2026-03-14 02:22:54
We started by asking how moralized AI has become in public discourse. Analyzing 69,890 news headlines from 2018 to 2024, we found that AI was moralized at levels comparable to GMOs and vaccines, technologies whose moral opposition has been studied for decades. It ranked above both. The sharpest spike came within weeks of ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022.
When we surveyed representative samples of Americans, a majority of AI opponents said their views wouldn’t change even if AI proved safe and beneficial. That’s consequence insensitivity, the hallmark of moral conviction, not practical calculation. Across art, chatbots, legal tools, and romantic companions, AI moralization loaded onto a single latent factor. A global moral stance, dressed up in whatever practical language is available.
The behavioral data make this concrete: a one standard deviation increase in moralization scores predicted a 42% drop in actual AI usage, even when it would have benefited that person personally. The conviction preceded the behavior by up to 573 days.
The next time someone gives you three different reasons to oppose AI, each one dissolving under mild scrutiny, you’re probably not watching someone think. You’re watching someone feel.
Here is the tweet storm, here is the paper by de Mello, et.al.
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2026-03-14 00:02:35
1. Redux of my 2009 post on my preferred exile. Mexico City now rates much higher, and Germany lower. Madrid would be a serious choice, in the top few. Even Rome falls under consideration. And I want more money for the exile too, which price index shall we use?
2. “In the past three months of the 119th Congress, fully 25% of documents in the Congressional Record are AI-generated.” Note that AI-generated text is about 30% more “progressive,” though that is showing up in the resolutions rather than substantive legislation.
3. The labor market consequences of rapid sectoral shifts.
4. Right now LLMs are “too altruistic” in the Ultimatum game.
5. Companies that should exist but don’t?
6. Piano bars and music popularity. The market test speaks.
7. An Islamic perspective on Sirat. And a very different view on the film.
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2026-03-13 15:16:14
Almost a quarter-billion calls are placed to 911 each year in the United States. A large share of them involve social problems, not crimes or emergencies—yet police are dispatched in response. This review traces how the 911 emergency system’s institutional design shapes demand for police, who is excluded from or ill served by this system, and what alternatives exist, including nonemergency lines (with police response), government hotlines (211, 311, 988), civilian crisis teams, and community-based resources. Among the universe of municipal police departments with at least 100 sworn officers in 2020, covering 107 million US residents, police have absorbed broad social service functions, with the availability of formal alternatives restricted to the largest cities. The evidence suggests that the primacy of police reflects institutional reproduction more than public need. I propose priorities for future research.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Bocar A. Ba.
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2026-03-13 13:11:48
Since I am in South Africa, I am reminded of my time studying with Ludwig Lachmann, the South African economist from University of the Witwatersrand. I was seventeen, and Lachmann teaching a graduate seminar at New York University. Someone (Richard Ebeling maybe?) had told me he was interesting, so I wanted to sit in on the seminar. I showed up, introduced myself to Lachmann, and asked if I could listen to the lectures. I obviously did not belong, but he was very gracious and said yes of course. He wore a suit and tie, had a very Old World manner, and he had been a Jewish refugee from Germany. He was 73 or so at the time, this was 1979.
His manner of speaking was very distinctive. Of course I now recognize the South African accent, but there is more to it than that.
Lachmann was best known for his connections to the Austrian School, as he was visiting at the NYU Austrian program at the time, under the aegis of Israel Kirzner. Nonetheless Austrian economics was not what I learned in the seminar.
On the first day, I heard plenty about Sraffa and Garegnani, and all that was new (and fascinating to me). Lachmann had studied with Werner Sombart, so I learned about the German historical school as well.
Lachmann also was my first teacher who made sense of Keynes for me, moving me away from obsessions with the hydraulic IS-LM interpretations of the General Theory. He flirted with views of cost-based pricing, brought me further into the kaleidic world of G.L.S. Shackle, and he insisted that a market economy had no overall tendency toward the constellation of a general equilibrium of prices and quantities. (He did believe that most though not all individual markets tended to equilibrate.) He inveighed against W.H. Hutt’s interpretation of Say’s Law, of course some of you here will know that Hutt also was South African. I kept on trying to read Hutt, to see if I could defend him against Lachmann’s critiques. I also imbibed Hutt’s economic critique of apartheid.
Lachmann did not talk about South Africa, other than to mention how long the journey to New York was. You may know that Israel Kirzner, another early mentor of mine, had South African roots as well. He also did not talk about South Africa.
“South African economics,” if you wish to call it that, played a significant role in my early intellectual development.
To this day, when I think about the economics of AI, and many other matters, Lachmann’s book Capital and its Structure is one of my go-to inspirations.
And I am still grateful to Lachmann for letting “a kid” sit in on his class. I paid avid attention.
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2026-03-13 01:24:23
…on March 12 we’ll be launching Liberalism.org, a new project from IHS [Institute for Humane Studies]. We’re aiming to build something akin to a modern-day coffee house of the liberal tradition—a digital gathering place where today’s most innovative liberal thinkers can weigh tradeoffs, think across differences, and apply liberal values to the challenges of today and the future.
The idea is to create a space that is serious but accessible—a home for exploring political, economic, intellectual, and civic freedom as a coherent and evolving tradition. We’re hoping it will serve as both an outlet for the ideas and a public-facing resource for those who care about the future of liberalism in its broad, classical sense.
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2026-03-12 23:47:05
1. A fund for alpha through UAP disclosure?
2. High-quality 3-D scans of art objects? And some Met examples of what has been scanned.
4. Will the billionaire wealth tax pass?
5. Redux of my 2024 post on whether drones favor offense or defense, evil nations or good nations.
6. How will strong AI interact with nuclear deterrence?
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