Bates and Tilley
Bates and Tilley give these complicated stories about why the Dutch and Swiss didn’t develop big, powerful military states in the 17th & 18th centuries, while France and Britain did. But… like… the population of the Dutch Republic in 1795 was 1.9 Million. The swiss were about the same time. In contrast, the Isle of…
I Continue to be Astounded by this Blindspot
There is incredibly strong data that immigration in Europe is economically beneficial and evidence from other developed countries suggests it can be politically sustainable. But not all immigration. Not the type of immigration that is politically controversial. The immigration that helps a host-country is selective migration and migration from rich countries. The politically controversial kind…
Reality-Driven Thinking about Migration and Family Policy
I am refraining from Twitter, so I will be posting here again. “Let me tell you about a New York Times opinion peice that angered me.” A call that has often portended good things. The particular article is by Lydia Polgren. It is basically normie lib stuff. I am not a right-winger, but I really…
California Ethnic
I recently found out that California now has mandated ethnic studies for any student to graduate from high school. I find this a striking fact amid concerns that Trump will politicize the education system. Having taken a look at the model curriculum, it’s not as bad/dishonest as you might think. Now, there is a bizarre…
NVIDIA Holy Shit
Interesting that even though AI has faded slightly from the national conversation over the last year, investors have decided that very important things are happening.
Links on the Biden Admin: Anatomy of a Fall
A notable thing about the Biden Admin is that they made a bunch of basically “Junior varsity” mistakes: own-goals that any seasoned political actor should have known not to do. Here are some of the big ones: Here are three links that explain, I think, how these errors came about. First, in 2020 they hired…
Two Eunuch Advisors and the Crisis of Trust
[Edit: HAHAHAHAHAHA Ezra’s Post-Mortem is basically this same take] I am going to tell you a parable. Consider this my election post-mortem. I hope it shapes your political decisions. Now, I will not try to give a broad range of advice. Josh Barro and Matt Yglesias basically have all the right takes about why the…
On Interruption
The Friendship Market In a well-functioning friendship market, an interruption is a credible signal that you have something valuable to say. At a general level, interrupting is positive-value if the interrupting comment adequately responds to the interrupted comment. That is, interrupting maximizes utility if and only if the person, upon hearing what you say, would…
Inclusive Moral Positivism
In my previous post, I described morality as a system that offers incentives to agents in the form of shame, guilt, pride, and self-righteousness. I argued that moral rules rise and fall insofar as they advance particular purposes. The purposes must be external to morality, insofar as we accept my premise/definition that morality is a…
Against Reason
Compatibilism is the position in philosophy that we may have free will while simultaneously living in a deterministic universe. Many have strong intuitions in favor of it. Here’s a close analogue to compatibilism that perhaps explains those intuitions: Analogue: What it is for a behavior to be “freely chosen” is to be subject to incentives.…
Dark Enlightenment Comes for the American Civic Religion, and it Might be a Huge Headache for HR.
SFFA was not a weird decision. The court held that you couldn’t legally use race preferences in choosing students. This was unsurprising, since race preference were already illegal in almost any other domain. Apparently a lot of people did not know that latter fact: It is illegal to have explicit race preferences in hiring! Even…
Wow, California Governance Really is Awful
New Noahpinion guest-piece by a twitter guy I like. The claim is that California has terrible educational results and this is because the education is bad. The really damning graphic is this one: The graph certainly makes California look bad, and the score isn’t an outlier. California in the past decade has consistently been in…
There is a Giant Elite Conspiracy to Force New Yorker Liberalism on the Public. This is Maybe Fine.
[Edit: yet another very important economist, Daron Acemoglu, chimes in to say he doesn’t believe the Card data:] One thing that surprises me when talking to people who are slightly to the left of me, is that they often think that the “elite” or the “academy” is biased in favor of the right: imperialism, capitalism,…
Let’s Very Quickly Get Clear on Something
I want something to be very clear about Harvard v. SFFA. Harvard’s claim was this: “Asians just have terrible personalities. It’s not visible from their academics, choice of curricula, or extra-curriculars, which are great. Nor is it visible to their teachers, guidance counselors, or alumni-interviewers. The only people who can see Asian applicants’ terrible personalities…
Dans mon Jardin, S’il Vous Plait!
[Edit: lol an Economist writer clearly read this blog post as well and just published an article about it: https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1684770461597716480%5D This may be one of the funnier things I have ever read: France is rich because it gets the big things basically right. Housing supply there is freer: the overall geographic extent of Paris’s metropolitan…
If Jesse Singal is Right about Gender-Care, then the Courts will Handle it Pretty Well.
Traditionally, the best respected gender care for youth was provided under the “Dutch Protocol.” The Dutch protocol uses a diagnostic model, whereby a clinician’s job is to decide what care is appropriate. The protocol requires heavy psychological testing and psychotherapy, then perhaps puberty blockers, hormones, or surgeries, depending on what the clinician considers appropriate. For…
Journalists are Surprisingly Careless About Defamation.
Sarah Jane Comrie is a random woman who was recently caught in the vortex of a scandal. She is white, and recently found herself in a dispute with some black teens over who had the right to use a citi-bike that either she or the teens had paid for. A video of this incident went…
A Legal Analysis of the Jordan Neeley Case
The Jordan Neely case is complicated enough that it could be on a criminal law issue spotter. You should not be surprised if Daniel Penny is acquitted. But he might also be convicted of 2nd degree manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide. Any of these is a plausible verdict. But Penny is probably going to get…
Hmm.
New article in the Nation about how swimming is especially transphobic. There is a particularly interesting passage: World Aquatics, the international federation that governs the sport of swimming, released a new transgender participation policy in July 2022 that essentially bans trans women from competing by creating incredibly restrictive requirements for their inclusion. (As I have written previously, there…
Wow, Dean Heather Gerken actually killed the US News Rankings.
New US News law school rankings came out and they’re a shitshow. A Duke/Harvard tie is just silly. No student has a hard decision between Harvard and Duke unless their parents are in Durham and are hospitalized. Harvard probably has the best legal faculty in the world. [NOTE: lol, no, I do not go to…
I May Have Been Right About Tests
A while ago I said that colleges faced a vicious cycle that made them all go SAT blind: Was that model right? It looks like it was. Why do I say that? Because a bunch of law deans have objected to a policy that would allow law schools to not require LSATs. If a law…
American Iconoclasm
People like tearing down confederate monuments. Seems largely sensible. Some worry there is a slippery slope. Circa 2016 the respectable position was to deny that such a slope existed: no-one would desanctify the good-but-problematic guys like George Washington. Then in 2020 people tore down some statues of George Washington in Portland. To be fair, that…
Institutions are the smartest dumbest.
One of the classic SlateStarCodex posts is about how pathetically easy it is to be smarter than institutions. Here is a great example of that. Robert Contee is chief of metropolitan police, saying that violent crime in DC has fallen in DC since 2015, and Robert Contee is obviously, obviously incorrect. If you’ve been in…
Big Eureka
Big Eureka. Unironically, Big Eureka is probably the best YIMBY idea out there. Let me explain. One bizarre thing about the NorCal/SoCal divide is that “Northern California” is actually in the middle of the state. The actual northern part of California is mostly just wilderness, except for the dying industrial centers of Chico and Redding,…
A Socially Conservative Vision for the United States
I consider myself a social conservative. By that I mean that I would endorse the following package of laws, which are aimed at the suppression of vice. Rule 1: All names for babies must be chosen from a list of ~1,000. If you wish to choose a name not on the list, you must document…
About Me
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Everyone’s Understanding of Redlining is Wrong
Everyone’s talking about redlining, but most of these discussions are bad. Very few people actually know what it was, and even fewer know its effects. Redlining improved housing affordability for black Americans, especially poor ones. Neighborhoods weren’t “red lined” because they were black. Neighborhoods became black because they were red lined, and red lining improved…
Elon’s Battle Against Substack is Probably Illegal
Twitter has a new policy that any tweets with links to Substack cannot be retweeted, liked, or commented on. The reason is pretty obvious: Substack is a competitor to Twitter for attention and the take-o-sphere. In particular, Substack just announced a Notes feature, which is transparently a twitter clone. This seems like anticompetitive conduct, which would be…
Against Qualification
There is a common verbal tic in fancy liberal non-profit circles of prefacing almost everything one says with some variant on “I think.” “I think the case for that is Exxon Mobile v. Allapattah” “I believe it costs $7” “I’m pretty sure it’s over here” Invariably, the statements so qualified turn out to be correct.…
Rust Cohle from True Detective is a Very Specific Type of Highly Online Guy
Emily Nussbaum is very smart and a good critic, and in particular she is right that the women on True Detective are paper thin. But she is genuinely wrong about Rust Cohle! He is not “a mash-up of Nietzsche, Lovecraft, and the nihilist horror writer Thomas Ligotti.” He is instead a taut, precise rendering of…
A Quick Note on Displacement and Morality
America has a lot of internal migration. She also has limits on housing supply. The upshot is that sometimes, high-wage internal migrants displace the locals. Lefties have gotten very upset about this in recent years, decrying “gentrification”. But that leaves us with a bit of a puzzle: if gentrification is so bad for natives, why…
The Laws of Law
Over the the last four to five hundred years, something very special has happened: Law won. In America, we tend to see the law as the dowdy chaperone of the frontiersman. We see her sensible office shoes following in the spurred footsteps of the cowboy, pushing the roughnecks and cavaliers further and further across the…
No, the Logic in Dobbs does not Reverse Obergefell
[Note: the post below is a legal argument for why the logic in the Dobbs opinion does not overturn Obergefell or Griswold and the other cases defended by “privacy rights”, despite some cheeky rhetoric in the opinion. I wrote it because I saw smart people, including Erwin Chemerinsky, who said that it would. This seemed…
How to Succeed in Social-Norm-Enforcement Without Really Trying
How do you enforce a rule? This is a common problem. Life is full of disputes and full of collective action problems, so many norms have to be enforced. We also have random bad pointless norms but let’s ignore those for today. In these United States, we have two tricks. First, we have a state.…
The Post that was Promised
In my last post I said that real wages for a given class of income have fallen in hyperdense cities since 2000 due to rising rents, and that professional class real incomes there are much lower than in other cities. If you haven’t read that one, read it first because here I’m just going to…
A Tale of Two (Maybe Eight) Cities
American life has gotten worse for the young professional classes since 1995-2000. Here is how we know. In a simple model of rational agents maximizing consumption, the direct implication is that life elsewhere has also declined. This simple model is basically correct. Let me explain: People have to choose between living in a hyper-dense city…
Ranked List of All Books I Read Since 2020
Ding-dong, booklist! Like last year, this is a purely objective ranking of the books I read in Anno Domini 2021. The original languages are (English) Greek, French, Russian, Italian, Latin, and Pirate. The forms include the novel, the play, history, philosophical essays, and self-help. The chronological range is slightly more than two thousand years. Naturally,…
Amtrak Sucks; Publics are Terrible at Choice.
The other day, I spent $312 dollars on a short distance train ticket. This is because the congress of the United States is a scoundrel and a thief. Let me explain. Every year, Amtrak makes a loss and has to be subsidized by the federal government. However, one part of AmTrak lessens the blow: the…
Giving Thanks
This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful that America exists. America was created in quite a bloody way, like all countries (except Belgium) and like all the great American states that predated it, but today we’re a rich happy country that’s nice to live in. People have been down on America recently, and are even feeling bad about…
Oh the Humanities!
There’s an old quote, I think from Megan McArdle, that media criticism dominates blogging, and the reason is because it’s easy. I am about to indulge in some media criticism. Forgive me; my only defense is that the medium being criticized is almost philosophy, and criticism of philosophy is almost philosophy itself, so this is…
How Far can Bentham Carry us?
What is the good life? From that, what is the right way to live? One might propose that both of those questions have more or less the same answer. That is: the good life is having something we are going to call “happiness” and the right way to live is to cause the most happiness…
How the Woke were Awoken
[Edit: Looking back on this, I think I undersell the role of the internet in fostering distrustful and anti-institutional politics. It has such a tendency to pull back hoods, and outrage is the handmaiden of virality. So, take the below as a hypothesis for why one distrustful politic emerged where it did, not a general…
I Come to Bury Tests, not to Praise Them
The University of California just announced it will be going test blind. That means, even if you submit ACT or SAT scores; they’re going right in the shredder. Some people are very upset. Obviously, the first order effect of the change is that they will have an easier time discriminating against Asians without running afoul…
What isn’t regulatory arbitrage?
If you were walking down the street in New York, Boston, or London in 1985 after having been in the rainforest since 1970, a number of things would jump out at you. Put aside for the moment that in New York, you would notice that everything had gone to seed, while in London you would…
Against Monty Hall
The Monty hall problem is easy and simple, and does not deserve the deep confusion it has engendered. I am going to explain the problem, its two solutions, and the situations where they are true, such that a child could understand, in the span of 700 words (two pages of print). Starting… Now. You are…
Against Thiel
Call me crazy, but I think Democracy is probably a good thing. There are clever theories for it’s not. Burke and Hobbes, Polybius, Plato; it may have even been the Take that Cancelled Socrates. I don’t think this is insane; senators tend to be a lot less annoying than congressmen, and part of this is…
Three Theses on Housing
The Northeastern housing market is weird in a lot of ways. By, “Northeastern” I mean, “anywhere that land value is most of the cost of housing”. So: New York, Boston, DC, California, Chicagoland, Cascadia, Connecticut, New Jersey, and increasingly Pittsburgh, Austin, and Miami. These are not normal markets. They are usually described as, “high cost…
Economist Fight? How Stimulating!
Something unexpected has happened on Econ Twitter. A line has been drawn in the sand. On one side, everyone under forty. On the other, every economist over, except for Paul Krugman. The line? How high should our young President Biden reach on the stimulus. Poor Paul himself is torn by indecision. To most people, the…
Minimum Wage, Shminimum Shmage!
The fight for fifteen! What a fantastic slogan! Let’s look at the policies behind it. There’s a lot of fuss over the results of the economic research regarding minimum wage, and I’m not going to link it because you have Google; you can do that yourself. Basically every study finds more or less the same…
What the Hell Happened Wednesday?
[Epistemic Status: I no longer believe this is true. From subsequent reporting, it looks like the rioters on January 6th came in with much more violent intentions than initial reporting suggested.] Wednesday, everyone in America was very surprised. A number of heavily armed men in furry costume overwhelmed the Capitol Police and ensconced themselves in…
Ranked List of All Books I Have Read Since College
Below is a ranked list of all books I have read since graduating from college into the COVID pandemic. The list includes children’s books, 19th century novels, high-modern fiction, sci-fi, and a number of academic texts. Thus, all comparisons are natural and objective. I have ranked them by how good they are. If you disagree,…
Nassim Taleb is making Dumb Arguments about Behavioral Genetics
Nassim Taleb, a lesser deity among Econ and stats bros, has recently started writing greatly about behavioral genetics. Most of his arguments are dumb, and this is why. First, let’s lay out his arguments. Research on behavioral genetics, especially pertaining to IQ, proceeds primarily by finding correlations between certain genetic factors and IQ tests, then…
Indefensible Expectations 