2026-02-16 14:02:20
From a recent paper by Eric Robertson:
Public officials often fail to implement government policy as directed, yet the role of economic ideas in shaping these implementation choices is poorly understood. This paper provides causal evidence that exposure to economic ideas can durably influence bureaucrat behavior. I study British colonial bureaucrats in India, exploiting a natural experiment created by the abrupt death of Thomas Malthus in 1834, replacing his economics instruction at a bureaucrat training college for that of a contemporary critic, Richard Jones. Whereas Malthus regarded economic distress as a natural mechanism for restoring equilibrium by reducing population growth, Jones disagreed with this view. Linking rainfall shocks to district-level fiscal responses, I show that officials trained by Malthus delivered less relief during droughts, providing 0.10-0.25 SD less aid across all major measures compared with officials taught by Jones. The results reveal that exposure to abstract economic ideas can shape real-world policy implementation for decades.
This may be a case where using rainfall shocks in a paper actually makes sense. Via Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski.
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2026-02-16 13:36:27
Shruti Rajagopalan surveys much of the AI policy debate in India. Excerpt:
If there is a single domain where India’s AI ambitions will succeed or fail, it is energy. And energy in India is not a technology problem. It is a political economy problem, arguably the most intractable one the country faces.
India’s peak electricity demand hit 250 GW in May 2024, up from 143 GW a decade earlier. The IEA forecasts 6.3 percent annual growth through 2027, faster than any major economy. Cooling demand alone could reach 140 GW of peak load by 2030. One number captures the trajectory. For each incremental degree in daily average temperature, peak demand now rises by more than 7 GW. In 2019 the figure was half that. India is getting hotter, richer, and more electricity-hungry simultaneously.
State-controlled distribution companies have accumulated $83.7 billion in debt because energy prices have been politically distorted for decades. Over 50 GW of renewable capacity sits underutilized. About 60 GW is stranded behind inadequate transmission. The shortage is financial and infrastructural, not resource-based. Without reforming distribution pricing, governance, and grid investment ($50 billion estimated by 2035), new renewable capacity will not become reliable electricity. It will become another line item on a DISCOM balance sheet no one wants to read.
India’s electricity reaches consumers through 72 distribution companies, 44 of them state-owned, collectively the most financially distressed utilities in the world. Accumulated losses stood at ₹6.92 trillion ($76.89 billion) as of March 2024, rising every year despite five government bailouts since 2002.
Substantive throughout.
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2026-02-16 03:13:34
Neal Spencer has a good review at the LRB, excerpt:
Over the past few decades, however, Egyptian museums have pivoted away from Europe and America. The National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation, which opened in 2021, rejected the traditional division of artefacts into pharaonic, Coptic, Greco-Roman and Islamic eras (a framework associated with European academic disciplines). The Grand Egyptian Museum, announced at the height of Hosni Mubarak’s rule and styled ‘the largest museum in the world dedicated to the people, history and culture of Ancient Egypt’, opened in November last year with a lavish ceremony broadcast round the world. It is estimated to have cost more than $1 billion ($300 million of which was a loan from Japan) and sprawls over an area the size of seventy football pitches. The financial crash of 2008, the Arab Spring and Covid meant that its construction took almost twenty years. Much has changed in that time. The last decade of construction took place under the military regime of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who installed one of his generals as its head – the first non-Egyptologist to direct a major Egyptian museum.
I saw the museum shortly after the opening and found it pretty spectacular, both the building/setting and the collection. It is worth making a trip to Cairo just to see this, and it now can be considered one of the world’s great museums and history sites (yes I had seen the earlier incarnation of the museum, years ago). The very wise Rasheed Griffith also gave the museum an A+.
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2026-02-16 01:30:41
1. Netflix series for Pamuk? (NYT)
2. Maybe America needs some new cities (NYT).
3. No Centre Pompidou for New Jersey.
5. Beatles markets in everything, pricey.
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2026-02-15 20:18:40
Excellent Veritasium video on the 19th century ice industry. Shipping ice from America to India would hardly seem like a wise idea—it’s hard to imagine ever getting a committee to approve such a venture—but entrepreneurs are free to try wacky ideas all the time, and sometimes they pay off, resulting in great riches. That’s the story of the “Ice King,” Frederic Tudor, who lost money for years before figuring out the insulation and logistics needed to make the trade profitable.
What I hadn’t fully appreciated is how the ice trade reshaped shipping, diet, and city design before the invention of mechanical refrigeration. Ice created the cold chain, and the cold chain made it possible to move fresh meat, fish, and produce over long distances. That in turn enabled cities to grow far beyond what local agriculture could support and shifted the American diet from salted and smoked provisions toward fresh food.
The profits of the ice trade encouraged investment in artificial ice which initially was met with resistance—natural ice is created by God!—a classic example of incumbents wrapping their economic interests in moral language, a pattern we see repeated with every disruptive technology from margarine to ridesharing.
Lots of lessons in the video about option value, permissionless innovation, and creative destruction. New technologies destroy old industries and create new ones that no one could have foreseen. The moral panic over artificial ice replacing the natural kind is no doubt familiar.
Hat tip: Naveen Nvn
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2026-02-15 16:23:33
Weprovide systematic evidence on the economic damages from espionage to US firms and industries. Compiling a comprehensive dataset of publicly disclosed espionage incidents from 1995-2024, we establish that espionage has substantial negative effects on targeted f irms. In an event-study design, revenues and R&D expenditures at targeted firms decline by roughly 40% within five years, with effects persisting for up to a decade. These effects do not appear for firms unsuccessfully targeted for espionage, supporting a causal interpretation. These firm-level damages translate into measurable aggregate effects on US industry: exports in targeted sectors decline by 60% over a decade. Given these substantial damages, we investigate whether firms restrict knowledge sharing in response to espionage. Across a wide range of outcomes, we find no evidence of such restrictions. Firms do not reduce their patenting with foreign inventors, and do not discriminate in employment based on perceived espionage risk. Overall, espionage has clear economic harms to targeted firms and US industry, but firms are puzzlingly unresponsive in how they manage innovation.
That is from a new paper by Andrew Kao and Karthik Tadepalli. Via Kris Gulati.
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