Year: 2022

What happened to EconTwitter?

mdmakowsky1 Comment

EconTwitter might be dead. Might be. Maybe. Regardless of it’s status, I thought it would be interesting to think about what EconTwitter was, what happened to it, and where (if anywhere) it might be going.

https://twitter.com/ben_golub/status/1604347951530360832?s=20&t=qkyE3L6Z6ITEdwoCyKA5pA

What was/is EconTwitter?

EconTwitter was a sub-network of (mostly) economists, policy professionals, and journalists that produced an unusually tidy amount of useful content and mutual support. The culture was largely positive, even amidst the occasional spats and political aggression. Research was promoted and discussed, expertise valued (especially in applied metrics), and policy ramifications argued over. The discourse was, by both the standards of Twitter and economics, broadly civil. Perhaps most importantly, voices often marginalized in more traditional academics institution attained prominence, most notably women and faculty in less famous institutions. Wit could carry you a long way, being helpful farther still.

What happened?

Elon happened is too simple of an answer, but it’s not a trivial component. I mean, Donald Trump used to have overwhelming gravity on the site, but EconTwitter persisted nonetheless. The negative impact of Elon Musk’s attempts to curtail criticism from journalists, failed changes to verification, and general ability to troll his way into being the main character of seemingly every Twitter sub-network all had negative effects on the discourse everywhere, but it seemed to hit EconTwitter particularly hard. Why? To get into this without careening off into a 6,000 word thinkpiece, let’s revisit the three sub-groups that make up the consituents of any collective action: privleged, intermediate, and latent members.

Privleged members are those who benefit so much from the public good being collectively produced that they would independently produce the good absent contribution from any other member types. For EconTwitter, you can imagine the 15-20 people with sufficient followings or fame that they can run profitable substacks or blogs, produce leading textbooks, or write a regular column for a major publication. These are the people with the most gravity on EconTwitter, who create the most within-cluster connections. Were any of us more than two degrees from Paul Krugman?

Privleged members could probably produce a club good that re-produces a lot of the EconTwitter discourse, but it would be unlikely to ever have the same reach outside of the academic and wonk bubble. The reach of EconTwitter only happened because of intermediate members, without whom the net benefit of the collective good meaningfully declines, but standard collective action obstacles would typically undermine the public good in question. These are the people who produced the research grist for EconTwitter mill, connected it to other clusters of journalists and policy influencers outside of the economist core, and consistently stirred the conversational pot.

Finally, there were the latent members, those whose contributions were negligible or even negative to the collective good. What EconTwitter seemed to be especially good at was keeping these people safely on the periphery, rarely taking the bait from trolls and “reply-guys”. There were a handful of economists who attracted thousands of followers from outside of EconTwitter simply by trolling and generally being a jerk, making wild accusations or throwing political wildfire seemingly at random, but EconTwitter was pretty good at rendering them irrelevant at best, annoying at worst.

So what happened? If we think of EconTwitter as a collective network good, the damage done to Twitter by Elon seemed to hit the intermediate members of EconTwitter especially hard. Journalists saw their peers attacked and became both less attached to the site and, when there, less concerned with content produced by non-journalists or less directly relevant to journalism as a protected enterprise. People promoting their newest research felt less urgency to take the conversation to Twitter. Perhaps most importantly, the urbane wits that ignited and maintained our conversations simply found less joy in holding a conversation on a platform being actively debased by it’s new owner. Less importantly, but perhaps non-trivially, those net-negative latent members became more prominent in threads, choking off conversations before they could get started. EconTwitter became less fun, a fact that left privleged member contributions largely unchanged, but dipped intermediate contributions sufficiently that the broader network good suffered to the point of flirting with a line it long ago surpassed: critical mass. It was worth taking time out of your day to curate a thread explaining your research or walk a stranger through the vagaries of standard error clustering because you knew there was an audience ready to both pay it back (by further sharing your work) and pay it forward (by helping the next person with a useful question).

The conversation slowed down just enough, combined with the usual holiday lull, that EconTwitter fell to the back of our minds. Some of the most frustrated tried to move to Mastodon, taking their contributions with them, pushing EconTwitter further below the critical mass threshold while simultanesouly producing nowhere near a criticial mass of discourse at Mastodon. Every day below the critical mass is another day of EconTwitter decay, making a revival that much harder save a massive shift in the platform.

What’s next?

I see a couple possibilities.

  1. Nothing. EconTwitter heals.
  2. Nothing. EconTwitter dies.
  3. Re-creation on a private, invite-only server run by the NBER or the AEA. I think this would be an enormous failure because the goods produced would be almost entirely redundant with the club goods already produced. Re-creating an exclusive club good in the current climate would also be fraught with a liability risk that these institutions would be wise to avoid.
  4. A moderated sub-Reddit or Discord. This would be potentially extremely useful, but success would come down to the quality and commitment of what would have to be nearly full-time moderators, otherwise risking being hijacked by the troll legions on the site-that-shall-not-be-named (no, I’m not going to link to it).
  5. A collaboration of previously privleged substack writers, bloggers, and columnists to start a Discord or Mastodon Server. This would do the most to recreate the economic discourse. It would be fabulous for metrics conversations and other technical concerns. It would be good for getting feedback on working papers. But could it ever have the same reach to policy influencers and the lay public?

It’s the last one I find most intriguing. That attempt to collectively create a mini-Twitter on Mastodon. The interface is clunkier, the server less reliable, a critical mass discouragingly far in the distance. And yet.

I can’t help but think that if we built it they would come. If a converstaion amongst academics and wonks were to start and persist for a couple years, then those beloved intermediate members, journalists, wonks, lay enthusiasts, meme geniuses, and, yes, even the joyful sh*tposters might find their way over. It sucks to have to start over, and maybe EconTwitter will recover, but if there is one thing I believe about society, it is this: once you’ve achieved proof of concept on a large-scale collective good, you should never give up on it, not matter how much water it’s taken on. These things are hard, but necessary for the broader social project. We made it work before, we can make it work begin.

You can find me on Mastodon at: https://econtwitter.net/@mikemakowsky I’m going to try to start contributing to the conversation there while not entirely abandoning Twitter quite yet.

(Thanks to Paul-Goldsmith Pinkham for administering the Mastodon server!)

Empirical Papers for Undergraduate Statistics Students

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

Once undergraduates have learned the basics of interpreting regression results, we would like to introduce them to the world of economics research papers. Reading these papers will help reinforce the statistical concepts, and also we want them to get access to the insights in the literature.

Many empirical papers in economics are too long or too difficult to assign to undergraduates, especially if the course is focused more on analytics than economics specifically. Here I provide materials and instructions for teaching two published econ articles to undergraduates. Assume the students have learned the basics of interpreting a regression model (perhaps from a course textbook) but have had few opportunities to apply theses skills or engage in scientific literature.

“The Effects of Attendance on Student Learning in Principles of Economics” is only 4 pages long! Students do not need to read past page 7 of “My Reference Point, Not Yours” to answer the reading guide questions. So, these readings can be assigned outside of class, but I did some of the reading during our class period.

Handing out printed copies of at least one of the papers and my guided questions can make a good classroom activity. If students do not have experience reading tables of regression results, it can be useful to do it together in person.

The questions in the reading guide help students to identify the main variables and hypotheses. Then, students are asked to pull specific results from the tables in the papers. You can customize this list of questions by deleting lines if you do not want to discuss issues like non-linear effects or the null hypothesis.

I provide links below. First is the reading guide with about 30 short-answer questions about the two articles.

  1. Link to download the reading guide that goes with both papers, starting with the shorter one.
readingguideempiricalpapersDownload link for the reading guide questions (Word doc)

2. This is a web link to download the Effects of Attendance paper. (4 pages long and the topic is relatable to undergraduates)

3. Two web sources for “My Reference Point, Not Yours” (15 pages in total in the JEBO manuscript, but students do not need to read past page 7 for this exercise, and they can skip the Literature Review section)

JEBO link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167268120300299

SSRN working paper link: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3434182

AI Can’t Cure a Flaccid Mind

Zachary Bartsch5 Comments

Many of my classes consist of a large writing component. I’ve designed the courses so that most students write the best paper that they’ll ever write in their life. Recently, I had reason to believe that a student was using AI or a paid service to write their paper. I couldn’t find conclusive evidence that they didn’t write it, but it ended up not mattering much in the end.

Continue reading →

Farewell to the First Normal Semester in 3 Years

James Bailey1 Comment

Today as I gave my last final and took my kids to a huge school party, it struck me that things are finally back to something like 2019 levels of normality.

2020 was a lost cause, of course. I had high hopes for 2021 that vaccines would immediately get us back to normal. They did get my school back to fully in-person by Fall 2021, but not really back to normal, partly thanks to the variants. My students were out sick more than normal, and I was out watching my sick kids more than normal, as every cold meant they would be home until the school was sure it wasn’t Covid. Toward the end of the Spring 2022 semester worries were subsiding, and my state was pretty much fully re-opened, but things still weren’t really back to normal. Student attendance and effort were still way below normal, partly from the lingering effects of Covid, and partly from celebrating its end- partying to make up for lost time (and cheering on a great basketball team).

Fall 2022 finally felt like a basically normal semester. I still see the occasional mask, still hear from the occasional student out with Covid, and still have one kid missing 2 school days with every cough (policies stricter than 2019, but much relaxed from the days when both kids were at schools that could have them miss 5+ days with every non-Covid cough). Overall though student attendance and effort are back to what seem like normal levels. Up to Spring 22 I’d have students just disappear for a few weeks, not in class, not answering e-mails about why they weren’t showing up or completing work, needing lots of help to get on track once they finally reappeared. This Fall that didn’t happen; in my Senior Capstone everyone turned in a quality paper basically on-time and without me having to chase anyone down for it. Also, everyone just seemed happier now that their stress levels are back down to the baseline for college students.

This semester was nothing special- and that was beautiful.

Inflation-Adjusted Wages Have Been Rising Since June 2022

Jeremy Horpedahl1 Comment

Back in May 2022, I wrote about the very bad picture for inflation-adjusted wages in the US. While they were still slightly above pre-pandemic levels, wages had been falling consistently since the beginning of 2021.

But since then, we’ve got some better news. The chart below shows the data (note: I’m using wages for private production and non-supervisory workers here, rather than for all private workers in the May post).

While the overall inflation picture still looks bad, with 7.1% annual inflation in the latest report, we also see that in the past 5 months wage growth has exceeded CPI growth. It’s also been true compared with the PCE price index for the past 4 available months (November PCE data won’t be available until next Friday). Inflation has cooled slightly in the past few months, while wages have continued to grow.

This all means that real (inflation-adjusted) average wages in the US have been rising consistently since June 2022. Finally, some good news!

Reckless Management Led to BlockFi Crypto Bankruptcy

Scott Buchanan2 Comments

Since my nontrivial deposits at the cryptocurrency lending firm BlockFi have been blocked (maybe forever) from withdrawal, I keep an eye on news from that front. My main source of information has been missives from BlockFi itself, in which management portrays itself as being very careful with customer funds; it was only the shocking, unforeseeable collapse of the FTX exchange that forced the otherwise sober and responsible BlockFi into its recent bankruptcy. I have believed that view of things, since that is all I knew.

However, Emily Mason at Forbes has poked around behind the scenes, including finding insiders willing to talk (off the record) about less-savory doings within BlockFi. The title of her recent article, BlockFi Employees Warned Of Credit Risks, But Say Executives Dismissed Them, pretty much says it all. The article starts out:

In its bankruptcy filing last week, New Jersey-based BlockFi attempted to paint itself as a responsible lender hit by plummeting crypto prices and the collapse of crypto brokerage FTX and its affiliated trading firm, Alameda.

That is the view I have held up till now. However, Mason then goes on to note:

 But a closer look at the company’s history reveals that its vulnerabilities likely began much earlier with missteps in risk management, including loosened lending standards, a highly concentrated pool of borrowers and unsustainable trading activity.

To keep this blog post short, I will just paste in a few excerpts where she fleshes out her case:

While the company regularly touted a sophisticated risk management team, current and former employees indicate in interviews that risk professionals were dismissed by executives preoccupied with delivering growth to investors. As early as 2020, employees were discouraged from describing risks in written internal communications to avoid liability, a former employee states.

Ouch. Not a good sign.

Until August 2021, BlockFi advertised that loans were typically over-collateralized. But large potential borrowers were often unwilling to meet those requirements, a cease and desist order brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission against BlockFi in February states. The availability of uncollateralized capital from competing companies like Voyager created stiff competition in the lending field.

Under pressure to continue growing and delivering yields, BlockFi began lending to these parties with less collateral than publicly stated without informing customers on the amount of risk involved with interest accounts, according to the SEC order which resulted in a $100 million fine for the company. As a result, BlockFi paused access to its interest accounts in the U.S.

Wait, that is MY money they were messing with. Now I am really annoyed.

In addition to lowering its collateral requirements, BlockFi’s due diligence process had flaws, former borrowers say. Available credit for borrowers was decided based on their assets, but BlockFi and other lenders failed to investigate both the size and quality of potential borrowers’ holdings. Like Voyager and other crypto lenders, BlockFi accepted unaudited balance sheets from hedge funds and proprietary trading firms former borrowers say, leaving room for manipulation on the borrower side.

In the due diligence process, lenders like BlockFi and Voyager did not examine whether borrowers’ balance sheet assets were denominated in dollars or less liquid tokens like FTX-issued FTT.

… The revelation that Alameda’s balance sheet was mostly FTT tokens was the news that set off the unraveling of both Alameda and FTX and triggered contagion effects across the industry. In early November, Alameda defaulted on $680 million in loan obligations to BlockFi, according to the bankruptcy filing.

Some BlockFi employees reportedly warned of the shakiness of the parties to whom clients’ finds were being loaned. Management dismissed these concerns because the loans were “collateralized”,  but as noted above, the extent of that collateral was *not* what we clients were told:

… An internal team at BlockFi also raised concerns that the borrower pool was too concentrated among a pool of crypto whales, including mega hedge funds Three Arrows Capital and Alameda, another former employee states. Management responded that the loans were collateralized, according to the employee.

This is a very common scenario in finance: In search of profits, management  cuts corners and takes more risks with client funds than they were telling the clients. Maybe Sam Bankman-Fried will up with cell-mates from BlockFi.

Because BlockFi survived the Luna/Terra collapse some months ago and because I believed the steady stream of reassuring pronouncements from BlockFi management, I only withdrew a third of my funds back in the summer. But as it turns out, that withdrawal was apparently bankrolled by a big loan to BlockFi from Bankman-Fried’s FTX; but FTX is now caput.  So the odds of my ever seeing the rest of my funds are slim indeed:

In BlockFi’s bankruptcy filing and in public statements made by its CEO, Zac Prince, the company points to its survival through the collapse of the Terra/Luna ecosystem and subsequent shuttering of Three Arrows Capital as evidence of strong management. But that endurance four months ago was made possible through a $400 million credit line from now-defunct FTX, which allowed the firm to meet panicked withdrawal requests from depositors. When FTX folded in early November, BlockFi lost its lending back stop and could no longer meet fresh waves of withdrawal requests.

One lesson learned: If there is a reasonable chance of a panic, it can pay to be the first to panic, not the last.

Present your work earlier

mdmakowsky2 Comments

I presented some new research three times in the last six weeks. There’s nothing new about that save the fact that we haven’t finished writing the paper. I can’t overstate how much I’ve learned about what our paper is and, more importantly, what it isn’t.

I can’t speak for you, fellow writer/scholar/waffle enthusiast, but I have a tendency to lose track of what we’ve actually, specifically, learned from the research in question when it comes time to present the research to the world. Instead, I get wrapped up in why we started the project in question. A haze of almost scholarly nostalgia can obscure the communicating of the contribution being made.

Often, for me, research is motivated by a discomfort I feel with how a question is being asked or answered in the literature, or often, not being asked at all. That sort of righteous indignation is great for fueling the sense of self-importance necessary for starting a 3-5 year research project, but it can be inhibitive to communicating the actual contribution produced by those years of work.

Sure there were the standard identification quibbles from audiences. And yes, I felt the groping reach of arms trying to pull me into their more narrowly siloed research areas. This isn’t labor, it’s IO. It’s not monopsony, it’s imperfect competition. Why don’t you talk more about policy? The history? That’s useful, it will help you refine your analysis and keep it up to date, but it’s not the kind of commentary that can fundamentally change how you write a paper.

What I’ve been able to observe, through these early presentations absent a draft, is the conversation the audience wants to have. Where there minds naturally take them without the structured guidance of a written draft. What our findings can and cannot convince them of.

What I’m learning isn’t how to convince them of the grand thesis that initially motivated the work. What I’m learning is the conversation our work can generate and, within that conversation how I can persuade them to take just a few steps down a path I want to see explored in the field going forward.

Present your work early. You’ll be amazed how much the audience can teach you about a paper you haven’t written yet.

Slow Adjustment in Tech Labor for CGO Research

Joy Buchanan2 Comments

The CGO published a policy paper I wrote with Henry Kronk.

The Slow Adjustment in Tech Labor: Why Do High-Paying Tech Jobs Go Unfilled?

Executive Summary

The United States technology industry continues to struggle to recruit new talent. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people employed in technology is not increasing quickly. 

Tech jobs pay well and don’t have the drawbacks of some other in-demand jobs, such as the travel schedule of a truck driver or the physically taxing labor required in oil fields.

Tech jobs are sometimes touted as a guarantee of having a comfortable and rewarding career, but the reality is not that simple.

Economics suggests that high wages would eliminate labor shortages, but that’s not the case in tech work. Why?

In this paper, authors Joy Buchanan and Henry Kronk propose a set of factors that have been overlooked and apply broadly to the tech sector. 

Individuals with high-status tech jobs report burnout, anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues at higher rates than the general population. They also have to deal with the constant threat of becoming obsolete. Because technology changes so quickly, they must constantly work to update their skills in order to remain competitive.  

The authors offer several recommendations for tech companies, educators, and policymakers:

  • Political and community leaders can provide more accurate messaging such as communicating clearer expectations about the difficulties of entering the tech workforce. 
  • The tech industry could benefit from improvements in computer education. The authors cite a need for more pre-college exposure to computer occupations as well as a need to add communication skills to computer science curriculums.
  • Teachers, parents, and tech companies can all find ways to inform young people at an age-appropriate level about opportunities. Computer science is abstract and hard to understand. Young people who have some exposure to computer science through a class or camp are more likely to become CS majors in college. 
  • Company leaders can improve their recruitment and development strategies to reflect the labor market realities including paying enough to compensate employees for the mental challenges of demanding technical work and alleviating their own talent shortages by investing in training and education. 
  • Tech companies may be able to attract more women and minorities by improving their scheduling and management practices.

Henry and I examined public data and the existing literature to get a better understanding of the current state of knowledge on this issue. I hope our paper can be helpful, however we partly just highlight how many questions still exist about tech and talent.

My recent paper in Labour Economics, Willingness to be Paid: Who Trains for Tech Jobs?, was designed to add new data to address these questions.

Inflation, Information, & Logic

Zachary BartschLeave a comment

Most economists know that the CPI is overestimated and therefore prefer the PCE price index. However, monthly CPI data is consistently released before PCE data for a given month. One would think that they move in the same direction and be highly correlated. Indeed, in the past five years, the correlation is 0.96. Therefore, it stands to reason that the there is less new relevant information on the PCE release dates than on the CPI release dates. Yes, CPI is biased, but it still contains some information about prices and it is known well prior to the more accurate PCE numbers.

Supply and Demand react to new information. Sometimes the new information changes our expectations about the future, and other times we learn that our beliefs about goods and assets were previously not quite right. So, with new relevant information comes new prices as people update their beliefs and expectations.

Let’s get financial.

Continue reading →

Sympathy for the Sauds

James Bailey1 Comment

I’ve always been confused by the US alliance with Saudi Arabia. Its a state with values abhorrent to many Americans, and it seems like we don’t get much practical value out of the alliance.

This essay on Saudi history, politics, and economics by Matt Lakeman makes the situation more comprehensible. I still don’t know that I want the alliance, but I can now see how so many US presidents have continued with it without necessarily being stupid, crazy, or corrupt. In short, they think that most of the realistic alternatives are worse. Some highlights:

Before starting this research, I had the same perception as Wood that the Saudi economy is essentially what he calls a “petrol-rentier state.” Basically, Saudi Arabia sits on top of a giant ocean of easily-accessed oil which they suck out of the ground and sell at enormous profit to prop up the rest of their extremely inefficient economy and buy the loyalty of their own people and foreign powers. Saudi Arabia is the wealthiest large state in the Middle East today by sheer virtue of geographic luck rather than any innovation or business acumen on the part of its people.

And after doing my research, all of the above is… basically true.

But all of that should also be true of Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Libya, and a few other countries which are also situated on giant oceans of oil but are far poorer than Saudi Arabia.

Economically, Saudi Arabia deserves little credit for its success. Politically, Saudi Arabia deserves a tremendous amount of credit for enabling its economic success. 

Dealing with the resource curse is always challenging, and foreign ownership is an additional challenge. How did they manage it?

the Sauds struck a clever balance between being too aggressive and too placating of the foreigners operating their oil wells. If the Saudi state had been aggressive and tried to nationalize its oil quickly, Saudi Arabia could have ended up becoming another Venezuela or Iran with lots of external political pressure from hostile Western countries and a low-efficiency oil industry. But if they had nationalized too late, they would have ended up like a lot of African nations who have all their natural wealth siphoned away by foreigners.

Instead, the Sauds executed a patient, and most importantly, amicable assertion of power over Aramco, which did not become fully owned by Saudis until 1974. At the very start of Aramco, the company was entirely owned and operated by Americans aside from menial labor. However, the Saudi government inserted a clause into their contract with the corporation requiring the American oil men to train Saudi citizens for management and engineering jobs. The Americans held up their end of the bargain, and over time, more and more Saudis took over management and technical positions.

In addition to carefully negotiating the balance of power with various foreigners, the Sauds have done so with the religious establishment:

Though the monarch has absolute power, his authority is at least in part derived from Saudi Arabia’s Islamic religious establishment. The ulema (a group of the highest-ranking clerics) is officially integrated into the government, and plays an important role in legal matters. However, the religious establishment has slowly been marginalized by the monarchy over the last few decades, and has possibly been subjugated entirely since the reform era began five years ago.

Winning freedom of action has been a long road with many setbacks:

[King] Abdulaziz constantly had to reassure enraged Wahhabi clerics that he wasn’t selling out the Arab homeland to treacherous infidels. IIRC, it was some time in the 1920s that Abdulaziz had to publicly smash a telegraph to prove to the clerics that he wasn’t bewitched by infidel technology.

In late 1979, 400-500 extremist Sunni Saudis seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca (the holiest Islamic site on earth) and demanded the overthrow of the Saud dynasty in favor of a theocratic state meant to await an imminent apocalypse. They held on for two weeks while managing to fight off waves of Saudi police and military squads. Eventually, three French commandos flew to Mecca, converted to Islam in a hotel room, and led a successful assault to retake the Mosque. Over 100 men died on each side, with hundreds more wounded.

The Grand Mosque seizure was the final wake-up call for the Saud dynasty. Something drastic had to be done or their regime would likely be ground down under mounting internal and external pressure…. King Khalid led a social/religious/political reactionary revolution within Saudi Arabia to align with the Sunni extremists. Up until about four years ago, Saudi society was still gender segregated and enforced a largely literalist interpretation of Sharia, hence the array of bizarre and antiquated laws – gender segregation in public, requiring women to cover their faces, outlawing of non-Muslim religious buildings (there are a few Shia mosques), restrictions on foreign media, etc. Saudi Arabia was always conservative, but most of these draconian laws were only put into place in the 1980s. The Saud dynasty purposefully induced a reactionary legal regime and pulled Saudi Arabia further away from liberalism.

The charitable take on making an already oppressive regime even more oppressive is that the Sauds were trying to bend Saudi Arabia to the extremists so the country would not break. And by all accounts, it worked; the conservative Wahhabi clerics backed by the Saud dynasty placated a sizeable portion of the Sunni extremists inside and outside of Saudi Arabia, and they became a pool of support against the Shia and Baathists. Saudi Arabia was certainly made a worse country for its citizens, but that was the price to pay for averting civil war.

More recently, Crown Prince Salman has consolidated power to the point where he can make modernizing reforms that Wahhabis might have opposed, like allowing women to drive, allowing non-Muslim foreigners to to get tourist visas, allowing music concerts, et c. Lakeman obviously likes these reforms, but at the same time worries that the concentrated power that so far Salman has largely used to enact positive reforms could be abused going forward, and on a larger scale than murdering the occasional dissident.

Wood argues that a worst case scenario parallel to MBS is Syrian Dictator Bashar al-Assad. Like MBS, there were high hopes that Assad would be a liberal reformer when he took over Syria. After all, Assad had been living and working in the UK as an ophthalmologist with no political aspirations, and was known to be a fan of Phil Collins. He was called to the throne after the unexpected death of his older brother, and so the West hoped that this nerdy British doctor would bring upper-middle class liberal values to Syria. Instead, Assad became one of the worst dictators of the modern Middle East, probably second only to Saddam Hussein.

I recommend reading the whole thing, here I’m quoting relatively small parts of an article full of interesting detail on the history, economics, and politics of Saudi Arabia. There’s also a section on visiting:

The silver lining to Saudi Arabia’s lack of tourism is that there aren’t many tourist restrictions. I went to two ancient settlements and I found no guards, no gates, no notices at all. I walked in, around, and on top of 2,000 year old houses, and I honestly have no idea if I was allowed to.