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Buried Before Ivermectin: Meet Chlorine Dioxide
by Filipe Rafaeli at Brownstone Institute

I always knew that corruption existed in every field. I assumed that when it came to Big Pharma, the same was true, but I thought of it as something abstract: an inflated contract here, an outrageously profitable deal there, an abusive markup somewhere else.

I assumed that yes, some products might have low-quality batches, like any product on a profit-driven production line. I understood that when discovered, everything was reported in newspaper headlines, properly investigated, with all wrongdoers prosecuted or jailed. I figured these things might cause some harm to public health, but that it was all under intense surveillance and control.

Before the pandemic, following news from the field through the papers, we knew that every now and then, some scientist or group of scientists, for various reasons, would commit fraud in a study. Whenever that happened, it would go straight to the headlines. The way I saw it, "science" always had mechanisms to protect itself, with serious scientists quickly moving to expose and expel fraudsters. After all, it's an absolutely noble branch of science: the one dealing with everyone's health, including my own.

In other situations, still before the pandemic, I found myself in conversations where someone would suggest that treatments for various diseases already existed but were being hidden from the public. Out of respect for the friends who raised these topics, I didn't quite laugh, but in my head, I understood all of it as hypothetically plausible, but given the lack of concrete evidence, nothing more than a “conspiracy theory.”

Then the pandemic came, and instead of spending lockdown watching movies or playing video games, I decided to follow every detail of the studies coming out. Before all this, I had no deep interest in the subject. I used to read the headlines alongside sports scores and weather forecasts. But during the pandemic I had a good reason to pay close attention: I wanted to come out of Covid-19 alive. And to be able to guide the people I care about toward the best options.

So I followed the various treatment possibilities closely, as well as the data from each vaccine rollout. I wanted to understand the details, straight from the sources, before everything was filtered through "science communicators" and experts in newspaper headlines.

What Was Covid-19?

I'll give you a simple summary. And I know this summary will make a lot of people stop reading right here. If that's you, I'll say it upfront: I can explain why you feel that way.

The pandemic in a nutshell: Covid-19 always had very effective and inexpensive treatments, right from the start. Millions were left to die because it was, of all things, profitable.

The lockdowns, when the world stopped as it never had before in history, was never necessary beyond two weeks, because with the disease properly treated, fewer people would have died than in a common flu season.

Yes, that's exactly what I said: millions dead for profit. For money. Does that shock you?

I know it's a hard story to believe. I understand. Because to believe it, given that it involves an enormous number of people, institutions, medical societies, scientific bodies, regulatory agencies, all in sync to cover up and steer people away from valid treatments, you have to believe something else: that humanity, at its core, doesn't care. It's a blow to your faith in human goodness. That's not easy to let go of.

Let's Get Straight to the Biggest Contrast of Covid-19

Six years after the pandemic, some striking contrasts remain. Let's look at the most remarkable one: the hydroxychloroquine saga.

Today, the words “chloroquine” and its slightly younger but still septuagenarian sister, “hydroxychloroquine,” have become synonymous with lunacy. “That person is chloroquine-brained,” someone might say, invoking the drug as a punchline. The word "chloroquine" became a setup for jokes. People made comedy sketches, genuinely funny ones, and songs mocking anyone who kept insisting on talking about the medication during Covid-19.

But how did this happen? Everyone knows that the WHO, understood as the final authority on such matters, never recommended hydroxychloroquine. Everyone knows that the FDA and other major regulatory agencies around the world, along with the most respected medical associations and scientific journals, never recommended it against Covid-19. Quite the opposite, in fact. They all recommended against it. The reasoning was that if desperate, frightened people believed in false cures, they would stop following the things that actually worked: vaccines, lockdowns, and masks.

In the US, newspapers treated the subject as a "conspiracy theory." In Brazil, a physician named Luana Araújo appeared before Congress during a parliamentary investigation and stated that "Discussing chloroquine is choosing which edge of the flat Earth we're going to jump off." That made headlines in Brazil's most important newspapers. Flat-earther stuff, you understand? Are you a science denier, or are you intelligent?

Now follow my thinking. If three or four thousand people were dying every day from Covid, and there was something effective out there, everyone would say it was effective, right? Nobody would commit the immeasurable evil of speaking against it, steering people away from valid treatments, letting millions die around the world. Therefore, faced with that obvious reality, only completely deranged people could claim that hydroxychloroquine had scientific evidence behind it.

And yet, despite all the clarification across every major newspaper that HCQ was "conclusively proven ineffective" against Covid, as the mainstream media put it, some physicians, clearly delusional, kept insisting that there was, in fact, evidence. Many of them were fired, faced investigations, and even lost their medical licenses. After all, only someone as deluded as a flat-earther could promote such dangerous nonsense and put society at risk.

Now let's get to the contrast. Open a link with me. It's a news article. Let's open it, check the website address, verify the source carefully: "Hydroxychloroquine provides moderate COVID-19 prevention, large clinical trial shows."

No, this is not some obscure corner of the internet. It's right there, on the University of Oxford's website: chloroquine is effective against Covid-19. Worth remembering that Oxford consistently ranks among the three most prestigious universities in the world by any measure, competing directly with MIT, Harvard, and Stanford. With nearly a millennium of history, the University of Oxford was a cornerstone of the Enlightenment, playing a crucial role in humanity's transition from the darkness of the Middle Ages into the age of reason and the scientific method.

Quite a contrast, isn't it?

Things Worth Noticing About the Oxford Study

Oxford only delivered its verdict because this was a meta-analysis of randomized trials – the highest possible level of evidence a medication can reach. For reference: according to a study published in JAMA in 2019, only 8.5% of recommendations in the major American cardiology guidelines meet that standard (multiple randomized controlled trials). To flip the numbers: 91.5% of the guidelines cardiologists follow are based on weaker evidence than what Oxford presented for HCQ.

HCQ against Covid-19, then, belongs to a select group of the most thoroughly proven treatments in existence. That's exactly why Oxford didn't use the cautious language typical of scientific studies – none of the usual "may be effective," followed by "further studies are needed." They brought the hammer down: it works. Full stop.

It's a peer-reviewed study published in a medical journal. But it also became a news item on Oxford's own website. So there's no room for the dodge of "those are Oxford researchers, not the University of Oxford itself," trying to move the goalposts. The institution gave its unequivocal endorsement.

And there's more: the news article includes a photo of the research team. Over 70 people signed the study, not much room for argument, outrage, or grandstanding. Because outrage and personal wishes count for nothing in science. Among the signatories is Sir Nicholas John White, a scientist with an H-index above 200, the world's foremost expert on tropical diseases. Is there anyone left foolish enough to call Oxford a "flat-earther?"

Necessary Questions About Oxford

I'd like to now move on to chlorine dioxide and say more about (Pierre) Kory's book, but I can't yet. I need to go a little deeper into the HCQ story first. Either way, it's important for you to understand a bit more about how this field works. Think of it as the warmup before the main event.

The first question: why did Oxford take more than 800 days to publish the study's results? Can you think of any reason why findings would sit in a drawer for more than two years?

Oxford conducted its gold-standard clinical trial on pre-exposure prophylaxis (that is, taking the medication before any contact with the virus, with the goal of preventing infection). In Oxford's trial, the use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine showed a 57% reduction in PCR-confirmed Covid-19 cases. Then, within the same study, they conducted a meta-analysis, pooling their trial with similar pre-exposure prophylaxis studies. Every previous study also showed positive results.

The second question: why did they change the outcome measure to seroconversion midway through the study? Vaccine trials didn't use that metric. They all used PCR testing. Seroconversion only measures whether the body produced antibodies, not whether the person actually got sick. Could changing the outcome be what made the result, as the headline put it, merely "moderate?"

A note to close this topic: this Oxford meta-analysis covers pre-exposure prophylaxis, taking hydroxychloroquine before infection to prevent it. For that use, it reached the highest possible level of evidence. But HCQ is also highly effective for early treatment, taking it in the first days after infection to prevent the disease from worsening. The evidence there is solid, though not at the same peak level. It's also effective for post-exposure prophylaxis, taking it after contact with an infected person to prevent catching the disease. Again, good evidence, but not at the maximum tier. (Side note: it is not effective in intubated patients, in extremis, or in overdose conditions. And yes, studies conducted under overdose conditions made the front pages of the world's most important newspapers.)

Second note: the evidence for ivermectin in Covid is also overwhelming, but I didn't use it as my example here because I don't have a contrast as sharp as a study from an Oxford-caliber institution. The Oxford contrast is simply devastating.

I watched all of this unfold in real time, right in front of me. And it led me to an inevitable question: what else was buried before this, throughout the history of medicine?

Chlorine Dioxide

"The Medicine That Could End Medicine;" that's the subtitle Dr. Pierre Kory and Jenna McCarthy, journalist and co-author, chose for the book. At the very least, it's intriguing, isn't it? End it all. Remake everything.

They use that phrase because they believe that chlorine dioxide (ClO₂) poses an existential threat to the business model of the modern pharmaceutical industry, just as hydroxychloroquine threatened Big Pharma's grip during Covid-19.

Chlorine dioxide is a cheap, non-patentable molecule that people can prepare at home, with reported efficacy against a wide range of infectious and chronic diseases. It could replace or eliminate the need for countless expensive, cartel-controlled medical treatments. Does that unsettle you?

But the book isn't only about scientific evidence. It tells the story of the molecule itself, and of the people who, throughout history, tried to bring it into wider use. The result? Three suspected murders, including that of Dr. Eugene Blass, who was beaten to death in front of his own laboratory. Another survived multiple poisoning attempts. And there was even a man whose legs were blown off by a bomb planted in his hotel room. Dangerous business, messing with this topic.

Then there are the people who were imprisoned. One case involves a professor and researcher who conducted and published a highly positive study of 500 malaria patients treated with chlorine dioxide in Cameroon, Africa. He traveled to a meeting, and on his way back, someone asked him to carry a package. It contained cocaine. He was arrested for drug trafficking. And the study he had already published? Retracted from the scientific literature. The book reads more like a Hollywood spy thriller than a medical text. It's a page-turner.

Pierre and Jenna also surface some remarkable details, like the fact that in 1987, NASA called chlorine dioxide a "universal antidote" due to its efficacy against 42 known pathogens.

One of the book's most brilliant moments is the "Kory Scale." It's a satirical but grounded metric he developed to assess the likely efficacy of "unproven" therapies. The premise is simple: the effectiveness of a treatment is directly proportional to the brutality of the attacks it suffers from the medical establishment: the FDA, the media, health agencies. On the scale, media attacks are worth 4 points, imprisonments 10, and murders 50.

The hydroxychloroquine story I told above never reached the level of assassinations. There were intimidating police raids, professionals losing their jobs, others losing their medical licenses, and a staggering volume of media attacks, but on the Kory Scale, that scores relatively few points.

The book has many other striking passages, like the researcher who installed a water treatment system that eradicated malaria in an entire city. Consider the stakes: 600,000 people die of malaria every year.

But one thing needs to be said clearly. For hydroxychloroquine against Covid, we now have the highest possible level of scientific evidence, produced by one of the most important universities in the world. For chlorine dioxide, we don't have that. But this reminds me of 2020. Early in the pandemic, the first evidence for HCQ in prophylaxis began emerging from observational studies, low on the evidentiary ladder. Yet there were many of them, from many different places, and all positive. Some scientists argued at the time that it was enough, that prophylaxis should begin immediately and the pandemic could be brought to an end. The picture, taken as a whole, was clear. Instead, everyone dragged their feet, held back, buried results in drawers, delayed studies. There was even outright fraud to derail or interrupt ongoing research, with the Surgisphere case being the most glaring example. "Monumental fraud," said Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the Lancet.

The book presents striking accounts of a vast range of conditions that reportedly responded to chlorine dioxide: acute infections such as malaria, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, influenza, and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis; chronic and inflammatory conditions including autism, diabetes, Lyme disease, and hard-to-heal wounds, among them severe cases of gangrene and diabetic foot that avoided imminent amputation. 

There are even case series documenting stable remissions in patients with metastatic cancer, pancreatic, prostate, and renal, who had exhausted all conventional options. Dr. Kory acknowledges that formal trials are still needed to determine the precise magnitude of the effect at scale. But the clinical impact of watching diseases labeled "incurable" simply recede is something that both astonishes and challenges the business model of conventional medicine.

Reading the book, I feel the way I did at the start of the pandemic. The evidence for chlorine dioxide, as it stands, shows a great deal. But given the violence of what surrounds this topic, I doubt anyone will ever manage to conduct large, randomized, gold-standard trials on it. One researcher who tried ended up in prison as an international drug trafficker, arrested on his way back from a meeting where he had been seeking funding for another study.

Who This Book Is Not for

If you don't find the Oxford hydroxychloroquine story important, if it didn't leave you shaken, this book is not for you.

Think carefully about what happened: with the efficacy Oxford confirmed for prophylaxis, the pandemic could have been over in 2020. One month of lockdowns at most, not a year and a half. Lockdowns that permanently shuttered small businesses, that generated the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in human history, that destroyed the livelihoods of millions of families, that left lasting illness and psychiatric damage in its wake. If all of that seems reasonable to you, this book is not for you.

Now try a simple exercise. Open Google and type "chlorine dioxide." For me, the first thing that appeared was not a study, not a news article. It was a large yellow icon reading: "Serious health risks." Below it: "No medical benefit." And an official instruction to report to the authorities any advertisement or sale of the product.

If that's enough for you, if a yellow Google icon closes the case, this book is not for you.

In my case, those flashing danger signs don't impress me. I've been vaccinated against them. In Brazil, one of the most prominent science YouTubers, when the possibility of HCQ treatment was raised in 2020, claimed that using chloroquine for five days as early treatment could cause "a severe loss of vision, possibly even blindness."

After this, I went to PubMed and looked it up. A 2003 study found no retinal toxicity from hydroxychloroquine in any of the 526 patients studied during the first six years of continuous treatment. Six years of continuous use. No problems. And no one ever went blind. Warnings driven by interest don't frighten me.

Now type "Pierre Kory" into Google. The first link that came up for me was: "Doctors accused of spreading misinformation lose their certifications." The article is about Kory and Dr. Marik. They fought together on the Covid-19 front lines. One of the pieces of "misinformation" in question? Hydroxychloroquine.

The same medication Oxford confirmed as effective, at the highest level of scientific evidence, after sitting in a drawer for more than two years.

If you think that was fair, this book is definitely not for you.

This book is for people who ask questions: The War On Chlorine Dioxide.

Buried Before Ivermectin: Meet Chlorine Dioxide
by Filipe Rafaeli at Brownstone Institute - Economics, Policy, Public Health, Education, Society

Following John Arnold, I posted earlier about how European laws often require wealthy people to give most of their wealth to their children. Here is an example:

Pierre-Edouard Sterin, founder of Smartbox and worth about €1.4 billion, told French senators he wants to disinherit his five children and donate everything to charity. French law, under the Napoleonic Code, mandates that with five children, three-quarters of his estate must go to them, leaving only one quarter freely disposable. Sterin argued for complete freedom to decide the fate of one’s assets, saying it is ‘a real freedom to start with nothing in life’.

The post Let Me Disinherit My Children, S’il vous plaît appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

I really loved this article. A one-time increase in per capita growth from 2% to 2.1% for a single year, then dropping back to 2%, would permanently raises the level of GDP per capita – and because that small gain recurs and compounds every year afterward across the population, it would add up to roughly a trillion dollars in cumulative value. https://abundanceandgrowth.org/p/a-little-progress-is-worth-a-trillion

When people talk about pausing AI development, I can’t help but think about the enormous cumulative value that would get lost over time, the higher rates of absolute poverty that would persist across the world, and the needless deaths from delayed medical advances. There may be worlds where some version of this is something to consider, but the evidentiary bar for delaying technological development should obviously be pretty high.

Here is the link.

The post Séb Krier appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Can artificial intelligence (AI) refute economic theory? I document experiments in which I asked several AI models (Gemini, Refine, Claude, and ChatGPT) to check the correctness of four published papers in economic theory, each containing an error that I helped identify or correct. ChatGPT Pro performed best, occasionally constructing counterexamples and corrected proofs, while other models fared worse. However, no model located a true error without substantial human guidance, and data contamination complicates interpretation. I argue that a competent human paired with a frontier model can outperform current peer review, but AI cannot yet refute economic theory on its own.

That is from a new piece by Alexis Akira Toda.

The post How well does current AI find errors in economics papers? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

by Judith Curry

It’s time to declare victory against climate stupidity and move on.

Well, the definition of victory here is about as fuzzy as that for the Iran war.  Here is a summary of why Climate Etc. is being euthanized:

• Major progress has been made in the climate debate and the political climate has changed
• My interests have evolved in other directions
• The logistics and cost of keeping the blog running are substantial.

State of the Climate Wars

There have been some decisive battles in the past two years, notably President Trump’s election, the DOE Climate Report, and widespread acknowledgement that RCP8.5 is an implausible emissions scenario.  As a result, many news agencies have dropped or substantially reduced their climate desk, we don’t hear about climate change so much in the media (particularly as related to extreme weather events).  Also, we can’t underestimate the impact of substantially reduced funding for climate-related NGOs, with USAID and other funds drying up.

The leaders of the climate alarmism movement have not conceded defeat but have done much whining, notably over President Trump and the RCP8.5 scenario.  They are still trying to discredit the authors of the DOE Report. Triggered by the DOE Report, they have mostly stopped flogging the warming/extreme weather link, although there is a hardcore group that is committed to extreme event attribution as a mechanism to support litigation against fossil fuel companies.  With the demise of the extreme weather link, the climate alarmists are now focused on climate “tipping points,” which simply doesn’t resonate with the public (extreme weather events were much more alarming).

But most importantly, the whole issue has lost its political relevance.  During the past several months we have watched the entire world panic over loss of access to Middle Eastern oil, and major concerns raised about the need for massively more electricity to support data centers. Putting a tourniquet around our energy supply in the name of eliminating CO₂ emissions is a much worse idea now than it was even a few years ago, and that seems to be widely recognized (even in Europe).  Most tellingly, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has dropped climate change as an issue, now focusing on AI (and health).

We are perhaps at an inflection point; one can only hope that the climate enterprise will redirect its efforts away from flogging the CO₂ climate control knob mantra and towards understanding regional climate variability, particularly as influenced by natural variability, to support efforts at reducing vulnerability to weather extremes.  And figure out how to better work with nature to support our needs for food, water, energy.

JC moving on

When I was planning my retirement for Georgia Tech, I viewed Climate Etc. as a hedge against becoming bored in my retirement.  Ha!  Seems that it is impossible for me to become bored, too many interesting things to do and to learn about and to ponder.

After publishing my book Climate Uncertainty and Risk, and co-authoring the DOE Climate Report (I have prepared revisions to my sections, who knows when this will ever be published),  I frankly don’t have much more to say on the topic of the climate wars.  I have no interest in battling with the likes of Michael Mann, Andrew Dessler, et al. (does anybody still care what they have to say?)

Apart from the climate wars, I remain very interested in the fascinating and complex climate system, I erratically consume new research as I come across it (which can be pretty random sometimes).  But most of climate science has become BORING . . . too much mega-modeling and politicking, and not enough thinking.  In any event, I no longer have an interest in writing for the public on these topics.

My professional interests are more focused on extreme weather on timescales from hours to a year, which is the focus of my company Climate Forecast Applications Network (CFAN), along with decision making under uncertainty and risk science.  It’s a fascinating time for weather forecasting, and CFAN is deeply immersed on the new opportunities afforded by AI.  I write reports on a range of related topics, which are sent to CFAN’s clients (they are not made public). I continue to do consulting on climate-related topics, supporting litigation and developing regional, decadal scale scenarios to support risk assessment for specific client needs.

I’be been pretty quiet on twitter (I can’t bring myself to call it X) for the last several months, maybe I should step up my commentary there — I still have alot to say, and short comments responding to a paper or news item is about the right level of effort at this point.

Now that my granddaughter is in high school (yes she is very interested in science), I have been paying more attention to what is going on at the universities, which I abandoned in disgust almost a decade ago. 

Personally, after a big downsize and moving into a much smaller and simpler place, Peter and I are focused on our new dog Lucy, after our previous dogs Bruno and Rosie succumbed to old age.  And establishing the garden at our new place.

A peaceful life with family and friends, exploring the world and its new developments from my laptop, and having a blast with AI.

Blog logistics and costs

Climate Etc. is a really old blog in terms of blog years – since 2010.  Since then, WordPress has modernized and upgraded.  Hacking/security has become a growing issue.  The way that Climate Etc. was originally set up is fairly obsolete.  Starting in 2022, the blog started having technical issues.  WordPress required new plugins for the website to operate in the way that I had been using it.  Not sure how many of you noticed, but there have been 2 major blog crashes, and periodically things would stop working such as commenting.

I found a company that would trouble shoot the blog, fix as needed, deal with all the WordPress cr@p and security issues.  In looking at my account, over the past 4 years there have been 19 tickets opened, for a total cost of $16K.  Now, could I have found someone trustworthy and capable to take care of the blog that would have been cheaper?  Maybe, but I’ve frankly just lost interest.

I have set up an account on Substack; if I am ever motivated to resume blogging, that is where I will be.  I can also make extended posts on twitter (X) although that is more awkward for anything at all technical.  Anything newsworthy that I write I will send to WUWT. 

But frankly, beyond this current post I’m not seeing any blogging or other public writing in my future.

Eulogy

Climate Etc. isn’t dead yet, but it is in hospice, and all life support is being removed (I’m not paying any more $$ to support the blog).  We’ll see how long the patches, etc. that I’ve already paid for will keep the site accessible.

An experiment that started in 2010 in the wake of ClimateGate, Climate Etc. has exceeded my wildest expectations.   It has been one of the highlights of my career, and I am endlessly grateful to all of you who have participated here (especially guest bloggers) and to the new friends and colleagues that I have found from the blog.  My book Climate Uncertainty and Risk is a culmination of the topics that we have explored on the blog, and is the legacy of this blog.

While writing this post, I have reminisced about the denizens and “characters” that have come and gone on this blog. An amazing cross section of people with diverse expertises from many different parts of the world.

My deepest thanks to all of the guest posters and commenters that have contributed to making Climate Etc. a vibrant, stimulating and occasionally influential place.  My very best wishes to each of you.

The post RIP Climate Etc. appeared first on Climate Etc..

New business formation is surging–again.

Business formation first jumped in 2020 as the pandemic reorganized work, shopping and logistics. After the pandemic ended, business formation leveled off, but it did not return to its old path. It remained historically high. Moreover, in the past 18 months or so business formation has surged again. Registered Agents Inc tracks new Articles of Organization or Incorporation filed in the 50 states and they report:

Every month in 2026 has set a new formation record, including March, which stands as the highest single-month total in the history of the Business Formation Report. Through May, 2.9 million new businesses have been formed nationwide, the strongest five-month start on record.

Stripe Economics agrees and calls this the age of the solopreneur.  Among businesses using Stripe, recent cohorts are reaching serious transaction volumes faster than earlier cohorts.

The share of businesses (not just solopreneurs) reaching $1 million in cumulative revenue within a year after going live on Stripe was roughly 30% higher for the 2025 cohort as it was for the 2023 cohort, and it was roughly 3x higher for the 2025 cohort than the 2019 cohort.

Furthermore, the trend is not just in the United States. France, where, as the story goes, they have no word for entrepreneur, has also seen business creation reach record levels, driven heavily by micro-entrepreneurs.

The most likely explanation is the devolution of power. A single person armed with Stripe, Shopify, cloud software, automated bookkeeping, and now AI can do what once required a small staff. Dynamism had been on a long secular decline, but we may now be seeing the early stages of an experimental economy—one in which far more people can test ideas, reach customers, and launch firms, some of which will grow very large, very fast.

The post New Business Formation is Surging–Again. appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Homeowners are being forced to tear out air conditioning from their properties under Net Zero laws that prioritise "passive cooling" and only permit "active cooling" as a "last resort".

The post Air Conditioning Torn From Homes Under Net Zero Clampdown appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

I have been banging on about FDA delay in approving new sunscreens since 2013. Well it has finally happened. Twenty six years after being approved by the European Union and thirteen years after then-FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg told lawmakers that sorting out the sunscreen issue was “one of the highest priorities” the FDA has approved a new sunscreeen ingredient.

The US has been slow because it regulates sunscreens under the the more expensive, time consuming and rigorous drug standard rather than the less expensive cosmetic standard. Does this mean that our sunscreens are safer? No.

In fact, American sunscreens may be less safe.

Sunscreens protect by blocking ultraviolet rays from penetrating the skin. Ultraviolet B (UVB) rays, with their shorter wavelength, primarily affect the outer skin layer and are the main cause of sunburn. In contrast, ultraviolet A (UVA) rays have a longer wavelength, penetrate more deeply into the skin and contribute to wrinkling, aging and the development of melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. In many ways, UVA rays are more dangerous than UVB rays because they are more insidious. UVB rays hit when the sun is bright, and because they burn they come with a natural warning. UVA rays, though, can pass through clouds and cause skin cancer without generating obvious skin damage.

The problem is that American sunscreens work better against UVB rays than against the more dangerous UVA rays. That is, they’re better at preventing sunburn than skin cancer. In fact, many U.S. sunscreens would fail European standards for UVA protection. Precisely because European sunscreens can draw on more ingredients, they can protect better against UVA rays. Thus, instead of being safer, U.S. sunscreens may be riskier.

European sunscreens are also more pleasant to apply, and because they work better with makeup they are probably used more often as part of a skin care regimen, which may reduce the prevalence of skin cancer. Once again, the United States’ slower and seemingly more risk-averse approach actually increases risk.

The lesson, for those who are listening, is general.

The post Here Comes the Sun(screen) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

A truly excellent movie, one of the best of the year.  Specifically, it concerns the meteorological forecasts (!) leading up to the D-Day invasion.  Thematically, it is about the differences between Americans and Brits, how bureaucracy operates, the nature of leadership, and the proper role of science in government.  It is like an old-style Hollywood movie.  Most of the action takes place in only a few rooms, and with superb dialogue and performances.  Although you all know how D-Day turns out, the movie still generates suspense on some of the major plot points.  Definitely recommended, here is the movie’s trailer.

The post *The Pressure* (no spoilers) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Most of my Free Press column deals with Mythos, but here are some remarks on Europe:

There is yet another huge problem behind all these first-order problems. Let us say, for instance, that France’s Mistral AI develops very nicely and serves as an EU counterpart of Anthropic and OpenAI. Well, then the other European countries will become highly dependent on the French. That may seem okay today, but it will be much less fun for the Germans if the French really do have all that extra power and leverage.

As for the French themselves, they would be highly dependent on a private company. France may end up with one such company, but it is unlikely to have three of them. So Mistral will in turn have high leverage over France, French politics, and French foreign policy. Let us hope they are up to that. The simple point is that being influenced by someone in your home country, even if it sounds more appealing rhetorically, is not always better than being pushed around by foreigners. Sometimes the foreigners are less oppressive and intrusive, if only because they care less about you.

Worth a ponder.  I am hearing good things about the new Mistral model, so these questions may become relevant sooner than I had thought when writing this.

The post AI nationalism, Europe included appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 represents the most significant reform of the U.S. income tax code since the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Previous analyses of the TCJA’s economic impact often rely on estimates based on data prior to the enactment of the legislation. This paper leverages plausibly exogenous variations in state-level tax changes brought about by the TCJA and employs local projections with two-way fixed effects to examine its effects on the labor market. Measures of TCJA tax shocks are constructed with the NBER-TAXSIM model using state-level tabulations of individual income tax returns from the Statistics of Income (SOI). Our findings suggest that tax cuts amounting to 1 percent of Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) under the TCJA are associated with a 0.7–1 percentage point increase in the labor force participation rate (LFPR) and a 0.8–1.5 percent increase in payroll employment over the two years following the TCJA’s implementation. These results appear broadly robust to assumptions about heterogeneous state responses and the inclusion of interactive fixed effects.

That is from a newly published article by Anil Kumar.  Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

The post Labor market effects of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

An ominous Heat Dome has settled over western Europe.

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It is literally 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) as I type this, and if you were an alien from Pluto listening to central German radio you’d have to conclude that these temperatures are at the very limits of human survivability. (It’s substantially warmer further west, but the hysteria is the same everywhere.) Meteorologists are running short of death doom colours to depict the dire state of our temperature emergency …

… and former Covid Minister Karl Lauterbach has declared that “many people will die” and denounced “right-wing conspiracy theorists” for not taking sunny summer weather seriously enough.

Meanwhile, in what has become a fixed seasonal ritual, German public health authorities and state media have begun circulating lunatic emergency advice for how to stay cool in this life-threatening heat situation.

Their pointers:

• Open windows only at night, early in the morning, and late in the evening.

• Otherwise close all windows and draw all curtains so you can be both uncomfortably warm and profoundly depressed.

• Safely ensconced in your stuffy dark apartment, unplug all electrical devices, including your internet router, because these can emit heat even in “standby mode.”

• Also roll up all of your carpets to stop them from storing heat.

• Hang up wet laundry in your dark apartment to cool the air via evaporation, but do not hang up too much wet laundry or the air will become excessively humid which is even worse.

• The one electronic device you might possibly consider plugging in, is a fan, to cool your skin. To enhance the cooling effect, put a bucket of all the ice that you have emptied from your unplugged freezer in front of the fan.

• What you should not plug in, is any kind of portable air conditioning unit, because the Federal Environmental Agency believes that they will actually make your room warmer when the exhaust air finds its way back into your apartment.

This is the modern German government in a nutshell: “The heat is going to kill you, stay inside with the windows closed and the curtains drawn and do all this other weird, crazy and unheard-of stuff to escape the murderous heat, but whatever you do, don’t do the one thing that will actually substantially reduce interior temperatures, because reasons.”

In California a 17 year-old can drive a car but can’t ride alone in an Uber or a Waymo.

I long for the days when you could put a kid in the post. We have weakened as a civilization.

The post CA Logic appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

1. Progress Ireland.

2. Some new results on tatonnement?

3. The new Paul McCartney album is his best since the 2004 Chaos and Creation in the Backyard.  Here is a song by song analysis.  For an 83-year-old, it is an astonishing and I think unparalleled achievement.

4. “Our findings suggest that the aggregate value of data is about 1.5% of GDP.”

5. Turkmenistan notes.

6. Seminar teaching rich kids how to manage their wealth (WSJ).

The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

In the US, someone with wealth is free to give it away more or less as they see fit (spousal claims excepted, which partly reflect marital co-ownership). In much of Europe, however, there is forced heirship–a large fraction of wealth must be handed down to children which makes it harder to direct large portions of wealth to charities, foundations, or non-family causes compared to the US. (Louisiana, with its French-Spanish civil law roots, is the one state with forced heirship and even it mostly gutted it in 1995.)

Here is an excellent post by John Arnold who, if he were European, would be required to give 75% of his wealth to his three children instead of spending it on philanthropy as he and his spouse are now doing.

America’s cultural ideal has been the self-made entrepreneur while Europe’s was rooted in aristocracy, with status inherited rather than earned. Europe’s inheritance laws show this divide.

Many European countries have “forced heirship” laws that require people to leave 50-75% of their estates to their children. Want to leave the majority of your wealth to charity? not allowed. Your kids are estranged from you, struggling with addiction, or irresponsible? still required to give them the money. Want your kids to avoid a life of entitlement? tough.

Incredibly, these laws look back at transfers made during your lifetime. If you have 3 children in France, you’re required to bequeath them a minimum of 75% of your estate. Because French law calculates this based on your assets at death plus all lifetime gifts, giving away more than 25% of your wealth while alive means your heirs can legally sue to force charities or foundations to return the funds. This has limited the development of the nonprofit sector on the continent.

The cultural gap between an entrepreneurial society and one shaped by dynastic wealth is enormous. If you make it yourself, you tend to want your kids to do the same. If you inherit it, the primary goal is protecting the estate for the next gen.

Countries like Spain, France, and Italy legally entrench family dynasties, while America has historically sought to limit them through estate taxes. The result is not only a weaker culture of philanthropy and civil society in Europe, but also less economic dynamism.

It’s interesting that in Capital Piketty discusses required equal division to children as an egalitarian legacy of the revolution but, as far as I recall, never reflects on the fact that forced heirship prevents a French entrepreneur from giving his fortune away to charity. A case for laissez-faire, no?

The post Europe Demands Family Dynasties appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

In 2015 I wrote Baltimore Arrests are Down and Crime is Way Up and, as I predicted, Baltimore tipped into an high crime equilibrium. After the Freddie Gray riots, arrests declined and crime shot up but crime stayed high even after arrests rebounded. In my view, the surge fed on itself: higher crime strained police resources, and that strain—in and of itself—reduced the probability of punishment, sustaining the high-crime equilibrium, as in my crime wave paper.

Yet, beginning around 2022 crime in Baltimore—most especially murders—began to fall.

In April, Baltimore had four homicides, the lowest total for any single month since at least 1970. So far this year, there were 38, compared with 51 in the same period last year. At the current rate, Baltimore would end 2026 with fewer than 100 homicides. There were 323 just four years ago.

How did we get from a city in which the question was how high can crime rise, to one where the question is how low can it go? The answer might be linked to the nationwide decline in murder, spurred by a restoration of policing as the excesses of the George Floyd years recede. But that raises the question of what cities across the country are doing right.

So what caused the decline? We can’t be entirely sure as national trends confound but Charles Fain Lehman has a good piece in the FP arguing plausibly that the answer boils down to carrots, sticks and the non-random nature of murder. Begin with the latter. A significant subset of murders are highly predictable. A gang member gets gunned down today. Next week, you can expect retaliation. Moreover, you know who is going to do the murder even more than you know who is going to be murdered. Namely, a close associate—a fellow gang or family member—will be the one to do the killing. Sometimes pre-Cog is not so hard.

So with this in mind, Baltimore, under a new mayor and tough on crime prosecutor, began to intervene in the murder cycle before it happened, i.e. a focused deterrence program based on Boston’s Operation Ceasefire.

The approach involves a detailed investigation of every shooting that happens in the city. Every week, the Baltimore Police Department and its partners review the week’s incidents….For every shooting, GVRS prescribes reaching out to known associates of the victim.

…At one recent coordination meeting, about 20 people gathered around the table of the conference room at Baltimore’s Doxa Ministries Church Without Walls. Under the direction of Reginald Williams from the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, they talked through two new “referrals” associated with the victim of a recent shooting. One had a long criminal history and was on house arrest. Another, barely an adult, was himself a victim a few years earlier.

Both men will have their doors knocked on by several of the meeting’s attendees. They will be offered services—job training, tattoo removal, relocation, whatever they need to get out of the “life.” But they will also get a clear message, delivered verbally and in the form of a letter from Mayor Scott: Baltimore is watching them—and will come after them.

Carrots, sticks, and a little Pre-Cog. Together they appear to be working.

The post Why are Murders Down in Baltimore? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

A police hate crime adviser says she was left “gobsmacked” after West Yorkshire Police focused on protecting mosques, not Jews, after last October’s Manchester synagogue attack – then sacked her for speaking up.

The post Police Sacked Hate Crime Adviser Who Warned Force Favoured Muslims Over Jews appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

This is terrifying. Read the whole post.

For now, this is a threat. And it's just part of Mamdani's new housing plan.

Article Written and Published by Libelists?
by Jessica Rose at Brownstone Institute

Here’s the article in question. It was written and published on Dec. 5, 2025, 6:00 AM EST by Brandy Zadrozny in MS NOW and is entitled: “RFK Jr.’s CDC panel: No more hepatitis B vaccine for some newborns. The CDC’s vaccine advisory panel, stocked with anti-vaccine activists and loyalists to RFK Jr., voted on Friday to stop recommending a birth dose of vaccine.”

I am posting my X remarks and defense of some of the false and defamatory comments made therein.

The first statement in this article is false, and what follows are many defamatory remarks including multiple references to “anti-vaccine activists” and descriptions of the ACIP meeting and members as “chaotic and ultimately unproductive” and “illegitimate”.

Read on... I would consider suing for libel here.

Without data?

Close up of “without data”…

147 children under 10 (including infants) got dosed and were monitored for 5 whole days. This is the Recombivax HepB clinical trial.

There’s been very little change in infant morbidity since the onslaught of at-birth HepB regimen. The age ranges with biggest declines indicate other sources as the reason for HepB acute cases decline.

Such as these…

Why does the US have HepB as a birth dose when other countries do not while these other countries do not suffer from hordes of endemic HepB in babies?

Looks like all the cases of HepB after 2003 were from chronic infections.

And that these chronic infections were in older adults.

Pebsworth simply offered the reasons for acute HepB becoming a more prominent issue in the US over the past decades. She was not misinforming or stigmatizing. At all.

“Pebsworth attributed risk from hepatitis B to gay men, drug users and immigrants — a claim that both misinforms and stigmatizes disease.”

HepB is an STD and is not transmitted through respiratory droplets, coughing, sneezing, or airborne routes, so blood or semen transmission is impossible in HBsAg- mothers. She states that a rapid rise of acute HepB were due to 1. increases in transmission blood-borne infections (STD transmission rates including HepB) [1960s - blood infusions + 1980s - STD problems + IV drug use], and 2. immigration from high endemicity areas with established chronic HepB carriers which preceded the 1991 universal infant vaccination strategy.

More data…

During the ACIP meeting, Dr. Meissner kept insisting that data showing harms to infants in HepB context does not exist. It does. I didn’t get this data to the ACIP table or to Dr. Meissner’s eyes, but it does in fact, exist.

Close up…

When comparing the estimated number of perinatal HepB deaths from HBsAg+ mothers in the US (2,268) to the estimated number of infant deaths reported to the VAERS pharmacovigilance database using an under reporting factor of only 5, the number of deaths is far greater in the latter estimation. This is based on AAP data, peer-reviewed literature and VAERS data.

Not only are there many deaths reported to VAERS for infants 1 year of age and under, temporal clustering indicates a causative effect.

The number of deaths in days in infants is clustered at 6 days old. This is the age at vaccination.

Temporal clustering represented as the number of days post vaccination in infants two years old and less clearly shows that most reports of death were made on day 1.

*Volitionally…

Republished from the author's Substack

Article Written and Published by Libelists?
by Jessica Rose at Brownstone Institute - Economics, Policy, Public Health, Education, Society

Judging by the headlines, Ted Turner, who died earlier this month at age 87, will be remembered as an adventurer and visionary: creator of CNN, and with it the 24-hour news cycle, the inventor of the satellite-supported national TV superstation, a distinguished sailor, a loyal conservationist, and a reputed playboy. He adored women so much that he produced five children with them, incidentally breaking faith with one of his core values: population control.  

When Turner was born on the eve of the Second World War, just over two billion people inhabited the earth. That number increased three-fold by 2000. For Turner, who had internalized the cataclysmic “overpopulation” fears of the Cold War, such growth in living, breathing souls was not a success, but a looming catastrophe. His goal was to first “stabilize the population,” then ideally reduce it to around two billion.  

Toward his vision of a world with fewer children, Turner was a generous donor to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Planned Parenthood, and the Guttmacher Institute. In 2004, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America presented him with the Margaret Sanger Award, which recognizes “leadership, excellence, and outstanding contributions to the reproductive health and rights movement.” 

Turner wasn’t the only billionaire philanthropist pouring money into population control. In 2009, he met privately in New York City with Bill Gates, David Rockefeller, George Soros, Warren Buffett, and others to discuss how they could use their wealth to curb overpopulation and fight climate change. They were known as the “Good Club,” The Guardian reported, and they wanted to “save the world.” 

Despite their anxieties about other people’s fecundity, the neo-Malthusian billionaires in attendance had, like Turner, been quite fruitful in their own reproductive behavior: Rockefeller had six children; Soros had five; and Gates and Buffett each had three. While sources described Gates as the “most impressive” speaker, Turner was the most outspoken and attempted to “dominate” the meeting.

His outspoken rhetoric certainly wasn’t limited to elite secret gatherings. At a climate luncheon in 2010, he urged world leaders to adopt China’s one-child policy, insisting that, “If we’re going to be here [as a species] 5,000 years from now, we’re not going to do it with seven billion people.” 

While lauded as an optimist, Turner believed humans were headed for a nightmare future unless they took drastic action against alleged overpopulation and climate change. He predicted a doomsday scenario of civilizational collapse, with famine, death, cannibalism, and very few survivors living in a “failed state like Somalia or Sudan.” The earth’s temperature is rising, he claimed, because “too many people are using too much stuff.”  

Meanwhile, as an adventurer, he afforded himself a lavish and abundant lifestyle, flying his Bombardier Challenger 300 private jet a distance of nearly 80,000 miles in 2022 alone. His aircraft that year surpassed the combined emissions of 34 average Americans.

Turner’s hypocritical and apocalyptic mindset reflected the zero-sum ideology of twentieth-century neo-Malthusians such as Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, co-author of the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, which boldly asserted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s due to overpopulation. Turner admired Ehrlich and derived his two-billion world population ideal from Ehrlich’s estimation of earth’s “carrying capacity.”   

This outlook received bipartisan support in Washington throughout the 1960s and 1970s among “Rockefeller Republicans” like Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger as well as environmentalist Democrats like Jimmy Carter. Neo-Malthusian ideas were institutionalized within the State Department and USAID, operating under the misguided assumption that rapid population growth inhibited economic development and constituted a threat to US national security and economic interests. Food aid was even conditioned on developing countries’ willingness to implement population control policies.  

The neo-Malthusian consensus wasn’t shattered until the Reagan administration declared rapid population growth a “neutral phenomenon” rather than a barrier to development at the UN’s 1984 World Population Conference in Mexico City. Economist Julian Simon, who argued that “the ultimate resource is people,” was instrumental in shaping the Reagan administration’s renewed approach to population policy.  

In 1990, Simon triumphed over Paul Ehrlich in a ten-year wager on the prices of five metals. Ehrlich, betting that population pressures would diminish resources and spike commodity prices, lost to Simon’s more optimistic view that human knowledge, innovation, and resource substitution would produce greater abundance and lower prices over time.  

Simon is no less correct today than he was in 1980 when his wager against Ehrlich began. The “time prices” of basic commodities — denoting the amount of time someone must work to earn enough money to purchase a given item — have continued to shrink, owing much to population growth and the expansion of the rule of law, property rights, and economic freedom.  

Contrary to the assumptions of Turner and the neo-Malthusians, population growth hasn’t exacerbated famine, poverty, and disease. Nor has it necessarily hastened global warming. As economists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso documented in their 2025 book After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People, no theoretical or historical relationship exists between population size and particulate air pollution. Whether the human population stabilizes or declines, global warming is forecast to proceed. “Billions of lives lived would make a small difference to this big problem,” they said.  

Addressing and overcoming challenges like climate change requires sustained technological progress, which is enabled by more free minds, not fewer. Turner wanted to limit both human numbers and human freedom, but his Malthusian views embodied a discredited consensus that applied a yeast-in-a-petri-dish model to the study of human population.  

This dismal perspective, which assumes people will breed themselves into oblivion, doesn’t take into account the better angels of our nature: our rationality, ingenuity, and adaptability unparalleled by any other species. But it reveals a lot about how Malthusians think about their fellow humans — not as sovereign individuals possessing inherent rights and dignity, but rather as an infestation requiring systemic control. As Julian Simon pointed out, this worldview isn’t predicated on scientific facts but on “value judgments about the worth of human life.”  

Simon’s intellectual archnemesis, Paul Ehrlich, preceded Turner in death by less than two months. These two Malthusian giants departed our resourceful earth at a time when roughly two-thirds of people live in countries with sub-replacement fertility rates, meaning the average woman is having fewer than 2.1 children. The depopulation they so fervently sought — and funded — has at last become a reality. 

But it comes at a price. Countries are not only facing spiraling debt and deficits spurred by population aging and worker shortages, but also a dearth of love, care, and support for the elderly. In countries like Japan, those who fulfilled Turner’s wish and had only one child — or perhaps none — are increasingly dying alone and undiscovered for days, weeks, or even months. It’s a sad and overlooked outcome of depopulation, but luckily for Turner, who suffered from Lewy body dementia, he had five children, along with billions of dollars, to support him in his final years of decline and dependency.

When a state starts floating an exit tax, it is telling you something more important than any campaign slogan: the people running the place know their model is not working. 

They may not say it that way. They will call it fairness, responsibility, or making the wealthy “pay what they owe.” But the meaning is the same. 

If families, entrepreneurs, and investors are leaving, the state can either ask why its policies are pushing them out, or it can try to tax them for escaping. An exit tax chooses punishment over reform. 

I understand why these proposals resonate with some people. If you are watching wealthy residents relocate while governments still face bills for schools, roads, pensions, and other commitments, it is easy to feel like the people with the most mobility are ducking the tab. 

That frustration is real. It deserves a serious answer. But an exit tax is not a serious answer. It is a confession that lawmakers would rather cling to a failing fiscal model than fix the spending, regulation, and tax policies that made people want to leave in the first place. 

That is why the current trend is so revealing. In California, proposals have centered on taxing billionaire net worth, including wealth that often exists on paper rather than in cash. In New York, the push has extended to a new surcharge on high-value second homes in New York City.

In Washington, lawmakers have already enacted a “millionaires’ tax.” These policies differ in form, but not in spirit. They all send the same message: if government has made your state too expensive, too hostile, or too unpredictable, it may still try to claim part of your future anyway. 

The economics are worse than the politics. Supporters talk as if wealth is a pile of idle cash sitting in a vault, just waiting to be skimmed. It is not. Wealth is usually tied up in businesses, shares, property, and future earnings. 

Taxing net worth or unrealized gains means taxing value that often has not been sold, realized, or converted into cash. That can force asset sales, dilute business ownership, weaken investment, and change behavior long before the tax collector ever gets a check.

 A Hoover Institution analysis of California’s proposal found that once likely migration responses are considered, the measure could leave the state with a negative net present value of about $25 billion. That is the real lesson: politicians score the tax statically, but the economy does not sit still. 

And that is before you get to the broader evidence. The OECD has noted that recurring net wealth taxes have become much less common across advanced economies because they tend to raise less revenue than promised while creating large compliance costs, avoidance incentives, and economic distortions. Countries tried them. Many backed away. 

A recent NBER study on Scandinavian wealth taxation found that higher top wealth-tax rates reduced the number of wealthy taxpayers and that many of those taxpayers were business owners whose departure reduced investment, employment, and value-added. 

That is the part too often ignored in political talking points. When a state drives out a founder, investor, or employer, it is not just losing one tax return. It is losing future jobs, future capital formation, and future opportunity for everybody else too. 

Defenders of exit taxes still fall back on one argument that sounds morally satisfying: these taxpayers benefited from state infrastructure, legal protections, and markets while they lived there, so the state deserves one final cut

But that argument quietly rewrites the relationship between citizen and government. It turns moving into a taxable offense. It says the state retains a lingering claim on your success because you once lived under its jurisdiction. That is a dangerous principle in a federal system built on mobility and competition.

 Even in the international arena, exit taxes are controversial, complex, and tied to specific movements of assets or functions across borders. Importing that logic into state tax policy is not modernization. It is escalation. 

The problem is not just that these taxes are bad economics. It is that they usually do not stay narrow. Politicians sell them as a tool aimed only at billionaires or luxury homeowners — policy aimed at an applause line. But when the revenue falls short, the scope expands. 

One-time wealth taxes become annual property surcharges. “Billionaire” thresholds are expanded to target millionaires and eventually the middle class. “Temporary” taxes become permanent fiscal architecture. New York’s pied-à-terre proposal is a good example of how quickly the logic expands once the principle is accepted. 

Frédéric Bastiat warned us to look not just at what is seen, but at what is unseen. We see the tax revenues. That’s a small, visible victory compared to the investment that never happens, the entrepreneur who builds elsewhere, jobs that never arrive — the unseen costs compound. 

Exit taxes are built on ignoring all of that. 

Claiming an exit tax frames mobility as theft, when it is often a rational response to bad governance. They do not restore prosperity. They steal the opportunity to prosper by doubling down on the very policies that made growth harder in the first place. 

If lawmakers want to deter departures, the answer is not a fiscal trap door. It is better policy: lower taxes, lighter regulation, spending restraint, and a serious effort to make their states places where productive people want to stay.

Real economic renewal is more difficult than yet more taxation, but it is also the only approach that works. Exit taxes will not save failing states. They only confirm why people wanted to leave. 

Earlier this month, in Part V of my series on the U.S. vs. Europe (previous versions available here, here, here, and here), I shared a chart showing the OECD calculations of “Actual Individual Consumption.”

The AIC numbers are designed to give people an apples-to-apples comparison of living standards.

I’m re-sharing the chart today, and I’ve highlighted the United States and France.

The average for OECD nations is 100. France is slightly better than average with an AIC score of 104.

But the US is way head, with an AIC score of 149.

In other words, the average person in the United States enjoys a much higher level of consumption than the average person in France.

What happens, though, if we compare the average person in Mississippi (America’s poorest state) to the average person in France.

I’m motivated to examine this question because there was an interesting exchange of views between Paul Krugman (Europe is doing well) and Pieter Garicano and Luis Garicano (Europe is not doing so well).

Megan McArdle of the Washington Post wrote about this debate. Here are some excerpts from her column.

I can certainly imagine myself in a Parisian cafe, enjoying some steak frites and a glass of wine while taking in the glorious streetscape. What’s harder to imagine is soaking in all that ambiance and thinking, “Yeah, this place is definitely poorer than Mississippi.” … that’s what gross domestic product statistics suggest. In 2024, France had a per capita GDP of $46,103. Mississippi’s was $55,876. As recently as 10 years ago, French GDP was ahead ($37,024 versus $36,184), but since then U.S. GDP and productivity have grown significantly faster than Western Europe’s. …If you want to understand the more serious version of the Europe/America debate, you should read a recent essay economist Paul Krugman wrote while traveling in Europe, saying he sees little evidence of relative decline. You should also read the response that my old economics professor, Luis Garicano, wrote with Pieter Garicano, urging us to believe the statistics over our lying eyes. …The answer Krugman offers is that it’s a mirage. Europe has chosen forms of consumption that don’t show up in GDP (such as taking more vacation than Americans). …The Garicanos offer compelling responses, including noting that highly productive export industries can pay a hefty premium to attract the best workers.

Megan then cites the OECD’s AIC data.

…for those who doubt that Americans are earning more after accounting for things such as Europe’s low-cost universal health care, that there’s a reasonably good measure…known as “actual individual consumption.” This measure includes what governments and nonprofits spend on providing things such as education and health care. Researchers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development looked at AIC in 2023, adjusted for local price differences and pegged America’s AIC at 150 percent of the OECD average. France is right around the median. …French homes average slightly under 1,076 square feet, while the average U.S. home is around 1,800 square feet and has energy-intensive amenities that most European homes lack, such as air conditioning and tumble dryers.

This is all interesting, at least for people who enjoy comparative economics.

But what about Megan’s speculation about whether France is poorer than Mississippi.

For my contribution to the debate, I’m going to generate an answer.

My methodology is simple

First, according to the Commerce Department, per-capita personal income in Mississippi is $54,531, significantly lower than the US average of $76,375. To be more exact, Mississippi is about 71.4 percent of the US average.

Second, the US is at 149 for the OECD’s AIC measure. So if we make the presumably reasonable assumption that the Mississippi AIC score is 71.4 percent of 149, we get a score that is a bit higher than 106.

Since France is at 104, this means Mississippi wins. Heck, not only does Mississippi beat France, it’s also ahead of nations such as Sweden, Ireland, and Denmark.

By the way, this does not mean I’m saying it’s better to live in Mississippi than in France. If you like old cathedrals, medieval villages, and a couple of thousand years of history, France beats every state, not just Mississippi.

What I will say, however, is that bad policy is hindering French prosperity. France could be and should be much richer. Sadly, it made the mistake of enacting the income tax in 1914 and then it dramatically expanded its welfare state beginning in the 1960s.

The U.S. also made the mistake of bad fiscal policy in the 1900s, but fortunately not as far and as fast in the wrong direction as France.

P.S. One final point is that Europe seems prosperous to American tourists because we generally visit their historic cities, which is where rich Europeans tend to live. Poor Europeans, meanwhile, usually live in the suburbs where tourists almost never visit. This is very different from the United States, where poor people often live in cities and upper-income Americans are more likely to congregate in the suburbs and exurbs.

P.P.S. Mississippi has approved legislation to repeal its state income tax. Assuming that ultimately happens, it will enjoy an even bigger advantage over France.

Scientific discovery is driven by the iterative process of observation, hypothesis generation, experimentation, and data analysis. Despite recent advancements in applying artificial intelligence to biology, no system has yet automated all these stages [1, 2, 3]. Here, we introduce Robin, the first multi-agent system capable of fully automating both hypothesis generation and data analysis for experimental biology. By integrating literature search agents with data analysis agents, Robin can generate hypotheses, propose experiments, interpret experimental results, and generate updated hypotheses, achieving a semi-autonomous approach to scientific discovery. By applying this system, we were able to identify promising therapeutic candidates for dry age-related macular degeneration (dAMD), the major cause of blindness in the developed world [4, 5]. Robin proposed enhancing retinal pigment epithelium phagocytosis as a therapeutic strategy, and identified and confirmed in vitro efficacy for ripasudil and KL001. Ripasudil is a clinically-used Rho kinase (ROCK) inhibitor that has never previously been proposed for treating dAMD. To elucidate the mechanism of ripasudil-induced upregulation of phagocytosis, Robin then proposed and analyzed a follow-up RNA-seq experiment, which revealed upregulation of ABCA1, a lipid efflux pump and possible novel target. All hypotheses, experimental directions, data analyses, and data figures in the main text of this report were produced by Robin. As the first AI system to autonomously discover and validate novel therapeutic candidates within an iterative lab-in-the-loop framework, Robin establishes a new paradigm for AI-driven scientific discovery.

Here is the full article from Nature.  And here are two other new Nature pieces on related topics.

The post Robin (it’s happening) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Tajikistan’s remittances are worth nearly half the country’s GDP—

In Tajikistan, remittances — the money sent or brought back by migrants — amounted to 48% of GDP in 2024. The chart places this figure in context by comparing it with other countries with data for the same year. Nicaragua and Honduras receive remittances worth around a quarter of their GDP — high by global standards, but still far below Tajikistan’s level. Remittances here include two types of flows: money migrants abroad send home to their families, and money cross-border workers bring home from short-term jobs abroad.

Both of these flows play a role in Tajikistan, where most remittances come from labor migrants in Russia. In addition to the roughly 400,000 Tajiks settled there, hundreds of thousands more cross the border for seasonal and short-term work.

According to a report from the International Organization for Migration, about 1.2 million Tajiks were in Russia in mid-2024, which is more than a tenth of Tajikistan’s total population.

The World Bank’s latest Tajikistan Economic Update says that much of the country’s recent rapid economic growth (above 8% since 2021) was supported by these remittance inflows.

That is from Our World in Data, with a picture at the link.

The post Tajikistan fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Last year, I wrote a column rebutting Sen. Tim Kaine’s (D., Va.) attack on a nominee for expressing his belief in natural rights that derive from God, not the government. (He later backtracked after a public outcry). Now, MSNOW host Katy Tur seems to be echoing the same concern over Speaker Mike Johnson expressing his faith in natural rights at the “Rededicate 250” rally on the mall in Washington, DC.

Those voices have seeked to distort the self-evident truth that we know so well, that our founders boldly proclaimed in the Declaration: That our rights do not derive from the government. They come from you, our creator and heavenly father.

The line clearly caused Tur some alarm. The host raised it with the show’s panelists:

What about this passage from Mike Johnson declaring that our rights do not derive from government? They come from you, our creator and heavenly father. Is this him putting God over the Declaration of Independence?

It is an astonishing question given that express reliance on God as the source for the rights declared in that document.

In my new book, Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution, I detail how the Declaration of Independence (and our nation as a whole) was founded on a deep belief in natural laws coming from our Creator, not government. Ours was the world’s first major Enlightenment revolution based on those very natural rights.

That view is captured in the Declaration, which states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The view stated by Kaine did exist at the founding — and it was rejected. Alexander Hamilton wrote that “The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”

The irony is that the acknowledgment of natural rights does not “put God over the Declaration of Independence.” It is the very premise of that Declaration.

As I discuss in the book, the right of the colonists to rebel was a major question debated before the Revolution. Loyalists would often cite Romans 13, in which Paul the Apostle reminds Christians that they must obey civil authorities and be loyal subjects. It would be Reverend Jonathan Mayhew to put this argument to bed, using his pulpit at Boston’s Old West Church to explore the moral foundations for both fealty and rebellion for citizens:

“His published sermon “A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers” was given on January 30, 1750, and proved to be one of the most significant publications leading up to the Revolution. Paine’s Common Sense would not be published for twenty-five years, and it was Mayhew who would lay out the moral right, if not obligation, to rebel when natural rights are denied. Mayhew gave the lecture on the one hundredth anniversary of the execution of Charles I, who was experiencing a revival in the minds of many as a martyr.

Mayhew would have none of it and laid out the “general nature and end of magistracy” for a people denied the rights given to them by the Creator. He directly took on the oft-cited biblical authority for those demanding blind loyalty to the King: Romans 13. In the chapter, Paul the Apostle reminds Christians that they must obey the civil authorities and be loyal subjects. The use of this passage, he argued, was a blasphemy in suggesting that a tyrant violating the very natural laws set by God could be treated as “God’s Minister.” To the contrary, there is a moral obligation to oppose such tyrants in defense of God-given rights.”

The Revolution was fought over natural rights that belonged to colonists as human beings, bestowed by God and defended by the American Revolution. The Constitution created a system that guaranteed the protection of those rights contained in the Declaration of Independence.

Speaker Johnson was speaking directly to the foundation of this Republic in reaffirming his faith in natural rights. Of course, the rejection of natural rights in academia and politics is consistent with the view that our rights evolve with a “living Constitution.” What the government giveth, the government may taketh away.

The debate reflected in Tur’s comments could not be more timely or elemental on our 250th anniversary. We must again decide not just who we were then but who we are now as Americans. There are many who want to decouple our system from natural rights as they “reimagine” American democracy and “trash” the American Constitution. It is the same Siren’s Call heard at the founding. That is precisely why Franklin was right that this remains our Republic “if [we] can keep it.”

The Brits actually convicted some bad guys??

“President Trump needs reinforcements, and that’s what war fighters do," Hegseth said.