February 2026 links
Heritability of lifespan doubles once accounting for extrinsic mortality, yet extrinsic mortality itself is correlated with traits that also likely reduce lifespan, such as risk taking or low conscientiousness. To set the goal of, and implementing the (often arduous) lifestyle practices of extending longevity, you almost certainly meet some minimum threshold for conscientiousness in the first place.
Anti-vaxxers are creating gargantuan negative externalities for the rest of us. My most authoritarian idea is that I'm open to compulsory vaccinations. At the very least, vaccine mandates for public spaces such as schools, and private businesses being allowed to implement such, are of course justified.
So to be clear, the link between social media use and mental health amongst young people is ambiguous at best (except perhaps for young liberal or adolescent females, where the case for a link is stronger). Bullying, suicide, substance abuse, delinquency, and dropout rates peaked in the 70s and 80s - inconsistent with the notion that social media is generating a teen mental health crisis. Policymakers, authoritarian safetyists, and enemies of free speech are using this incredibly tenuous nascent “research” on the mental health impacts of social media to implement bans for specific age groups. Of course, as in Britain us adults have to undergo age verification (with biometric readings and official documentation) just to read Substack articles, these bans will restrict free expression for all of us.
IQ and conscientiousness matter in sports too. Neuroticism and agreeableness are negatively correlated with success here, whilst openness to experience and extroversion are positively correlated.
21st century fertility decline in Latin America "is driven primarily by reductions in within-group birth rates rather than by changes in population composition". Delayed childbirth and those with kids having less, rather than childlessness, are the main explanations.
Attitudes to immigration are, in part, influenced via predicted partisan support of the newcomers. Nonetheless, racial prejudice is also a variable with partisan variation…
The US government is basically a welfare state with a military and police force attached. Social spending merely stabilised, rather than fell, throughout the “neoliberal” era. By expenditures as a proportion of output, this makes the US the largest welfare state in the developed world - outpacing even the Nordics! However, as this welfare state is largely gerontrocratic, it's not associated with redustributive vibes.
What I find fascinating about jeans is that they owe their immense popularity to one film. If the media landscape can cause such durable change in tastes, then this substantially increases my estimates of the social costs of social media misinformation.
How cosmic dipole anomalies pose a challenge to λ-CDM. Even in a field where significance is reported in σs rather than p-values, there's immense gaps and disagreements in our knowledge, which implies we should never be too confident on anything.
Quantum superposition can work with thousands of atoms. This could make quantum computing commercially viable at scale.
With AI, you get the best predictive results if you start with structural priors then fine-tune with real-time data. Not a complete abandonment of the Lucas critique, yet this does indeed suggest a role for adding on extra parameters.
A short thread on how government funding of select public goods (innovation is nonrival, and may or may not be excludable depending on IP etc, so is considered a semi public good) can be optimal. Although many of these cases (science, biotechnology, nuclear, etc) yield obvious military implications, so it’s unclear whether strict deontological minarchists should by their own standards even be opposed to this.
Affirmative action or DEI-consciousness in hiring decisions does indeed boost the career prospects of minorities. When I speak to proponents of such schemes, they nearly always justify them on the basis of equality of opportunity (a value actually consistent with meritocracy), and indeed if human capital accumulation is subject to learning-by-doing dynamics (generating increasing returns), then there exists path dependency. On the other hand, human capital could easily be subject to diminishing marginal returns too. If the latter is correct, then there are limits with respect to the extent that DEI can increase minority capital.
Deregulation of the airlines is a major win for proponents of free markets.
"AI exposure and adaptive capacity are positively correlated".
Gupta reckons that the Internet is connected to fertility decline, via raising the value of outside options to sex or childrearing. However, the Internet also (via online dating) reduces transaction costs to matching, and may also allow for more efficient matches. We must model the effects of the Internet in general equilibrium.
"Most presidential ads were targeted toward parties’ own supporters". "No detectable effects of removing political ads on political knowledge, polarization", and so social media isn't the main problem. The demand for misinformation and tribalism dominates, although social media does drive the fixed and marginal costs of misinformation production down to near-zero, which obviously increases its spread so is an issue.
LP(a) increases your risk of cardiovascular disease, and unfortunately its variation across humans is entirely genetic. Fortunately, we may be on the verge of treatments for this.
Out of the very tiny proportion of ballots marked as fraudulent, most of those were marked by mistake…
Time spent childrearing amongst couples with children has increased over the last few decades.
Another dynamic structural model on the effects of AI on wages, output, and employment. Ambiguity noted in the labour-market response. Whether AI is a substitute and complement is task-dependent, and changes over time.