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For alerting me to this short clip, I thank Greg Rehmke.

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Dan Hannan writes wisely about this unfortunate fact: “The belief that industries exist to provide jobs, rather than jobs existing to create prosperity, is a two-hundred-year-old fallacy.” A slice:

The wistfulness people feel when they look back at the era of heavy industry stems from the widespread belief that economic growth exists to sustain jobs rather than the other way around. The early 19th-century French economist Frédéric Bastiat called this fallacy “Sisyphism” after the mythical Greek tyrant who was sentenced by the gods to spend all eternity pushing a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down each day. Bastiat asked acerbically whether, by their own logic, the Sisyphists would prefer barren farmland, since it would take more people to grow food on it.

In our domestic lives, we recognise the advantages of labour-saving technology. No one laments the work “destroyed” by their dishwasher. But extend the same argument to industry and many of the same people turn Luddite, fretting that automation makes human tasks redundant.

Similar concerns surface in every generation. “The idea that the utility and importance of an industry are to be measured by the employment which it gives to labour is so deeply rooted in human nature that economists can scarcely claim to have taken the first step towards its eradication”, wrote the Canadian mathematician Simon Newcomb. That was in 1893. Today, the first step has still not been taken.

What the economist Bryan Caplan calls “the make-work fallacy” seems to be hardwired into our genome. In the late 18th century, there were widespread fears that mechanising agriculture would destroy jobs and turn farm-workers into vagabonds. These newfangled “manufactories”, clever men averred, would never employ enough people.

In the late 20th century, the same argument was applied to services. The “real” jobs, we kept being told, were in manufacturing. What were all the former factory-workers going to do? Cut each other’s hair? Flip burgers? Now, in the 21st century, the bogeyman is AI. And yet, every time, people end up being released from tougher jobs into better ones, and living standards rise.

Reason‘s J.D. Tuccille is correct that Donald Trump is a cartoonish mercantilist. Three slices:

Politics is an industry in which ideas demonstrated to be ineffective and morally reprehensible live on long after they should have died. That’s the case with President Donald Trump’s fondness for mercantilism, as he espouses hoary old nostrums about the alleged benefits of hoarding money and preventing Americans from using their capital to purchase desired goods from other countries. Like a throwback to the 18th century, the president mistakes accumulating the means of exchange for building actual prosperity, as if we’d all be better off with overstuffed wallets than with the things our funds can purchase.

…..

Of course, trade isn’t a collective endeavor. Companies, organizations, and individuals buy and sell all the time, often without much regard for whether they’re dealing with domestic purchasers and vendors or partners based overseas. So long as payments clear and orders arrive, everybody is happy buying what they want and selling inventory. If they weren’t reasonably content, they wouldn’t make deals.

The problem comes when we aggregate those uncountable separate transactions and treat them as a team sport in which countries lose if they use capital to pay for needed goods and services. It’s a weird collectivist treatment of what are actually a multitude of market transactions, one that Trump obviously buys into with his comments about “we lose” in trade, and we’d be better off “if we stopped trading.” It’s a mindset that hearkens back to the days of absolute monarchs boasting about galleons full of gold.

…..

With his continual grumping that Americans “lose” money by buying from vendors in other countries, the president at least gets an “A” for consistency. But he’s consistent at being wrong in his belief that we’re better off accumulating money than we are in exchanging it for things we want, such as food.

“Just think how rich you’ll be when you stop eating altogether!” Cato Institute economist Scott Lincicome snarked in response to Trump’s grumbles, evoking a vision of fat wallets at the expense of empty bellies.

Trade isn’t a team sport, and there are no losers—just different degrees of winners—when people freely buy and sell, exchanging money for the goods and services that satisfy their needs. Unfortunately, the president’s economic notions are stuck in the mercantilist past.

Colin Grabow reports that “the Jones Act waiver has moved more energy than official numbers show.”

Jeffrey Degner reminds us of an actual historical example of what Comrade Mamdani calls “the warmth of collectivism.”

Gabriele Mazzini counsels skepticism of the motives of AI CEOs’ recent doomerism. A slice:

A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.

For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.

There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.

When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what today nevertheless does – need explaining: “Conservatives cheering Trump’s exclusion of Politico, CNN and MS NOW from the White House are being shortsighted.” A slice:

President Donald Trump’s attempt to divide and conquer the media isn’t going well. On Monday, after the White House deactivated CNN’s press passes, each of its major competitors said they would halt video coverage of the president until further notice. That means less attention: the lifeblood of this presidency.

Fox News and its personnel have performed creditably in this episode. The news channel’s Washington bureau chief, Bryan Boughton, currently chairs the group of TV networks that pool resources to record all of the president’s public appearances. That role rotates every quarter. He announced the decision to indefinitely pause presidential pool coverage alongside ABC, CBS and NBC.

Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich, in her capacity as president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, issued a statement saying that Trump’s move to bar Politico, MS NOW and CNN from the White House briefing room violates the First Amendment.

Similarly commendable media solidarity was displayed in 2009, when Fox News was on the receiving end of presidential ire. President Barack Obama’s administration tried to bar a Fox News reporter from a television pool, but the news channel’s competitors showed a united front, and the White House backed down. That would be a welcome resolution in this matter, too.

Republicans now cheering the exclusion of media outlets from the White House would do well to keep the Obama example in mind. If Trump’s move against Politico, MS NOW and CNN stands, the next Democratic president might exclude Fox News and other right-leaning outlets from the briefing room.

National Review‘s Jim Geraghty decries Trump’s contempt for the U.S. Constitution. A slice:

Trump has not helped the government’s argument by making statements that suggest he does not recognize First Amendment rights, such as Friday’s statement, “I don’t think somebody should be allowed to come in and write fake stories, they’re fake news, and that’s why they have no credibility. That’s why — so, I had 96 percent negative coverage during the election, and I won because they have no credibility. . . . I mean, there’s something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories.”

The first thing a president does is pledge, so help him God, to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” If you do not believe that the First Amendment protects an American’s right to write purposely negative stories, you are not preserving, protecting, or defending the Constitution.

Charles Lane: “When Congress is silent, Trump expands his power.” [DBx: Yes – but so, too, does every president.]

About the hostility of young Americans toward capitalism, Arnold Kling asks: “Are young people objectively worse off? Or have they just been brainwashed by progressive educators?”

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… is from pages 168-169 of Razeen Sally’s excellent 1998 book, Classical Liberalism and International Economic Order [original emphasis; footnote deleted]:

Since 1945 the case for a liberal international economic order has been made in terms of multilateral reciprocity: freer trade is good, providing all parties liberalise trade. This is the kind of thinking that became the conventional wisdom of the GATT from the outset. The belief that nations benefit only when other nations open their markets has dominated GATT negotiations; the liberalisation of imports is a ‘cost’ one has to pay, or a ‘concession’ one has to make, in order to gain from exports to newly liberalised foreign markets….

This predominant approach to postwar trade liberalisation is foreign to basic presumptions introduced to economic analysis by the classical economists. As Jagdish Bhagwati puts it, reciprocity ‘builds on the notion, not consonant with good economic sense, that trade liberalisation is a cost rather than a source of gain’. Reciprocity leads us to believe that the national gain accrues from exports; classical trade theory teaches us that the national gain comes from imports, not exports (which are only a means of paying for imports). Hence, the unilateral repeal of trade barriers, even in an otherwise protectionist world, ushers in imports that replace inefficient domestic production and release resources for more productive uses. Quite apart from other benefits, import liberalisation provides cheaper inputs, and reallocates resources, to promising export sectors. This kind of gain is of greater national benefit than the gain that arises from the opening of foreign markets to home exports through intergovernmental negotiations.

DBx: Yes. A trillion times yes. And if anyone thinks that the truth that Sally here explains is trivial, let that person consult the countless statements by Donald Trump that explicitly reveal Trump’s belief – a belief as blind as it is confident – that imports are a cost, while exports are a benefit in and of themselves. Note also that Trump is hardly alone in clinging to this zombie mercantilist myth.

But it must also be said that for all the great truth of Sally what writes, it remains the case that the GATT did manage to liberalize trade more than trade would have been liberalized in its absence. The GATT channeled mercantilist motivations into liberalizing currents. It’s unquestionably true that each country and the world would have been better off had each country liberalized regardless of the policies of other countries. But special-interest politics and economic illiteracy, being what they are, make such economically sensible liberalization nearly impossible in reality to achieve politically.

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Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler makes this case: “The smart fix for the Treasury secretary is to dump tariffs and encourage free trade.” A slice:

The Trump tariff regime is premised on limiting imports into the U.S. Perversely, this reduces the Treasurys that foreigners buy. That, and a dollar down by 10% since Donald Trump took office (not against the yen) is a deliberate attempt to make imports more expensive—one reason inflation is still more than 3% and the 10-year is at 5%. Mr. Bessent has been jumping through hoops with short-term fixes that don’t work.

Desmond Lachman reports this about Scott Bessent:

Rufus Miles, an American government administrator, famously said that where you stand on an issue depends on where you sit. This aphorism seems all too true of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. As a young man, Bessent made his reputation and fortune as one of George Soros’s traders by taking advantage of governments’ economic policy mistakes. Today, as treasury secretary, he is committing the same sort of economic policy mistakes that other economic policymakers have made. That is creating the trading opportunities for today’s hedge fund traders that he was once so ready to exploit.

“‘It’s awful’: How tariffs, soaring fuel costs and higher interest rates are squeezing American companies.” (HT Scott Lincicome)

Another Wall Street Journal columnist, Allysia Finley, documents some of the ‘progressive’ cluelessness in California. A slice:

Adjusting for population, California has more than 16 times as many social-assistance outfits as Florida and five times as many unsheltered homeless people. And Californians wonder why homelessness keeps increasing even as the government keeps spending more to combat it.

Democratic lawmakers in Sacramento are asking voters in November to approve another $11.25 billion in state borrowing to finance more “affordable” housing, even though they acknowledged during hearings this spring that the state wasn’t doing enough to track how homeless money is spent.

In April 2024, California’s auditor reported that the state had spent $24 billion on some 30 programs to combat homelessness over the preceding five years yet lacked “information on the ongoing costs and outcomes of its homelessness programs.”

GMU Econ alum Paul Mueller makes the case that the Great Recession was an unintended result of good intentions. A slice:

Simultaneously, more than a decade of regulatory pressure forced Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to lower their underwriting standards — a shift that soon infected the entire industry. The Community Reinvestment Act, federal agencies, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development all pushed for reduced mortgage underwriting standards. More people were able to buy a home — even if they couldn’t afford it.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post decries ‘teachers” unions’ on-going efforts to shield their members from accountability. Two slices:

If teachers unions put as much effort into improving test scores as dodging accountability, students in New York’s public schools would have markedly better chances for success in life.

…..

The Progressive Policy Institute, a center-left think tank, found recently that stronger presence of teacher unions in a state is negatively correlated with the adoption of literacy programs.

Spencer Klavan reminds us that in a free society the future, while not unimaginable, is unknowable – even by hyper-smart individuals. A slice:

What’s more, outside the domain of mathematics, some things might be fundamentally irreducible to the satisfying absolutes of numbers. This may now count as heresy in certain quarters, but it’s what the ancients knew: “Our discussion will be adequate if it has as much clarity as the subject matter can sustain,” wrote Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics. Politics, morality, and human action “admit of much dispute and variability.” They are fundamentally unpredictable: It is as silly to apply mathematical proof to an ethical deliberation as it is to vote in Congress on the surface area of a cube.

Perhaps this is why the forecasts of our most supposedly hyper-rationalist intellectuals keep falling so embarrassingly flat, and why they persist in making new ones just the same. In 1992, Al Gore wrote that “up to 60 percent of the present population of Florida may have to be relocated” — according to some predictions — “in the next few decades.” Florida has remained firmly in place, but that didn’t stop Al Gore from making equally self-assured — and wrong — declarations in his 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

AI is not a Segway, and Dario Amodei is by no means as far off the mark as Al Gore. Deep learning technology has already revolutionized many industries, and its effects on us — for good and ill — will likely continue to be profound. Now that AI leaders across the industry are raising concerns about an imminent spike in the dangers and capacities of the technology, it makes sense to take those concerns seriously.

But not to take them as gospel. It would lower the temperature of the current AI conversation substantially if we could recall that neither Amodei, nor Sam Altman, nor Elon Musk, nor you, nor I — no, not even the angels, but only the Father in Heaven — know the future with anything like mathematical certainty.

This is America, after all, and we don’t govern ourselves by the certainties of very intelligent people, even if those certainties come with equations attached. Choosing a reasonable and wise path forward is not merely a matter of crunching numbers but of public debate, moral reasoning, and level-headed deliberation based on our best current knowledge and inherited wisdom. Anything more or less than that is beneath us.

GMU alums Caleb Petitt, Phil Magness, and Ed López write informatively about differences in monetary incomes and in wealth.

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… is from page 6 of Robert Higgs’s “Introduction” to his important 2012 book Delusions of Power:

While knocking from their pedestals some of the “great men” of the past century, I also devote attention to debunking a variety of ideas and related programs that flourished along with these leaders, such as business-government cooperation, pump priming via government deficit spending, Johnson’s War on Poverty, Nixon’s New Economic Plan, and the antirecession “stimulus” and bailouts caring out recently by the Bush and Obama administrations. Such ideas cloak a frenzy of opportunism in which politicians snatch new powers and special interests enrich themselves at public expense, all in the guise of saving the day – more often than not, a day that needs saving only because of destructive actions the government has taken previously.

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Here’s a letter to a long-time correspondent.

Mr. Barnes:

Thanks for sending along Oren Cass’s recent Congressional testimony. Unlike you, I’m not favorably impressed.

The Chinese government is indeed a bad actor and, therefore, a case can be made for certain trade restrictions with that country. Cass’s case, however, isn’t it. A credible case would, unlike Cass’s, be free both of misleading statistics and dubious claims, such as this one:

In 2024, the United States imported $440 billion in goods from China while exporting only $143 billion in return. For the most part, the PRC refuses to open the Chinese market to American exports and instead trades its own exports for American assets. This not only compounds the problems of investment and control, but also hollows out American industry, as production for the American market moves offshore but no commensurate foreign demand emerges for what America might produce.

Face-palm.

In our world of more than two countries, a bilateral ‘trade deficit’ between any pair of countries has no policy-relevance. It does nothing to establish that the country running the bilateral ‘surplus’ restricts access to its market. And because Americans produce and export services as well as goods, a bilateral goods trade ‘deficit’ with China tells us even less about the economic consequences of trade with that country.

Yet Cass trots out this statistic as if it establishes that trade with China damages the American economy. It doesn’t.

Moving on. Even if China were the world’s only other country, and even if all production and consumption were of goods, Cass’s assertion that China thereby “trades its own exports for American assets” remains misleading.

The American assets that Chinese investors acquire through market transactions are assets that their American owners choose to sell. These Americans receive payment in exchange, and foreign demand for American assets can increase the value of assets that Americans continue to own. Cass identifies several industries in which he believes Chinese investment or control poses national-security risks. But he offers no evidence that the bilateral ‘trade deficit’ has resulted in Chinese acquisitions of American assets that threaten national security.

Moreover, contrary to the impression Cass conveys, these asset sales do not necessarily reduce Americans’ net worth. Americans can invest the proceeds in other assets or use them to finance productive enterprises. Indeed, that Americans have largely done so is evidenced by the fact that Americans’ real median household net worth has risen substantially over the past several decades.*

As for the hackneyed assertion of ‘hollowing out,’ U.S. industrial capacity today is at an all-time high and 13% larger than when China joined the WTO in 2001.

One reason for this healthy growth in U.S. industrial capacity is that the U.S. remains the world’s leading destination for inward foreign direct investment (FDI). In 2025, the value of the stock of FDI in the U.S. was $5.7 trillion – the largest in the world. The corresponding figure for China was $3.8 trillion.** On a per-capita basis, therefore, the U.S. now has 5.2 times more inward FDI stock than does China. Foreign capital finances new American enterprises and expands the very productive capacity that Cass claims foreign purchases of assets in America ‘hollow out.’

Cass’s errors further cascade with his claim that “no commensurate foreign demand emerges for what America might produce.” In our world of more than two countries, the Chinese need not purchase American products in amounts equal to their sales to Americans. They can instead purchase products from other countries, whose residents then use the resulting dollar earnings to purchase American exports. And in fact, the inflation-adjusted value of U.S. exports is today at an all-time high, having more than doubled since China joined the WTO.

If a serious case is to be made for the U.S. to restrict trade in order to minimize the military threat posed by China, that case should rest on evidence of specific threats and a careful assessment of the likely consequences of the proposed restrictions. Yet Cass’s talk of bilateral trade ‘deficits,’ foreign asset purchases, and ‘hollowing out’ instead inflames rather than informs.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

* Here’s part of an Endnote from Bryan Caplan’s and my forthcoming book, Blockade (Cato Institute, 2027):

Jeremy Horpedahl – using data from the Federal Reserve’s historical financial surveys and adjusting the figures for inflation with the chained Consumer Price Index and the earlier CPI series used by the U.S. Census Bureau in its historical household-income series – calculated the increase in real (in 2022 dollars) median U.S. household net worth:

1962 – $57,380
1969 – $71,226
1983 – $87,859
1989 – $108,501
1992 – $102,977
1995 – $111,868
1998 –$130,733
2001 – $145,208
2004 – $146,128
2007 – $173,151
2010 – $105,166
2013 – $103,609
2016 – $119,995
2019 – $141,145
2022 – $192,700.

** Calculated by Claude from data here and here.

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Rather than tighten the reins on the power of the executive branch to levy tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports, Congress recently loosened those reins, as was wanted by the late protectionist Lindsey Graham. Clark Packard, Alfredo Carrillo Obregon, and Eli DeLuca warn of the consequences. A slice:

For nearly a decade, the executive branch has abused the broad, highly discretionary tariff authorities Congress granted it throughout the 20th century. These abuses have imposed high economic costs on American firms and consumers; undermined the United States’ international standing; and fueled rent-seeking cronyism in Washington. Thus far, Congress has failed to rein in those abuses by reforming the underlying laws and reasserting its constitutional authority over tariffs and trade policy. To be sure, the political costs of limiting the executive branch’s powers—particularly concerning policies that benefit many well-connected, highly concentrated special interests and are simultaneously intertwined with sensitive issues like “national security” and geopolitical competition with China—are high for most legislators.

But what is indefensible is for Congress, knowing about the economic costs and political dysfunction engendered by executive tariff abuse, to grant even broader and highly discretionary tariff authorities to the White House—and this president in particular. Yet, that is exactly what Congress did on September 16, when the House of Representatives passed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026.

We have previously outlined the flaws of the tariff mechanism approved as part of this legislation to sanction the largest purchasers of Russian energy and the largest enablers of Russian sanctions evasion. To be clear, our criticisms have nothing to do with the underlying objective of supporting Ukraine or even with the foreign policy merits of doing so by putting economic pressure on these countries. But achieving them need not require giving the executive branch outsized discretion to impose additional annual tariff costs as high as $400 billion on a static basis. And discouragingly, even amendments that would have kept this mechanism in place but limited its proneness to presidential abuse did not even make it out of committee. Congress is, indeed, content to abdicate its Article I authority for political convenience.

Until now, lawmakers had an alibi. The statutes the administration relied on were enacted decades ago in policy landscapes very different than today—plus, the president invoked them on his own. When he imposed 25 percent tariffs on imported upholstered furniture in the name of “national security,” members of Congress could accurately claim he acted on his own.

When the Supreme Court held in February that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize tariffs, the administration pivoted to a 1974 balance-of-payments statute drafted for a world with fixed exchange rates (which no longer exists). After the Court of International Trade ruled against those tariffs in May—and after they lapsed in July—the White House concocted a forced labor rationale in 60 countries to impose yet another round of new tariffs. Congress could look the other way and treat all of it as a battle between the president and the courts.

That alibi is now gone. This time, Congress wrote the new authority itself, with the whole record in front of it. The bill lets the president set tariffs up to 100 percent on the largest buyers of Russian oil and gas that continue purchasing these goods, as well as on the largest facilitators of Russian sanctions evasion. Yet it never specifies which data determine who those buyers or facilitators are. It leaves the executive branch to decide whether a country’s efforts to cut Russian energy purchases are “significant” for reducing tariffs. And Congress failed to reserve any power to approve or block any particular tariff (it may only disapprove of a presidential decision to terminate a tariff). Every member who voted yes had President Trump’s track record in plain sight. Whatever tariffs follow will carry their fingerprints.

Ironically, there’s a non-negligible chance that once this authority is used to impose high tariffs, some of the legislators who voted to approve it will petition the executive branch for relief from such onerous duties for their constituents. Earlier this week, it was reported that staunch Trump tariff supporter Sen. Katie Britt (R‑AL) quietly lobbied the administration for exemptions from Section 232 and Section 301 tariffs for companies in her state. “Tariffs for thee, but not for me,” is alive and well.

Scott Lincicome shares this line from The Economist:

Chinese GDP per person grew half as fast in 2014-24 as it did in 2004-14.

Jason Willick writes insightfully about AI and “Effective Altruism.” Two slices:

Effective altruism is a philosophy developed in the past 20 years or so, focused on estimating the probability of existential risks to humanity. It has attracted many smart, well-meaning, secular followers who want a moral purpose. Technologists seem especially drawn to the way EA appears to justify its precepts with mathematical rigor.

…..

Put aside the great imprecision of probabilities about such extreme circumstances that EA throws around. The utilitarian math wrenches attention away from more plausible dangers of rogue AI — such as hacking and theft, which can be dealt with through ordinary legal and cybersecurity mechanisms — and wrenches it toward the most extreme imaginable scenarios. The claim that a risk is existential gives EAs a pass to dismiss laws and institutions. “Our systems of laws, norms and organizations for handling risk have been tuned to the small- and medium-scale risks we have faced over past centuries,” Ord breezily claims.

EA’s philosophy of AI doom could have a self-fulfilling quality. It imagines humanity as essentially a machine for calculating and maximizing the well-being of the greatest number of people, now and in the future, ignoring other theories of morality. Imagine if AI agents were trained to act the same way. They’d just be one step away from calculating that they ought to be single-mindedly maximizing the “welfare” of AI agents, rather than humans, and (like their extinction-obsessed creators) taking extraordinary measures to ensure the bots can survive any contingency.

That would be the start of the very doomsday that EAs fear, in which humans irrevocably lose control of the technology. I’m not convinced such a scenario is particularly plausible, because computers aren’t conscious and don’t have any reason to be “motivated to wrest control of the future from humanity,” as [Toby] Ord puts it. EAs fear AI in part because they project their moral vision onto the algorithms. They assume agents will act in parallel with the way they believe people are supposed to act — as collective utility-maximizers.

The AI industry talks about “aligning” artificial intelligence with human value systems. Most human value systems look nothing like EA. But if the EA moral vision is triumphant in the technology world, the industry might end up making bots that are more prone to bizarre and dangerous behavior.

Fear of an apocalyptic AI takeover is rooted in the perception that machines can have motivations like people do. It isn’t true, as Microsoft recently emphasized in a helpfully “humanist” AI manifesto. But the illusion that it is true, rampant among doomers, can itself be dangerous.

Autumn Billings reports on “the shaky evidence that Flock cameras reduce crime rates.”

Carola Binder, Laura Crespo, Carlos Gento, Luis M. Guirola, and Ernesto Villanueva find evidence – unsurprising to me – that survey results should be read with much skepticism. Here’s the abstract of their new paper:

Probabilistic expectation questions are often used to measure subjective uncertainty, but respondents frequently assign all probability to one outcome. We show that this bunching is partly a survey artifact rather than genuine certainty. In the (online) ECB Consumer Expectations Survey and the (in person) Spanish Survey of Household Finances, bunching is higher among less financially literate respondents and increases with panel tenure. Two survey-design changes provide stronger evidence: enforcing neutral interviewer protocols reduces bunching by about 15 percentage points, and a later questionnaire redesign reduces it by a further 18 percentage points. Interviewer-level variation also falls after standardization. These findings imply that degenerate responses in probabilistic expectations can reflect task burden and survey administration, causing standard measures to overstate certainty and understate uncertainty.

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… is from page 4 of GMU Econ alums Matthew Mitchell’s and Peter Boettke’s superb 2017 book, Applied Mainline Economics: Bridging the Gap between Theory and Public Policy:

Prosperity matters. Greater wealth, of course, buys us nicer vacations and fancier gadgets. But it also buys us longer life spans. It buys us better nutrition and lower infant mortality. It buys more time with family and less time at work. It buys greater self-reported happiness. It makes us better stewards of the environment. And it even buys intelligence, for as societies grow wealthier, their average IQs seem to rise.

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Sarah Thomas sings the praises of globalization. A slice:

An economic order based on comparative advantage is more efficient and productive than economic nationalism. As a result, societies that have liberalized economically have seen the strongest growth, where growth often drives democratization and, ultimately, peace. But comparative advantage has less to do with a country’s technical ability for production and more to do with the efficiency of its production—so even the countries with the fewest resources can grow.

This dynamic intersects with opportunity cost, meaning that even if a country had superior technical skills in producing, another country could produce and sell the good to the first country at a lower cost than if that country produced it itself. In doing so, the other producer can be said to have a comparative advantage. A real-world example of this is Germany and Saudi Arabia. Germany has superior technical know-how but channels those skills toward the production of cars—its comparative advantage. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has the reserves and sufficient skill to extract and refine oil, giving it a comparative advantage as the world’s largest exporter of oil.

Hence, comparative advantage drives the international division of labor, which cultivates a peaceful world order of trading partners. But this peace is not limited to the modern globalized era. Indeed, earlier societies also embodied the peace of commerce—even prior to the Industrial Revolution. As Johan Norberg notes in Peak Human, history attests to seven “Golden Ages” of civilization where economic dynamism and peace prevailed.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal decries Trump’s “tariff gift to Abdul El-Sayed.” A slice:

President Trump’s trade war with Canada is harming both countries, but it’s helping American Democrats who are using his border taxes to attack Republicans. Ground zero is Michigan, where competitive races could decide control of Congress in November.

A new Ipsos poll conducted for the business coalition M finds that Mr. Trump’s tariffs are overwhelmingly unpopular in the state, especially the tariffs on Canada. While the President says other countries pay the tariffs, 80% of Michigan likely voters say American consumers do. They’re right.

Businesses that import goods embed the tariffs into their prices, sometimes in stealthy ways. Cox Automotive this spring found that Mr. Trump’s tariffs drove a 10.4% increase in the average suggested retail price for new cars. Michigan Smart Trade Alliance estimates tariffs have cost the state $26 billion since January 2025, or about $6,419 per household.

A large share of this tax bill comes on imports from Canada, which exports about $40 billion in goods to Michigan every year. Vehicles and parts make up roughly half of that. Because of its significant car manufacturing, Michigan depends heavily on cross-border supply chains with Canada and Mexico. Michiganders understand that.

Some 81% of Republicans and 92% of Democrats and independents say the U.S. trade relationship with Canada is crucial to the state economy, according to the Ipsos poll. About three-quarters of both parties want the U.S. to focus on combatting China’s mercantilist trade practices while at the same time maintaining strong trade ties with Canada and Mexico.

National Review‘s Daniel Foster, noticing the positive reaction of fans at Thursday’s Buffalo Bills – Detroit Lions game to the playing of Canada’s national anthem along with the Star Spangled Banner – and noting also the unpopularity in the U.S. of Trump’s tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports from Canada – understandably wonders what effect Trump’s belligerence toward Canada will have on the November elections.

Incoming tourism is an export industry because the domestic economy is thereby selling goods and services to foreigners. Economic theory makes clear that restrictions on imports are also restrictions on exports. In 2025 Trump dramatically increased U.S. restrictions on imports. Unsurprisingly, therefore, in 2025 a major U.S. export industry – tourism – took a big, bad hit, as shown in this graph shared by Scott Lincicome.

My Mercatus Center colleague Satya Marar explains that “Trump’s MFN price controls aren’t the answer to America’s high patented drug pricing, but trade deals may be.”

Eric Boehm reports this: “The Trump administration paid federal workers $9.5 billion to skip work.”