2026-02-24 02:34:54
I have not been to China recently enough to judge these claims:
Behaviour is notoriously harder to engineer than buildings. A recent trip to the Fragrant Hills in western Beijing on a newly constructed metro line, had me marveling at the improved crowd-management. Despite massive groups of domestic tourists from around the country thronging the area, in what would not-so-long-ago have been a scenario for a potential stampede, the crowds moved in relative order. The park environs were spick and span with no litter in sight; not a single old codger sneaking a cigarette.
There was some amount of strident rule-announcing on loudspeakers: stay on the designated tracks, no smoking etc., but overall, it was possible to enjoy the natural beauty, notwithstanding the hordes of day-trippers. The toilets were not fragrant, despite the nomenclature of the spot itself, but they were clean, and the seats were free of the tell-tale footprints that indicate squatting rather than sitting. Barely anyone gave me, an obvious foreigner, a second glance. In contrast, there was a time in 2002 when a cyclist fell off his bike in his shock at having spotted dark-skinned me walking along a road in the outskirts of Beijing.
So how had the Chinese been pacified/disciplined/habituated to ways of behaviour that went so against their until-very-recent, loophole-finding, chaos-shuffling, phlegm-expectorating deportment in public spaces?
The answer, as answers to sociological questions invariably are, is multipronged.
Some of it is more money.
Here is more by Pallavi Aiyar. Via Malinga Fernando.
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2026-02-24 00:45:03
1. “Nigeria’s industrialization fails to gather steam after 65 years.”
2. Did Eastern Europe produce that many slaves?
3. Vitalik on AI and governance.
4. Does AI put women at a disadvantage? (FT)
6. I wonder what their portfolios look like. Maybe they just bought a lot of Nvidia and consider themselves prophets. Here is an economics-motivated response, though it has some problems too, such as underrating Say’s Law, which is not always false. It is not in reality that complicated, but over the years we have talked ourselves into a lot of dubious macro mechanisms.
7. More on the new “kingpin” warfare strategies.
8. From a week ago: “Derrotar a Cártel Jalisco sin incendiar el país.“
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2026-02-23 22:40:23
Here is the Bloomberg article. Here is previous MR coverage of de Soto. Here is Wikipedia on de Soto.
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2026-02-23 20:16:19
Daniel Litt is a professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto. He has been active in evaluating AI models for many years and is generally seen as a skeptic pushing back at hype. He has a very interesting statement updating his thoughts:
In March 2025 I made a bet with Tamay Besiroglu, cofounder of RL environment company Mechanize, that AI tools would not be able to autonomously produce papers I judge to be at a level comparable to that of the best few papers published in 2025, at comparable cost to human experts, by 2030. I gave him 3:1 odds at the time; I now expect to lose this bet.
Much of what I’ll say here is not factually very different from what I’ve written before. I’ve slowly updated my timelines over the past year, but if one wants to speculate about the long-term future of math research, a difference of a few years is not so important. My trigger for writing this post is that, despite all of the above, I think I was not correctly calibrated as to the capabilities of existing models, let alone near-future models. This was more apparent in the mood of my comments than their content, which was largely cautious.
To be sure, the models are not yet as original or creative as the very best human mathematicians (who is?) but:
Can an LLM invent the notion of a scheme, or of a perfectoid space, or whatever your favorite mathematical object is? (Could I? Could you? Obviously this is a high bar, and not necessary for usefulness.) Can it come up with a new technique? Execute an argument that isn’t “routine for the right expert”? Make an interesting new definition? Ask the right question?
…I am skeptical that there is any mystical aspect of mathematics research intrinsically inaccessible to models, but it is true that human mathematics research relies on discovering analogies and philosophies, and performing other non-rigorous tasks where model performance is as yet unclear.
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2026-02-23 14:20:06
Mostly about geopolitics, plenty of fresh content. And here is the transcript. Excerpt:
Jon Finer:
Should the United States be willing to take military action to defend Taiwan? It’s a thorny question for politicians to answer, but we’d be interested in your view.
Tyler Cowen:
Well, this is what economists would call a mixed strategy. Ex-ante, we should have strategic ambiguity, and not just say, we’re not going to defend Taiwan. And when Joe Biden said, “Well, we are going to defend Taiwan,” I was quite happy.
Jon Finer:
Four times. Four times.
Tyler Cowen:
Four times, yes. I know there’s different versions of how it was talked back and the like, but it should be unclear. That said, when push comes to shove, if China has made its move, you have to look at what are the terms of the deal? What are they going to do with TSMC to our best knowledge? What’s the domestic quality chip production in the United States? How do we feel about Japan and maybe South Korea getting nuclear weapons? Can South Korea remain an autonomous nation? Those are a lot of balls to juggle and they’re all hard to judge at this moment. But I think ex-ante, we should definitely create some risk that we will go to war over Taiwan, but then make the best decision ex-post. But China knows that too, right? They’re not fools. They’ve studied game theory.
Jake Sullivan:
Tyler, I’m going to put you down as that being Tyler Cowen’s version of strategic ambiguity.
Tyler Cowen:
It may not be that different from your version.
Jake Sullivan:
Exactly.
Recommended, and I also talk about my secret, unpublished China book, still pending at Tsinghua, almost certainly forever. And we cover UAPs and curling as well.
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2026-02-23 06:16:18
For some while I have wondered what would happen if the U.S. military sought to assist Mexico in taking out one of the top drug lords. I suppose now we are finding out. A few points:
1. There is a good chance a few more drug lords will be hit. It makes no sense to get involved just to take out one guy (supply is elastic!). Sheinbaum is doing this, so it is not just the oddities of Trumpland at work here. Presumaby the goal is to shift the entire equilibrium.
2. The cartels would do better to lay low for a while, rather than making this a big public issue. The virulence of their response indicates they are probably pretty scared. Of course the actual decisions here are being taken by (threatened) individuals, not by the (persisting) “cartels.”
3. “Cartels” is an overused word here. They are more like loose syndicates, and by no means are they always colluding with each other.
4. Perhaps there is a new “Trump doctrine,” namely to focus on going after lead individuals, rather than governments or institutional structures. We already did that in Venezuela, and there is talk of that being the approach in Iran. If so, that is a change in the nature of warfare, and of course others may copy it too, including against us. Is there a chance they have tried already?
5. With this action, which seems to have U.S: involvement at least on the intelligence side (possibly more), we are also sending a message to Iran.
6. I believe my post from this morning is holding up pretty well. What the U.S. is supplying here is “more decisive action,” rather than some new, detailed understanding of the Mexican dilemma. See also my Free Press Latin America column from October.
7. In its most extreme instantiation, today’s action represents a willingness of the U.S. to get involved in a Mexican civil war of sorts. I do not expect matters to take that path, as the last time U.S. troops had direct involvement in Mexico was 1916-1919. “Convergence to some warning shots” is a more likely equilibrium outcome here. Nonetheless such an escalatory scenario is not off the table, do note that American foreign policy has been returning to much earlier eras in a number of regards.
8. This story is not over.
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