Jts5665

The Yale Report was quite good but for concision I prefer Kevin Bryan’s Eight Rules:

1. Produce and Teach Useful Knowledge
Universities exist to generate and teach useful knowledge. This knowledge is grounded in skeptical inquiry, empirical evidence, and logical deduction. “Useful” includes not only practical applications but also fundamental discoveries that expand our understanding of the world, even if their benefits are long-term.
2. Be Useful to All of Society
Universities are subsidized only if society at large finds them valuable. Research may take time to bear fruit, but its insights should ultimately serve the public good, communicated openly and accessibly, and presented with epistemic humility. Teaching should be done with care and draw on up-to-date research.
3. Attract Talent from All of Society
Useful knowledge can be created by people from any social or economic background. Do not waste talent. Do not select talent based on who knows “how to play the game”. Avoid insular language or norms that deter people from entering research.
4. Neutral, Objective Research Produces Useful Knowledge
Research must be neutral and objective. It is true that everyone has their individual background and preferences; nonetheless, unbiased research is still possible. Tradition, folk knowledge, and storytelling all play an important roles in society, but they are not the purpose of universities. There is no “Western science” or culturally-determined “ways of knowing”. Rather, research is open to all and can be performed identically regardless of background.
5. Hire, Promote, and Cite Based on Knowledge Contribution
Hiring, promotion, and citation must be based on an individual’s contribution to knowledge. Nepotism, group preferences, and adherence to specific “schools of thought” corrupt this process. When advancement is not based on merit, the public rightly questions our integrity and the objectivity of our findings.
6. Keep Personal Views Out of Research and Teaching
A scholar’s personal politics should be invisible in their research and teaching. If a finding is predictable based on the author’s identity or known views, the process has failed. Objectivity is the hallmark of credible science. Academics may hold private beliefs like anyone else, but their academic work must stand apart from them.
7. Research Fraud is Unacceptable
Fraud destroys trust. Misrepresentation of results, selective reporting, or methods designed to publish rather than to discover are also harmful. Proven fraud must bring immediate dismissal, as it violates the core purpose of academia.
8. Scientific Institutions Should Be Apolitical
Universities, journals, and scientific societies must remain non-partisan. Their public statements must be rare, restricted to issues of direct expert consensus, and made only when silence would be a greater threat to their integrity than speaking. Activism sacrifices credibility for influence – or worse yet, sacrifices credibility and influence alike.

I would add 9) Grades must be objective and useful discriminators of talent.

The post Eight Rules to Regain Public Trust in Academia appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

I just returned from voting in Virginia in the special election on the Democratic gerrymandered districts. It was fast and easy. Polling place workers said that they had a couple of hundred voters in just the last few hours.  I hope that you will participate if you live in the state.

I have long opposed gerrymandering by both parties.

Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger captures the hypocrisy of politicians attempting to justify these power grabs.  Even before this vote, she was widely criticized for running as a moderate but then veering to the far left as soon as she was elected. Her polling numbers reflect a “stunning” drop in support due to the bait-and-switch.

No issue is more glaring than her vocal opposition to gerrymandering in any form before she ran for governor. In 2019, when the Supreme Court halted redistricting, Spanbergger declared:

“This is good news for Virginia and the country. Gerrymandering is detrimental to our democracy and it weakens the individual voices that form our electorates. Opposing gerrymandering should be a bipartisan priority.”

However, now that Democrats control the legislature, Spanberger changed her position and is pushing the most extreme gerrymandered map in the nation — a move that would take an almost evenly divided delegation and wipe out all but one Republican district. In a state considered purple and divided down the middle, the Democrats would seize 10 of 11 absurdly crafted districts, including one called “the lobster” for its contorted shape.

The Democrats are insisting that they are merely responding to Texas, but this is far more extreme than in other states. Moreover, this is a purple state where Democrats are not even trying a modest accommodation for roughly half of the voters. It is a simple muscle play to suspend the state constitution despite a prior commitment to bar gerrymandering.

Spanberger believes in fighting gerrymandering unless it works to her party’s advantage.  Others have shown greater integrity. For example, Republicans in Indiana control the legislature but have refused to gerrymander the state, even “temporarily.”

The radical proposal is only possible because Virginia was once widely cited as a model of fairness in voting. Spanberger and the Democrats have now shattered that model.

Not only are the Democrats wiping out the representation of roughly half of the state (in the name of protecting Democracy), but polls show that the voters are sharply divided.  A slight majority is polling in favor of the move. Yet, that division is not reflected in the measure itself, which lacks any moderation or restraint. Democrats are simply wiping out almost every Republican district because they can.

The fact that Democrats are ignoring the unfairness to half of their neighbors shows how rage politics has taken hold of the country.

It is a quick vote on a single-issue ballot, but Virginians could send a powerful message of principle by defeating this measure and standing by their long-standing opposition to gerrymandering.

The legendary baseball player and manager Ted Williams once wrote a letter to the Angels outfielder Jay Johnstone on improving his hitting. Among his pieces of advice was that “with two strikes, you simply have to protect the plate.”

Williams’s advice on not striking out came to mind this week when another leak of confidential information rocked the Supreme Court. (The prior leak of the Dobbs decision went unsolved). For Chief Justice John Roberts, the message is clear: it is a time like this when you have to protect the plate.

Roberts, of course, is famous for his own baseball analogies. In his confirmation, he declared that “judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules. They apply them…Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire.”

Yet, justices do make rules not only in new precedent, but in the operation of the court system. Those rules are being broken.

In the same week as the new leak, Justice Sonia Sotomayor attacked her colleague Brett Kavanaugh as essentially an out-of-touch prig who had never even met an hourly wage worker. It was an unfair insult and a departure from the Court’s long-standing rules of civility. (Sotomayor later apologized).

Additionally, a forthcoming book by Mollie Hemingway on Justice Samuel Alito contains an embarrassing account of how Justice Elena Kagan allegedly screamed at Justice Stephen Breyer so loudly before the Dobbs opinion that the “wall was shaking.” (The book suggests that Kagan was upset with Breyer agreeing to spur along the dissents to get out the final opinions in light of rising threats against conservative colleagues after the leak).

For an institution that prides itself on its confidentiality and insularity, the Court is looking increasingly porous and partisan in these leaks.  Worse yet, people are indeed coming to the Court “to see the umpires.”

The most recent leak was published by the New York Times, which was given internal memos from various Supreme Court justices on the use of what is known as the “shadow docket” to issue rulings without oral arguments.

Notably, the leaks occurred after a controversial speech by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson at Yale Law School in which she denounced the use of the shadow docket by her conservative colleagues to release decisions that were sometimes “utterly irrational.”

The memos reveal the concern of the justices that the Environmental Protection Agency was effectively gaming the system, imposing unlawful regulatory burdens on electric utilities despite a countervailing earlier ruling in Michigan v. EPA.

Chief Justice Roberts noted that the EPA was using the ongoing litigation to force utilities to spend billions of dollars to comply with the new regulations: “In other words the absence of stay allowed the agency to effectively implement an important program we held to be contrary to law.”

The controversy over the use of the shadow docket is immaterial to this story. The most immediate concern for Roberts should be that this is strike two: another leak from within the Court that was clearly designed to wound some of its members.

Unlike the Dobbs leak (which appeared to be an effort to influence the final opinion), this is a leak about a decade-old case. It had a purely malicious purpose to embarrass or disrupt the Court.

The question, again, is the identity of the culprit. There is no reason to assume that the same person was involved in both leaks. Rather, the leaks appear to reflect a deteriorating culture at the Court.

After the Dobbs leak, Chief Justice Roberts launched a fruitless investigation through the federal marshals to find the responsible person. The use of the marshals as the lead investigators (rather than the FBI) was criticized at the time. Roberts may have been sensitive to an executive-branch agency rooting around in the highest court of a sister branch.

The result was the worst possible outcome. The culprit succeeded in both leaking the opinion and evading any accountability.

The fact is that the Court’s culture and institutional identity have always been its greatest protection of confidentiality. In a city that floats on a rolling sea of leaks, the Court was an island of integrity and civility. The “umpires” could call balls and strikes without playing the leak game.

That culture is fast becoming nothing but a relic in the wake of yet another major leak. For the future of the Court and the faith of the public, Roberts has to set his reservations aside and bring in the FBI to find the culprit. Most importantly, he has to guarantee total transparency in allowing the public to see the results wherever they may lead. In other words, with two strikes, Roberts needs to protect the plate.

Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution

This column ran on Fox.com

Remember this guy?

Christians praying at a flag pole get sued, but Muslims get their own prayer rooms!

Selling 97,400 copies of your book is an impressive accomplishment. It's not nearly as impressive, however, if you bought 67,000 of them yourself. Ask Gavin Newsom.

Below is my column on Fox.com on the Swalwell scandal. His resignation from Congress was expected in light of the likely expulsion and criminal investigations awaiting him. The worst, however, may be yet to come.

Here is the column:

The resignation of Rep. Eric Swalwell (D., Cal.) came with one of the most spectacular falls in political history. Just days ago, Swalwell was the leading Democratic candidate for governor of California and positioned to be one of two final candidates (the other a Republican). He expected that, regardless of his unpopularity, California Democrats would never vote for a Republican.

Now Swalwell has pulled out of the race, pulled out of Congress, and was even tossed out of the home of a billionaire who had been letting him crash there during the scandal.

Swalwell continues to deny the allegations and pledges to fight them.

For the record, I have been one of Swalwell’s most vocal critics for the last ten years. Yet, while I am not surprised by the allegations, I am surprised by how quickly Swalwell was abandoned by his political patrons in Congress and the unions.

In Washington, Harry Truman advised politicians that if you want a friend in this city, get a dog. However, even Swalwell’s dog Penny has yet to appear in public with him. Presumably, she is consulting with her own canine crisis team.

Swalwell has spent his entire career protected by an enabling establishment and media. He was a made man in Washington, and those who made him protected him despite years of rumors and allegations of misconduct.

He was never much of a legislator.  One 2025 study showed that he was outvoted in Congress by a colleague who had died months earlier.  His value was his vicious signature. He was always first to a mob. When Sen. Susan Collins received death threats, it was Swalwell who mocked her. In running for governor, he not only pledged to arrest ICE agents but to deny them driver’s licenses and jobs.  He trafficked in unadulterated rage to a nation of rage addicts.

His greatest patron was Nancy Pelosi, who single-handedly saved Swalwell’s career when he was found to have had an affair with an alleged Chinese spy. She told the media, “I don’t have any concern about Mr. Swalwell.” For most of the media, that was enough and they slinked away.

When critics sought to remove him from the classified House Intelligence Committee, Pelosi shocked many by insisting that he remain in the sensitive position, lashing out at those “trying to make an issue of this.”

Now, Pelosi and the media allies are gone. Even Swalwell’s friend, Sen. Ruben Gallego (D., Ariz.), has morphed into Claude Rains and proclaimed that he is “shocked” by the allegations. His former campaign chair, Gallego was shown in a picture bare-chested and riding camels with Swalwell on a luxury junket paid for by Qatar business interests.

The photo has not aged well for Gallego any more than his earlier lament that the Democratic party “used to be the party of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.”

The abandonment of Swalwell is a familiar move of political triage. By letting Swalwell succumb to the scandal, Pelosi and others hope to protect the establishment from any blowback after years of enabling his career. The media, as usual, is complying.

The media will cover a scandal involving a leading Democrat if there is no real alternative. What is interesting is how the Democratic establishment is now signaling that they want Swalwell destroyed — quickly and surgically.

The media is content calling Swalwell a monster without delving into who created and released that monster. Swalwell is no self-made man.  He is a made man of the Democratic establishment.

The alleged victims have lashed out not only at Swalwell but also at many in the establishment. They allege that they were rebuffed when they tried to bring their allegations to reporters.

One independent reporter said that he had been raising similar allegations about Swalwell with California Democrats from before Swalwell was elected to Congress. He was also turned away.

Swalwell had a use and that made his “appetites” irrelevant. If even half of these allegations are true, it shows the sense of license that Swalwell developed for years in Washington.

He lost that political immunity this week and now faces real legal liability. That does not mean that Democrats will not try to control the damage. They want Swalwell to take a deal to avoid any investigations that will pull other Democrats into the vortex of the scandal.

They are counting on New York and California district attorneys to produce the type of controlled explosion seen in construction where a hotel is brought down without damaging the adjacent structures.

The problem is Republicans may not just accept his resignation as the final act. They could call the women to testify and even call some of his congressional friends who took trips and partied with him. They could cite Swalwell himself for demanding such total transparency.

Swalwell’s resignation may indicate that he is now fully briefed on what lies ahead. With a criminal investigation announced in New York and one expected in California, any competent defense counsel would advise Swalwell that he needs to jettison every extraneous concern from his career to his office to his law license. Swalwell needs to fight for his liberty if these women are prepared to give statements not just to the media but to the police.

In both New York and California, the statute of limitations for rape and sexual assault were removed. The published allegations, from raping intoxicated women to leaving victims bruised and bleeding, would likely satisfy those statutes if established by the police.

Swalwell, ironically, will now join Hunter Biden as a political refugee.  (Swalwell supported in his public defiance of a congressional subpoena).  Like Hunter, Swalwell lost any influence and ability to make money when he fell out of power.  Hunter is now reportedly millions in debt and remaining in South Africa.

Swalwell may have to burn through his wealth in fending off these criminal investigations in multiple jurisdictions.  If any of the allegations are proven, he will likely lose his bar license and ability to support himself as a lawyer.

In the end, this is no morality tale because there are no more moral figures from Swalwell to those who created or protected him. It is a Washington tale where morality, like villainy, is measured by your proximity to power.

Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”

 

The email, which was sent from the White House Management Office, explained that it's a criminal offense to use nonpublic information to buy or sell prediction-market contracts.

Gender theory has always been a lie, and science keeps confirming it.

Adam Smith (1723-1790) is widely considered to be the father of modern economics. There were precursors, such as the School of Salamanca and the French Physiocrats, but Adam Smith’s 1776 magnum opus, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, was the first comprehensive treatise.

In this 250th anniversary year, much ink will be spilled – and with good reason – celebrating the legacy of Adam Smith. My purpose here is as joyous as it is modest: to share ten quotations that are particularly relevant today, and demonstrate Adam Smith’s enduring influence. I like to weave them into my lectures – on markets, on political economy, on constitutional economics, or on the moral foundations of capitalism. Adam Smith, in the versatility of his writings, was indeed a man for all seasons.

1. The Invisible Hand Acts

[B]y directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention… By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.

Perhaps the single best-known concept from Adam Smith, the invisible hand was famously picked up by the Austrian school of economics and its key lesson of spontaneous order. FA Hayek, especially, noted the importance of phenomena that were “the result of human action, but not of human design.” Alas, interventionists of all stripes still think they can supersede the invisible hand of the market. 

2. People Are Not Pawns

The flip side of the invisible hand involves social and economic engineering. Adam Smith was prescient in describing the psychology of social engineers, those self-proclaimed experts who believe, in their hubris, that they can run an entire economy.

The man of system…is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it.

3. Collective Action Can’t Be Imposed

The “man of system” quotation is long enough that it bears cutting in two. In the second part, Smith laments the unintended consequences of social engineering. If the policymaker is cautious and respects both human nature and local knowledge, the results can be a marginal improvement over the status quo (this is the basis of Buchanan and Tullock’s theory of collective action through the state).

“If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.”

4. Markets Coordinate Effort

Adam Smith’s key theoretical contribution is the division of labor. But this is not merely an economic model, to be calculated with production charts by eager students of microeconomics. For Smith, it is something more, an instrument of cooperation to overcome the limitations of human beings:

This division of labor, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom… It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature…, the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.

The division of labor solves a social problem: 

It is thus that man, who can subsist only in society, was fitted by nature to that situation for which he was made. All the members of human society stand in need of each others’ assistance, and are likewise exposed to mutual injuries. Where the necessary assistance is reciprocally afforded from love, from gratitude, from friendship, and esteem, the society flourishes and is happy. All the different members of it are bound together by the agreeable bands of love and affection, and are, as it were, drawn to one common centre of mutual good offices.

But though the necessary assistance should not be afforded from such generous and disinterested motives, though among the different members of the society there should be no mutual love and affection, the society, though less happy and agreeable, will not necessarily be dissolved. Society may subsist among different men, as among different merchants, from a sense of its utility, without any mutual love or affection; and though no man in it should owe any obligation, or be bound in gratitude to any other, it may still be upheld by a mercenary exchange of good offices according to an agreed valuation.

5. Self-Interest Actually Helps Everyone

Smith was excited about the potential for markets to align incentives. In another famous quip, he reminded us that markets transform private interest into public harmony:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

 In more recent terms, we are reminded of Deirdre McCloskey and Art Carden (both fellows of AIER). The title of their book speaks for itself: Leave Me Alone, and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World.

6. Permissionless Societies Creates Prosperity

The bourgeois deal has alternately been described in Physiocrat ARJ Turgot’s plea: “laissez-faire, laissez-passer” (let us act, let us pass). Ever the professor of moral sentiments (and not just the founder of modern economics), Smith was quick to show that the bourgeois deal was instrumentally good, indeed – but it was also the grounding for a free society: “Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest in his own way.”

7. Cooperation Connects Us

Smith’s first major work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), predated The Wealth of Nations by almost two decades. While demonstrating how markets advance the public good by appealing to and channeling private interests, Smith made it clear that human beings are fundamentally creatures of cooperation:

How selfish ‘soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

8. Individual Responsibility… With Limits

While emphasizing the importance of individual responsibility, Smith was also realistic about the limitations of what human beings could do. He warned:

The administration of the great system of the universe… is the business of God and not of man. To man is allotted a much humbler department, but one much more suitable to the weakness of his powers, and to the narrowness of his comprehension; the care of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country: that he is occupied in contemplating the more sublime, can never be an excuse for his neglecting the more humble department.

In a similar spirit, Ludwig von Mises explained in his 1927 book, Liberalism: “[classical] liberalism limits its concern entirely and exclusively to earthly life and earthly endeavor. The kingdom of religion, on the other hand, is not of this world. Thus, liberalism and religion could both exist side by side without their spheres’ touching.” Smith, Mises, and the classical liberal tradition stand as a foil against the busybodies – on the right and on the left – who would attempt to administer the universe through temporal means.

9. Collusion Threatens Competition

If Smith was worried about the political “man of systems”, he was also worried about business colluding against the consumer, instead of serving the market through competition. “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices…”

Smith cautioned us, however, against state efforts to prevent industry collusion: “It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice… ” But he did offer a solution, in the form of more free trade, and fewer regulations to discourage competition: “But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.”

10. Institutions Drive Economic Growth

I am an institutional economist. I first came to economics from a preoccupation with economic development and ending (or at least abating) poverty. With economist Robert Lucas (if not with the same success), I am obsessed with such questions. When observing that some countries are rich and others poor, and that some grow slowly and others quickly, he commented: “I do not see how one can look at figures like these without seeing them as representing possibilities. Is there some action a government of India could take that would lead the Indian economy to grow like Indonesia’s or Egypt’s? If so, what, exactly? If not, what is it about the “nature of India” that makes it so? The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else.”

International development is infuriating, for two reasons. First, it has been a massive failure – well, international aid has been a massive and expensive failure; behind the futile efforts of the men and women of systems, markets have been plugging along, and poverty has fallen radically in the past 200 years. Second, because the recipe for growth is so obvious. It works every time it’s applied, from the US and Western Europe in the early 1800s to China after Mao’s death and India after the end of the licensing raj, and to every country that embraced globalization and market reforms. It’s the recipe that Smith offered as early as 1755, twenty years before The Wealth of Nations, and well before the Enlightenment ideals were translated into economic policy: “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice, […the] rest being brought about by the natural course of things.” (This quotation is thought to come from a transcript of a 1755 Adam Smith lecture, from Dugald Stewart’s lecture notes.)

In more modern language, peace is obvious, as is low and transparent taxation. A “tolerable administration of justice” might be translated as rule of law. Taken together, we have economic freedom, which is closely correlated with growth and wealth. Instead of fancy macroeconomic policies, imposed from the top down by the men and women of systems, the New Development Economics proposes a radical and simple solution. Focus on microeconomics, institutions, incentives, and the transmission of knowledge in the Austrian tradition.

Smith warned us what happens when the basic conditions for economic growth are ignored by conceited policymakers and politicians: “All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel, or which endeavor to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.”

Tyranny is the midwife of poverty; liberty, of prosperity.

Two recent joint-papers Did California’s Fast Food Minimum Wage Reduce Employment? by Clemens, Edwards and Meer and The Effects of California’s $20 Fast Food Minimum Wage on Prices by Clemens, Edwards, Meer and Nguyen give what I think is a plausible and consistent account of California’s $20 fast food minimum wage.

California’s $20 fast food minimum wage raised wages in the sector by roughly 8 percent relative to the rest of the country but employment fell by 2.3 to 3.9 percent (depending on specification, median ~3.2%), translating to about 18,000 lost jobs. Food away from home (FAFH) prices in California’s four CPI-reporting MSAs rose 3.3–3.6 percent relative to 17 control MSAs. Falsification tests on Food at Home and All Items Less Food and Energy show zero differential movement—this is specific to restaurant prices.

What’s interesting is that the papers are independently estimated but the fit is consistent. The price paper uses Andreyeva et al.’s demand elasticity of -0.8 to convert the estimated price increases into an implied quantity declines: about 3.9–4.1 percent in limited-service and 1.7–1.8 percent in full-service. These align well with the employment declines of 3.2 and 2.1 percent estimated in the first paper.

The consistency tells us something about the mechanism. One thing we have learned about the minimum wage in recent years is that the pass-through effect is large and more of the employment decline is driven by pass through than by labor-capital substitution. In other words, prices rose, quantity demanded fell, and that’s what killed the jobs—not robots replacing workers. Not today, anyway.

In terms of welfare, the bulk of employed workers get an 8% wage increase, a small minority get disemployed. The big transfer was from consumers to workers. California has roughly 39 million residents, all of whom face 3.3–3.6% higher FAFH prices. The transfer is likely regressive — lower-income households spend a larger budget share on fast food specifically. So the policy effectively taxes low-income consumers generally to raise wages for a subset of low-income workers, while eliminating jobs for another subset. Your mileage may vary but I don’t see this as a big win for workers. We thought small increases in the minimum wage were absorbed–maybe some were or maybe they were just hard to estimate–but you can’t extrapolate the small  increases to big ones–the effect is non-linear. Big increases in the minimum wage start to bite.

As usual, when it comes to fast food there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Addendum: Clemens’s JEP paper continues to be the masterclass in how to think through minimum wage issues.

The post The CA Minimum Wage Increase: Summing Up appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Let's check in on the "defend democracy" and "Russian interference" folks, shall we?

1. The most important woman in Kant’s life.

2. Incentives matter?  Dealing with Iranian scientists (New Yorker).

3. “In the months that followed, US tariff policy changed more than 50 times, spanning rate increases, rate decreases, new product exemptions, and new product inclusions.”

4. The British minimum wage.

5. The next generation of books and publishing?

6. More Scott Sumner movie reviews.

7. How people actually use ChatGPT.  A massive new dataset from OpenAI.

8. They added a baby to the end of Tristan!???

9. Results on reproducibility.  And a simple visual, comparing different fields.  “Education” does not do great.  And the Nature link.  None of this should come as a surprise.

10. Resilient societies: a Mercatus call for proposals.

11. “There are now ten toilets in space.” (And the aliens?)

12. The anti-data center coalitions and their squabbles.

Lots to read and ponder in today’s links…

The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is again warning of a growing threat to the nation. In her lone dissent in Chiles v. Salazar, Jackson observed that “to be completely frank, no one knows what will happen now.” The ominous tone stemmed from the fact that free speech had prevailed over state-imposed orthodoxy in a Colorado case. Eight justices, including her two liberal colleagues, ruled that Colorado could not prevent licensed counselors from “any practice or treatment” that “attempts or purports to change” a minor’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

The win for free speech was catastrophic for Jackson and many on the left. Allowing counselors to discuss the causes and basis for sexual orientation changes, Jackson maintained, would “open a can of worms.” It would be far better for the majority to simply silence such dissenting voices in the name of science.

The dissent in Chiles is only the latest example of the chilling jurisprudence of Justice Jackson, including a pronounced dismissal of free speech values. Consider the holding of her colleagues that Jackson finds so horrific.

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that the First Amendment “reflects … a judgment that every American possesses an inalienable right to think and speak freely, and a faith in the free marketplace of ideas as the best means for discovering truth … any law that suppresses speech based on viewpoint represents an ‘egregious’ assault on both of those commitments.”

What a nightmare.

Instead, Jackson would have declared the ban on anything deemed “conversion therapy” to be “conduct,” not speech. It is that easy. You simply impose an orthodoxy and then treat any dissenters as being regulated for their conduct, not their viewpoints.

Justice Elena Kagan could not withhold her frustration with her colleague, noting that “[b]ecause the State has suppressed one side of a debate, while aiding the other, the constitutional issue is straightforward.” She added that Jackson’s view “rests on reimagining—and in that way collapsing—the well-settled distinction between viewpoint-based and other content-based speech restrictions.”

Other countries have embraced Jackson’s permissive approach to speech curtailment. Recently, Malta failed to convict a man who was facing five months in prison for merely discussing his own abandonment of homosexuality due to a religious conversion.

Of course, we just went through a pandemic when censorship and orthodoxy were dressed up as science. Leading scientific figures were canceled and harassed. That was the case with Jay Bhattacharya, who co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration and was a vocal critic of COVID-19 policies. Bhattacharya was targeted due to his dissenting views on health policy, including opposing wholesale shutdowns of schools and businesses.

He and other scientists were later vindicated. European allies that did not shut down their schools fared far better than we did, including avoiding a national mental health and learning crisis. We simply never had that debate.

He was recently honored with the prestigious “Intellectual Freedom” award from the American Academy of Sciences and Letters. He is also now the 18th director of the National Institutes of Health.

Yet, years ago, the courts, the media, and politicians joined in treating dissenting views as “conspiracy theories.”

Some argued that the virus’s origin was likely the Chinese research lab in Wuhan. That position was denounced by the Washington Post as a “debunked” coronavirus “conspiracy theory.” The New York Times Science and Health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli called any mention of the lab theory “racist.”

Federal agencies now support the lab theory as the most likely based on the scientific evidence.

Likewise, many questioned the efficacy of those blue surgical masks and supported natural immunity to the virus — the government later recognized both positions.

Others questioned the six-foot rule, which shut down many businesses, as unsupported by science. In congressional testimony, Dr. Anthony Fauci later admitted that the rule “sort of just appeared” and “wasn’t based on data.” Yet not only did it result in heavily enforced rules (and meltdowns) in public areas, but the media further ostracized dissenting critics.

For years, pundits portrayed those who questioned gender reassignment surgeries and treatments as bigots. Now, leading medical associations and European nations have decided that such procedures should not be generally allowed.

All of it was orthodoxy masquerading as science.

Yet, Jackson sees the protection of dissenting scientific and professional views as a “can of worms” that the courts should avoid in favor of state and assocational imposed truths.  She wrote that allowing such opposing views “ultimately risks grave harm to Americans’ health and wellbeing.”

Keep in mind that counselors can still be sued for any harm that they cause due to malpractice or negligence. Indeed, recently in New York, a jury awarded $2 million to Fox Varian, 22, over the double mastectomy performed on her while she was a minor.

State associations can also publish positions on such therapy and seek to convince both professionals and the public on the best practices for children.

None of that was sufficient for Justice Jackson or Colorado. Ironically, Colorado has now succeeded in dramatically strengthening free speech in its repeated failures to curtail it. The Democratic legislators have made the state arguably the most hostile to free speech in the nation.

Colorado’s Supreme Court sought to bar President Donald Trump from the ballot. Notably, while many of us viewed Trump’s views on the 2020 election to be protected speech, Colorado treated it as conduct and advocacy of insurrection.

It was Colorado that sought to force bakers, photographers, and web designers to produce work in favor of same-sex marriages despite their religious objections.  Each effort was supported by the Tenth Circuit and each failed in spectacular fashion before the Supreme Court.

As many of us celebrate this victory for free speech, these advocates are denouncing the ruling in apocalyptic terms.

What is most chilling is that Jackson is now routinely called the model for new nominees, including the push to pack the Supreme Court with an instant liberal majority.

If so, Jackson’s radical views on constitutional interpretation could be replicated on a new packed Court. To paraphrase this decision, “to be completely frank, we know exactly what will happen then.”

Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”

This column appeared on Fox.com

New Penn-Wharton study shows per-capita federal spending on each age group:

Seniors: $43,700

Children and young adults: $4,300.

Here is more from Jessica Riedl.

The post U.S.A. fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The post I appear on the Coleman Hughes podcast appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Let's go!

I am offering a new piece of work — I do not quite call it a book — online and free.  It has four chapters, is about 40,000 words, is fully written by me (not a word from the AIs), and it is attached to an AI with a dual page display, in this case Claude.  Think of it as a non-fiction novella of sorts, you can access it here.  You can read it on the screen, turn it into a pdf (and upload into your own AI), send it to your Kindle, or discuss it with Claude.

Here is the Table of Contents:

1. What Is Marginalism?

2. William Stanley Jevons, Builder and Destroyer of Marginalism

3. Why Did It Take So Long for the Science of Economics to Develop?

4. Why Marginalism Will Dwindle, and What Will Replace It?

Here are the first few paragraphs of the work:

How is it that ideas, and human capabilities, become lost? And how is that new insights come to pass? If eventually the insight seems obvious, why didn’t we see it before? Or maybe we did see it before, but didn’t really know we were on to something important? Why do new insights arrive suddenly, in a kind of flood? How do new worldviews replace older ones?

And what does all of that have to do with the future of science, the future of research, and the future of economics in particular? Especially when we try to understand how the ongoing artificial intelligence revolution is going to reshape human knowledge, and the all-important question of what economists should do.

Those are the motivating questions behind this work, but I will address them in what is initially an indirect fashion. I will start by considering a case study, namely the most important revolution in economics, the Marginal Revolution (to be defined shortly). The Marginal Revolution made modern economics possible. What was the Marginal Revolution? How did it start? Why did it take so very long to come to fruition? From those investigations we will get a sense of how economic ideas, and sometimes ideas more generally, develop. And that in turn will help us see where the science, art, and practice of economics is headed today.

Recommended!  I will be covering it more soon.

The post *The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Spring break travel is a mess thanks to Democrats, who are refusing to fully fund DHS because they don't want illegal immigrants deported.

[This is a guest post, written by David Speiser, author of the Ollantay review in last year’s Non-Book Review contest. David provided the concept and original draft; Scott edited the final version. Remaining mistakes are likely mine (Scott’s)]

The Problem

Everyone hates Congress. That poll showing that cockroaches are more popular than Congress is now thirteen years old, and things haven’t improved in those thirteen years. Congressional approval dipped below 20% during the Great Recession and hasn’t recovered since.

A republic where a supermajority of citizens neither like nor trust their representatives is not the most stable of foundations, so it should not be shocking that the legislative branch is being subsumed by the executive.

What’s the solution? Many have been proposed, some with very snazzy websites. FairVote thinks that ranked choice voting and proportional representation will solve it. The Congressional Reform Project has another snazzy website with such bold proposals as “Increase the opportunity for Members to form relationships across party lines, including by bipartisan issues conferences.” There are more think tanks. They want to enlarge the House by a few hundred members, switch to a biennial budget system, spend more on Congressional staffers, and introduce term limits, among many other suggestions.

There are op-eds too. Here’s how the Atlantic wants to fix Congress. The New York Times of course has a solution. Here on Substack, Matt Yglesias thinks proportional representation is the solution, and Nicholas Decker has an especially interesting solution.

These proposals, no matter which direction they’re coming from, have two things in common. The first is that they largely agree on the problem: members of Congress are disconnected from their constituents. Thanks to a combination of huge gerrymandered districts, national partisan polarization, and the influence of large donors, a representative has little incentive to care about the experience of individual people in their district.

The second thing that all these proposed solutions have in common is that none of them will ever be implemented. They all involve acts of Congress - and members of Congress have no incentive to vote to change broken systems that currently benefit them. Why would you want to stop gerrymandering when it’s the reason you don’t have to run a real campaign to stay in office? Why would you vote to give yourself more work? Why would you vote to make it harder for people to give you money? If we want to fix Congress, we need a solution that doesn’t involve Congress.

Luckily for us, such a solution exists: if we get 27 states to ratify the Congressional Apportionment Amendment, then we can make some real progress towards fixing Congress without Congressional buy-in. This solution is not a new idea. It comes up every few years and gets little traction. My hope in writing this piece is that it gets more traction now.

The Only A+ Ever Given At The University Of Texas

In 1789, Congress passed the Bill of Rights, containing twelve Constitutional amendments meant to protect the American people. Ten of these twelve were ratified by the states and became law. Two failed and were forgotten.

Eighty three years later - in 1872 - a Congress voted themselves a pay raise1. In fact, they voted themselves a pay raise effective as of two years ago, meaning that every member of Congress immediately received two years of back pay.

The American people were outraged, especially after an economic crisis hit later that year. In the midst of the backlash, a member of the Ohio state legislature remembered the failed eleventh amendment in the Bill of Rights, which read:

No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.

In other words, if Congress votes themselves a pay raise, it can’t take effect before the next election cycle. Ohio decided - better late than never - and became the 9th state to ratify the amendment, almost a century after the first eight. But it still wasn’t enough, and besides, the American people punished Congress in a more traditional way: they voted the Republican majority out of office and handed the chamber to the Democrats. Everyone forgot the eleventh amendment a second time.

One hundred ten years later - in 1982 - an undergrad at University of Texas in Austin wrote a paper on the pay-raise amendment, mentioning that there wasn’t technically anything in the Constitution that said that amendments had expiration dates. He got a C on the paper and very reasonably turned that into a decade-long crusade to prove his history teacher wrong. He started a nationwide campaign to get state legislatures to ratify the amendment. In 1992, he succeeded: the 38th state approved the provision, and it was added to the Constitution as what is now the Twenty-Seventh Amendment. The crusade worked; thirty-four years after the original paper, his political science teacher submitted a petition to the university to retroactively change his grade to an A+; since there is no A+ on the official UT grading rubric, this became the only A+ ever given in the history of the University of Texas.

That means eleven of the original twelve Bill of Rights amendments have made it into the Constitution. There’s only one left. It’s been ratified by eleven states already. If twenty-seven more states agree, it will become the law of the land. It is the right to Giant Congress.

The Right To Giant Congress

Here is the text of the Congressional Apportionment Amendment, the sole unratified amendment from the Bill of Rights:

After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.

In other words, there will be one Representative per X people, depending on the size of the US. Once the US is big enough, it will top out at one Representative per 50,000 citizens.

(if you’ve noticed something off about this description, good work - we’ll cover it in the section “A Troublesome Typo”, near the end)

The US is far bigger than in the Framers’ time, so it’s the 50,000 number that would apply in the present day. This would increase the size of the House of Representatives from 435 reps to 6,6412. Wyoming would have 12 seats; California would have 791. Here’s a map:

This would give the U.S. the largest legislature in the world, topping the 2,904-member National People’s Congress of China. It would land us right about the middle of the list of citizens per representative, at #104, right between Hungary and Qatar (we currently sit at #3, right between Afghanistan and Pakistan).

Would this solve the issues that make Congress so hated? It would be a step in the right direction. Our various think tanks identified three primary reasons behind the estrangement of Congress and citizens: gerrymandering, national partisan polarization, and the influence of large donors. This fixes, or at least ameliorates, all of them.

Gerrymandering: Gerrymandering many small districts is a harder problem than gerrymandering a few big ones. Durable gerrymandering requires drawing districts with the exact right combination of cities and rural areas, but there are only a limited number of each per state. With too many districts, achievable margins decrease and the gerrymander is more likely to fail.

We can see this with state legislatures vs. congressional delegations. A dominant party has equal incentive to gerrymander each, but most states have more legislature seats than Congressional ones, and so the legislatures end up less gerrymandered. Here are some real numbers from last election cycle3:

So for example, in Republican-dominated North Carolina, 50.9% of people voted Trump, 60% of state senate seats are held by Republicans, and 71.4% of their House seats belong to Republicans. The state senate (50 seats) is only half as gerrymandered as the House delegation (14 seats).

In many states, the new CAA-compliant delegation would be about the same size as the state legislature, and so could also be expected to halve gerrymandering.

As a bonus, the Electoral College bias towards small states would be essentially solved. Currently, a Wyomingite’s presidential vote controls three times as many electoral votes as a Californian’s. Under the CAA, both states would be about equal.

Money: This one is intuitive. If you can effectively buy 1/435 elections, you’ve bought 0.23% of Congress. If the same money only buys you 0.02% of Congress, you’re less incentivized to try to buy House elections and more incentivized to try to buy Senate seats or just to gain influence within a given political party. Money in politics is still a thing, but it becomes much harder to coordinate among people. This makes it easier for somebody to run for Congress without having to fundraise millions of dollars. Because it’s less worth it to spend so much money on any one seat, elections to the House become cheaper4.

Polarization: Some of the think tanks that want to increase the size of Congress by a few hundred members rather than a few thousand claim that this increase will fix political polarization by making representatives more answerable to their constituents who tend to care more about local issues than national ones.

I’m more skeptical of this claim, mainly because it seems that all politics is national politics now. There’s one newspaper and three websites and all they care about is national politics. My Congressional representative ran for office touting her background in energy conservation and water management, arguing that in a drying state and a warming climate we really need somebody in Congress who knows water problems inside and out. Now that she’s actually in Congress, it seems that her main job is calling Donald Trump a pedophile5. The incentives here are to get noticed by the press and to go viral talking about how evil the other side is, so that people who are angry at the evil other side will give you money and you can win your next election.

But maybe Big Congress can solve that. Maybe in a district of less than 50,000 there will be less incentive to go viral and more incentive to connect with your constituents. At the very least, it seems that people trust their state representatives more. And when my state representative and my state Senator tell me about the good work that they’ve done and ask for me to vote for them again, they point to legislation that they’ve passed, not clips of them calling their opponents pedophiles.

Won’t Congress Become Unmanageable?

At first, probably yes!

The Capitol Building couldn’t fit a 6,641 person Congress, let alone all of the extra staffers and administrative personnel who would come with it. We’d need to build a new monument to the largest democratic body in the history of the world. This is a good thing.

But it would also become conceptually unmanageable, with individual members having more trouble networking with one another and sounding out consensus. I expect that out of necessity, the House would take on a more parliamentary form with the party as the baseline for decision making. Then the big negotiations become those between parties, not between individuals.

Why Should I Support This?

Democrats: You’re about to take a beating in the next census. California is moving to gerrymander its Congressional delegation, but it’s also going to lose four seats. Texas is moving to gerrymander its delegation even more aggressively, and it’s going to gain four seats. Florida is going to gain three. Illinois and New York are losing seats. Across the board it’s bad news; while you might come out on top in this year’s elections, you’re going to lose the gerrymandering battle come 2030. Ratifying the CAA will make the battle that much fairer for you.

Republicans: You’re about to take a beating in the midterms. The aggressive gerrymandering in Texas could easily backfire in a blue year, and California just passed the “I Hate Republicans” act to gerrymander that state as well. Ratifying the CAA is a way to blunt the effect, and let your colleagues in Illinois and California and New England have their voices heard. But there’s a bigger reason for you to want to support this. If you’re a Republican in 2026, you exist to serve Donald Trump and his vision for America. You want to help Donald Trump recreate America in his image. The image of America will be the image of the new Capitol Building, and Donald Trump will lead this design. You saw how excited he was about the east wing of the White House; imagine how ecstatic he would be to get to design the Donald J. Trump Capitol Building. Imagine how owned all those Washington libs will be when they walk by the giant golden statue of Donald Trump that hosts Congress.

Libertarians/Communists/Greens/etc: Third parties are at their nadir right now. Zero state or national legislative seats are currently occupied by third parties, which is historically unusual. But increasing the size of Congress would give a shot in the arm to third parties. Getting 25,000 people to vote for you seems much more doable, especially if the whole party goes all-in on one seat. And it only takes one. I gotta believe that the Libertarians could win a Congressional seat in New Hampshire. The Communists could win one in Seattle. And once you get one seat, then it’s off to the races. Getting national recognition as one of 6,641 is really hard - joining or forming a third party is the kind of thing that gets you press. This is speculation, I have no data to back it up, but I fully expect that we would see a big upshot in third party representation and membership. The CAA is exactly what the Libertarians need to break out of their funk.

State legislators: Because you have an opportunity here. The most likely people to be elected to the new Big Congress are those who already have political experience and know what it takes to win an election in a small district. If you vote to ratify the CAA, odds are good that you’ll be among those elected to fill the ranks of Big Congress. And you’ve always wanted to be there in Washington. We both know it.

A Troublesome Typo

The second clause of the amendment describes the situation when the US population is between 3 million and 8 million. It says (my bolding):

There shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons

Sounds reasonable enough. This is making the straightforward claim that there should be many representatives, and a high representative-to-constituent ratio.

The third clause of the amendment describes the situation when the US population is greater than 8 million people (i.e. the situation we’re in now). It says:

There shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.

Notice the non-parallelism with the second clause. The second clause was two less-thans, meaning many representatives and low representative-to-constituent ratio. The third clause is a less-than followed by a more-than, meaning many representatives and a low representative-to-constituent ratio.

Aren’t these two goals - many representatives, and a low representative-to-constituent ratio - in tension?

Yes. In fact, the clause is mathematically impossible to satisfy at populations between eight and ten million. For example, with nine million Americans, we need at least two hundred representatives, but fewer than 9,000,000/50,000 = 180 representatives. Obviously there is no number which is both above 200 and less than 180, so this makes no sense.

At other population sizes, the clause does the opposite of what its founders intended, saying that the legislator-to-constituent ratio should be low and Congress has to be small. For example, at the current US population of 350 million, the clause merely says that Congress must be smaller than 6,641 representatives, meaning that the current Congress size is fine and nothing changes.

The simple explanation is that this is a typo. The people who wrote the law had three clauses, and meant to say “less than . . . less than” in each. But in the third clause, they said “less than . . . more than”. This has been noticed and acknowledged for over two hundred years.

So we have a potential Constitutional amendment which says the opposite of what it definitely means. If passed, this would set us up for a court case that directly pits the legal school of textualism (you need to follow the law as written) against originalism (you need to follow what the people who wrote the law meant). These two schools are often in oblique and complicated conflict. But as far as we know, they’ve never faced so direct a test as a section of the Constitution with an obvious-for-two-hundred-years typo that inverts its meaning. All the Supreme Court Justices who have previously gotten away with talking about how the law is subtle and complicated would have to finally just decide whether textualism or originalism is right, no-take-backs, once and for all. It would be hilarious.

The most likely outcome would be that they would bow to two hundred years of obvious criticism of this incorrectly-worded law, agree that it meant to say that the legislator-to-constituent ratio must be high, and we would get Giant Congress.

But there’s a remote chance that the textualists would win after all. This wouldn’t make things worse - Congress would be constitutionally banned from having more than 6,641 representatives, but this was hardly in the cards anyway. It would also mean that if the US population ever declined to between eight and ten million - admittedly another thing that’s not really in the cards - the Constitution would become logically impossible to follow, and America would officially be a paradox. If the population ever declined to between eight and ten million people, this probably would not be our biggest problem. But it might be the funniest.

The Path To 38

A constitutional amendment must be ratified by 3/4 of states; that’s 38/50. Eleven have ratified it already, so we need 27 more. Of the 39 states that have not ratified the CAA, 13 have legislatures run by Democrats and 25 have legislatures run by Republicans. This has to be a bipartisan effort.

But it’s no worse than the situation with the Twenty-Seventh Amendment. Gregory Watson, the previously mentioned Texas undergraduate, got it passed with $6,000 of his own money and a very dedicated letter-writing campaign. The Congressional Apportionment Amendment may require more work, but the precedent is there.

If you’re a state legislator, or if you know a state legislator, or if you want to be a state legislator after they all move up to Washington, then please introduce a motion to ratify this amendment. And tell all your colleagues that, if they ratify it too, they’ll get to be real Congressmen and Congresswomen. We can have the largest legislative body in the world. We can build monuments again. We can have real third parties again.

Either that, or we’ll turn the Constitution into a paradox and our government will vanish in a puff of logic. Still probably beats what’s going on now.

In the Danish mortgage market every mortgage is backed by a corresponding bond. Thus, if a home buyer takes out a 500k mortgage at 3% interest, a bond is issued that pays the lender 3% interest on 500k. I’ve written about this system several times before. It has two distinct advantages.

• The correspondence principle means that mortgage banks don’t bear interest rate risk but instead specialize in evaluating credit risk (the risk that the borrower won’t pay). Deep markets rather than banks take on the interest rate risk. This makes the Danish system very stable.
• Mortgages can be pre-paid by buying the corresponding bond at market rates and extinguishing it. If a Danish borrower takes out a 500k mortgage at 3% interest and then rates rise to 6%, for example, the value of that mortgage falls to $358k and the borrower can buy the corresponding bond, deliver it to the bank, and, in this way, extinguish the loan.

In the US, a mortgage can be pre-paid only at a par. As a result, if interest rates rise, home owners don’t want to move because moving would require them giving up a 3% mortgage and replace it with say a 6% mortgage. This is called the lock-in effect. Lock-in can be quite severe. Fonseca and Liu find:

Using individual-level credit record data and variation in the timing of mortgage origination, we show that a 1 percentage point decline in the difference between mortgage rates locked in at origination and current rates reduces moving by 9% overall and 16% between 2022 and 2024, and this relationship is asymmetric. Mortgage lock-in also dampens flows in and out of self-employment and the responsiveness to shocks to nearby employment opportunities that require moving, measured as wage growth within a 50- to 150-mile ring and instrumented with a shift-share instrument.

What about in Denmark? The Danes definitely take advantage of the opportunity to buy-back. Part of this is due to tax advantages but those are just a transfer. More importantly, Danes don’t get locked in. A new paper by Berger, Jeong, Marx, Olesen, and Tourre compares mobility across Denmark and the US:

We study Danish fixed-rate mortgage contracts, which are identical to those in the United States except that borrowers may repurchase their mortgages at market value. Using Danish administrative data, we show that households actively buy back debt when mortgage prices fall below par and that household mobility is largely insensitive when existing mortgage rates are below prevailing market rates — unlike in the United States, where moving rates fall sharply as rates rise. We develop an equilibrium model that explains these patterns and show that introducing a repurchase-at market option into U.S. mortgages substantially reduces interest-rate-induced lock-in with limited effects on equilibrium mortgage rates.

The last point is especially important because you might wonder whether we are assuming a free lunch? After all, if US borrowers lose when they have to pre-pay at par then lenders surely gain. And if lenders gain on pre-payment then they will be willing to lend at lower rates on mortgage initiation. No free lunch, right? The logic is correct but note that the gain to lenders comes mainly from the relatively small set of households that move despite lock-in so the pre-payment bonus to lenders is quite small. Under the author’s calibrated model, mortgage interest rates in the US would rise by only 18 basis points on average if the US moved to a Danish type system.

In other words, there actually is a free or at least a low-priced lunch because lock-in is bad for homeowners and it doesn’t benefit lenders. As a result, moving to a Danish system would create net benefits.

The post A Danish Fix for U.S. Mortgage Lock-in appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Republican Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders was kicked out of another restaurant this week. Years ago, I wrote about how Sanders, then the Trump White House spokesperson, was told to leave the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia. Now, the Croissanterie Restaurant in Little Rock, Arkansas, has told the governor to leave because employees said they felt uncomfortable having her in the restaurant. One person yelled at her and flipped her off as she left with her friends and security.

Sanders went to the restaurant with three other moms for a quick meal. She recounted how she and the other moms were then told to leave: “Last week I was having lunch with two other moms at a restaurant when the owner approached a member of the State Police Executive Protection Detail and said my presence made their employees feel threatened and told us to leave.”

She added: “Arkansans are known for their warm hospitality, and while that restaurant certainly doesn’t meet that standard, my administration will continue to focus on lifting Arkansans up, not tearing others down with discrimination and hate.”

Sanders had already started to eat when the restaurant’s owner approached a member of the security detail and requested that the governor leave.

The Croissanterie released a lengthy statement and admitted that they told the governor and her party to leave. While offering a hand-ringing explanation about being “surprised and uncertain how best to respond,” it admitted that it “ultimately made the decision” to “support our employees and guests who expressed they were uncomfortable.”

It added, “We regret being placed in this position and having to make a difficult decision. However, we stand by our choice to support our employees and guests.”

The restaurant is founded and owned by Jill McDonald, executive chef, and Wendy Schay, pastry chef.

We have seen various restaurants refusing to serve Trump supporters,  conservatives, and even those deemed allies. Democratic members of Congress have defended such actions and even encouraged liberals to disrupt meals of conservatives.

Liberals went to social media to celebrate the move by the restaurant. One posting from an employee declared:

“Good Morning! Sarah Huckabee Sanders no amount of evil you send our way can ever take our smiles away!!! I’m proud af to work here! I’m proud af to be gay and I’m proud af to be an Arkansan. My voice matters. Try again.”

There have been virtually no condemnations from leading Democrats, who either fear or support such mob actions.

In my book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” and my new book, Rage and the Republic, I discuss what I called this “age of rage.”

Rage is a curious emotion. It is the ultimate release. It allows you to do things and say things that you would not otherwise do or say. That is why it is addictive and contagious. What people will not admit is that they like it. It allows them to hate completely; to dispense with notions of decency or civility.

This restaurant yielded to hate and intolerance to appease not only its employees but the radical left.

This action occurs the same week as a poll showing that a majority of Americans now view those with opposing views as “morally bad.”

The rage addiction is obvious in these postings, as shown most recently by James Carville.

Interesting shift here from New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who, now that a bunch of people have left New York for the Free State for Florida (she told them to), wants these former New Yorkers to come back.

Pentagon removed leftwing Ivy League schools from military fellowship program, but a replacement school proposed by the Pentagon has an entire center staffed by Trump foes, many of whom participated in what could only be called a "disinformation" campaign to deny the legitimacy of Hunter Biden's infamous laptop.

Who Needs Glyphosate?
by Joel Salatin at Brownstone Institute

President Donald Trump’s executive order of Feb. 18 invoking the Defense Production Act of 1950 to ensure US glyphosate production and availability is neither necessary nor helpful. HHS Secretary and Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) founder Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s endorsement of the order has created a firestorm in that health-interested base.

On Feb. 22, Kennedy conducted triage explanations to his base with this statement: 

“Unfortunately, our agricultural system depends heavily on these chemicals.” He went on to post that “if these inputs disappeared overnight, crop yields would fall, food prices would surge, and America would experience a massive loss of farms even beyond what we are witnessing today. The consequences would be disastrous.”

Kennedy then described the many weed control alternatives that are being developed. All of us farmers in the nonchemical community already use many of these innovative alternatives: lasers, AI-driven wipes, steam nozzles, cover crop crimping, and soil balancing. The grain farmers I patronize for our chicken and pig feeds do not use glyphosate or genetically modified organisms (GMOs). We pay a slight premium, but these farmers have great yields and are certainly not going out of business like many more conventional operations.

This showdown has been a long time developing. On Apr. 14, 2025, The Wall Street Journal’s Patrick Thomas reported that “Bayer said it could stop producing the world’s most popular weed killer unless it gets court protection against lawsuits blaming the herbicide for causing cancer.” Bayer and friends tried to slip in liability protection in an appropriations bill earlier this year, but the effort failed.

With thousands of lawsuits, many of them winning, still scheduled for court hearings, and its multibillion-dollar war chest to fight them and/or settle them impacting profits, Bayer, manufacturer of the popular Roundup brand, is desperate to shed this liability. Most of the time, things like this executive order happen after long-term wrangling and cogitating behind the curtain, and I suspect that is the case now.

At the risk of irritating my MAHA friends, I take umbrage with this whole sordid affair because glyphosate is a deadly poison, is not needed, and certainly does not jeopardize American security. Its use is primarily on genetically modified corn and soybeans. But consider that nearly half of America’s corn production goes to ethanol fuel; it has nothing to do with food.

What about soybeans? Half of them are exported and not even used in America. Roughly 40 percent of glyphosate is made by Bayer in the United States, Belgium, and Argentina, which are all friendlies. If we eliminated half the corn and half the soybeans because they aren’t needed for food, we’d only need half the glyphosate, which is nearly all manufactured either domestically or in friendly nations.

That’s giving the benefit of the doubt to the inherent need for glyphosate, which is a dubious argument. It’s like demanding special concessions for cocaine because some addicts have an inherent need for cocaine. While they may be addicted, arguing that funding and fueling their continued addiction is necessary for their survival is dubious at best and erroneous at worst. 

The real national security breach is that we have thousands of farmers producing unnecessary corn and soybeans and a federal government determined to keep them in business.

Herbivores don’t need grain; they were not built to eat grain any more than children were built to eat candy bars. If we drop the exports and drop the fuel, America’s need for corn and soybeans is only 30 percent of current production, which can easily be met by the glyphosate produced domestically and in friendly nations. The point is none of the scaremongering and none of the math adds up or makes sense.

Something else is going on here, and it has nothing to do with national defense. It has to do with offering a shield of protection to arguably the most egregious agricultural chemical on the planet. It’s also a financial windfall for Bayer.

The catastrophic predictions in this scenario have no basis in fact. First, China has not threatened to withhold glyphosate from the world market. Second, an immediate cutoff by any manufacturer is not imminent—except Bayer indicating it could terminate the herbicide due to lawsuits. But that has nothing to do with China. Third, neither RFK, Jr. nor President Trump offered a timeline of phaseout that would be acceptable.

In other words, if the real goal is a phaseout, which RFK, Jr.’s long X post indicates, then why not offer a timeline that would be acceptable? One year? Two years? How about three? But neither President Trump nor RFK, Jr. even mentions a time when glyphosate would not be used, which begs the question of whether the real agenda is a forever encouragement to use this horrid chemical on America’s food.

If the president wants to truly address the nation’s food security, he would issue a Food Emancipation Proclamation executive order freeing America’s homesteaders and small farmers from tyrannical, scale-prejudicial regulations. If two consenting adults want to exercise freedom of choice to engage in a voluntary food transaction, they should not need a bureaucrat’s permission to do so.

Unleashing neighbor-to-neighbor unregulated food commerce on the marketplace would show just how unnecessary half the corn and soybeans really are. Who will tell these farmers, destroying the soil and waterways, that their production is not needed and they could do better reverting to perennial prairie polycultures growing beef? 

Well-managed and not overgrazed, to be sure, but financially profitable and necessary to meet the shortage of red meat in America.

Thousands of small farmers stand ready to serve their neighbors with food outside the industrial food oligarchy. 

As a small farmer, I should not need a $500,000 facility to make one chicken pot pie to sell to a fellow church member mom to feed her kids something without artificial food additives. An army of clean-food entrepreneurial farmers stands ready to serve our nation with food; an army of government agents prohibits them from engaging the market. That, dear folks, is a national security problem.

Republished from Epoch Times

Who Needs Glyphosate?
by Joel Salatin at Brownstone Institute - Economics, Policy, Public Health, Education, Society

Did you know you could churn butter while out on a run?

Back in the first heady days of the attacks on Iran I cautioned that it was relatively easy to kill a few leaders and bomb a bunch of stuff, but harder to understand how a liberal democracy was to magically eventuate in Iran.  The US has a history of removing one bad leader and getting only something worse afterwards (remember Diem?  Gaddafi?).  One problem is that after 40 years of rule, the totalitarian government there is strong and deeply entrenched, and the opposition (while it certainly exists) does not seem to have leadership, plans, or coherent organization.  Would killing Hitler in 1943 or Stalin in 1937 have incited a successful revolution?  Almost certainly not -- not because they were loved but because their party's instruments of control were strong and the opposition was smashed flat.

The only vague hope I might have harbored was that the CIA had some secret plan in place with the opposition organized by agents on the ground.  Really, this was an absurd hope, but I grew up in the 60's and the 70's when the CIA had a certain aura of competent deviousness.  Intellectually, I disabused myself of this mythology years ago, but its remnants must have still been lurking around my brain.

For others who might be harboring such vague hopes of secret master spy plans, there is this:

Even a massive military assault on Iran is unlikely to topple the Islamic Republic of Iran and its state system, according to a classified assessment produced by the US intelligence community shortly before the US and Israel launched their current 'shock and awe-style' military campaign on Tehran. The Washington Post first reported it, perhaps based on some kind of leak or briefing by an anonymous intelligence official, and calls it—

a sobering assessment as the Trump administration raises the specter of an extended military campaign that officials sayhas "only just begun."

The report, compiled by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) roughly a week before the war began, concluded that Iran's political system is structured to survive even major leadership losses, The Washington Post reports. However, this should really come as no surprise to anyone awake and observant throughout the past two plus decades of America's 'nation building' efforts in the Middle East, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya. ...

The intelligence report also poured cold water on the idea that Iran's opposition could quickly fill any power vacuum. US intelligence analysts assessed that the country's fragmented opposition movements remain too divided to seize control, regardless of whether Washington pursued limited strikes against leadership targets or a broader assault on state institutions.

Equally unlikely, according to current and former US officials familiar with the analysis, is the prospect of a spontaneous nationwide uprising. We could speculate that this possibility may have had a chance of some degree of success within the opening one or two days of the mass US-Israel bombing campaign, but it clearly didn't materialize.

I will observe that no such promised revolution has occurred so far after the Maduro snatch.  You can almost visualize the Administration look of confusion when the revolutions they were convinced would magically appear did not occur.  Sort of like the look on the coyote's face when some trap he has created fails to work.

Postscript:  I put all of the above in the "I wish I were wrong" category.  Opponents of wars frequently fall into the trap of supporting the other side.  The Iranian government is one of the worst in the world, both in how it treats its people (or at least the half without a Y chromosome) and its proclivity for inciting violence and mayhem in other countries.  It is a totalitarian regime responsible for much of the current instability in the Middle East and I would love to wave my magic wand and see it gone.