Tuesday assorted links
1. Lakers’ LeBron James shocked to learn he has played against 35 percent of all players in NBA history.
2. Affordability is about output, not prices.
3. “In this cohort study including 22.7 million vaccinated individuals and 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals, vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 and no increased risk of all-cause mortality over a median follow-up of 45 months.” In reality, that debate has been over for some time now, but you can take this as a final confirmation.
5. Is there a market for this cinematic ape bathrobe? (NYT)
6. Latin American immigration to Spain (NYT).
Three Nobel lectures in economic science
Crime and the Welfare State
Several recent papers claim that expanding programs like Medicaid reduces crime (e.g. here). I’ve been skeptical, not because of weaknesses in any particular paper, but just because the results feel a bit too aligned with social-desirability bias and we know that the underlying research designs can be fragile. As a result, my priors haven’t moved much. The first paper using a genuine randomized controlled trial now reports no effect of Medicaid expansion on crime.
Those involved with the criminal justice system have disproportionately high rates of mental illness and substance-use disorders, prompting speculation that health insurance, by improving treatment of these conditions, could reduce crime. Using the 2008 Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, which randomly made some low-income adults eligible to apply for Medicaid, we find no statistically significant impact of Medicaid coverage on criminal charges or convictions. These null effects persist for high-risk subgroups, such as those with prior criminal cases and convictions or mental health conditions. In the full sample, our confidence intervals can rule out most quasi-experimental estimates of Medicaid’s crime-reducing impact.
Finkelstein, Miller, and Baicker (WP).
It could still be the case that very targeted interventions–say making sure that released criminals get access to mental health care–could do some good but there’s unlikely to be any general positive effect.
A similar story is found in Finland where a large RCT on a guaranteed basic income found zero effect on crime
This paper provides the first experimental evidence on the impact of providing a guaranteed basic income on criminal perpetration and victimization. We analyze a nationwide randomized controlled trial that provided 2,000 unemployed individuals in Finland with an unconditional monthly payment of 560 Euros for two years (2017-2018), while 173,222 comparable individuals remained under the existing social safety net. Using comprehensive administrative data on police reports and district court trials, we estimate precise zero effects on criminal perpetration and victimization. Point estimates are small and statistically insignificant across all crime categories. Our confidence intervals rule out reductions in perpetration of 5 percent or more for crime reports and 10 percent or more for criminal charges.
Quantifying human-AI synergy
From Christoph Riedl and Ben Weidmann:
We introduce a novel Bayesian Item Response Theory framework to quantify human–AI synergy, separating individual and collaborative ability while controlling for task difficulty in interactive settings. Unlike standard static benchmarks, our approach models human–AI performance as a joint process, capturing both user-specific factors and moment-to-moment fluctuations. We validate the framework by applying it to human–AI benchmark data (n=667) and find significant synergy. We demonstrate that collaboration ability is distinct from individual problem-solving ability. Users better able to infer and adapt to others’ perspectives achieve superior collaborative performance with AI–but not when working alone. Moreover, moment-to-moment fluctuations in perspective taking influence AI response quality, highlighting the role of dynamic user factors in collaboration. By introducing a principled framework to analyze data from human-AI collaboration, interactive benchmarks can better complement current single-task benchmarks and crowd-assessment methods. This work informs the design and training of language models that transcend static prompt benchmarks to achieve adaptive, socially aware collaboration with diverse and dynamic human partners.
Here is a useful tweet storm on the work. I do not love how the abstract is written, I would stress these sentences: “We demonstrate that collaboration ability is distinct from individual problem-solving ability. Users better able to infer and adapt to others’ perspectives achieve superior collaborative performance with AI–but not when working alone. Moreover, moment-to-moment fluctuations in perspective taking influence AI response quality, highlighting the role of dynamic user factors in collaboration.”
Ford Madox Ford on Joseph Conrad
And, above all things else, as the writer has somewhere pointed out, Conrad was a politician. He loved the contemplation of humanity pulling away at the tangled skeins of parties or of alliances. Until, suddenly a strand gave, a position cleared up, a ministry was solidly formed, a dynasty emerged. He was, that is to say a student of politics, without prescription, without dogma, and, as a Papist, with a profound disbelief in the perfectibility of human institutions. The writer never saw Conrad read any book of memoirs except those of Maxime Ducamp and the Correspondence of Flaubert; those we read daily together over a space of years. But somewhere in the past Conrad had read every imaginable and unimaginable volume of politicians’ memoirs, Mme de Campan, the Duc d’Audiffret Pasquier, Benjamin Constant, Karoline Bauer, Sir Horace Rumbold, Napoleon the Great, Napoleon III, Benjamin Franklin, Assheton Smith, Pitt, Chatham, Palmerston, Parnell, the late Queen Victoria, Dilke, Morley…. There was no memoir of all these that he had missed or forgotten—down to Il Principe or the letters of Thomas Cromwell. He could suddenly produce an incident from the life of Lord Shaftesbury and work it into Nostromo: which was the political history of an imagined South American Republic. That was one of the secrets of his greatness.
But certainly he had no prescription. Revolutions were to him always anathema since, he was accustomed to declare, all revolutions always have been, always must be, nothing more in the end than palace intrigues: intrigues either for power within, or for the occupancy of, a palace. The journalists’ bar in the palace of the Luxemburg where sits the present Senate of the Third Republic was once the bedchamber of Marie de Medicis. That is not to say that Conrad actively desired the restoration of the Bourbons: he would have preferred the journalists to remain where[Pg 60] they were rather than have any revolution at all. All revolutions are an interruption of the processes of thought and of the discovery of a New Form … for the novel.
The short book, online and free, is interesting throughout. Ford knew Conrad well, and appreciated him at a deep level.
Does studying economics and business make students more conservative?
College education is a key determinant of political attitudes in the United States and other countries. This paper highlights an important source of variation among college graduates: studying different academic fields has sizable effects on their political attitudes. Using surveys of about 300,000 students across 500 U.S. colleges, we find several results. First, relative to natural sciences, studying social sciences and humanities makes students more left-leaning, whereas studying economics and business makes them more right-leaning. Second, the rightward effects of economics and business are driven by positions on economic issues, whereas the leftward effects of humanities and social sciences are driven by cultural ones. Third, these effects extend to behavior: humanities and social sciences increase activism, while economics and business increase the emphasis on financial success. Fourth, the effects operate through academic content and teaching rather than socialization or earnings expectations. Finally, the implications are substantial. If all students majored in economics or business, the college–noncollege ideological gap would shrink by about one-third. A uniform-major scenario, in which everyone studies the same field, would reduce ideological variance and the gender gap. Together, the results show that academic fields shape students’ attitudes and that field specialization contributes to political fragmentation.
That is a recent paper from Yoav Goldstein and Matan Kolerman. Here is a thread on the paper.
Monday assorted links
1. New Yorker best films of 2025. The full panoply (not always available to actual viewers in advance) is in fact quite good, once the full list is out.
2. Individual home NIMBY in Fairfax.
3. Jerry Muller Substack and intellectual biography.
4. Mick West sides with a guy with 286 Twitter followers over classified intelligence, based on multiple sensor readings. Russian drone incursions are not seriously doubted…except by him (no doubt some are mistaken observations ofc).
6. Scott Alexander on the vibecession.
7. The New School will cut or pause 25 different programs.
8. On new, for-profit cities (FT).
9. Are global aesthetics flattening India’s fashion imagination?
Political Organization in Pre-Colonial Africa
We provide an overview of the explanations for the relative lack of state formation historically in Africa. In doing so we systematically document for the first time the extent to which Africa was politically decentralized, calculating that in 1880 there were probably 45,000 independent polities which were rarely organized on ethnic lines. At most 2% of these could be classified as states. [emphasis added by TC] We advance a new argument for this extreme political decentralization positing that African societies were deliberately organized to stop centralization emerging. In this they were successful. We point out some key aspects of African societies that helped them to manage this equilibrium. We also emphasize how the organization of the economy was subservient to these political goals.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Soeren J. Henn and James A. Robinson.
What has gone wrong with tourism to Las Vegas?
Agitators in the city have attempted to document the deterioration by posting ominous images of barren casinos, conjuring the perception of a place hollowed out by economic armageddon. The reality is more nuanced, but it is true that practically every conceivable indicator tracking tourism to Las Vegas is flashing warning signs. Hotel occupancy has cratered. Rooms were only 66.7 percent full in July, down by 16.8 percent from the previous year. The number of travelers passing through Harry Reid International Airport also declined by 4.5 percent in 2025 during an ongoing ebb of foreign tourists, for familiar reasons. Canadians, historically one of the city’s most reliable sources of degenerates, have effectively vanished. Ticket sales for Air Canada jets flying to Las Vegas have slipped by 33 percent, while the Edmonton-based low-cost carrier Flair has reported a 62 percent drop-off.
Here is the full story, which shows it is by no means an exclusively Canadian phenomenon. Overall, I am happy to see a shift away from gambling, drinking, and “shows for wealthy old people”?
Colors of growth
This looks pretty tremendous:
We develop a novel approach to measuring long-run economic growth by exploiting systematic variation in the use of color in European paintings. Drawing inspiration from the literature on nighttime lights as a proxy for income, we extract hue, saturation, and brightness from millions of pixels to construct annual indices for Great Britain, Holland, France, Italy, and Germany between 1600 and 1820. These indices track broad trends in existing GDP reconstructions while revealing higher frequency fluctuations – such as those associated with wars, political instability, and climatic shocks – that traditional series smooth over. Our findings demonstrate that light, decomposed into color and brightness components, provides a credible and independent source of information on early modern economic activity.
That is new research by Lars Boerner, Tim Reinicke, Samad Sarferaz, and Battista Severgnini. Via Ethan Mollick.
The chess culture that is India
Sarwagya Singh Kushwaha has become the youngest player in chess history to earn an official FIDE rating at the age of three years, seven months and 20 days.
Born in 2022, Sarwagya — from Sagar in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh — has been rated by FIDE, the international governing body of chess, which requires a player to score points against at least five rated opponents in official events.
The toddler’s first rating of 1572 is considerably above the minimum rating of 1,400, having won five of his eight rated matches. As detailed by chess.com, Sarwagya’s victories have come against opponents including 22-year-old Abhijeet Awasthi (FIDE-rated 1542), 29-year-old Shubham Chourasiya (1559) and 20-year-old Yogesh Namdev (1696).
Sarwagya has broken the record held by another Indian child, Anish Sarkar, who set it at three years, eight months and 19 days old, in November 2024.
Here is more from the NYT, via the excellent Samir Varma.
Sunday assorted links
1. The fight over Romansh (New Yorker).
3. Kelsey Piper responds on Mississippi. She is probably correct.
4. Future VP?
5. Is the political allocation of gay representatives skewed?
6. If Arnold Kling taught conservative thought.
7. Noah is right.
My 2011 Review of Contagion
I happened to come across my 2011 review of the Steven Soderberg movie, Contagion and was surprised at how much I was thinking about pandemics prior to COVID. In the review, I was too optimistic about the CDC but got the sequencing gains right. I continue to like the conclusion even if it is a bit too clever by half. Here’s the review (no indent):
Contagion, the Steven Soderberg film about a lethal virus that goes pandemic, succeeds well as a movie and very well as a warning. The movie is particularly good at explaining the science of contagion: how a virus can spread from hand to cup to lip, from Kowloon to Minneapolis to Calcutta, within a matter of days.
One of the few silver linings from the 9/11 and anthrax attacks is that we have invested some $50 billion in preparing for bio-terrorism. The headline project, Project Bioshield, was supposed to produce vaccines and treatments for anthrax, botulinum toxin, Ebola, and plague but that has not gone well. An unintended consequence of greater fear of bio-terrorism, however, has been a significant improvement in our ability to deal with natural attacks. In Contagion a U.S. general asks Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) of the CDC whether they could be looking at a weaponized agent. Cheever responds:
Someone doesn’t has to weaponize the bird flu. The birds are doing that.
That is exactly right. Fortunately, under the umbrella of bio-terrorism, we have invested in the public health system by building more bio-safety level 3 and 4 laboratories including the latest BSL3 at George Mason University, we have expanded the CDC and built up epidemic centers at the WHO and elsewhere and we have improved some local public health centers. Most importantly, a network of experts at the department of defense, the CDC, universities and private firms has been created. All of this has increased the speed at which we can respond to a natural or unnatural pandemic.
In 2009, as H1N1 was spreading rapidly, the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency asked Professor Ian Lipkin, the director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, to sequence the virus. Working non-stop and updating other geneticists hourly, Lipkin and his team were able to sequence the virus in 31 hours. (Professor Ian Sussman, played in the movie by Elliott Gould, is based on Lipkin.) As the movie explains, however, sequencing a virus is only the first step to developing a drug or vaccine and the latter steps are more difficult and more filled with paperwork and delay. In the case of H1N1 it took months to even get going on animal studies, in part because of the massive amount of paperwork that is required to work on animals. (Contagion also hints at the problems of bureaucracy which are notably solved in the movie by bravely ignoring the law.)
It’s common to hear today that the dangers of avian flu were exaggerated. I think that is a mistake. Keep in mind that H1N1 infected 15 to 30 percent of the U.S. population (including one of my sons). Fortunately, the death rate for H1N1 was much lower than feared. In contrast, H5N1 has killed more than half the people who have contracted it. Fortunately, the transmission rate for H5N1 was much lower than feared. In other words, we have been lucky not virtuous.
We are not wired to rationally prepare for small probability events, even when such events can be devastating on a world-wide scale. Contagion reminds us, visually and emotionally, that the most dangerous bird may be the black swan.
Planning sentences to ponder
Planning assistance caused municipalities to build 20% fewer housing units per decade over the 50 years that followed.
Here is the full abstract:
We study how the federal Urban Planning Assistance Program, which subsidized growing communities in the 1960s to hire urban planners to draft land-use plans, affected housing supply. Using newly digitized records merged with panel data across municipalities on housing and zoning outcomes, we exploit eligibility thresholds and capacity to approve funds across state agencies to identify effects. Planning assistance caused municipalities to build 20% fewer housing units per decade over the 50 years that followed. Regulatory innovation steered construction in assisted areas away from apartments and toward larger single-family homes. Textual evidence related to zoning and development politics further shows that, since the 1980s, assisted communities have disincentivized housing supply by passing on development costs to developers. These findings suggest that federal intervention in planning helped institutionalize practices that complicate community growth, with subsequent consequences for national housing affordability.
Hail Martin Anderson! The above paper is by Tom Cui and Beau Bressler, via Brad, and also Yonah Freemark.
The EU production function
The central puzzle of the EU is its extraordinary productivity. Grand coalitions, like the government recently formed in Germany, typically produce paralysis. The EU’s governing coalition is even grander, spanning the center-right EPP, the Socialists, the Liberals, and often the Greens, yet between 2019 and 2024, the EU passed around 13,000 acts, about seven per day. The U.S. Congress, over the same period, produced roughly 3,500 pieces of legislation and 2,000 resolutions.1
Not only is the coalition broad, but encompasses huge national and regional diversity. In Brussels, the Parliament has 705 members from roughly 200 national parties. The Council represents 27 sovereign governments with conflicting interests. A law faces a double hurdle, where a qualified majority of member states and of members of parliament must support it. The system should produce gridlock, more still than the paralysis commonly associated with the American federal government. Yet it works fast and produces a lot, both good and bad. The reason lies in the incentives: every actor in the system is rewarded for producing legislation, and not for exercising their vetoes…
Formally, the EU is a multi-actor system with many veto points (Commission, Parliament, Council, national governments, etc.), which should require broad agreement and hence slow decision making. In practice, consensus is manufactured in advance rather than reached through deliberation.
By the time any proposal comes up for an official vote, most alternatives have been eliminated behind closed doors. A small team of rapporteurs agrees among themselves; the committee endorses their bargain; the plenary, in turn, ratifies the committee deal; and the Council Presidency, pressed for time, accepts the compromise (with both Council and Parliament influenced along the way by the Commission’s mediation and drafting). Each actor can thus claim a victory and no one’s incentive is to apply the brakes.
That is from an excellent piece by Luis Garicano. What would Buchanan and Tullock say?