2026-08-25 01:39:23
…children are increasingly seen as interfering with the freedom of parents; views on whether mothers of young children should work have become markedly more progressive and account for a substantially larger share of the decline among the tertiary-educated; and fewer people believe that women or men need children to lead a fulfilled life. This last attitude changed most over the decade and is the largest contributor to the fall in intended fertility, above all among less-educated women.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
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2026-08-24 23:38:14
1. There is now a formal 150 kph (93.2 mph) speed limit in one part of Czechia.
2. Why does the Japanese prime minister spend so much time in seclusion?
3. Decker defends academia (noting I do not think the “only the peaks” defense quite works. I also worry about very high quality research that ends up being too context-specific to be very useful. That is no fault of the researchers, but…the world is not wrong to be less than totally impressed in response. Economists, when they discuss what they are up to, are far too taken in by “the quality of the work” as a relevant variable. I think they can be fairly delusional as to how much progress they actually are making, even though along the “research quality” dimension the work is much better than what people were doing say thirty years ago. In fact we train economists to make precisely this kind of mistake.)
4. Rhine Group. More European optimism.
5. Entrepreneurs in state government improve state government.
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2026-08-24 17:30:37
Joint custody reforms are among the most consequential family-law changes for children, yet little is known about their long-term effects. Exploiting staggered adoption across US states and 13 million ACS observations, we show that childhood exposure reduces adult fertility by 7 percent, symmetrically for women and men and operates primarily through lower parenthood and couple formation. Effects are sub-additive within couples, while exposed individuals assortatively match. Our findings point to the formation of family preferences during childhood and align with a US fertility decline increasingly driven by rising childlessness and declining couple formation rather than smaller families among parents.
That is from a recent research paper by Daniel Fernández-Kranz and Sébastien Fontenay. Via the excellent Samir Varma.
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2026-08-24 13:08:29
MUSIC EPISODE: “You think you understand patriotism, you have your hands around it–it’s the simple thing, but it turns out it’s not. And maybe, music and the history of music shows us all that better than mere discourse about it.”
0:00:00 Tyler Cowen
0:00:24 Intro: Patriotism in Music
0:03:09 John Philip Sousa & Stars and Stripes Forever
0:07:38 Country Joe & the Fish: The Anti-War Song
0:16:49 Andrews Sisters & Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy
0:22:04 Liszt & Bartók: Hungarian Independence
0:36:29 Dvořák, Rossini & William Tell
0:47:24 Stockhausen, Percy Grainger & Sacred War
0:59:59 Trinidad, Congo & Brazil: Independence Songs
1:21:49 William Byrd & the Sex Pistols
1:28:00 Elgar, Charles Ives & Chuck Berry
Here is one link to the podcast itself, here is another. Recorded in Tuscany, definitely recommended, all fresh material.
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2026-08-24 00:49:19
1. “Underestimating something that has an AI “accent” by reflexively dismissing it as slop rhymes curiously with underestimating someone because they have a funny accent in your native language (and it isn’t one of the accents that you think signals superiority, like the BBC British accent for English).” V. Rao.
2. Profile of Joe Lonsdale. And from the NYT, mostly on Cicero and homelessness.
3. Graceland just isn’t that impressive.
4. Mill, Hayek, and liberalism.
5. Interview with Peter McCrory, Head Economist at Anthropic.
6. Will AI intensify or weaken market competition?
7. This economist is not a nominalist.
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2026-08-23 19:15:42
In my 2015 post discussing Joseph Heath’s excellent book Enlightenment 2.0, I had this to say:
One of the reasons that I oppose the extension of democratic politics into every aspect of modern life is precisely that in trying to do too much, democracy delivers incoherence, gridlock and frustration, forces that eventually undermine its own legitimacy. I worry about democratic legitimacy because I see democracy as a check and balance on Leviathan (while Heath sees it as a check on government by experts).
The legislature has become a sideshow. But I worry, because the more Congress is held in contempt the greater the support for a bold executive that takes charge, makes decisions and gets things done. Under these pressures, executive power has grown not just in the United States but also in Canada and Great Britain (on this theme see F.H. Buckley’s The Once and Future King.) But for all its faults, the legislature and the rule of law are more conducive to liberty than the executive and the administrative state. Legislators are satisfied with reelection and a bit of pork but executives hunger for greatness and in so doing they promote the real dangers, idolatry, the centralization of power and war.
In short, I worry that the pathologies of democracy drive the demand not for rational, technocratic government but for Caesarism.
I should note that this was before Donald Trump was a Republican presidential contender, let alone a candidate for office.
Addendum: See also my review of Enlightenment 2.0. It has some good lines!
The propagandizing messages of markets and politics are also very different. Market messages are largely inclusive and cosmopolitan. Coca-Cola advertises “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” because they’d like the world to buy a Coke. Firms do try to build brand affiliation but they rarely do so by promoting hatred of their competitors. Pepsi doesn’t tell the Pepsi Generation that Coke drinkers are stealing their jobs and spitting on their gods.
Hat tip: @kingofthecoastt who recently tweeted about the original post.
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