Weekend Links 03/01/2025
1) Last Wednesday, Jeff Bezos released publicly a note he had sent to employees of The Washington Post, announcing an overhaul of the paper's opinion pages. They would henceforth "be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets." Negative reactions came from all directions. People i
n the progressive camp think Bezos is catering to Trump, but there's no way Trump and his economic advisors will like a "classical liberal" view on tariffs, exploding deficits, industrial policy, and arbitrary pressure on businesses.
Defending his action, Ryan Bourne and Sophia Bagley note, "Bezos is correct that most economics commentary today is anti-free market. Other than railing against Trump and his agenda, the surest way for a conservative or libertarian to get published in The Financial Times, The New York Times, or The Washington Post is to moan about free-market policies and call for government intervention." Perhaps this will level the playing field a bit.
Trump may not be able to reliably depend on SCOTUS to validate his executive actions, even with its conservative majority. There are differences among them on the question of the extent of constitutionally legitimate presidential power.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/02/26/supreme-court-conservative-trump-agenda-00206066
2) Scott Sumner says, "I see a lot of discussion about what the government should do with the $1 trillion dollars that DOGE intends to save by reducing wasteful government spending. In fact, this is not a meaningful question, as even in the unlikely scenario where DOGE achieves $1 trillion in saving, there would be no money available to disburse." He ends by saying that the idea of sending "DOGE checks" to taxpayers shows "how deeply unserious our politics has become."
https://www.econlib.org/what-money/
Alan Auerbach and William Gale, who for a long time have been leading analysts of U.S. fiscal policy, assess the outlook for spending, taxes, deficits, and debt, as we look forward from the beginning of Trump 2.0. Click to download the full report.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-fiscal-outlook-at-the-beginning-of-the-new-administration/
3) Three Brookings economists use their "regulatory tracker" to classify Trump's deregulation initiatives into four buckets and describe each in great detail, thereby forecasting what the regulatory battle will look like.
4) Columbia linguistics professor John McWhorter offers a spirited defense of NYC's congestion pricing scheme, which has significantly reduced traffic in Manhattan (I can verify that, finding it much easier and safer to cross streets as a pedestrian) and has raised lots of money for upgrading the subway system. Hopefully, NY officials and the courts can hold off Trump's unwarranted and malicious attempt to scuttle the program.
5) Daniel Drezner wonders whether this is finally the time that Europe gets its act together and moves toward true "strategic autonomy" from the U.S., now a very unreliable ally. But Dan can't shake "a strong sense of déjà vu." Europe has made noises in that direction several times before. Will this time be different?
6) This is great fun. Richard Dawkins, the eminent evolutionary biologist, asks ChatGPT whether it is conscious.
7) Another discovery on Substack (at least for me; he's been posting for three years) is Jonathon Sine, who presents an impressively cogent explanation of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of Putin's Russia. Was it a "tale of botched reform" or a result of "entrenched bureaucracy?" There are lessons here for both China and the U.S.
8) Bryan Caplan lends his substack to young podcaster Theo Jaffee, who found that the putative "worst neighborhood in Japan," Kamagasaki (in Osaka), "was significantly nicer than not just the Tenderloin (San Francisco), but a good chunk of urban neighborhoods in the US."
