History

The Tragedy of the Commons, or Lack Thereof

Zachary BartschLeave a comment

In 1968, Garrett Hardin wrote an influential paper named “The Tragedy of the Commons”. It was published in Science and was kind of a big deal. The paper was about the problem of common resources that can be rationally over-used by individuals such that the resources are destroyed – making everyone worse off. The general idea is a great insight and we can see examples everywhere. People being loud in public spaces, odiferous foods microwaved in the breakroom, spoiled food that remains in the refrigerator. These are relatively innocuous. But more substantial parallels include dumping waste into common water sources, overfishing/hunting, or over-harvesting trees or scavenging in common forests.

The Original Problem

Harden was specifically concerned with human overpopulation. He wrote in the same vein as Paul Ehrlich, who published “The Population Bomb” in the same year. Harden explains that the universe, and earth specifically, only has so much matter and carrying capacity for humans. He left the limiting constraint open. Maybe there would be inadequate clean air, water, nutritious food, etc. The specific inadequacy doesn’t matter, they are all due to the finiteness of our world.

From Hardin’s perspective, there was no natural prophylactic that would prevent us from bumping into the natural and horrifying constraint that inadequate resources would impose. He thought that people would continue to reproduce at greater than replacement rates and death would ensue. He also astutely pointed out that if good people agree to limit their number of offspring, then we will be left with only bad people reproducing. They’d place everyone at risk with their irresponsible, though entirely rational, folly. He concludes that the only hope for humanity is a mutual consent to a coercive entity that would prevent this commons problem of over-reproduction.

The Typical Response and its Shortcoming

The most popular argument against Hardin comes from Julian Simon, who argued that humans are the source of innovation and ingenuity and that more humans implies more innovation. Against Paul Ehrlich, Simon famously bet that commodity prices would fall over the course of the 1980s, asserting that human ingenuity would increase abundance.

Putting the wager aside, Simon’s idea that humans figure out ways to make resources more accessible is entirely correct – except for when it isn’t. The Malthusian booms and busts in population and persistent subsistent income levels did occur historically. But it’s been a long time since then. For a few hundred years we’ve had increasing standards of living *and* an increasing population. There are exceptions. There’s been starvation in Venezuela, Cuba, Ethiopia, China, North Korea, and Ukraine. These countries were plenty populous with plenty of human minds to tackle the challenges of scarcity. More people = more abundance isn’t exactly what Julian Simon said, but it’s how a lot of people answer Hardin and Ehrlich’s predictions.

The Better Responses

Continue reading →

Fiscal Health & Divided Government

Zachary BartschLeave a comment

For the past two years, we’ve had a unified government in which the Republican party has populated the White House and had majorities in both chambers of congress. Once the new legislators are in office we’ll have a divided government. That means that the political party controling the White House won’t also control the senate and house of representatives. In the spirit of saying something of substance, I want to know what the implications are for our fiscal picture.

One can measure fiscal health in many ways. Does a divided government bode well for shrinking the deficit? Rather than spit-ball about politics, I take the data since 1960 in one hand and a model in the other. See the end notes for model details.

Since 1960, the most popular form of government split has been a Democratic president and unified government, followed by Republican presidents and a divided government. Democrats have controlled at least one chamber of congress for 62% of the years. Do these splits matter for federal outlays, receipts, and the deficit? Since a unified democratic government was most common, I use that as the baseline fiscal case and compare the cases to it.

Below are the average impacts of government-party types on federal spending, revenues, and the deficit. The blanks are insignificant differences. On average, the only party split that results in less spending is a Democrat president with divided government. Those and unified Republican governments raise more revenue and reduce the budget deficit from its trend (there was a small decline in in discretionary spending at the start of Trump’s 2nd term with a unified government).  The bad news for deficit hawks is that Republican presidents with a divided government – the type that we’ll have for the next two years – perform poorly. On average, they reduce government revenue and increase the deficit. Again, all of this is ‘on average’.

Continue reading →

Holmes Whistleblower Claims “You Can See Everything” Film Is Misleading

Scott Buchanan2 Comments

Elizabeth Holmes is a very clever woman. She was an honors student in chemical engineering at Stanford, which demonstrates high intellectual engagement. Eager to start her own company, she dropped out to form Theranos, which sold a device purported to be able to run a multitude of medical analyses using just a drop of blood. Numerous professors told her the device could not work (and in fact it did not work), but she pressed ahead anyway and charmed bigwigs and VCs into backing her firm.

When WSJ reporter John Carreyrou started an investigation in 2015, Holmes initiated a hardball campaign to stop Carreyrou from publishing, which included legal and financial threats against both the Journal and the whistleblowers. In 2022, a federal jury convicted her of investment fraud, and she was sentenced to 11 years in prison. Holmes is an accomplished liar, as documented by Forbes (“Watch Elizabeth Holmes Lie To Forbes About Theranos”). There is no ambiguity here.

Enter equally clever filmmaker Nathan Fielder and his colleague Lance Oppenheim. In the month before she shipped out to prison, Holmes and her partner Billy Evans invited Fielder and Oppenheim to their home for extended interviews. Holmes used this as an opportunity to cultivate a sympathetic image of a sincere, vulnerable mother of two young children, who is facing tragic separation from her family. This was a trademark clever Elizabeth Holmes move to dispel the (true) image of the ruthless fraudster, knowing that at some point she would be likely requesting a reduction in her sentence.

Fielder exploits inconsistencies in her statements, and Evans’ unpleasant abusive behavior, to weave a web of “ambiguity” around the Elizabeth Holmes story. Did she actually lie, or was she just confused? Does her mind simply work differently than most people? Oh dear, it is so hard to know…Fielder parlayed this into in a critically-acclaimed documentary, “You Can See Everything.”

Fellow blogger Mike Makowsky captures the strong impressions on audiences made by this movie: The singular dominant theme, for my money, was the grand telephone game that “truth” is distilled through as it skips from source to source, medium to medium. By the end of the film you may find that, like me, you have updated your priors a half dozen times, left with your hands up in the air as the crushing weight of subjective reality threatens to abandon you in a fog of nihilism.

But Mike also supplies a reality check: “Then you get home, rewatch the documentary (“The Inventor: Out for Blood”), scroll through a few bullet points of the actual case and remind yourself that no, this person is very much a crook.”

People who actually know the truth are dismayed. The WSJ investigative journalist John Carreyrou acknowledges that the film is “great” art, but Forbes reports that in a post on X:

Carreyrou pushed back against viewers who find Holmes to be “unknowable” or “ambiguous,” noting she went after himself and Theranos whistleblowers “with everything she had,” saying she ran a “ruthless cover-up of a breathtaking fraud, and she was at the controls.”

Tyler Schultz was a scientist in his early twenties, just starting his career, when he joined Theranos. Within a few months he discovered that the device the company was hawking did not do what it was claimed; this put patients’ health at risk. He first tried to address the problems through internal channels and government oversight, before finally going to the press. Theranos counterattacked viciously, threatening to blacklist him from ever working again in his field and costing him $400,000 in legal bills to defend himself.

Schultz has responded to the film in an accessible 6-minute interview on YouTube, Theranos whistleblower says he nearly jumped out of his seat watching Elizabeth Holmes documentary. He states that the woman portrayed on the screen is absolutely not the actual Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos. He states that Holmes knowingly lied (he gives example). A centerpiece of his criticism is that the medical device that Holmes shows on the film is NOT the device that Theranos sold back in the day. The original device was indisputably a complete fake. By trotting out some completely new device and claiming that it “could” (what does THAT mean??) do wonderful things, Holmes deftly muddies the waters. And Fielder is completely complicit in this muddying. Indeed, the muddiness is what makes the film. Schultz lays out his case in detail in an article in STAT. The Schultz article starts off:

“You Can See Everything” is a hilarious, thrilling, fascinating, beautiful piece of art. What it certainly is not is a documentary, and it’s dangerous to pretend that it is.

I’ve had the displeasure of watching disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes at work not just over a three-hour film, but over the entirety of my adult life. I was an employee turned whistleblower at Theranos, my grandfather sat on her board, she came to my family holidays and birthday parties. I met her when I was 20, she went to prison when I was 32. I wish I could have told director Nathan Fielder what I told John Carreyrou when he started investigating her: Do not underestimate Elizabeth Holmes.

The rest of the article is paywalled, but AI will summarize it for you if you ask. See also a Forbes article on the subject.

It seems the only real ambiguity here is whether filmmaker Fielder was too dumb to know Holmes was gaming him, or too ambitious to pass up an opportunity to exploit his encounter with a set of intriguing, dishonest people. Claude summarized it for me this way: Holmes gets a softened image, Fielder gets an enigma, and the audience gets a fog that the court record and the whistleblowers had already cleared.

Some film critics have run out of superlatives in gushing over this film (e.g., “An Astonishing Achievement That Changes How We Experience Cinema“ ). So, let’s give credit to Rick Romancito of the Taos News for calling it straight:

“You Can See Everything” has been praised for reimagining the documentary genre, but to me it merely muddies the waters between fiction and truth.

Disability: Income, Unemployment, & Education

Zachary BartschLeave a comment

Let’s talk about disability. The American Community Survey (ACS) identifies seven broad categories, not including the baseline case of ‘No Disability’. I’ve written before about how disability designations are difficult because many qualifying conditions are a matter of degree. Surely you’ve met a person who is legally blind but can see *some*. How much sight ability can remain while still being considered blind? If a person can identify the sun’s location, but nothing else, then is that person still blind? Similarly, who’s to say whether some physical or cognitive characteristic is disabling? Why not enabling – depending on the task?

Wisely, the ACS side-steps this entire discussion and simply asks respondents whether they have “difficulty”.  We can be agnostic about the cause and degree while still trying to get at the heart of the matter. One downside is that people tend to have more difficulty as they age. Since that’s not relevant for earlier life economic outcomes, I only examine ages 24-45. Difficulty with “self care” is too small of a category in the 2024 ACS for the analysis here. Below are the other six difficulties identified:

  • Hearing Difficulty (n=6,609)
  • Seeing Difficulty (n=8,307)
  • Cognitive Difficulty (n=26,792)
  • Ambulatory Difficulty (physically getting around) (n=4,568)
  • Independent Living Difficulty (n=5,997)
  • No Disability (n=885,302)

We should say early on that many of the people who participate in “Deaf” (capitalized) culture do not consider deafness to be a disability and that any such suggestion is motivated by bias and hearing culture. I won’t engage with that here. But I can say that there is a long tradition going back through the 1800s that rejected alms-giving for deafness and instead supported independent living for deaf people. Historically, this manifested as outlawing panhandling while featuring deafness and rejecting government programs that provide simple transfers due merely to deafness. More recently, the push to reject the ‘disability’ label and its baggage has even been the motivation for some deaf people to oppose cochlear implants being covered by medical insurance. For ease, I’ll be using the colloquial terms for all of the above difficulties. Now that you have the greater context, let’s jump into the data (unweighted).

The baseline income chart is above. Given the above description, it should come as no surprise that deaf people have the highest average income among disability groups, conditional on employment. However, it’s also surprising that most of the above disabilities have incomes that I wouldn’t exactly call destitute. Many people who have a disability look much like everyone else. From an economic point of view, we all have a comparative advantage and it’s perfectly consistent with gainful employment and flourishing otherwise.

Continue reading →

WWII Strategic Initiatives 7. The Man Who Built the T-34 Tank That Helped Save Russia.

Scott BuchananLeave a comment

This is the seventh in a series of occasional blog posts on individual initiatives that made a strategic (not just tactical) difference in the course of the second world war.

History’s most important machines often have a stubborn, slightly obsessive person behind them. For the Soviet T-34 tank, that was Mikhail Koshkin. Koshkin ran the design bureau at the Kharkov tank and locomotive plant. What made him special was that he paid attention to how tanks died. The fighting against the Japanese at Khalkhin Gol in 1939, along with the lessons of Spanish civil war, showed that Soviet tanks were too thinly armored and caught fire too easily. Koshkin pushed for a diesel engine, thick sloped armor, wide tracks that could handle mud and snow, and a big gun. He didn’t just copy what already existed. He took the lessons of real combat and built a tank around them.

He made it very simple.  For instance, in most tanks, there is a whole interior compartment, holding the tank crewmen, which rotates along with the turret. But with the T-34, only the upper visible turret (with its gun) rotated. That minimalist turret simplified construction, even though it meant the gun loader had to scramble around on the fixed floor to keep up with turret rotation. The T-34 was easy to build in staggering numbers, by workers who were often barely trained, and it cost far less than the elaborate German machines. Stalin supposedly said that quantity has a quality all its own. The Soviets eventually built over 50,000 T-34s. Here are links to an original  (in Russian) T-34 gunnery manual (1942), and a complete maintenance manual (1944) with cutaway views of its construction.

Soviet T-34 Tank (Looks like museum model, not combat-ready)

From 1939 through late 1942, the Germans looked unstoppable. Poland, France, and the Balkans all fell quickly. However, in the opening weeks of their 1941 invasion of the U.S.S.R, Barbarossa, the T-34 proved a nasty surprise for the German Army. German antitank shots bounced off its sloped front armor and its gun could take out most German vehicles.

The Germans were impressed. Field Marshal Ewald von Kleist later called it “the finest tank in the world.” Armor strategist General Guderian said the news was “very worrying” and that German tank superiority had ended for the moment. So, early in the war, the relatively few but potent T-34’s helped to slow down the Nazi onslaught enough to give the Soviets time to recover from their staggering losses. Later in the war, the sheer numbers of T-34’s gave the Soviets resilience and offensive punch. By 1944-45 the Germans were fielding gigantic Pather and Tiger tanks which could easily take out two or three T-34’s, but not a swarm of ten or twenty up-gunned T-34’s which could surround a Tiger and shoot it from the side.

Sadly, Koshkin never saw the vindication of his design. In early 1940, he insisted on proving his prototypes by driving them himself 500 miles from Kharkov (in today’s Ukraine) to Moscow, through cold and mud, to show the brass what they could do. The tanks made it. Koshkin didn’t. He caught a bad cold that turned into pneumonia and died in September 1940, at just 42, nine months before the Germans invaded. The man who gave the Red Army its best weapon spent himself on the proof that it worked.

“The Grim Old Days” in Charts

Jeremy HorpedahlLeave a comment

I’ve just started reading Chelsea Follett’s new book The Grim Old Days, which shows just how bad things were in the past. It’s a great book, and I encourage everyone to buy it. If you want a sample of what’s in the book, check out her series of blog posts on “contemporary accounts of daily life in the past” or read her blog post summarizing some of the topics in the book.

As an economist when I think about the past, in my head I see charts. Lots of charts, full of data! Follett’s book is mostly narrative history, and it is not filled with charts and data. That’s OK, I still am very much enjoying the book. But what charts would I select to show how grim the old days were, if I wanted to take that approach to the topic?

Here are four good ones from Our World in Data.

Child mortality in the past was horrible, with only about half of children surviving to adulthood (goes along with Chapters 2 and 3 of her book):

Continue reading →

Family Income Continues to Grow in 2025 Data

Jeremy HorpedahlLeave a comment

Yesterday the Census Bureau released their annual treasure trove of data from the Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplement. Loads of new data are now available for 2025 on income, poverty, and health insurance coverage. This new data allows me to update one of my favorite charts, showing the distribution of family income in the U.S. since 1967. Census releases this data by grouping families into nine different income groups, which I have collapsed into three groups, each being as close to one-third of the total as I can get using the publicly available data.

Figure 1

See also a similar chart from Mark Perry which uses household income (rather than family income) over the same time period.

Figure 1 shows that, adjusted for inflation, the proportion of families with income over $150,000 has grown almost seven-fold since 1967. There has been a roughly constant one-third of the population between $75,000 and $150,000, and the ranks of those under $75,000 has been cut in half since 1967. Again, these dollar figures all adjusted for inflation, using the preferred deflator of the Census Bureau.

What’s even more astonishing is when we look at the number of families at various thresholds, rather than just the share, as seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2

In 1967 there were fewer than 3 million families with incomes over $150,000 (in 2025 inflation-adjusted dollars). By 2025, that had grown to over 31 million families. If we look at the highest income threshold in this Census data — over $200,000 — the number of families has grown from just 1 million in 1967 to over 20 million in 2025. And there are fewer lower-income families too: the number of families under $75,000 shrunk, not just as a proportion of the total as seen in Figure 1, but even in absolute terms by almost 3 million families from 1967 to 2025.

Of course, some of these families do have more earners than in 1967, though we shouldn’t overstate that too much. Using other data from Census, we can see that the share of families with multiple earners hasn’t increased much since 1967, and especially hasn’t since the mid-1990s.

Table 1

As seen in Table 1, as far back as 1967 the majority of families in the U.S. had multiple earners. Now it’s true these were not all married couples with both spouses working full-time, and hours of work in the household have risen over time — but not much since the 1990s. This data is somewhat skewed by the aging of the population, as evidenced by the rising number of families with no earners. But even if we drop those families with no earners, multiple-income families haven’t grown much: from 58% of the total in 1967 to 63% in 2025.

Women Have Always Worked, Often in the Formal Labor Force

Jeremy HorpedahlLeave a comment

In a February 2025 blog post, I created a chart showing male and female work patterns both inside and outside the home, going back to 1900. The data was for the United States, and the general trends were more female work in the paid labor force, more male work in the household (rather than paid labor force), but overall total hours of work being roughly constant from 1900 to 2023 (on average, of course).

Despite women always working, 1900 did look a lot different: adult working-age women in the US spent about 50 hours per week working in their own household, and a little under 10 hours per week in the formal paid labor force. Men were almost a mirror image of this (though working a few hours less per week in total).

So the gradual change over the 20th century was a huge shift in gender roles, and by 2023 women on average spent about the same number of hours in household and paid work. But the US is something of an anomaly here. Female labor force participation was higher — in some cases much higher — in other developed countries around 1900. Using data collected by Claudia Olivetti, here are female labor force participation rates for working age women (generally ages 15-64) around 1890-1900 (I average across years if there are multiple estimates):

Continue reading →

WWII Strategic Initiatives 6. Fort Commander’s Lonely Decision Saves Norwegian Government from Capture by Germans

Scott Buchanan1 Comment

At 4:21 a.m. on April 9, 1940, a 64-year-old Norwegian colonel six months from retirement had about ninety seconds to decide whether to start a war.

Birger Eriksen, who entered Norwegian military service way back in 1893, commanded Oscarsborg, a sleepy coastal fortress on a rocky island in the Oslofjord, armed with three 28cm (11 inch) Krupp guns dating to the 1890s – – plus a secret weapon the Germans didn’t know about: torpedo tubes from 1901. His garrison was mostly reservists conscripted a week earlier. Out of the pre-dawn dark came six unlit, unidentified warships steaming toward Oslo.  Norway had assumed that its diligently neutral stance would avert any foreign attack, and so was lax about maintaining coastal surveillance. The ships could have been British. Firing on the wrong flag meant international catastrophe; not firing, if they were German, meant the capital fell before breakfast.

Colonel Birger Eriksen, the commander of Oscarsborg on 9 April 1940.

Eriksen had no orders from Oslo and no time to ask. He gave the command anyway, reportedly saying: “Either I will be decorated, or I will be court-martialed. Fire!”

The lead ship was the Blücher, a brand-new 16,000-ton heavy cruiser packed with troops, Gestapo officers, and administrators meant to seize the king, the government, and Norway’s gold reserves in one stroke. Two shells from the fort tore into her at point-blank range, followed by torpedoes into her flank. Within ninety minutes she rolled over and sank, taking hundreds of men down with her. The German attack on Oslo was not completely averted, but it was significantly delayed and hampered.

German Heavy Cruiser Blücher (Image by Bundesarchiv)

That single decision to attack the invading fleet bought Norway’s government just enough hours to flee Oslo by train with King Haakon VII — and to load 53 tons of gold bullion onto trucks barely ahead of the advancing German columns. The gold made it out to Britain via a harrowing overland and sea relay; the government reached London and kept functioning as a legitimate exile authority, which gave the Norwegian resistance something to fight for rather than just against. Also, Norway had an enormous (~1000 ships) merchant marine fleet, and the intact, legitimate Norwegian government in exile ordered it into the service of the Allies, right when Britain desperately needed ships and sailors to transport cargo to stay in the war.

The strategic hangover lasted five years. Hitler, rattled by the loss of the king and by ongoing Allied fake Scandinavian invasion plans, garrisoned Norway with somewhere around 300,000–400,000 troops for the rest of the war. This was a staggering commitment, sitting largely idle when they could have made a decisive impact elsewhere. One old colonel, one hunch, one order — which tied down a whole German army guarding a country it barely needed.

This is the sixth in a series of occasional blog posts on individual initiatives that made a strategic (not just tactical) difference in the course of the second world war, an event that gave us the world of the second half of the twentieth century. Here are previous posts:

WW II Key Initiatives 1: FDR Prodded the Navy to Convert Cruisers to Carriers, Just in Time

WW II Key Initiatives 2: “Thatch Weave” Tactic to Counter More-Agile Japanese Fighter Planes

WW II Key Initiatives 3: Kurt Tank Gives Germany a Superior Fighter Plane, the Focke-Wulf 190

WW II Key Initiatives 4: Building Hundreds of Small, Slow, But Cheap Ships to Counter the U-Boat Threat

WWII Key Initiatives 5: General Zhukov Helped Save USSR By Mastering the Pincers Counterattack

Predicting Social Media from 1997

Joy Buchanan3 Comments

At a rummage sale, I picked up a book by cartoonist Scott Adams called The Dilbert Future: Thriving on Stupidity in the 21st Century published in 1997. I thought I might find a clever prediction about the future, which we can now verify from the standpoint of 2026.

The text of the book is mostly dumb. I get the impression that Scott Adams was making easy money with a guaranteed humor book contract. I don’t recommend the book to anyone.

HOWEVER, with my paper copy I kept skimming ahead to see if any of his predictions about the future were impressive. Finally, on page 200 I found something.

Recall, the internet only became publicly available in the early 90’s. Respectable newspapers might have started to lose out to cable news in the mid-90’s. Blogs did not start until after Adams’ book was published. Social media proper (marked by the launch of Facebook) started in 2004. (Let millennials quietly walk away from Xanga journals and pretend that never happened.)  So, my interest in this passage hinges on the fact that this book has a publication date of 1997.

The following is copied from Adams’ humor book.

I predict that news outlets will try to compensate for the loss of relevant news by focusing on stories that are more shocking and depressing than ever. At least that way they’ll get your attention and sell advertising even if the stories aren’t “news” in the traditional sense.

This will limit the reporting to a few stories per year about famous people who are killing other famous people. And if there are not enough of those stories to sell advertising slots, the media will…

Prediction 51: In the future, the media will k*** famous people to generate news that people will care about.

The end of traditional news outlets will not limit people’s access to information. Thanks to the ubiquity of video cameras and the Internet, every citizen will be a reporter. If something happens in your neighborhood, you’ll tape it, stick it on the Internet with your own commentary and make it available to the world… The weather reports will be computer-generated and constantly available by computer, pager, voice-mail… All news gathering will be disaggregated.

Prediction 52: In the future, everyone will be a news reporter.

People will have access to software that constantly combs the internet for “small” news that is relevant to them.

…

your software will be able to do a sort of “credibility credit check” on any person who posts information to the Internet… This won’t be foolproof, but nothing is.

This new model depends on people being willing to take the time to put information on the Net without the benefits of payment. Why will people do that? They will do it because that’s our most basic human nature: People like to talk more than they like to listen.

Joy again: Not bad as predictions go. Notice the quaint terminology, such as “tape it” and pagers. (Pagers use radio networks instead of cell towers.) Attention is scarce, and writing is not (even pre-LLM). Adams predicted what I call poastmodernism.