David Neumark has an excellent article reviewing the extensive literature examining the effects of the minimum wage on, well, a little bit of everything. Sometimes we see improved outcomes, sometimes worse outcomes, often not much of anything. I’m not demeaning this literature to which I’ve myself helped make a modest contribution, but there does arise the concern that perhaps the fruit has begun to hang a bit too low. Which is to say that in a world of modern computing, where regressions can be run at approaching zero cost and policy changes are characterized by an at least a minimally sufficient level of exogeneity, there’s nothing stopping anyone from regressing any measurable outcome on the minimum wage. We’re still arguing about the minimum wage, but what exactly is it that we are learning?

I’m going to head this post off at the pass befores it veers into “back in my day economics used to be about the theory” territory. Yes, the ascendance of empirically-driven applied economics has led to theory to taking something of a backseat, at least in terms of the sheer volume of published research, but I don’t think that is what is going on with the minimum wage literature. Rather, I think its a story of supply and demand.

The minimum wage is an almost perfect issue for people to argue over. It’s not life or death, which keeps the temperature below “brick throwing” levels. The status quo always bears the possibility of change, making arguments policy salient. The absence of action is a meaningful option, particularly in a world with non-trivial inflation. It’s a quantifiable policy that affects incomes and employment directly, which means it’s sufficiently concrete for anyone to have an opinion on. Last, but certainly not least, it lends itself to binary opinion-affiliation in that you either think the minimum wage should be higher or you don’t.

From the point of view of researchers, this adds up to a policy for which there will be near endless research demand. To satisfy that demand your research should, preferably, give consumers a new reason to belief the minimum wage should or should not be higher. To do that a researcher need either i) give new and useful evidence as to how and how much the minimum wage affects earnings and employment, or ii) new and useful evidence that the minimum wage makes some other measurable outcome better or worse. When you consider that the cost of consuming new research is both low and constant, it’s fair to consider the demand to be perfectly elastic. Coupled with the increase in the supply of empirical research generated by reduced cost of computing noted earlier, we shouldn’t be surprised by an equilibrium where an ever-growing number of outcomes have been regressed on the minimum wage.

I don’t think this is anything to get worked up over, don’t see any first-order negative externalities. Most complaints about low-cost empirical research usually sound like academics pining for a time with higher barriers to entry, when you had to be “really good” to produce economic research. The assumption that the complainer is themselves, of course, “really good” always seems to remain unstated. Back to my earlier question, though: what are we learning?

If you’re genuinely curious about the minmum wage, read Neumark’s review. It’s characteristically excellent. Rather than recap, let me come out and say what I think I’ve learned from the reading a lot, but certainly not all, of the minimum wage literature. The minimum wage matters, it’s salient to people earnings, but not nearly as much as the volume of research or argument would suggest. The effects observed tend to be moderate, but labor markets are sufficiently local, heterogenous, and complex that the there remains the possibility of observing different results with different (but largely honest) analyses. This goes doubly so for observing any second-order effects beyond wages and employment, such as health, education, or crime. You are more likely to observed improved outcomes when changes are small, deleterious effects when changes are large.

Those are easy, largely riskless conclusions to share, so let me go a bit farther. The fact that we observe anything but trivial outcomes, positive or negative, is a stark reminder of the margins on which so many people are making decisions. Whether it’s earning a dollar more an hour or losing half a shift a week, it is telling that we see more criminal recidivism, more smoking, less teen-pregnancy, more maternal time with children, and a dozen other effects. It just doesn’t take that much to move the needle.

There is a constant cultural bombardment to value income and material goods less. Perhaps the lesson of a thousand and one minimum wage regressions is that many people aren’t experiencing the diminishing returns to income that popular advice would have you believe. For the young, less-educated, recently immigrated, or those burdened with the stigma of a criminal record, the income elasticity of human behavior remains very much intact. Labor policies matter, even if the minimum wage shouldn’t be quite so close to the top of the list.

I saw A24’s newest and most expensive film to date, Civil War. <<Spoilers incoming>>

A brief summary: the audience is dropped into the middle of a new US civil war as being documented by a group of journalists, our viewpoint centered around a veteran war photographer played by Kirsten Dunst and her (nearly) uninterrupted, first-ballot hall of fame 108 minute RBF. (Seriously, her face is perfection in this movie, I’ve never appreciated her more, absolutely no notes.) A traveling party is formed, a road trip through a war taken on, each stop bringing the gang into contact with increasingly grim and grotesteque humanity.

The subject matter and timing of the film naturally lend themselves to interpretation, subtextual analysis, and Straussian readings. Most films tend to be pretty ham-fisted in their less than subtle themes. With regard to Civil War, there are plenty of thoughts about the underlying meanings and metaphors. Here’s mine: there is no subtext, metaphor, or Straussian messages to be unearthed. The director has pushed this concept and it’s being received as milquetoast marketing. I disagree. There are no secret themes and I think that is the absolutely radical agenda that defines and motivates the artistic endeavor. To portray a war without imbuing it with narrative, only tragic, significance. Hear me out.

There’s a million war movies, most of which have arcs and metaphors strewn throughout. The problem with making a moving about a hypothetical civil war in the modern United States is that the audience will spend so much time looking for the heroes, villains, and associated opportunities to feel morally superior that it seems almost impossible to deliver an effective portrayal of what it might actually feel like to wake up to a US civil war, with a genuinely splintered federalist system of governments and military forces. How do you make a movie that doesn’t celebrate a Civil War as an opportunity for anyone, that doesn’t unintentionally, if inevitably, enoble the prospect of such an outcome? How do you tell a story where nothing good happens because you earnestly believe such a war would be empty and horrible, with nothing advanced or achieved save the destruction of institutions and the killing of millions? Well, it seems that Alex Garland thought the best strategy was to strip a war story down to its barest bones and leave you absolutely zero metaphorical scaffolding to graft your identities or theories on to.

I think it worked. A couple points.

There are no heroes in the film. The four journalists in questions are respectively hollowed out, adrenaline addicted, naive, or looking for one last ride. There is zero allusion to nobility or moral obligation. We never learn the name of a single soldier, whether they are accomplishing a mission, pointlessly dying, or perpetrating atrocities. There’s no arch-antagonist. There are bad people, to be sure, and the third-term President that the film opens with has green lit air strikes on American citizens while filling the airwaves with empty propaganda, but he turns out to be nothing more than a standard-issue cowardly politician wholly incapable of anything save false bravado and begging for his life.

There are no political identities in the film. No left or right wing schism. It might seem that the “Western Forces” alliance of California and Texas is either a transparent political cop-out (putting the largest “red” and “blue” states together) or a subtextual allusion to a schism over immigrants (those states having the largest Latin immigrant populations), but I think there is a far simpler explanation: those are the only two states whose coalition could actually oppose a President trying to usurp the executive branch and fully subvert the constitution. Beyond their populations and economies, the raw number of military bases in the two states (especially air bases), are sufficient that a couple 2 star generals could coalesce a rival military body. There’s also a reference to Florida being an i6 ndependent secessionary state. [EDIT 4/23/24] Guess which states have the most military personnel and air force bases? California (184k+ 8 AFB) and Texas (164k + 9 AFB). Florida has the 5th most active duty personnel, but also has 6 AFB. Everyone else is a either a battle ground or a (literal) flyover state.

The film captures, I think brilliantly, the idle chaos of such a scenario. A world simultaneously shutting down and carrying on with life. Of people mostly trying to survive and wait it out. Mostly. There are some who are not sitting it out, putting themselves in contexts where they can play out their dreams to be heroes or monsters, never accomplishing anything but spreading a little extra death around. I kept thinking about the pandemic on the drive home from the theater. Millions of people died but most of our memories at the peak of the lockdown are of feeling trapped and bored. A civil war in a country this big might not feel all that different for months or even years at a time for most of the population.

The thing about the “banality of evil” is that it’s both extremely real and nearly impossible to portray in a film without comedic deadpan or ghoulish overkill. Civil War portrays a United States ripped apart at it’s constitutional seams by midwit politicians incapable of forward inducting from usurping power and committing atrocities to eventually being executed by a nameless soldier who will report their success to a command chain with no understanding or possibly even interest in putting it all back to together. That’s how the story of the United States as we know it could end. Without heroes or villains, moral or philosophic judgements, without even primary or secondary causes. The thing about a country falling apart, there isn’t always a why, just a when and how.

The lesson I took away from Civil War is that a world doesn’t have to end for a reason. It can just end. And when it does, mostly what we’ll do is watch and wait for it to start up again.

The mai tai is a lesson in how a good thing can become a bad thing without the name changing. Followers of politics should take notice. Good rule of thumb: if a mait tai is red it is bad. The simple solution is to always order a Trader Vic’s Mai Tai. If the bartender doesn’t know what that is, just order a Dark and Stormy and live to fight another day.

Trader Vic’s Mai Tai

3/4 ounce fresh lime juice
1/2 ounce orange curaçao
1/4 ounce orgeat
1/4 ounce simple syrup
2 ounces aged rum

If you are looking to abstain from alcohol I suspect you could make a phenomenal limeade by mixing in orgeat and some pineapple juice and then garnishing it with dusted red chili or habanero paper.

In terms of unexpected introspection, I was careened into by an emotionally wreckless Winnebago :

Would you rather be 20% better at your job or twice as good at a hobby of your choice?

— Adam Ozimek (@ModeledBehavior) April 7, 2024

The answer is obviously job, right? I mean, I’ve dedicated huge swaths of my life to economics. I love economics. Sacrifices have been made, time and emotional toil committed. I would love to be a 20% better economist. That would mean my labor in the profession would be at least 20% more valuable, likely more. The opportunity cost of my time would skyrocket. I would be in more demand as a consultant, would receive more outside offers that would bring me to new heights of salary, likely other parts of the country, other parts of the world even. My work would receive greater attention and scrutiny. I would be fueled by the pressure to keep up with my past self and past contributions. There would be more speculation as to whether I’ve passed my peak, remain worthy of continuing investment. There would be disserations to be written, careers to be made identifying the errors I’ve committed, both subtly important and catastrophically innocent. I’d feel a greater sense of obligation to my, perhaps unearned, talent. To make good on it through service to the world. Sleep, travel, leisure would all feel that much more costly, that much more selfish. Strangers would feel that much more compelled, that much more rewarded, for publicly impugning my abilities and intentions. I would, ironically, probably receive 1000% more public censure as a result of 20% greater capacity. Would my 20% spike in competence come bundled with a thicker skin, independence of thought, and clarity of identity? Would I still be me? What exactly does come out the other side of the teleporter Mr. Scott?

Yeah, so I told the djinn I’d rather be 100% better at golf.

Thailand has a legitimate problem with roving gangs of monkeys that recently achieved significant scale leading to territorial violence in Lopburi :

Biggest news to come out of Thailand since #สุขุมวิท11: The city of Lopburi is experiencing unprecedented violence between two monkey gangs, authorities have been mobilised to quell chaos and are currently attempting to relocate the primates. pic.twitter.com/NUXKlvcPdT

— yammi (@sighyam) March 29, 2024

The sophistication of the monkeys in question is such that gangs have been known to take a train two hours to find rival territory that is sufficiently resource rich and for which they have adequate numbers to the challenge the local monkeys. They also seem to have a rudimentary familiarity with firearms that makes tranquilizing them at any scale challenging.

There appears to be some theory behind mitigation strategies, tranquilizing and apprehending group leaders being number 1. What else might a little basic theory suggestion? Any alternative strategies?

The first question that comes to mind is whether there is a means to tilt the resource calculus towards exurban territories. That seems challenging simply given the calorie density of urban groceries and refuse. It’s probably too difficult to raise the price of resources sufficiently on their own (locked garbage cans, closed door supermarkets), but maybe the offering of monkey feeding sanctuaries outside of city limits that are within sight/smell of train lines? That could be useful means of concentrating then populations in an area that would then enable second-level strategies. And yes, I am already imagining small monkey cities wherein we can study their emergent politics. I’ve already titled my 2029 paper “Rhesus Politik” and before you ask, 1) No you can’t have the title, and 2) yes, you can be a co-author.

What about the violence as it stands within Lopburi? Can we shift the payoffs away from Hawk and towards Dove strategies? Can we increase each monkey’s expected cost of violence or decrease their payoff to exerting dominance? Perhaps an evolutionary tax on weight i.e. taking the largest monkeys out of the gene pool, the equivalent of neutering and spaying? Melee violence has signficant returns to scale, so perhaps we could expect less violence if groups were smaller. Can we change the optimal scale of individual gangs through artificial pheremones simply dousing them with knockoff Drakkar Noir? If Big Science has an genetically modified banana high in the amino acids that lead to introversion, now is a great time to share it. Personal experience suggests that if we start blasting Elliot Smith songs through the streets will monkeys begin to break off under the crushing weight of their own ennui.

I’d suggest fomenting another agricultural revolution amongst monkeys, but the initial reduction in violence over rival turf would eventually evolve into feudal violence between stationary bandits, which I fear would lead to a net increase in violence, at least for the first few thousand years. Instead, I believe we would be better served giving groups of monkeys the necessary institutions for establishing and adjudicating property rights, changing the payoffs such that the exchange of resources were preferable to violent expropriation. We’ve lived this evolutionary history before, we know how it goes. Maybe this time we can skip to the democratic peace and pax economica.

I mentioned this in conversation yesterday and they found it of interest, so here is the prospective usecase for blockchain/crypto that is the main reason I am bullish and things like ethereum:

Artificial Intelligent agents will eventually get to the point where we are comfortable letting them act autonomously on our behalf. For them to maximize their value to us, however, they will need to be able to contract with other AI agents without human middlemen slowing down the process. This means they need a way to form contracts outside of the traditional legal system, particularly since we are unlikely to grant them personhood or power of attorney any time soon. Tokens and the blockchain offer an immutable ledger that will serve as a form of credible contracting for agents absent any legal institutions in real time. I expect they legal human agents will remain necessary for early stage formation and late stage ex post adjudication of disputes, but the micro (nano) contracting facilitated in real time will allow for an allocation (and arbitraging) of personal private capital not previously accessible to any but the largest personal and corporate wealth agglomerations.

There you go. That’s why I own a little bit of ethereum and plan on holding it for a few more decades. Don’t know if it will end up being worth anything, but that’s why I own it. NB: I didn’t google it, so I’m not sure if this is a standard usecase or not.

My parents have moved into an elder community. Having a passing familiarity with nursing homes of decades past and elder care scams of decades current, my family spent considerable time researching options, reputations, and legal concerns. Now that it is done, however, I have sufficient peace of mind to make broader reflections.

The resulting institutions essentially looks like a hybrid college campus/country club, albeit less concerned with status projection than the different manners in which a human might lose their balance. More importantly, however, it is a small scale reminder of the powers of agglomeration and returns to scale. My middle class parents now enjoy greater total amenities than they ever have in their entire life, some for the first time ever. I assure you that it is the rare government engineer to who spends their prime earning years with a heated olympic swimming pool, jacuzzi, steam room, sauna, and modern gym equipment within 200 steps of their front door. A separate restaurant, cafeteria, and bakery sit on the campus. Community transit is available 12 hours a day to connect them to the broader region, but live culture, education, and entertain appear as daily options within each building. I won’t get into the myriad physical and mental healthcare options, but they’re there in spades.

Essentially my parents are living a city for the first time in 50 years. A small, niche catered, contract-chartered city, but a city nonetheless. It’s amazing how many amenities become affordable when you only have to pay for a 100th, 1000th, or 10,000th of the underlying cost of provision.

This raises some questions. First of all, why don’t more of us live like this? Which, with a little reflection, is simply asking why more people don’t live in cities, which in turn invites standard answers regarding preferences for more space and fewer neighbors while also further highlighting the immense costs of 40 years of construction and density obstructionism.

The more interesting question, I believe, is how many of us are going to live like this? When octogenerians peak as a fraction of the population, will we see a new golden age of agglomeration, but in private communities instead of cities? What sort of scales might these communities achieve? Will Boomers rediscover their affection for transit, but as a private club good rather than a government-provided public good? Will generations of rural and suburban Americans find themselves living in cluster micro-cities surrounding major cities, enjoying trips daytime trips into the very urban areas they’ve previously feared were overrun with imagined crimewaves? Who is going to run for mayor? What sort of power is constitutionally invested in the mayor of city whose citizens pay a flat tax i.e. community fees i.e. rent?

What’s going to happen when the Boomers pass on and subsequent Generation X members show up with greater urban affinities, but smaller numbers and fewer children to support them? Will some elder communities collapse and be absorbed into a smaller number of larger elder cities, breeding greater scale returns, but within the economic security of a generation of grown children to foot the bill if the money runs out? Will there be an Orange Julius and Tower Records for me to hang out at? Will chain wallets come back?

Come to think of it, why are we waiting until our 80s? What’s stopping us from living in tightly-knit condominium communities filled to the brim with the social and community public goods that increasingly lonely Americans seem to be in desperate need of? Why can’t I go on reddit and find the apartment complex whose emergent culture of tenants caters to my households specific interests in games, art, and sports?

I started this worried about how my parents were going to live and finished trying to figure out how to live more like them. What I’m saying is the YIMBYs need to win and make it snappy so my household can live its dream of living in a 3 bedroom condo on the 5th floor of a building built on top of the Startcourt mall.

Addendum: I am not the first person to think along these lines.

Apparently Claude 3 Opus AI/LLM is a pretty decent economist:

The word hasn't gotten out yet just how good Claude 3 Opus is for economics and economic reasoning. So here's the word.

— tylercowen (@tylercowen) March 9, 2024

As much as I appreciate the prospect of an AI economist, allow me to ask the most annoying and, in turn, most important, question an economist can ask of any proposition: “Compared to what?”

It seems to me any consideration of the quality of economic analysis produced by an AI/LLM model demands a series of comparison points. We need bad economic analysis. We need AIs that generate mediocre, decent, atrocious, acceptable, and perhaps if possible, brilliant economic analysis for comparison. Which, it seems to me, is entirely possible given that a large language model (LLM) is trained on reams of text. So, lets do it. Let’s see how many different artificial economists we can produce and observe. A digital zoo of economic Pokemon with less violence and more discussion of underlying elasticities.

What happens when we train Claude on every edition of Mankiw’s principles textbook? Cowen and Tabarrok’s textbook. All of the principles books. The most daunting book in all of graduate economics? What happens when we train it on sociology and anthropology textbooks? NYT and WSJ editorials? What happens when we let it consume nothing but Presidential State of the Union addresses? Campaign speeches? Every book in the Google digital library? Twitter? The economics subreddit? A perfectly respectable blog?

How should we evaluate the outcomes? Should it attempt to complete the prelimary exams to continue your PhD training at the University of Chicago? The final exams in Intermediate Micro and Macro Economics at the University of Virginia? At what price would it have sold shares of Gamestop? Perhaps it could write an explicit function that would advise a family when to buy instead of rent based on age, city, income, and number of children. Maybe it could manage to pull off a reverse-Sokal hoax, writing a paper making a genuine scholarly contribution worthy to pass through the review process at a top 25 peer-reviewed economic journal. Maybe it could convince your brother-in-law to stop asking for stock tips and just buy into index funds.

In the end, the market test for what stands as a valuable contribution from an AI is what will matter for most of us. But the time is quickly approaching when we will leave behind awe- and angsted-filled proclamations of whether an AI model is discretely good or bad, useful or dumb. The next step demands granularity of evaluation and consideration. Perhaps not false cardinal (continuous) values, but ordinal rankings aligned with useful and actionable assessments of their analysis. And in case you think this is dull or tedious, consider for a moment what it will mean to evaluate the analytical skills of AIs stratified by their training materials. It will stand for many as a meta-analysis of the broad merit of entire disciplines, literatures, and oeuvres. It will be coarse and efficient, messy and cruel. It will cultivate and distill the core messages of intellectual and social identities, many of which were previously latent, if not outright inert. Subtext will be made text, it’s merits evaluated and compared.

That last bit is perhaps the most terrifying. The entire culture of etiquette and politeness, of politics, is built around the institutions that ensure that too much is never said too directly. I have no doubt that this has some of you salivating. You are so very comfortable in your truth that it enrages you when you are implored not to call ideas silly, arguments wrong, people stupid. A utopia of the mind awaits us in this new world of AI-adjudicated debates and augmented salons. Be careful what you wish for. And don’t be so sure your imagined AI arbitrator is going to be remotely fair. Or on your side.

An AI is only as good as the material it is trained on. Genuine insights are found in economics journals by the thousands every year, but fallacies and sophistries are found by the billions in the endless sea of casual text that fills the internet, airwaves, and podcasts. We all (all) spend large parts of our day being casually wrong about things because it costs us precisely nothing to be wrong. The law of large numbers, in the parlance of statistics, will innoculate AIs from such intellectual food poisoning as the randomness of our errors cancel out. What that won’t save us from, however, is the raw populism underlying much of the casual text out there. Is it outlandish to say there are more people who receive rewards, pecuniary and non-pecuniary, for telling people what they want to hear rather than the truth? Have you ever consumed any media ever?

I’m not an AI doomer. I remain rather sanguine on the entire enterprise. But part of the human condition is never knowing for 100% sure what is right or wrong. We pass that on to all of our intellectual offspring, no matter how smart or artificial they are. Or least, we should.

The nature of power, the stories people tell about us, and the stories we tell ourselves is a current throughline within seemingly everything I’ve been watching lately.

Dune Part 2. Loved it, IMAX recommended. The sheer scale of story isn’t just something exposited, you feel the crushing weight of it throughout. The film is trimmed to the point where some detail is skipped over, but the upside is the story never loses momentum. The underlying political economy remains relevant at all times.

Shogun feels true to the source material. Beautifully rendered. The possibility of power, and in turn the taking of power from others, can force your hand. How many coups are forced by the expectation of a coup? Funny how a world can hinge on an inelastic resource, be it a planet’s worth of hallucinogen or a single sailor’s navigational human capital.

The Great. Funny, decadent, ludicrous, and pitch dark at different times, I see a shocking amount of my own worldview in the writing. The alchemy of fear and self-interest swirling around power makes for an incredible comedic substrate. I recommend this to anyone who will listen and I’m probably going to write more about it.

The Kid Detective. How did none of you tell me about this movie? Much like Confess Fletch, it is an absolute gem that fell through the cracks of a theater-less pandemic. A dark comedy about the tragedy of being labeled a prodigy and how that can short-circuit a young person’s development, set within a town short-circuited by a crime. It’s not a happy movie, so don’t expect a happy ending, but it felt honest at every step.

Alex Burns recapped a conference session about the market for PhD students in History. It was, predictably, rather despondent as is the nature of the job market for all graduate students in history, but doubly so for those outside the absolutely most elite 3 to 5 schools. The whole thread tells the story of graduate education in history, and the broader humanities, with sincerity and empathy.

Now, if I were a respectable economist, I would note that discussed plans to increase the supply of graduate student labor in a market with already paper thin demand is most certainly not the answer. Economists rarely pass up the opportunity to roll their eyes at any academic failing to understand supply and demand, but fortunately Christopher Jones (a proper historian) already made the appropriate observation:

This would be a disaster, as shortening time to degree UK style means more people successfully complete PhDs, flooding the market with candidates and making the jobs crisis even worse than it is now. https://t.co/bdLVnXApBv

— Christopher W. Jones (@cwjones89) February 25, 2024

What caught my eye, however, was the noted recommendation that faculty stop identifying scholarship in their field as a viable career altogether:

This makes my blood run cold for a number of reasons. First, its a trap whose bait is appealing to those students who are simultaneously the most earnest and most insecure. Unsure of what life will be like after college but know in your heart that you loved your classes in rhetoric or 16th century literature? Then why not make the noble decision to forsake the material world for a life of the mind? That’s exactly the kind of trap that makes for the pompous 23-year olds who turn into angry and despondent 30 year olds.

Perhaps worse, however, is the forsaking of an entire discipline that once held the mantle of profession and might now resign itselft to the standing of a hobby. I’m a STEM-y, arrogant economist who consumes very nearly no pre-19th century literature but that doesn’t mean I don’t think the deepest understanding of the foundations of a culture, any culture, doesn’t have profound insight to offer future generations. There is value there, the kind that might even qualify as a public good, whose provision we might want to collectively support, if we so chose.

It’s especially frustrating, however, because I can’t help but think the answer is right in front of them. It just happens to be nearly the inverse of the first suggested policy. History and the humanities need to reduce the supply of graduate students. That’s all there is to it. Yes, research and teaching will be more slower and more arduous without as many graduate assistants. It’s a tough break, but it sure as hell seems a more modest price to pay than the abandonment of scholarly training as something that leads to a viable career. I’d also like to very much hope that it would ease the conscience of faculty taking on graduate students as assistants, then thesis advisees, knowing that 5 years of laborious apprenticeship isn’t destined from the beginning to end in tears. You’ll have fewer graduate students, but hey, at least now you’ll be able to look them in the eye.

There’s a term in urban development: shrinking to greatness. A city can in fact shrink in population and still come out the other side viable, even potentially stronger than ever. That’s the story of Pittsburgh. Embrace what you are, not what you used to be or wished you were. There are a lot of disciplines and subdiscplines that are going to destroy themselves trying to become the STEM fields they wished they were or the recreate past golden ages of dubious veracity. But there will be some, across fields or within single universities, who will recharacterize themselves as custodians and curators of scholarship whose demand may have shrunken, at least for the moment, but whose contributions can carry forward. If that means at a slower pace or smaller scale, so be it. Better to embrace what you are than recruit the naive as kindling for a bonfire lit by arrogance and denial.