Vittoria Benzine, at Artnet (via Oliver Thomas):

The singular American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick saw the little details. He even saw the future. But, most of all, he saw people, with all their quirks. Kubrick’s films, from Dr. Strangelove (1964) to The Shining (1980), offer proof of this — as do his earliest photos, produced during the 1940s. One new trove of 18 such images will get its first-ever outing next week, when Los Angeles-based Duncan Miller Gallery presents the find alongside works by contemporary photographer Jacqueline Woods at the Photography Show in New York. [...]

The photos are some of the earliest images that the director made for Look. “New York’s subway trains are a reading room on wheels, a lover’s lane and, after 11 p.m., a flophouse,” Kubrick’s subsequent photo essay accompanying his subway visions opined.

I’ve seen some of these before, but not all. (Which makes sense, if some of them have only now been discovered.)

Mia Moffet, writing for Museum of the City of New York back in 2012 (where you can see more of these photos):

As you can see below, with the exception of iPods and smart phones, activities on the train haven’t changed much in the last 66 years, including shoving one’s newspaper in everyone else’s faces.

My favorite:

(Here’s another from the same scene, moments apart.)

Moffet then quotes from this 1948 interview with young “Stan” Kubrick, regarding how he captured them:

Indoors he prefers natural light, but switches to flash when the dim light would restrict the natural movement of the subject. In a subway series he used natural light, with the exception of a picture showing a flight of stairs. “I wanted to retain the mood of the subway, so I used natural light,” he said. People who ride the subway late at night are less inhibited than those who ride by day. Couples make love openly, drunks sleep on the floor and other unusual activities take place late at night. To make pictures in the off-guard manner he wanted to, Kubrick rode the subway for two weeks. Half of his riding was done between midnight and six a.m. Regardless of what he saw he couldn’t shoot until the car stopped in a station because of the motion and vibration of the moving train. Often, just as he was ready to shoot, someone walked in front of the camera, or his subject left the train.

Kubrick finally did get his pictures, and no one but a subway guard seemed to mind. The guard demanded to know what was going on. Kubrick told him.

“Have you got permission?” the guard asked.

“I’m from LOOK,” Kubrick answered.

“Yeah, sonny,” was the guard’s reply, “and I’m the society editor of the Daily Worker.”

For this series Kubrick used a Contax and took the pictures at 1/8 second. The lack of light tripled the time necessary for development.

When astronaut Christina Koch, the first woman to fly around the moon, reported an issue from space that could have been copy-pasted from any IT helpdesk ticket, something clicked for Americans. Her grievance? “No joy seeing the device in the list of available devices when I attempt to re-pair it after doing the Bluetooth forget.”

Commander Reid Wiseman, orbiting Earth aboard the Artemis II mission, radioed Houston with a problem millions of office workers share: “I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working.” So much for old “one small step for man…”

Internet commentators found these moments painfully relatable and shared them widely. Why did those quotes about tech maintenance go viral in April 2026? Beneath the comedy lies an underappreciated cost of modernity: we are wealthier, and that wealth means we own more things. More things means more things that break, more things that need updating, more things that require troubleshooting guides, more passwords to forget and recover. Even billion-dollar space hardware runs the same glitchy consumer software we all use every day. There is a certain democracy of frustration here.

The old problems never went away, either. The Artemis program has been plagued by a malfunctioning toilet. Even as we layer on new technology, the ancient headaches remain. We still have leaky pipes and dead batteries. We also now have Wi-Fi dead zones, incompatible Bluetooth drivers, and cloud storage accounts we can’t access because we changed our phone number.

Wealth and Happiness: The Running Debate

This raises the question that EconLog readers know well: does becoming wealthier actually make us happier?

It’s one of the site’s oldest debates. Arnold Kling kicked it off as early as 2003, arguing from revealed preference that higher income must produce more happiness. Otherwise, why would people choose to earn it? David Henderson complicated the picture further, expressing skepticism about cross-country happiness surveys.

Scott Sumner, in his review of Tyler Cowen’s book on economic growth, accepted the broad finding that wealth and wellbeing are positively correlated but noted that the relationship runs through many indirect channels: better health outcomes, a cleaner environment, reduced violence, expanded human rights. Growth, he argued, should be the default policy posture even when we’re uncertain about its direct happiness effects.

More recently, Bryan Caplan staked out an interesting position: calling himself an economic optimist but happiness pessimist. He looks at the data and sees genuinely robust growth. He also looks at the data and sees that income barely moves the happiness needle. He concludes that we’re materially richer, and should be glad of it, even if survey respondents don’t report feeling much better.

I believe that progress is good and that people pursue higher incomes for a reason. Having more makes us better off, but the astronauts’ complaints illustrate the cognitive tax that goes with it. This helps explain, in part, why the happiness gains are not even larger.

Consider the distribution of the more-stuff burden across a typical household. Parents contend with a level of domestic complexity such as choosing among subscription services and managing multiple accounts. Fathers who once needed to know how to change the oil and fix a leaky faucet might now also serve as the de facto IT department: managing family passwords and troubleshooting the smart TV. Children face being locked out of their schoolwork because they’ve forgotten a password.

None of this is a “skills problem,” as the astronaut examples make plain. It is structural. The NASA crew has a team of engineers on the ground to handle their tech problems, while most of us have a four-year-old YouTube tutorial.

Our devices connect us and entertain us. I will continue to enjoy syncing my phone to my car stereo and flipping through the entire Apple Music library until something breaks. Are we happier today with more stuff? I believe we are better off, overall. However, to paraphrase The Notorious B.I.G., “more money, more problems.”

Featured image, “Illuminated in Orion” from NASA.

The post Tech Troubleshooting in Space appeared first on Econlib.

In contrast, the Polo brothers who went to Asia, Niccolo the elder and Matteo the elder, amassed wealth both in tangible and intangible assets.  It was Marco “the voyager” who benefited most from the family business, both as the heir to substantial portions of the family estate, and as a shrewd and cautious — and perhaps tight-fisted — private investor.  His will and inventory of his assets reveal a considerable amount of cash, real estate, and valuables.  Marco Polo traveled for business even after he returned to Venice, but not for long.  After 1300, although he continued to invest in various enterprises, it appears that Marco stayed in Venice.  Perhaps this was due to his advancing age (he turned fifty in 1304), although his energy was most likely taken up by overseeing his interests and local investments, and abo ve all in publicity for his book.  He commissioned numerous copies to be distributed to powerful and influential people.

And:

However, Marco had great difficulty leaving the empire.  The Polos required the khan’s consent not only to be given official leave, but above all to have adequate protection.  As Marco recounts, despite thee riches they had accumulated, they were not free to leave.  By then, the khan had also grown old, and they were concerned that he might die, leaving their fate in the hands of his successor, who may not have granted the necessary permits.  Marco’s account reveals that the three Polos had a subservient relationship with the khan, as they were in the khan’s service and depended on him.  He continually rejected their pleas to return to Venice, as he “loved them too much” and could not accept the idea that they should leave him.

That is all from the new and noteworthy Venice and the Mongols: The Eurasian Exchange that Transformed the Medieval World, by Nicola di Cosmo and Lorenzo Pubblici.

The post The Venetian empire and the Mongols (modeling Marco Polo) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The Davis-Bacon Act requires that workers on federally funded construction projects be paid at least the “prevailing wage” for their trade in the local area.

Mike Schmidt, Director of the CHIPS Program Office, has an excellent piece on how Davis-Bacon impacted the CHIPS program. My initial understanding was that it simply required paying construction workers more—an unnecessary transfer from taxpayers to a politically favored group, but not one that would impede efficiency. I was wrong.

Start with the complexity. Davis-Bacon’s prevailing wage isn’t a simple minimum wage: plumbers are not electricians are not fitters, and the required rate varies by locale. The Department of Labor maintains a list of more than 130,000 (!) wage rates to implement it.

That’s complicated enough. But it gets worse. Some firms building fabs used their own employees rather than contractors—and Davis-Bacon applies regardless but it covers only the portion of time an employee spends on “construction” work:

[A]pplying Davis-Bacon to company employees rather than contractors proved to be a big hurdle. Davis-Bacon required tracking every hour each employee spent on covered construction activities — by trade classification, with a different prevailing wage applying to each — and paying a wage differential for that portion of their work as distinct from fab operations work or non-Davis-Bacon construction work. The company also relied heavily on profit-sharing (where a portion of employees’ pay was tied to the firm’s profits) and Davis-Bacon’s guaranteed wage floor was difficult to reconcile with a pay structure that was inherently variable. Moreover, Davis-Bacon has a statutory requirement to pay wages weekly, meaning the company would need to change its payroll systems for a portion of the pay for a portion of its workforce.

Thus, DB required that two salaried employee with equal salaries and profit-sharing plans be paid differentially depending on whether one of them did “construction” work. This created internal strife.

Davis-Bacon was passed in 1931, when a carpenter was a carpenter. How does it apply to building a semiconductor factory?

The construction tasks involved in building and modernizing semiconductor fabs don’t always map cleanly onto DOL’s Davis-Bacon classifications, so applicants must go through a construction plan line-by-line to determine which rate applies to which activity. In traditional Davis-Bacon contexts this is less burdensome because contractors know the system and have processes in place. But semiconductor construction was a novel application, and all of our applicants — and most of their contractors — were navigating Davis-Bacon for the first time.

For large recipients, the administrative cost of this work was real but manageable relative to project scale: they could hire consultants, procure software systems, and build internal compliance capacity….

Perhaps the biggest fiasco involved timing. The government wanted firms to move quickly and encouraged them to break ground before the Act’s rules were finalized. But when Davis-Bacon was added to the Act it required that the firms pay the prevailing wage *retroactively*:

The financial and operational implications of retroactive application were significant. A leading-edge project might have 10,000–12,000 construction workers on site at peak, with a rotating workforce totaling perhaps 30,000 individuals over the project’s life. Working through 300-plus subcontractors across multiple tiers, retroactive application could require identifying wages paid to 20,000 workers who had already cycled off the project, determining what each worker should have been paid under Davis-Bacon, and paying the difference — resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in additional cost.

The retroactive pay exposes the law’s true nature. Firms and workers had already struck voluntary agreements; the work was done, the wages paid. No one can pretend this has anything to do with incentives. Workers received a pure windfall (“DB Christmas!”) for one reason only: “construction workers” are a politically favored class. Janitors and scientists got nothing extra.

Moreover, a large fraction of the cost wasn’t the higher wages at all—it was compliance. Firms likely spent as much reworking payroll systems and hunting down thousands of former workers in this Byzantine classification system as they spent on the wage premiums themselves. Every dollar transferred to workers may have cost firms—and ultimately taxpayers—two dollars or more. A very leaky bucket indeed.

If the Trump administration is serious about cutting regulatory costs and reviving industrial competitiveness, Davis-Bacon is an obvious target. It delivers little to workers, plenty to lawyers and consultants, and a bill to taxpayers for both. Rescind it.

The post Rescind Davis Bacon appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Here’s a revision  I made to Modern Principles, my textbook with Tyler. Some things change dramatically, some things never change.

The post Revising Modern Principles appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.