Authenticity doesn’t interest me. It’s a way of marketing subpar material: this might not be any good, but at least it’s sincere. You can always tell when a book is going to be dogshit because the blurb copy describes it as ‘raw’ or ‘unflinchingly honest.’ In my personal experience, the writers who make a big show of authentically portraying themselves in their writing, warts and all, raw and authentic, are all actually portraying an entirely separate set of more interesting personality defects that they wish they had. In person, they’re unbearable. Authenticity is exactly the same as phoniness. Good writing is never authentic to the self, because a good writer needs to know that the self is fundamentally unknowable: it’s the ‘wedge-shaped core of darkness’ that Virginia Woolf saw humming beneath the surface of daily life, and definitely not anything you can write autofiction about.

From Sam Kriss, there is more of interest at the link, on varied topics, some of the remarks being quite “off.”  Via Isaac.

The post “Authenticity is exactly the same as phoniness.” appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Pope Leo XIV recently tweeted that there is “an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others.”

As a description of how today’s models work, that’s fair enough. AI learned to paint by looking at our paintings.

Paul Graham (also a painter!) notes that this is about to change. Robots wired into the world will soon perceive it for themselves. A robot or AI that learns from its own sensors isn’t borrowing images from others. LLMs were founded on our words but their words will dominate the future.

So picture a robot on a beach at dusk. It watches the sun go down, then paints what it saw. Is it art? The Pope would no doubt still assert an ontological difference. But once the factual distinction between borrowing and perceiving fades, what makes that more than a statement of faith?

The post Paul Graham Versus the Pope appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

In a new paper, Brennan and Freiman argue persuasively that:

the arguments against laissez-faire capitalism apply in a rather straight way against laissez-faire democracy. This should be a rather startling result, considering that laissez-faire capitalism is widely rejected, yet laissez-faire democracy is widely accepted.

All the typical market failure arguments–externalities, asymmetric information, principal-agent problems, behavioral issues–apply to democracy. For example:

democracies also suffer from obvious externality problems. Indeed, this is the key difference between markets and politics. Market decisions are usually and mostly internalized; negative externalities are seen as an anomaly to be corrected. Political decisions are by nature public. For instance, about 37% of the eligible
voting public, and 26% of the entire population of the UK voted in favour of Brexit, but the effects of Brexit are borne by everyone else, including losing voters, eligible voters who abstained, children and other citizens ineligible to vote, future generations, and foreigners.

…The problem is similar to the pollution of individual automobile drivers or airline passengers. We drive too much and pollute too much because we bear the benefits of these actions but pass the costs onto others. Individually we matter little but collectively we matter a great deal. If externality regulation is prima facie justified in the case of pollution, it is prima facie justified in the case of voting.

They go on to suggest regulations that might apply to democracy. Noting first that:

…pretty much everyone already accepts some government actions which are plausibly seen as vote or democratic regulation. For instance, some issues are put directly to voters, while others are left to elected leaders, while others are left to judges and bureaucracies, and still others are removed from political consideration entirely. The timing and place of elections, who is permitted to vote (at what age), who is permitted to run for office, and so on are kinds of regulation. Government funding of public education is in part meant to be a non-laissez-faire subsidy meant to increase voter competence. Many readers are likely comfortable with government regulation of campaign donations, campaign expenditures and even which kinds of speech are permitted. Probably almost all readers reject straight up markets in votes (Freiman 2014). Each of these things is a kind of government regulation of democracy which inhibits laissez-faire democracy.

The authors sketch possible regulations while stipulating, for the sake of argument, universal, equal suffrage—no weighted votes or knowledge tests for voting eligibility. Possibilities include paying citizens to pass a voluntary civics exam; tracking campaign promises and fining deceptive claims; regulating political advertisements more like drug advertisements; and requiring supermajorities for certain decisions. See the paper for more.

You may object that these regulations would be captured by special interests, be administered by biased officials, or have unintended consequences. Indeed, welcome to the argument for laissez-faire.

The post Against Laissez-Faire Democracy appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The organ procurement system has long been a miasma of inefficient monopoly providers. In 2024 I quoted some shocking facts from a great Statecraft interview with Jennifer Erickson and Greg Segal:

“Organs are literally lost and damaged in transit every single week. The OPTN contractor is 15 times more likely to lose or damage an organ in transit than an airline is a suitcase.”

Organs are not GPS-tracked!

“In an era when consumers can precisely monitor a FedEx package or a DoorDash dinner delivery, there are no requirements to track shipments of organs in real time — or to assess how many may be damaged or lost in transit.

“If Amazon can figure out when your paper towels and your dog food is going to arrive within 20 to 30 minutes, it certainly should be reasonable that we ought to track lifesaving organs, which are in chronic shortage,” Axelrod said.

Here’s one more astounding statistics:

“Seventeen percent of kidneys are offered to at least one deceased person before they are transplanted….”

Did you get that? The tracking system for patients is so dysfunctional that 17% of kidneys are offered to patients who are already dead–thus creating delays and missed opportunities.

Fortunately, even then there were changes in the works. In 2019 President Trump issued Executive Order 13879 to improve the performance of OPOs with better incentives and to allow living donors to recover more of their costs. The government being what it is, it has taken years to implement some of the new rules and enforcement of the  OPO performance measures was deferred to 2026-2027. Nevertheless, there have been improvements. For example, many OPOs now GPS-track kidney transfers. And a new report estimates there have been significant gains from the changes.

• The Advancing American Kidney Health initiative was launched by President Donald Trump via Executive Order 13879 on July 10, 2019. In this Data Point, we estimate the range of increased growth in transplants that might be attributed to the policies launched through the Executive order and the economic value of that increased growth.
• The estimated impacts of the Executive Order (EO) range from a conservative 1,055 additional transplants annually to an upper estimate of 2,110 additional transplants. The range reflects variation in the counterfactuals used to compare with post-2019 transplant growth.
• Under the conservative-case scenario, the policy is estimated to be associated with approximately 23,214 additional kidney transplants between 2019 and 2040, generating about 147,410 life-years gained and 21,821 quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) gained. Under the optimistic-case scenario, the policy is estimated to be associated with approximately 46,428 additional kidney transplants between 2019 and 2040, generating about 294,819 life-years gained and 43,643 quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) gained.

The biggest and most consequential change would be to allow payment to living organ donors. The End Kidney Deaths Act, H.R. 2687, proposes a $50,000 refundable tax credit over five years for qualifying nondirected living kidney donors. The act has bipartisan support. Because dialysis is so expensive—and the federal government pays for much of it through Medicare’s special kidney-failure entitlement—the Act could save taxpayers money as well as saving lives.

Hat tip: The indefatigable Elaine Perlman.

The post Better Incentives, More Kidneys, More Lives appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The average price of health insurance in the Obamacare marketplaces will rise by 13 percent next year, according to an analysis on Friday by KFF, the health research group.

The Trump administration on Friday published new prices for 2027 in 30 states with markets managed by the federal government. Using that data and state figures, KFF calculated the increase nationwide.

…The average cost for the cheapest bronze plan with a high deductible will be about $700 a month for a 50-year-old single person, according to Ms. Cox.

Here is more from the NYT.  Of course that makes the people who can expect to be healthy all the less likely to sign up, given that the enforcement of the mandate, for political reasons, was forced to evolve into something quite weak.  For purposes of context, when the original mandate was more tightly enforced, with actual penalties, the ACA was very unpopular and led to significant political protests.  In essence the benefits to a broad, scattered majority were imposed on a well-identified minority, namely those who signed up because of the mandate.  Trump in his first term relaxed mandate enforcement, thereby politically saving Obamacare at least for a while, but also creating this longer-term problem.

It is striking to me how infrequently I hear Democrats boasting about Obamacare.  They instead prefer to talk as if little or nothing has been done for America’s uninsured.

The post As predicted, the ACA exchanges seem not to be stable appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.