Inside Silicon Valley’s Growing Obsession With Having Smarter Babies

Tech execs are paying tens of thousands to find brilliant dates or select high-IQ embryos. ‘They want to raise high-performing children.’

By Zusha Elinson of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Parents here are paying up to $50,000 for new genetic-testing services that include promises to screen embryos for IQ."

"professional matchmakers are setting up tech execs with brilliant partners partly to get brilliant offspring."

"in Silicon Valley, where top preschools require IQ tests and openness to novelty runs high, parents aren’t burdened by moral quandaries of using technology to select for their children’s intelligence before birth."

"Startups Nucleus Genomics and Herasight have begun publicly offering IQ predictions, based on genetic tests, to help people select which embryos to use for in vitro fertilization. Bay Area demand is high for the services, costing around $6,000 at Nucleus and up to $50,000 at Herasight."

[one couple] "made a shared Google spreadsheet and both ranked the importance of each trait."

"“What percent additional lifetime risk for Alzheimer’s balances a 1% decrease in lifetime risk for bipolar?” they wrote. “How much additional risk of ADHD cancels out against 10 extra IQ points?” After vigorous discussion and some complex calculations, they came up with scores for each embryo."

This reminds me the sperm bank whose donors were Nobel Prize winners in science. See Book Excerpt: 'The Genius Factory' from ABC News in 2005. Excerpt:

"Robert K. Graham was a millionaire who set out to create a sperm bank stocked solely with the sperm of Nobel laureates. During its 19 years, The Repository for Germinal Choice, also known as the genius sperm bank, sparked a great deal of controversy. Critics accused Graham of being a racist and a white supremacist for trying to create a race of "superkids."

The sperm bank produced 215 children between 1980 and 1999."

"he was distributing it [the sperm] only to women smart enough to qualify for the high-IQ society Mensa. Graham had given his sperm bank a name that had the thud of second-rate science fiction: "The Repository for Germinal Choice."" 

Related posts:

The preference for partners of the same education has significantly increased for white individuals (2017) (It seems like well educated whites want partners that will share their values in developing the human capital of their children (like sending them to college))

What Will College Students Do For Money? (2013)

""College newspapers and Craigslist carry advertisements seeking women and men, particularly students with high GPAs and SATs, who are willing to "donate" their gametes."

"Egg donors in the United States are typically paid $5,000 to $10,000, a voluntary ceiling established by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. Sperm donors get about $100 per donation;..."" 

Primitive communism: Marx’s idea that societies were naturally egalitarian and communal before farming is widely influential and quite wrong (plus Ruth Benedict on property rights)

By Manvir Singh. He is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. Excerpts:

"It was on that first trip that [anthropologist Kim] Hill saw the Aché share their meat. A man returning from a hunt dropped an animal in the middle of camp. Another person, the butcher, prepared piles for each family. A third person distributed. ‘At the time, it seemed kind of logical to me,’ Hill said. The scene reminded him of a family barbecue where everyone gets a plate.

Yet the more he lived among the Aché, the more astonishing food-sharing seemed. Men were forbidden from eating meat they’d acquired. Their wives and children received no more than anyone else. When he later built detailed genealogies, he discovered that, contrary to his expectations, bandmates were often unrelated. Most importantly, food-sharing didn’t just happen on special days. It was a daily occurrence, a psychological and economic centrepiece of Aché society.

What he started to see, in other words, was ‘almost pure economic communalism – and I really didn’t think that was possible.’"

"In 1985, he started working with another group, the Hiwi of Venezuela. He didn’t expect dramatic differences from the Aché. The Hiwi, too, were hunter-gatherers."

"Then, there was food-sharing. In the primitive communism of the Aché, hunters had little control over distributions: they couldn’t favour their families, and food flowed according to need. None of these applied to the Hiwi. When meat came into a Hiwi village, the hunter’s family kept a larger batch for themselves, distributing shares to a measly three of 36 other families. In other words, as Hill and his colleagues wrote in 2000 in the journal Human Ecology, ‘most Hiwi families receive nothing when a food resource is brought into the village.’

By exercising control over distributions, hunters convert meat into relationships

Hiwi sharing tells us something important about primitive communism: hunter-gatherers are diverse. Most have been less communistic than the Aché. When we survey forager societies, for instance, we find that hunters in many communities enjoyed special rights. They kept trophies. They consumed organs and marrow before sharing. They received the tastiest parts and exclusive rights to a killed animal’s offspring.

The most important privilege hunters enjoyed was selecting who gets meat. Selective sharing is powerful. It extends a bond between giver and recipient that the giver can pull on when they are in need. Refusing to share, meanwhile, is a rejection of friendship, an expression of ill will. When the anthropologist Richard Lee lived among the Kalahari !Kung, he noticed that a hunter named N!eisi once ignored his sister’s husband while passing out warthog meat. When asked why, N!eisi replied harshly: ‘This one I want to eat with my friends.’ N!eisi’s brother-in-law took the hint and, three days later, left camp with his wives and children. By exercising control over distributions, hunters convert meat into relationships.

To own something, we say, means excluding others from enjoying its benefits. I own an apple when I can eat it and you cannot. You own a toothbrush when you can use it and I cannot. Hunters’ special privileges shifted property rights along a continuum from fully public to fully private. The more benefits they could monopolise – from trophies to organs to social capital – the more they could be said to own their meat.

Compared with the Aché, many mobile, band-living foragers lay closer to the private end of the property continuum. Agta hunters in the Philippines set aside meat to trade with farmers. Meat brought in by a solitary Efe hunter in Central Africa was ‘entirely his to allocate’. And among the Sirionó, an Amazonian people who speak a language closely related to the Aché, people could do little about food-hoarding ‘except to go out and look for their own’. Aché sharing might embody primitive communism. Yet, Hill admits, ‘the Aché are probably the extreme case.’

Hunters’ privileges are inconvenient for narratives about primitive communism. More damning, however, is a starker, simpler fact. All hunter-gatherers had private property, even the Aché.

Individual Aché owned bows, arrows, axes and cooking implements. Women owned the fruit they collected. Even meat became private property as it was handed out. Hill explained: ‘If I set my armadillo leg on [a fern leaf] and went out for a minute to take a pee in the forest and came back and somebody took it? Yeah, that was stealing.’

Some proponents of primitive communism concede that foragers owned small trinkets but insist they didn’t own wild resources. But this too is mistaken. Shoshone families owned eagle nests. Bearlake Athabaskans owned beaver dens and fishing sites. Especially common is the ownership of trees. When an Andaman Islander man stumbled upon a tree suitable for making canoes, he told his group mates about it. From then, it was his and his alone. Similar rules existed among the Deg Hit’an of Alaska, the Northern Paiute of the Great Basin, and the Enlhet of the arid Paraguayan plains. In fact, by one economist ’s estimate, more than 70 per cent of hunter-gatherer societies recognised private ownership over land or trees.

The respect for property rights is clearest when someone violates them. To appreciate this, consider the Mbuti, one of the short-statured (‘pygmy’) hunter-gatherers of Central Africa.

The Ute of Colorado whipped thieves. The Ainu of Japan sliced their earlobes off

Much of what we know about Mbuti society comes from Colin Turnbull, a British-American anthropologist who stayed with them in the late 1950s."

"his writings still undermine claims of primitive communism. He described a society in which theft was prohibited, and where even the most desperate members suffered for violating property rights.

Take, for instance, Pepei, a Mbuti man who in 1958 was 19 years old and still unmarried. Unlike most bachelors, who slept next to the fire, Pepei lived in a hut with his younger brother. But instead of collecting building materials, he swiped them. He snuck around at night, plucking a leaf from this hut and a sapling from that. He also filched food. He was an orphan after all, and a bachelor, so he had few people to help him prepare meals. When food mysteriously disappeared, Pepei always claimed to have seen a dog snatch it.

‘Nobody really minded Pepei’s stealing,’ wrote Turnbull, ‘because he was a born comic and a great storyteller. But he had gone too far in stealing from old Sau.’

Old Sau was a skinny, feisty widow. She lived a couple of huts down from Pepei, and one night caught him skulking around in her hut. As he lifted the lid of a pot, she smacked him with a pestle, grabbed his arm, twisted it behind his back, and shoved him into the open.

Justice was brutal. Men ran out and held Pepei, while youths broke off thorny branches and thrashed him. Eventually Pepei broke away and ran into the forest crying. After 24 hours, he returned to camp and went straight to his hut unseen. ‘His hut was between mine and Sau’s,’ wrote Turnbull, ‘and I heard him come in, and I heard him crying softly because even his brother wouldn’t speak to him.’

Other foragers punished stealing, too. The Ute of Colorado whipped thieves. The Ainu of Japan sliced their earlobes off. For the Yaghan of Tierra del Fuego, accusing someone of robbery was a ‘deadly insult’. Lorna Marshall, who spent years living with the Kalahari !Kung, reported that a man was once killed for taking honey. Through violence towards offenders, foragers reified private property.

Is primitive communism another seductive but incorrect anthropological myth? On the one hand, no hunter-gatherer society lacked private property. And although they all shared food, most balanced sharing with special rights. On the other hand, living in a society like the Aché’s was a masterclass in reallocation. It’s hard to imagine farmers engaging in need-based redistribution on that scale.

Whatever we call it, the sharing economy that Hill observed with the Aché does not reflect some lost Edenic goodness. Rather, it sprang from a simpler source: interdependence. Aché families relied on each other for survival. We share with you today so that you can share with us next week, or when we get sick, or when we are pregnant. Hill once saw a man fall from a tree and break his hip. ‘He couldn’t walk for three months, and in those three months, he produced zero food,’ Hill said. ‘And you would think that he would have starved to death and his family would have starved to death. But, of course, nothing happened like that, because everybody provisioned him the whole time.’

This is partly about reciprocity. But it’s also about something deeper. When people are locked in networks of interdependence, they become invested in each other’s welfare. If I rely on three other families to keep me alive and get me food when I cannot, then not only do I want to maintain bonds with them – I also want them to be healthy and strong and capable.

Interdependence might seem enviable. Yet it begets a cruelty often overlooked in talk about primitive communism. When a person goes from a lifeline to a long-term burden, reasons to keep them alive can vanish. In their book Aché Life History (1996), Hill and the anthropologist Ana Magdalena Hurtado listed many Aché people who were killed, abandoned or buried alive: widows, sick people, a blind woman, an infant born too soon, a boy with a paralysed hand, a child who was ‘funny looking’, a girl with bad haemorrhoids. Such opportunism suffuses all social interactions. But it is acute for foragers living at the edge of subsistence, for whom cooperation is essential and wasted efforts can be fatal.

Once that need to survive dissipated, even friends could become disposable

Consider, for example, how the Aché treated orphans. ‘We really hate orphans,’ said an Aché person in 1978. Another Aché person was recorded after seeing jaguar tracks:

    Don’t cry now. Are you crying because you want your mother to die? Do you want to be buried with your dead mother? Do you want to be thrown in the grave with your mother and stepped on until your excrement comes out? Your mother is going to die if you keep crying. When you are an orphan nobody will ever take care of you again.

The Aché had among the highest infanticide and child homicide rates ever reported. Of children born in the forest, 14 per cent of boys and 23 per cent of girls were killed before the age of 10, nearly all of them orphans. An infant who lost their mother during the first year of life was always killed.

(Since acculturation, many Aché have regretted killing children and infants. In Aché Life History, Hill and Hurtado reported an interview with a man who strangled a 13-year-old girl nearly 20 years earlier. He ‘asked for our forgiveness’, they wrote, ‘and acknowledged that he never should have carried out the task and simply “wasn’t thinking”.’)

Hunter-gatherers shared because they had to. They put food into their bandmates’ stomachs because their survival depended on it. But once that need dissipated, even friends could become disposable.

The popularity of the idea of primitive communism, especially in the face of contradictory evidence, tells us something important about why narratives succeed. Primitive communism may misrepresent forager societies. But it is simple, and it accords with widespread beliefs about the arc of human history. If we assume that societies went from small to big, or from egalitarian to despotic, then it makes sense that they transitioned from property-less harmony to selfish competition, too. Even if the facts of primitive communism are off, the story feels right.

More important than its simplicity and narrative resonance, however, is primitive communism’s political expediency. For anyone hoping to critique existing institutions, primitive communism conveniently casts modern society as a perversion of a more prosocial human nature. Yet this storytelling is counterproductive. By drawing a contrast between an angelic past and our greedy present, primitive communism blinds us to the true determinants of trust, freedom and equity. If we want to build better societies, the way forward is neither to live as hunter-gatherers nor to bang the drum of a make-believe state of nature. Rather, it is to work with humans as they are, warts and all."

Singh's article reminded me of a passage about the Kwakiutl from Ruth Benedict's book "Patterns of Culture." Click here to go to a link that has her entire book online. It indicates that they may have had strong property rights

"The tribes of the North-West Coast had great possessions, and these possessions were strictly owned. They were property in the sense of heirlooms, but heirlooms, with them, were the very basis of society. There were two classes of possessions. The land and sea were owned by a group of relatives in common and passed down to all its members. There were no cultivated fields, but the relationship group owned hunting territories, and even wild-berrying and wild-root territories, and no one could trespass upon the property of the family. The family owned fishing territories just as strictly. A local group often had to go great distances to those strips of the shore where they could dig clams, and the shore near their village might be owned by another lineage. These grounds had been held as property so long that the village-sites had changed, but not the ownership of the clam-beds. Not only the shore, but even deep-sea areas were strict property. For halibut fishing the area belonging to a given family was bounded by sighting along double landmarks. The rivers, also, were divided up into owned sections for the candlefish hauls in the spring, and families came from great distances to fish their own section of the river."

How much would you pay to get a job? $10,000? And are their any skill certificates worth getting?

First, see Inside the $10,000 Job Search: Career Coaching, LinkedIn Fees, Résumé Help: The costs of finding work climb as job hunts stretch over months; ‘It’s trying to be louder than anyone else’ by Lindsay Ellis of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"One job hunter hired a "firm [that] provides weekly meetings with a career strategist to evaluate open roles and sources potential jobs from talent recruiters. It also created a personal website"

They help him "tailor his résumé to job descriptions"

[He] "says the price will be worth it if it helps him land a job faster.'

There is an "exploding cottage industry of networking and job-search subscriptions, career-coaching services and artificial-intelligence tools—all capitalizing on job seekers’ frustrations in a stalled hiring market."

[There is a] "growing length of the average job search as companies slow recruiting and leave positions unfilled."

[One guy "spent $17,000 last year for an eight-month coding boot camp and now plans to attend college for cybersecurity."

"Spending money on LinkedIn Premium, where connections can help users find someone on the inside, “has a pretty big ROI”—return on investment, said Edward Voelsing, founder of Rivet Group, a recruiting firm in the Charlotte, N.C., area. Connections are helpful in a stagnant market, where applicants can average 100 applications for every interview, he said."

Then see More Workers Are Getting Job-Skill Certificates. They Often Don’t Pay Off.: Many of thousands of online courses and other credentials employees pursue fall short in delivering, new study finds by Haley Zimmerman of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"most programs deliver few material returns"

"Workers, though, have few tools to assess which of thousands of options are worth their time and money. Employers, too, often struggle with what to value."

"just one in eight nondegree credentials delivered notable pay gains within a year of completion." 

[a] "study compared workers who received a credential with similar workers who didn’t get one—then measured the difference in their pay gains and career movements a year later."

"Even some certificates from elite institutions—and for skills in demand—provided little immediate payoff"

"A Project Management Graduate Certificate from Harvard Extension School, for instance, costs $13,760 and takes an average of 18 months to complete online, according to Harvard’s website. Of workers who earned the certificate, the share that advanced in their field was only slightly higher than for similar workers who didn’t get the certificate—a difference of about 3.7 percentage points" 

[Students] "didn’t see pay improve any more than they otherwise would have."

"Workers who received one of the 2,000 top-performing credentials earned about $5,000 extra a year, on average, within 12 months of completing the programs. Many of the certificates were in nursing, radiology and other medical fields"

"A lot of credentials are being designed based on a loose understanding of what it takes for somebody to get hired in the field" 

Maybe with the economy changing so much (and perhaps partly due to AI), no one can be sure which direction to go in. A skill that sounds promising might turn out not to be in demand in just a few years. 

Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence

By Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen.

"This paper examines changes in the labor market for occupations exposed to generative artificial intelligence using high-frequency administrative data from the largest payroll software provider in the United States. We present six facts that characterize these shifts. We find that since the widespread adoption of generative AI, early-career workers (ages 22-25) in the most AI-exposed occupations have experienced a 13 percent relative decline in employment even after controlling for firm-level shocks. In contrast, employment for workers in less exposed fields and more experienced workers in the same occupations has remained stable or continued to grow. We also find that adjustments occur primarily through employment rather than compensation. Furthermore, employment declines are concentrated in occupations where AI is more likely to automate, rather than augment, human labor. Our results are robust to alternative explanations, such as excluding technology-related firms and excluding occupations amenable to remote work. These six facts provide early, large-scale evidence consistent with the hypothesis that the AI revolution is beginning to have a significant and disproportionate impact on entry-level workers in the American labor market."

See also There Is Now Clearer Evidence AI Is Wrecking Young Americans’ Job Prospects: Young workers face rising AI competition in fields like software development, but some also benefit from AI as a helper, new research shows by Justin Lahart of The WSJ. 

Related posts:

AI Is Forcing the Return of the In-Person Job Interview: More companies are returning to face-to-face meetings to counter cheating by candidates—and more ominous digital threats (2025) 

AI’s Overlooked $97 Billion Contribution to the Economy: The AI ‘dividend’ may not be evident yet in estimates of gross domestic product but it’s making life better and more productive (2025) 

AI Is Wrecking an Already Fragile Job Market for College Graduates (is the problem structural Unemployment & the case of a skills mismatch?) Companies have long leaned on entry-level workers to do grunt work that doubles as on-the-job training. Now ChatGPT and other bots can do many of those chores (2025) 

No, AI Robots Won’t Take All Our Jobs: Instead, they will boost productivity, lower prices and spur the evolution of the labor market (2025) 

IBM CEO Says AI Has Replaced Hundreds of Workers but Created New Programming, Sales Jobs: The tech company promises higher total employment as it reinvests resources toward roles like software development (2025)

Technological Disruption in the Labor Market (2025)

Why AI Might Not Take All Our Jobs—if We Act Quickly (2025)

Some good news on productivity (2025) (AI is mentioned)

Some economics of A.I. (2025) 

The AI-Generated Population Is Here, and They’re Ready to Work (2024)

Robots writing science fiction (2024) 

Will technology cost artists their job? (2023)

“Why did the human stare at the glass of orange juice?” “They were trying to concentrate.” (2023) (Partly about AI being used to tell jokes)

The $900,000 AI Job Is Here (2023) 

Prompt engineers chat with generative-AI chatbots (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2023)

Are robots writing fake product reviews? (2022)

What if companies can't afford real models for their ads? Use AI generated fake pictures (2020) 

An AI Breaks the Writing Barrier (2020) 

What Econ 101 Can Teach Us About Artificial Intelligence: Here's why advancing technology often leads to more jobs for humans, not fewer (2017) 

World War II Liberty Ships and the Law of Increasing Opportunity Cost

 See ‘Launching Liberty’ Review: Shipyard Victory The U.S. quickly constructed a fleet of vessels to carry vital war supplies across the oceans. Did the rush to build so fast affect quality? by Marc Levinson. He reviewed the book Launching Liberty: The Epic Race to Build the Ships That Took America to War by Doug Most.

The Liberty ships were cargo ships and at one point during the war they were built very quickly. But as this article points out, as we tried to expand production early on we had to bring in workers with very little experience. And the time it took them to learn how to do this greatly raised the cost.

That is party what the Law of Increasing Opportunity Cost is about. As you produce more of a good you have to take resources out of producing a different good and those resources will not be well suited to producing the good whose output you want to expand.

One example I often used in class was of a school that wanted to have more math classes. If they had to move teachers from other fields into math they would have to be retrained and that would be costly. I also provide a different numerical example below after a list of related posts.

Excerpts from the article:

"Between 1941 and 1945, some 2,700 Liberty ships were built at U.S. shipyards. The goods they transported were critical to the Allies’ victory."

"“The biggest challenge facing shipyards was not building the ships,” Mr. Most writes. “It was hiring a large enough labor force, knowing that none of the workers available would have actual, firsthand shipbuilding experience.” He makes astute use of oral histories to describe the lives of workers willing to relocate to towns that were unprepared to receive them. The social impact was enormous, as the desperate need for labor opened doors that were previously closed. “The idea that white Okies and Arkies and Texies from middle-America farmland could work so easily alongside African, Hispanic, and Asian Americans was an unimaginable thought before the war,” Mr. Most comments. “So was the idea of men welding together a cargo ship alongside women.”"

"Only two Liberty ships were put in service in 1941; the first required about 250 days to complete." [That is a very high opportunity cost since those workers could have been doing something else]

"the enormous improvement in productivity between 1941 and 1944 owed mainly to heavy capital investment. The government owned the yards that built Liberty ships, and where it installed the latest cranes and automatic welding equipment, workers’ productivity was greatest."

Related posts:

Tariffs and the Law of Increasing Opportunity Cost (2025) 

Magnets and the Law of Increasing Opportunity Cost (2024)

EV-Battery Plants and the Law of Increasing Opportunity Cost (2023)

Monoclonal-antibody drugs and the law of increasing opportunity cost (2021)

Flushing out the true cause of the global toilet paper shortage amid coronavirus pandemic (2020)

Ventilators and the law of increasing opportunity cost (2020)

Hand sanitizer and the law of increasing opportunity cost (2020)

Here are some basic terms that economists use to discuss this issue:

Opportunity Cost-The value of the best foregone alternative. There is no such thing as a free lunch. If we want to build one more skyscraper, we may have to give up one submarine, since there may not be enough steel to go around (steel is scarce!).

The law of increasing opportunity cost-As more of a particular good is produced, the opportunity cost of its production rises. Why is the law of increasing opportunity cost true? Different resources are better suited to different productive activities. This is just about the same as saying people have different abilities, like some are more entrepreneurial and some are more bureaucratic.

Let’s assume that we have society with five workers who can make either of two goods, candles or shoes. Now the best candle maker will not necessarily be the best shoemaker and some candle makers will be better than others. This simply means that workers have different abilities.

In the real world, the best doctor would not be the best lawyer. Some plumbers are better than others.

In the table below, the number of candles OR shoes that each worker can make in a day is listed.

Worker	Candles	Shoes
I	7	3
II	6	4
III	5	5
IV	4	6
V	3	7

Again, the workers have different abilities, just as they do in the real world.

What are all of the combinations of candles and shoes that this society can make? If all the workers make candles, they can make 25 (just add up how much each worker can make). How many shoes? ZERO, since each worker spends all day in the candle factory (this is combination A in the table below).

If we want to make some shoes, the first worker we would tell to stop making candles, if we are rational and trying to get the best deal, would be worker V.  So we gain 7 shoes and lose 3 candles. That is why combination A is 22 and 7. Worker V no longer makes candles since they are making shoes. So the opportunity cost of making a shoe is some number of candles (and vice-versa).

The rest of the combinations that show what would happen if we kept moving workers out of candle making and into shoe making is in the table below.

Combination	Candles	Shoes
A	25	0
B	22	7
C	18	13
D	13	18
E	7	22
F	0	25

Now what happens to the opportunity cost as we move from combination A to combination B? Then combination B to combination C, and so on? The table below shows this:

Change	Candles Given Up	Shoes Gained	Candles per Shoe
A to B	3	7	0.429
B to C	4	6	0.667
C to D	5	5	1.000
D to E	6	4	1.500
E to F	7	3	2.333

By moving from point A to point B, we give up 3 candles to gain 7 shoes. The cost of each shoe in candles is .429 (3/7). Then we give up 4 candles to get 6 shoes, with each shoe costing .667 candles. The more shoes we try to produce, the more candles that have to be given up to get each shoe. So the opportunity cost of producing shoes rises.

This is called the law of increasing opportunity cost.

The law of increasing opportunity cost-As more of a particular good is produced, the opportunity cost of its production rises. (see how the numbers rise in the “Candles per Shoe” column in the table above)

Why is the law of increasing opportunity cost true? Different resources are better suited to different productive activities. This is just about the same as saying people have different abilities, which is what we see in the number of candles and shoes each worker can make.

 

Why Haven’t Tariffs Boosted Inflation? This Theory Is Gaining Traction

New research suggests the actual tariff rates are well below what economists have suspected

By Konrad Putzier of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"tariffs being paid by importers are lower than advertised."

"the weighted-average tariff rate—the average of all tariffs, adjusted for import volume from each country—that month was around 9%. That number is well below the 12% rate that they had previously estimated based on White House announcements, and far less than what some others have estimated."

"more than half of U.S. imports were duty-free"

"many U.S. companies and consumers bought less from countries with higher levies" [although this still hurts consumers since it means that they bought less preferred items]

"importers switched to countries with lower tariffs or to domestic producers." [again, this that they bought less preferred items]

"the U.S. hasn’t collected tariffs on many goods—for now. In June, just 48% of U.S. imports were actually subject to tariffs, thanks to myriad exemptions"

"the actual rates importers pay are likely to rise in months to come"

"Barclays expects weighted-average tariffs to end up at around 15%, up from a current 10% and 2.5% last year."

"many U.S. companies are importing fewer goods facing high duties"

"But part of that, too, might be temporary. U.S. companies imported more early in the year to get ahead of tariffs, leading to lower imports in the following months. As inventories shrink, imports are likely to rise again."

"more companies say they are increasingly likely to pass tariffs on to their customers in the months ahead.

Many companies were slow to raise prices while they were waiting to see where levies would ultimately end up."

Related posts:

Trump’s Tariffs Are Being Picked Up by Corporate America: Neither consumers nor foreign countries are assuming much of the tariff burden. At least not yet. (2025) 

Are Businesses Absorbing the Tariffs or Passing Them On to Their Customers? (2025) (This one has supply and demand curves that show that businesses usually can't pass all of a tax like tariffs on to the buyers and that how much gets passed along depends on the price elasticity of demand for the different products) 

Trump’s Tariffs Are Unique in History: U.S. trade policy went through three eras, focused on ‘revenue, restriction and reciprocity,’ economist Douglas Irwin says. The 47th president likes all three Rs, and a fourth, ‘retribution.’ (2025) 

Can Trump’s Tariff Offensive Deliver New American Jobs? (2025)

Americans Are Stockpiling Ahead of Trump’s Tariffs (2025)

Powell Warns of ‘Challenging Scenario’ for Fed as Trade War Rages (2025) 

How Much Do Tariffs Raise Prices? (2025)

Politicians talk about creating manufacturing jobs but do people really want them? (2025)

How some of Trump's policies might affect the economy (2024)

Tariffs are regressive: they fall more heavily on lower-income families who tend to spend more of their income on cheap imported goods (2024)

Americans Are Stockpiling to Get Ahead of Tariffs: Some consumers are snapping up computer parts, vacuum cleaners, coffee and olive oil before levies take effect (2024)

Life is full of tradeoffs: If we support American workers with trade restrictions it might mean more inflation (2023)

New Noise Cameras Pit Drivers of Fast Cars Against Their Neighbors

Traffic police deploy new technology—and steep fines—to combat roaring mufflers, revving engines and blaring stereos

By Scott Calvert of The WSJ. 

This seems like a good example of negative externalities. Hard to tell if the policies to deal with it make sense. What price tag should we put on noise?

Excerpts:

"Noise cameras are the new frontier in automated traffic enforcement. Growing numbers of agencies across the U.S., from New York to Hawaii, see them as a way to combat revving engines, blaring stereos, honking horns and earsplitting mufflers—some illegally altered.

For police, public officials and residents, the machines partially solve a perennial top complaint, particularly during warmer months in spots like Newport, where throngs flock to the Gilded Age mansions, music festivals and the bustling colonial waterfront."

"To critics—some who refuse to pay the tickets—the devices are another step toward a surveillance society and can unfairly ensnare drivers simply going about their routines in street-legal vehicles."

"Noise cameras are a recent import from Europe, first appearing several years ago and now spreading."

"Newport . . . gave every officer a handheld noise meter, with minimal success."

"Some motorists dinged by Newport said that doesn’t describe them. Pat Morganti, a dentist from Warwick, R.I., got a $250 ticket when his Corvette Z06 hit 84.3 decibels one morning. He said he was on a main road heading to a patient at a satellite office.

“It’s got a pretty obnoxious engine, but that’s the way the car is made,” said Morganti, 63, who reluctantly paid the fine."

Related posts:

Could a tax on vehicle miles traveled instead of a per-gallon gas tax raise money for the Highway Trust Fund and increase social welfare? (2017)

Vehicle Exhaust Linked To Brain-Cell Damage, Higher Rates of Autism (2011)

Could Those Hours Online Be Making Kids Nicer? Maybe Facebook and Twitter have positive externalities (2011)

Genetically Engineered Corn Has Positive Externalities (2010)

Smoking As A Negative Externality (2009) (But also see The Implicit Association Test, “fails the most basic reliability and validity criteria & second hand smoke is not dangerous from 2021)

Determining The Cost Of Pollution Is Hard (Which Makes Finding The Right Government Policy Hard, Too) (2009)

Should Movie Downloaders Who Clog The Internet Pay More? (2008)

AI Is Forcing the Return of the In-Person Job Interview

More companies are returning to face-to-face meetings to counter cheating by candidates—and more ominous digital threats

By Ray A. Smith of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Artificial intelligence has taken over so much of the job search that employers are resorting to a retro move: the in-person job interview.

Virtual interviews have become the new normal in hiring in recent years, driven by the rise of remote work and companies’ desire to speed up hiring. Trouble is, more candidates are using AI tools to cheat by feeding them answers off screen, especially in technical interviews, recruiters say. In rarer cases, AI-enabled scammers are impersonating job seekers with the aim of stealing data or money once they are hired.

Companies are responding by going old school. Cisco and McKinsey are among a growing number of companies bringing back or adding face-to-face meetings with candidates at various stages of the interview process. Google also has brought back in-person interviews for some roles this year, in part to ensure interviewees have the proper skills, for instance, in coding."

"it has become relatively easy to use AI tools off camera to write the code job candidates are being tested on"

"the share of the company’s employer-clients requesting in-person interviews has risen to 30% this year from 5% in 2024."

"Overwhelmed by the flood of applications to online job postings, employers turned to software to sort through candidates—and screen many out. Frustrated job seekers, in turn, have leaned on AI tools to craft more tailored applications and robo-apply for hundreds of jobs in just a few clicks."

"it possible to create highly realistic deepfake videos and audio. Such tools can enable a perhaps less-qualified candidate to gain an unfair edge in an interview"

"In a survey of 3,000 job seekers by research and advisory group Gartner this year, 6% said they had participated in interview fraud"

Related posts:

AI’s Overlooked $97 Billion Contribution to the Economy: The AI ‘dividend’ may not be evident yet in estimates of gross domestic product but it’s making life better and more productive (2025) 

AI Is Wrecking an Already Fragile Job Market for College Graduates (is the problem structural Unemployment & the case of a skills mismatch?) Companies have long leaned on entry-level workers to do grunt work that doubles as on-the-job training. Now ChatGPT and other bots can do many of those chores (2025) 

No, AI Robots Won’t Take All Our Jobs: Instead, they will boost productivity, lower prices and spur the evolution of the labor market (2025) 

IBM CEO Says AI Has Replaced Hundreds of Workers but Created New Programming, Sales Jobs: The tech company promises higher total employment as it reinvests resources toward roles like software development (2025)

Technological Disruption in the Labor Market (2025)

Why AI Might Not Take All Our Jobs—if We Act Quickly (2025)

Some good news on productivity (2025) (AI is mentioned)

Some economics of A.I. (2025) 

The AI-Generated Population Is Here, and They’re Ready to Work (2024)

Robots writing science fiction (2024) 

Will technology cost artists their job? (2023)

“Why did the human stare at the glass of orange juice?” “They were trying to concentrate.” (2023) (Partly about AI being used to tell jokes)

The $900,000 AI Job Is Here (2023) 

Prompt engineers chat with generative-AI chatbots (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2023)

Are robots writing fake product reviews? (2022)

What if companies can't afford real models for their ads? Use AI generated fake pictures (2020) 

An AI Breaks the Writing Barrier (2020) 

What Econ 101 Can Teach Us About Artificial Intelligence: Here's why advancing technology often leads to more jobs for humans, not fewer (2017) 

Adam Smith Meets Jonathan Haidt (on political polarization and the animosity of hostile factions)

Jonathan Haidt wrote the book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. It is about how polarized and nasty our politics have become, how everyone loves to demonize and ridicule anyone from a different political party. But these are things that Adam Smith talked about in his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments. I will have an excerpt from that at the end of the post.

Haidt is also concerned about how politically biased higher education has become, with the vast majority of professors being liberal, especially in the social sciences and humanities. So he and some other professors have founded the Heterodox Academy. Here is what they are about:

"We are a politically diverse group of social scientists, natural scientists, humanists, and other scholars who want to improve our academic disciplines and universities.

We share a concern about a growing problem: the loss or lack of “viewpoint diversity.” When nearly everyone in a field shares the same political orientation, certain ideas become orthodoxy, dissent is discouraged, and errors can go unchallenged.

To reverse this process, we have come together to advocate for a more intellectually diverse and heterodox academy."

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article in 2017 titled  Can Jonathan Haidt Calm the Culture Wars? You might have to be a subscriber to read it. Excerpts:

""The extremes, the far left and the far right, are being" — Haidt pauses a beat — "well, I’d say bizarre and crazy, but first, that would be a microaggression" — a roar of laughter from the audience — "and second, it would not be true. What’s happening isn’t crazy. It’s straight moral psychology.""

[Haidt] "explains what he calls "the new moral culture spreading on many college campuses." It is a culture, he says, that values victims, prioritizes emotional safety, silences dissent, and distorts scholarship. It is a culture that undermines the university’s traditional mission to pursue truth — "veritas" is right there on the seals of Harvard and Yale — in favor of a new mission: the pursuit of social justice. It is a culture that Haidt believes is fueled by three factors: political polarization, the rise of social media, and a lack of ideological diversity in the professoriate."

"Today, however, precious few conservatives are in psychology departments. "If you say something pleasing to the left about race, gender, immigration, or any other issue, it’s likely to get waved through to publication," says Haidt. "People won’t ask hard questions. They like it. They want to believe it." This represents "a real research-legitimacy problem in the social sciences.""

"His critics, of whom there are many, see his efforts to shift the conversation about diversity away from race and gender and toward politics as at best obtuse and at worst hostile. They say his absolutist stance on free speech is at odds with the need for a diverse and inclusive university. They say he lends a social-scientific sheen to old conservative arguments. They say his penchant for skewering the left, coupled with his willingness to engage the right, is suspect and creates confusion about where his sympathies actually lie. They say he’s either a closet conservative or a useful idiot for the right.

Haidt acknowledges that, especially in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, he risks sounding like a guy in Berlin in 1933 insisting that wisdom is to be found on both sides of the political spectrum. "The election has ramped up emotions so strongly that any effort to say, ‘You really need to have more conservatives in the university, and you need to listen to them’ strikes some people as immoral." On the other hand, he says, the election has forced a reckoning. More academics are saying, "Wow, we really are in a bubble. We must get out of this bubble.""

"On the left in the early 2000s, he grew frustrated by what he saw as the failure of Al Gore and John Kerry to speak to voters’ moral concerns. Haidt shifted his research focus to political psychology and immersed himself in conservative media, subscribing to National Review and watching Fox News. "My reaction was constantly like, ‘Oh, I never thought of that. Oh, that’s a good critique,’ " he says. "The scales were falling from my eyes." He’s since carefully positioned himself as a centrist, a neutral broker who speaks with all sides."

"Some liberal professors fear giving even inadvertent comfort to the right, especially with Trump in the White House and a Republican majority in Congress. Others, he argues, are intimidated by the bullying tactics of the far left.

That diagnosis rings true to David Bromwich, a professor of English at Yale. His 1992 book about the campus culture wars, Politics by Other Means (Yale University Press), is a withering assault on both traditionalists of the right and thought-policers of the left. (As John Silber wrote in a review, the book might have been called A Plague on Both Your Houses.) Asked how the current mood on elite campuses compares with that time, Bromwich says it’s at least as bad. "There is a horror of being associated with anything or anyone conservative," he says, calling it "a mark of the timidity of the academic personality in our time. It leads to a great deal of conformity, small acts of cowardice, and the voluntary self-suppression of ideas.""

"It’s human nature to make things sacred — people, places, books, ideas, Haidt says. "So what’s sacred at a university?" he asks. "Victims are sacred," he answers. And a victimhood culture offers only two ways to get prestige: Be a victim, or, if you can’t manage that, stand up for victims. How? "By punishing the hell out of anyone who in any way, shape, or form, even inadvertently, marginalizes a member of a victim class.""

""I’m very alarmed by the decline of our democracy." He grabs a stack of four books from beside his keyboard. The spines read like a map of his anxious mind: The Authoritarian Dynamic, The Federalist Papers, Rude Democracy, Why Nations Fail. He is especially worried about how social media deepen our political divisions. "We are all immersed in a river of outrage, drowning in videos of the other side at its worst," he says"

Here is the passage from Adam Smith:

"The animosity of hostile factions, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is often still more furious than that of hostile nations; and their conduct towards one another is often still more atrocious. What may be called the laws of faction have often been laid down by grave authors with still less regard to the rules of justice than what are called the laws of nations. The most ferocious patriot never stated it as a serious question, Whether faith ought to be kept with public enemies?—Whether faith ought to be kept with rebels? Whether faith ought to be kept with heretics? are questions which have been often furiously agitated by celebrated doctors both civil and ecclesiastical. It is needless to observe, I presume, that both rebels and heretics are those unlucky persons, who, when things have come to a certain degree of violence, have the misfortune to be of the weaker party. In a nation distracted by faction, there are, no doubt, always a few, though commonly but a very few, who preserve their judgment untainted by the general contagion. They seldom amount to more than, here and there, a solitary individual, without any influence, excluded, by his own candour, from the confidence of either party, and who, though he may be one of the wisest, is necessarily, upon that very account, one of the most insignificant men in the society. All such people are held in contempt and derision, frequently in detestation, by the furious zealots of both parties. A true party-man hates and despises candour; and, in reality, there is no vice which could so effectually disqualify him for the trade of a party-man as that single virtue. The real, revered, and impartial spectator, therefore, is, upon no occasion, at a greater distance than amidst the violence and rage of contending parties. To them, it may be said, that such a spectator scarce exists any where in the universe. Even to the great Judge of the universe, they impute all their own prejudices, and often view that Divine Being as animated by all their own vindictive and implacable passions. Of all the corrupters of moral sentiments, therefore, faction and fanaticism have always been by far the greatest."

Related posts:

The Chronicle of Higher Education Posted My Letter To The Editor About Adam Smith And Jonathan Haidt (The Ugly and Dangerous Side of Political Righteousness?)

Why Tribalism Took Over Our Politics (Social science gives an uncomfortable explanation: Our brains were made for conflict)