Latest posts
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Somalia facts of the day
The fruits of better security are plain to see. “Business is booming,” says Gamal Hassan, the commerce minister. New buildings are going up at a frenetic pace. The district around the airport, in particular, has grown much denser (see satellite images). Dahab Tower, a 26-floor confection of luxury flats, a mall, a gym and a…
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A Conservative Case for Liberal Immigration
That is the title of my latest Free Press piece, here is one excerpt: Or look at the AI revolution, another area where America is leading the world and also using its AI models to exert soft power. Dario Amodei of Anthropic has an Italian father, neural-network pioneer Geoffrey Hinton is originally from the U.K.,…
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That was then, this is now
I very much like the new Michael Khodarkovsky book The Steppe and its Empires: The Russian Empire & its Eurasian Counterparts. Excerpt: Russia presented the most remarkable contrast to both Eurasian and Western empires. The oower of Moscovite tsars and Russian emperors seemed to be completely unconstrained by moral or ethical boundaries. Whereas religious authorities…
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Regulated Markets Are Slow to Handle Change
Gowrisankaran, Langer and Reguant have an excellent paper, Energy Transitions in Regulated Markets (WP), in the latest AER. The basic idea is that regulation designed to prevent utilities from building useless power plants can induce them to keep obsolete power plants. Some background. We regulated electric utilities under the theory that they were natural monopolies…