A new paper, “Beyond Teachers: Estimating Individual Guidance Counselors’ Effects
on Educational Attainment” by Christine Mulhern observes significant contributions from guidance counselors to student outcomes:

It’s the last bit that rings truest to me: that counselors are most salient to low-achieving and low-income students because they lack other resources, specifically information. As I’ve noted before, information deserts are real, particularly for potential first generation college students. As modern applied economists, we are obsessed with identification and causality, but don’t sleep on distribution of impacts observed. Her finding that “counselors vary substantially in their effectiveness” is worth consideration and further exploration. Where does that variation come from? The excellence of the best counselors or the negative impact of the very worst? I’ve only a handful of experiences interacting with counselors, but my expectation is that it is both. Given that counselors tend to be woefully paid, I expect that they frequently sort across schools on non-pecuniaries i.e. how pleasant it is to work somewhere, which seems like yet another channel through public school students in affluent neighborhoods will find themselve advantaged.

But that’s enough speculative extrapolating for one day. Read the paper.

The EJMR paper presentation dropped at the NBER summer meetings. If you were a 90s kid who loved hacker movies, you were not disappointed. Some are worried it’s an exercise in doxxing (it isn’t). What I think is worth a bit more reflection is the “big reveal” that EJMR toxic posters were not limited to the periphery of the profession. Quite to the contrary, large swaths were matched to the IP addresses of elite universities. Besides disabusing people of the notion that toxic behavior and ideas might decrease with prestige, accomplishment, or intelligence, I think it serves as a healthy reminder that 1) Any anonymous message board will devolve into a cesspool if left unmoderated (see Law, Gresham’s) and, 2) Any status game can devolve into a negative sum game if left unmoderated.

Academia is a status tournament

From a purely careerist standpoint, academia is a long run status tournament built around rankings and tiers. It starts from the moment you apply to graduate schools, hoping to get into the highest ranked school. Some are admitted, some are not. Those admitted are sorted across tiers of schools. Once in a school there is the (sometimes true) perception that students are internally ranked, sorting to faculty advisors, projects, and data access. Some graduate, some leave early with a masters degree, some leave with nothing. Those who graduate are sorted into academic and non-academic jobs. Those that are pushed by the faculty on to the academic market sort into better and worse schools. The best prospects are swapped across the best schools (it’s generally uncouth to hire your own students, at least immediately). Once they are established in tenure track positions, the tournament continues in its least compressed, but also most heightened form, as scholars conduct research, write papers, tour seminars, apply to workshops and conferences, submit to journals, apply for grants and fellowships, and generally fight their way towards tenure. Tenure, to be noted, is a stage of this tournament, but it’s not the end (the end happens at funerals and Nobel Prize ceremonies.)

“You aren’t tenured by your department. You’re tenured by the profession.” – academic proverb

The tournament is subtle and unrelenting. For those who seek to climb the ladder or remain on top, the strategies are more varied than you might expect. It is, point of fact, not all about research productivity, scholarly contributions, and intellectual advancements. It’s also about public goods, including data curation, lab management, feedback on other people’s research, journal editing, idea sharing, even referee reports. From the most cyncical careerist point of view, however, it remains a status game, which means what matters at the end of the day is not how good you are, but how good other people think you are. Or how good people think other people think you are. Or how good…you get the k-level reasoning idea.

Can you see where the trouble seeps into this tweedy swamp of ambition and ego? The inherent subjectivity of it. The biases some of us have, the biases all of us have. The dark arts of manipulating image, conversation, and public opinion. The herding around ideas. The bureaucratic and scholarly gamesmanship that can hold back one paper and elevate another. Every story your paranoid lizard brain can dream up explaining why a node in the tournament decision tree turned against you and in another’s favor.

Which brings me back to EJMR.

I’ll make a statement you don’t have to believe: I expected the worst behavior to be at the good schools. Why? Because they are embroiled in the most ruthless, unforgiving level of the tournament, and most of them are losing. That’s not a hypothesis, that’s just a mathematical reality. For every 25 students in a top PhD program, I’d guess 10-12 end up in academia. Of those, 6-10 are at an R1. Of those, 1-2 are in a top school. Of those, maybe 1 gets tenure at said top school.

From the perspective of the most competitive souls, that’s 96% who are losers. Not in the absolute sense, but in the “at some stage of the game someone else was chosen over them” sense. In the relative, zero-sum, status seeking sense. That doesn’t mean 96% of academics are angry, but it does make for a large pool of potentially angry people. People who, in a moment of weakness, might feed that dark tapeworm of the soul whose only sustenance is the denigration and suffering of people they envy. That desperate willingness to believe the only reason you didn’t “win” is because your competitors were vile and dishonorable? That’s a tapeworm buffet.

The dark tapeworm is an emotional parasite, isolated and lonely in it’s host. EJMR, in its toxic final form, allowed thousands of depressed, angry tapeworms to find community and feed each other. To affirm the belief festering within each of them that they were cheated. That they would have gotten the job, published, admitted, invited, tenure. That they would have won just one more round, and risen just one more level, if it wasn’t for them. The cheaters.

It’s not surprising that the targets of EJMR hate were disproportionately (but not exclusively) women and people of color. I’m not going to tour you through the misogny and racism on EJMR, but I will note that it’s a good reminder that intelligence isn’t the prophylactic against grotesque beliefs and behavior that you might hope it is. Quite the contrary, it’s almost (almost) heartwarming to see that status envy and anger turn everyone into the same monsters, looking to attack and blame the same people, whether you’re an unemployed trucker in Arkansas worried about making rent or a 5th year PhD student at Harvard nervously managing the shame of having to settle for an industry job that starts at $190k a year.

Returing to the thesis of this post, let’s not forget that tournaments are perfectly fine. They can even be positive sum games. A golf tournament only has one winner, but the more honorable the competitors are, the more they collectively raise the status and opportunities of others in their tournament, the higher the quality of their collective product, which means a bigger prize pool for everyone. There’s a reason the prize money isn’t winner-take-all: they know that a certain amount of cooperation amongst competitors is necessary for the tournament as a whole to thrive.

And that’s why this paper is important. Beyond shining a light on grotesque and dangerous behavior, it’s a wake-up call that the status tournament in academic economics is out of control and veering into negative sum territory. EJMR got a foothold because students and faculty had questions nobody felt they could ask or answer without anonymity. A secret curriculum. A gnawing, desperate fear that you don’t understand the rules. How do I get in the NBER? Can I use the same data as another student? Can I renege on a job if a better one is offered? Does journal X count for tenure? EJMR thrived and achieved critical mass. But that critical mass, combined with anonymity and the abandoning of content moderation, became a breeding ground for emotional tapeworms and here we are.

So how do we kill it off? Well, we can go after the most aggressive and disgusting posters on the website, but that feels a bit like attacking a forest fire with a fire extinguisher. In the long run, I suspect the solutions will be public goods. Not unlike undermining the labor supply of a terrorist group by supplying clean water and healthcare, I think the profession needs to start providing the public goods that were the original EJMR lifespring. Journal submission records. Hiring decision transparency (i.e. when a job is filled or still considering candidates). Invitation, acceptance, and rejection statuses in real time. Repositories of course notes and slides. A hidden curriculum made visible.

And, yes, an anonymous message board (or a identified board with a special anonymous section), but with strict content moderation. We know it can be done. You don’t see any of the same filth on statalist or the economics subreddit. We have professional associations, including the AEA, whose sole purpose is to provide public goods. I’m not going to dissuade anyone, particularly those attacked, from going after EJMR operators or posters through legal channels. But it we want to rip it out of the earth, root and vine, I see no better way than to beat it in the marketplace. And in doing so, we might even smooth over the rough edges of the status tournament we’re trying to build lives and careers in.

Because maybe the collective production of new knowledge at the bleeding edge of economics could even be a positive sum game?

Many of us desire at times to overcome insomnia, anxiety, brain fog, depression, or some other mental/emotional hindrance. Some common interventions include healthy lifestyle changes like better diet, drink more fluids, and exercise (all of which we should just do anyway), and more expensive therapies such as counseling or doctor-prescribed pharmaceuticals. These all have their places, but (in keeping with an economics blog) I’d like to call attention to another treatment modality which seems quite cost-effective and harmless*.

It has been known for decades that the electrochemical activity in our brains occurs in measurable waves. “Alpha waves” are pretty well known as a state associated with calm attention, and can be attained by meditation. These waves operate at a frequency of about 10 cycles per second, or 10 Hertz (Hz). Deeper meditation and sleep are associated  with slower frequencies, while intense attention and problem-solving thought operate at faster speeds.

Source: Abhang, et al.

Ideally, your brain would automatically generate the right waves for the situation you are in, and for the most part it does. However, for some folks, their brains don’t make the most effective waves much of the time, and even for more normal folks, it can be helpful to tweak it now and then.

Ways To Shape Your Brainwaves

There are three main avenues for you to manipulate your brainwaves. These are indirect methods, neurofeedback/biofeedback, and direct stimulation. Some indirect ways are to practice various types of mindfulness or meditation, which usually move you towards alpha waves, or intense exercise can lead to alpha in the subsequent rest session.

A direct route, which involves training yourself, is to don some sort of device on your head that measures brainwaves or a correlate such as cerebral blood-flow or heartbeat, and feeds back to let you know what your brain state is. It turns out that humans (without being to explain how) are able to learn to shift their brain states if they are given feedback on whether they are getting closer or further from some desired target. Consumer devices are available in the $400-$1400 price range that can do this with varying degrees of sophistication and requiring various degrees of training and effort. More extensive and targeted training of specific frequencies in particular spots in the brain is done in the offices of neurofeedback clinicians, often as an adjunct to talk therapy. The neurofeedback can calm the animal-level fear/panic/emotional noise, such that the client can relate therapeutically with the counselor. This can be very helpful to address specific pathologies including depression (and here), anxiety,  PTSD , reactive attachment disorder,  and maybe even autism, but naturally it is expensive to go through a course of say ten sessions with a highly trained professional. Unfortunately, you cannot count on routine coverage by insurance.

Direct Audio-Visual Stimulation

A less-expensive way to achieve a desired brainwave state is to present yourself with (say) 10 Hz stimulation of light and sound. The theory is that your brain waves become
“entrained” along with these external stimuli. Hence the name audio-visual stimulation or audio-visual entrainment (AVE).

There are many YouTube videos claiming to have embedded alpha or other frequencies. These videos often have many comments from appreciative users claiming calming or other effects, so they are certainly worth a try. The price is right. However, research studies cast doubt on whether sound alone is very effective at creating specific brainwaves. Light stimulation has been shown to evoke e.g., alpha waves.

What has been shown to work well are systems where you don headphones for the sound and lightweight “goggles” (thin opaque glasses with LEDs on the inside).  Studies have shown this to help with ADD, anxiety, depression, and migraines. Perhaps the most widely produced AVE devices are the “DAVID” models from MindAlive.  MindAlive is headed by David Siever, who has spearheaded numerous studies of AVE.

MindAlive “DAVID” AVE System

The AVE devices can quickly move you into desired brain states, in the comfort of your home, for just a modest (~ $400) up front cost. You can use them with your eyes open or closed. They are perhaps more usable for children and seniors than the neurofeedback modalities, where the client has to engage with some feedback and learn to make their brainwaves go where they should. [1] With AVE, you just sit back and relax and let the sound and light carry you along. However, AVE is something of a blunt instrument, stimulating the auditory and visual and linked centers in the brain, whereas regular neurofeedback can train say two specific spots in the brain to two different specific frequencies, and has more enduring effects.

My Experience with AVE

I have owned a DAVID for many years. I and my family members have used it off and on, when we happened to feel a need for it. We all find that straight down the middle 10 Hz alpha sessions make us feel just plain good, positive, calm, etc. This can help cure anxiety (mind too fast, hard to focus) or sluggishness (mind too slow). It only takes about ten minutes exposure to the 10 Hz to get us in “the zone.” [2] On most mornings, when I wake up feeling OK anyway, I don’t bother with it. But it is good to have it around as needed. We find the feeling from an AVE session sticks with us for a number of hours.

AVE has been shown to help with seasonal asset disorder (SAD). That makes sense because SAD is about light deprivation. I had a bit of SAD when we lived in a house with few windows, and tried my DAVID for that. It did help, but it turned out to be more satisfactory and less bother to just use a big bright sunlamp at the breakfast table.

We find the slower AVE sessions useful to combat occasional insomnia (where mind is anxious or racing) and even to help with pain. A month ago I had some serious pain from an injury, that was so bad I could not sleep. These slow programs (3.5-7 Hz) did help to divert and relax my brain and help me get to sleep.  Again, the effects can be enduring. If we have used a really slow, say 3.5 Hz, program to knock us out at night, we often are sluggish the next morning, so we reset our brains with some 10 Hz alpha. For sleep, I usually prefer a 7-7.8 Hz protocol that does nicely slow and relax my brain, but does not leave me groggy in the morning.

The literature and the operator’s manual recommend slightly faster waves, e.g. 14 Hz “beta” waves as a normal morning waker-upper, like a cup of coffee. These faster “Brain Brightening” protocols have shown benefits for seniors. My family does not necessarily find 14 Hz enjoyable. It sometimes feels feels tiring.

One the other hand, the 14 Hz protocol can sometimes be quite helpful as a pick-me-up. Early one winter, I was feeling sluggish and low, not wanting to get out and exercise, and was nearly ten pounds over my normal weight. It probably had something to do with an extended road trip (stress, food) plus Thanksgiving (food) and the reduced sunlight hours, including daylight savings time ending, plus a stretch of cloudy/rainy weather. I did use a sun lamp to get more photons into my head, but that didn’t cut it. I decided to push myself and use the 14 Hz flashing lights, instead of the comfy 10 Hz, to get more of an activation. It actually worked out well. Three mornings in a row with the 14 Hz, and I felt “reset” to a more energetic, optimistic me. So score one for beta waves.

A couple of us have experimented even faster programs, around 18-20 Hz. That gave an unpleasant buzz, which persisted. I think if I had to drive a truck all night, it might be useful for keeping me awake and alert. After these high frequency sessions I soon used the 10 Hz program to reset to my nice smooth alpha. It is nice to know that if I go too high or low on an entrainment session, I can always recover by using the 10 Hz alpha session [3].

At any rate, I am a satisfied customer and I think this is a cost-effective treatment modality for amateurs to use, or for therapists to prescribe.

* If someone is susceptible to seizures, they should avoid any device like this with repetitive flashing lights.

ENDNOTES

[ 1 ] There is a newer, less-studied technique called LENS that kind of bridges between classical neurofeedback and AVE and trans-cranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). “Transcranial” means the stimulation is from coils outside your skull. Straight TMS is approved by the FDA for treatment of major depressive disorder (MDD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), migraines, and smoking cessation. With LENS, the brain waves are monitored with electrodes, and this information is used to shape special synchronized electromagnetic stimulation of the brain (from outside the scalp). This stimulation is keyed to the existing brainwaves, which may make it particularly effective, e.g. for reducing anxiety and helping with PTSD and traumatic brain injury (e.g., from military explosion exposure). This LENS technique is also called direct neurofeedback, in contrast to the standard neurofeedback, where the client must actively muster the altered brainwaves via training.

[ 2 ] Many of the canned protocols in the DAVID devices begin with about ten minutes of transitional sound and light pulses. These “dissociation” segments are intended to help users transition from their starting brain states and move to the final target frequencies. But we find these segments to be an unnecessary waste of time. We fire up a program, do something else for 8-9 minutes, and then don the headphone and glasses and dive right into the desired frequency, with only 1-2 minutes of dissociation.

One other user tip is that there is some virtue in starting with the lights a little dim (which I do by either playing with the Intensity setting, or by holding the goggles an inch away from my face), and by tapering down the brightness at the end of a session as you reenter the real world. With the David, you can push a pair of buttons to have it automatically ramp down light and sound intensity over the course of a minute or so.

[ 3 ] There is some evidence that super-fast AVE, at 40 Hz, stimulates cerebral bloodflow which can do marvelous things with the brain, such as mitigate Alzheimer’s degeneration.

I don’t know if Team Transitory (in which I count myself, though I included Fed intervention in my expectations) gets to take home the final prize regarding inflation. Certainly the timeline was imperfect. It’s good that we’re debating who and what gets credit for a soft landing, though, since it means that Covid recovery policies haven’t likely mired us in a decade of heavy inflation (let alone hyperinflation). No, that doesn’t mean that the last round of payments wasn’t a net welfare loss, but let’s do our best to be sympathetic to the possibility that one-too-many is preferable to one-too-few when trying to bubblewrap your economy through the worst global pandemic in a century.

I bring this up because we will no doubt continue to suffer through “If inflation is under control, why is _____ so expensive” takes for a few year. I look forward to entirely ignoring these takes, with the occasional link back to this post when the commenter is sufficiently thoughtful (or annoying) to engage. And I just want to remind everyone that a lot of goods and services continue to steadily rise in price, not just because of the opportunity cost of labor (i.e. Baumol’s disease), but because of the opportunity cost of death.

We value human life more than at any previous point in human history (I haven’t consulted actuarial tables, or even googled it, but remain confident this is true). There are a lot of things we used to produce cheaply by throwing labor at the problem until it was built or everyone was dead (see Giza, the Pyramids of). You don’t have to go back nearly so far to appreciate the phenomenon.

Have you ever seen The French Connection? It has the single greatest car chase in history. It’s amazing. How did they do it? By not giving a damn about anyone or anything, including the actors in the cars and the unknowing civilians on the street. The film with arguably the greatest long-form stunt set-piece was produced for a total of $1.8 million (12.8 in 2023 dollars). Not that scene, mind you, the whole movie. It was cheap in dollars, but they had to put hundreds of people at risk to do it. Just because a miracle occurred and no one died doesn’t mean it was enormously expensive in turns of human risk (including unconsented risk).

Did you see John Wick 4? It has the best chase scene I’ve seen since the French Connection (at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, no less). Priscillia Page, without question my single favorite film writer going these days, interviewed the director, and brilliant action movie obsessive that she is, got him to discuss in extensive detail the months of planning, the small city of professionals, and the enormous investment that went into mitigating risk at every possible turn for just that scene. All in service of John Wick driving the wrong way on the world’s most famous roundabout and then running through traffic. John Wick 4 cost $100 million to film precisely because it places so much value on every human being directly and indirectly involved.

just dropped the first part of my interview with Chad Stahelski, one of my absolute favorite filmmakers https://t.co/BPpjTRbjGk

— priscilla page (@BBW_BFF) June 17, 2023

Does anyone seriously believe movies are more expensive because of decades of inflation? Of course not. We know, at some level that the products have become more costly to produce and that that is reflected in the price facing consumers. I remain an unrepentant YIMBY who thinks that the key to the future of the US economy is lowering the costs of rebuilding our infrastructure, but we would do well to remember that the dollar costs of the past are no longer attainable because we are (gratefully) no longer comfortable throwing human suffering at a problem instead of money. This doesn’t let us off the hook from permitting, NIMBY, and public union gridlock, but we would do well endure rising costs with a bit more alacrity.

Technological innovation means the total cost of most things has gone down. That total cost includes dollars and physical risk. Our willingness to tolerate physical risk has gone down so much that, even in our world of technological miracles, there are some products that the dollar cost we are left with has gone up. But that’s not inflation. Or even a problem. It’s literally the best thing about living in the modern world.

There is much to admire in the bundle of Canadian policy, but housing and construction regulation remains a largely unmitigated disaster.

The Canadian housing market… 😬 pic.twitter.com/pdr2oeLa5B

— Alec Stapp (@AlecStapp) July 9, 2023

I note this only as a reminder that

1. It’s safer to admire individual policies rather than national bundles. There isn’t a nation on earth that gets anywhere close to everything right.
2. What you gain from an optimal policy is often just slack that softens the impact of getting something else completely wrong.
3. Often you only really feel the true cost of bad policy when political tides undermine what was previously buttressing your entire system. Case in point: the NHS and Brexit.

What happens to the Canadian economy when the housing market is still strangling disposable income and an anti-immigrant political movement rises to power on the false but persuasive accusation that immigrants, and not bad housing policy, is to blame? Leveraging all my gifts of analysis and foresight, I predict bad things. Bad things will happen.

[Author’s note: I almost used the word “radical” in the title, but stepped back from the abyss. Being wrong is always more forgivable than being sweaty and clichéd.]

The principal objective of disinformation campaigns is to lower the value of publicly available knowledge so the purveyor’s preferred narrative can compete in the market for ideas. This is particularly attractive to authortarian regimes who have control of large media outlets. If the integrity of public information is sufficiently low, then wholesale fabrications can dominate based on reach and volume.

But what if you are a benevolent democratic regime without a state media outlet trying to compete with targeted disinformation campaigns? Your enemies have flooded the zone with so many conspiracy theories and falsehoods that your ability to steer the public discourse is significantly hindered. How do you recover control of the narratives driving elections and, in turn, policy?

The classic power solution would be to eliminate the disinformation. Constraints on production and dissemination of information, bans on outlets, criminal prosecution for promoting foreign propaganda. Standard command and control governance. But what if the genie is already out of the bottle? Maybe you can limit access to foreign-owned outlets (i.e. TikTok), but eventually everything is going to leak through via other outlets. Half of Instagram Reels is essentially TikTok on a two week delay after all. And that doesn’t solve the problem of domestic disinformation/misinformation. If disinformation has reduced the price of lying to zero, then we should expect news and campaigns to indulge whenever it serves their bottom lines, which means lies will find every crack in the media regulatory firewall, like water on concrete.

(Brief aside: maybe you don’t believe in the horseshoe theory of political politics as it relates to authoritarianism and identity, but it sure does seem to accurately describe affinities for conspiracy theories.)

If you are a benevolent democratic regime seeking to retain office for yourself or your political party, how do you communicate with a public unable to distinguish truth from opposition deception? How do you produce something with signal value when the world is being purposefully and strategically filled with so much noise?

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What if you didn’t focus on communicating with the public, per se, at least in the short run? What if you gave up on communicating broadly, for a moment, and focused entirely on the subset who could independently extract signal from noise? You’d lose elections, right? There’s not enough “signal extracters” to compete with “noise voters”, are there?

This is going to sound mathy and, at first, elitist, but hear me out. Maybe there are enough signal extractors simply because noise voters cancel each other out. This is not a new theory. This is classic statistics and political economy. If we assume that noise voters are purely random in who they vote for, then the Law of Large Numbers kicks in and you essentially get an even split of noise voters across all candidates, allowing the election-within-the-election “signal extractors” to determine the final winner.

If that all sounds just a little too cute and too convenient, its because it probably is. Assuming that noise voters are randomly distributed across parties and platform is a pipe dream. At this moment in the US and abroad, authoritarians and social conservatives are far more invested in pursuing noise voters, to varying degrees of success, by serving them up bespoke misinformation at every turn. Not that we should expect this to stay constant. As we speak a Kennedy (!) is running for the Democratic nomination on what is essentially a platform of disinformation, conspiracy theories, and pure hokum.

At the end of the day, we have to increase the value of signal campaigns relative to noise. How do we do that? Education! Public service! A recommitment to civic duty! A recommitment to God! A blogging revival! Ha. You wish. Sorry, those are certainly aspirational, if not inspirational, solutions. But I think those whither and die in the face of unrepent bullshit and lies. I have a different answer.

What if the solution to disinformation is more misinformation? But first, an aside.

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There is a classic story in game theory that professors still put in front of their students to this day: if you had to meet someone in New York City tomorrow, but couldn’t communicate with them, where would you go and when would you go there? When posited to New Yorkers, specifically, and East Coasters broadly, it’s amazing how many people give the same answer: the clock in Grand Central Station at noon.

This is known as a focal point (or Schelling Point). It allows for coordination without communication. Focal points show up in culture and social norms on fairly regular basis simply because they are so useful. They emerge, over time, from thousands of repeated interactions, with certain norms taking hold when they create advantages for their adherents. The seeds of these focal points are when enough people find something useful that it becomes duplicated. Like meeting a friend arriving in town at the train station.

The truth can be a natural focal point, not because it is necessarily pretty or inviting, but because it is actually there.

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So, again, what if the solution to disinformation is more misinformation? Not debunking the lies and bullshit, but heaping more out the window until it covers every surface? The reason that targeted disinformation works is that it reduces the advantage of telling the truth, allowing your preferred narrative to compete. The weakness of disinformation and lies, though, is that they are nearly costless to supply. Noise voters aren’t shopping for the best answer, they’re shopping for the answer that they would prefer to be true. So give it to them! Give them exactly the answer they want. Give everyone the exact answer they want. Flood the zone to the point of total saturation.

If everyone can find their own truth, then the Law of Large Numbers can actually dominate the outcome. If everyone can be fed exactly the story they need to hear to vote for Candidate A and exactly the story they need to hear to vote for Candidate B, then their vote will be effectively a coin flip. They only votes remaining to be determined outside of our probabilistic system? The signal voters. But it gets better, because the truth has an advantage in this landscape: it’s a superior focal point. If beliefs are blades of grass in a lawn fertilized with pure and utter bullshit, the truth will look like all the others, but it will be just a little taller. As people observe signal voters collecting around it, it will grow and grow until people decide, absent communication, to meet at the tall blade of grass.

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How do you create such an infinite system of bespoke false narratives for the tiniest slices of the electorate? Targeted large language models. Artificial intelligence. The exact thing that some people fear will destroy democracy and enable authoritarians everywhere. If everyone is receiving their perfect cocktail of flattering, angering, entertaining disinformation, the only people that will determine elections will be those with an abnormal resistance to bullshit. Narratives flooding the internet, produced by a million AIs at a million typewriters, will ensure that each of us will stumble upon the exact sonnet you most want to hear, telling you which aliens caused which problems, which conspiracy cost people jobs, and which reason the world is worse than when you were sixteen.

No one will be fully, purely resistant, but we, each of us, have dimensions on which we actually know what we are talking about. Our own experiences, tacit knowledge, and expertise what will dominate our decision making process and tilt the balance of our vote towards the best outcome. A lot, if not most, of us, have a signal voter within. If our lesser proclivities are nullified in the aggregate by the power of statisics and perfectly curated bullshit, then the political carnival might just leave us governed by the better angels of our nature. A curious, counter-intuitive distillate, to be sure. But maybe also a functioning, more resilient democracy.

Just don’t read the comments ever again.

While the FTC is trying to break up a monopoly that, in my current but open to revision opinion, isn’t a monopoly, the most efficiently labor-extractive cartel in US history is literally sitting inside the Capitol begging Congress to give them back their (near) zero wage labor.

I’m not going to make the case against Lina Khan’s FTC lawsuit against Amazon (and by all accounts I’ve come across, it is very much her lawsuit). I’ll leave that to people who know a lot more about monopoly and antitrust than me. What I would like to humbly suggest, however, is that there is something kafkaesque about dedicating significant resources and political capital to pursue a case that is at least not unreasonable to say is wrong-headed while an obvious cartel that spent decades enforcing a zero-wage policy on labor in physically dangerous occupations is at this very moment actively lobbying for legislation to create a legal firewall ensuring that billions of dollars never suffer the ignomius fate of falling into the hands of their employees.

Yes, I know, I just wrote the same paragraph twice, but it’s just that flabbergasting, a “too-on-the-nose” political cartoon come to life. I’m not even sure that else to write.

I could talk about the pure powers of rationalization and cognitive dissonance. Nothing will lead to a more clear-eyed, full-hearted, open-throated defense of the purity of amateur sports and the inevitable destructive powers of wages than the $1.14 billion cut in rents the NCAA receives each year. And that’s just the NCAA, the governing body that oversees the cartel. The chief participants earned $3.3 billion in revenue from sports. You don’t have to be a sociopath sincerely spouting bald-faced lies with those kinds of incentives. The human capacity for narrative internalization and rationalization will do the trick for you, no sweat.

I could delve into classic the capture theory of regulation, how monopolies and cartels are often the only people sufficiently informed and motivated on niche issues to tilt the balance of democratic forces in their favor. I could reference the classic prisoner’s dilemma/collective action problems that plague even the most successful cartels. The network-structure of competitive sports leagues allowed the NCAA to successfully monitor and enforce the rules of their cartel (no compensation for players other than in-kind tuition, room, and board), but even such a successful cartel was still on borrowed time against the incentives facing top programs combined with the march of innovation and the rival collective of players.

No, what disappoints me is our regulatory institutions ignoring low-hanging fruit. I get it, political appointees are political animals, as well as just standard humans trying to make a secure living. Any FTC chair that sues Amazon, successful or not, will never want for law school appointments for the rest of their career. More than 70% of US adults are in households subscribed to Amazon Prime, which is affects a lot of voters and will lead to a lot of thinkpieces. For a $139 a year they get a bundle of goods and services, including the rough equivalent of Netflix. Is that too high? Is exit from the service too costly? Even if the answer is yes, what is the preferred outcome? A $7 lower price? Three-clicks fewer to unsubscribe? Even spread across the entirety of the US adult population, the costs seem fairly trivial, and added up in aggregate that’s not that much either. If it’s suppression of competition, well that’s a far tougher argument to win, which is why they aren’t making it.

The NCAA, on the other hand, has extracted a) enormous rents, likely > 50% of the marginal product of labor, b) from employees in physically dangerous and demanding jobs, many of whom c) are engaged in the task for which they have the peak marginal revenue product of their entire career. That last part is often under-appreciated. Very few of us, myself included, will ever have a marginal revenue product from our labor that compares to a starter on a Division I sports team that is regularly televised. They’re literally being denied earnings in what should be the highest 1 to 4 years of their career earning power. Maybe that doesn’t add up to as much in the aggregate of shaving $7 off of Amazon Prime, but the the number of households for whom Prime fees are salient to the trajectories of their lives is absolutely trivial compared to the NCAA cartel.

One of the big questions in governance is what do we want out of our regulatory agencies? A not unreasonable school of thought is to say we want a counterbalance to scale. Government forces with enough heft that they can bring the mightiest companies to heel. A reasonable person might say we want to maximize welfare, which could mean targeting cartels and monopolies of any size, looking strictly at the bottom line for consumers. A third might say the world is noisy and constantly changing. Cases are confusing and take years to adjudicate. What we should pursue are the most obvious transgressions, where we can operate with a high degree of confidence that government action will lead to better outcomes in contexts that matter.

If you count yourself in that third camp, as I do, then let me suggest there is no easier antitrust case to make than when a multi-billion dollar entity comes to you hat in hand begging for an antitrust exemption. Legal rhetoric and economic evidence are great, but nothing beats an old-fashioned confession.

I’ll keep it brief today. The best golfers in the world are usually in the running, but who wins depends on who flips heads on the most coins i.e. who makes the most putts. Putting is a skill to be sure, but there is enough chaos in the green that randomness has a heavy say in who wins. Skill can wholly dominate when the differences between the best and everyone else is greater than multiple standard deviations of a coldly binomial distribution.

The greatest record in golf is not who won the most tournaments, but Tiger Woods making 142 consecutive cuts after the first two days of tournaments. He was so much better than everyone else that even when every coin flip went against him he was still in the top half of the leaderboard. The greatest record in tennis is Roger Federer making 23 consecutive semifinals in major tournaments. The greatest record in the NBA may be Lebron James reaching the NBA finals 8 times in a row, including with some Cleveland teams exceedingly thin on talent. The home run record is nice, but Barry Bonds greatest achievement may be his reaching base 61% of at-bats in 2004. 61%! To put that in context, the leader last year reached base 42.5% of the time.

The mark of true excellence is when repeated competition reveals a gap from their opposition so great that even the cruel left tail of randomness can rarely overcome it.