My kids, in contrast, have taken rideshares hundreds of times. Which got me thinking: How typical is my experience? So I went to ChatGPT and asked it to estimate passenger miles traveled in traditional taxis versus rideshares since 2000. The results seem credible, yet they blew my mind. I like the table version best, because it builds suspense.

But you can view it in figure form if you prefer:

This is one of the clearest demonstrations of positive-sum change I know of. Yes, Uber devastated the taxi industry. But they didn’t just “drink their milkshake.” They made six additional milkshakes in the process. The combined effect of a massive price cut and a massive convenience boost multiplied vehicle miles roughly seven-fold. Who would have imagined that demand could be so elastic?

Last week, Alex Tabarrok gave me my first ride in a driverless car. The technology took way too long to arrive thanks to government, lawsuits, and paranoia. But it’s finally here, and it’s fantastic. 9/10. In the next ten years, we’re going to see another Uber-sized revolution in transportation.

Consider: The cheapest self-driving Tesla is a bit under $40k. A car that netted just $100 a day would pay for itself in about one year. Subtracting downtime for charging, they could be on the road 20 hours a day, and probably remain usable for 10 years. Even if they’re empty half the time, and energy and maintenance double the cost of the car itself, the equilibrium price is about $2 an hour. Truly, it wouldn’t be surprising to see paid miles multiply another 7x.

The main risk is that the federal government regulates this technology into the ground. But now that self-driving cars are already on the road, we’ve probably escaped. It’s a perfect time to go full Magneto on the status quo and gloat, “You should killed me when you had the chance!”

1. I have said on the record that “Literally 100% of anti-immigration people I personally know are unpleasant to be around.” I now feel like I personally know Simon Hankinson, and am reconsidering that categorical statement.

2. The reason I’m reconsidering is not that I don’t know if Hankinson is unpleasant. He is not. The reason is that I’m not confident that he’s really anti-immigration! The bedrock for his stance on immigration genuinely seems to be that he thinks existing laws should be enforced regardless of their merits. In Dungeons and Dragons terms, he’s Lawful Neutral: “The rules are the rules, and we have to follow them.”

3. Normally, asserting “The rules are the rules” in an immigration argument is mere pretense. But Hankinson seems like he’d be perfectly fine with more immigration as long as we did it by the book.

4. Hankinson’s top substantive argument against immigration is just that it is bad for native workers who directly compete against immigrants. At UVA last week, for example, he roughly asked, “If we could replace all the employees at UVA with cheaper immigrant workers, should we?” He refers to the affirmative answer as the “libertarian” view, when it’s really just the standard economists’ view (minus a little hemming and hawing). Which is, in turn, the same as the brutally honest view of any rational person! Should we have prevented the mechanization of agriculture to save jobs of farmers? Factories to save the jobs of artisans? The internet to save the jobs of travel agents? Vaccines to save the jobs of morticians? Uber to save the jobs of taxi drivers?

5. The only way to make “saving jobs” rhetorically plausible is to weaponize status quo bias. All the job destruction in the past is fine. It was fine for Uber to hurt taxi drivers. But is it fine for Waymos to hurt Uber drivers? That’s a veeeery complex question that we as a sociiiiiiety need to have a looooooong conversation about.

6. Hankinson accuses those who accept the market’s job destruction of dogmatically assuming that the unemployed readily find better jobs. But that’s a straw man. There are always losers from progress! Always!!! The point, rather, is that progress is awesome overall for almost everyone. The secret of mass consumption is mass production, and distributional concerns are a dangerous distraction. To quote Lucas, “Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution.”

7. Hankinson admonished students not to freak out over a few grisly deportation stories. Fair enough. But then he tried to freak them out with a few grisly stories about immigration causing job loss, crime, and so on. He even repeatedly voiced the Dadaist, “What if it was you?” when I pointed out that various fears were astronomically rare. Not kosher. The future should not be held hostage to a few stories, however true and sad.

8. Hankinson did make more substantive claims about immigrants’ allegedly horrible overall effects crime, especially in Sweden. So I checked the numbers. For murder, the most clear-cut statistic, Sweden’s rate is .8/100,000, less than one-fifth the U.S. rate. And even if there was a crisis, Sweden should respond with harsher enforcement for all murderers, not impose collective punishment on high-crime subpopulations.

9. When I discussed the keyhole solution of restricting welfare to immigrants, Hankinson misinterpreted it as a facile, “Simply get rid of the welfare state.” Yes, the welfare state is popular — for natives. However, it is not popular for immigrants. The real problem is that anti-immigration people put almost all of their energy into cutting immigration rather than trying to handle reasonable complaints in a way that pro-immigration people might support. Seriously, if Trump’s central immigration policy had been “Amnesty with a lifetime welfare ban,” it plausibly could have won the support of enough Democrats to break the filibuster. Assuming, of course, that Republicans went along with it.

10. Hankinson often points out that every country restricts immigration, which is of course true. “Is every country on the planet either foolish or evil?” is not a crazy argument, though if you believe in American exceptionalism (as I think Hankinson does) you should feel some cognitive dissonance. What’s bizarre, though, is that Hankinson also specifically points out that the worst countries in the world restrict immigration. That’s plainly an argument (if not a strong one) for doing the opposite.

11. Hankinson warns that “Immigrants will save Social Security” is a “Big Lie.” Given current Social Security policies and the level of immigration, that is indeed an exaggeration. But immigrants do help. And yes, immigration could easily solve the entire problem if you accepted far more while denying them benefits.

12. The silliest thing Hankinson said is that immigration supporters think that “No country is better than any other.” Of course some countries are better than others. And those countries ought to have a lot more people in them.

Not only are EAs extraordinarily likeable; they have also made strong arguments that have causally improved actually-existing philanthropy. Mainstream charities mostly run on a combination of wishful thinking and Social Desirability Bias. As a result, they often do little good or are actively counterproductive. EAs, in contrast, closely study the evidence to figure out how to get the most bang per donor buck. This, in turn, has led to large cash infusions for three charities with demonstrably high benefit/cost ratios: deworming, anti-malaria, and Give Directly. While the typical college EA meeting is just a social club, these social clubs have ultimately made philanthropy better, especially by inspiring tech donors.

But despite their high IQs and winning personalities, EAs are sadly short on common sense. Like other humans, they’re prone to groupthink and paranoia. As a result, many have basically lost interest in philanthropy that demonstrably saves many human lives at low cost, and started obsessing about AI risk.

I’ve already explained at length why I think this is silly. But let me add that AI doomsters’ own behavior shows that deep down, they know they’re being silly. Only two doomsters have been willing to bet me; and yes, you absolutely can bet on the end of the world. The optimist prepays the pessimist, end of story.

Betting aside, if you really thought the world was likely to end, you should be going into massive debt, secure in the knowledge that you won’t have to repay it. But almost no AI doomster — EA or otherwise — does so. I know, they’ve got just-so stories about why they’re not playing the obvious strategy given their stated beliefs. The best explanation, however, is that their stated beliefs are mere lip service.

AI is such a promising technology that EA-inspired efforts to curtail it are likely to outweigh all of the good that EAs achieved back when they sensibly focused on deworming, anti-malaria, and Give Directly. That’s very sad, showing that without common sense, even high-IQ good intentions still pave the path to bad outcomes. But EAs have another set of views which, if taken seriously, wouldn’t merely strangle progress, but make humanity massively worse off: their extreme moral commitment to animal welfare.

Ten years ago, I wrote a reductio ad absurdum of the pro-animal welfare position. If all animals morally matter, what about bugs? At the time, the main response was, “Bugs don’t feel pain.” A decade later, however, plenty of EAs are just embracing the reductio, often with further bizarre epicycles. Unlike their AI doom crusade, however, I’m not even slightly worried about the real-world harm of this failure of common sense. Meat and dairy will remain legal, and bug (and shrimp!) welfare will remain fringe topics of idle intellectual curiosity. While fanatical commitment to bug welfare could easily rationalize all kinds of totalitarian horrors, even the loudest champions of this absurd position take it with a grain of salt.

Let me end by responding to all the EAs who object, “You don’t have an argument, Bryan. Not on AI. Not an bugs.” Because I really do love you guys.

First, the point of an argument is to reason from highly obvious premises to not-so-obvious conclusions. But if your conclusion is extremely non-obvious, then its denial is correspondingly extremely obvious. “If A, therefore B” only works if “Not-B, therefore not-A” isn’t more plausible.

Second, how do you find maximally obvious premises? Not via argument, which is circular, but via common sense. Science rests on the validity of perception, reason, and memory. Morality rests on the value of human well-being and prima face human rights. If you demand an argument for any of these, the right response is: “It’s obvious. The end.” Or as Thomas Reid explains in Essays on the Active Powers of Man:

And when we attempt to prove by direct argument, what is really self-evident, the reasoning will always be inconclusive; for it will either take for granted the thing to be proved, or something not more evident; and so, instead of giving strength to the conclusion, will rather tempt those to doubt of it, who never did so before.

P.S. My decision may have been influenced by Cate Hall’s You Can Just Do Things!

In particular, if you frame policies as “Government should do more X,” “Government should do less X,” and “Government should stay the course,” public opinion data usually reveals that the latter is the median position. And the main counterexample, category-specific spending, usually goes away if you add a reminder along the lines of “Remember, more spending requires more taxes.”

But U.S. politics has grown so weird during the last decade that I suspect a revision to the Median Voter Model is in order. I dub this the Neo-Median Voter Model. It works roughly like this:

1. In primary elections, both parties myopically select their candidates. Partisan voters in both parties pay almost no attention to the impending general election; they vote expressively for whichever candidate most appeals to them.

2. What determines appeal? While policy positions play a role, charisma and name recognition matter more. But again, due to myopia this is not charisma in the eyes of the median voter in the general election. It is charisma in the eyes of the median primary voter.

3. This charisma is extremely scarce. A party is pretty lucky even to have one presidential candidate who seems charismatic to party loyalists. Candidates who actually seem charismatic to the median voter are rarer yet. Since 1980, Reagan, Clinton, and Obama had general charisma. Trump has partisan charisma only. The last election where both parties had a charismatic candidate was 1964, where Johnson (general charisma) clobbered Goldwater (partisan charisma only).

4. After the primaries, both winning candidates make a moderate effort to pretend they’re more mainstream than they really are. But both sides primarily play to their base in the general election.

5. Given this odd candidate selection process, the Median Voter Model still determines the election. The main underlying factors: per Achen and Bartels, economic conditions and peace or lack thereof immediately prior to the election; charisma; and which party’s primary voters’ issue positions are further from the median voter. In that order.

6. Caveat: Voters have a longer memory for inflation than for other economic variables, and they hate inflation.

7. Once a party gains the presidency, they pay much more attention to their base than to the median voter. And the presidency is the main thing that matters for policy. The non-delegation doctrine notwithstanding, Congress has long since delegated most of its power to executive agencies — and presidents have usurped most of the remaining power. The budget is the only notable exception.

8. Thus, it is only a slight exaggeration to say that despite much rhetoric to the contrary, the president is more than halfway to being a four-year dictator. Congress has trouble merely surmounting the filibuster; an actual veto override is almost impossible. Judicial oversight isn’t completely irrelevant, but the system allows presidents to keep imposing the same illegal policies using different legal rationales. Since each Supreme Court challenge takes about a year, you only need three bogus rationalizations to maintain a blatantly illegal policy for your whole term. See Biden on student loans or Trump on tariffs.

9. After three years in power, the next presidential election cycle starts. The primaries myopically select two candidates, and the mechanisms of the Neo-Median Voter Model once again kick in.

Punchline: The traditional Median Voter Model’s central erroneous prediction is platform convergence. In the Neo-Median Voter Model, platforms diverge widely, especially on issues where the base is passionate and the median voter in the general election is apathetic. And it’s amazing how many issues most people are apathetic about. The median voter is pro-choice even in most Republican states, but very few Republicans are going to vote for Democrats over abortion. They can be annoyed for a week or a month over pro-life policies, but not a year, and definitely not permanently.

Is the Neo-Median Voter Model bad news? Probably. It means that the famed checks and balances of the U.S. Constitution are now mostly impotent. But the really bad news comes from studying primary voters. The Democratic Socialists of America and the national conservatives are tiny shares of the population. But they intellectualize the economically illiterate cruelty of their respective party faithful. Never in my lifetime has there been a better time to hate politics.

But love it or hate it, the Neo-Median Voter Model is a good guide to modern American politics. If you know how to make it better, please tell me in the comments.

Update: Jonathan Landy has some similar ideas.

Update #2: Several people have convinced me that Lyndon Johnson was not charismatic in his public persona. My mistake.

After victory, however, conflict with Saddam Hussein persisted for 12 more years. Why? Because although the U.S. had a careful plan for the war, they decided to wing the peace. There was a confused combination of sanctions, no-fly zones, demands for WMD inspections, and periodic bombing. If not for the totally unrelated 9/11 attack, Saddam Hussein might still be in power today. If the U.S. had any plan for peace after the Gulf War, it wasn’t much of a plan.

Poor peacetime planning led to another war — and an even more impressive military master plan. In 2003, using only 250,000 troops, the U.S. achieved full regime change in less than a month. While their list of active allies was much shorter than in 1991, they clearly weren’t necessary.

The shock-and-awe military performance of the U.S. was matched only by its truly harebrained plan for peace. Guerrilla warfare and sectarian violence began almost immediately and lasted for many years. Instead of installing a reliably pro-Western government, the U.S. quickly handed power over to the Shiite Islamist Nouri al-Maliki. He proved to be uncooperative, incompetent, and power-hungry. While he desperately needed U.S. military support, he went out of his way to antagonize his benefactors.

In the same vein, the U.S. had little trouble engineering the military overthrow of the Taliban or Gaddafi. But their plans for post-war Afghanistan and Libya were little more than wishful thinking. And to belabor the obvious, it showed.

You could consider “Since 1990, the U.S. has carefully planned its wars, yet poorly planned for the aftermath” a mixed compliment. But when the lives of millions hang in the balance, it’s a harsh condemnation. Actual war means killing a lot of innocent people — and that cannot be justified unless you have high confidence that the long-run effects are very good. Truly, with great power comes great responsibility.

That has long been my view, and I haven’t changed my mind. But Trump’s Iran War really does put all of the wars of my adult lifetime in a new perspective. Why? Because for the first time in decades, the U.S. has failed even to competently plan for the war! Before February 28, at least Iran wasn’t attacking its Arab neighbors. Oil freely flowed through the Strait of Hormuz. Now, over six months after killing much of the Iranian leadership, the U.S. has no idea how to even get back to square one. Alternating between sour grapes and empty threats may confuse the new Iranian leadership, but that’s about it. I wouldn’t be surprised if this conflict runs into 2028. Nor would I be surprised if the U.S. simply withdraws and hopes that its allies can somehow make peace on their own.

But even if the war ends today with a durable restoration of the pre-war status quo, the U.S. government has reached a new level of negligence. It used to demonstrate selective care: When we fight, we win — and win quickly and decisively; we just don’t know what to do after we win. Now it can’t be negligent after victory, because there will be no victory. Instead of learning from past failures, it has become a model of failure for future leaders to study. If they’re the kind of leaders who bother.

He was great mind, a free spirit, and a true friend.

Hail the victorious dead.

1. Anyone want to do a late meet-up in Cincinnati tonight? I’m available at the Hilton Garden Inn Cincinnati Midtown starting at 9:30 PM. Or we could meet at a nearby restaurant. Ideas? Let me know in the comments.

2. Thursday, I’m speaking at the Affordable Housing Crisis Symposium at Xavier University in Cincinnati alongside Mayor Aftab Purevalon September 17, 8:30 AM-1:30 PM. Please register here.

3. On September 23, I’m debating Simon Hankinson on immigration again, this time at the University of Virginia. Topic: “Do We Need Less Immigration? Or More?” Details here.

4. I’ll be at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from September 30-October 3. Happy to meet for lunch any day while I’m there. And I’ll probably be playing games at the Noble Knight on October 2. Like games? I’m open to requests.

5. I’m doing a roadtrip from Bozeman, Montana to Laramie, Wyoming on October 4-16. Holler if you’re on my path.

6. There’s still a Heterodox Conversation on immigration between me and Garett Jones at the University of Wyoming in Laramie on October 15. Register here.

Textbook asymmetric information models have a response. Namely: While sellers know what quality level they’re producing, customers can’t easily tell. So while they might be happy to pay $500 extra for a product that costs $400 extra to produce, unregulated businesses will try to take advantage of their cluelessness. How? By saying “We spent the extra $400” even though they didn’t. In asymmetric information models, customers are aware of these incentives, so when firms insist “We spent the extra $400,” customers sarcastically respond, “Sure you did.” The end result is that only the lowest quality products get produced.

To be fair, some of the earliest asymmetric information papers admitted that reputation and warranties could be viable free-market solutions to this problem. In practice, however, mainstream economists have long lazily used these models to justify sweeping regulation of product quality to “protect consumers.” While they know the populist “They cut corners to save money” accusation is deeply confused, they still endorse policies inspired by the populist complaint.

A key feature of both populist and textbook complaints: They directly contradict the adage, “You get what you pay for.” Instead, they are stories of market failure, where firms fail to provide high-quality products despite ample consumer demand.

Which raises one big question: Do you really think that the rich cannot get high-quality products? Or to put it more personally: For any given product, could you get it if you were rich?

The question sounds obtuse. Not only can the rich get high-quality products; they obviously do get high-quality products. But if that’s so obvious, not only is the populist complaint totally wrong. The textbook complaint is deeply wrong, too. If rich consumers don’t need government help to get high-quality products, then all the government is protecting ordinary consumers from is the opportunity to save money by sacrificing quality.

Government quality regulations are normally strictest for safety and loosest for sheer luxury and convenience. So we can modify my question to reinforce the point: Do you really think that the rich cannot get all the luxury and convenience they’re willing to pay for? No? Then what’s the point of the strict safety regulation? Markets will happily provide all the safety people are willing to pay for.

In slogan form: “Consumers, not firms, cut corners.”

Does this argument prove too much? For example, does it show that externality problems are somehow fake? Not at all. Consider air pollution. Yes, a superrich person could enjoy clear air by living in the middle of nowhere. But if a rich person is in Los Angeles or Mexico City or Cairo, they still have to breathe the same dirty air as the poor. The same goes for crime: While the rich can pay extra to live in a safe neighborhood, they cannot visit a bad neighborhood and count on their riches to protect them. In fact, their wealth probably puts them at greater risk of being victimized in a high-crime area, because they’re such a tempting target. Try parking a Ferrari in Oakland, California.

“Could you get it if you were rich?” This question is an elegant way to tell the difference between phony and genuine market failures. If you can fix a problem by throwing some of your money at it, the market is working. If many or most people with this option refuse to exercise this option, the problem isn’t the market. It’s scarcity: They’d rather live with the problem and save their money to spend on something else.

P.S. Completely confused? Start here.

The Trials of Dagobah: A LARP for Kids

Intro: (a) Idea of the game: Let’s pretend! (b) Safety rules: Don’t try to hurt anyone, and if you see anyone getting hurt, help them! If you’re hurt or think someone else is, shout PAUSE to pause the game. (c) Don’t be scared! Monsters are just your dads and brothers trying to show kids a fun time. (d) Escape hatch: If you’re scared, just run back to the starting place (the spaceship) until you feel better, then rejoin the game! (e) Rules: Stay with the group, and heed the words of Yoda. When creatures put hands on their heads, pretend they’re not “really” there. When you want to attack something with your light saber, hit it and shout “1 Damage!” (The birthday boy does +1 Damage). If a creature hits you, fall down on the ground AWAY from the fighting. You’ll feel all better once your friends defeat the creature. Then you can wake up and rejoin the game!

Equipment: Yoda and the Padawans have light sabers. Padawans can have masks if they want. Yoda has a flash light, too.

Set-Up: The stairwell lights are on. But the basement is dark, and Padawans may NOT turn on the lights! Depending on outside light, use a blanket to cover the external basement door. The theater door and utility doors are locked, and the spare bedroom is for creatures only. The bathroom is just a bathroom. Tents with a connecting tube block the way between the theater door and the closet door. The trampoline is by the pillar. A ball pit is over by the book shelves.

Creatures: Creatures drop at 0 Life. Snake-Men and the Spider have 3 Life, the Vulture-Man has 4 Life, and the Sith Lords have 7 Life! Snake-Men attack with long foam swords, the Spider with his arms, the Vulture-Man with two pillows, and the Sith Lords with light sabers.

Scene 1: Yoda and Jedi start in the stairwell. Yoda explains they’re all Padawans flying to the swamp planet of Dagobah for Jedi training. Kids sit down on the stairs and make spaceship noises until Yoda says they’ve landed on Dagobah.

Scene 2: Yoda and the Padawans leave their spaceship and enter Dagobah by opening the basement door. Yoda warns the group that hostile Snake-Men will be waiting for them. A first Snake-Man runs around, harrying the Padawans. Then another Snake-Man pops up. Once both have circled around, they attack, and the Padawans have to defeat them!

Scene 3: Yoda tells the Padawans they have to crawl single-file through the Dagobah caves – the tents. He asks for the bravest Padawans to slowly go first! There are lots of (safe) obstructions inside the tents. But when the bravest Padawans emerge, they’re attacked by a Giant Spider! Other Padawans can hurry through to reinforce them if they cry for help.

Scene 4: Once all the Padawans are through, they have to use the Force to leap from tree to tree through the jungle. All the kids jump on the trampoline, then circle around the pillar, over and over, until they reach the mountain-top. One or two more Snake-Man appears mid-way to try to stop the Padawans from climbing the mountain.

Scene 5: Once the kids reach the mountain-top, Yoda hears a loud bird. Oh no, it’s a Vulture-Man! The Vulture-Man swoops over and starts whacking kids with his giant wings (pillows) until he’s defeated.

Scene 6: From the mountain-top, Yoda and the Padawans can see the Clay Springs (the ball pit). Ancient light saber crystals of great power (2 Damage instead of 1 Damage) can be found therein. Two More Snake-Men harry the kids as they hunt for the crystals inside the disgusting goopy springs.

Scene 7: Yoda tells the Padawans they are ready to face their final challenge… alone! He enters the creature room, telling them to stay on their guard as he departs. Heavy breathing and light saber noises come out of the door. Finally the door opens, revealing Darth Veidt and Darth Corruptus, plus other optional creatures. When the Sith Lords fall, Yoda soon re-emerges to congratulate the Padawans on completing their mission, and assures them they will all one day become powerful Jedi Knights!

During the interview, I discovered that Zitelmann is also the world’s leading expert on not only public perceptions of the superrich, but the psychology of the superrich. I’m eager to learn what he’s discovered, and perhaps I’ll do a second interview on that.

How much of that net worth comes from housing? It’s a surprisingly complicated question. If you use exact percentiles, you wind up basing your answer on how much home equity the one household at the 25th percentile of total net worth happens to hold. To get a meaningful answer, then, you’ve got to switch to bands of net worth, then take an average. Here’s what you get:

I honestly found the results a little puzzling, but they check out. In the cells that read $0, literally zero households have any home equity. And the overall patterns are still eye-opening:

1. Age is the great underrated factor. If you want to know how much home equity someone owns, knowing their percentile for their age is less informative than simply knowing their age. Almost everyone starts with low housing wealth, yet a large majority end up with massive housing wealth.

2. Total net worth falls slightly with age. Housing wealth, in contrast, doesn’t seem to fall at all. On average, Americans do not cash out their homes for living expenses, even though modern financial markets make it easy to do so via negative mortgages, home equity loans, and simple downsizing. Instead, the American elderly sit on their massive housing wealth until they die.

3. Without Social Security, permanently sitting on massive housing wealth would be hard to do! For the 25th-75th percentiles of total net worth, housing is their main asset. To live at all comfortably without Social Security, most of these people would have to rely on their housing wealth. Horrors? Au contraire. This wouldn’t just be better for taxpayers; it would be better for young families, who could move into the homes of the elderly when they downsize to pay for their retirements.

4. While total housing wealth naturally rises with total net worth, it falls as a share of net worth. The very poor rent. The middle class lives in their main asset. The upper-middle class and rich own great homes, but have plenty of other assets to live off of in retirement.

5. “Paying off your mortgage” early is a common financial priority for the middle class. But given the mortgage interest deduction, it’s probably a foolish priority. Instead, they should make the minimum monthly payment on their mortgages, then invest their excess savings in a diversified portfolio of stocks and other high-yield assets. That’s exactly what I did, and the results speak for themselves. While I won’t own my home outright until I’m 80, my net worth is much higher than it would have been if I fetishized being “debt-free.”

All are welcome. Hope to see you there!

P.S. Other than recognizably drawing me, this is pretty good.

I had ChatGPT work with the actual data, which it then cross-checked against other published estimates. The SCF net worth data is ultimately derived from very finely-grained self-reports, designed to remind respondents to put a dollar value on each and every one of their notable assets and liabilities.

Main reflections:

1. Economists have long known that inequality is relatively low for consumption, medium for income, and high for wealth. What they rarely emphasize, however, is how much wealth depends on age. The richest Americans aged 65-69 are worth about 30x as much as the richest Americans aged 18-24.

2. Net worth is very high in absolute terms. The median is over six figures by the mid-30s. Americans at the 75th percentile are millionaires by their mid-50s. Americans at the 90th percentile are millionaires by around 40. Claims about middle-class, middle-aged Americans who “can’t afford” eggs or gas or beef are nonsense.

3. The most sensible argument for worrying about trade deficits is that we’re “living beyond our means.” Trade deficits represent borrowing, and we can’t keep borrowing forever. But given Americans’ extraordinary net worth, the most sensible argument for worrying is still senseless. After 50 years of unbroken trade deficits, we’re wealthier than ever.

4. Americans of staggering net wealth are all around us. If you walk around an American mall on a weekend, you probably cross paths with several decamillionaires. But except for being older, you probably couldn’t pick them out of a crowd. Even their cars rarely scream extreme wealth.

5. Whatever your complaints about American capitalism, you’ve got to admit that a large share of Americans use the system to become staggeringly wealthy by the time they retire. Not 1% or 5%, but 25%.

6. Americans with low or negative net wealth are also all around us. But who ever thought otherwise? In my 20s, I had very low net worth, and so did all my friends. And that fact contains a lesson: Almost all low-wealth Americans are young. If you have a regular job and age a couple decades, you’re rarely poor anymore.

7. If you’re old and your wealth is still low, your financial situation is basically hopeless. You can still be happy, but it would take a miracle (like winning the lottery) for your finances to dramatically improve. Every other American, however, is already rich, or could become rich with durably cautious budgeting. The math behind “Skip a $5 coffee every day from the age of 18, invest the savings in the stock market, and you’ll have hundreds of thousands of extra inflation-adjusted dollars when you retire” is sound.

8. Earning regular high income is the easiest way to end up with high wealth. But it’s neither necessary nor sufficient. A high-skilled worker who blows his whole paycheck week after week ends up with a net worth of roughly zero. A Costco cashier with a high savings rate ends up a millionaire. That’s not just a freak anecdote. It’s math.

9. Wealth peaks around age 70, roughly what you’d expect given the permanent income hypothesis. What’s surprising is how slowly wealth declines from this peak! Americans over 80 are still loaded, generally having higher net worth than they had 30 years earlier. And despite this wealth, Social Security checks keep rolling in.

10. Given their current net wealth, a solid majority of Americans can comfortably retire without Social Security. The federal government could cut them off completely and they’d still do fine. The best rationale for the status quo is paternalism, but most Americans are well-prepared for their futures even ignoring Social Security.

11. What’s a “solid majority”? Median net worth peaks at about $400k, which is more than enough to live the last third of your life in comfort. I wouldn’t say the same about the 25th percentile, though. My ballpark: 60% of Americans could comfortably get by with zero Social Security even though they were counting on it.

12. Granted, the median American has over half of his net worth in home equity. So without Social Security, people would commonly downsize or use negative mortgages to fund their living expenses. My line in the sand: That is “doing fine.” If you’re living small because you’re determined to bequeath an unmortgaged house to your kids, that’s on you.

13. In the absence of Social Security, Americans would obviously save more. So in the long run, this table actually overstates the share of unfortunate and improvident retirees.

14. The word “gerontocracy” is becoming more common, but not nearly common enough. The U.S. is obsessed with ensuring the financial security of elderly Americans who already have more wealth than they know what to do with.

15. “More wealth than they know what to do with.” Part of the reason my net worth is so high is that I don’t really want to do many expensive things. I’ve built up strong habits of frugality, and spending money fruitfully is aggravating work. Looking at the table, I suspect that many wealthy people are in the same position.

16. If you look at the table and think, “Wow, there are so many wealthy people available to fund redistribution,” you’re not wrong. But gerontocratic policies are one of the main reasons why there’s so much inequality in the first place.

17. Worried that if you means-test Social Security, you’ll reduce support for the whole system? We should be so lucky. Our current system wastes trillions of taxpayer dollars based on paranoid fears that some elderly American will end up eating cat food. This dysfunctional system can, should, and must be deeply undermined.

18. If you’re still complaining about your economic suffering when your net worth is several hundred thousand dollars, your problem is not economic, but psychological. You’re rich, but neurotic. Once you accept this ugly realization, you can start on the hard but rewarding work of learning to appreciate your awesome good fortune.

19. What’s the most negative possible take on American net worth numbers? Probably, “10 percent of Americans are obscenely rich, and most don’t make more than a token effort to share their good fortune with others.”

20. What’s the most positive possible take on American net worth numbers? Probably: “25% are unbelievably rich, another 35% are pretty rich, and almost everyone in the remaining 40% has — or at least once had — the opportunity to join them via steady work and savings.”

1. Literal free will. It is metaphysically possible for people to do more than one thing, holding constant the state of the universe. I am well aware of all the incredulity this engenders, but I observe my free will via introspection in every waking moment, and if you can dismiss my constant observation with “That’s just an illusion,” you could just as easily dismiss all observation as illusion.

2. Widespread overestimation of constraints relative to preferences. People are quick to say, “He can’t do X” when the correct story is obviously, “He doesn’t want to do X.” I can’t fly to the moon by flapping my arms, but I can refrain from drinking alcohol, eating 4000 calories a day, and much more.

3. Most humans are deeply conformist. Though this was probably functional in the ancestral environment, in a modern anonymous society, this creates immense opportunities for thoughtful nonconformists.

Nevertheless, reading Hall’s book starkly reminded me of the dangers of high agency. After being a high-profile lawyer and a professional poker player, she spent three years as a heavy drug abuser. She sees her drug addiction as a failure to use her agency. From the intro:

I consider the state of addiction to be the opposite of agency. Agency entails the ability to recognize all the degrees of freedom one has. Addiction strips them away, reduces life to one option, and subordinates everything else in service of making sure that option is selected over and over again. To some extent, you can think of addiction and agency as two sets of labels on the same dial, like hot and cold on a tap. Addiction is automaticity. Agency is autonomy.

For three years, I became a prisoner in my own life.

Or not. Hall repeatedly talks about the lame excuses people make for failing to do good things. I submit she should apply exactly the same skepticism to excuses people make for doing bad things. “I’m a prisoner in my own life” is wrong for lawyers who don’t like their job — and it’s wrong for drug abusers.

Imagine you see a heroin abuser shooting up on the street. You shudder, and say, “I could never do that.” But sure you could. Need help getting started? Most of the techniques Hall teaches apply. Thus, she tells readers to “Stop living in movie logic.” You don’t need the story to lead you into drug abuse. You Can Just Do Things. Good Things. Bad Things. Feel the power — and remember that with great power comes great responsibility.

I’m tempted to think that it’s primarily low IQ people who will use high agency badly. But Hall’s obviously high IQ, she chose three years of self-destruction, and though she’s an outlier, she’s not that extreme of an outlier. The main segment of the population I’d really trust with maximum agency is just people very low in Neuroticism.

This big reservation aside, Hall has a lot of pretty good advice. My favorites:

• “Be willing to look stupid.” We’re in a highly anonymous society. Hardly anyone will notice, so the reputational risk is much lower than your emotions tell you.

• “Get out of your lane.” Or to put it my way, “If you’re curious, experimentally enter a new lane and see if it works for you” and “Look like you’re supposed to be there.” No one ever told me a professor could become a graphic novelist. I just started making storyboards and ten years later, I was a graphic novelist.

• “Court rejection.” That’s how Hall phrases it. The way I put it is, “Everyone is bad at everything at first” plus “Practice makes better.” So getting rejected at something new is part of the process of improving — and part of the process of finding out how quickly you’ll improve.

• “Increase your surface area for luck” (as well as “Host events”). I have lots of amazing friends in large part because I go out of my way to meet people who might be amazing.

I also loved her advice for “the opposite of casual dating.” Not for everyone, but You Can Just Do This:

We started the relationship with severely incompatible communication styles and very different requirements in terms of personal space. Moreover, we were both shaken from recent breakups, and we lived in different countries!

Had we approached our relationship in the style of “casual dating” that’s popular these days, I don’t think we would have made it. Instead, we jumped in with both feet. Our first date was him moving in for a week, and our second was me bringing him along to a professional conference abroad. We got engaged within a couple of months, and married within a year.

Today, we’re one of those annoying couples that glow with love and affection. But we had to dig deep to get there. I can pinpoint several moments where I’m pretty sure we would’ve broken up if we hadn’t erected the “barrier to exit” of marriage.

“Wow, you’re great. Want to move in with me for a week?” would rarely work, but it’s a great icebreaker. And after you get rejected, you definitely try, “Well, would you at least go on a date with me Friday?” If that doesn’t get a laugh, you don’t want to be with that person anyway.

I’m happy to talk about the three books I have coming out over the next year. In chronological order, the 15th-anniversary edition of Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids (Hachette), Unbeatable: The Brutally Honest Case for Free Markets (University of Chicago), and — with Don Boudreaux and Zach Weinersmith — Blockade: The Science and Ethics of Trade (Cato). But I’ve also got plenty to say about the future of academia, economic freedom under National Socialism, Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, apostasy, or anything else I’ve blogged on.

Or we can just talk about games, music, movies, and travel. I recently discovered this 1990 dystopian high school movie and laughed almost until I cried.

Renters, to be fair, don’t really suffer on balance. They get compensated for the noise and traffic with lower rent. Local workers, too, receive extra pay to compensate them for their suffering. The main victims of the externalities, then, are property owners. Living right next to an airport typically depresses their property values by 5-15%, a major hit to their net worth.

On reflection, however, these NIMBY complaints miss almost all of the externalities of airports! Imagine what would happen to property values in a major city if its sole airport closed. Imagine what would happen to property values in a mega-city if all of its airports closed. A rough estimate is that property values for the entire city would fall by about 4%, with further harm on overall economic activity. Even though gainers rarely show up at land-use meetings, the externalities of airports for most people are positive. And since there are far more who gain than lose, the net externalities of airports are positive as well.

Far from being a thoughtful Pigovian response to negative externalities, then, regulation that limits airport construction and expansion is an impulsive demagogic response to positive externalities. On balance, laissez-faire would be far better than the status quo.

What about the externalities of immigration? Are they positive or negative? For high-skilled immigrants, it’s a no-brainer. They raise property values in their local neighborhoods, and they raise property values overall. But for low-skilled immigrants — or low-skilled domestic migrants for that matter — the question is more complicated. If a lot of poor people move into your neighborhood, you can definitely imagine that property values will go down. Garett Jones raised this issue in our UATX debate last May, favorably referencing Sá (2015).

Like airports, however, there is a big difference between local externalities, which might well be negative, and net externalities, which are still likely to be positive. Indeed, typical anti-immigration thinkers point to all of the studies finding that immigration raises housing prices — which they then bizarrely interpret as an argument against immigration rather than for housing deregulation. As Sá explains:

Studies of the impact of immigration on house prices and rents find different effects depending on the level of geographic disaggregation used.

Studies looking at broad regions tend to find a positive effect. Saiz (2007) looks at house prices and rents across metropolitan areas in the US. He finds that an immigration inflow equal to 1% of the local population is associated with an increase in average rents of about 1% and an increase in average prices of 2.9 to 3.4%. For Switzerland, Degen and Fischer (2009) find that an immigration inflow equal to 1% of a district’s population increases prices of single family homes by about 2.7%. For Spain, Gonzalez and Ortega (2013) use data at the province level and find that an increase in the foreign‐born population equal to 1% of the total population leads to an increase in house prices of 3.2%. In contrast to these studies, Akbari and Aydede (2012) and Stillman and Maré (2008) find that immigration has only small effects on house prices in Canada and New Zealand. These two studies use census data and thus examine long‐run effects. Because housing supply is likely to be more elastic in the long run, it is not surprising that immigration would have a smaller impact on house prices and rents between census dates than between consecutive years.

At the local level – looking at neighbourhoods within metropolitan areas in the US – Saiz and Wachter (2011), find a negative association between immigration and changes in house prices and rents. The authors suggest three possible explanations for this result. First, natives may have a preference for living with individuals of the same ethnic group and of higher socio‐economic status. Second, immigration may generate more crime or affect the quality of locally provided public goods (e.g. schools) which may experience overcrowding. Finally, immigration may affect the quality of the housing stock. The authors find that reported crime decreases in the housing units where immigrants move in and that there is no significant difference in quality between native and immigrant owner‐occupied properties. Moreover, they find that immigrant arrivals are associated with decreasing native populations, especially of non‐Hispanic whites. Also, the negative association between immigration and changes in housing values is stronger in neighbourhoods where immigrants are less educated and tend to be ethnic minorities. These results favour the first explanation: a preference by natives for living with individuals of the same ethnic group and of higher socio‐economic status.

The analogy between airports and immigration is admittedly imperfect. Living across the street from an airport is always bad. Living across the street from immigrants, in contrast, is often great. Half the people in my neighborhood are immigrants, and so is my wife, and only a hypersensitive bigot would find fault with them.

Indeed, even if the immigrants across the street are crime-prone, they’re a blessing for locals as long as they’re less crime prone than the people they displace.

But yes, some subsets of immigrants plausibly impose negative externalities on their local neighborhoods. The demagogic response is to reduce immigration, or at least low-skilled immigration. The thoughtful response, however, is laissez-faire. Wise policy is based on overall effects on everyone, not just the highly visible effects on highly vocal people. This is true for airports, and it’s true for immigrants.

P.S. Couldn’t the effects of low-skilled immigration be horrific enough to make the net externalities negative? Sure. The same goes for airports. If planes literally deafen large numbers of people, it would be better to close the airport. But basing policy on awful anecdotes is folly, and basing policy on morbid imagination is even greater folly.

P.P.S. ChatGPT reconsiders Sá in light of later evidence.

Applying familiar NIMBY logic, you might insist that streaming “hollowed me out.” Sure, kids can now enjoy unlimited music free of charge. But I’m $40,000 poorer. A victim of cruel progress. A clear-cut “loser.”

If I had zero interest in listening to any new-to-me music, that would be a fair, if self-pitying, verdict. Fortunately, I am not dead inside. I don’t want to keep listening to the same 4,000 albums for the rest of my life. I want to hear the albums whose release I overlooked. I want to hear the albums from before my time. And due to my neoteny, I want to hear new music. The music of the future. The music of the far future.

Thanks to streaming, I can now consume infinite new-to-me music gratis. Given my tastes, that means massive consumer surplus for multiple decades. In present value, that’s vastly more than $40,000. YouTube access to the complete Lebendige Vergangenheit catalog of vintage opera recordings alone is plausibly worth $5,000. Back in the day, I paid $13.99 for each of these premium imports. Now they’re all $0.

To repeat, the lesson is not that everyone in my position gains from streaming. If I were totally set in my ways, I really would be $40,000 poorer with no offsetting gain. The lesson, rather, is that NIMBY negativity is not the automatic response for everyone who experiences a capital loss. Most enjoy some upside with their downside. Some, like me, enjoy a net gain despite a large gross loss.

But the more general lesson is that this is not just a curiosity for music lovers. It fully applies to the archetypal NIMBY who opposes housing deregulation because he already has a valuable home!

Suppose you own a $1M home, then deregulation halves its value. Yes, someone who has zero desire to live in any other home suffers a $500k loss. But suppose they want to upgrade to a better home. Then they have an offsetting gain: The dream home that previously cost $2M now only costs $1M, so their consumer surplus potentially rises by a full $1M. And the same goes to a lesser extent if they were planning on downgrading: The home that cost $500k is now just $250k.

The offset is even larger if the homeowner was thinking of buying a second home. Indeed, since rental and sale markets are closely connected, the owner gets an offset every time he checks into a hotel or rents a vacation property.

For alleged “losers” who love their children, the potential upside is greater still. Let’s go back to my CD collection. Even if streaming didn’t benefit me personally, I have four children. I love them, so their surplus is also my surplus. The $40,000 capital value I lost was going to them anyway. So while each will now inherit $10k less, in exchange they get infinite free music for a lifetime. And so will their kids. The blessings of streaming shall be their patrimony.

The same holds for any homeowner who loves his children. Even if you’re in your “forever home,” even if you have no desire to travel, crashing housing prices have a massive upside: cheaper housing for your kids. Maybe even cheap enough to buy the house down the street. Yes, their inheritance will be less, but they’ll get to enjoy cheaper housing for a lifetime.

If all this sounds like wishful thinking, consider the polar case where housing deregulation drives the price of housing to zero. Yes, this wipes out the value of whatever housing you already own. But it also means that you can move to a palace anywhere on Earth for free. Indeed, it means that you could own a palace in every location you desire for free. Lose the value of your home, gain access to every home of your dreams. It’s not just a fair trade. It’s the deal of a lifetime.

Outside of the tech world, many people are unfamiliar with how advanced AI has become. Some still think “AI” is just a chat app that spits back text based on predicting the most likely next word. But the AI models have far more training beyond next-token prediction and the AI chat tools can spend time searching and thinking before providing an answer. AI tools can also do much more than just chat - they can develop software, analyze data and navigate web pages. Many of these capabilities require users to leave the regular chat interface and use separate tools, and these tools generally require payment as well.

Recently, Bryan Caplan asked ChatGPT to fact-check Paul Johnson’s book Modern Times. I figured I could do some additional fact-checking within Claude Cowork, a tool which has far more “agentic” capabilities than a regular chat. A chat app can provide a text response to your query, but an agentic tool can create its own plan, use tools, run iterative loops, execute code, and determine the next steps of action. For fact-checking, an agentic tool can carefully go through a book page-by-page. Claude Cowork is geared at non-programmers, so it has a more user-friendly UI than coding-focused tools and runs in a safer “sandboxed” environment by default (although it still has some risks).

I downloaded a PDF of the book from the Internet Archive; it was one of the top results when searching “modern times by paul johnson”. I generally support following copyright rules so I also purchased the book from Amazon, but I needed a DRM-free copy to pass to AI. I then put the PDF in Claude and prompted it:

Please go through the attached book (Modern Times) and evaluate each significant fact or claim for accuracy, and then collect all the errors.

Claude asked some clarifying questions and I told it to do a full sweep of the book and flag potential errors, and then go through the flagged errors afterwards to verify. Going through a 784-page book uses up a lot of tokens, and I’m only on the $20 monthly Claude plan so I hit my session limits a few times. When that happened, I either used additional credits I had in my account, or paused the analysis and resumed later when the limits reset. I was using Claude’s Opus 5 model for the analysis (on the “high” effort setting); it would have been cheaper to use the “Sonnet” model. When the analysis finished I noticed many of the errors were pretty minor so I asked Claude to highlight the important ones. It was also able to publish a nicely styled web page with all the information.

One limitation of the initial analysis is that Claude only reviewed a sample of the flagged claims; it would have taken much longer to review everything. I had it check a random sample of the rest, and it turned out that about 15% of the unverified flags were false positives, a higher rate than the first batch because those had been hand-picked as the clearest cases. This reduced the estimated number of true errors in the book from around 600 to around 500 errors. I asked it to add a “Corrections and calibration” section to the analysis page with this information.

One of the more interesting claims Claude made is that Johnson’s errors have a specific bias:

Where the victims are of the Left’s making, Johnson takes the high estimate (Cambodia, the Cultural Revolution, the Gulag, Soviet war dead); where they are of the Right’s, he takes the low one (Sétif, Philippeville, Chile, the Spanish repression, Franco’s 1947 referendum). That is not itself a factual error, but it shapes what a reader takes away, and it is documented in Part Two.

That’s a claim about an overall pattern rather than a specific fact. To verify this, you’d need to compare Johnson’s numbers to the published estimates, and also investigate whether there’s any bias in the published estimates themselves. More generally, AI is good at checking facts, but can’t be relied on to the same extent for more complex questions and judgment calls.

ChatGPT was more limited in the analysis of the book it did for Bryan, since he was using the chat app, not “ChatGPT Work”. It didn’t use a full agentic loop, so it couldn’t be as thorough in checking for errors or in carefully going over its own findings. For example, one of the top errors it highlighted was:

Johnson says Pentagon Papers participants could not be jailed in America because the press enjoyed constitutional privileges “under the Fourth Amendment.” The press clause is of course in the First Amendment.

Claude pointed out that Johnson actually wrote “First Amendment” on page 651, and the phrase “Fourth Amendment” doesn’t appear anywhere in my 1991 edition of the book (both the PDF and the Kindle version). It seems likely that ChatGPT was misled by an online comment about the text, perhaps a different edition of the book had this mistake. However ChatGPT said it was checking the 1991 edition of the book but wasn’t able to notice this discrepancy, nor did it give any page numbers for any of the mistakes it claimed. This demonstrates the limitations of a chat tool for this kind of task.

It’s also interesting to compare the error rate in Johnson’s book with the error rates in other books. I asked Claude to fact-check A Short History of the World by H.G. Wells, since it’s out of copyright and easy to find a good-quality PDF online. I focused on volume 3, which covers the French Revolution to 1919. In this case the text was small enough that Claude could review all the flagged factual claims. The error rate in this book was over 2x the error rate in Modern Times, even when only counting facts that were known at the time the book was published. However the Wells book has a higher density of facts and Claude was able to check it more closely. The full analysis can be seen here.

Ideally, one should develop consistent standards for this fact-checking so that people can review many different books in a neutral manner. To help with this, I used Claude to create a Claude Skill so any book could be analyzed with a similar approach, and I published it on Github. This can be installed in Claude Code or Claude Cowork and can be modified as needed.

As sophisticated as this analysis was, it still had many limitations. Claude only spot-checked the book’s footnotes rather than working through them systematically, and it doesn’t have access to most of the books cited. It also made mistakes of its own - 9 of the initially flagged errors in Modern Times had to be withdrawn. Modern agentic AI has a lower error rate than earlier versions of AI, since it can look up more information and double check its claims, but it still makes mistakes. When an AI mentions something you’re unsure about, ask it to confirm a specific fact and it will check more closely. To further improve the fact checking process, one could develop a more sophisticated pipeline where every claim in a book is categorized, the sources are checked, one AI does an initial analysis on everything, and then another AI automatically does a second pass. And then run this tool on every book. And while we’re at it, maybe run it on everything published anywhere…

Ariel Krakowski is a software engineer at Google, but the opinions expressed here are his own. You can follow him on Substack at zappable.com or subscribe to his podcast on Spotify or YouTube.