Not long after Covid ended, a tenant in one of my Manhattan buildings died. He was an elderly Italian immigrant who lived alone in a small studio near Gramercy for decades. These things happen in the course of life, and there’s always a story: Sometimes people die, get married or divorced, or decide that the big city isn’t for them.
Normally, it doesn’t take too long for landlords like me to renovate an empty apartment and list it on StreetEasy so that new people can move in and start the next chapter of their lives. But since this particular apartment is rent-stabilized, laws that were passed in 2019 essentially prevent me from doing anything with it except shutting the door and keeping it empty.
Strict limits on rent increases under the 2019 laws have left an estimated 50,000 apartments like this one vacant across the city. Because the restrictions on what landlords can charge for these apartments often don’t even cover the costs of maintaining them, they become ghosts. It’s like they don’t exist at all.
Incoming New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani promised during his campaign to “immediately freeze the rent” for rent-stabilized apartments, but those rents have essentially been frozen since 2019. At the time, the laws were widely heralded as the strongest set of rent regulations anywhere in America, and were specifically designed to protect tenants from price gouging and the threat of displacement after decades of gentrification.
Supporters hold signs during a rally in support of Zohran Mamdani at Brooklyn Steel in Brooklyn, New York, on May 4, 2025. (Madison Swart/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images)
But sometimes people die, as was the case with my Italian tenant. And his apartment wasn’t exactly in “all you need to bring is your toothbrush” move-in condition. He had lived there since at least 1984. To get an apartment like this one into good shape after such a long occupancy requires renovations, and renovations cost money.
Heiltsuk First Nation fisherman in British Columbia kept finding their underwater crab traps looted, even the ones out in deeper waters, so they asked researchers Kyle Artelle and Paul Paquet for help.
The author is economist Jennifer Doleac, and the subtitle is A Revolution in Criminal Justice. Excerpt:
We found that adding anyone charged with a felony to the law enforcement DNA database in Denmark reduced future criminal convictions by over 40 percent. Again, people responded to the higher probability of getting caught by committing fewer crimes. Being added to the database also increased enrollment in school and rates of employment — signs that folks really were on a better path. This effect was largest for the youngest men, those ages eighteen to twenty-four.
Incentives matter. An excellent book, recommended, due out next year.
Everyone is focused on building, but “supply” is so much more than building. There is tremendous supply in using more efficiently what we have now. Most cities have laws against renting parts of single family homes, or sharing larger homes. Think how many spare bedrooms are empty every night. There is plenty of housing supply in the US, it’s just not in places where people want to move. Others moving out is “supply,” and greatly impeded. Older people stay in too-big houses and apartments, in locations close to work and school opportunities that young families desire, but the older people no longer need. Why? If they sell, they are taxed on capital gains, even just due to inflation. They lose property tax exemptions, and, of course, rent control protection. Each older person who cashes in, downsizes, or moves to a more neighborhood more suited to them, supplies a house or apartment. The non-portable fixed rate 30 year mortgage, an invention of our federal housing subsidy regime, leads people to stay where they are rather than move to where they want to go, and free up a scarce house or condo for someone else. Strong apparently “consumer protection” laws in rental contracts dry up the supply, especially to the marginalized. If you can’t kick people out, you’re much more careful who you let in. Limits on short term rentals limit rentals. Remove rent controls, permanently, and houses and condos can be rented. Many houses and apartments need rehab, not new construction, which can happen very quickly once owners know they will not be robbed of their investment. Even “affordable” housing leads people to stay where they are, rather than move to better opportunities for them and free up an apartment for someone else, because it’s rationed with long waiting lists.
The rest of the post is an excellent analysis of rent control. On one of John’s closing points, I should note I am not opposed to speculating about motivations.
By James D. Agresti
November 7, 2025
Credit: Medical-R/Shutterstock.com
Overview
Vice President JD Vance claims that the “far left faction of Senate Democrats shut down the government because we wouldn’t give them hundreds of billions of dollars for health care benefits for illegal aliens.” President Trump takes this a step further by alleging that Democrats “want to spend $1.5 trillion on illegal immigrants and destroy health care for everyone else.”
On the other side of the aisle, Senate Democrat Leader Chuck Schumer claims that under their bill to open the government, “not a single federal dollar goes to providing health insurance for undocumented immigrants.” Likewise, the Democratic National Committee blames the shutdown on Republicans’ refusal to “negotiate about Americans’ health care.”
Contrary to Democrats and certain “fact checkers,” Senate Democrats are demanding significant amounts of taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal immigrants in exchange for opening the government for merely one month.
Contrary to Republicans, healthcare for illegal immigrants, even under the broadest definition of that term, accounts for less than 13% of the Democrat bill that would enact their demands.
Contrary to the figures quoted by nearly everyone, the Democrat bill would cost multiples of what is commonly reported. This is because it creates permanent welfare benefits, but politicians and journalists are only citing the cost estimates for the next 10 years.
Background
The federal government is now partially shut down because Democrats and Republicans are at an impasse.
House Republicans passed a funding measure that largely maintains the status quo for two months so that the parties have time to negotiate, but Senate Democrats effectively filibustered it. This stalled the bill in the Senate, even though it received 55 out of 100 votes, including all but one of the Republicans, two Democrats, and one Independent.
Senate Democrats wrote and voted for a competing bill that would open the government for just one month in exchange for:
entrenching a temporary Covid-era handout that increased Obamacare subsidies.
repealing “health care provisions that were included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, including provisions that reduced Medicaid funding.”
The Democrat bill would cost taxpayers about $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years. This is the standard timeframe that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) uses to estimate the costs of mandatory spending bills. Such laws permanently enact spending which continues every year into the future unless congress and the president pass new laws to change the status quo.
To pass either bill will require 60 votes due to Senate rules. A majority could also employ the nuclear option to do away with the filibuster, but that would destroy a long-standing principle that requires senators to reach a level of consensus before passing certain bills.
“Lawfully Present”
One of the keys to understanding how Democrats funnel welfare to illegal immigrants is explained in a 2015 federal appeals court ruling that struck down President Obama’s attempt to unilaterally place four-to-five million illegal immigrants above the law. The ruling states:
The “Attorney General,” who is under the authority of the President, has certain powers to deem unauthorized immigrants as “lawfully present in the United States.”
Although a “grant of lawful presence” is “not an enforceable right to remain in the United States and can be revoked at any time,” it “removes” a prohibition against receiving “federal public benefits” and “thereby makes otherwise ineligible persons eligible to qualify” for them.
In short, a “grant of lawful presence” can allow illegal aliens to receive welfare, but it doesn’t transform them into legal immigrants.
“Legal Fiction”
Likewise, a 2022 federal appeals court ruling explains that grants of “parole” — which President Biden gave to millions of inadmissible aliens — don’t confer “legal status”:
But when an alien is granted parole, immigration authorities temporarily allow the alien access to the country while his or her application for admission is pending, though the alien is explicitly not considered “admitted” while in this condition. …
Put another way, parole creates something of legal fiction; although a paroled alien is physically allowed to enter the country, the legal status of the alien is the same as if he or she were still being held at the border waiting for his or her application for admission to be granted or denied.
In other words, such aliens are not legal immigrants and are only allowed into the U.S. under a “legal fiction” that pretends they aren’t really in the country.
“Fact Checkers”
With broad disregard for the facts of this matter, so-called fact checkers have repeatedly conflated grants of lawful presence or parole with legal status. For example:
CNN’s chief fact checker, Tom Foreman, argues that Democrats aren’t trying to give Obamacare to illegal immigrants because “the law itself says” that the “only people who could get” it are “lawfully present in the United States.”
Daniel Dale, another CNN fact checker, admits that “Democrats are trying to reverse” provisions of the Big Beautiful Bill (BBB) that “took away some combination of Obamacare subsidies and Medicare eligibility from various immigrant groups,” but “it’s important to emphasize that these immigrants with parole” have “permission to be in the U.S.”
PolitiFact’s Maria Ramirez Uribe claims that “Democrats want to restore access to certain health care programs to legal immigrants who will lose access under the Republican tax and spending law.”
Leonardo Cuello, a research professor and PhD legal scholar at Georgetown University, alleges that repealing the BBB won’t “increase or reinstate” healthcare benefits for “undocumented immigrants” but for “lawfully present immigrants.”
All of those statements fail to reveal that the aliens in question aren’t legal immigrants but the beneficiaries of executive decisions that grant them a temporary reprieve from deportation.
Illegal Bulk Paroles
Furthermore, the vast bulk of parolees, particularly under Biden, were let into the U.S. by distorting a federal law that allows for temporary entries of inadmissible aliens “only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.” “Case-by-case” doesn’t mean letting them in by the millions, which is what Biden did.
Twenty states filed a lawsuit against Biden’s bulk parole of inadmissible aliens, but the case was dismissed by a federal judge on the basis of standing, a legal doctrine that prohibits lawsuits unless plaintiffs can prove that they suffered a direct personal injury. The litigation continued but wasn’t resolved before Biden left office.
Even if the courts had ultimately sided with Biden on the issue of standing, this wouldn’t make his actions legal. Biden used the same argument when he tried to illegally transfer student loan debts to taxpayers. This was struck down by the Supreme Court in a 6–3 ruling, but the minority of justices sided with Biden’s claim that the plaintiffs didn’t have “standing” to challenge his actions.
DREAMERS
Another revealing example of how Democrats give welfare to illegal immigrants involves DACA recipients, commonly called DREAMERS. This group of 800,000 people was deemed “lawfully present” by a mere memo from Obama’s Attorney General in 2012. Ten years later, Biden formalized the memo with a regulation while admitting that “DACA is not a form of lawful status but DACA recipients are considered ‘lawfully present’ for certain purposes.”
At the outset of DACA, Obama unilaterally decided to make them eligible for Medicare and Social Security but not Obamacare. Thus, numerous politicians, media outlets, and “fact checkers” insisted that these illegal immigrants couldn’t receive Obamacare. That was until Biden unilaterally decided to make them eligible.
Trump has since rescinded Biden’s edict, and the BBB explicitly bans future presidents from doing what Biden did, but the Democrat bill would repeal this section of the law. Yet, Democrats deny that they want to give healthcare to illegal immigrants, and “fact checkers” are helping them spread this falsehood.
The Actual Amounts
A Trump White House report titled the “Democrat Plan to Fund Healthcare for Illegal Immigrants” alleges that about $195 billion of Democrats’ demands for reopening the government consist of taxpayer-funded healthcare benefits for “illegal immigrants and non-citizens over the next decade.”
Importantly, the term “non-citizens” is broader than “illegal immigrants,” which is how Republicans are misleadingly framing the issue.
In detail, the Democrat bill would repeal “Subtitle B of title VII” of the BBB. This part of the bill contains the following provisions that limit healthcare handouts to aliens. Unless Democrats rescind them, CBO estimates that over the next 10 years they will save taxpayers about:
$91.4 billion by preventing illegal immigrants and other non-citizens like temporary workers from receiving Obamacare benefits. (This is section 71301 of the BBB.)
$34.6 billion by preventing states like California from using a tax kickback scheme to obtain more federal money for Medicaid, which is fungible and can be used to fund comprehensive Medicaid coverage for illegal immigrants, as California does for 1.7 million aliens. (Section 71117 of the BBB.)
$28.2 billion by ending an Obamacare provision that gives extra federal money to states like California for emergency room services and childbirths for illegal immigrants. (Section 71110 of the BBB.)
$27.3 billion by preventing illegal immigrants and other non-citizens from receiving special Obamacare benefits given to poor people who are typically ineligible for Medicaid due to their immigration status. (Section 71302 of the BBB.)
$6.2 billion by preventing illegal immigrants and other non-citizens like refugees from receiving comprehensive Medicaid. (Section 71109 of the BBB.)
$5.1 billion by preventing illegal immigrants and other non-citizens from receiving Medicare benefits for elderly people. (Section 71201 of the BBB.)
In total, these figures amount to $193 billion that the Democrat bill would give to illegal immigrants and other non-citizens over the next 10 years. This is 13% of the $1.5 trillion that Democrats are demanding in exchange for keeping the government open for just one month.
All of the figures above are far beneath the full costs of the Democrat bill because they involve changes to mandatory programs. This means the spending will continue endlessly into the future unless congress and the president pass new laws to repeal these provisions.
I forgot who it was who said the other day that most people — unless they are history geeks, of course — have no longer historical memory than the last two generations — those of their parents and grandparents.
The concept is ancient, however, and can be traced all the way back to Ibn Khaldun’s Prolegomena (original title: al-Muqqadima), where it is part of his theory about how settled societies lose their issawiya [freely: vital force and cohesion] after a few generations.
People hear their parents’ and grandparents’ (assuming the latter live long enough) own recollections (however imperfect) about events they lived through. If they are at least somewhat curious, it will stimulate them to try and learn more about these events. Events still further back in history are more abstract — say, World War One for a Gen X’er or later.
We now have Gen Z and Gen Alpha for whom World War Two, the Shoah, and the ravages of Stalinism happened before even their grandparents were born. Hence, with the rare avid student of history as an exception, they become vulnerable to sirens songs by apologists and nostalgics for dark regimes — of the extreme left and right alike.
On Friday, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation anchor Andrew Nichols tossed to correspondent Caroline Barghout in Edgewood, British Columbia for one of the most uncomfortable on-site TV reports ever. Barghout spends an agonizing minute and six seconds searching for creative ways to deliver a story about the Canadian government gunning down 330 ostriches without using key words like “kill” or “dead.”
Barghout’s standup script would deserve its own exhibit in the Newseum, if the place still existed:
Right now, it is very quiet here. Uh, it’s actually eerily quiet. We had been here a few times over the past few weeks, and we always would see ostriches, and now we’re not seeing ostriches. And as you mentioned, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has said that it has completed the cull of the ostriches.
After conveying a statement from the CFIA that “experienced marksmen would be the best and most appropriate and most humane option” to “conduct this cull,” Barghout described the post-event location of the story’s main characters in a way that carefully avoided reference to their current level of, well, aliveness:
So they brought in professional marksmen to conduct this call on this property. We know that the birds are still on the property. We don’t know where they will be moved to now that the cull is done.
Having Barghout stand in front of a wall of hay bales strategically erected by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and summarize the affair as “Previously, we saw ostriches, but now we do not see ostriches” was a sadly perfect mix of news-speak and Newspeak. Once again, the CBC fulfilled Canada’s historical mandate to preview what news delivery will look like in a post-misinformation universe.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) decided last year that the animals required termination after some tested positive for Avian Flu. Still, the government came under intense criticism not just for carrying out a procedure not all felt was necessary, but for doing it in a gruesome manner, gunning birds down in “kill boxes” under cover of darkness while activists and owners of the Universal Ostrich Farm screamed from a distance.
When a New York billionaire named John Catsimatidis got involved in a campaign to stop the “cull” and Trump administration figures like Robert F. Kennedy and Medicare and Medicaid Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz tried to intervene, the Great Ostrich Cull somehow turned into a “Republicans Pounce” story, with Politico for instance running a headline, “How a flock of Canadian ostriches became an all-time MAHA cause.” A BBC headline even went so far as to describe the story as the “ostrich cull saga that captivated RFK, Jr.,” explaining that ostriches were an “unlikely political symbol,” since “culls like this are often conducted without fanfare.”
The linguistic tap-dancing around the ostrich version of the Kronstadt Massacre would be less unnerving, were it not for the intersection of Canada’s aggressive word-twisting during the Covid pandemic and the more recent literary inventions around the country’s euthanasia craze. At a time when wide-scale misery seems to be in fashion across the political spectrum (Michelle Obama’s new coffee-table book Lookis 304 pages about what a burden it was to have to dress as First Lady), Canada in 2021 quietly opened the door on mass Kevorkianism for people not merely not terminal, but potentially not even sick.
The country that year amended a program called Medical Assistance In Dying — MAID according to the grim acronym — changing the eligibility requirement from assisted suicide for those whose natural deaths were “reasonably foreseeable” to those with a “grievous and irremediable medical condition.” In a flash, assisted suicide (rebranded as “assisted dying”) became one of the country’s leading causes of death. One out of every twenty Canadians who died in 2023 were “assisted” deaths, a rate higher than deaths from “Alzheimer’s and diabetes combined,” as The Atlantic put it. While outlets like the New York Times and the BBC uncharacteristically expressed unease with a possible “slippery slope” effect, there’s comparatively little controversy in Canada, where 86% of the public reportedly approves of the changes in polls.
I wouldn’t feel so uneasy about all this if it weren’t for the language. A lot of thought has been put into how governments market state-assisted (or mandated, in the case of the ostriches) death. Assisted-dying hospices have been re-christened in some quarters as “MAIDhouses,” a term that sounds like a harmless new tapestry color or flavor of geriatric ice cream. “MAIDhouse” is also the name of a non-profit devoted to helping people eligible for assisted dying receive support in a “supportive, inclusive and comfortable setting.” Moral arguments against suicide have mostly vanished outside Catholic publications. There is something deeply troubling in the combination of relentless media coverage of how hard life is for a widening class of victim groups, and the sudden appearance of an instant legal pass to a better place for All Who Ail.
Most of the stories that have come out about “assisted dying” up north focus on people in horrible physical pain from diseases like spina bifida or cerebral palsy, but Canada is also currently scheduled to begin allowing euthanasia/suicide/assisted dying for people suffering from mental illness only — even depression, theoretically — on March 17, 2027.
I wonder if they will call it “assisted culling” by then.
Brownstone Institute was a proud exhibitor at the huge Children's Health Defense conference, Austin, Texas, November 7-9, 2025. The event was filled with exuberance and trust among the more than 1,000 attendees, all of whom were thrilled to be with real friends at a time in which trust in nearly everything else is in free fall. At last, we were with people on the right side of history.
Within this social context, two 30-something men with British accents were making the rounds to decry fake meat and proclaim the superiority of real meat. This is a position with which probably everyone there agreed. They also looked the part: well-dressed and clean-shaven. Of course we want our activists to look this way.
The main actor told people his name is Aldrich Willows, an entirely fictional name, though no one seemed to have checked. He explained that he runs the Alliance for Sustainable Protein. The site is down as of this writing but it was created in March 2025. If anyone doubted their authenticity, pulling up their website on the phone was the first riposte, which is what they did with me.
The goal was to get people on film with the camera they had set up outside the security zone. Just before going on camera, they present the victim with a study that they say proves that fake meat causes autism. They have you stand in front of a ridiculous graphic with a patty of real vs fake meat, then they turn on the camera, first eliciting permissions to use what is filmed.
Next they push the unsuspecting person to endorse their study. If you are wary, as I was, the cameraman acting like the producer says, “It would be best for you to clearly state that fake meat causes autism while holding the study.” It’s an intimidating moment because the people being interviewed hate fake meat, suspect that the cause of autism is environmental, and feel a bit of sympathy for these guys.
If the victim does not comply, they keep pushing, clearly trying to get people on camera to say something ridiculous. The study in question is entirely fake, with no author, and generated entirely by artificial intelligence. But they are moving so fast that it is hard to follow what is going on. The study is presumably embargoed, though it has been variously circulating here and there for weeks.
Just for gags, I generated another study using Grok that shows a causal link between eating waffles and going bald. Anyone can do this in about 5 seconds.
Finishing with my interview, after a long day of interviews, I quickly forgot about the entire strange episode. I figured that it was some naive activists who were drawing unconfirmed connections between two bad things. But in my mind, my attitude was whatever: such events draw all types.
It was not until the next morning when it dawned on me what they were doing. They were scammers who had targeted the health freedom movement. They were piecing together a film for a documentary that would claim that all of us are naive and rallying around fake science to advance our political agenda.
Very clever.
The next morning I confronted them and told them that their plot had been revealed. I explained that they should be kicked out and their film confiscated. Alarmed, they grabbed their camera and left everything else, including their lights and bags of material, and ran to the elevators.
Someone captured this image of the two being confronted.
Further research reveals that the main person is not Aldrich Willows but rather Luke or Louis Wilson. Lucio Eastman of Brownstone discovered this while perusing the code to their website, which is now down.
Wilson works for the Centre for Climate Reporting. This is their website. He is a major climate activist who does undercover reporting, affiliated with the Net-Zero movement that the WEF has promoted. The funding trail leads to the usual suspects in the NGO space with major funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, Ikea, Bloomberg, and others.
Here is Luke Wilson being interviewed by Democracy Now:
The other person in the picture is Tom Costello, co-founder of Centre for Climate Reporting. He was famously caught interfering with the 2024 election with various undercover schemes.
The team had planned to conduct interviews all day on Sunday, but their plans were foiled. That said, they have plenty of people on camera to make a video designed to discredit the entire movement and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s tenure at HHS.
After all, if these health freedom people are willing to endorse an AI-generated fake study with no author, they are willing to believe anything.
A few points of context, however.
First, the plan was rather brilliantly hatched, pushing every button, including fake meat and autism with an environmental cause. It’s the kind of story that people who are sick of being poisoned might be emotionally inclined to believe.
Second, the guys were deeply deceptive, only drawing the connection just before filming and then pressing the victim into saying the magic words. People on camera are nervous and often lack the presence of mind to think through all the implications of what they are being told to do.
Third, the plot was foiled because in fact the people at this event do believe in authentic science and have zero tolerance for hucksters.
Their scam is now exposed but there is a lesson here for anyone who dares stand up to such powerful forces. Threatened industries are against you. They are daily scheming to humiliate you. As much as we might trust our comrades, there are bad actors out there who want to exploit your trust to destroy you.
It’s a dangerous world out there. No question that Brownstone Institute was on the target list, maybe at the top of the list. They might yet cut and paste a video of me exuding about meat and who knows how many others they ensnared in their plot. But let’s face it: that such an elaborate and well-funded scheme was hatched in the first place proves we are over the target.
This is from the latest Census release of CPS ASEC data, updated through 2024 (see Table F-23 at this link).
In 1967, only 5 percent of US families earned over $150,000 (inflation adjusted).
And even though it says so in the chart and in the text let me say it again, this is inflation adjusted and so yes it’s real and no the fact that housing has gone up in price doesn’t negate this, it’s built in. We would have done even better had NIMBYs not reduced the supply of housing.
NIMBYism is a key part of the problem of housing supply not meeting demand and forcing higher prices. This will further the problem as NIMBYist progressives use th tool to keep people from building on their own property.
We are just beginning to think these issues through:
The government’s plan to use artificial intelligence to accelerate planning for new homes may be about to hit an unexpected roadblock: AI-powered nimbyism.
A new service called Objector is offering “policy-backed objections in minutes” to people who are upset about planning applications near their homes.
It uses generative AI to scan planning applications and check for grounds for objection, ranking these as “high”, “medium” or “low” impact. It then automatically creates objection letters, AI-written speeches to deliver to the planning committees, and even AI-generated videos to “influence councillors”.
Kent residents Hannah and Paul George designed the system after estimating they spent hundreds of hours attempting to navigate the planning process when they opposed plans to convert a building near their home into a mosque.
An important goal of Marxist thought is the proletarianization of the middle class -- to convince great numbers of people in the office worker and shopkeeper classes that they are not beneficiaries of a rising tide of success but are no better than coal shovelers in a boiler room, victims of capitalist oppression that need to join the revolution. It is impossible to view the recent mayoral election in NYC as anything but a sign of their success. People in NYC wail about how dehumanizing it is to sit in an office for 8 hours a day.
Socialists have been brilliantly successful at creating bad outcomes via institutions they control or policies they promote, and then blaming those bad outcomes on capitalism. Probably the most brilliant success has been the shittification of higher education. Socialist-controlled universities create sky-high expectations for their degrees, and reinforce these expectations with rampant grade inflation that makes every student feel like a success -- even when they do almost no work. Academics on the Left route students into degrees and classes with absolutely no economic value (e.g. Paraguayan Feminist Poetry) and then dump them into the world -- after loading them down with $250,000 or more of debt -- with no possible path to reaching the promised expectations or even paying off the debt. And when all this inevitably fails, the academic apparatchiks who live high on tuition money are quick to blame the failure on "capitalism." And since these schools no longer teach students much about reasoned engagement with difficult and complex ideas -- and in fact encourage emotional reasoning, virtue-signaling, and just wailing in anger on TikTok over logical argument -- voters respond that "yeah, it must be capitalism's fault."
Anyway, in the context of all the turgid articles about the shrinking of the middle class and the failures of capitalism for the middle class, consider this which is all in 2024 $ (source):
Yes the middle class is shrinking -- because people in it are becoming richer. They are not (on average, certainly there are individuals who go up and down) getting poorer because the poorest band on this chart is shrinking even faster than the middle class. This is an enormous freaking victory for most everyone, but yet we are electing radical communists to tear down capitalism. Incredible.
Postscript: About a dozen years ago when my son was looking at colleges, like many parents I sat in a number of college admissions department presentations about the school. All these presentations were remarkably similar -- my kids and I started calling them the "how we are unique in the exact same ways every other school is unique" speeches.
But another thing I noticed quickly was all the encouragement of students that if they go to their school, they will all go out and change the world the moment they graduate. I guess it is good to be encouraging but this is a ridiculous expectation. Except for perhaps a half dozen kids a year across the whole country, no one changes the world at 22 with an expensive degree and little life experience. I have great respect for my son but at 22 he was happy to get a job with a beer company managing complex pricing lists and evaluating channel profitability. It was work that was of value to the company but it was certainly not changing the world. But he gained some great experience with data analysis, how to work in an organization, how to manage his time, etc. that were building blocks for better jobs or perhaps a future entrepreneurial excursion. He learned what he was interested in doing, which focused his future learning plan.
For myself, I eventually helped shape a new industry but I didn't even get started on that path until my forties. I had the opportunity to get fairly useful degrees at two renowned schools (Princeton engineer, Harvard MBA), but what I learned there was like 5%, at most, of the knowledge I used to eventually be successful.
Perhaps I am just old now and every older generation thinks this same thing, but haven't you noticed that many 22-year-olds that enter an organization today in an entry-level position seem to think they are in charge? I have been asked to speak to young people about school and careers and one of the things I tell them is that at 22 they are not going to be advising presidents, they are going to be updating pricing lists. And that is OK. Deliver value to the company and learn from it what you can. I think a lot of young people would be happier and in a better position to manage their learning and career if someone had just told them "your entry-level job is probably going to suck -- do a good job and work for something better."
Apparently there are still a ton of horrible passwords out there. I thought this lesson had been learned.
There were more than 2 billion accounts compromised in 2025 and some researchers got their hands on the data and decided to make a list of the most popular passwords.
While some countries have followed Trump's lead in designating Antifa a terrorist organisation, Germany actively promotes the far-Left group with publicly-funded guides to political activism and 'defensive' violence.
Legislation requiring cars and trucks, including electric vehicles, to have AM radios easily cleared a House committee Wednesday, although it could run into opposition going forward.
H.R. 979, the “AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act,” would require the Department of Transportation to enforce the mandate through a rulemaking. It passed the Energy and Commerce Committee by a 50-1 vote. Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) was the only “no.”
What’s next—mandating 8-track players in every car? Fax machines in every home? Floppy disks in every laptop? If Congress actually cared about emergency communication, it would strengthen cellular networks, not cling to obsolete technology. Congress is a den of old busybodies.
Addendum: If AM radio is so valuable for emergencies then the market will provide or you could, you know, put an AM radio in your glove box. No need for a mandate. We already have FM, broadcast TV, cable, satellite, cell, and Wireless Emergency Alerts; resilience can be met without specifying AM hardware.
Long-serving military and intelligence officer Thomas Speciale, who served as a senior advisor to Tulsi Gabbard on counterintelligence issues, wasn’t planning on playing a starring role in a viral Internet video this weekend. The Virginia resident just happened to see a LinkedIn announcement about an event called “The Directors,” to be held at George Mason University on October 30th. It included two characters he spent a fair portion of the last years researching: former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former CIA chief John Brennan.
“I didn’t know the venue,” says Speciale. “I didn’t know who the people were that were running it. I didn’t know anything. I just went, and out of the clear blue, they’re like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to take questions.’”
Speciale dropped a doozy on Brennan, who in turn dropped his usual mask of muttering atonal insouciance and blew up, making himself undesirably Internet-famous. It was a revealing episode about a figure rumored to be at the center of a wave of prosecutions related to Russiagate and other intelligence corruption episodes, already begun with the indictment of former FBI chief James Comey for perjury (and to a lesser extent, the indictment of former National Security Adviser John Bolton).
Unfortunately, the messaging around all of these releases wasn’t always clear, and while the public heard Gabbard use the phrase “treasonous conspiracy,” officials largely weren’t able to explain the breadth of the malfeasance story being investigated. Even the few mainstream efforts at covering the releases hinted at most at a series of picayune-sounding transgressions — a dubious piece of testimony here, a maybe-leak there — as opposed to the epic, years-long political espionage scam at the heart of the probe. Thanks to our Langley Softball Team of a news media, the key players also never had to answer confrontational questions in public. That streak ended with the clash of Speciale and Brennan.
A key issue with Brennan was his approval of the use of the infamous Steele Dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian meddling he and Comey helped build at Obama’s request. Speciale asked about this.
Specifically he referenced a pair of emails involving NSA chief Michael Rogers, who wasn’t sure he was “100% comfortable” with the use of “underlying material” like the Steele reports, and a reply from Clapper, Brennan, and Comey which told Rogers this was a “team sport” and he needed to sign off in the spirit of “that’s OUR story and we’re stickin’ to it”:
“A TEAM SPORT”: The crucial email in which four intelligence chiefs agreed to “stick” to a fake story of Russian collusion
Brennan seethed and squirmed while the question was asked by Speciale — no outsider but like him, an intelligence professional — who had “access to the classified ICA.” When Speciale finished asking his question, Brennan blew up:
SPECIALE: There was, there was there was an email that went around from General Clapper, from General Clapper to yourself and… yourself and Comey, et cetera, that basically said, ‘We all gotta get on board with this, otherwise it isn’t gonna work,’ basically. I think that that email puts everybody in the crosshairs. I would like to hear what your justification was for supporting the dossier that was known to be false being used as source material in the second ICA…
BRENNAN: I don’t know who put you up to this.
SPECIALE: Nobody put me up to this, sir. I’m here on my own.
BRENNAN: I don’t know what role you played or who you are, but it’s a bunch of bullshit that you just passed on. (applause) It’s absolute…
SPECIALE: The emails are clear, sir.
BRENNAN: Bullshit.
SPECIALE: The emails are clear.
BRENNAN: Bullshit.
SPECIALE: The emails are clear.
MODERATOR: Next!
SPECIALE: Second question…
MODERATOR: Next, next, next next, next, next…
Speciale tried to shout out a second question about Brennan’s role in signing the “51 Spies” letter about the Hunter Biden laptop story. He was shouted down, but in another unplanned encounter, Speciale got to confront Brennan about the episode after the event.
“I didn’t expect him to come into the reception,” Speciale says. “I look over, and Brennan and Hayden are surrounded by a bunch of college students, and they’re talking, just an open conversation. So I go over and… I’m standing there. He sees me for a good full minute or two. He sees me and he’s kind of trying to get ready to leave anyway. And then I hit him with that question.”
Speciale asked about the implication that the laptop story was Russian disinformation. Brennan, furious, poked Speciale in the chest. “You misrepresented that,” he said, insisting he never called the story disinformation. This is kinda-sorta technically true — they did use the phrase “information operation” — but there can be no doubt about the intent behind the letter, which Politico published under the headline, “Hunter Biden Story is Russian Disinfo, Dozens of Former Intel Officials Say.” Either way, Brennan’s normal cocksure cold-blooded demeanor dissolved again:
This exchange flew around the Internet for good reason. “Wild. Guy’s not usually the poking type,” is how one Congressional source put it. Speciale was also no ordinary crowd member. His point of view is significant because he advised Gabbard and other administration officials not only about this case, but about structural failures within the Intelligence Community that led to Russiagate and other messes.
At what possible offenses are Trump Administration officials currently looking? Why was the “this is OUR story and we’re stickin’ to it” email printed above so important? I asked Speciale this morning about these and other questions:
I asked Speciale about the randomness of the event, particularly the second encounter in the reception area.
“The funny thing is, I didn’t even know the guy shooting the video,” he says. “I didn’t know anybody else in the room. It was a total stranger. And when I asked my question and [Brennan] poked me in the chest, I knew it got him on a personal level… And I turned and looked, and I saw the guy with the camera and I said, ‘Hey, man, can you send me that so I can post it? And he sent it to me.”
Speciale, who’s posted an extensive (and, for Russiagate obsessives like me, invaluable) timeline on his site, was at the Defense Intelligence Agency during the summer and fall of 2016, when the FBI and Brennan’s CIA were cooking up various schemes to infiltrate and surveil the Trump campaign. He says it’s not unusual that counterintelligence investigators might have looked at someone like Trump. “The guy’s probably a multi-billionaire. He has no political background, and he’s got hotels all over the world,” Speciale says. “These are the kinds of people that might be recruited by the Russians. It’s a possibility, at least.”
However, Speciale says, authorities can only investigate for a short time without predication. “The law is very specific,” he says. “You could only do that for 90 days without a predicate of some kind of foreign involvement.”
The FBI opened its “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Trump in July of 2016 on dubious grounds, citing an absurdly vague conversation between an Australian official named Alexander Downer and young Trump aide George Papadopoulous about “information” a mysterious not-even-Russian character named Josef Mifsud claimed Russians could deliver. The FBI quickly determined Papadopoulous was a dead end, because evidence “didn’t particularly indicate” he was in contact with Russians, and moved on to fellow aide Carter Page as a surveillance target. As has been determined by an Inspector General report and a criminal case, the FBI falsified its warrant application to use FISA spy authority on the campaign.
“That’s where the FBI really went off the rails,” Speciale says, “If they’d have just done the initial investigation and determined that he wasn’t a source for the Russians, they should have just closed ‘Crossfire Hurricane.’ It should have just been closed. But they didn’t. They kept it going, and they lied to the FISA court, and they did all these things.”
That might have gone unnoticed, if not for a historic curveball. “They didn’t expect Trump to win,” Speciale says. “Trump even admitted it on Joe Rogan, where he said, ‘I didn’t even know anybody in Washington.’ He didn’t expect to win either, Matt. He didn’t. He was shocked.”
The problem with that, Speciale says, was “they had run this illegal Crossfire Hurricane investigation, and [National Security Adviser Mike] Flynn would’ve discovered that. And Flynn would’ve immediately told Trump.”
The emails Gabbard released this summer show that the intelligence community as of December 8, 2016 was on the cusp of issuing a similar second report, saying, “Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure.” However, the White House instead hastily convened a meeting of its “Principals Committee,” after which a new, broader Assessment was assigned that would come to a much starker conclusion.
Gabbard’s office may have erred in giving the impression that the main issue was the contradiction between the later, Obama-ordered Intelligence Community Assessment of January 6th stating with “high confidence” Russia meddled in the 2016 election to elect Trump, and the “did not impact U.S. election results” report that was ready to be published on December 8th. What really happened was more complicated: the narrow cyber report was suddenly stopped, then swapped out for a much broader report. Why? Speciale, who said he was “involved” with helping set up the Principals Committee meeting, offers his thoughts.
“Here’s what I think happened,” he says. “The cyber ICA was the foundation document, and [intelligence officials] said, ‘Mr. President, the Russians did not hack the election…’ But Comey said, ‘But, Mr. President, they ran a disinformation campaign, and did all these other things.’ And Brennan’s on board with this. Obama says, ‘Well, where’s the reporting on that? And he said, ‘I want a fulsome, whole-of-government intelligence report on everything the Russians were doing, not just cyber…’ And so Obama directed them.”
He pauses, then goes on:
“Here’s the real rub,” he says. “I’ve been saying this for years and years and years and trying to get traction on it. If an intelligence officer from a foreign country comes to, say, the FBI, and gives them a suitcase of bogus intel, but it all looks legit, and he’s doing it at the behest of the foreign government, that’s considered espionage. That’s considered offensive counterintelligence, essentially giving an adversary fake secrets so that they use a lot of resources to either prove or disprove them, or they make decisions based on bad intel.”
A foreign agent giving bad intelligence, Speciale explains, is called OFCO, or Offensive Counterintelligence.
“The dossier came from [Christopher] Steele, a trained counterintelligence agent,” he says. “It gets funneled to the FBI. The FBI reads it. They’re like, ‘This kind of sounds a little fishy, but let’s look at it.’ As soon as they picked it up and kept running with it, because they knew it was bullshit, they knew what they were doing, they knew that they were doing an OFCO. And here’s why. Because we now look at the information. The investigations were being leaked to Congress, and then the congressmen and women were leaking it to the American people and saying, Hey, there’s an investigation into Donald Trump for Russian collusion.”
Speciale insists the operation “wasn’t against Trump, it was against everyone. It was against the entire American electorate.” The creation of the impression that the White House was compromised, the use of resources on bogus investigations, moving public opinion in a direction it largely holds to this day, was the intelligence community taking aim at the whole country. Trump was a major character, but not the whole story. As for the “team sport” emails Speciale pointed to, they’re evidence of collective guilty knowledge, for which there’s a legal term.
“It’s damning,” says Speciale. “At the very least, seditious conspiracy.”
Speciale, who’s ensconced in a lawsuit against Virginia gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger (whom he claims issued a defamatory press release regarding his role in the J6 riots), had a lot more to say about Russiagate as well as the Hunter Biden story. The former DIA and DNI officer underscores, for instance, the bizarre fact that the ostensible key piece of evidence justifying the initial “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation of Trump, from the Maltese professor Josef Mifsud, is missing and somehow has never been found, nor has the person who planted two pipe bombs at J6.
“We can find a goatherd on the top of a mountain making IEDs in Afghanistan and hit him with a Predator missile,” he says. “But we can’t find a guy who dropped two fucking pipe bombs in plain sight in the middle of Washington, DC, our capital? And who in the fuck is Joseph Mifsud? We don’t even know. We don’t even know who that is. We don’t even know if that’s a real person.” He pauses.
“No way. No fucking way.”
I asked Speciale if, given his prior advisory role, he had any insight into what kind of conspiracy charge the administration is gunning for. Espionage? Sedition?
“I’ve had conversations, and I keep saying that I think this is just my suspicion,” he says. “My hope is that they want to have all their Ts crossed and their Is dotted before they level any public accusations of seditious conspiracy. I don’t think they’re going to go for treason. I think they’re going to go for seditious conspiracy, but I hope [Trump] puts the right person on messaging for this. Because from the White House side, not just from the DOJ, but from the White House side, their messaging has to be really, really carefully done to say, listen, ‘We don’t want revenge. We don’t want retribution. We want a restoration of the rule of law.’”
Jim Jordan’s Judiciary Committee referred Brennan for prosecution two weeks ago. We’ll see what happens, but there’s no question that tensions are high, as last week’s encounter shows.
On The Marginal Revolution Podcast this week, Tyler and I discuss compensating differentials and Olsonian selective incentives. Here’s one bit:
If you think about the gender wage gap, it’s sometimes said that women earn—it varies—80 cents for every dollar that a man earns. That doesn’t control for anything. Once you control for education and skill and so forth, this gets smaller. Then you also have to control for these quite difficult, elusive sometimes, job amenities. Claudia Goldin, for example, has pointed out that men are much more willing to take jobs requiring inflexible hours.
COWEN: And longer hours, too.
TABARROK: Longer hours and inflexible hours, where your hours are less under your control. That’s what I mean by inflexible. For example, in one study of train and bus drivers, the train and bus drivers are paid equally by gender. There’s no differences whatsoever in what they’re paid on an hourly basis. It turns out that the male drivers, their wages, their returns are much higher because they take a lot more overtime. They take 83% more overtime than their female colleagues. They’re much more likely to accept an overtime shift, which pays time and a half. The male workers also take fewer unpaid hours off. The male salaries on a yearly basis end up being higher, even though males and females are paid equally.
Now, you can roll this back and say that’s because of the unfair demands on women of childcare or something like that, but it’s not a market discrimination. It’s not market discrimination. It’s a compensating differential. Males earn more because they’re more willing to take the inflexible overtime hours and so forth.
One of the most interesting ones is that Uber drivers, male drivers earn a little bit more. Now, obviously, there’s no gender difference whatsoever in how the drivers are paid. It just turns out that male drivers just drive a little bit faster.
COWEN: I’ve noticed this, by the way, when I take Ubers.
TABARROK: On an annual basis, they make about 7% more. Now, again, it’s not entirely obvious that this is even better for the male drivers. Maybe they’re taking a little bit more risk. Maybe they’re a little bit more likely to get into an accident as well.
….COWEN: …Someone gets the short end of the stick. Not only women, but maybe women on average would be more likely to suffer.
TABARROK: I’m not sure it’s the short end of the stick, though I agree with increasing returns, that the people who work longer hours will also earn higher salaries and maybe have plush offices and so forth. Let me put it this way. One of the things which I think the feminism story sometimes gets a little bit wrong is to actually underestimate the value that women get, and that men can get as well, of childcare, of looking after kids, of spending more time at home, or spending more time doing childcare. That can be extremely valuable. At the end of life, who writes on their tombstone, “I wish I could have worked more”?
I really thought I would never post this, as I think Kamala Harris is in the dictionary next to "extreme Peter Principle," but she was right when she said that her loss to Trump was the closest Presidential loss this century, at least when looking at the popular vote. John Hinderaker tries to argue otherwise:
I suppose Harris was referring to the irrelevant “popular vote,” but her claim isn’t true there, either. By far the closest of the seven elections in terms of popular vote was 2000, where the margin was only around 500,000 votes. By that yardstick, the 2024 election was a distant second, with Trump’s margin over Harris being around 2,300,000 votes.
Sorry, but the year 2000 is not in this century. It was the last year of the last century. Yes, I know this has already been litigated around Y2K in the court of public opinion and my side mostly lost because we just pissed everyone off who wanted to celebrate a round number, but that does not mean I am wrong.
When you were born, you started out as age 0. After one month you were age 1/12 a year. At your first birthday you were one year old. On your hundredth birthday you have lived exactly a century. People analogize the calendar to this, but they are wrong.
The reason is that there was no year 0 on our calendar. The first day after BC times (or BCE if you are up on modern academic jargon) was January 1 of the year 1. That means that the post-BCE world was not one year old until January 1 in the year 2. The era turned one but we call it year 2. The first decade did not end until December 31 in the year 10, and January 1, 11 was the beginning of the next decade. The first century did not end until December 31 in the year 100 and the second century began on January 1, 101. In the same way, this century (and millennium) began January 1, 2001 (queue: Also Sprach Zarathustra).
Now, I am pretty sure this was NOT Harris's reasoning but I really, really hope she adopts it because I would love to see her try to explain it in an interview.
Below is my column in the Hill on how some on the American left have learned how to hate. Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones is actually leading in the polls after admitting that he wanted to see a political opponent and his children killed. It appears that many Democratic voters have now embraced the rage as leaders ratchet up violent rhetoric. Those who once demanded the criminalization of hate speech appear to relish it.
Here is the column:
In Shakespeare’s Richard III, Queen Elizabeth — whose husband King Edward IV was overthrown and her twins taken to the Tower — asks the older Queen Margaret (widow of the murdered King Henry VI) to “teach me how to curse mine enemies.” The Queen responds that it is easy: “Think that thy babes were sweeter than they were, And he that slew them fouler than he is.”
The lesson: The key to hate is to decouple it entirely from reason and reality. Only then can you hate completely without restraint or regret.
It seems that the left has learned how to hate. Hateful speech is in vogue as Democratic leaders ramp up violent rhetoric and political violence rises. The key is to get voters to hate your opponent so much that they forget how much they dislike you.
The irony is crushing. For years, liberals have sought to criminalize hate speech while expanding the range of viewpoints considered to fall within this category. Democratic leaders, from senators to former presidential candidates, have falsely claimed that hate speech is not protected under the First Amendment.
In “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I write about rage and the uncomfortable fact: “What few today want to admit is that they like it. They like the freedom that it affords, the ability to hate and harass without a sense of responsibility.” Rage is addictive, and it is contagious.
What rage-addicts cannot tolerate are those who cling to residual impulses of decency or humanity. In an age of rage, reason is viewed as a reactionary tendency.
This week, Bravo star and liberal podcast host Jennifer Welch praised footage of a “No Kings” protester celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk, holding her up as an example for all liberals.
In the clip, the elderly woman said, “Charlie Kirk is horrible. Yes. I’m glad he’s not here.” When pressed if she was actually happy that the husband and father of two had been murdered, the woman said “Yes…because he was horrible on the campuses. Horrible person.”
After playing the clip, Welch laughed with joy and declared, “So listen up, Democratic establishment. You can either jump on board with this s—, or we’re coming after you in the same way that we come after MAGA. Period.”
Celebrities like Jamie Lee Curtis certainly got that message. The actress was facing a social and professional meltdown after openly mourning Kirk’s death in a podcast interview. “I disagreed with him on almost every point I ever heard him say,” she said. “But I believe he was a man of faith, and I hope in that moment when he died, that he felt connected to his faith, even though his ideas were abhorrent to me.”
It appeared to be a moment of weakness that briefly overrode wokeness. Curtis quickly found herself persona non grata in Hollywood, as an angry liberal mob began to circle her. Curtis quickly saw the light and effectively retracted her fleeting expression of humanity, claiming it had been “mistranslated.” It is said that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. But that does not apply if you then gouge out your own eye. Now fully and comfortably blinded by her own hand, Curtis is back as a member of good standing in Hollywood.
Internationally, the left has pushed for criminalizing the speech of those with opposing views as hateful and harmful. UNESCO works off a definition of hate speech as including “pejorative or discriminatory language with reference to a person or a group on the basis of who they are, in other words, based on their religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, color, descent, gender or other identity factor.” This includes “scapegoating, stereotyping, stigmatization and the use of derogatory language” based on any “identity factor.”
Countries are also “required to prohibit” speech tied to “conspiracy theories, disinformation and denial and distortion of historical events.”
In the past, some leftists have included political criticism or parodies of their leaders as hate speech. For example, when a rodeo clown, Tuffy Gessling, donned a President Barack Obama mask at the Missouri State Fair as part of a skit years ago, the response was calls for his arrest. The President of the Missouri chapter of the NAACP, Mary Radliff, insisted that it constituted criminal hate speech.
But things have changed. The left has now discovered the thrill of uninhibited hate.
Recently, in Chicago, elementary school teacher Lucy Martinez was shown on video reacting to an image of Kirk by mockingly making a gesture akin to being shot in the neck, mimicking how Kirk had been assassinated.
Another educator, Wilbur Wright College Adult Education Manager Moises Bernal, screamed to a crowd that “ICE agents gotta get shot and wiped out.” Bernal told the crowd, “You gotta grab a gun!” and “We gotta turn around the guns on this fascist system!”
In academia, hateful speech has long been a way to establish one’s bona fides as a faculty member. By attacking and excluding others, you reaffirm your own protected status.
Even school board members have referred to taking faculty “to the slaughterhouse” for questioning diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
Last week, Democratic strategist James Carville went on a hate-filled rant, to the delight of his podcast audience. He declared that anyone supporting Trump and the Republicans will be treated like collaborators in World War II who were publicly abused and paraded by mobs.
“You know what we do with collaborators?” he said. “I think these corporations [funding White House renovations] — my fantasy dream is that this nightmare ends in 2029 and I think we ought to have radical things. I think they all ought to have their heads shaven, they should be put in orange pajamas and they should be marched down Pennsylvania Avenue and the public should be invited to spit on them.”
Carville later repeated the call that “The universities, the corporations, the law firms, all of these collaborators should be shaved, pajamaed and spit on.”
For years, Democratic leaders have given their base the license for such blind rage by calling Republicans “Nazis” and claiming that democracy will die unless their opponents are stopped.
The effect has been transformative across the party. In the current race for Virginia Attorney General, Democratic nominee Jay Jones admitted to sending text messages expressing the desire to kill a political opponent, “piss on the grave” of a dead Republican, and kill his children, whom he dismissed as “little fascists,” in their mother’s arms.
There was a time when such a candidate would be denounced by those on the ticket from his party and made a nonentity in politics. Instead, the Virginia Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Abigail Spanberger (who had previously told her supporters to “Let your rage fuel you”), has refused to withdraw her endorsement. Moreover, the race remains close, with most Democratic voters still planning to cast their ballots for him.
It is a lesson many hope will take hold in the midterm elections. Like Queen Elizabeth, these voters have overcome all inhibitions and can now teach others “how to curse.”
It is ironic that, with so many Americans having sacrificed their lives (including my FIL z”l, who died a premature death from Agent Orange exposure) in Vietnam in an attempt to stem the spread of communism… fifty years later, the “Communist Party” officially abandons Marxism-Leninism, embraces capitalism and private property rights. (De facto, the system was only in name communist anymore.)
This paper studies the long-term neighborhood effects of the American public housing program, one of the largest and most controversial American urban policies of the 20th century. I construct a new national dataset tracking the locations, completion dates, and characteristics of over 1 million public housing units built between 1935 and 1973, which I link to neighborhood-level data from 1930 to2010. Ifirstshowthatpublichousingprojects were systematically targeted towards initially poorer, more populated neighborhoods with higher Black population shares, reflecting the program’s slum clearance goals and racialized site selection politics. Using a stacked matched difference-in-differences approach, I estimate causal effects of public housing construction on neighborhood change by comparing treated neighborhoods to matched control areas within the same county based on pre-treatment characteristics that predict placement. Public housing neighborhoods experienced large, persistent increases in Black population and population shares and substantial declines in median incomes and rents. Geographic spillovers to nearby neighborhoods were limited: median incomes declined modestly, but demographic composition remained relatively stable on average. I find evidence consistent with neighborhood tipping dynamics: neighborhoods with initial Black shares in a plausible tipping range experienced substantial white population outflows in response to public housing construction. Linking to modern mobility data, I show that children from low-income families who grew up in public housing neighborhoods experienced significantly lower rates of upward mobility. These f indings demonstrate that, despite intentions of slum clearance and neighborhood revitalization, public housing reinforced existing patterns of economic and racial segregation and reduced long-run economic opportunity, although effects were largely confined to project neighborhoods themselves.
That is from a new paper by Beau Bressler at UC Davis. Beau is on the job market this year, here is his home page.
The monkeys, weighing approximately 40 pounds each, were being transported from Tulane University in New Orleans, and are aggressive toward humans. Six of the 21 monkeys escaped in the crash on Interstate 59, with the other 15 still being caged.
We need free markets not voting to confiscate the wealth of the productive.
The poll found that 58% of respondents believe that America needs more economic populism, including 32% who strongly agree, while 27% of respondents disagree, including 13% who strongly disagree
This suggests that the BBC is actively producing propaganda for Hamas.
The BBC breached Ofcom's broadcasting code with a Gaza documentary that was narrated by the son of a Hamas Government official, the regulator has found.
alexmccullough at Dune has a very good post on the accuracy of Polymarket prediction markets. First, how do we measure accuracy? Suppose a prediction market predicts an event will happen with p=.7, i.e. a 70% probability. The event happens. How do we score this prediction? A common method is the Brier Score which is the mean squared difference from the actual outcome. In this case the Brier Score is (0.70−1)2 = 0.09. Notice that if the prediction market had predicted the event would have happened with 90% probability, a better prediction, then the Brier Score would have been (0.90−1)2 = 0.01 a lower number. If the event had not happened then the Brier Score for a 70% prediction would have been (0.70−0)2 = 0.49, a higher number. Thus, a lower Brier Score is better.
Across some 90,000 predictions the Polymarket Brier Score for a 12 hour ahead prediction is .0581. As Alex notes:
A brier score below 0.125 is good, and below 0.1 is great. Polymarket’s total score is excellent, and puts it on par with the best prediction model’s in existence… Sports betting lines tend to average a brier score of between .18-.22.
Brier Scores have been widely used to measure weather forecasts. A state of the art 12 hour ahead forecast of rain, for example, might have a Brier Score of .0.05 – 0.12 so if Polymarket suggest a metaphorical umbrella you would be wise to listen.
Moreover, highly liquid markets are even more accurate.
Even markets with low liquidity have good brier scores below 0.1, but markets with more than $1m in total trading volume have scores of 0.0256 12 hours prior to resolution and 0.0159 a day prior. It’s hard to overstate how impressive that is.
There are, however, some small but systematic errors. The following bar chart splits events into 20 buckets of 5% each so the first bucket covers events that were predicted to happen 0-5% of the time and the last bucket covers events that were predicted to happen 95-100% of the time. The black bar gives the predicted probability, the orange bar the actual frequencies. As expected, events which are predicted to happen more often do happen more often with a very nice progression. Note, however, that the predicted probability is almost always slightly higher than the actual frequency. This means that people are paying a bit too much. It’s unclear whether this is due to market design issues such as the greater difficult of shorting or something about the Automated Market Makers or due to psychological factors such as favorite bias. Thus, some room for improvement but very impressive overall.
In a recent debate with a Harvard Law Professor, I was surprised when my counterpart insisted with (other dubious factual claims) that no one has celebrated the death of Charlie Kirk. He knew that the challenge for me to name one was unlikely to be answered in a debate on a different topic, even though many have celebrated and mocked the assassination on the left. The tactic is part of a type of name game being played on many cable shows. That was again evident this week when Harry Sisson, a liberal commentator, challenged a panel to name one person who analogized Trump to Hitler. It was also on display when Rep. Dan Goldman (D., N.Y.) challenged anyone to name a single Antifa member. The name game is popular because it is rarely challenged on the spot, though that was not the case with Sisson.
Most people had little knowledge of Sisson’s work as a social media influencer until he was featured in the video circulated by the White House showing President Trump dumping human excrement on his head (as well as others marching in the “No Kings” rally). For the record, I thought that the video was juvenile, distasteful, and remarkably unfunny.
The video propelled Sisson into greater public visibility and he appeared on “Piers Morgan Uncensored” and challenged the panel to name one high-level Democrat who’s compared Trump to Hitler. The response was crushing. When rebutted by the other guests, Sisson then demanded an actual date which is consistent with the tactic. After all, if anyone is fast enough to give a name, they would surely be unable to provide a date. Then someone did.
Obviously, this has been a mantra on the left with many Democratic politicians making the analogy. Jen Rubin was one of the first out of the gate after the election with a column titled “Hitler is in power.”
The whole appeal of the name game is that you make the claim in a forum where no one is likely to respond. It then leaves naive viewers with the impression that it is manifestly true. The saddest aspect of an age of rage is the level of self-delusion that occurs. Many people want to be told that they can ignore troubling facts, leaving narratives unchallenged in their echo-chambered news and social media circles. Figures like Rep. Goldman are the denial agents that many need to avoid addressing their own disinformation or rage rhetoric. They are the Nathan Thurms of American politics:
The point of this game is not that it will convince most people, but will allow many to avoid serious reflection over their own actions or rhetoric. In American politics, there is no Walter White demanding that you “say my name.”
That is the key to the game. No one listening in your echo chamber wants to say the name. The problem is when you invite others to play outside of that silo. Then you end up like Sisson with a virtual Boston telephone book of rebuttals and not a single friend to call.
By Kim Bowes, this is an excellent book, the best I know of on ordinary economic life in the Roman empire. It also shows a very good understanding of economics, unlike some forays by archeologists. Here is one excerpt:
On the income side, we’ve seen that unskilled wages, which were very low indeed, were also a very bad proxy for income. Wages were usually part of a portfolio of income, a portfolio that all family members contributed to, but one still centered on own production — either farming or textile/artisanal work. Unskilled wages supplemented own-production; they mostly weren’t equivalent to it. Roman wagges, unlike modern wages, can’t be used as a proxy for income.
Gross income from own-production, particularly farming, appears to have been much higher than previously supposed. Rotation strategies practiced by Italian and Egyptian farmers meant that per-hectare outputs were many times greater than alternate fallow models predicted, since outputs included not only wheat but also significant quantities of fodder and animals. In the northwest provinces, where rotation was less common, outputs per hectare were lower but still included some hay and larger animal herds. And every, high settlement densities and shrinking amounts of land would have urged farmers to achieve higher yields — in some places three or more times greater than previously supposed. We can’t be sure they managed this, only that low yields would have been mostly unteanble and that farmers had the tools — rotation, manuring, weeding — to achieve higher ones.
Most working class Romans, by the way, bought their clothing rather than having to make it themselves.
