Power Monger

Setting prices and allocating resources through markets is, in fact, very conducive to general welfare. It just isn't working in the case of climate change because of underreliance on prices: the price of emitting greenhouse gases is free (or positive but too cheap in jurisdictions with weak climate policies).

There was some reasonable nitpicking from @centrally-unplanned and a few others when I posted this American Affairs article about the Navy, but I still think its basic premise stands:

This theory of war is not intellectually bankrupt? If you do win overwhelmingly, you can "simply" bomb the enemy's industrial capacity away once you obtain military superiority, and modern bombardment capacities to do that are pretty high. But A: even our basic capacity for ordinance/ammunition production is struggling, B: that is an incredibly rosy prediction for the course of any conflict, and C: really isn't how modern conflicts go? If the US is in a conflict with China over Taiwan and we find ourselves carpet-bombing Chongqing, that is not a conflict over Taiwan; that is World War 3. Most conflicts today seem to occur in boxes of restraint to ensure they don't tip into nuclear MAD or destroy the world economy, and those boxes are absolutely going to leave some shipyards untouched and permit a "round 2". We don't really have a plan that?

Ofc if you were a serious military planner in the US with power and agency, you would be pushing hard to alleviate this problem via A: friendshoring military-related production to allies to build a robust, economically cost-effective production network, and B: going all-in on immigration to boost US total productive capacity and maybe even allow for the economics of more truly domestic industrial investments to pencil out without needing to force rich Americans into lower-paying jobs. But that kind of serious military planning is also a capacity we no longer have, so. Yeah.

It seems to be a cycle where:

- Congress doesn't trust the USN with more money because of all the bungled surface combatant projects

- shipyards can't expand capacity without more concrete orders, requiring money

- the USN has to fiddle with and overengineer all its surface combatants because there's no new capacity being created and no surge of money, both of which would be required to achieve economies of scale

The more elite the level of post-secondary schooling, the higher the rate of claimed disability in the student body. I see a few causal pathways, mostly relating to the fact that being classified as disabled gives payoffs in the form of academic accomodation or easier acceptance; TLDR versions are in the poll answers, expanded versions are below.

Institutional Incentives: the more elite institutions offer greater payoffs to students classified as disabled, and being classified as disabled helps more with acceptance.

Student Culture: the student bodies of more elite institutions possess "group knowledge" of the payoffs of being classified as disabled, and have cultures encouraging it at any given level of academic payoff.

Individual Student Characteristics: the type of student who can get accepted to a more elite institution is craftier at working within academic bureaucracies, and would be more likely to get themselves classified as disabled at any school.

Simple coincidence: elite schools simply have more disabled students by coincidence, there is not an interesting causal relation.

obviously your life can be made worse if someone runs you over with a car, and we all understand they should not have run you over with a car. and so if your favourite part of your morning routine is getting coffee at a particular shop and that shop closes and now your every morning is worse than it used to be, it can be tempting to think that someone has wronged you. the coffee shop owner for deciding to close their business, or people in your area for not liking that shop enough to make it a profitable, or the government for making taxes too high and not subsidising your particular lifestyle. your life is worse, therefore someone, somewhere is at fault.

Y'know, I've largely moved on beyond pointing out and lamenting at how openly corrupt the Trump administration is, but holy shit the Trump administration is so unbelievably corrupt.

As in the rest of the literature, we find that the effect of each college characteristic [average SAT score, Barron's Index of selectivity, and net tuition] is sizeable for both cohorts in cross-sectional least squares regression models that control for variables commonly observed by researchers (such as student characteristics and SAT scores). However, when we adjust for a proxy for unobserved student characteristics—namely, by controlling for the average SAT score of the colleges that students applied to—our estimates for the effects of college characteristics fall substantially and are generally indistinguishable from zero for both the 1976 and 1989 cohort of students. Notable exceptions are for racial and ethnic minorities (black and Hispanic students) and for students whose parents have relatively little education; for these subgroups, our estimates remain large, even in models that adjust for unobserved student characteristics. One possible explanation for this pattern of results is that highly selective colleges provide access to networks for minority students and for students from disadvantaged family backgrounds that are otherwise not available to them.

Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges

Using this design, we find that being admitted from the waitlist to an Ivy-Plus college increases students’ chances of achieving early career upper-tail success on both monetary and non-monetary dimensions. The causal effects of admission to an Ivy-Plus college are much larger for students with weaker fallback options– e.g., whose colleges in their home state channel fewer students to the top 1% after college. Exploiting this heterogeneity in treatment effects, we estimate that the marginal student who is admitted to and attends an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average flagship public is about 50% more likely to reach the top 1% of the income distribution at age 33, nearly twice as likely to attend a highly-ranked graduate school, and 2.5 times as likely to work at a prestigious firm.