families with the lowest quintile incomes, on average, did not experience any income growth from 2015 to 2022.
America has always been a place where, in spite of our follies and faults, the world’s aspirational poor voted with their feet and traded up. We were the dream. Every U-Haul heading east out of Los Angeles or south out of New York City, with families that would have preferred to not make the move; every family spending half their income on rent because they don’t know what they would do if they lost their last foothold in Phoenix or Portland or Atlanta, is a moral failure against the duty of our birthright.
The American psyche was deeply scarred by the dramatic inflation surge during the pandemic years. This recent history has left American households highly sensitive to perceived inflationary threats, complicating the Fed's efforts to reliably achieve its 2% inflation goal. It also explains why the current trade war, which is expected to raise consumer prices, could prove even more unsettling than the trade tensions of 2018-2020
This inflation scarring complicates the Fed’s return journey to 2% inflation. Conventional wisdom says central banks should “look through” inflation caused by negative supply shocks as long as inflation expectations are well anchored. That is why the Fed was initially not worried about “transitory” inflation during the pandemic. It is also why Fed Chair Jay Powell is now invoking the “transitory inflation” claim about Trump’s tariffs, as they too can be seen as a form of a negative supply shock.
the next time someone claims that European VATs disadvantage American exporters…, remember—it’s their misunderstanding of how consumption taxes work that’s causing the confusion, not unfair practices by our trading partners. If anything, America’s reliance on our patchwork state sales tax system (which often taxes business inputs) creates more embedded taxes in our exports than other countries’ VAT systems do in theirs.
We present the Growth and AI Transition Endogenous model (GATE), a dynamic integrated assessment model that simulates the economic effects of AI automation. GATE combines three key ingredients that have not been brought together in previous work: (1) a compute-based model of AI development, (2) an AI automation framework, and (3) a semi-endogenous growth model featuring endogenous investment and adjustment costs.
The model is implemented in an interactive sandbox, enabling users to explore the impact of AI under different parameter choices and policy interventions. The modeling sandbox is available at: this http URL.
This post has two goals. The first is to simply summarize the four different disputes at issue across these six applications… The second is to suggest, in contrast to the first Trump II case to reach the Court, that these cases are the reckoning we’ve been waiting for.
by the end of next week, the Court will have (at least) six fully briefed emergency applications from the federal government covering four major disputes.
Why does the stock market rise and fall? From 1989 to 2017, the real per-capita value of corporate equity increased at a 7.2% annual rate. We estimate that 40% of this increase was attributable to a reallocation of rewards to shareholders in a decelerating economy, primarily at the expense of labor compensation. Economic growth accounted for just 25% of the increase, followed by a lower risk price (21%), and lower interest rates (14%). The period 1952 to 1988 experienced only one third as much growth in market equity, but economic growth accounted for more than 100% of it.
The MSR-backed note totals $878 million and is only the second nonrecourse MSR securitization in market history, following Rithm’s $461 million offering in November 2024.
A little followed announcement happened last week in finance. CME Group ($CME) will begin tokenizing its clearinghouse using Google ($GOOG) cloud technology. No one is going to be able to speculate on the token like they can with XRP. No one is going to be able to earn profits from holding the token or mining the token.
Innovation never stops. With quantum computing, AI, tokenization, and things we don’t even comprehend yet, you can’t stop innovating. I think that CME’s antique fee system is keeping it from figuring out new ways to innovate. It’s putting upward pressure on data fees, which the entire customer community hates, and gives them a reason to look for alternatives. So far, because of the dominance of the CME clearinghouse, the alternatives haven’t been appealing, but technology can change that.
But the big question is, what happens if the court invalidates the government’s decision and the government refuses to comply—who decides then?
That question leads to what I call the “bodyguard test.” Imagine a scenario in which the attorney general declares Prime Minister Netanyahu “incapacitated” due to his ongoing corruption trial—something the court has suggested it may do. If Netanyahu arrives at his office, and the attorney general has declared him unfit to serve, what will his bodyguard do?
the munitions are stored out in the open in long continuous tunnels and large caverns with no, or at least limited, blast doors or separated revetments. That could result in devastating consequences should the facility be breached in an attack. The lack of these protective measures could lead to an absolutely massive chain reaction of secondary explosions. This is an interesting revelation because other Iranian underground weapons caverns, especially those that can launch missiles through apertures in the surface, do appear to have these measures
The bombers present a unique mix of capabilities, particularly their ability to penetrate past dense enemy air defenses to carry out ‘bunker buster’ strikes employing 30,000-pound class GBU-57/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) bombs.
• Scenario A: Already announced tariff increases, plus a low reciprocal tariff that escalate into higher tariffs, but escalations remain contained.
• Scenario B: High reciprocal tariffs that include VAT by the US. WTO-conform retaliation by the EU.
• Scenario C: High reciprocal tariffs and full trade war escalation with no equilibrium leading to US withdrawing from Bretton Woods institutions and financial sanctions/ fragmentation.
• Scenario D: Plaza / Mar A Lago accord following high tariffs and coordinated FX/Macro settlement
We believe the ECB should put in place some contingency planning across at least three dimensions:
• Revising the ECB’s swap line and repo agreement and preparing a bold expansion to backstop the European financial system and assist emerging economies that would require hard currency liquidity.
• Preparing to expand massively not only the asset purchase universe and instruments but also the list and range of counterparties that the ECB would engage with including central clearing counterparties, exchanges, asset managers, pension funds.
• Preparing to collaborate more actively with the IMF and other leading central banks including the People’s Bank of China (PBC) to arrange access to dollar liquidity in an environment where the Federal Reserve would refuse to provide dollar liquidity through the existing FED swap line network.
Chief of Poland’s National Security Bureau Dariusz Lukowski recently revealed that Poland only has 1-2 weeks’ worth of stockpiled ammo, which came a little more than a month after he candidly admitted that his country “doesn’t have independence” in the military-industrial sphere. This dangerous state of affairs is in spite of Poland now boasting NATO’s third-largest military
Since airing last May as a five-part series on TV2, Denmark’s biggest television network, The Black Swan has sent the country into convulsions. One out of every two Danes has seen the documentary. After its release, a biker-gang member and his accountant were charged with financial crimes and taken into custody; others, including a municipal official, are under investigation. The Danish Bar and Law Society formally apologised to the minister of justice for the conduct of two lawyers caught on camera; they have been either fired or disbarred. A new money-laundering law was introduced to give banks more oversight over “client accounts” – the kind of accounts in which lawyers pool the funds of several clients and transact on their behalf, and that featured in many of the machinations in Smajic’s office. In her New Year’s speech, Denmark’s prime minister suggested biker-gang criminals ought to be stripped of their pension rights – a detail so specific it was surely inspired by The Black Swan.
For most of the past forty-five years, the Chinese economic miracle has been driven largely by mobilizing factors of production, especially labor and capital. That strategy worked well in the early stages of its development. But as China closes in on living standards of the advanced economies, the perspiration of factor mobilization will need to give way to the inspiration of organic changes in deeply entrenched behavioral norms. At CDF 2025, there was a clear understanding that the road to high-income status is not easy. For China, the inspirational impetus to the last mile may well be the toughest mile of all.
Well, it appears we are on the cusp of finding out about Finding Out. There have been a litany of hot-dog car man style quotes from various US business leaders and titans of Wall Street. Just a few months ago, post the Presidential Election, the types of quotes reporters got from finance guys were along the lines of “I’m so glad that I can feel free to say slurs again without being cancelled”. To which one might say, oh… that’s nice for you.
It turns out that Trump 2.0 does not mean only freedom for slurs. Along with the vanquishing of ‘woke’ there appear to have been several other victims so far, including free trade, support for Ukraine over Russia, USAID, the Department of Education, the National Institute of Health, Venezuelans with Real Madrid tattoos, French scientists who text their friends that they don’t like Trump’s science policy, and the potential sovereignty of Canada.
the speech was very clearly all about the awkward relationship between Common Good Conservatism and Let Software Eat The World. When a politician specifically and repeatedly denies that a tension is important, it is excellent evidence that the tension is urgent and worrying. This tension is by no means necessarily a sign of imminent collapse. Previous conservative coalitions, such as National Review “fusionism,” had spotty welding in places, but somehow still held together for decades. Still, it is a visible weakness that might be exploited.
The simplest way of describing integralism is as the proposition that society ought be shaped by agreement on a common good that in turn reflects Christian natural law. If you believe that God has told us how we should lead our lives, then shouldn’t our society and our government reflect these values? There will be complications and compromises - the City of God is not the City of Man - but still you ought do what you can to build the worldly paradise.
Accelerationism of the Silicon Valley variety takes just the opposite stance. According to right-accelerationists, the best political order is exit all the way down (or, more precisely, exit between one CEO-founded microsociety and another). In their radicalized version of market liberalism, if you demolish the state, and allow unhindered innovation, our descendants will find their way to the stars.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance, is politically self-conscious. It has a particular ideological audience in mind and a specific plan of influence focused on progressive political elites. That means Ezra and Derek have to carefully cut and frame their message into a form that progressive elites will accept.
This kind of political pressure is exactly the motivation behind the subtextual messages identified in the works of ancient philosophers by Leo Strauss. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson won’t face forced suicide for unorthodox views like Socrates did, but they do risk a form of exile.
Half of the federal budget is already spent on transfers to individuals and government transfers make up 40% of the income of people in the bottom 20th percentile of household income. Parceling out more of present day wealth to these efforts is well past diminishing returns and probably has negative growth effects which far outweigh the benefits. Under this view, redistribution does matter but we already have more than enough of it. Now, let’s focus on abundance!
In other words, the AMA isn’t offering a software product. It just runs this process, keeping a list of codes that map to different medical procedures. You would think it would be free, a standard for everyone to use. But it’s not, and the AMA is able to charge a royalty for the license to use those codes. Every medical software company seems to have CPT codes and royalties built into their workflow.
It sure looks like the AMA has turned itself from a voice of doctors into a Silicon Valley tech incubator financed with money extracted from doctors at the behest of the government.
if they couldn’t win the trust of the public at large, they would use their millions to create a supportive majority in Congress. Three crypto-backed super PACS—innocuously named Defend American Jobs, Fairshake, and Protect Progress—spent more than $265 million in the 2024 election cycle trying to oust crypto skeptics in favor of candidates who had signaled a willingness to ease regulations on the currency.
But before the surviving Inuit fled the new Danish settlement, he found out about the nujaqaqut, the hairy ones. The Inuit told him that just like there could be breath without body, sometimes there were bodies without breath. Every person breathes a part of the wind, and all the animals they have to hunt, and even rocks and plants, but not the nujaqaqut, who are shaped like men but have no souls. Because they’re made of leftover body, they can wear the signs of any animal. All of them are covered from head to foot in white hair like a bear, but some of them have antlers too, or a pair of walrus tusks. They have terrible fangs. They live on the ice but come near human settlements at night, to steal Inuit men and women and feast on their flesh. The nujaqaqut are not the old Viking settlers. The nujaqaqut are what ate them.
Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.”
Students are not absolutely illiterate in the sense of being unable to sound out any words whatsoever. Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done. They’re like me clicking through a mandatory online HR training. Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn't even take the time to read the question properly. Reading anything more than a menu is a chore and to be avoided.
But today, that model is fading. AI can now perform much of the work the knowledge class was trained to do. LLMs can draft legal memos, write code, analyze data, and summarize research. What once required degrees and credentials is now being overtaken by prompts and AI agents. Meanwhile, global markets and off-the-shelf technology are lowering the barriers to building products, starting businesses, and spreading ideas. Intelligence isn’t going away, but it’s no longer scarce.
What’s scarce now is initiative — the ability to turn abundance into impact. That’s why agency is the new superpower, the new force multiplier. I’m not saying intelligence no longer matters. Creativity, vision, critical thinking — these are critical abilities in the Age of Agency. But the most impactful people will not necessarily be the smartest in terms of raw IQ. They’ll be the ones who initiate and execute with competence, the ones who most effectively harness the tools of superintelligence. The high-agency guy with a 120 IQ will be better positioned than the brilliant guy with a 140 IQ who spins in indecision and passivity.
There have been inklings of glucose's behind-the-scenes role. Embryonic stem cells, which can differentiate into every cell in the body, lose this ability when grown in the presence of high levels of glucose—presumably because the increased glucose stimulates the cells to differentiate and lose their "stemness." Additionally, people with high glucose levels due to diabetes often experience impaired wound healing and tissue regeneration.
"This finding is a springboard for research on dysregulation of glucose levels, which affects hundreds of millions of people," Khavari said.
"But it's also likely to be important in cancer development, because cancer is a disease of failed differentiation. This is an entirely new and growing field. People have thought that small biomolecules like glucose were quite passive in the cell.
Research at the National Cancer Research Center (CNIO), published in Nature, has discovered in animal models a previously unknown mechanism of liver regeneration. It is a process that is triggered very quickly, just a few minutes after acute liver damage occurs, with the amino acid glutamate playing a key role.
The authors write that, in light of their results, nutritional glutamate supplementation can effectively promote liver regeneration and benefit patients with severe and chronic liver damage, such as those recovering after hepatectomy, to stimulate liver growth, or even those awaiting a transplant.
The results show that liver and bone marrow are interconnected by glutamate. After acute liver damage, liver cells, called hepatocytes, produce glutamate and send it into the bloodstream; through the blood, glutamate reaches the bone marrow, inside the bones, where it activates monocytes, a type of immune system cell.
Monocytes then travel to the liver and along the way become macrophages—also immune cells. The presence of glutamate reprograms the metabolism of macrophages, and these consequently begin to secrete a growth factor that leads to an increase in hepatocyte production.
In other words, a rapid chain of events allows glutamate to trigger liver regeneration in just minutes, through changes in the macrophage metabolism. It is, says Djouder, "a new, complex and ingenious perspective on how the liver stimulates its own regeneration."
If the single-family neighborhood density of West University Place were applied to Indianapolis, the city would have a population of 2.8 million people—1.9 million more than today—solely due to differences in street grids and more efficient lot sizes. Yet, in this scenario, everyone would still have a yard and a single-family home.
A recent paper by Thomas Felesina and Brendan Zietsch summarizes what we’ve learned to date about the evolutionary genetics of same-sex sexual orientation. Here are the five main conclusions of the paper.
Same-sex sexual orientation is around 30% heritable….
The heritable component of same-sex sexual orientation is the product of many, many gene variants, each of which has only a tiny effect - consistent with the Fourth Law of Behavior Genetics.
Gay men and lesbians have fewer offspring than their straight counterparts, as shown in the following graph.
This raises an interesting and difficult question: How do gene variants predisposing people to same-sex sexual orientation persist in the human gene pool? The short answer is that we don’t know. One possibility, however, is that when these variants found in straight people, they confer a reproductive advantage - an advantage that matches or outweighs the reproductive disadvantage associated with same-sex sexual orientation.
Same-sex sexual behavior is fairly common in other animals. Exclusive same-sex sexual orientation, however, is rare or entirely absent.
