New York’s subway construction is strangled by government bloat
It has become increasingly well appreciated lately that “America can’t build.” More accurately, modern America seems to be incapable of building large infrastructure in anything resembling a timely, cost-effective manner, leaving us handily outdone by obscure North African countries. The prevailing diagnoses much resemble the crumbling decrepitude of human aging: the cost overruns appear to arise from a multitude of disparate inefficiencies rather than from any one key failing. I argue, however, that a new case study on the failures of New York’s Second Avenue Subway extension from the Transit Costs Project well illustrates how government bloat writ large is a unifying lens through which America’s construction inefficiencies can be productively analyzed. This analysis, in turn, helps us concretely imagine what a model of effective-but-small governance would look like.
Localizations of a ring at maximal ideals correspond to stalks of a sheaf
We have previously observed that localizing a finitely generated algebra at a specific element 
yields a local ring which is exactly the set of regular functions on the distinguished open set 
, or in other words, the sections of the sheaf of regular functions on . That is to sayーwe have the concept of a (pre)sheaf 
, which ‘collects together’ regular functions that are defined on the open sets of a topological space 
, and we have shown that if we look at the functions that are assigned to special types of open sets (distinguished open sets ), they correspond to the localizations of a finitely generated algebra 
at specific elements of that algebra. (Notably, this means they have global representations as polynomial quotients over each .) However, what happens if we want to look at the behavior of these functionsーsections of the sheaf ーnear a specific point in the topological space?
What are Hilbert and Banach spaces?
It is dangerous to live without knowing what Hilbert spaces are. One might be spontaneously quizzed on one’s recollection, and it would be very embarrassing to not know the answer! Thankfully, you need only remember that Hilbert spaces are the objects which allow you to generalize linear algebra and apply it to analytic settings.
Localizations of a ring at specific elements correspond to sections of a sheaf
One fundamental observation in algebraic geometry is that there are a number of powerful correspondences between ring localizations and algebraic sheaves. Although elementary, this post will outline one such correspondence, which is that the localizations of a ring to a specific element can be exactly thought of as the sections of the sheaf of regular functions over the distinguished open set of . (Consider this post to be a self-directed refresher! It has been a long time since I learned this material.)
An anthropological expedition into a Portland anarchist newsletter
I recently stumbled upon a “blog” called Rose City Counter-Info, which brands itself as an “anarchist counter-info platform in Portland, Oregon.” Specifically, it is a “platform for submissions of any communiques, reports, zines, analyses, announcements, calls to action, art and musings relevant to anarchists and radicals in ‘Portland’ and the greater Portland area.” The “counter-info […]
Reconciling the signaling and human capital models of education?
Economists have long debated the “signaling theory of education” versus the “human capital” or “value-add” models. In the former case, students benefit from degrees because degrees are a credible signal of underlying traits such as intelligence or conscientiousness; in the latter case, students benefit because because they learn useful skills, go through personal development, etc., experiences which improve their long-run earning potential. Here I lay out some preliminary thoughts on how one might begin to reconcile these two models by looking at the role of compulsory education in the transition from a primitive to a developed economy.
Excellent cheeses
Some excellent cheeses follow.
The tenured professor and the sea of cancellation: Gregory Clark on human intelligence
Gregory Clark is a tenured professor of economic history at UC Davis known for studying intergenerational mobility in England from the 17th through the 21st century. Interestingly, he more or less re-derived the additive inheritance of human talent (principally but not wholly composed of human intelligence) from empirical analysis of how social standing fluctuated throughout the centuries. These findings are well summarized in a recent podcast between him and the physicist Steve Hsu. I will highlight and expand upon some points of considerable interest from this podcast.
Beware of Gell-Mann amnesia about government quality
Many people are amateur experts in some specific domain of government regulation, such as land use zoning or immigration law, which they know for sure is horribly inefficient and profoundly harmful to the nation. However, they often fail to appropriately generalize these observations to the quality of political governance at large: a form of Gell-Mann amnesia applied to the quality of our rulers.
Advantages of building many castles in the High Middle Ages
Why did medieval rulers like Richard the Lionheart or Edward I build so many castles? Castles were very expensive, especially given poor tax-collection infrastructure; yet the historical record shows that successful conquerors expended great effort (and revenue) on the construction of numerous fortified stone castles. They embarked on these programs of mass construction not out of ignorance but, instead, because of economic and strategic considerations that made efficient use of castles a vital part of conquering and holding territory.