Blog reading types might have already seen “Fertility on demand” by Ruxandra Teslo.

My first reaction is that, at the current state of technology, I feel like wishing for more IVF on women is cruel. If someone you love has gone through it, you wouldn’t wish it on more people. Supporting the careers of women who want to have children while they are young seems preferable and lower cost to society. The problem is that supporting mothers is a tricky collective action problem, so we seem stuck with this.

“The egg freezing process is also expensive, costing between $8,000 to $15,000 per cycle. Fortunately, more and more women are being covered by insurance plans that offer free egg freezing. According to a 2021 survey, 20 percent of American companies with over 20,000 employees and 11 percent of smaller companies offer such benefits – an increase from six and five percent respectively in 2015. But most women still have to pay out of pocket.” $15,000 is sort of a lot. It’s cheaper than a year of paid maternity leave for a PhD student, but the total cost of a “medical baby to an older couple” is pretty high.

Some of the technology Rux described was new to me and encouraging. If babies and birth becomes much more medicalized (and civilization doesn’t end), then I could imagine a world where most couples look like Simone and Malcolm Collins by choice with designer babies on demand after having a carefree childfree decade.

“The main advantage of IVM is that it allows immature eggs to be collected instead of mature ones, which significantly reduces the burden of hormonal stimulation.” Exciting! Think of how far we’ve come with cancer treatments or treating AIDS. If enough research goes into this, then potentially the cutting, injecting, pill popping hell that women have to go through for IVF could become smaller and more focused on exactly what is near certain to work.

Someone’s going to come along and grumble and say nature is better, but recall from earlier: “Supporting the careers of women who want to have children while they are young seems preferable and lower cost to society. The problem is that… “

On an optimistic note, I am witnessing a beautiful success story of embryo adoption among my relatives. It worked. A wonderful couple has twins now, and those twins are experiencing love and contact from both their birth family and genetic parents. That technology only became available in the late ’90s. Expect more stories like this.

We might even be close to AI childcare that works. Imagine a daycare where robots do 100% of the food and cleaning work so that the humans in the room can focus exclusively on emotional and relational work with the kids. That could make daycare better or cheaper or both.

The simple technology of food and grocery delivery has already helped parents. The founder of Shipt, Bill Smith, got the idea for grocery delivery by experiencing how hard it is to do grocery shopping with his young children. Guess what? We don’t have to take toddlers to the grocery store anymore, unless we want to.

earlier thoughts: Awards for young talent are antinatalist

Will they be subpoenaed? If yes, will they comply? If they comply will they be arrested? If arrested will they be tried and convicted? If convicted will they be pardoned? If pardoned will he be impeached? If at any point your deductive reasoning concludes with a “no”, then you can reason backwards inductively to why this is happening.

Homan: "We're not stopping. I don't care what the judges think. I don't care what the left thinks. We're coming."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-03-17T15:05:29.721Z

Trade. Diplomacy. Aid. National Defense. Social Security. Medicaid. National Institute of Heatlh.

These are big things and they are under duress at best, out right attack at worst. It’s useful to when observers point out that bad policies are bad, that people are getting hurt, that there are consequences in play that have not been in play in since the early days of the Union. It’s useful, but what’s the next step? What is actionable?

I’m curious about the political incentives for damage control. Is there credit to be had for politicians who lay themselves on the tracks in front of an administration that seems to run on spite, to draw the kind of attention that will lead to retribution against their districts and states? Are we seeing so little action on the part of the opposition party because there is no political incentive to take action?

Put another way, how do you sell opposition to constituents as they begin the feel the pain of new policy regimes? Is it simply going on TV to lay the blame ex post or do you tell them the pain is coming in advance? Is it good politics to serve as the messenger of doom for someone else’s policies?

This isn’t building up to a big observation. I don’t know. These are just the questions I’m walking around with. There’s something about the current administration that makes political opposition feel like punching a cloud. No one is sure what the adminstration can and can’t get away with. What the courts will strike down or hold up. What the next hour’s executive order will be. How do you oppose chaos if chaos is the sole (governance) objective?

The simple answer may simply be to begin building institutions at the subnational level. That takes time, and tax dollars, to be sure, but sometimes you have to plant trees whose shade you will never sit in. It doesn’t just have to be single states, either. Why can’t New York, California, and Massachusetts have their own health consortium to prepare flu vaccines and fund research? Why can’t Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona set aside resources to grow solar power generation? I don’t know how you escape federal tariffs legally, but such considerations don’t seem to be slowing down the executive branch. Why can’t California or Michigan play the same game?

I don’t know where this is going, and the entire political landscape may shift the first time Social Security checks go out a week late, but at some point the opposition will have to pivot from anger and resistance to building for a new and different governance landscape, and that will include rebuilding newer, perhaps more resilient or even redundant institutions. It’s all pie in the sky until it isn’t.

It’s hard to keep up with all of the Trump administration’s activities. There is such a flurry of activity related to funding, regulations, and executive actions that no one can keep up with everything. Individuals and news outlets have scarce resources and attention. There’s the added typical challenge of filtering out fact from analysis. If only there was way to summarize the administration’s activities in an objective and meaningful sense.

Luckily, numbers don’t lie – and the federal government publishes a lot of numbers. Specifically, they publish the Daily Treasury Statement which identifies each day’s various categories of outlays. We can look at the raw number of spending to get a sense for where and whether Trump is changing spending within the federal government.

Lauren Bauer at The Hamilton Project noticed that the US Treasury has an API for those daily statements.  She created a nice online tool at Brookings that is relatively user friendly. Individuals can visit and see each day’s spending or the cumulative spending throughout the year. Below is the cumulative federal spending for 2024 and 2025. As of March 5^th, the US has spent a total of 5.2% more in 2025 than in the year prior (that’s on track with the growth rate of GDP). Importantly, she makes all of the data available for download so that individuals can conduct their own analysis. I lean on her data here.

Where have the cuts been happening? The below graph includes the 5 spending areas that have been most deeply cut relative to the same day in 2024.* The red line denotes inauguration day. The USAID cuts made big news, and it seems like they knew something was happening around the time of inauguration. It looks like they were trying to get spending out the door before the taps were shut off. The FCC and the Library of Congress were also affected by the funding freeze that was announced in late January.

President Trump claims to have made cutting waste a priority. With Elon Musk in tow, the administration has made waves by disrupting USAID, the NSF, and federal payroll. We’re 45 days into the administration. We can use the data provided by the Treasury and made accessible by Bauer to evaluate how the Trump administrations has been spending and cutting according to the numbers.

One way to evaluate spending is to compare the cumulative spending over the course of 2024 and 2025. That is, spending on the 45^th day of the year should be more or less comparable in 2024 vs 2025. It’s still early in the year and since various payments can be quite irregular, there’s a lot of noise in the data so far. But we should be able to see big changes. Smaller changes will be easier to see as the year goes on.

The 5 areas of greatest cumulative spending growth relative to 2024 are graphed below.* It does look like some funding was trying to get out of the door prior to Trump taking office, but that’s just speculation on my part.   FEMA spending was up, likely due to the fires in California.  Much more US Treasury spending is happening, specifically for Claims, Judgments, & Relief. We might see that remain elevated as the new administration keeps ‘trying’ things and then being stopped by injunctions, being the subject of lawsuits, and owing compensation.

While big percent changes in outlays can have massive implications for individual programs, Musk and Trump will need to cut huge amounts in order to claim any kind of victory over profligate spending. (Just so we’re all on the same page, they will fail if they refuse to touch old-age entitlements.) Where have the biggest spending cuts happened as measured by actually dollars? See below.*** The deepest and most consistent cuts are coming from the reductions in federal employee insurance payments. Similarly, the USAID and FCC cuts amount to a $2 billion cut from this time last year. Department of Education spending and the hospital insurance trust fund are down, but are also more volatile in their expenditures. Those one-time spikes in the data are due to pay dates between 2024 and 2025 being offset by a day or two.

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The future is always uncertain, but the short term returns on Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers already look better than some would have forecast. While he isn’t up to his highest previous standard of play yet, the reduced burden and additional space being enjoyed by Lebron James is already evident in his play. You’ll find no predictions regarding the rest of the season here, but it is a healthy reminder that complementarities are harder to anticipate than substitutes. The possibility of substitution between inputs is more than anything else revealed by their sameness, an attribute that alllows revelation by comparions. Complementarity, on the other hand, is far more complex and often obfuscated by the near infinite ways two or more inputs can be different. Substitutes can be predicted with information and attention to detail, and is therefore more easily reduced to a repeatably applied formula. Predicting complementarities demands more bespoke creativity, an art that is far harder to differentiate from luck.

Institutional vandalism is neither privatization nor creative destruction. It’s just cruelty masquerading as genius that plans to simply plead the necessary risk of endeavor when exposed as gratuitous incompetence. We may, within 10 years, see a newer, better NIH (or, preferably, cluster of baby NIHs) rise from the ashes. We may see a revitalized NSF and a whole slew of new institutions funding educaton research domestically and supporting the broader world through American aid programs. Maybe, maybe not.

But make no mistake: this is not a controlled burn. There is no plan, other than perhaps the wholly articulated belief that destruction wrought from chaos is a plan. This is a series of forest fires set by gleefull children with matches, wholly unable to even comprehend the risks they are taking on behalf of everyone else. We’ll probably get through to the other side, but for those of us who have been thinking about tail risk for a decade of Trump, the number of standard deviations between us and the unthinkable keeps getting smaller.

How bad are things? You know, in terms of our democracy and economy crumbling under the great wheel of history as the current administration tries to waddle us into fascist kakistrocracy. Are they bad? Maybe! Or maybe things are mostly fine and all we have to cope with is fear-peddling journalists and neurotic academics hyperventilating through what promises to be a four-year panic attack.

Well, Tyler is looking for market indicators. Signs that the market is internalizing the possibility of deteriorating government and political institutions into prices. That’s a really tall order, even more so than what it might seem to those of us who tend to rely on prices to reveal collective wisdom and the best underlying forecast. Prices reflect the expected benefits and the opportunity cost of an asset or choice in question. Opportunity cost can be explained in a number of ways, but they all boil down to the best outside option. It’s always going to be trickier to expect convenient and obvious price indicators for risk that is inescapable, where there is little in the way of an outside option. If you want a good forecast for avian flu, poultry and egg prices work pretty well, reflecting culled supply, reduced demand from a fearful public that thinks carnitas is sufficiently tasty, and the moves made by speculators who think that things are (or are not) going to get worse. So what are the analogous prices for those speculating that the center will or will not continue to hold in the Great American Project?

If you believe that the Trump administration is, in fact, trying to backdoor in an authoritarian revolution while walling off the largest economy from the rest of the world into a protectionist backwater, all while undermining the global reserve currency, what exactly is the outside option? Where can the money go? The people? The ideas? There are no doubt answers to those questions, but while most of the developed world is struggling with protectionist and authoritarian fevers, all while many entertain the prospect of a Russian invader who is already actively attacking a democratic nation, a host of obvious answers don’t rush to mind.

But let’s not punt entirely. Let’s get a little more micro. Is the market internalizing a more protectionist future for the US market and the global economy? Here’s the S&P 500 index for the “Materials” sector vs the entire S&P 500 over the last year:

Correlation is not causation, but the rapid drop off in the value of “chemicals, construction materials, containers and packaging, metals and mining, and paper and forest products” since what was effectively a coin-flip election is certainly convenient to the hypothesis that the market thinks materials previously circulating the global economy are not as likely to find their most valued uses under the Trump administration. If the market thinks we should take the threats of protectionism seriously, why shouldn’t we treat the administration’s threats to default on the debt similarly? Of weaponizing the DOJ against political opponents or ignoring court decisions? There’s not going to be a silver bullet composite price, but for each individual threat we should be looking for a relevant price.

If we are going to accept the hypothesis that any one single price indicator is going to be hard to identify, how about a forecasting index? The folks beind the Policy Uncertainty Index have a measure that reflects the language used in a large variety of publications combined with professional forecasters to reveal not what the future of policy is likely to be, but how much disagreement there is about it. Again quite the increase in the aftermath of a coin-flip election, which is odd because you would expect their to be more uncertainty before a coin-flip election, not afterwards. Shouldn’t we know what we are getting to a greater degree now what we know who is holding the office? I mean, assuming we actually know who is wielding power and influence within the office…

So there are some metrics that point towards a more isolationist future characterized by less predictable government institutions. That’s not nothing. We should be careful not to expect the markets to hand us a forecast on a silver platter, however. In both 1962 and 1983, it’s entirely possibe that nuclear war was averted by Stanislav Petrov and Vasily Arkhipov, who respectively refused to launch missiles and report (erroneously indicated) US missile launches, as dictated by Soviet protocol. As chaos is injected into the US government, including those tasked with overseeing the nuclear arsenal, we should perhaps look to the past. What were the prices that revealed how close we were to history-forking events? Did any price reflect the ebbs and flows in that underlying risk, the changing cultures within the Soviet military and the growing and shrinking prospects of nuclear war? Or did prices instead remain largely untouched by such tides of history? Not to get melodramatically apocalyptic, but perhaps prices cannot accurately reflect the prospect of a world without connection to the markets of today. So it goes. There’s some risk you simply can’t diversify, insure, or reallocate against.

Which prices will reflect those risks?

On its merits, the dumbest trade in the history of the NBA, if not modern professional sports, occurred last week. There is no shortage of content explaining why the trading of Luka Doncic for Anthony Davis was a poorly exectuted trade in which the Dallas Mavericks got pennies on the dollar from the Los Angeles Lakers. Even if you subscribe to the theory that there is a signficant unobserved defect in Doncic motivating Dallas to avoid what would have been a new $350m contract, the fact remains they could have traded him for a host of draft assets far in excess of the value of Anthony Davis.

This has unsurprisingly spawned a cottage industry of conspiracy theories. The most popular is that the new Dallas owners are maneuvering for a casino license, but my favoirte is that the owners have inside information that a new Saudi Arabian, LIV Golf-style, rival league is in the works (I can’t find a post where such a thing was suggested. If you have a link, please put it in the comments). I have observed **ZERO** evidence for such a thing…but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t make for an excellent thought experiment, particularly since I think Saudi “sport washing” is largely motivated by a desire to diversify out of the oil business. A couple actual facts:

1. LIV Golf
   • The conceit of LIV golf was that the PGA Tour had a global monopoly based on nothing but i) high start up costs, ii) historical capital including brand recognition, and iii) the network effects born of having every top player in the world currently participating. The Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) made the audacious move to commit no less than $2 billion in winnings and up front fees to players to switch to their rival event series. The PGA and PIF are multiple years deep into trying to negotiate a merger with the LIV tour.
2. The Saudi Pro League (Soccer/Football)
   • The PIF took a 75% ownership stake in the league and immediately went plundering for talent around the world, signing late career-stage (but still very good) Christiano Ronaldo and a host of other excellent players, often tripling their salaries
   • They didn’t fully ignore existing contract rights, probably because of a hope to eventually integrate into the broader international soccer structure.
3. The basketball labor pool is no longer American-dominated
   • The best player in the world is Serbian.
   • 36% of NBA players were born outside the United States.
4. The ABA was cooler than the NBA
   • The last time the NBA faced competitiion from a rival league, they absorbed it in 1976.
   • The WHA was in many ways cooler than the NHL as well. The NHL similarly merged with them.
5. NBA players are paid far less than their market value
   • The owners and players union have a collectively bargained team salary cap of $140.6 million per season. The highest single player salary is $56 million.
   • Young players are so underpaid relative to their value their contracts are some of the most valuable assets because they give you a competitive advantage under the salary cap. No one ever seems to bring up how much the NBA Players Unions allows owners to underpay incoming players.

So, let’s put it this way. Why *wouldn’t* the Saudi Arabian PIF invest $5 billion in creating a rival basketball league? Remember, the Saudi soccer league successfully acquired some of the best players in the world from a sport that a) has nearly zero restrictions on salary (“financial fair play” rules not withstanding) and b) is, quite frankly, miserable to play with players that are below your level. What sort of havoc could they wreak on the NBA?

They could at least double the salaries of every single non-American player in a league that, in many cases, would be a shorter flight to their home countries. For comparative pennies they could fill out the rosters tripling the salaries of all of the best players in the Spanish and Italian leagues. As the PGA learned, there are no doubt a couple dozen top American players that would be happy to play abroad for 200% salary bumps. Would a single season of Lebron be worth a half billion dollars to a nascent league? Victor Wembanyama is currently the single most valuable player asset in the NBA and is getting paid $12.77million a year. A Saudi league could start him at $60m a year today and not bat an eye. What is the career arc of a sport-altering talent worth from beginning to end for a global entertainment product?

How is this relevant to the Doncic-Davis trade?

What exactly are the incentives for players, especially non-American players, and the PIF to honor existing contracts? Having a top 5 player under contract has exactly zero value if they don’t intend to honor the deal. Let’s go further – what exactly is the value of a draft pick if the cartel enforcing your “right” to be the sole employment option for player if that draft right isn’t honored by a rival league offering higher wages? The entire market value of NBA assets is predicated on the pre-existing property rights surrounding contracts and draft status. The calculus underlying those values is made astonishingly complex by the byzantine rules of the NBA salary cap. It’s all very confusing, but also taken entirely for granted in the ecosystem of analysts inside and pundits outside the system.

What happens if a rival shows up with no regard for the pre-existing institutions of the NBA cartel?

Every NBA institution would be up for grabs. The salary cap? It threatens the ability to retain the top talent. The draft? Why would rookies accept pennies on the dollar and a single possible employer? Why would someone who grew up in Sao Paulo want to take an 80% paycut for the privlege of playing in a town they’ve never heard of? I’m sure people who grew up in Los Angeles would prefer San Antonio to Riyadh, but *how much* would they prefer it? Is it a $100 million preference?

There is no shortage of irony in European sports existing in largely unbridled market competition while American sports leagues putter on as little socialist cartels. The thing about cartels is that all the antitrust exemptions in the world won’t protect you from competition if you’re too profitable. And the NBA is very profitable.

Again, I don’t think there is reason yet to believe that the Dallas Mavericks made anything other than a foolish, no good, very bad business decision. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t also the first sign that NBA owners aren’t 100% sure how to value their current assets going forward. This deal wasn’t just foolish, it was weird. When market prices get weird, big changes aren’t usually far off.