Weekly Links (Midweek Edition) 01/15/2025
1) Starting with a set of articles on the L.A. fires: First, climate change is a reflexive go-to for many people, but climate scientist Patrick Brown explains that it's only a minor factor in the severity of the current disaster.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/la-wildfires-cause-california-risk
Brian Potter summarizes a number of excellent comments and includes a striking graph showing that "the overall, century-long trend suggests that most of the 20th century represented an unusually low amount of fire, and what we’re seeing now is a return to the “normal” levels of fire of the early 1900s."
If the fire level is not out of line with historical trends, maybe the problem, at least in part, comes from the fact that people have moved en masse to more vulnerable areas.
Contributing also to the severity of the fires have been failures in forest management.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/la-wildfires-forest-management-regulatory-reform
An additional concern is the supply and pricing of fire insurance. Sophia Bagley and Ryan Bourne, editors of The War on Prices, explain how regulatory restrictions -- and now "price-gouging" rules -- have kept the insurance market from functioning efficiently.
California has tried to fix the fire insurance market, but changes have been too little and too late.
https://reason.com/2025/01/13/californias-insurance-regulation-fixes-came-too-little-too-late/
2) Not everything, especially stock price movement, is about the Fed, says Scott Sumner. But the Fed does have the job of stabilizing, as much as is possible, NGDP growth fluctuations. A soft landing, says Scott, is still plausible but not certain.
https://www.econlib.org/its-all-about-the-fed/
3) How far away is practical quantum computing? Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, says twenty years. Here's the reaction of computer scientist Scott Aaronson.
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8567
James Pethokouks evaluates the pushback against an anticipated robot evolution, as Nvidia and other tech giants invest heavily in "physical AI."
https://www.aei.org/economics/pushback-against-an-emerging-robot-revolution/
4) Three business professors study aging leaders of family businesses who are reluctant to let go of the reins. Transferred to the political domain, it feels familiar.
5) Manmohan Singh, who died recently, was the chief architect of the process of economic reform that, in the 1990s, set the world's most populous country on a path to faster growth.
https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/2025/manmohan-singh-indias-quiet-reformer