Of course, Fungi also can be deadly—some mushrooms will kill you dead and AI has analogous risks.

I.

You would be surprised to learn that almost 69% of the US mushroom production occurs in the borough of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. It is a small town of about 6000 people, but mushroom-growing facilities around town produce almost 451 million pounds of mushrooms annually (2024). 451 million pounds of mushrooms would occupy about 45 American football fields or 35 soccer fields. The dollar value of mushroom production in the US is roughly $ 1 billion per year.

China is the undisputed leader in mushroom production. China accounts for 93% of the world’s global mushroom production.

That is from Software is Feeding the World’s post “The case of missing American mushrooms”. The missing-American-mushroom angle centers on how immigration restrictions are introducing major supply-side problems.

II.

Imagine I told you that AI was going to create a 40% unemployment rate. Sounds bad, right? Catastrophic even. Now imagine I told you that AI was going to create a 3-day working week. Sounds great, right? Wonderful even. Yet to a first approximation these are the same thing. 60% of people employed and 40% unemployed is the same number of working hours as 100% employed at 60% of the hours.

…

Nor is this argument purely theoretical. Between 1870 and today, hours of work in the United States fell by about 40% — from nearly 3,000 hours per year to about 1,800. Hours fells but unemployment did not increase. Moreover, not only did work hours fall, but childhood, retirement, and life expectancy all increased.

That is directly from Alex Tabarrok at MR. The implied lesson is that AI-caused job loss, while likely disruptive and painful in the short term, would be greatly beneficial in the long run (for everyone) if history is any guide.

Consider both stat links food for thought.

Substack mentioned:

We are not on the brink of apocalypse. The world has continued to warm, due to accumulating carbon dioxide emissions. Of course, catastrophists are still with us, and surely always will be, but research has not supported the claims that humanity faces an existential threat. Most significantly, the most extreme climate scenarios that have dominated climate science and policy are not plausible. As a consequence, estimates of 2100 warming under “current policies” have declined from ~4°C to ~2.5°C. No one need take that from me, take it from the IPCC and UN FCCC.

Most types of extreme weather have not become worse. Floods, drought (hydrological and meteorological), tropical cyclones, and tornadoes have not had detectible changes according to the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report. Some signals have emerged — heat waves have become more frequent and heavy precipitation has increased in some regions. However, the fire and brimstone of AIT remains far from reality.

Those are just two of several points Roger Pielke makes in examining how Al Gore’s thesis in An Inconvenient Truth and the famous speech (a.k.a. sermon) he gave at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting have not held up in the 20 years hence.

Pielke explains that he, Pielke, misunderstood the problem with what Al Gore was doing and how he was doing it. Having thought of it as a science-understanding problem, he missed that it was actually akin to a religious movement of a apocalypticism. Thus, the reason Pielke calls it a revival sermon.

Continuing with another from Pielke, he appeared on The Human Progress Podcast this past week. Here are a few of snippets from the transcript:

Marian Tupy: Very good. So in this podcast, I want to spend most of our time talking about climate change and global warming and where we are. But I think probably the best thing to do is to start with the two extremes in the climate change debate. I don’t like to use the word denialist, but let’s look at that side first. So people who are critical of the dominant view that climate change is a crisis or even a problem will say things like CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are much lower than what they were in the distant past of the planet. CO2 is vital for life, it is plant food, and it has led to global greening, which is a good thing. So nothing to worry about. What is wrong with that point of view?

Roger Pielke Jr.: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of what you say the science supports global greening and the fact that CO2 levels were higher in the past but where that goes away from scientific understanding is the “nothing to worry about” part. Anyone who claims to have certainty about the future, either we’re headed for the apocalypse or “don’t worry, be happy,” that’s not consistent with understandings of how humans are affecting the climate system. It always was and always will be a risk management problem. The late Steve Schneider, who was a famous climate scientist and climate activist I have this in my book he said at one time, the fundamental challenge of climate change is that outcomes could be very benign or they could be very serious and consequential, and we won’t know the difference during the time that we need to prepare. So both sides, I think, on both extremes the apocalyptics and the “don’t worry, be happy” folks are guilty of selectively interpreting evidence in a way that they think is favorable to whatever cause they want to advance. And the reality is that they’re both in that spectrum of possibilities, but smart decision-making has to consider that entire spectrum, not just one tail of the distribution on either end.

And then later:

Marian Tupy: We’ll get to the other side very soon. But the trade-off would be something like this. By emitting more CO2 into the atmosphere, we are making the world much richer so that even if we do have more CO2 in the atmosphere and it leads to some climatic problems down the line, the society is going to be so technologically advanced and so rich that we’ll be able to take care of it. Is there any evidence for that or is it mostly wishful thinking?

Roger Pielke Jr.: So humans are a fantastically inventive species. A lot of your work and a lot of the stuff I read that you put out emphasizes the progress that’s been made in making our material environments that much better off. And it’s absolutely true that fossil fuels, which have the side effect of emitting carbon dioxide, have been central to all of that progress. One data point, a trend that I think many people aren’t aware of, is that the carbon dioxide intensity of economic activity so technically it’s carbon dioxide per unit of GDP that has been steadily going down for as long as we have records, 60, 70 years. So as we’ve become wealthier, we’ve also become much less carbon intensive. And there are good reasons for that, and we could go into that, but it turns out that as a species we really like getting more output for less input, and that includes fuels. And we like cleaner burning fuels in terms of particulates in the atmosphere and other metrics. And so if that trend were to continue, then at some point we do go over the hump of increasing carbon dioxide emissions and it starts going down.

Roger Pielke Jr.: In fact, right now over the last decade, emissions have plateaued in the sense that there are small increases, but they’re within the margin of error measurement. And if you look to 20, 25 years ago, emissions were really going up fast, particularly due to coal consumption in China. So there is a background force that has nothing to do with climate policy that our economies have been decarbonizing. And so for those people on that side of the debate who really love CO2, we would have to intentionally take action to pump CO2 into the atmosphere because the long-term economic trends are in the other direction. I know it’s not as fast as some would like and it could be faster, but the decarbonization of the economy is just a fundamental reality of life on planet Earth.

And then later still:

Marian Tupy: Extreme weather events, especially hurricanes, cyclones, wildfires, and droughts.

Roger Pielke Jr.: Yeah, so I always say we gotta take these one by one. I’ve studied tropical cyclones for 30 years, which includes hurricanes, and the IPCC gets this one right also. There is not any convincing evidence that there’s more hurricanes, more intense hurricanes over the period of record. The IPCC is clear on that. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US, very clear on that. Hurricanes have become kind of a poster child. They’re very photogenic. Al Gore had one coming out of a smokestack in his famous movie. And hurricanes are probably one of the worst places to look for any signals of climate change. Simply, the numbers are small. There’s only 60 to 80 hurricanes on planet Earth in any given year. That’s a small number of events when you compare it to the millions and millions of temperature measurements we have everywhere every year. And the more measurements you have, the easier it is to detect small signals. Flooding, as I said, no detection or attribution. Drought, for most metrics of drought, again, no detection or attribution. The one distinction that the IPCC makes is soil moisture deficits, so think of dry land, which is associated with warming more than it is with precipitation. Winter storms, again, no detection or attribution there. What other events…?

The entire interview is definitely worth a listen. It is filled with his insightful (certainly not inciteful) perspective that brings careful balance and thoroughness to what is so often the fraught climate discussion. The message I always get from Pielke is: The climate is warming (and changing), humans are partially the cause, the implications are complicated and often misunderstood—the devil is in the details.

Here are a few examples.

Occupational licensing is where we’ll begin. Ritz Penaranda writes,

Today, an estimated 25 percent to 30 percent of Americans require a license – permission from the government (typically the state, rather than federal) – to engage in their occupation. Examples range from the unobjectionable to the eyebrow-raising.

Her article, “Permission to Earn a Living: History, Economics, and the Ethics of Occupational Licensing,” is a succinct look at the history, current state, and political economy of occupational licensing including a balanced analysis of its costs and benefits—both pragmatic and philosophical.

On the pragmatic, I found this part noteworthy:

Indeed, the supply-side theory highlights serious flaws in the demand-side argument. First, occupational licensing drives up prices. It decreases competition. And it leads to market inefficiencies, such as forum-shopping (whereby states attract professionals through higher salaries or lower regulatory burdens) or decreased economic mobility (as professionals licensed in one state will face higher transaction costs, in the form of repeat licensing, if they wish to move to another state.) It’s hard to see how any of these outcomes benefit consumers.

Second, occupational licensing appears to function as a polite form of incumbent protection. A recent Cato Institute report finds that “data on state associations for nine major occupations reveal that the probability of an occupation becoming regulated increased by 20 percentage points within five years of… [the] founding in that state [of a trade association representing that occupation].” Further supporting the supply-side, or lobbying, thesis, the Institute for Justice finds that licensing burdens disproportionately affect low-income occupations.

Third, a study by the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University identifies three counter-arguments to the public interest (consumer protection) approach: 1) technological advances over the past 30 years have reduced information asymmetries, so, if the consumer [protection] theory is correct, we should see a decline — not a rise — in occupational licensing (see the discussion of alternatives below); 2) consumer protection cannot explain the wide variation in licensing across states; and 3) consumers do not lobby for occupational licensing, but professional associations do, lending credence to the theory that licensing is motivated more by incumbent protection than by consumer protection.

On the philosophical, I highlight this excerpt:

Twentieth-century champions of liberty such as F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and James M. Buchanan – who were all deeply concerned with individual rights and the rule of law – called for public support (if not provision) of such things as primary education, mosquito control, the earned-income tax credit, or even a minimum basic income. Super-minimalists would, naturally, rely first on voluntary market and reputational mechanisms; second, on legal action by the state to prosecute contract violations and fraud; and only then, as a last resort, on positive state action to protect consumers in cases of information asymmetry. They are careful to avoid policies that encourage incumbent protection or rent-seeking. Their approach involves gradually intrusive levels of enforcement: mandatory bonding or insurance could be a first step, followed by mandatory registration or disclosure, and only in extreme cases would they propose occupational licensing — and only for the most critical occupations.

Turning next to unionization, Liya Palagashvilli writes [emphasis in the original],

In 2023, the contract between UPS and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, one of the world’s largest private sector unions, was widely described as historic. The agreement delivered large pay increases, expanded benefits, and introduced new work rules governing how labor is scheduled, deployed, and compensated. It was heralded as a turning point for workers in the shipping and logistics sector. For many observers, it appeared to demonstrate that aggressive bargaining could reverse years of stagnant wages and restore labor’s leverage.

Two years later, UPS is in the midst of a sweeping restructuring.

Since that contract, the company has eliminated 48,000 operational jobs, announced plans to cut another 30,000 positions, and closed or consolidated more than 100 facilities. Executives describe the effort as a necessary “right-sizing” of the business, driven by lower package volumes, higher operating costs, and a strategic shift away from less profitable delivery segments.

…

It is true that the 2023 contract delivered meaningful gains. Many UPS workers now earn higher pay and enjoy improved benefits. But that is rarely the end of the story.

The question, then, is not whether the gains are real, but how the trade-offs unfold. Why do headline-grabbing contracts so often coincide with downsizing, automation, and job losses in sectors governed by exclusive, monopoly bargaining arrangements? When short-run wage gains are secured through monopoly bargaining power, where do the adjustments occur—and who ultimately bears the costs?

The evidence suggests that this pattern is not accidental, but a structural feature of monopoly bargaining. Our recent study (with Revana Sharfuddin), Do More Powerful Unions Generate Better Pro-Worker Outcomes?, helps explain why the sequence now unfolding at UPS is not an anomaly. Drawing on 147 studies, the paper shows how monopoly union power tends to shift costs into the future, where they often appear as reduced employment, lower investment, and faster automation—often to the detriment of workers over time. This suggests that improving long-run worker outcomes requires rethinking not worker voice itself, but the monopoly structure through which it is exercised.

She uses the UPS example to draw broader points made in the referenced paper. Continuing she adds,

Research on the decline of Rust Belt manufacturing from 1950 to 2000 finds that powerful unions and frequent labor conflict played a significant role in the region’s employment losses—more so than globalization in the early decades. Wage premiums persisted even as investment slowed and firms gradually shifted operations elsewhere. When labor costs significantly rise without corresponding productivity gains, firms adjust over time. The Rust Belt shows this dynamic unfolding over decades; UPS illustrates it in real time.

The ironic twist is that, as argued in the paper and this piece, it is union monopoly that is at the heart of the problem. Whereas unions theoretically fight a monopolistic power (known as monopsony in this case, a single demander), the union itself poses an anti-market power threat to well-functioning markets.

Lastly, let’s look at a knock-on effect from immigration restrictions. Obviously immigration is a key component of well-functioning labor markets—all the more important in an aging, high-skilled economy like the United States. Less obvious, though, is what the downstream effects are from tampering with immigration flows. David Bier writes,

From 1994 to 2023, immigrants generated roughly $100,000 more in taxes per capita than the average US-born person—about 17 percent more over the entire period. In 2023 alone, immigrants paid $1.3 trillion in taxes while receiving $761 billion in benefits—a net fiscal surplus of over half a trillion dollars in a single year.

Here in the 250th year of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations we are still suffering the effects of people of the same trade conspiring against the public and the conceits of the man of system.2 Will we ever learn? . . .

Substack referenced above:

Richard Hanania writes,

I want people to stop giving younger generations names. Except in articles like this where you deconstruct the concept, there is rarely any reason to use terms like “Generation Z” or (God help us) “Generation Alpha.” For cohort analysis, you can just split people up by the decade they were born and get all of the same benefits without the drawbacks. The names of generations used to mean something, and were applied retroactively. Today, we simply assign young people to arbitrary letter cohorts. This is pathological, and likely has had harmful downstream effects.

A thousand times YES! I've always hated and resisted the stupidity that is labeling generations after an arbitrary and fluid defining of what constitutes them and then drawing (jumping to) conclusions. Generation analysis that depends on these labels is not science; it is hokum used by shallow minds parroting real social science.

That said, Boomers suck, Gen X rulz!!!

II.

Greg Lukianoff writes,

All of this is why I resist the very modern expectation that the best speech is somehow gentle, hygienic, and emotionally pre-approved. No. Free speech is valuable in part because it gives us a way to fight without using fists. Self-government is deadly serious business. Historically, disputes over power, humiliation, injustice, and corruption have often been settled with blood, prison, or both. Speech offers another route: jokes, chants, songs, satire, mockery, sermons, pamphlets, editorials, and sometimes gloriously juvenile acts of public ridicule. It is not always pretty or kind, and only a certain kind of Victorian mind would expect it to be.

The lesson he’s teaching is that being polite isn’t always best. This is important to take to heart especially as it pushes back against what is otherwise a good practice, manners. I preach and attempt to practice the mantra of pleasant honesty—disagreement done with grace.

I don’t think Lukianoff contradicts that mantra, but it does suggest that it can certainly be overdone. Not only is there a risk of communication failure by overly disguising one’s position. There is also the risk of insufficient protest. As Lukianoff makes clear: when voices of opposition are stifled, the oppressed are made to suffer. The upshot eventually is even more violence in rebellion.

To put an exclamation on Lukianoff’s topic, Afroman is everything good about America. And whether you like it or not is my point.

Substacks referenced above:

Scott Sumner writes:

Sophisticated skeptics often tell us that people exaggerated the risk that Trump would abolish democracy and become a dictator. That’s true, they did exaggerate the risk.

But these pundits miss the more important point. Trump failed to achieve his goal precisely because people overreacted. A “hysterical” reaction can be a good thing. It was the reaction of investors, politicians, allies and voters that stopped Trump from following through with his instincts.

Trump’s worst instincts are not “negotiating positions”. He really did endorse China’s policy of putting a million Uyghurs into concentration camps. He really did endorse Duterte’s policy of murdering drug suspects. He really does respect Putin more than Zelenskyy. He really did support using force to take Greenland from Denmark. When people panic, Trump is stopped. When there isn’t enough panic, Trump indulges in his worst instincts.

This could be a candidate for my annual New Year’s Resolution—changing my mind. I’ve always thought the right way to think about panicking is never. It is never the “right time to panic”—the nature of panic being irrational. Sumner shines a new light on the question for me. Panic has a place, can serve a purpose. Sad but true.

II.

Veronique de Rugy writes:

Some argue that the solution is the European model of value-added taxes and high payroll levies. Michel estimates this would increase the average American household’s tax bill by roughly $12,000 per year, a heavy burden for the lower and middle classes.

But there’s a deeper problem: Europe’s approach doesn’t work, either.

Look at France, which has everything the American left claims to want: a 20% VAT, top income tax rates exceeding 45%, a lingering remnant of its old wealth tax and a state that consumes roughly 57% of GDP with its spending, among the highest in the developed world.

But with public debt standing at approximately 116% of GDP, France didn’t tax its way to solvency.

Veronique is making the key point of her article on why solving the government’s deficit problem cannot be fixed through taxation. As the title says and article makes clear, “Gov’t Doesn’t Collect Too Little, It Spends Too Much”.

Here in the peak of tax season, this is quite apropos. Our collective appetites for government are too ambitious for our collective capabilities to fund them.

Jeremy Horpedahl writes:

It may be more useful to remove some spending from the equation. In particular, entitlement programs and interest spending are very large spending categories that aren’t subject to the annual budgeting process. Of course, any program is ultimately under the control of Congress, so it’s a little bit of a cheat to remove Social Security and Medicare, but those programs are on autopilot with respect to the annual federal budget process. They are worth talking about, but they are probably worth talking about separately (especially because they have their own funding mechanisms). And interest on the debt isn’t something a President can control directly: it can only be reduced in future years by closing the budget gap today.

Removing those programs — which constitute about $4.8 trillion of the $7.8 trillion in 2025 spending (so a lot!) — gives you this chart:

Federal spending by this measure was about $160 Billion lower in 2025 than the prior year, or about 5 percent. And that’s in nominal terms: it is an even bigger cut if we adjust for inflation.

Horpedahl is answering the question: “Did federal government spending shrinking in 2025?” This is a fair presentation, and one that counts as a win for Trump. Though as he notes in the post, the cuts, which total about $200 billion before accounting for some increases, are certainly one-time hits and low-hanging fruit. The next 5% will be that much harder to find—probably requiring the help of Congress (RIP). And to make even the first 5% last, Congress probably needs to enshrine those executive orders into law. Otherwise the next president can simply restore those categories Trump eliminated with the stroke of a pen.

Turning to the minus, Dan Greenberg writes:

Biden’s pardons eliminated roughly $680,000 in financial penalties (fines, restitution, and forfeitures) owed to victims or the government. In contrast, Liz Oyer, the former lead pardon attorney of the United States, has calculated that Trump’s second-term pardons have forgiven criminal debts of more than $1.5 billion. This staggering sum—composed of money owed to crime victims and to government treasuries—has been zeroed out by presidential edict.

Neither Greenberg nor I are so much worried about the monetary value, per se. It is simply a signal of how egregious and problematic Trump’s use of the pardon power has been. It has been a very useful tool enabling his scheme of corruption.

All presidents have abused it—read the article for more details. But Trump, true to his character, takes it to new heights. People must come up to him tears in their eyes saying they’ve never seen pardons like this. In the spirit of this post, that thought cuts both ways.

The examples in this brief post are a good microcosm for how I see the Trump administration especially in this second term—small gains at huge costs. To say the juice is not worth the squeeze is quite the understatement.

I think that libertarianism is generally closer to the truth than any other political philosophy held by a substantial number of people. It is also the case that libertarianism attracts a lot of individuals inclined toward grifting, conspiratorial thinking, bigotry, and authoritarianism.

Those are the opening lines of Richard Hanania’s “Thoughts on Elite Versus Populist Libertarianism.” He continues,

These are two very different tribes, and it’s an interesting question of how they can both identify with the same political label. What exactly does the Cato Institute or George Mason University have in common with “The Redheaded Libertarian”? To put it another way, how does a philosophy that prioritizes nonaggression and individual liberty above all else so often end up represented in politics and the media by collectivists and authoritarians?

Also this:

Ultimately, elite libertarians are driven by ideas, while populist libertarianism is a strategy for gaining a large audience and a mode of emotional catharsis for those angry at the world.

This is something that I have wrestled with. Namely, I always have felt that the weirdness of those in the libertarian movement and the Libertarian Party in particular was a combination feature with buggy byproducts and something that comes with the territory. Now there are clear fissures. “End the Fed” has become “Crush the Others.” It is a bad development. As Arnold Kling says directed in this case at the libertarian movement, “Have a nice day.”

II.

That the libertarian community if filled with contradictory actors is not exactly counter conventional wisdom for those paying attention. As for something that is CCW for those not paying attention, I offer this from Eli Stark-Elster:

For instance: did you know that daily social media use increases the likelihood a child will commit suicide by 12-18%? Or that teenagers are far more likely to visit the ER for psychiatric problems if they have an Instagram account? Or that a child’s amount of social media use, past a certain threshold, correlates exponentially with poorer sleep, lower reported wellbeing, and more severe mental health symptoms?

If that was all true for social media— and again, none of it is — you and I both would agree that people under 16 or so should not have access to platforms like Instagram or Snapchat. Imagine allowing your child to enter any system that would make them 12-18% more likely to kill themselves. That would be insane. You wouldn’t let your kid anywhere near that system, and the public would protest until it was eliminated once for all.

Great. So let’s get rid of school.

That is from his recent piece, “School is way worse for kids than social media.” The post is filled with substantiating facts and nuance. I find it problematic that the predictable knee-jerk reaction is a moral-panic when it comes to social media and kids. This will all be the subject of a future post in the Pessimist Archive Newsletter.

I find it additionally problematic and frustrating that the failures of schooling as we’ve made it are being overlooked while social media use is scapegoated along the way as an excuse for education failures. This is similar to how the go-to solution in education is “all this would be fixed if we just had [even more] money.” Money alone won’t solve it. We spend enormously on school already. And blaming social media use by the young won’t either.

From his conclusion:

But schooling is a system, and ultimately, it is the system itself that is ruining the minds of young people. Well before 2012, children were still committing suicide in the fall. Fundamentally, school is not what kids have evolved to do: they’re supposed to play freely with their friends, not spend their childhoods performing for adults under constant supervision.

Yet this is our brave new world. For the last fifty years, adults have opted to put their children in a panopticon. Social media bans are yet another brick in the wall.

The kids these days don’t know how good they got it. And the olds these days don’t know how bad they had it. Both can be true while the opposite is often claimed by each respective group.1

Here are some arguments with evidence to support my view.

Start with John Cochrane sharing an expanded version of his recent article “The 1950s: A Not-So-Golden Age.”

Many people say was the 1950s, when, as the fable goes, the economy was growing robustly, manufacturing was strong, there were good union jobs for not very skilled people, and a man (sorry, it was a man) could buy a house and support a family on such a job.

Not so fast.

Look at standards of living. Real gross domestic product per capita, which is also national income per capita, sat below $19,000 in 1955. In 2025 it approached $69,500. These figures are expressed in 2017 dollars, thus accounting for inflation. The average American is about 3.7 times better off today than in 1955. It’s not even close.

He cites a wealth of meaningful statistical measures along with many qualitative facts that are equally impactful. He counters and busts numerous myths held religiously by progressives or conservatives and sometimes both.

Next comes Zvi Mowshowitz who ponders the question “When Were Things The Best” looking at a large number of facets.

He makes a lot of arguments for today as the best version of these various things but not always. Some of them are quite compelling while others I have my doubts about. Sometimes it’s definitions and framing that might make today or some other period the unarguable answer. This is a nuanced topic.

We don’t have the best everything [today]. There are exceptions.

Most centrally, we don’t have the best intact families or close-knit communities, or the best dating ecosystem or best child freedoms. Those are huge deals.

But there are so many other places in which people are simply wrong.

. . .

The Best Cars

Today. We wax nostalgic about old cars. They looked cool. They also were cool.

They were also less powerful, more dangerous, much less fuel efficient, much less reliable, with far fewer features and of course absolutely no smart features. That’s even without considering that we’re starting to get self-driving cars.

. . .

Not everything is getting better all the time. Important things are getting worse.

We still need to remember and count our blessings, and not make up stories about how various things are getting worse, when those things are actually getting better.

To sum up, and to add some additional key factors, the following things did indeed peak in the past and quality is getting worse as more than a temporary blip:

1. Political division.

2. Average quality of new music, weighted by what people listen to.

3. Live music and live radio experiences, and other collective national experiences.

4. Fashion, in terms of awesomeness.

5. Roads, traffic and general infrastructure.

6. Some secondary but important moral values.

7. Dating experiences, ability to avoid going on apps.

8. Job security, ability to stay in one job for decades if desired.

9. Marriage rates and intact families, including some definitions of ‘happy’ families.

10. Fertility rates and felt ability to have and support children as desired.

11. Childhood freedoms and physical experiences.

12. Hope for the future, which is centrally motivating this whole series of posts.

The second half of that list is freaking depressing. Yikes. Something’s very wrong.

But what’s wrong isn’t the quality of goods, or many of the things people wax nostalgic about. The first half of this list cannot explain the second half.

Compare that first half to the ways in which quality is up, and in many of these cases things are 10 times better, or 100 times better, or barely used to even exist:

1. Morality overall, in many rather huge ways.

2. Access to information, including the news.

3. Logistics and delivery. Ease of getting the things you want.

4. Communication. Telephones including mobile phones.

5. Music as consumed at home via deliberate choice.

6. Audio experiences. Music streams and playlists. Talk.

7. Electronics, including computers, televisions, medical devices, security systems.

8. Television, both new content and old content, and modes of access.

9. Movies, both new content and old content, and modes of access.

10. Fashion in terms of comfort, cost and upkeep.

11. Sports.

12. Cuisine. Food of all kinds, at home and at restaurants.

13. Air travel.

14. Taxis.

15. Cars.

16. Medical care, dental care and medical (and nonmedical) drugs.

That only emphasizes the bottom of the first list. Something’s very wrong.

. . .

Once again, us doing well does not mean we shouldn’t be doing better.

We see forms of the same trends.

1. Many things are getting better, but often not as much better as they could be.

2. Other things are getting worse, both in ways inevitable and avoidable.

3. This identifies important problems, but the changes in quantity and quality of goods and services do not explain people’s unhappiness, or why many of the most important things are getting worse. More is happening.

As he makes clear in the post, not all is grand, but not all is lost either. And rightful hope springs eternal.

He followed that post up with another considering “The Revolution of Rising Expectations.” This one serves as an attempted reconciliation of the debate between those you claim "life sucks, you can't get ahead" and those who claim "but every measure is better than ever."

Thus In This House We Believe The Following

1. We live in an age of wonders that in many central ways is vastly superior.

2. I strongly prefer here to elsewhere and the present to the past.

3. It is still very possible to make ends meet financially in America.

4. Real median wages have risen.

However, due to rising expectations and rising requirements:

5. The cost of the de facto required basket of goods and services has risen even more.

6. Survival requires jumping through costly hoops not in the statistics.

7. We lack key social supports and affordances we used to have.

8. You cannot simply ‘buy the older basket of goods and services.’

9. Staying afloat, ‘making your life work,’ has for a while been getting harder.

10. This is all highly conflated with ‘when things were better’ more generally.

All of that is before consideration of AI, which this post mostly excludes.

For those who like a data-rich examination with helpful charts, I direct you to the American Abundance Index from Human Progress.

No, not everything is great much less perfect. But it’s getting better . . .

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay. —Christopher Hitchens

This post from Greg Kukianoff is a great rundown of all the many recent challenges to the principle and right of free speech:

Rejecting European speech codes doesn’t leave Americans defenseless against the worst harms. Laws already exist against threats, stalking, harassment, discrimination and violence. A new category that turns moral disgust into police action is not needed. Disgust is a tribal instinct, and tribalism fuels the fire that reason is meant to extinguish.

Three from Scott Sumner in his post on systemic analysis, which is filled with pithy quotables including the third one in this group itself a quote originally from Alex Nowrasteh & Ilya Somin.

Systemic analysis is all about looking beyond the surface. Most people respond to a bad experience in a business by blaming the business. I do that on some occasions, but more often I blame government regulation. Today, I had a bad experience at CVS. I blame the government regulation that prevents me from buying medication without a prescription. In my view, bad regulations and a bad tort law system explain more than 90% of my bad experiences with the private sector. The other 10% are customer service phone lines.

and:

Environmentalists often oppose solar, wind, hydro and nuclear. Anti-trust advocates often oppose low prices. Immigration advocates often (unintentionally) create a public backlash against immigration. Affordable housing advocates tend to make housing less affordable. Labor advocates enact policies that lower real wages and raise unemployment. Safety advocates make the world less safe by making the perfect the enemy of the good. Civil rights advocates enact discriminatory policies. Peace advocates often give aid and comfort to aggressors. Medical ethics advocates enact policies that kill tens of thousands of people. Education reformers usually make kids dumber.

and the requote:

Nationalism’s failures in the 20th century, from starting two world wars to genocide to jingoistic economic policies that have immiserated millions, rank it as a horrific failed ideology, second only to communism. Conservatives, classical liberals, and libertarians rightly mock leftists who claim that “real communism hasn’t been tried” or that “the Soviet Union wasn’t really communist” when confronted with the disastrous effects of their policies. Those who make similar excuses for nationalism are on no firmer ground.

Bryan Caplan uses the “F” label (note that this was from before the homicides of Renee Good and Alex Pretti):

The world is a confusing place, and major events occasionally help us attain clarity. Almost anyone with a conscience has been troubled by stories about the brutality of recent immigration enforcement. But as long as you accept the idea that it’s morally acceptable for government to arrest and expel someone simply because “he’s not one of us,” the methods ICE has been using make sense. They’re treating the people they call criminals as if they’re criminals. Yes, brutally enforcing fascist laws is worse than enforcing them laxly. But the primary evil is not the methods of enforcement, but the laws themselves.

Alex Tabarrok checks in on the department of unintended consequences:

To let Americans buy smaller cars, Trump had to weaken fuel-efficiency standards. Does that sound crazy? Small cars, of course, have much higher fuel efficiency. Yet this is exactly how the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards work.

One goal I have in sharing these is to get you to click through to read the entire piece. Another is to invite you to follow these brilliant thinkers.

Substacks referenced:

I.

Let’s start with a truly magical example that is factual and very counterintuitive.

Anscombe’s quartet is an example as shown in the picture below where four very different datasets all have the same mean, variance, correlation, and linear regression. See for yourself if you would have predicted this just looking at the graphs.

Those seemingly couldn’t be more different, and they are! Yet they share common descriptive statistical properties to a high level of exaction. The point I draw from this is that math and statistics can deceive us and explicitly be used as a tool to lie1 to us by unsuspecting and (worse) motivated actors. Now let’s examine some cases of the latter.

II.

Every time a big expense comes up, President Donald Trump assures Americans that all the money raised from tariffs will take care of it. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, has been tracking Trump’s promises on how he would spend the revenue going back to the campaign. Added together, Trump has said the windfall from his tariffs will help cover nearly $6 trillion in costs. That’s over 22 times more than the administration’s own estimates for how much revenue his taxes on imports will generate this year.

That is the opening paragraph from the Washington Post editorial board where they compare Trump’s promises of what his tariffs will pay for and how much they were estimated to bring in. The graph is from the piece as well. The boxed region is the amount the Trump administration estimates that tariffs will would have brought in.

The lie is made obvious by the analysis. Without tallying up and comparing the promises to the funding source however, one could easily be duped into thinking that the tariff revenue could deliver on these various, vast promises.

Government spending is in the realm of incomprehensible numbers. We just don’t have a way to grasp them in our heads intuitively. Very big numbers have this problem. I call it a “can’t see the trees for the forest problem” in that we can see that a small forest has lots of trees, but it is nearly impossible to understand how many trees even a small forest possesses. This is all the more impossible when we try to conceptualize how many trees are in all the world’s forests.

Now that the Supreme Court has struck down the major portion of his tariff case as unconstitutional, I guess we will have to make do without the magical math the beautiful tariffs would have allowed.

III.

I have successfully wielded the tariff tool to secure colossal Investments in America, like no other country has ever seen before. By his own accounting, in four years, Joe Biden got less than $1 trillion of new Investment in the United States. In less than one year, we have secured commitments for more than $18 trillion, a number that is unfathomable to many.

That is directly from the Liar in Chief himself, Donald Trump as quoted with the emphasis by Scott Lincicome.

Not only is that figure “unfathomable”. It is also hogwash. As Lincicome points out:

To be sure, Trump’s many threats and tariff reductions will doubtless induce some amount of new investment in the United States. The real question, however, is just how much—especially on net and as compared to recent history. At this stage, the short answer to that question is “nobody knows, and we won’t know for years.” In the meantime, however, it’s already clear that we’re getting nowhere near the number Trump keeps using. Put another way, Trump’s right that $18 trillion in new investment is “unfathomable,” but that’s because it’s completely—and impossibly—untrue.

In 2024 the U.S. had a record $4 trillion of private investment as shown in this chart:

Lincicome generously tries to reconcile Trump’s claim of $1 trillion under Biden by showing that it comes close to the total foreign direct investment made under his term. He then shows that the $18 trillion claim would indeed be astounding and that is it totally fake—any way you cut it, it doesn’t add up.

The deception lies in using very big figures that are lost on most of the audience to make audacious and unreliable claims. These are not harmless lies. They are being used to gain support of the populace for an administration that is pursuing bad ends using harmful means.

Again and again Trump invokes tariffs as a magical elixir that can cure all our woes. He hides behind nonsensical big numbers using confusion as his shield and desire for magically great outcomes as his sword.

We start with Alex Tabarrok.

In 2024, for example, one individual alone submitted 20,089 complaints, accounting for 25% of all complaints! Indeed, the total number of complainants was only 188 but they complained 79,918 times (an average of 425 per individual or more than one per day.)

What I learned recently is that it’s not just airport noise complaints. We see the same pattern in data from the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights which enforces federal civil rights laws related to education funding. In 2023, for example, 5059 sexual discrimination complaints came from a single individual–from a total of 8151 complaints. Thus, one individual accounted for 68.5% of all sexual discrimination complaints in that year.

In the first case he’s talking about noise complaints at Reagan national Airport. So he is making and I am echoing a complaint about complaining. Or more accurately, we are complaining that we should not let the squeaky wheels have so much influence.

The granting of veto power from vocal, vested constituencies contributes strongly to development problems. These range from energy development (opposition to solar, nuclear, etc.) to housing development (NIMBYs) to immigration (xenophobes).

Everyone’s opinions matter (to a degree). But almost no one’s opinion should be unduly powerful much less decisive.

II.

When the complaints get strong enough, the proper answer is often exit rather than voice. And many are reasonably accepting that as pointed out by Jason Sorens:

Some of these rates are quite large! New York, for example, is losing fully one percent of its population to other states every year, on average. At the other extreme, Idaho, South Carolina, Montana, and Delaware are growing by more than one percent of their population moving in from other states, on average per year.

He is discussing the U.S. Census Bureau’s recent state population data release and the latest version of his and William Ruger’s analysis of it. Their claim is that relative levels of freedom (personal and economic) explain the migration trends quite well.

The states as 50 laboratories of experimentation are yielding a wealth of wisdom. If we would only take it to heart letting it guide policy . . .

III.

On the other hand, experiments that should not guide us include non-randomized observational studies on food.

Neither of our pleas changed anything. I asked Claude to estimate how many observational nutritional studies have been published in journals since 2017, limiting to Impact Factor > 2. The answer: 45,000-85,000 studies.

That is from Dr. John Mandrola where he is complaining from authority using a recent study that claims to show that coffee consumption prevents dementia to make a broader point. As he and others scream protest into the vast abyss, these “studies show . . .” keep churning out of the research-publishing factories. The incentive problem is clear: They are rewarded for telling us what we want to hear.

As delicious as the results seem to be, they unfortunately do not stand up to logical scrutiny. As he says,

You should pause there to Stop and Think. Dementia and cognitive decline are highly complex conditions caused by many different conditions, ranging from either vascular disease, bleeding conditions, genetic disorders, toxic exposures or the combination of these. Your Bayesian prior that exposure to one food (coffee) could influence this sea of complexity should be very low.

Another surprising stat:

We at Sensible Medicine had the great fortune to have a discussion with Dr Dana Zeraatkar from McMaster University regarding the way these studies are analyzed.

Her group famously showed using a meta-analysis of meat consumption’s effect on mortality, that there are literally a quadrillion different ways to analyze the data—and doing so yields different associations. Brian Nosek’s group has also shown this phenomenon. [emphasis added]

His conclusion could have made a pithy quotables link:

The three take-home messages are a) don’t be fooled by these studies, b) encourage researchers to resist the urge to perform these studies—especially with taxpayer money from NIH. And c) discourage journals from publishing these studies.

Tying these all together, complainers always have a point. Sometimes those points are valid but insignificant. Other times the magnitude matters.

Substack mention:

Immigrants reduced deficits by $14.5 trillion since 1994.

That’s trillion with a “T”!

The quote above and excerpts below come from the Cato Institute’s latest study “Immigrants’ Recent Effects on Government Budgets: 1994–2023”. It contains a wealth of analysis many will find surprising as well as quite counter to conventional wisdom. And the gravity of it is of a massive magnitude—hitting triple themes here at MM.

David Bier is one of the authors. His recent post summarizes the findings well.

Here’s another way to look at our main conclusion. Immigrants accounted for 14 percent of tax revenue and 7 percent of government spending from 1994 to 2023. Even if the government had not spent a dollar on immigrants, while somehow still getting all their tax revenue, the US government at all levels would still have run a $20 trillion deficit. Immigrants are not to blame for government deficits. Indeed, they reduced the deficit by about $14.5 trillion.

None of this will be a surprise to those of us who actually know and have followed the issue closely.

From the study’s introduction:

The government first began gathering detailed information on benefits use by citizenship status in 1994. The data show:

• For each year from 1994 to 2023, the US immigrant population generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government.

• Over that period, immigrants created a cumulative fiscal surplus of $14.5 trillion in real 2024 US dollars, including $3.9 trillion in savings on interest on the debt.

• Without immigrants, US government public debt at all levels would be at least 205 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)—nearly twice its 2023 level.

These results, which do not account for any of immigration’s indirect, tax-revenue-boosting effects on economic growth, represent the lower bound of the positive fiscal effects. Even by this conservative analysis, immigrants may have already prevented a fiscal crisis.

To head off those who might think welfare fraud committed by immigrants would reverse these findings, the authors carefully account for any fraud impact. In a nutshell—legitimate and illegitimate welfare benefit expenses are in the numbers.

II.

Speaking of welfare fraud, Phil Gramm and John Early recently published an article highlighting the actual biggest fraud in welfare.

Yet even as our economy has experienced broad-based growth, real federal welfare spending has soared by 765%, more than twice as fast as total federal spending, and now costs $1.4 trillion annually. Were that money simply doled out evenly to the 19.8 million families the government defines as poor, each household would receive more than $70,000 a year.

The source of this dramatic mismatch is a fraud built into how various programs determine welfare eligibility: The government doesn’t count any refundable tax credits or benefits that aren’t paid in cash as income to the recipients.

There are two major components of surprising stats in this article. First is how much uncounted benefits actually flow to those in poverty, which greatly reduces the actual poverty rate. The second is how much less it would take to achieve the same result without all the complexity the current process entails—with poorly aligned incentives creating unintended beneficiaries as well as anti-work incentives among intended beneficiaries not to mention the explicit fraud that expectedly results.

The government’s failure to count its largess as recipients’ income allows welfare households to blow past the income level above which a working family no longer qualifies for government help. Take a single parent with two school-age children who earns $11,000 annually from part-time work. The government considers this household in poverty because its income is below $25,273. But this family would qualify for benefits worth $53,128. It would receive Treasury checks of $3,400 in refundable child tax credits and $4,400 in refundable earned-income tax credits. The family would also receive Food Stamp debit cards worth $9,216 a year, $9,476 in housing subsidies, $877 of government payments for utility bills, $16,033 to fund Medicaid, $3,102 in free meals at school and $6,624 in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. All this puts the family’s income at $64,128, or 254% of the poverty level.

A hardworking family earning anything like $64,128 in salary wouldn’t be eligible for any of these welfare benefits in four-fifths of the states. Meanwhile, the welfare family would be eligible for another 90 small federal benefits and sundry state and local welfare programs.

According to the Congressional Budget Office and other independent researchers, when all means-tested payments are counted as income, most welfare recipients have incomes that put them in the middle class, and the proportion of poor people in the U.S. falls from more than 10% to less than 1%.

...

If the government simply gave every poor family in America enough money to raise its income above the official poverty level, it would cost only $240 billion. That would reduce the annual deficit by two-thirds.

There are good arguments against switching to a flat benefit payment system like a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG)1 even if we can assume we could achieve a switch rather than an add on to the current mess. However, we should think about the savings as a very meaningful benefit pushing us to consider such a move. Notably it could also remove the benefit cliff problem. Regardless, the difference between where we are and where we could be in terms of actual benefits flowing to those we actually seek to help is enormous.

From Hannah Ritchie at Our World in Data:

Humans and livestock make up 95% of the world’s mammal biomass; wild mammals are just 5%.

This is a one-two punch on how humans dominate Earth. We have proliferated with +8 billion of us roaming far and wide plus we have converted the animal kingdom to do our bidding as about 92% of the animal kingdom as measured by biomass is our livestock and pets (59% of 64%). This is kind of amazing and kind of tragic. The tragic part is that so much of this weight/animal count is industrial farming. Yes, that is how we’ve fed the (human) world, and that is a good thing. But it is also a bad thing in terms of the conditions for many of these animals. I’ve written before on this ethical problem arguing essentially for moral relativism in this regard.

II.

When it comes to mammals, humans are the GOAT. That is seen somewhat in the stat above. But let’s talk about one of the very few (only two?) humans who can lay legitimate claim to being the GOAT in the domain of basketball.

LeBron James has played against 35% of all players who have ever played in the NBA. — CBS Sports

Argue what you will about the greatest of His Airness, I don’t think MJ comes close to this achievement.

III.

I’ll end with something sad about something happy—no good deed is achieved without hardship.

The Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs has confirmed that at least 468,000 dogs are currently kept on farms in cages nationwide, or at some 5,900 related businesses, including slaughterhouses, distributors and restaurants. Following the ban, there are few clear plans about how the dogs will be cared for, raising the possibility of some being left to fend for themselves in the wild.

That is from The Korea Times reporting on the happy thing (progress on ending dog meat consumption) that has a sad or at least worrisome outcome in getting from here to there.

A picture from the story:

I.

I think it is hard to fully comprehend just how remarkable this first one is from Roger Pielke, Jr.

Globally, 2025 has had one of the lowest annual death rates from disasters associated with extreme weather events in recorded history.

...

If [estimates] prove accurate, that would make 2025 among the lowest in total deaths from extreme weather events. Ever!

...

To put the death rate into perspective, consider that:

in 1960 it was >320 per 1,000,000;

in 1970, >80;

in 1980, ~3;

in 1990, ~1.3;

Since 2000, six years have occurred with <1.0 deaths per 1,000,000 people, all since 2014. From 1970 to 2025 the death rate dropped by two orders of magnitude. This is an incredible story of human ingenuity and progress.

The long-term implications of climate change are complex. I think it has been both a scientific as well as politically strategic error on the part of environmentalists and others concerned with climate change to make extreme weather their marketing tool. Not only do extreme weather predictions not hold up. The fact that man can adapt to them when they do happen makes dismissing the climate change issue too easy.

(Re-read that last paragraph until you realize what I’m saying.)

II.

Speaking of adaptation to a world that is always unintentionally trying to kill us:

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.

That is from a new study published in JAMA.

Unfortunately for some it is still a surprise (held in disbelief) that the COVID mRNA vaccines worked—in the strongest sense of the word. Regardless, this is great news. The breakthroughs in vaccines from this technology will yield benefits of great magnitude for decades.

III.

I knew long-distance calls were expensive in the past. I remember in the 1990s purchasing phone cards at a discount to defray some of this cost. I was still stunned to read this from Adam Omary at Human Progress:

By 1950, the luxuries of traveling between coasts in six hours and communicating across coasts in real time became possible. But these new services were still extraordinarily expensive. Transcontinental flights, both then and now, cost around $300; however, adjusted for inflation, a $300 flight in 1950 corresponds to well over $3,000 in today’s dollars. Likewise, while modern phone plans offer unlimited texts and calls for the equivalent of a few hours of the average minimum wage per month, transcontinental phone calls in the 1950s cost over $2.00 per minute, or over $27 per minute in today’s dollars.

Today that call is essentially free at the margin. The magnitude of the change goes well beyond the nominal cost difference. It means our business world has expanded from small, local networks to global in virtually every domain. We can keep up with loved ones (and others!) instantly and constantly—to be sure there is a downside to this, but the upside vastly outweighs it.

From Timothy Taylor:

The size of the global economy in 2025 is about $117 trillion, according to the IMF. The volume of trading in foreign exchange markets is now up to $9.5 trillion per day, according to the Bank of International Settlements (BIS).

II.

Larry Swedroe updates us on long-term yields for broad equity markets.

And here is the more familiar inverse of that chart for the U.S. portion courtesy of Multpl.com.

This is not surprising to any of us who have been paying attention, but it is nonetheless surprising when we consider the implications. It is extremely likely that the total return for large U.S. stocks will be quite poor over the next decade. That is even with the fact that some years in the next 10 are likely to be quite good. Good luck figuring those out ahead of time.

III.

California’s 5% wealth tax would take 50% of Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s Alphabet holdings. From Garry Tan’s X post (full thread).

While this is by far not the only problem with this tax concept (wealth taxes) or this specific version, it does highlight an unusual kind of unintended consequences. The usual ones would be taking more than 5% over time and driving out current wealth while strongly disincentivizing new wealth.

In part this is inspired by a reader’s request for me to write more on education—specifically what works and what doesn’t. This is one of several pieces I plan to do in fulfillment of that request.

I’ve linked to Professor Gray in the past including to a snippet of the longer interview I highlight below. Long-time readers can therefore be forgiven for their feeling of Déjà Vu.

First I would like to share his recent post on “Helping Kids (and Ourselves) Use Smartphones Safely”.

This is the most thorough and reasonable discussion on smart phone use by children that I have read recently. And I have read a lot on this topic.

In it he patiently walks through 9 benefits and 9 harms. As he argues, this is not a complete list nor does he give a definitive conclusion. We must be thoughtful about this new technology. A luddite’s opposition is as unhelpful as is a completely laissez faire approach. Parents have to engage and fine tune. This is very much in keeping with his philosophy generally.

Second I would like to share his post from July outlining “A Brief History of Education”. From this I will quote at length.

When we see that children everywhere are required by law to go to school, that almost all schools are structured in the same way, and that our society goes to a great deal of trouble and expense to provide such schools, we tend naturally to assume that there must be some good, logical reason for all this. Perhaps if we didn’t force children to go to school, or if schools operated much differently, children would not grow up to be competent adults. Perhaps some really smart people have figured all this out and have proven it in some way, or perhaps alternative ways of thinking about child development and education have been tested and have failed.

…

Children now are almost universally identified by their grade in school, much as adults are identified by their job or career.

Over time, from the early Prussian days to now, certain schooling premises about the nature of learning have remained unchanged: Learning is hard work; it is something that children must be forced to do, not something that will happen naturally through children’s self-chosen activities. The specific lessons that children must learn are determined by professional educators, not by children, so education today is still, as much as ever, a matter of inculcation (though educators tend to avoid that term and use, falsely, terms like “discovery”).

Clever educators today might use “play” as a tool to get children to enjoy some of their lessons, and children might be allowed some free playtime at recess (though even this has decreased greatly in recent decades), but children’s own play is understood as inadequate as a foundation for education. Children whose drive to play is so strong that they can’t sit still for lessons are no longer beaten; instead, they are medicated.

The theories and practices of education began in a most brutal form that included severe beating of children both physically and emotionally. It somewhat evolved into a less physical but still brutal form of forced learning, mainly for the purposes of obedience. One could say, as Gray points out, we have not learned much of how to teach or how we learn, especially in childhood.

From his conclusion:

Schools as we know them began centuries ago as Church-run institutions designed explicitly for obedience training and indoctrination. The curriculum and stated goals of schooling have changed over time, but the methodology has not. We still have today a system well designed for obedience training and indoctrination and poorly designed for anything else.

Think about it. The only way students can pass in school is to do what they are told to do, no matter how stupid and irrelevant it seems; and almost the only way they can fail is to not do what they are told to do. Teachers go into the profession for all sorts of idealized reasons and, generally, obedience training is not one of them. But once in the profession, they are, by necessity, obedience trainers. They reward for obedience and punish for disobedience. We don’t like to think of the school lessons today as doctrine, but when you require students to feed back, unquestioningly, whatever it is you “teach,” then what you are teaching is doctrine. Some great teachers can overcome it, but it takes much effort and cannot be fully overcome as the school structure doesn’t allow that.

Third and last I share the interview with John Papola from his podcast Dad Saves America. Here it is in podcast form and here it is on YouTube. The show’s synopsis sums up well Gray’s philosophy:

Peter explains how we stripped childhood of the one ingredient that actually builds competence: real freedom. We talk about the collapse of free, self-directed play, the fear-driven culture that keeps kids under constant adult management, and how modern schooling turns learning into compliance and metrics—resulting in bad habits and chronic stress. Play isn’t a “bonus” part of childhood; it’s how children learn judgment, resilience, social intelligence, and self-control. The path back to healthier kids starts with letting them take risks, solve problems, and grow up the way humans evolved to.

Gray’s Substack is Play Makes Us Human. There is a lot of wisdom in just that titling. I take from it several lessons.

• We shouldn’t take ourselves or the things around us too seriously. This isn’t a lesson of disregard but of humility.

• We learn by doing, trying, failing, and trying again. Mistakes are necessary.

• The playful spirit of a child is not something to be stamped out. It is something to be embraced. To say, “Though an adult, she had a child’s like curiosity,” is a strong compliment.

• There is no single method or formula, no one way. Again, experimentation and the freedom to try is what builds better people and richer societies (richer in all respects).

Play around with his ideas, and you might just learn something new as well as something you instinctively knew all along.

From Noah Smith,

But in the years since 2007, it feels like that Japanese future has been lost. Living standards grew only 6.5% between 2007 and 2022.:

Source: Our World in Data

And even that meager amount of growth was entirely due to increased labor input — women, old people, and young people going to work — rather than to productivity increases. In fact, Japanese workers produced less per hour in 2019 than in 2007, falling well behind other advanced nations:

He is making the argument that Japan collapsed after 2008 rather than in the 1990s as is the conventional wisdom. His description of what Japan was like before 2008 is remarkable, and his amazement is well placed. The same can be said for his hope for Japan and their prospects despite substantial headwinds.

II.

From Nate Silver,

The rate of field goal attempts of 55 yards or more has increased by 135 percent compared to just four seasons ago, in 2021. And the number of makes from 55-plus has tripled in just four seasons. I’m guessing we’re in for some mean reversion — but so far on the year, kickers are actually converting 64 percent of their attempts from super-long-range. [see the post for clickable source links]

In the post he has a lot of interesting stats on how football is changing from drive strategy to 4th-down decisions (the economists finally won the battle!).

III.

From Andrew G. Biggs,

Americans born in the 1960s and hitting age 65 over the next decade are promised an average of 33% more in Social Security benefits than they paid over their lifetimes in taxes, including interest on those taxes.

His proposed reforms are aligned with mine.1 Namely, reduce the maximum benefit and increase the minimum benefit. In my proposal all seniors would eventually get the same minimum benefit—and no more—making Social Security a universal basic income for the elderly. I would also gradually increase the date of when benefits begin and have that be the same date for all recipients. His reform might be more politically realistic by keeping some greater benefit for higher earners, who are of course higher payers into the system, but that would not be in the actual spirit of the program as a social safety net.

Substacks referenced:

Noahpinion

I want the Japanese future back!

My first book, Weeb Economy, came out in March of this year, but only in Japanese. Since then, a bunch of people have been asking me for an English translation…

Read more

6 months ago · 246 likes · 13 comments · Noah Smith

Silver Bulletin

The NFL has entered the Scorigami Era

This article…

Read more

6 months ago · 158 likes · 22 comments · Nate Silver

It is refreshing and surprising to see how far we’ve come in so short a span of time.

We live in a time of abundance as most importantly seen in the link above. You can also witness it metaphorically and literally by looking at light.

The light that cost 10,800 seconds in 1830 costs only 0.0735 seconds today. The time price has dropped by 99.99932 percent. For the time it took to earn the money to buy 1,000 lumens for one hour in 1830, workers today earn 146,980 hours of light today. That’s a 14,697,900 percent increase. Light abundance has been increasing around 6.3 percent annually on a compound basis, doubling every 12 years.

That is from Saul Zimet at Human Progress. It is hard to overstate the importance of being able to overcome darkness.

Here is more good news:

The FBI will likely report the lowest murder rate it has ever recorded when the Reported Crime in the US for 2025 comes out in the second half of 2026.

That is from Jeff Asher at his Substack. This decline in murder is seen not just in the United States as London had a record low 97 homicides in 2025.

Still more good news: Poverty in the U.S. is probably a lot lower than you probably think it is.

When measured by consumption, the much more appropriate method of assessing poverty as opposed to income especially given our generous welfare state, the poverty rate in the United States is a very minimal 2.4%. It should be noted (1) that this is still a representation of a lot of people not enjoying as much consumption as we would like for them to have, but also (2) that it represents a level of consumption much of the world would find to be quite desirable.

The source for that is Timothy Taylor relating finds from the Aspen Economic Strategy Group.

Another source, PovertyMeasurement.org, finds the figure of consumption poverty is about 1.1%. This was part of a great post in The Free Press by Cliff Asness and Michael Strain. I believe the differences between the two lies in the inflation adjustment. Regardless, this is great and perhaps surprising news. I share the chart of this progress below.

Lastly, you may have heard that the U.S. income level poverty line starts at $140,000. That would be surprising news for sure. Fortunately, it is completely wrong as thoroughly debunked by Scott Winship, Jeremy Horpedahl, Scott Lincicome, and Noah Smith among many others.

Substacks referenced in this post:

The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter

Self-Esteem, Microaggressions, and the IKEA Effect

Welcome to the October 2025 edition of the N3 Newsletter Linkfest: a monthly roundup of studies and stories that caught my eye over the last few weeks. On the menu this time, we’ve got five interesting facts about self-esteem, the first known case of a nonhuman animal whose evolution has been shaped by its culture, a major breakthrough in embryo selection for intelligence, and three new findings on sex differences. On top of that, we’ll explore the…

Read more

7 months ago · 39 likes · 22 comments · Steve Stewart-Williams

Jeff-alytics

The FBI Will Likely Report The Lowest Murder Rate Ever Recorded In 2025

The FBI will likely report the lowest murder rate it has ever recorded when the Reported Crime in the US for 2025 comes out in the second half of 2026. Murder has only been reliably estimated nationally since 1960, but reaching the lowest level ever recorded just 5 years after the largest one-year increase on record would be quite remarkable…

Read more

8 months ago · 33 likes · 13 comments · Jeff Asher

First World Problems

How Not to Redefine Poverty

I tried to let it go. Someone mentioned the essay to me on Monday, when it was a Substack post. I tweeted out some quick thoughts as to why no one should take it seriously, pointing out the glaring problem that I’ll walk through below. I tried to get back to my other work (a paper showing that declining homeownership among young adults is due to falling…

Read more

6 months ago · 99 likes · 53 comments · Scott Winship

Allison Schrager commenting on the Mamdani tax plan:

I know this may seem small compared with everything else at stake in economic policy, including a four-year rent freeze on private property. But the fact that if you earn $1 more than $999,999 you’d owe $20,000 is just amateurish tax design — like something an eighth grader would come up with. It points to outright economic illiteracy — or that no one with even a passing familiarity with tax policy reviewed it.

Michael Munger arguing that government spending austerity is a myth:

My point is more than simple pedantry. While it is annoying to hear the false “austerity narrative” constantly repeated as Progressive gospel, the real problem is the policy implication. If we permit the “austerity cuts caused poverty, we need to spend more!” fable to become the stylized fact on which policy is based, we will not only be thinking of the wrong solution, but we’ll be working from a false history.

Arnold Kling discussing the problem with solutions to the real and supposed problems of extreme wealth:

Philanthropy, as opposed to charity, means giving to a cause, not to a community. I dislike philanthropy, as I have said before.

People assume that because non-profits do not seek profits, their intentions are good. And good intentions are sufficient to make them morally superior to profit-seeking enterprises. The intention heuristic ignores the possibility that the outcomes of profit-seeking businesses can be—and often are—more socially beneficial than the outcomes of nonprofits. We should evaluate enterprises based on outcomes, not on intentions.

Then there is the issue of accountability. A profit-seeking business is ultimately accountable to customers, who are in the best position to gauge the value of what the business provides. If customers do not pay more than the cost of what the firm provides, the firm loses money and goes out of business. In contrast, a nonprofit only has to keep its donors happy. If the services it provides are not worth the cost, it can continue to operate by maintaining good relationships between the executives of the nonprofit and the providers of funding.

A lot of supposed public goods turn out to be public bads. Take higher education. Please. Or government’s propensity to subsidize demand and restrict supply, turning health care, education, and housing into never-ending crises.

The theme of his post is “all men are created equal” and it is full of pithy quotables. Writing at the time in the season of generosity (both virtue-signaling intentionality and true giving), the case Kling makes is quite apropos.

Eric Nelson presents what he calls the most shocking retirement stat ever.

His point is that just like in circa 2000 the S&P 500 is very, very expensive today. That implies a very, very likely low return over the next decade or so. And bonds wouldn’t have saved you—the hypothetical withdrawal path of $50,000/year that he describes (5% of the initial portfolio) is depletive despite the seemingly conservative start and allocation.

Stock diversity was one’s only hope.

II.

Yet maybe there is another. The cost of living continues to decline in important areas like food. In fact as Jeremy Horpedahl demonstrates, “groceries in November 2025 are the most affordable they have ever been.”

Tying the two posts together, the key to not running out of money might be work longer so as to enjoy greater wage growth and then invest wiser so as to avoid backdoor concentration risk. Of course, one could also adjust spending down, but no one does that.

III.

Sticking with affordability since it seems to be the theme uniting both sides of the political force, Matthew Yglesias digs into the money illusion aspects including how a shallow understanding underlies much of the public’s frustration with high prices.

Just as in Jeremy (adjusted-for-inflation) Horpedahl’s post above, once you adjust for inflation things look very different. For example in the Yglesias post we see that the real (inflation adjusted) cost (tuition and fees) of college education at public institutions has been steadily declining for over a decade. It is down 11.7% since 2015-16.

Affordability is a nuanced topic. There are a lot of variables to consider. Be careful what assumptions you bring to your projections and update often. You can’t afford not to.