Links to Consider, 6/26

Michael Strong and me; Samuel J. Abrams on The Talk; Is immigration over-estimated or under-estimated?; me on AI and other topics; Noah Smith on infrastructure and other topics

Michael Strong discusses his experiences offering alternatives to the stifling government-school experience for K-12. A bracing interview. He foresees American students escaping public schools by the tens of millions soon.

Samuel J. Abrams writes,

Recently I decided to give my six-year-old son his first lesson because I could no longer shield him from the harsh world that Jews are now forced to confront. While I never shared the details of the October 7th massacre with him, he has picked up on the fact that something awful happened. He knew that his cousins were suddenly trying to save people in a “war” in Israel. He was visibly distressed and worried about the hostages, especially the children, because he could see the posters all over the city. And as a member of a Zionist Jewish family active within the Jewish community, my son eventually figured out that a lot of Jews were killed. Being in New York City, he has witnessed several anti-Israel demonstrations, heard their words, and seen their posters, flags and graffiti.

Suppose that after Pearl Harbor demonstrations had broken out in major cities around the world and at campuses in the United States expressing solidarity with Japan. We would wonder where such feelings came from.¹

The October 7 attack tapped into a wellspring of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatred. We don’t know how it is going to turn out.

Kristin Butcher and others write,

standard estimates of the foreign-born population may currently be too high. We also show that recent labor market indicators are inconsistent with increased foreign-born induced slack.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

On the other hand, Market Watch reports,

A new Wall Street report says even that CBO report is underestimating the immigration wave.

Barclays, in a new report on immigration in conjunction with the bank’s half-year outlook, estimated net immigration reached 4 million last year, vs. the CBO’s 3.3 million estimate, which itself was more than other U.S. government agency.

Pointer from Moses Sternstein, who writes,

Random Walk has long maintained that secular aging, plus a “pull forward” of retirees, precipitated a labor shortage, leading to a wage spike, leading to inflation . . . and that our immaculate landing is largely a story of a few million migrants replacing those retirees.

Did you and Butcher, et al, visit the same labor market?

Corbin Barthold interviews me. More energy than my usual podcast appearance, mostly because of Corbin.

Topics include: - Why central planning is impossible - The importance of prices - What is AI good for? - Will AI know us better than we know ourselves? - What markets will AI disrupt? - Social media and tribal gang-sign flashing - The myopia of the revanchist right

And here I am on Fox Business Video. I get 30 seconds to explain the decline of the moral order. Remind me to be busy next time someone from cable TV asks me.

Noah Smith writes,

I view this as America’s great generation challenge. Reversing the pro-stasis policies of the 1970s and once again becoming a nation of abundance will require any number of changes — permitting reform, a more effective bureaucracy, various kinds of deregulation, industrial policy, and renegotiations of the social compact between a wide variety of interest groups. This is not going to be quick or easy.

But just to maintain a sense of urgency, here are some updates on how bad things are.

Industrial policy, of which Smith is a big fan, subsidizes demand. But the other hand of government restricts supply. Not surprisingly, he gets frustrated.

Also, Smith writes,

Thomas Philippon realized that the U.S. and eurozone inflation numbers are wildly different than the price numbers calculated by the World Bank people who calculate PPP. Two different sets of researchers are finding very different price numbers — the eurozone people think their prices have gone up a lot more than the World Bank people think.

And it’s just not clear yet who’s right. People are looking into the difference, but for now we just don’t know whether Europe has been mostly keeping pace with the U.S. or falling behind.

Economists try to read too much into aggregate productivity differences. Unless you are talking about really long time horizons—meaning many decades—noise in making quality adjustments and aggregating across disparate industries swamps the signal.

substacks referenced above: @

Open border 'saved' the economy (reprise)

1. Adolf Hitler declared war on the U.S. in solidarity with Japan. As an expression of anti-Americanism, make of that what you will.