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.
Sectoral shifts in supply, wartime agriculture edition
It is all the more remarkable, then, that within six years Britain’s agricultural output had transformed, more profoundly and at a faster pace than any time since the start of the Industrial Revolution. The most urgent need was to provide a substitute for all that previously imported foreign wheat. In 1939, Britain only had 11.8 million acres of suitable land under the plough, compared to 17.3 million acres of grass and pastureland. Four years later those figures had been almost exactly reversed — to 17.3 million and 11.4 million acres respectively. The amount of tillage soil devoted to wheat had doubled. Just over 4.2 million harvested tons of wheat, barley and oats had become 7.6 million tons. By 1943 the potato crop was almost twice as big as it had been in 1939. Less pastureland meant fewer animals, and so a veritable massacre on pork and poultry farms ensued. By 1943 there were almost 30 million fewer British chickens and 2.2 million fewer pigs than pre-war numbers. Cows were spared — but strictly for milk production, not beef.
That is from the new and excellent book by Alan Allport, Advance Britannia: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1942-1945.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Seb Krier. Put your LLMs in dialogue with each other.
2. Cows use tools (NYT).
3. Choctaw Hayride.
4. Finland will be switching off its last remaining landlines.
5. Scepticism about the UK productivity comeback.
6. “In one of his final acts in office, Gov. Philip D. Murphy signed a bill on Monday requiring third, fourth and fifth graders to learn cursive.” (NYT, why?)
Measuring Efficiency and Equity Framing in Economics Research
Using LLMs:
We measure how frontier research frames what is normatively at stake along the efficiency and equity dimension. We develop and validate an LLM-based measurement pipeline and apply it to 27,464 full-text journal articles from 1950 to 2021. Efficiency focused framing rises through the late 1980s, then declines as equity related framing expands after 1990, especially in applied work and policy evaluations. By 2021, papers with an equity component are about as common as papers framed purely around efficiency. President transmittal letters in the Economic Report of the President show a similar post 1990 shift toward equity, providing an external benchmark.
Here is the new NBER working paper by . I take this to be a sign of radical decline in the quality of our profession. I am all for welfare economics considering values other than efficiency. How about liberty, opportunity, and merit? Actual people, especially Americans, care about those too. The longstanding focus on equity as the relevant alternative to efficiency is one of the most blatant politicizations of economic research you will find. Most people doing it are not even aware of that, they simply take for granted that is the relevant trade-off.
Indicate precisely what you mean to say…
The book I was reading is titled Encounters and Reflections: Conversations with Seth Benardete, here is one excerpt:
Michael: What was [Allan] Bloom like when you first met him?
Seth: He was supersensitive to people’s defects. He had antennae out, he knew exactly…
Robert: People’s weak spots?
Seth: Oh yes, it was extraordinary.
Ronna: You continued talking to Bloom often over the years, didn’t you?
Seth: Pretty often. But he was often was distracted. He got impatient if you could not say what you wanted to say in more than half a sentence.
Robert: The pressure of the sound bite.
Seth: I remember the last time he came. He was about to write the book and he asked me what I thought the Phaedrus was about. I summed it up in a sentence, and it didn’t make any impressions.
Ronna: Do you remember what the sentence was?
Seth: Something about the second speech turning into the third speech, and how this was connected to the double character of the human being. I managed to get it into one sentence, but it wasn’t something he wanted to hear.
A fun book. For all the criticisms you hear of Straussians, the few I have known I find are quite willing to speak their actual views and state of mind very clearly and directly.
What happens when dating goes online?
This paper studies how online dating platforms have impacted marital outcomes, assortative matching, and sexually transmitted disease (STD) rates in the United States. We construct county-level measures of online dating usage using data from website-based platforms (2002-2013) and mobile app-based platforms (2017-2023). Leveraging county-level variation and an instrumental variable strategy, we show in the desktop era, a 1% increase in online dating sessions raises divorce rates by 0.50%, while in the mobile era, a 1% increase in online dating activity lowers marriage and divorce rates by 0.40% and 0.33%, respectively. We also document shifts in assortative matching. Desktop sites reduce sorting along education and employment dimensions, whereas mobile sites reduce sorting by employment, but increase sorting by race. Across both eras, we find no evidence that greater online dating usage increases average STD rates. Average effects are negative or statistically insignificant, but are positive for some subpopulations. We develop a search and matching model where technological changes impact search costs, market size, and market noise can explain our empirical findings.
That is from a new paper by Daniel Ershov, Jessica Fong, and Pinar Yildirim. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Tuesday assorted links
1. European T-Bill sales are not an effective threat.
2. Is the 1963 The Essex hit song “Easier Said than Done” actually about a white woman who cannot bring herself to confess her love for a black man?
3. New Zealand is contracting (NYT). And Knausgaard overview (NYT).
6. In America, would fewer bus stops be better?
8. China fact of the day: “Put differently, there were fewer births in China in 2025 than in 1776”
9. Does the Japanese bond shock mean tighter global liquidity?
The Most Significant Discovery in the History of Biblical Studies
The great biblical scholar, Bart Ehrman, gave his retirement lecture at UNC. It’s an excellent overview on the theme of the most significant discovery in the history of biblical studies. After encomiums, Bart starts around the 13:30 mark with about 10 minutes of amusing biography. He gets into the meat of the lecture at 24:38 which is where it is cued.
Keeping matters in perspective
Moreover, China’s expanding leadership in scientific production has not translated into a commensurate shift in global diffusion and integration. Elite research remains disproportionately focused on US topics (40% of breakthrough publications), and citations to Chinese research disproportionately come from within China rather than from other regions, even for top-tier science.
That is from a new NBER working paper on the geography of science, by
Fear of larger wars in East Africa
This is one of my major worries for 2026 and beyond. The ethnic and tribal conflict in Ethiopia is not finished, and it killed 700,000 people not long ago. Ethiopia still covets sea access and Eritrea, which at times in the past belong to Ethiopia anyway. Israel has recognized Somaliland, with a variety of other countries, including the United States, likely to follow. For Somalia, that is akin to an act of war because it dismembers what they perceive as their country. Somalia and Ethiopia still have troubles. Ethiopia and Egypt have a major dispute over water rights, a possible casus belli.
The United States, and thus other countries too, might recognize South Yemen, in an attempt to better control Gulf access. This is not nominally Africa but it is a very real African issue as well.
Saudi and UAE are no longer close in a manner that enable them to collectively bring order to the area. More generally, political property rights are weak in the region, many borders are contested, and there is no generally acknowledged legitimate referee. UAE is seeking to play a larger role, perhaps with a good deal of hubris. Trump is Trump.
The battles in the Sudans may be spiraling into a larger regional conflict. There is also Rwanda and the Congo region.
So I am worried.
Is there a British productivity comeback?
Let us hope:
Britain is seeing early signs of a long-awaited turnaround of its productivity woes, according to an alternative measure that suggests output per hour worked has risen at a pace not seen since before the financial crisis.
The Resolution Foundation said a “blistering” productivity surge has been masked by problems with official statistics and pointed to encouraging indications of a clearout of “zombie” firms that contribute little to the economy.
Productivity growth, when measured using the Office for National Statistics’ troubled Labour Force Survey, was just 1.1% in the year through the third quarter of 2025. But the figures look far better when based on employee payrolls data that are more trusted by economists, the think tank said.
“Productivity was essentially flat between the pre-pandemic peak of Q4 2019 and post-pandemic trough of Q1 2024, but it has grown by a blistering 3.4% in the six quarters after that, a rate not seen since before the financial crisis,” the Resolution Foundation said in a report published Monday. Those gains are more than the previous seven years combined, it added.
Here is more from Bloomberg. I will update you on this as I learn more.
Monday assorted links
1. Republican investigators are not finding much electoral fraud (NYT).
2. New Yorker interview with Amanda Seyfrieds (of Ann Lee fame). An interesting movie, by the way. 28 Years Later is also very good, though too gory for most people, myself included. Watch it if you can.
4. Why it is hard to run Venezuela (NYT).
6. Hunter Thompson, belated and stochastic RIP (NYT).
7. Ralph Towner, RIP (NYT).
Greenland fact of the day
Greenland held a referendum on 23 February 1982 and voted to leave the European Communities / European Economic Community (EEC) (about 52–53% for leaving).
GPT link. They left in 1985.
I write this not to justify current American policy, which I consider a major mistake with extremely poor execution. Rather the point is that we are pushing the Greenlanders into the arms of the Danes, when over some longer haul it could be very different.
The FT offers many more interesting facts about Greenland, including its growing dependence on Asian foreign labor.