The show so far, DOGE edition
Round one is over, and so far no progress and indeed steps backwards:
President-elect Donald Trump’s last-minute demands for a congressional funding package were rejected by dozens of Republicans this week, foreshadowing the legislative challenges he could face next year — even with unified GOP control.
The Republicans also revealed they are not willing to shut down the government, and they do not have such a stable coalition in the House, and that is even before they lose some number of seats.
The package that passed the House includes more than $110 billion in disaster aid and a one-year farm bill extension but is stripped of Trump’s demand: a debt limit extension.
There was not an actual substantive win in the final outcome. Not surprisingly, the Democrats are touting it as a win for the Democrats.
And here Vivek concedes the loss.
I very much hope DOGE makes progress on its key issues — excess regulation and spending — but political change is tough and requires some highly unusual and idiosyncratic skills. Keep also in mind that while Trump has a mandate to attack Woke and secure the border, voters seem far less excited by cutting back on government spending and regulation (if anything the opposite?). Government spending is what “makes Washington go round,” and Reps love it, no matter what they may say in some of their more manufactured moments. So DOGE strategy will need to adjust accordingly.
Saturday assorted links
2. The impact of new products on ethical beliefs.
3. Speculative claims about the new economics of open source AI.
4. BBC interviews me about Milei.
5. Grok rates the top economists on X. This seems better than AGI, right? Four of the top tier are GMU-affiliated.
6. A lengthy Scott Sumner post on inflation dynamics. Here is commentary from o1 pro.
AI is Not Slowing Down, Except for Stop Lights
After 25.3 million fully autonomous miles a new study from Waymo and Swiss Re concludes:
[T]he Waymo ADS significantly outperformed both the overall driving population (88% reduction in property damage claims, 92% in bodily injury claims), and outperformed the more stringent latest-generation HDV benchmark (86% reduction in property damage claims and 90% in bodily injury claims). This substantial safety improvement over our previous 3.8-million-mile study not only validates ADS safety at scale but also provides a new approach for ongoing ADS evaluation.
As you may also have heard, o3 is solving 25% of Frontier Math challenges–these are not in the training set and are challenging for Fields medal winners. Here are some examples of the types of questions:
Thus, we are rapidly approaching super human driving and super human mathematics.
Stop looking to the sky for aliens, they are already here.
Incarceration sentences to ponder
My analysis reveals a significant change in political beliefs since being incarcerated. There is an increased effect of changing political beliefs for women and people of color incarcerated. The effect reveals that people of color are becoming, either for the first time or further aligned, with the Republican Party since being incarcerated.
That is from researcher Hope Martinez. And here is the explanation for the mechanism:
The experience of violence and abuse while incarcerated extends the tools of white supremacy in the prison system by influencing feelings of shame, hopelessness, and cultural inferiority, further aligning vulnerable groups to conservatism and whiteness.
Via tekl.
What is wrong with the NBA?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one hypothesis:
The NBA has a salary cap, which prevents teams in major markets, such as the Los Angeles Lakers or New York Knicks, from snapping up all the talent.1 An unfortunate side effect it that is harder for all teams to bid for additional players, or to keep the ones they have. Even when the total amount of the cap goes up, adding more talent at the margin has become increasingly costly in terms of penalties. It is becoming more difficult to form and maintain durable great teams, which makes it harder to elevate new superstars, which is what many fans want.
Think about a casual fan’s impressions of the NBA. They have heard of Michael Jordan and LeBron James, and maybe watched them play or even seen their movies. They know they are two of the all-time greats. The 27th-best player over the that same time span — whoever it may be — is extremely accomplished, but does not attract anything close to the same attention. Superstars are what the game and its popularity are about, most of all with the marginal fans who do not know every player.
It is not surprising that one of the best-known players today, with more than 8 million Instagram followers, is Bronny James, son of LeBron. Bronny has barely played in the NBA and is far from a star; his popularity stems from his family story.
Jordan won six rings and LeBron four, but who is to follow in their footsteps and be the game’s marquee player? One candidate was Nikola Jokic, center for the Denver Nuggets and three-time MVP. Given his extraordinary statistics, he is in the running to be MVP again this year.
His team is another story. The Nuggets won an NBA title in 2023, but since then they have been in free fall. They let some of their key rotation players leave, most of all because of the salary cap. If they had kept those players around, or brought in star replacements, the Nuggets would have had to pay large fines to the league. Denver is a relatively small basketball market, so it made more sense to let the players walk. Jokic thus might retire with only one ring, when he could have three or four and become a truly iconic star.
And this is important:
Of course, there are also problems with the product itself. Regular-season games don’t mean very much, and the median outing is too often mediocre. Optimizing players no longer give their best in these settings. Due to basketball analytics, too many three-point shots are taken. What was originally a source of excitement has become routinized and predictable. And perhaps American fans don’t relate as well to the growing number of foreign players and stars.
Worth a ponder.
The new o3 model from OpenAI
Some more results. And this:
Yupsie-dupsie, delivery of this:
Happy holidays people, hope you are enjoying the presents!
Recreating the past isn’t easy (but is possible)
Hidden above the stone vaults of Notre-Dame de Paris, the 13th-century timber structure that once supported the cathedral’s steep lead roof was so extensive it was known as “the forest”. When the cathedral caught fire in 2019, the flames spread quickly through the lattice of oak beams, each one hewn from an individual tree by medieval carpenters. Around two-thirds of the roof was destroyed in the blaze.
By March 2024, the entire roof frame—la charpente in French—had been identically reconstructed by a small army of 21st-century carpenters trained in the traditional technique of working freshly harvested “green wood” by hand with an axe. (This time, however, the frame is protected against fire risks by an automatic misting system, thicker roof battens and fire-resistant trusses separating the spire from the nave and choir on either side of it.)
After generations of mechanisation, this ancient skill had almost disappeared in France when an association called Charpentiers Sans Frontières (Carpenters Without Borders) began promoting its revival in 1992. The movement’s workshops now attract volunteers from around the world. Among their members are father and son Rémy and Loïc Desmonts, whose specialist family business in Normandy shared the winning bid to restore Notre-Dame’s charpente with Ateliers Perrault, a large carpentry company near Angers with a track record of restoring historic monuments.
Friday assorted links
1. Andrew Batson reading from 2024.
2. On how to test more drugs (DOGE take note).
3. America is suddenly getting healthier. Very much an overlooked point. And: “Higher labor supply in the US accounts for 2 to 3 percentage points in extra health expenditure as a share of GDP and between 10% and one-third of the American health disadvantage.” Link here.
4. Only Oliver Williamson can stop James Bond (WSJ).
5. GMU’s youngest graduate ever has a 4.0 and plays cricket.
6. Security clearance only markets in everything, CIA gift shop edition (WSJ). I didn’t buy anything there, but yes there is CIA barbecue sauce.
Scott Alexander on chips (from the comments)
Those new service sector jobs, LDS edition
Bob Sagers was walking around an indie music festival in Salt Lake City when a friendly stranger approached and asked for his number.
“Has anyone ever told you that you have a Jesus look to you?” the man asked, according to Sagers, a 25-year-old who works as a cheesemonger at a grocery store. It wasn’t a pickup line—the man’s wife was an artist looking for religious models.
“I didn’t really get that a lot,” says Sagers, who is 6-foot-5 with dirty-blonde, shoulder-length hair and a beard he says gives Irish and Scandinavian vibes. “I make for a pretty tall Jesus.”
And so it was that Sagers began a side hustle as a savior.
Models who look like Jesus are in high demand in Utah. That’s because for a growing number of people in the state, a picture isn’t complete without Him. They are hiring Jesus look-alikes for family portraits and wedding announcements. Models are showing up to walk with a newly engaged couple through a field, play with young children in the Bonneville Salt Flats, and cram in with the family for the annual Christmas card.
Since being recruited about four years ago, Sagers has posed as Jesus nearly a dozen times. Others have done so far more often, charging about $100 to $200 an hour to pose with children, families and couples at various locations in the Beehive state.
For the newly sought-after models, the job can be freighted with meaning and responsibility. Look-alikes find that people expect them to embody Jesus in more ways than the hair and beard. Some models said they feel like a celebrity when they don the robe—and get treated like one too. (One felt compelled to remind an onlooker he wasn’t the real Jesus.) Others said they’ve had their own semireligious experiences on the job.
And note this:
Finding a model can be difficult. Areas of Utah with high concentrations of Mormons—who also call themselves Latter-day Saints or LDS—tend to lack potential Jesus doppelgängers. Some men who work or volunteer for the church, one of the state’s largest employers, are required to shave every day and keep their hair short.
Here is more from the WSJ. Via The Wisdom of Garett Jones.
*The Return*
I rarely like adaptations of classics on the big screen, but I give this one (trailer) high marks. Ralph Fiennes plays Odysseus and Juliette Binoche has the role of Penelope — you cannot imagine better castings. The film is fully serious, and understands the classic text extremely well, without being slavish to it. It understands the implicit politics in the story. And while you know the ending (more or less), it is truly dramatic and suspenseful at the psychological level. Don’t be put off by the so-so reviews, how many film critics today have a decent command of Homer?
Thursday assorted links
2. China coal consumption fact of the day uh oh.
3. John Cochrane on Bob Hall and consumption.
4. Are high stock prices and tech stagnation compatible?
5. OECD on the macro productivity gains from AI. One of the better estimates in my view.
Unconventional Indicators of National Aspiration
What are your top indicators of national aspiration? Percentage of GDP devoted to R&D would be a good conventional indicator. What about some unconventional indicators? My top five:
1) Top marginal tax rate
2) Space Program
3) Distance to travel to mother’s home
4) Tallest statue
5) Cultural exports
On these, the US and India perform well. India leads on tallest statue and its space program is impressive for a developing country. Cultural exports are currently low but historically high–I would not be surprised at a rebound. A lot of eastern European countries such as Hungary and Romania have flat taxes with top rates of 10-15%. Israel has a space program.
I am always surprised by how little people tend to move from the family home. In the US:
…80% of young adults migrate less than 100 miles from where they grew up. 90% migrate less than 500 miles. Migration distances are shorter for Black and Hispanic individuals and for those from low-income families
If anything this seems to be down in the US despite the much greater ease of moving today than in the past.
Your unconventional indicator?
Hat tip: Connor.
Why are Top Scientists Leaving Harvard?
Harvard magazine has an excellent interview with three scientists, Michael Mina, Douglas Melton and Stuart Schreiber, all highly regarded in their fields of life sciences, who have recently left Harvard for the private sector.
Why did they leave? Mina tells an incredible story of what happened during the pandemic. At the time Mina was a faculty member at the Chan School of Public Health, he is extremely active in advising governments on the pandemic, and he brings Harvard millions of dollars a year in funding. But when he tries to hire someone at his lab, the university refuses because there is hiring freeze! Sorry, no hiring for pandemic research during a pandemic. In my talk on US Pandemic Policy I discuss the similar failure of the Yale School of Public Health and how miraculously and absurdly Tyler stepped in to save the day. The rot is deep.
Melton also notes the difference in speed of response between the public and private/commercial sector:
Polls have shown that principal investigator biologists now spend up to 40 percent of their time—it’s a shocking number, 40 percent of their time—writing grants.
In industry, the funding allows for very rapid change. There’s no writing a grant and waiting six months to see if it could get funded, and then waiting another six months for the university to make arrangements to receive the funds. The speed with which you can move into a new area is not comparable.
Years ago, the pharmaceutical industry rarely did discovery research. But now, pharmaceutical companies do basic science. That’s been a good shift, in my opinion, but it’s been a shift.
“The computational resources, the sequencing, the chemical screening— it’s not comparable to what we can do in any university.”
Everything gets done much quicker. For example, when you want to file for a patent at a company, the next morning there are two patent attorneys in your office ready to write that patent. The computational resources, the sequencing, the chemical screening— it’s not comparable to what we can do in any university. It’s a whole order of magnitude different.
Our last hire at GMU took well over a year to complete. It’s outrageous. There are no functional reasons why universities should be so slow. Don’t forget, Harvard has an endowment of $50 billion!
Melton also asks whether a new private-public partnership model is possible:
Why can’t we find a way—since many of our undergraduates and graduates will end up working in industry—why can’t we find a way for them to do their studies and their Ph.D. and their postdoctoral work in conjunction with Harvard, with MIT, and with Vertex? There are reasons for that, but we haven’t been imaginative enough to think about a compromise.
Hat tip: R.P.
UK fact of the day (52 snippets from 2024)
In the UK, more than half of crimes are estimated to be caused by alcohol consumption.
From Yuri, here are 51 others, not mainly about the UK: “More countries have produced a nuclear bomb than mass-produced a jet engine.”
From this post on chip export bans:
That seems to be the real Scott from the IP address and his knowledge of our conversation. Plus it sounds like Scott (apologies if it is not!).
I would say this: since I chatted with Scott I took a very instructive and positive trip to United Arab Emirates. I am very impressed by their plans to put serious energy power behind AI projects. If you think about it, they have a major presence in three significant energy sources: fossil fuels, solar (more to come), and nuclear (much more to come). They also are not so encumbered by NIMBY constraints, whereas some of the American nuclear efforts have in the meantime met with local and regional stumbling blocks. There really is plenty of empty desert there.
So I think America has a great chance to work with UAE on these issues. I do understand there are geopolitical and other risks to such a collaboration, but I think the risks from no collaboration are greater.
This short tale is a good example of the benefits of travel.
And if you can get to Abu Dhabi, I urge you to go. In addition to what I learned about AI, I very much enjoyed their branch of the Louvre, with its wonderful Greek statue and Kandinsky, among other works, not to mention the building itself. The Abrahamic Family House, on a plaza, has a lovely mix of mosque, church, and synagogue, the latter of course being politically brave and much needed in the Middle East. Here is Rasheed Griffith on Abu Dhabi.