worse paintings priced in seven figures. Elsewhere, here are some major works up for auction.
Philosophical Ideas Behind Their Time
Justin Weinberg at Daily Nous riffs off my post, Ideas Behind Their Time, to ask for philosophical examples. He nominates Gettier problems–i.e. counterexamples to the idea that knowledge is simply “justified true belief” as a possibility. The classic Gettier paper is from 1963. Wikipedia notes that the Indian philosopher Dharmottara has some clear examples c770 AD but as an element within the Western tradition the idea does seem behind its time.
I would nominate the following as philosophical ideas behind their time:
- Hume’s is/ought distinction: the idea that you cannot derive a normative conclusion from factual premises.
- Hume’s problem of induction: past regularities do not rationally guarantee future regularities.
- Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance: the principles of justice should be derived without knowing one’s own particularities of class, race, gender and so forth. Seems obvious as an idea.
- The Trolley Problem: similar ideas can be found earlier but the clean distinction between killing and let die or more generally omission and commission could have come much earlier. One might also think of the Prisoner’s Dilemma in this category of ideas or constructs that cleanly isolate an otherwise present but opaque idea.
- The analytic/synthetic truths distinction: some things are true by definition, others are empirical. Obvious and it can be found before say Kant, yet a clear earlier statement would have resolved many issues and seems well within say Aristotle’s capability.
- Aumann’s Agreement Theorem, technically, this requires Bayesian machinery and is difficult to formulate with precision, so I would not say the actual theorem was behind its time. But the underlying idea—that disagreement itself, not merely the arguments offered, should cause one to question and refine one’s own beliefs—could have been developed in Athens.
- I’d also nominate a package of ideas like abolitionism, equal rights for women, and religious toleration–each of these is tendentious as examples yet the basic package seems fairly obvious as a category and yet late. (Perhaps if the veil of ignorance had been thought of earlier so would these ideas!) Note, that I am not arguing that abolitionism or equal rights for women could have happened much earlier only that these ideas were behind their time–the ideas were morally obvious even if not institutionally feasible.
Note also that I am not arguing that these ideas are all correct, only that they were philosophical ideas behind their time. More examples?
Christopher Nolan, Straussian?
When asked what secondary literature Nolan consulted in working on his epic magnum opus masterpiece, he said none. None save Benardete’s The Bow and the Lyre. “It was my muse” —Christopher Nolan,
, April 2026.
Here is the link.
One way to benefit adolescents
Have school start later:
We examine the impact of California’s Senate Bill 328 (SB 328), the first statewide mandate requiring later school start times for middle and high schools, on adolescent sleep, mental health, and academic outcomes. Using difference-in-differences and eventstudy designs across five data sources, we find that SB 328 increased the share of students sleeping at least 8 hours per night by 13%, meeting the CDC-recommended minimum for this age group. Average mental health effects are imprecisely estimated, but boys show significant reductions in sadness, hopelessness, and suicidal ideation, and Hispanic students, who experienced the largest sleep-timing shifts, show parallel reductions in difficulty concentrating; together these patterns are consistent with a dose-response relationship between sleep improvement and mental well-being. Math and English scores in grade 8 improved by approximately 0.08–0.10 standard deviations, with the largest gains among Hispanic and economically disadvantaged students. A within-state analysis using teachers’ commute arrival times as a proxy for pre-policy school start times corroborates these findings, and shows academic gains accumulating over 2023–2025 alongside a suggestive decline in high school dropout rates. The absence of effects on chronic absenteeism rules out an attendance-driven mechanism, pointing instead to the direct cognitive benefits of aligning school schedules with adolescents’ biological rhythms.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
Meta-papers in science (from my email)
From Brennan Plaetzer:
Hi Tyler,
Your post yesterday argued AI will replace papers with meta-papers that synthesize, re-run, and extend prior work. I built one in oncology last month, before reading your post.
I ran my friend Omar Abdel-Wahab’s (MSK) last ten papers through an AI synthesis layer. This came out on top: an integrated, falsifiable hypothesis bridging two of his 2025 papers, one in Cancer Cell on a refractory MEK1 mutation, one in Cell on splicing-derived neoantigens. It comes with seven testable experiments his lab can run today. The move generalizes to any field: surface the questions hidden in plain view, the ones the source papers could answer with their own data but never asked.
https://page56capital.com/writings/cross-paper-synthesis
The “box” you described already exists in biology. It just doesn’t have a name there yet.
Brennan
Note that if you, in the future, do not do this kind of thing yourself, someone else, or their AI agent, will do it for you. Solve for the equilibrium!
MIT fact of the day
Outside of Sloan and the EECS MEng program, still in the midst of admissions, compared with 2024, our departments’ new enrollments for next year are down close to 20%.
That means that, in total, outside of Sloan, we could have about 500 fewer graduate students. Which means we’ll have many fewer students advancing the work of MIT, and undergraduates will have fewer grad students as mentors in their research.
That is from the president of MIT in a recent speech. It is time to put aside denial about the tsunami coming for higher education.
Thursday assorted links
How Much Has Shale Gas Saved U.S. Consumers?
Every US president since Nixon has called for freeing the US from ‘dependence on foreign oil’ (within ten years!). Every president has failed. Fracking, however, has delivered the goods. Fracking has reduced the price of energy, reduced net emissions of greenhouse gases and turned the US into an energy exporter.
In How Much Has Shale Gas Saved U.S. Consumers? Lucas Davis compare LNG prices in the US ($5.3 Mcf), Europe ($14.4 Mcf) and Japan ($16.1 Mcf) to offer some plausible back of the envelope calculations:
Advances in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling caused U.S. natural gas production to increase significantly, and the U.S. went from being a net importer of natural gas to being the world’s largest exporter. This paper calculates how much shale gas has saved U.S. natural gas consumers. Using price differences between the United States, Europe and Japan, we calculate that U.S. natural gas consumers have saved $4.5-$5.3 trillion between 2007 and 2025, equivalent to $237-$276 billion annually. Access to low-price U.S. natural gas has been particularly valuable during major supply shocks such as the war in Ukraine, and the benefits of shale gas have been experienced broadly across sectors and states.
The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet
The proliferation of AI-generated and AI-assisted text on the internet is feared to contribute to a degradation in semantic and stylistic diversity, factual accuracy, and other negative developments. We find that by mid-2025, roughly 35% of newly published websites were classified as AI-generated or AI-assisted, up from zero before ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022. We also find evidence suggesting that increases in AI-generated text on the internet bring about a decrease in semantic diversity and an increase in positive sentiment. We do not, however, find statistically significant evidence supporting the hypothesis that an increased rate of AI-generated text on the internet decreases factual accuracy or stylistic diversity. Notably, our findings diverge from public perception of AI’s impact on the internet.
That is from a new paper by Jonas Dolezal, Sawood Alam Mark Graham, and Maty Bohacek. Via Glenn Mercer.
My excellent Conversation with Bob Spitz
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Bob Spitz has written major biographies of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and now the Rolling Stones — but also, somehow, Ronald Reagan and Julia Child. In rock, his credentials were hard won: he started out hustling gigs for an unknown Bruce Springsteen for six years, moved on to handling Elton John’s American business, and spent long enough in the world to find himself jamming with Paul McCartney and chatting with Bob Dylan on a stoop in the Village. The Reagan and Julia Child books are harder to explain, and perhaps that’s the point—Spitz seems to do his best work when he has no business writing the book at all.
Tyler and Bob discuss how the Stones became so great so quickly, what they added to the blues, how their melodies stack up against the Beatles’, whether Exile on Main Street deserves its canonical status, which songs are most underrated, what Charlie Watts actually got out of playing in a rock band, the rise and fall of Brian Jones, how the Stones outlasted nearly everyone, the influence of Mick’s London School of Economics training, why popular music has lost its cultural influence, what we should still be asking Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, whether the Beatles’ breakup was good for the world, how senile Reagan really was in his second term and whether he was ever truly a communist, how good a cook Julia Child actually was, his next book on Lennon’s second act, and much more.
Excerpt:
SPITZ: Mick, from a very early age, was an exercise freak.
As we know from my investigation in the book, Mick’s father was the Jack Lalanne of the United Kingdom. He had a television show, an exercise show like Richard Simmons, and he always had a great person to show off the exercises, young Michael. He would say, Mike, get down, show him 50 pushups. Mike, do 100 chins, and Mick would jump to it and do it. That man still has a 27-inch waist at the age of 83.
Keith, on the other hand, is a medical miracle.
And this:
COWEN: Mick once said his favorite economist was Friedrich A. Hayek. Do you know anything more about that?
SPITZ: I do not, actually. I think it’s incredible that Mick had favorite economists. We do know that Mick was a scholarship student to the London School of Economics, and that for two and a half years, he attended and got pretty good grades. He did fairly well. The one thing that amazes me about Mick coming out of that London School of Economics is this. After 1967, when Andrew Loog Oldham stopped managing the Stones, they have never had another manager. They’ve had some money managers, but as far as managers go, Mick Jagger was their manager.
And:
COWEN: How good a cook was Julia Child? That’s another of your biographies. Actually, how good was she?
SPITZ: She was great. She was a wonderful person, but here’s the little secret. Julia was a great cooking teacher, but not a very good cook. There were people who left her house—and John Updike told me this. He was a frequent guest with her. Corby Kummer, who was a wonderful food writer, told me this as well. They’d leave Julia’s house. They’d go to a little park around the corner, and they’d get physically ill. They’d get sick. Julia used too much butter, too much cream. She really had no reins on her when it came to using things like that.
Bob was excellent throughout, and I very much enjoyed his new biography of the Rolling Stones.