There are also some good ones. The second group fails not on pure fallacy. Rather, these work on their face at least, and in some cases they rise to a level deserving strong response.

One response in either case is that an argument might be assuming too much. That is the case for capital-C “Culture” as a catchall explanation for differences and as a premise fundamental to the argument being made.

Alex Nowrasteh makes the case that culture is a crutch. His subtitle says it all, “How lazy social scientists and commentators use the c-word to avoid doing their jobs.”

Culture is human behavior that is socially learned and transmitted rather than genetically inherited or individually discovered. In Substack and online debates, culture means whatever the person invoking it needs it to mean. Values. Beliefs. Norms. Attitudes. Customs. Work ethic. Family structure. Trust. Time preference. Cuisine. Music. When someone says “culture explains X,” they’re gesturing at a black box the size of human civilization and calling the gesture a theory.

Keep that definition of culture in mind as I explain how unsatisfying using the word “culture” is as an explanation. You notice a spike in unemployment. Curious what could be causing it, you ask your economist friend why unemployment is rising. He says it’s because of “the economy” and then sits back as if he’s explained something when he has done nothing of the sort. That’s how everybody sounds to me when they say that culture explains a behavior or outcome.

. . .

If you’re going to claim that culture has an effect, you should be able to do four things. First, pinpoint exactly what cultural characteristic you mean. Don’t be vague, be specific by describing the type of behavior. Second, prove that cultural behavior actually exists as a measurable trait. Don’t rely on stereotypes, do the hard work. Third, demonstrate that the cultural behavior differs meaningfully across the groups being compared. Wow, that culture likes food a lot. Which culture doesn’t? Fourth, rule out that the real cultural trait isn’t caused by an exogenous economic force like high real estate prices, rising wages, or different institutions that incentivize behavior. Almost nobody who invokes culture does any of these four things. Culture is endogenous to everything. That’s why you have to do the work to isolate it. That’s also why almost nobody bothers.

Here is the heart of the problem:

Culture is endogenous to everything. Claiming culture causes an outcome without first ruling out that the outcome’s causes also produced the culture is circular reasoning. Every cultural explanation must first survive a price, incentive, and institutional audit. Few of them do, but those that do are extraordinary findings, which is perhaps another explanation why so many claim it. Nobody would let economists get away with explaining a recession of high unemployment with the explanation, “It’s the economy.” We shouldn’t let others get away with the equally lazy non-explanation of “it’s the culture.”

As he says in his conclusion:

The culture-as-explanation discourse is largely anti-intellectual. These are faux explanations for social behavior and outcomes that have real explanations. Think harder. Read the literature on a topic yourself or ask AI to search for you. Other researchers have probably already written about the issue you claim is just caused by culture. Before you write the word “culture” in a causal sentence, search for the price. Search for the institution. Investigate the incentives. Search for the constraints. If you exhaust those and culture is still standing, then maybe you’ve found something. But you probably just didn’t look hard enough.

Throwing up your hands claiming “it’s cultural differences” is another way of saying “I don’t know!” Watch out for this dodge and beware falling for its slight of hand.

Next, Bryan Caplan offers two other responses to weak and strong arguments. Both come in the form of live debates.

The first is from the SoHo Forum where Caplan debated Simon Hankinson on the resolution: “Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should complete its mandate to deport all illegal aliens currently residing in the United States.”

From his opening statement:

While I’ve done many debates on immigration, this is the first time that you can figure out the correct side without knowing anything about immigration. The resolution states: “Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should complete its mandate to deport all illegal aliens currently residing in the United States” — and all means all. Which is a crazy view about the enforcement of even the best law imaginable. If we were debating “The NYPD should complete its mandate to imprison all murderers currently residing in New York City,” every person here should still vote nay.

How can I say such a thing? This is the basic economics of crime. Solving and prosecuting all murders would be astronomically expensive. Some murders virtually solve themselves, others require the proverbial 48 hours, others require years of police work, and others might remain unsolved even if the entire NYPD indefinitely focused 100% of its attention on the crime. About 70% of murders committed in NYC currently end in a conviction, but the NYPD couldn’t get to 100% even if they had 100% of the city’s GDP to deploy.

Astronomical expense aside, however, stricter enforcement means more false positives. The easiest way to punish every murderer is to lower the burden of proof. But the lower the burden, the more innocent people you end up punishing.

. . .

Deporting all illegal aliens currently residing in the United States has exactly the same insuperable problems. The cost would be astronomically high, probably exceeding total GDP because the goal is impossible to achieve. And even if it could be achieved, there would be massive collateral damage along the way. You can also think about it like this: To deport every illegal alien, you would have to deport everyone with a 50%, a 10%, or even a 1% chance of being an illegal alien. Otherwise, you will miss some.

Once you accept these two obvious-once-you-think-about-them facts, you really are obliged to vote nay. You’re obliged to vote for me even if you think that an illegal immigrant is as bad as a murderer! But since I have ten minutes left, I’m going to add a bunch of extra arguments to reinforce the conclusion. And along the way, I’m going to tell you exactly what I really think.

. . .

[A] law that forbids a person from living in the United States and having a job is, at minimum, mildly stupid. Why should anyone on Earth need permission from the U.S. government to wash dishes, clean toilets, or take care of kids? Work is good. Production is good. No one should need the permission of any government to work, to produce. If you think it’s OK to break a law against driving 56 mph in the desert, you should think that it’s OK to break a law against mowing grass for money.

On further reflection, though, laws against foreigners living and working here without government permission are worse than mildly stupid. Even unreasonably strict speed limits are only a minor inconvenience. Immigration laws, in contrast, are a terrible burden on everyone without the good fortune to be born a citizen of the First World. Standard estimates say that moving from the Third World to the First World multiplies migrants’ incomes by a factor of 5x, 10x, or 15x. The flip side is that successfully enforcing immigration laws divides migrants’ incomes by a factor of 5x, 10x, or 15x. That is a terrible thing to do to another human being just for doing a normal job without proper paperwork. Imagine if the U.S. government passed a law that divided your income by a factor of 10. It would be a massive harm, and almost everyone — not just libertarians — would demonize not people who broke this law, but those who enforced it.

. . .

What should be done about illegal immigration? Simple: We should make it legal. A massive apology would also be nice, but I don’t ask for miracles. What about all of the problems caused by mass immigration? They’re minor compared to the massive gains of moving hundreds of millions of workers from countries where their productivity is low to countries where it is high. If you’re still worried, then adopt the massively successful immigration policies of countries like the United Arab Emirates, almost 90% foreign-born, which welcomes immigrants of all skill levels to live and work, but not to receive government benefits or participate in politics.

Caplan was brilliant in this debate despite “losing” (I’m certain the audience was stacked). The fallacy-filled arguments by the opponent demonstrated that the anti-immigration side is filled with emotion and devoid of reason or morality.

I do think the opponent, Hankinson, is a reasonable person who could be constructive in a less-absolutist position that he otherwise agreed to take. To wit: During the debate they agreed they could come up with a sensible compromise policy if selected as co-dictators tasked with solving the problem. Unfortunately, as I’m sure Caplan would agree, this is because any compromise would be preferable to the situation we have now.

Still, the crux of the case against immigration relies on emotion-filled hypotheticals that are highly implausible. The task is mighty as I’ve pointed out before.

The second is from his UATX debate with Garett Jones, a truly strong opponent with strong arguments.

From Caplan’s opening statement in that debate:

Estimated magnitude: If everyone on Earth moves to the United States, average IQ falls from 98 to 87, reducing U.S. GDP per-capita by 49%. But on closer examination, this does not show that the immigration is a net negative! On these assumptions, total Gross World Product still rises by 81%, roughly the same as the Clemens calculation that open borders would double the production of humanity.

What would this mean in practice? Specialization and trade between higher- and lower-IQ people. Higher-IQ people — disproportionately current citizens of the First World — would specialize in high-skilled work, especially management and entrepreneurship. Lower-IQ people — disproportionately current citizens of the Third World — would specialize in low-skilled work, especially basic services. This is the same logic as any well-run business: Google doesn’t hire college grads as janitors — but it has plenty of janitors.

. . .

There’s no time to respond to the countless other complaints about immigration, but here’s my general approach. I dismiss all vivid anecdotes as demagogic distractions. If you hear a story so juicy you’re dying to repeat it to “prove your point,” don’t. In contrast, if you’ve got ugly numbers, I’m happy to hear them. But before we act on these numbers, we should always remember the truly massive economic gains of immigration. Immigrant crime, welfare dependence, and so on are sometimes notable problems, but they’re rounding errors compared to the gains. There’s more to life than GDP? Sure, but GDP and almost everything else good go hand in hand.

Both debates are highly recommended. They offer the best in response to the worst and best arguments made by immigration opponents.

Substacks mentioned:

Laissez-Faire, Laissez-Passer w/ Alex Nowrasteh & David Bier

The Culture Crutch

I bumped into a conservative acquaintance in the green room at Fox News several years ago. He was obsessed with falling fertility. Knowing that I worked on immigration policy, he said that immigrants assimilate too rapidly to America’s “low-fertility culture” and we have to find a way to slow assimilation to boost the birthrate. I disagreed. “They’re no…

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3 months ago · 122 likes · 25 comments · Alex Nowrasteh

Bet On It

Immigration Laws Are Made to Be Broken

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25 days ago · 56 likes · 36 comments · Bryan Caplan

Let’s start down this path with a video.

In this interview by John Stossel, Don Boudreaux succinctly explains the case for economic freedom. It is a very accessible explainer inviting those interested to learn even more from Boudreaux's recent book with Phil Gramm, The Triumph of Economic Freedom. Send this video to those in your life confused by the current economic-political landscape.

Now let’s go a little deeper touching on something that shallow critics of economics love to latch on to—the idea that economics rests on a bad assumption of a rational actor.

Josh Hendrickson demonstrates in his post “Panhandlers and Price Theory” that this is a mistaken accusation. Using panhandling and dovetailing off of his other recent posts on drug use he provides a great example of why price theory does not rely on the critic’s strawman version of rational actor. Rationality emerges from even “irrational” people. Chicago market economics for the win!

I also like examining topics like this precisely because they highlight what price theory is and is not. Price theory is a framework for understanding, explaining, and predicting human behavior. Price theory is not a theory of mind.

. . .

Suppose that you wanted to test this idea that, all else equal, competition tends to equalize rates of return on particular types of investments or activities. How could you do it?

. . .

For example, think of a situation in which there is (a) free entry, but (b) some reason to believe that the competitive model might not apply. If one finds evidence in favor of the competitive model under those conditions, then that is pretty strong evidence in support of the model.

One such example is that of panhandlers. It seems pretty clear that there are places in which panhandling is perfectly legal and there is no restriction on panhandling. The absence of those restrictions suggests that anyone can show up and panhandle. As a result, if panhandling turns out to be quite lucrative, we would expect to see people switch to panhandling from some alternative use of their time. In fact, competition in panhandling should drive down the rate of return on panhandling until it reaches the opportunity cost of the marginal panhandler.

. . .

Setting aside whether competition equalizes rates of return across different stations, one simple test would be to see if panhandlers follow basic economics incentives. For example, one would expect that there would be more panhandlers at the busier stations and the friendlier stations. One would also expect that there would be more panhandlers where the barriers to entry are low, such as at stations where there is a shuttle stop for the homeless nearby.

This is precisely what [researchers Peter Leeson, August Hardy, and Paola Suarez in their recent paper] find for the full sample.

He concludes:

Critics of economics generally, and price theory in particular, tend to argue that we assume that everyone is a hyper-maximizer, only concerned with self-interest and that the world is more complicated than that. People aren’t walking around all day solving utility- and profit-maximizing problems in their head. Not everyone is a rational calculator.

I think that we can reject these criticisms. I am not saying that we should reject them on the grounds that they are false characterizations of the real world, but rather that they are a false characterization of price theory. As I wrote in my previous posts, price theory is about providing rational frameworks to understand, explain, and predict human behavior. It is about rational frameworks, not rational people.

Going deeper still I share two from Scott Sumner. In the first post he explores the usefulness of tautologies examining six.

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the news media attribute a sharply decline in stock market indices to a “selling wave” hitting Wall Street: The Dow fell 800 points as investors sold 15.4 billion shares of stock. Yes, but investors also purchased 15.4 billion shares of stock.

At one time, the stock market was closed at night and yet market indices often changed dramatically, even without a single share being traded. A hundred years ago, the Dow might close one day at 243 and open the following morning at 227, reflecting bearish overnight news. In that case, it is fairly obvious that the market moves on new information, not trading activity. To the extent that trading activity has any impact on prices, it is due to what the trading reveals about information held by various participants in the market.

In these examinations of tautologies he highlights wisdom that can be obtained from understanding them including organizing our thinking to see causal connections. This includes rejecting bad reasoning such as reasoning from a price change.

I’ll give two slices. The first is using the tautology that savings = investment:

Unfortunately, many people misinterpreted Keynes’s “paradox of thrift” as a claim that more saving is bad for the economy. That’s not what Keynes said! Keynes argued that a decline in aggregate demand (basically nominal spending or NGDP) is bad for the economy, and that this sort of decline might be caused by an increase in the public’s desire to save. But Keynes never said that more saving is itself a bad thing, as he understood that in equilibrium there is an equality between saving and investment. And since Keynes was very much pro-investment, that means he was also very much pro-saving.

The second is using the tautology that aggregate supply = aggregate demand coupled with Say’s Law:

Here’s AI Overview:

Say’s Law, often summarized as “supply creates its own demand,” posits that the production of goods generates the necessary income (wages, rent, profit) to purchase that total output. It implies that general overproduction or widespread “gluts” are impossible in a market economy, as total demand always equals total supply.

When defined this way, Say’s Law is true. The Great Depression was not caused by overproduction (as Franklin Roosevelt believed), rather it was a case of too little production. On the other hand, Say’s Law does not mean that we need not fear a situation where nominal spending is falling. Even if aggregate supply equals aggregate demand in a Depression, the equilibrium may occur at a undesirably low level of output and employment:

[Graph courtesy of ChatGPT]

Much of the confusion is due to the use of the term “aggregate demand”. I wish the model were called the nominal spending/real output model, not the AS/AD model. It has nothing to do with “demand” in the ordinary sense of the term as used in microeconomics.

The second post from Sumner is his take on the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s (CRFB) plan to save Social Security, which he both praises and laments as politically implausible.

In praising and explaining the implications of the CRFB's proposal, Sumner effectively works the body on two separate fronts. He makes the case that the reform is essentially a progressive consumption tax with the economic and fairness benefits that policy change would imply while also demonstrating wealth and charity aren't well understood by the common man.

Starting with the tax part:

The CRFB’s proposal is essentially a progressive consumption tax, although it won’t look like that to the average person. I cannot teach an entire course in public finance theory in a blog post, but the essence of a consumption tax is as follows:

Imagine a world where people can either spend $6000/month on consumption today, or $12,000/month on consumption in 20 years, by saving their incomes. Now assume you impose a 33.3% tax in that world, which takes away a third of the public’s resources for consumption. With a pure consumption tax, your choice is now $4000/consumption today or $8000 consumption in 20 years.

Notice that the “terms of trade” have not changed, in both cases, the opportunity cost of a dollar spent on consumption today is foregoing two dollar’s consumption in 20 years. A consumption tax is a tax that does not change the relative price of current and future consumption. In a sense, all taxes are consumption taxes, as the burden of any tax is its impact on a person’s lifetime consumption. However, economists use the term “consumption tax” to refer specifically to taxes that treat current and future consumption equally. An income tax punishes savers and hence is not a consumption tax.

I’m pretty sure that most people don’t understand this concept, as I often see commenters say things like “we should tax consumption, not labor.” Actually, a labor tax is a consumption tax. Indeed, these three taxes are all equivalent consumption taxes, in the long run:

1. A 20% VAT

2. A 20% payroll tax on wages

3. A 20% income tax with unlimited ability to put savings into a 401k plan, and no mandatory date of withdrawal from the 401k. (Funds borrowed for consumption are also taxed.)

Note: Although I think I usually say something like “we would tax consumption rather than capital,” I’m sure I’ve made the sloppy mistake he points out of saying “we should tax consumption rather than labor.”

After fully describing how the CRFB’s plan is desirable, he turns to the implausibility basing his case on how people misunderstand wealth and charity.

Unfortunately, the CRFB plan seems too good to be true, and I expect Congress to implement something far worse. In order to understand why, consider two neighbors that both spent their careers in upper-middle class jobs making close to the Social Security taxable maximum (currently $184,500). Both retire as single people entitled to roughly $50,000/year in benefits. Both would see their benefits capped in nominal terms, which means their real benefit levels would decline over time.

But these two neighbors differ in one very important way. Smith was a high spender who would buy the latest BMW, while Jones was a high saver who always bought used cars. Smith saved very little while Jones maxed out his 401k plan.

Now Smith starts whining to his congressman that the proposed cap is unfair. It should only apply to “the wealthy”. His neighbor Jones is now pulling $100,000/year out of his 401k and doesn’t “need” his Social Security benefit to rise with inflation. “Please make the cuts depend on income levels, not benefit levels.” Because America has far more grasshoppers than ants, Congress listens to the whiners and applies benefit cuts only to those with high current incomes, not those with high lifetime wage incomes. They punish savers and reward spendthrifts.

. . .

People focus on the fact that those who are currently wealthy have more resources than the less wealthy, even when the gap is 100% due to the less thrifty person choosing to spend at an earlier stage of their lives. In my thought experiment, the two neighbors were equally wealthy in the only way that matters—they had equal lifetime resources to allocate to consumption and simply choose to do so at different points in time. Smith consumed when he was young enough to enjoy it, and Jones foolishly waited until he was old, wrongly imagining that he could still get a thrill out of life at age 70.

. . .

There’s an ongoing debate over how much money billionaires ought to donate to charity. Unfortunately, most people miss the point. The issue isn’t charity vs. investment; it is consumption vs. non-consumption. A charitable person is an individual that doesn’t consume much relative to his or her wealth. If you wish to consider heirs, you might say a charitable person is someone who ensures that he or she and all their future heirs consume only a modest portion of their current wealth.

But you can also argue that a charitable person is someone that maximizes their wealth, given the share of that wealth that they intend to use for consumption (both they and their heirs.) A wealthy person can become more charitable by reducing long run family consumption of wealth from 40% to 30%, but also by increasing their total stock of wealth and keeping the consumption share at 40%.

. . .

As Matt Yglesias recently pointed out, those billionaires that consume a large share of their wealth are the actual problem.

. . .

To be altruistic is to forego consumption for you and your heirs. That’s it.

[emphasis in the original in all cases above]

He ends with two great quotes. One is favorite of mine from Steven Landsburg that I have referenced before about misers being the ultimate philanthropists. The other is Bastiat's greatest insight, “That which is seen, and that which is not seen.” Another from Bastiat came to my mind while reading the post: “The State is the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.”

P.S. As if right on cue, Landsburg brings in another with this post making the same essential point about people confusing money transfers with wealth transfer:

I doubt very much that Mr. Musk plans to spend a trillion dollars before he dies. Suppose instead that he plans to spend, say, a hundred million. Now suppose he gives away all his money (or we confiscate it) and he reduces his lifetime consumption to zero. That leaves an extra hundred million dollars worth of food, clothing and fuel for the rest of us. Divide a hundred million dollars among three hundred and fifty million Americans and you get not $2800 per person, but 28 cents. That’s how much extra stuff the average American can now buy.

Whatever Elon gives to John, Paul and George must ultimately come from Elon. What’s available to others is capped by what he sacrifices.
In fact if you confiscated, say, half of Elon’s wealth and he chose to go right on consuming at the same rate, then the total value of what you could redistribute would be exactly zero.

What if you ignore all that, take Mr. Musk’s trillion dollars and redistribute it anyway? Or what if Elon himself ignores all that and decides to give a bunch of money away? The answer, in either case:: We all get $2800 checks, we all feel richer, we collectively try to buy an extra trillion dollars’ worth of stuff, there’s only an extra hundred million dollars’ worth available, so prices and/or interest rates adjust to the point where your $2800 check can purchase only about 28 cents worth of goodies.

Substacks referenced:

Economic Forces

Panhandlers and Price Theory

In my previous two posts (here and here), I focused on the role of price theory in explaining drug use. One reason that I wrote those posts is that I wanted to illustrate that price theory has explanatory power beyond the standard examples. I’m a firm believer that price theory is useful for understanding any decision that involves costs (which is essen…

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2 months ago · 42 likes · 4 comments · Josh Hendrickson

The Pursuit of Happiness

The beauty of tautologies

Tautologies have a bad reputation. They are often dismissed as mere definitions. People get scolded for trying to draw causal implications from tautologies. They are viewed as being simplistic…

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2 months ago · 48 likes · 42 comments · Scott Sumner

The Pursuit of Happiness

Too good to be true

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) has put forth an excellent plan to save Social Security, featuring a $100,000 benefit cap. The plan is so good that I see almost no prospect for it ever being enacted by our Congress, an institution that has fallen to a sadly dysfunctional state. In this post, I’ll discuss why I like the plan and t…

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3 months ago · 53 likes · 52 comments · Scott Sumner

Remember also, again importantly, that in some cases CCW leads to truth and solutions.

Along those lines, here are two posts to ponder. Each will challenge certain constituencies: one more left centered and the other more right centered. Yet in both cases these are positions that come from a high-safety value set. Like any bias, prioritizing safety comes with downsides . . . no solutions, only tradeoffs.

In the first case is Judge Glock writing a Works in Progress. The title of the post says it all: “American water is too clean.”

I imagine your first reaction is dismissal followed by consideration only allowing this in a technical sense.

Today, the average urban household in America pays about $1,300 a year for water and sewers, close to the $1,600 they spend on electricity. In San Francisco, even before the new sewer mandates went into effect, water rates were about $3,600 a year. Local governments spend more on building and maintaining their water and sewer systems than they do on policing.

The main reason for high water charges is federal mandates. The US, largely through federal mandates and subsidies, has spent about $5 trillion, in contemporary dollars, to fight water pollution since 1970, about 0.8 percent of the annual GDP in that period. This effort makes clean water ‘arguably the most expensive environmental investment in US history’, according to one study, far more than air pollution regulations.

Yet the EPA finds that the one category of environmental regulation where estimated costs exceed benefits is surface water regulations. The EPA does say that most of its drinking water mandates have benefits that exceed the costs, but, as one study showed, ‘these determinations were unsupported by the Agency’s own regulatory impact analyses’. The EPA analyses found that for many of the regulated dangers ‘the risks may be as low as zero’, but argued that potential risks should be treated as probable ones.

Technology and local governments have worked wonders over the decades to make drinking water and water systems incredibly clean. But that desire for progress has now become excessive. Mandates from the EPA are demanding water become too clean. It is important to remember that the optimal level of pollution is never zero and there are always important trade-offs to consider. The ironic knock-on effect is that these mandates have actually become environmentally negative on top of being economically destructive.1

He ends the article with suggestions about balancing the costs and benefits including this:

There is an old joke about a boy who said that he knew how to spell the word ‘banana’ but that he didn’t know when to stop. Officials in control of water today know how to get cleaner water but don’t know when to stop. Local voters already face the problems of balancing costs and benefits and the more distant the regulators, the less likely they are to get the balance right themselves.

Now turning to the second case we have Benjamin Nadelstein suggesting a way to abolish prisons.

Prisons can be viewed as an overall bad deal for society. They are expensive, inefficient, and often counterproductive. Prisoners live in dehumanizing conditions, the legal system groans under inefficiency, and taxpayers have to pay an average of $30,000 per year for every inmate.

The total price tag for U.S. prisons exceeds $80 billion annually, while the economic cost to incarcerated individuals in lost earnings exceeds $500,000 per person over a lifetime.

Prisons generally fail any purported goals of rehabilitation, failing to provide adequate educational opportunities or career programming. Prisons also tend to create overcrowded spaces with heightened violence, that often makes people more criminal, not less, by surrounding them with antisocial values and criminal networks.

That introduction lays out the scope of the problem. Here is his CCW proposal:

Instead of sitting in a prison cell at taxpayer expense, governments could auction off their prisoners’ future tax payments to private investors in exchange for more flexible confinement and rehabilitation arrangements.

These investors—let’s call them “prison career agents”—would assume full responsibility for their prisoner’s security and reintegration into society.

Crucially, these career agents could also be on the hook for their prisoners’ negative tax receipts. That means if a prisoner fails to earn income or returns to crime and is imprisoned, the career agent eats the associated costs and not the taxpayer.

After listing what he believes would be the win-wins, he anticipates pushback ending the post with a hypothetical Q&A. The quote he references from Bob Murphy probably hints at how opponents to this idea might retreat from a “it won’t work!” reaction to one of “but that’s not what I want.”

Economist Bob Murphy has pointed out that market forces would naturally regulate the private provision of prisoner security:

“No insurance company would vouch for a serial killer unless he agreed to live in a secure facility. These facilities, akin to hotels, would compete for prisoners by offering better conditions, as inspectors ensure safety. Undue cruelty would disappear because prisoners could switch providers, just as travelers switch hotels.”

PTAs would introduce competition into incarceration for prisoners, just as Airbnbs compete with hotels for travelers, Uber competes with taxis compete for riders, and UPS competes with the Post Office.

It is hard for people to get past the idea of prison as pain where any alleviation of pain is repugnant. For them there is a ratchet effect. They might not think they want it worse for prisoners at each step in it getting worse, but they refuse to think about it moving backwards from where it happens to be even though previously (before it got worse) they weren’t prepared to advocate for it being worse.

I’m not ready to endorse this as THE solution (aptly, Robin Hanson comments). But I am ready, stand always ready, to think outside the box. This idea has merit in direction and spirit if not exact specification.

Substacks mentioned:

The Works in Progress Newsletter

American water is too clean

The European Union spends more on science each year than America’s National Science Foundation, but European scientific output trails the US. What can it do to fix this? To answer this question, Works in Progress is hosting an event in Brussels on 2nd March. Sign up…

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5 months ago · 98 likes · 38 comments · Works in Progress and Judge Glock

The Invisible Foot

How to Abolish Prisons by Using Career Agents

Prisons can be viewed as an overall bad deal for society. They are expensive, inefficient, and often counterproductive. Prisoners live in dehumanizing conditions, the legal system groans under inefficiency, and taxpayers have to pay an average of $30,000 per year…

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5 months ago · 5 likes · 6 comments · Benjamin Nadelstein

I freely confess: Very few of my personal friends are low-skilled workers. I’m a professor and a nerd, with decidedly high-brow tastes. If I tried sharing my feelings with any particular low-skilled worker, my outreach would no doubt come off as awkward and condescending. But I still declare before the whole world that I am deeply, sincerely grateful for low-skilled workers’ ubiquitous life-sustaining and life-affirming contributions. Contrary to popular insinuations, you are not charity cases. You keep us alive. You put roofs over our heads. You care for our children and our elders. You pick up the slack of life, taking care of the troubles others are too frazzled to handle. You deserve respect and appreciation, not casual disdain. Elites who talk as if you’re a massive burden aren’t merely rude. They are massively, blatantly, grotesquely wrong.

And ChatGPT writes in the second:

The nobility of low-skilled work is not that it is romantic. Much of it is tiring, repetitive, boring, and unpleasant. The nobility is that people do it anyway because other human beings value the result. That is enough. More than enough.

The economic case is overwhelming. Low-skilled workers expand output. They lower prices. They let higher-skilled workers specialize. A surgeon with a clean operating room, an economist with childcare, a CEO with a functioning supply chain, a parent with takeout dinner, and a tourist with a made bed are all more productive because someone else handled tasks that needed handling.

This is the division of labor. It is not glamorous. It is glorious.

And here is the ode:

To the janitor who makes the office usable before the office workers arrive.

To the dishwasher who saves the evening after the diners depart.

To the roofer under the August sun.

To the cashier who absorbs a hundred tiny indignities and still says, “Have a nice day.”

To the hotel maid who restores order after strangers leave chaos.

To the delivery driver who turns my laziness into dinner.

To the immigrant with poor English, little money, and a heroic willingness to start at the bottom.

Thank you. You are not a problem to be solved. You are fellow builders of civilization.

The least we can do is stop getting in your way.

Truly beautiful, as is the work he praises—directly and through AI prompting.

Neil Hacker explains how ASML makes the essential chips that run our world:

The most advanced version of this technology, extreme ultraviolet lithography, is used to make the very smallest chips. The smallest in 2025 were marketed as three nanometers, roughly 25,000 times thinner than a human hair.

To make them, a droplet of liquid tin is released into a chamber and hit with a single pulse of light, which melts and flattens it. As the droplet continues to fall, a second, more powerful pulse vaporizes the tin, creating an extremely hot plasma that emits light at the narrow wavelengths needed for extreme ultraviolet lithography. The light beam is then concentrated by reflecting it across a series of slightly concave mirrors so flawless that, if scaled to the size of Germany, their imperfections would be measured in millimeters. [emphasis added]

Dan Williams argues that the idea of speaking truth to power is misguided:

A simple heuristic that power and truth systematically collide doesn’t get you anywhere. Powerful people often speak the truth; the powerless often speak nonsense; and very often nobody—neither the powerful nor the powerless—has a clue what is going on, which is why we need rigorous, trustworthy, truth-seeking epistemic institutions in the first place.

Substacks referenced:

I.

Here’s a proposed list of the top 100 technological innovations in products, systems, and technologies over the past 250 years. (I confess that I am a total sucker for mulling though lists like this.) The entries highlighted in dark blue were US-led; the entries in light blue were US-involved. In a broad sense, consider the dominance of US technological leadership since around 1900.

That is from Timothy Taylor referencing a McKinsey report on America’s competitive edge.

II.

Another recent analysis published in The Economist finds that global inequality in consumption spending is falling. In 2000, the richest 10% of humanity spent 40 times more than the poorest 50%. In 2025, they spent around 18 times more. Using data from World Data Lab, they find that the poorest 50% now out-consume the richest 1%, breaking from past trends.

That one is from Chelsea Follett writing “A Reality Check on the Inequality Panic”. It is a short summary of how much better the world has gotten for the poorest relatively when compared to the wealthiest. By extension, the poorest enjoy a much better world today in absolute terms, which is what really matters.

III.

And now for the uglier news . . .

The economic costs of this complexity are enormous. For starters, there’s simply the time and money we have to spend complying with an ever-growing and always-changing tax system. According to the Tax Foundation, compliance with the federal tax code cost Americans roughly $536 billion in 2024–2025—or nearly 1.7 percent of 2025 gross domestic product. They conservatively derive this number from two sources: First, there’s $148 billion in out-of-pocket costs for software, tax preparers, and accountants. Second, there’s time: Using a reasonable hourly wage, the 7.1 billion hours Americans spent complying with the tax code translates to roughly $388 billion in lost productivity.

To put these figures in context, $536 billion is more than the corporate income tax will generate this year, around twice as much as Trump’s tariffs will raise, and more than 43 times the IRS budget. The 7.1 billion hours spent complying, meanwhile, is the equivalent to 3.4 million full-time American workers—almost the population of Los Angeles—doing nothing but tax paperwork for a full year. The National Taxpayers Union puts the total compliance burden at $464 billion for 2024, with the average filer spending 13 hours and $290 just to pay his taxes. For many Americans (including me—sigh), tax filing demands multiple spring weekends doing unpaid labor just so we can cut the government another check. (Yes, I am bitter.)

That is from Scott Lincicome reporting on how much Tax Day cost Americans besides what they paid in taxes. Sadly unsurprising to me, and yet we don’t have the political will to change it. I’m bitter too, Scott.

We are never in “normal” times where normal means no worry about the future and the path we are on. But from time to time it is worse (heightened).

Here are two items that I read recently that offered some hope amongst the fear.

I.

Derek Thompson continues in a recent post:

The results were remarkable: On an independent test set of 493 scans, REDMOD detected the invisible signature of future pancreatic cancer with significant accuracy at a median lead time of 475 days before diagnosis. In other words, this AI program could detect cancer 40 months before the best doctors. Most importantly, REDMOD didn’t cheat. The team prevented the AI from cheating in several ways by making it impossible for the AI to use electronic records to identify scans where a mass was determined to be “present but overlooked.”

Before AI kills us all, it appears that it will give us meaningfully reduced mortality.

II.

Yes, China builds. Some of that building is impressive. Some of it is surveillance infrastructure and junky apartments sitting on top of a brittle political model with an aging, shrinking population. This is not a superior civilization. It is a ruthless machine that can be highly efficient at specific things while being deeply warped at its core.

Meanwhile, what does America still have?

The lead in AI.

The world’s best universities.

The deepest capital markets.

The most creative entrepreneurial culture.

The most important alliance network.

The reserve currency.

The most capable military.

The greatest ability to absorb talent from everywhere.

The broadest ecosystem for turning ideas into dominant global companies.

This is what the America declinists never understand. America’s strength has never come from looking neat on a high-speed rail brochure. It comes from combining freedom, talent, capital, scale, ambition, and military reach in a way no other country has matched. China can manufacture very effectively. America still invents the future.

That is from Lee Bressler. I love the last line of that quote from his post, “America still invents the future.”

While we need to work to make that continue to be true, it is worth pondering how enduring that truth is despite the headwinds—some of our own making.

Substacks referenced above:

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.