Early North America was more agricultural than we had thought?
A new study has found that a thickly forested sliver of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is the most complete ancient agricultural location in the eastern United States. The Sixty Islands archaeological site is recognized as the ancestral home of the Menominee Nation. Known to the members of the tribe as Anaem Omot (Dog’s Belly), the area is a destination of pilgrimage, where remains of the settlement date to as far back as 8,000 B.C.
Located along a two-mile stretch of the Menominee River, Sixty Islands is defined by its cold temperatures, poor soil quality and short growing season. Although the land has long been considered unsuitable for farming, an academic paper published on Thursday in the journal Science revealed that the Menominee’s forbears cultivated vast fields of corn and potentially other crops there.
Here is more from the New York Times. The data came from drone-based LIDAR, which has been possible for only a few years. Most likely, much of the early history of the New World will need to be rewritten, as similar efforts are being pursued elsewhere.
The wisdom of Ezra Klein
What both forms of populism share is a tendency to treat virtue as a fixed property of groups and policy as a way of redistributing power from the disfavored to the favored. When I said we needed “a liberalism that builds,” David Dayen, the editor of The American Prospect, responded that “we need a liberalism that builds power” and that the way to get it is for the government “actively supporting the very groups that have been left out of past economic transitions, building the necessary coalition for long-term transformation.”
Every policy, in this telling, has two goals. One is the goal of the policy or the project; perhaps you’re trying to decarbonize the economy or build affordable housing or increase competition in the market for hearing aids. But the other is the redistribution of power among groups: Does this policy leave unions stronger or weaker? Environmental justice groups? Corporations?
Under the populist theory of power, bad policy can be — and often is — justified as good politics. In California, the California Environmental Quality Act is defended by unions that use it to “greenmail” all manner of projects. CEQA is meant to protect the environment, but the threat of unending litigation can be used to win non-environmental concessions on virtually any building project in California.
Here is the full NYT piece, interesting throughout, for instance:
My view of power is more classically liberal. In his book “Liberalism: The Life of an Idea,” Edmund Fawcett describes it neatly: “Human power was implacable. It could never be relied on to behave well. Whether political, economic or social, superior power of some people over others tended inevitably to arbitrariness and domination unless resisted and checked.”
Worth a ponder.
The convent where the Salamancans wrote their great works
Convent San Esteban. It is still there, you can just walk right in, though not between 2 and 4, when the guards have off. Arguably the Salamancans were the first mature economists, and the first decent monetary theorists, as well as being critically important for the foundations of international law, natural rights, and anti-slavery arguments. It is also difficult to find issues where they were truly bad.
You can just walk right in, and you should.
Sunday assorted links
1. “Particulate matter local air pollution from road transport is much less due to petrol exhaust than most people think. More is due to brake, tyre, and road wear.” There is some disputation going on here, but at the very least there is something directionally correct in this point.
2. Milei gives Hayek’s Fatal Conceit to the Pope.
3. Walton heirs to start a new STEM-focused university in Arkansas.
4. Mathematicians encounter o4-mini.
5. What will happen to the federal GSA art collection? (NYT…I am, by the way, happy to auction it off).
Supersonics Takeoff!
In Lift the Ban on Supersonics I wrote:
Civilian supersonic aircraft have been banned in the United States for over 50 years! In case that wasn’t clear, we didn’t ban noisy aircraft we banned supersonic aircraft. Thus, even quiet supersonic aircraft are banned today. This was a serious mistake. Aside from the fact that the noise was exaggerated, technological development is endogenous.
If you ban supersonic aircraft, the money, experience and learning by doing needed to develop quieter supersonic aircraft won’t exist. A ban will make technological developments in the industry much slower and dependent upon exogeneous progress in other industries.
When we ban a new technology we have to think not just about the costs and benefits of a ban today but about the costs and benefits on the entire glide path of the technology
In short, we must build to build better. We stopped building and so it has taken more than 50 years to get better. Not learning, by not doing.
… I’d like to see the new administration move forthwith to lift the ban on supersonic aircraft. We have been moving too slow.
Thus, I am pleased to note that President Trump has issued an executive order to lift the ban on supersonics!
The United States stands at the threshold of a bold new chapter in aerospace innovation. For more than 50 years, outdated and overly restrictive regulations have grounded the promise of supersonic flight over land, stifling American ingenuity, weakening our global competitiveness, and ceding leadership to foreign adversaries. Advances in aerospace engineering, materials science, and noise reduction now make supersonic flight not just possible, but safe, sustainable, and commercially viable. This order begins a historic national effort to reestablish the United States as the undisputed leader in high-speed aviation. By updating obsolete standards and embracing the technologies of today and tomorrow, we will empower our engineers, entrepreneurs, and visionaries to deliver the next generation of air travel, which will be faster, quieter, safer, and more efficient than ever before.
…The Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) shall take the necessary steps, including through rulemaking, to repeal the prohibition on overland supersonic flight in 14 CFR 91.817 within 180 days of the date of this order and establish an interim noise-based certification standard, making any modifications to 14 CFR 91.818 as necessary, as consistent with applicable law. The Administrator of the FAA shall also take immediate steps to repeal 14 CFR 91.819 and 91.821, which will remove additional regulatory barriers that hinder the advancement of supersonic aviation technology in the United States.
Congratulations to Eli Dourado who has been pushing this issue for more than a decade.
Ireland fact of the day
Ireland’s population are the most educated in the world — with 52.4% (1.8million) of the population aged between 25-64 having a bachelor’s degree or higher.
While, of course, the whole numbers of people with bachelors degrees may be higher in countries with a higher number of people, percentage wise Ireland is the most educated; beating out countries such as Switzerland (46%), Singapore (45%), Belgium (44.1%) and the UK (43.6%) who round out the top five.
Here is the link. That would not have been an obvious prediction say in the 1970s. Here is o3 on how this came about.
America’s Housing Supply Problem: The Closing of the Suburban Frontier?
Housing prices across much of America have hit historic highs, while less housing is being built. If the U.S. housing stock had expanded at the same rate from 2000-2020 as it did from 1980-2000, there would be 15 million more housing units. This paper analyzes the decline of America’s new housing supply, focusing on large sunbelt markets such as Atlanta, Dallas, Miami and Phoenix that were once building superstars. New housing growth rates have decreased and converged across these and many other metros, and prices have risen most where new supply has fallen the most. A model illustrates that structural estimation of long-term supply elasticity is difficult because variables that make places more attractive are likely to change neighborhood composition, which itself is likely to influence permitting. Our framework also suggests that as barriers to building become more important and heterogeneous across place, the positive connection between building and home prices and the negative connection between building and density will both attenuate. We document both of these trends throughout America’s housing markets. In the sunbelt, these changes manifest as substantially less building in lower density census tracts with higher home prices. America’s suburban frontier appears to be closing.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Edward L. Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko. The suburbs again are underrated. I am all for the various urban YIMBY ideas I hear, but keeping growth-viable suburbs up and running may be more important.
Not hard to geoguess this location…
Of course it is not in the state of Virginia…
Saturday assorted links
Very Expensive Affordable Housing
In my post Affordable Housing is Almost Pointless, I highlighted how point systems for awarding tax credits prioritize DEI, environmental features, energy efficiency, and other secondary goals far more than low cost. A near-comic example comes from D.C., where so-called affordable housing units now cost between $800,000 and $1.3 million dollars each!
One such unit includes a “rooftop aquaponics farm to produce fresh fruits and vegetables for its tenants.” Another boasts “a fitness room to encourage physical activity, a library, a large café with an outdoor terrace, a large multi-purpose community room with a separate outdoor terrace, an indoor bike room, on-site laundry, lounges and balconies on every floor.”
The issue isn’t that the poor are getting better housing than many working-class D.C. residents. It’s that, with finite resources, the city could fund twice as many units at $400,000 than at $800,000. Secondary goals have overwhelmed affordability.
“There’s the desire of policymakers to ensure that affordable housing meets lots of other goals,” said Carolina Reid, an associate professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies affordable housing costs. They tend to be worthy goals, she said, but they drive up costs, which results in fewer affordable housing units being built for those in need.
A report released in April by the nonprofit research organization Rand similarly said “unprecedented cost increases” in recent years have been due “in large part to the adoption of policies that prioritize factors other than the efficient production of affordable housing units.”
Of course, as costs rise, various groups along the way also get their slice of a bigger pie.
The kicker? Market-rate housing is cheaper to build than affordable housing!
Next door, the same developers built the Park Kennedy, for mostly market-rate tenants, at a per-unit cost of about $350,000, records show.
This is one reason I much prefer housing vouchers, aka Section 8, to government subsidized “affordable” housing.
Avila, Spain
The town has amazing, quite intact walls from the 11th-14th centuries, and also three (!) of the most beautiful churches in Spain. It is only about ninety minutes from Madrid, yet I have not seen North American tourists here.
This morning it struck me to see a large number of Avila children reenacting the “lucha entre los christianos y los moros” [fight between the Christians and Moors] with toy swords and costumes, some of them dressed up like Saudis in their full garb. This made an impression on me because the Mexican village I used to visit, San Agustin Oapan, has a very similar fiesta, and here is the history of how the fiesta was transmitted, dating back to the 16th century. Even the dances and toy swords felt familiar to me. How many of them in Oapan even know what “the moros” are? I recall during my second visit to Oapan I was shocked to learn they did not know what China was, or that there was a Pope, even though they were Catholic. That all changed rapidly with the later arrival of satellite television of course.
In any case, Avila, along with the nearby Roman aquaducts of Segovia, is a much underrated visit, underrated at least in North America.
On German romanticism (from my email)
Tyler,
I’ve been thinking about what might be the most underrated aspect of your intellectual formation, and I believe it stems from Germany. You’ve mentioned studying Goethe closely, and “manysidedness” is a quality you prize highly in “GOAT” (which I’m currently reading during my lunch breaks).
Another aspect would be your sometimes extreme artistic taste, such as your penchant for brutalism or Boulez. This, too, is romantic and German.
Your recent emphasis on being a “regional thinker” strikes me as quite Herderian.
These elements from German romanticism are not, to be clear, predominant in your thought, but without them you would surely be a different thinker.
I myself am somewhat biased against German romanticism, as I see it as a strain of thought that culminated in the Pangerman folly. The second – perhaps even more important – reason is that it disturbed the development of Polish intellectual life. These intellectual currents also distorted French philosophy, which in turn transformed minds across the Atlantic (for the worse).
I’m curious about your current relationship with German romanticism and how you see it in retrospect. Perhaps you could expand on it in one of your ‘autobiographical’ series.
Best,
KrzysztofP.S. I highly recommend Albert Béguin’s book on German romanticism. It hasn’t been translated into English, but you can find a Spanish translation titled “El Alma romántica y el sueño”. The minor Romantic philosophers built peculiar and astonishing systems. Part of me admires their subtle efforts; part of me pities how fruitless they were.
On the mark, that is from Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski. For the time being, I will note simply that the importance I attach to elevating aesthetics is one of the most important marks from this heritage.
I podcast with Azeem Azhar on the speed of AI take-off
Substack: https://www.exponentialview.co/p/ai-and-growth-tyler-cowens-20-year
X: https://x.com/azeem/status/1930226966139154510
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/azhar_my-advice-to-20-year-olds-navigating-the-activity-7335993878912622592-8c9Z?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAACj_5X0Bmd-vBkHG0NIIQdYLk_OwGAcChH8
Youtube: https://youtu.be/3Bc_eXNCvlg?si=J7scE8ukZVxLAGXu
Simplecast: https://player.fm/series/azeem-azhars-exponential-view-2447657/tyler-cowen-on-how-ai-will-reorder-economies-schools-and-spirituality
Friday assorted links
1. Claude, with human oversight, is writing its own blog.
2. Larry Summers on Stanley Fischer.
3. My SEJ piece with Alex T., on avant-garde culture, makes it to TikTok.
4. Per Norgard, RIP (NYT).
5. Is Britain going all-in on nuclear power?
6. “An auto driver in Mumbai is earning Rs 5-8 lakh a month without driving by offering a bag-keeping service outside the US Consulate, where bags are prohibited. He earns ₹1,000 per bag and serves 20–30 customers daily.” Link here.
7. Claims about neurons and light. Speculative and unconfirmed, but if true does not ease the path for ASI.
Ideological Reversals Amongst Economists
Research in economics often carries direct political implications, with findings supporting either right-wing or left-wing perspectives. But what happens when a researcher known for publishing right-wing findings publishes a paper with left-wing findings (or vice versa)? We refer to these instances as ideological reversals. This study explores whether such researchers face penalties – such as losing their existing audience without attracting a new one – or if they are rewarded with a broader audience and increased citations. The answers to these questions are crucial for understanding whether academia promotes the advancement of knowledge or the reinforcement of echo chambers. In order to identify ideological reversals, we begin by categorizing papers included in meta-analyses of key literatures in economics as “right” or “left” based on their findings relative to other papers in their literature (e.g., the presence or absence of disemployment effects in the minimum wage literature). We then scrape the abstracts (and other metadata) of every economics paper ever published, and we deploy machine learning in order to categorize the ideological implications of these papers. We find that reversals are associated with gaining a broader audience and more citations. This result is robust to a variety of checks, including restricting analysis to the citation trajectory of papers already published before an author’s reversal. Most optimistically, authors who have left-to-right (right-to-left) reversals not only attract a new rightwing (left-wing) audience for their recent work, this new audience also engages with and cites the author’s previous left-wing (right-wing) papers, thereby helping to break down echo chambers.
That is from a new paper by Matt Knepper and Brian Wheaton, via Kris Gulati. If it is audience-expanding for researchers to write such papers, does that mean we should trust their results less?