2026-05-01 17:35:17
The subtitle is How the Nature of Belief Shapes the Fate of Societies. Here is Ryan doing a podcast with Brink Lindsey. As Brink writes:
All of the blessings of modernity, Ryan Avent argues in a fascinating new book, rest on faith. It is our faith in others, our ability to trust strangers we will never meet, that makes possible the large-scale cooperation that has given us science, modern economic growth, and liberal democracy. But if everything depends on our ability to weave and maintain particular webs of complex meaning, what happens when we allow those webs to weaken and fray? In his book In Good Faith, Ryan contends that the dysfunctions and discontents plaguing 21st century democracies reflect such underlying neglect.
I am pleased to see “thought books,” as one might call them, headed in this direction and I was happy to blurb Ryan’s latest effort.
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2026-05-01 15:30:42
AI-powered mental health apps have attracted growing interest as a low-cost way to expand care. Yet questions remain about their effectiveness, safety, and whether they may crowd out psychotherapy. We evaluate one such app in a randomized controlled trial among 1,964 Mexican women with mild to severe psychological distress. Over six months, app access improved mental health by 0.3 standard deviations with no evidence of harm, improved sleep quality, increased healthful behaviors, and reduced missed work, yielding considerably larger benefits than costs. Treated participants were also more likely to seek traditional psychotherapy, but this increase does not explain most of the mental health gains. App use was high in the first month but then declined, as is common in digital interventions. Despite this drop in use, treatment effects persisted. Participants continued to implement practices promoted by the app, suggesting that even short-term engagement can produce durable improvements through sustained behavioral change.
That is from a new paper by Manuela Angelucci, Raissa Fabregas, and Antonia Vazquez. Those are some pretty strong results for a cheap intervention, let us hope they hold up. Via John Holbein.
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2026-05-01 13:04:16
Do market-oriented reforms cause economic growth? This paper revisits this question using a cross-country panel of reform episodes identified from various changes in well-known economic freedom and structural reform indices. We exploit the timing of reforms using distributed-lag and event-study frameworks that trace the dynamic response of per-capita GDP. We find little evidence of immediate growth gains and some short-run adjustment costs following reform. However, growth rises gradually and persistently over time, with economically meaningful effects emerging after several years. These patterns are robust across alternative measures of reform and specifications. The results reconcile conflicting findings in the literature by showing that market reforms generate long-run growth gains despite short-run disruptions. Overall, the evidence supports the view that institutional liberalization operates through slow-moving channels that accumulate into sustained improvements in economic performance.
That is from a recent paper by Jon Hartley and Brian Wheaton.
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2026-05-01 02:07:39
2. An SRO approaching to regulating AI.
3. Dwarkesh: “We don’t talk enough about how any state or group which is harvesting encrypted packets right now will be able to read those contents once quantum computers arrive. There’s a huge espionage and transparency overhang on any information that is currently “secret” and hasn’t been encrypted using post-quantum cryptography.”
4. Craig Venter, RIP. Here is the NYT obituary.
6. With the UAE’s departure, OPEC will become much more an instrument of Iranian power (FT). But also weaker.
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2026-05-01 00:07:35
Teen fertility collapsed globally starting around 2007. This affected countries across the income and policy spectrum. This paper argues that smartphones changed how teens spend time with each other, and that this change in turn drove the collapse in teen fertility. Once enough teens are on the phone, being on the phone is where the peer network is; in-person time falls sharply, and with it the unstructured contact in which most unintended teen conceptions occur. A coordination model formalizes this tipping: as the smartphone price falls, the in-person equilibrium ceases to exist and the economy moves to a phone-mediated one. Within the United States, terrainruggedness variation in broadband and 4G coverage identifies a causal effect on teen fertility, and time-use diaries show in-person socializing among teens roughly halving while digital leisure roughly tripled. A parallel design for England and Wales recovers the same acceleration and the same effect of mobile coverage on teen conceptions, ruling out country-specific contraceptive-access and welfare-reform stories. The model predicts that the shift towards the phone-mediated equilibrium affects multiple aspects of teen behavior. The same instrument that produces a collapse in teen fertility produces a surge in teen suicides.
That is from a recent paper by Nathan Hudson and Hernan Moscoso Boedo.
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2026-04-30 19:18:46
The Breakthrough Institute (BTI) found that “just 10 organizations initiated 35% of the total NEPA cases brought by NGOs.” The Sierra Club and its local chapters alone were responsible for more than 14% of these lawsuits. The dominance of a small number of groups is more pronounced in forest management and energy cases; only 10 groups filed 67% and 48% of these cases, respectively. In BTI’s “The Procedural Hangover: How NEPA Litigation Obstructs Critical Projects” follow-up, which expanded the analysis to district and circuit court NEPA cases, Alliance for the Wild Rockies and the Center for Biological Diversity were responsible for 24% of all litigation against public lands management decisions.
To paraphrase Alex Tabarrok, federal environmental agencies seem to exist to manage the obsessions of a tiny number of neurotic—and possibly malicious—environmental NGOs.
Grant Mulligan’s excellent post shows in detail how environmental groups use the courts to block projects—including environmental projects. But Mulligan finds that a disproportionate share of the lawsuits come from a handful of relatively small organizations. A textbook case of the tyranny of the complainers.
The lawsuits give environmentalists a bad name but the key point is that many environmental groups are not reflexively anti-development.
What are the largest environmental groups doing with their money if not suing to stop development? Two of the three biggest, the Wildlife Conservation Society and San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, primarily operate zoos. Land trusts like TNC, The Conservation Fund, and Ducks Unlimited protect land directly. Many also work on research and policy to varying degrees. Contrary to the typical narrative, many operate pro-market, abundance-style projects.
TNC has several programs that align with the abundance agenda. TNC’s Power of Place research and policy work is aimed at facilitating the build-out of renewable energy and transmission infrastructure. The idea behind the research is to identify and speed the permitting and development of renewable energy projects that won’t interfere with important conservation areas. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) used the research as part of its Western Solar Plan, which aims to promote solar development on public land. TNC also wants permitting reform, and their mapping efforts are an example of what environmentalism that builds could look like — identify critical habitats that need protecting and guard them closely while unleashing building everywhere else.4
While the tyrannical minority has held up forest management projects, TNC has been an advocate and practitioner of forest thinning and prescribed burns to prevent catastrophic wildfires for more than 60 years. In California, they’re part of a coalition working to thin millions of acres of overgrown forests.
TNC isn’t alone. Audubon’s renewables siting work, Ducks Unlimited’s water infrastructure projects, and the Conservation Fund’s Working Lands programs all follow the same pattern of balancing environmental protections with economic imperatives. Plenty of green groups agree, as Larry Selzer, Conservation Fund’s President and CEO, says in Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, “we have to build, and build, and build.”
I’m not trying to defend all the choices of TNC or suggest that the big environmental NGOs don’t promote their share of bad policies. I had plenty of discussions with degrowthers when I worked at TNC that made me want to pull my hair out. I’ve also written about the need for environmentalism to be more positive-sum in frustration over zero-sum environmental positions. But on the whole, environmentalists have been made too convenient a villain by abundance advocates. Environmentalists aren’t as uniformly obstructionist, degrowth, and misanthropic as commonly believed.5
Understanding that only a vocal minority of environmentalists are anti-progress, procedural complainers is important because abundance advocates and environmentalists aren’t natural enemies—and assuming they are serves neither side.
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