Did you think fertility couldn't get any lower than South Korea's seemingly impossible 0.72 births per woman in 2023?
Macau is trending toward 0.49 births per woman in 2024 🤯.
Lesson #1, don't build like Macau if you want your country to have a future.
Bryan Caplan

So, the longer our good times last, the more we accumulate a “suffering debt”.

Augustus' limitation on speech started out small, first the proceeding of the senate which until now was published in public as a kind of a 'new sheet' so internal criticism by senators would not be published to the public, only government-approved material.

'Someone who has integrated an anti-racist perspective, DiAngelo told us, should be able to say: 'I hold awareness of my whiteness in all settings, and it guides how I engage. I raise issues about racism over and over, both in public and in private … You want to go watch a movie…

My best guess for the main reason culture drifts so much faster theses days is: youth seeking changes that puts old at disadvantage. overcomingbias.com/p/youth-drive-…

Another MindsAlmostMeeting podcast with Agnes Callard, this time on: The Two Cultures
Website: mindsalmostmeeting.com/episodes/the-t…
YouTube: youtu.be/95PuASACwJg

Fertility Roundup #3: thezvi.substack.com/p/fertility-ro…

I consider here in more detail the various ways we might try to fix cultural drift. overcomingbias.com/p/how-fix-cult…

'Declining US internal migration rates are primarily due to the decreasing responsiveness of households, particularly older ones, to locational disparities in housing prices.' nber.org/digest/202405/…

'location of [financial] innovation shifted, with banks moving activity away from states with tight financial regulation and high-tech regions attracting innovation by payments, IT, and nonfinancial firms.' journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.108…

Drs Alexander and Hanson have used many thousands of words debating the utility of healthcare. Both make great points.

Obviously healthcare helps people. Obviously much of healthcare is low value.

Love this advice from RH on finding low-value care

Odd that all the MSM agree this is the big news of the day. wsj.com/us-news/columb…

Notice that the norms of protest are quite libertarian. Protestors have little tolerance of authorities regulating the when, where, who, or how of protest. They have especially low tolerance of ex ante, instead of ex post, regulation of protest.

Q&A sessions tend to embody affirmative action of lower quality question/comments. Organizers typically can judge quality more than they use in choosing who speaks.

A sad failure of over-regulation.

Compared to the usual style of talk, how much longer in words would it take to make one's claims fully precise and clarified, so that one never needs clarify them later?

Most all advice I might give of the form 'When X, do Y' means include substantial weight on X when considering Y. Doesn't mean 'Always do Y when X'.