My Conversation with the excellent Coleman Hughes
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary: Coleman and Tyler explore the implications of colorblindness, including whether jazz would’ve been created in a...
View ArticleWhat should I ask Velina Tchakarova?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. She runs a geopolitics firm, hails from Bulgaria, is in my view broadly classical liberal, focuses on conflict in Eastern Europe and Ukraine, and is very...
View ArticleFree Trade with Free Nations
Alec Stapp points out that Canada is the only NATO country that has a free trade agreement with the United States. That’s quite remarkable if you think about it. NATO allies are bound by mutual defense...
View ArticleMy excellent Conversation with Benjamin Moser
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary: Benjamin Moser is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer celebrated for his in-depth studies of literary and cultural figures such as...
View ArticleThe Generalist interviews me
I was happy with how this turned out, here is one excerpt: I think we’re overestimating the risks to American democracy. The intellectual class is way too pessimistic. They’re not used to it being...
View Article*Unit X*
The subtitle of this new and excellent book is How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Art of War. It is written not by journalists but two insiders to the process, namely Raj M. Shah...
View ArticleThe Sea Change on Crypto-Regulation
In the last few weeks there has been a sea change in crypto regulation: 1. Bitcoin spot ETFs were approved–reluctantly, after a 3-judge Federal Appeals court ruled unanimously that the SEC had acted...
View ArticleA theory of information, by Noah Smith
So here you go: a theory of how totalitarianism might naturally triumph. The basic idea is that when information is costly, liberal democracy wins because it gathers more and better information than...
View ArticleThe who and how of campaign spending on Meta
Trump targets horse riding, Biden targets football, and RFK Jr. targets comedy. Trump also can claim Ted Nugent fans, here is the full story. Via A. The post The who and how of campaign spending on...
View ArticleNationalism in Online Games During War
We investigate how international conflicts impact the behavior of hostile nationals in online games. Utilizing data from the largest online chess platform, where players can see their opponents’...
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Neuroticism and the political Left
From Greg Lukianoff and Andrea Lan: Liberal students have worse mental health than moderate and conservative students At the extremes, 57% of very liberal students in our study reported feelings of...
View ArticleThe partisanship of American inventors
Using panel data on 251,511 patent inventors matched with voter registration records containing partisan affiliation, we provide the first large-scale look into the partisanship of American inventors....
View ArticleAre Older People Aware of Their Cognitive Decline? Misperception and...
We investigate whether older people correctly perceive their cognitive decline and the potential financial consequences of misperception. First, we show that older people tend to underestimate their...
View ArticleDoes visiting South Africa make you more right-wing or more left-wing?
Perhaps “both” is the correct answer? The right-wing tendencies are easiest to explain. South Africa is obviously much wealthier than the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, and of course Westerners play a...
View ArticleMy Conversation with Velina Tchakarova
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary: Founder of the consultancy FACE, Velina is a geopolitical strategist guiding businesses and organizations to anticipate the...
View ArticleWhat is Newsworthy? Theory and Evidence
We study newsworthiness in theory and practice. We focus on situations in which a news outlet observes the realization of a state of the world and must decide whether to report the realization to a...
View ArticleClaims about Africa and its politics
From Ken Opalo: A common misperception economic policies in African states tend to be statist, far-Left, or anti-market. This is not supported by the data (see examples of Kenya, Nigeria, Cote...
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Accelerating India’s Development
What will India look like in 2047? Combining projections of economic growth with estimates of the elasticity of outcomes with respect to growth, Karthik Muralidharan in Accelerating India’s Development...
View ArticleThomas Schelling meets LLMs?
Drawing on political science and international relations literature about escalation dynamics, we design a novel wargame simulation and scoring framework to assess the escalation risks of actions taken...
View ArticleEconomic Freedom, Even More Important Than You Think!
Economic freedom, as measured by say the Fraser Institute’s EF Index correlates highly with GDP per capita. Alvarez, Geloso and Scheck show that once you take into account the fact that dictators lie,...
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