Basic income; Mississippi education; Nick Fuentes; Positive social trends; Botswana; Prison vs. mental hospitals; Building aesthetics; China brain-drain
1. Botswana is really in a bind. Duma Boko is trying to acquire a majority stake in De Beers, while De Beers is dying as a company. China's lab-grown diamonds are destroying the natural diamond industry. Debswana, the joint venture between De Beers and Botswana, saw revenues plunge roughly 50% in one year in 2024.
Natural diamonds are becoming what Peruvian guano or Chilean nitrates used to be: a has-been commodity that got replaced by the genius of engineering & science. (In this case, Lab-grown diamonds are the synthetic ammonium nitrate of yesteryear).
Frankly, Botswana has a problem where the main ways to be an economic elite in Gaborone either wants to secure government contracts for construction/consulting, work in a top civil service job, or be a rich cattle farmer. Botswana has a structural trap. Because Botswana relies so heavily on diamonds, the government collects almost all the money, meaning the government is also the primary customer for almost every business.
I wrote more about how China is crushing the natural diamond market here, if anyone wants more info:
The depressing question is what chance the Botswanan elite can realise the writing is on the wall and try to go hard on a new economy pivot (diversification, de-positioning Gov as central buyer). Grabbing Debeers doesn't bode well as response but they have otherwise a stronger pivot base than many extractive economies in Africa.
It's also a highlight of a danger of even a generally well-managed state-focused mono-economy - feet of clay if the economic basis moves and for extractives, that is non-trivial risk.
Taking Noah's electrification economy obsession (which I agree with) and given Botswana's nickel, copper, Uraniam resources (later I don't know much about other than read they exist and are reasonable) - they may have a kind of pivot and potential tie-up with supply-chain - Not-China/PRC-locked. With good decent educational base, and solid infra (really something westerners too often take for granted / ignore the impact of), perhaps that's their best path (That Niger is in such a state maybe gets Euro interest for risk diversification, I personally would not want to have my sourcing locked into Niger given Sahel evolution nowadays).
I suspect that part of the reason so many people are skeptical of the Mississippi Miracle is that people outside of the south look down on Mississippi. We think of Mississippi as poor, ignorant, backward, and racist. If that's your view of Mississippi it's going to be hard to believe that they figured out how to get many more kids to become proficient I reading rather than say California. And if you're attached to the idea that Mississippi is extremely racist, you're not going to want to believe that it's doing a good job of teaching black kids to read.
Regarding the rise of the odious Nick Fuentes and others , social media appears to be a medium built for speed, virality, and decontextualized fragments that will naturally elevate the most flamboyant extremists, and that bots and “shadowy forces” merely accelerate what the form already selects for. It seems that each wave of technology has weakened human gatekeepers by privileging what is shocking and simplified over what is thoughtful and contextual, so someone like Fuentes is a predictable product, not an aberration. Calling for “new institutions” to restrain this while leaving the platforms’ form and business model intact is like asking a casino to protect democracy from its highest rollers—the platforms are already the sovereign gatekeepers, and they profit most from exactly what you want filtered out.
The zero effect of money on crime does not surprise me at all. Maybe it would have been different with Jean Valjean levels of hunger. Hunger indeed drives people to do things that they wouldn't do otherwise.
But once you live in a country where your most basal needs can be covered by a societal safety net, the set of criminals will quickly narrow down to actual sociopaths who don't mind victimizing other people.
I grew up in a Czechoslovak rust belt city in the period when the heavy industry was collapsing. The country was going through an economic transition and lots of people struggled, but the criminals were usually of the expected "prison bird" type, and not desperate single moms nor nearly homeless workers.
For buildings, Modernism happened and that was that. The knowledge and supply chains needed to make buildings presentable has been thrown away and now they have to be rebuilt bit by bit. Meanwhile everyone has some intuitive feeling that new buildings always make the streets that little bit more alienating and unpleasant, which makes it really easy for NIMBYs to get traction for their BS.
Case in point: Auckland. Almost the entire inner ring of suburbs consists of cheap mass produced bungalows, built appx. an entire century ago. And redeveloping this with any sort of higher density is pure political poison. We have train stations a few kilometres from town hall surrounded by these things. So Auckland is becoming a donut, where that inner ring is slowly depopulating as old people die off and households become smaller, and high density is occurring in further out places. And we’re finding out the hard way that for young people the alternatives to that inner ring are not called the further out suburbs, they’re called Sydney and Melbourne.
There have been incidents where some old building was so decrepit that it was literally about to fall down. And if someone wants to put something new there are protests. People fully expect anything new to look even worse. This would be insane for literally any other thing in our lives. If some rusty old car is parked on a street people would complain about that old car, rather than declaring that they should keep using it because our neighborhood should not have those ugly new cars.
Meanwhile regulators are doing all sort of clumsy stuff to tray to avoid ugly buildings being built. Which you can’t do of course. You can’t describe why people think buildings are ugly in the same way you can’t describe in technical terms what makes certain food look tastier than others.
Oh well here we are in 2025, where architecture is slowly and painfully trying to recover from this. And meanwhile software development is speed running the same mistakes. “Let’s make everything flat because buttons that actually look like they can be clicked are ugly.” Said no user ever.
The complete refusal of leftists to accept any amount of personal responsibility is perfectly illustrated in the first 2 topics.
People continue to make bad choices after UBI = must be something else causing them to make bad choices. Kids test scores improve after being forced to do phonics for another year = must be some other reason for the improved test scores.
>But the kids who are held back are not “on their own”. They are still in school. And to claim that they improve “no matter what is done” doesn’t make sense, since all of them are still in school. So I’m not sure what Gelman is talking about here.
They will likely improve somewhat simply by being older.
It's eighth grade, but yeah, the gap there hasn't closed as much. One reason is that the methods they're using to teach 4th graders are great for the stuff kids learn in 4th grade (reading words and simple sentences), but aren't as helpful for reading whole paragraphs. That's fine -- the phonics methods don't *hurt* literacy later. They just need to figure out equally effective techniques for more advanced tasks. Which of course they are working on.
In all other cases it eventually turned out that you can't move the needle long term. What would you give the chances of this ending up another example of this pattern?
I wonder if some portion of the Mississippi Miracle is just red-shirting. There's good reason to think that a kid who waits an extra year to start school is going to do better, just because, when you are young, an extra year of maturing just makes you more mature. That means that kids. The kids that get held back are still going to have to take the test, but they are going to take it at age 10 or 11 rather 9, and that's going to help them regardless of what happens in the interim. The real question is what does it do for them when they graduate, by which point the difference of a year is no longer such a big deal.
That's really the question anyway. Having your 4th graders be better able to read doesnt really matter, what matter is how well your graduating seniors are prepared for college or to enter the workforce. I haven't seen anyone answer that question, even though, if the program has been in effect since 2015, we should have some data on that.
::Shrugs:: That's part of the reason why I said "some portion." It's just something that seems relevant, but which I haven't seen raised. I also haven't seen much in the way of discussion about whether these improvements carry forward, which I think is really the relevant metric and, to the extent you are just getting an advantage of having older kids in fourth grade, that would suggest it wouldn't really do so.
FWIW, I asked ChatGPT (DeepRearch) about this, and it's response was basically: It's actually too soon to say, because kids that were retained are just graduating now, but Mississippi's earlier reforms haven't done much to improve on most end metrics (ACT scrores, college attendence, etc.) and, post reform, it seems that there is a lot of fading of effects between 4th and 8th grade, which doesn't bode well. (Full ChatGPT response if you're interested https://chatgpt.com/s/dr_693c1ee0ce8c8191b69a3ff926e217ed)
Once upon a time, before the modern levels of sensitivity, "slower kids" was a fairly widespread euphemism. And it was reality based; those kids learn slower than average, but many of them can actually learn what is needed, provided that they have enough time for that.
Holding slower kids back is a good thing, but for whatever ideological reasons, the educational system is going to have to re-invent an already existing tool.
I'm not opposed to holding kids back, but holding a kid back can lead to better results in the short term for one of (at least) two reasons:
(1) It could be that they needed the extra year's instruction to catch up or that they needed to be more mature to be in a position to take in the instruction, and after that, they will advance at the normal rate through graduation.
(2) All else being equal, older kids are going to do better on a given curriculum than younger kids, so an 11-year-old 4th grader is going to do better than a 10-year-old 4th grader. But I'd expect these benefits to fade over time, since you haven't actually changed anything and, while a 11 yo is significantly more mature than a 10 yo, a 19 yo isn't much different than an 18 yo.
2. It makes perfect sense to claim that the children who are held back would improve on their own, whether or not they were in school, because they get a year older and therefore smarter.
Holding students back isn’t exactly dropping the bottom 5% of your sample. But it is giving the bottom 5% of your sample a mulligan with an extra year of mental development added to basic regression-to-the-mean effects. Clearly, that’s going to have an impact.
On the first topic, of basic income: I'm not sure, from a society level, that's as much of an L as you say. Labor income remaining steady or even dropping can mask some desirable social phenomena:
- People staying home to care for their children
- People engaging in entrepreneurship or taking risks they otherwise might not
- People taking lower-paying jobs than they otherwise might, including art, or deferring income by going back to school
I've admittedly only skimmed the paper, but it doesn't appear to me that they analyzed the prevalence or impact of those behaviors. Possibly it's just out of scope to consider less-tangible social benefits, but it seems germane if they're going to focus on negative social impact in the form of crime. If I had a guaranteed income and health insurance, I'd probably quit my well-paying job and write full-time. That would look like an L by the metrics of that paper (and if you don't like my work) but I would argue that it's part of the point of basic income.
I am, however, fascinated by the crime results. I would absolutely have predicted that violent and property crime rates would have gone down, and even broken out separately from traffic crime, to see it unchanged is very interesting. That might only hold in Finland, though: culture has a big effect on who commits crimes and why (and even what's considered a crime) so I could see that changing a lot country by country.
Regarding the Nick Fuentes thing. We as a society really need to make it our mission to do something about the bots and that starts with all forms of social media gating access to verified people and entities - KYC for the Internet. It is imperative that we do this for so many reasons. It is not in the business interests of Meta at al to do this. So, therefore it should be legislated. Eyes on Australia.
Great post as usual!
1. Botswana is really in a bind. Duma Boko is trying to acquire a majority stake in De Beers, while De Beers is dying as a company. China's lab-grown diamonds are destroying the natural diamond industry. Debswana, the joint venture between De Beers and Botswana, saw revenues plunge roughly 50% in one year in 2024.
Natural diamonds are becoming what Peruvian guano or Chilean nitrates used to be: a has-been commodity that got replaced by the genius of engineering & science. (In this case, Lab-grown diamonds are the synthetic ammonium nitrate of yesteryear).
Frankly, Botswana has a problem where the main ways to be an economic elite in Gaborone either wants to secure government contracts for construction/consulting, work in a top civil service job, or be a rich cattle farmer. Botswana has a structural trap. Because Botswana relies so heavily on diamonds, the government collects almost all the money, meaning the government is also the primary customer for almost every business.
I wrote more about how China is crushing the natural diamond market here, if anyone wants more info:
https://yawboadu.substack.com/p/guns-germs-and-cobalt-q-and-a-9-insights?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=garki&triedRedirect=true
Yes, Yaw's post is very useful.
The depressing question is what chance the Botswanan elite can realise the writing is on the wall and try to go hard on a new economy pivot (diversification, de-positioning Gov as central buyer). Grabbing Debeers doesn't bode well as response but they have otherwise a stronger pivot base than many extractive economies in Africa.
It's also a highlight of a danger of even a generally well-managed state-focused mono-economy - feet of clay if the economic basis moves and for extractives, that is non-trivial risk.
Taking Noah's electrification economy obsession (which I agree with) and given Botswana's nickel, copper, Uraniam resources (later I don't know much about other than read they exist and are reasonable) - they may have a kind of pivot and potential tie-up with supply-chain - Not-China/PRC-locked. With good decent educational base, and solid infra (really something westerners too often take for granted / ignore the impact of), perhaps that's their best path (That Niger is in such a state maybe gets Euro interest for risk diversification, I personally would not want to have my sourcing locked into Niger given Sahel evolution nowadays).
I suspect that part of the reason so many people are skeptical of the Mississippi Miracle is that people outside of the south look down on Mississippi. We think of Mississippi as poor, ignorant, backward, and racist. If that's your view of Mississippi it's going to be hard to believe that they figured out how to get many more kids to become proficient I reading rather than say California. And if you're attached to the idea that Mississippi is extremely racist, you're not going to want to believe that it's doing a good job of teaching black kids to read.
The Nick Fuentes example is really suggestive about the dangers of AI.
The ability of AI agents to "flood the zone with shit" is massive.
I know that there is a post coming about it and I am really eager to read it.
Super bummed about Econ 102. I've been missing it a lot lately.
I'm sorry! I'll have more content for you soon!!
Regarding the rise of the odious Nick Fuentes and others , social media appears to be a medium built for speed, virality, and decontextualized fragments that will naturally elevate the most flamboyant extremists, and that bots and “shadowy forces” merely accelerate what the form already selects for. It seems that each wave of technology has weakened human gatekeepers by privileging what is shocking and simplified over what is thoughtful and contextual, so someone like Fuentes is a predictable product, not an aberration. Calling for “new institutions” to restrain this while leaving the platforms’ form and business model intact is like asking a casino to protect democracy from its highest rollers—the platforms are already the sovereign gatekeepers, and they profit most from exactly what you want filtered out.
The zero effect of money on crime does not surprise me at all. Maybe it would have been different with Jean Valjean levels of hunger. Hunger indeed drives people to do things that they wouldn't do otherwise.
But once you live in a country where your most basal needs can be covered by a societal safety net, the set of criminals will quickly narrow down to actual sociopaths who don't mind victimizing other people.
I grew up in a Czechoslovak rust belt city in the period when the heavy industry was collapsing. The country was going through an economic transition and lots of people struggled, but the criminals were usually of the expected "prison bird" type, and not desperate single moms nor nearly homeless workers.
For buildings, Modernism happened and that was that. The knowledge and supply chains needed to make buildings presentable has been thrown away and now they have to be rebuilt bit by bit. Meanwhile everyone has some intuitive feeling that new buildings always make the streets that little bit more alienating and unpleasant, which makes it really easy for NIMBYs to get traction for their BS.
Case in point: Auckland. Almost the entire inner ring of suburbs consists of cheap mass produced bungalows, built appx. an entire century ago. And redeveloping this with any sort of higher density is pure political poison. We have train stations a few kilometres from town hall surrounded by these things. So Auckland is becoming a donut, where that inner ring is slowly depopulating as old people die off and households become smaller, and high density is occurring in further out places. And we’re finding out the hard way that for young people the alternatives to that inner ring are not called the further out suburbs, they’re called Sydney and Melbourne.
There have been incidents where some old building was so decrepit that it was literally about to fall down. And if someone wants to put something new there are protests. People fully expect anything new to look even worse. This would be insane for literally any other thing in our lives. If some rusty old car is parked on a street people would complain about that old car, rather than declaring that they should keep using it because our neighborhood should not have those ugly new cars.
Meanwhile regulators are doing all sort of clumsy stuff to tray to avoid ugly buildings being built. Which you can’t do of course. You can’t describe why people think buildings are ugly in the same way you can’t describe in technical terms what makes certain food look tastier than others.
Oh well here we are in 2025, where architecture is slowly and painfully trying to recover from this. And meanwhile software development is speed running the same mistakes. “Let’s make everything flat because buttons that actually look like they can be clicked are ugly.” Said no user ever.
The complete refusal of leftists to accept any amount of personal responsibility is perfectly illustrated in the first 2 topics.
People continue to make bad choices after UBI = must be something else causing them to make bad choices. Kids test scores improve after being forced to do phonics for another year = must be some other reason for the improved test scores.
>But the kids who are held back are not “on their own”. They are still in school. And to claim that they improve “no matter what is done” doesn’t make sense, since all of them are still in school. So I’m not sure what Gelman is talking about here.
They will likely improve somewhat simply by being older.
Maybe, but the great thing about what Mississippi is doing it that it is improving the test scores of the students who are not held back as well.
Isn't the whole point that we don't know the extent to which that is true?
2. Isn't the issue the next test is in 6th grade and when they do test all the kids the purported benefits disappear?
It's eighth grade, but yeah, the gap there hasn't closed as much. One reason is that the methods they're using to teach 4th graders are great for the stuff kids learn in 4th grade (reading words and simple sentences), but aren't as helpful for reading whole paragraphs. That's fine -- the phonics methods don't *hurt* literacy later. They just need to figure out equally effective techniques for more advanced tasks. Which of course they are working on.
In all other cases it eventually turned out that you can't move the needle long term. What would you give the chances of this ending up another example of this pattern?
I wonder if some portion of the Mississippi Miracle is just red-shirting. There's good reason to think that a kid who waits an extra year to start school is going to do better, just because, when you are young, an extra year of maturing just makes you more mature. That means that kids. The kids that get held back are still going to have to take the test, but they are going to take it at age 10 or 11 rather 9, and that's going to help them regardless of what happens in the interim. The real question is what does it do for them when they graduate, by which point the difference of a year is no longer such a big deal.
That's really the question anyway. Having your 4th graders be better able to read doesnt really matter, what matter is how well your graduating seniors are prepared for college or to enter the workforce. I haven't seen anyone answer that question, even though, if the program has been in effect since 2015, we should have some data on that.
So why do all the quintiles improve, not just the bottom?
::Shrugs:: That's part of the reason why I said "some portion." It's just something that seems relevant, but which I haven't seen raised. I also haven't seen much in the way of discussion about whether these improvements carry forward, which I think is really the relevant metric and, to the extent you are just getting an advantage of having older kids in fourth grade, that would suggest it wouldn't really do so.
FWIW, I asked ChatGPT (DeepRearch) about this, and it's response was basically: It's actually too soon to say, because kids that were retained are just graduating now, but Mississippi's earlier reforms haven't done much to improve on most end metrics (ACT scrores, college attendence, etc.) and, post reform, it seems that there is a lot of fading of effects between 4th and 8th grade, which doesn't bode well. (Full ChatGPT response if you're interested https://chatgpt.com/s/dr_693c1ee0ce8c8191b69a3ff926e217ed)
Once upon a time, before the modern levels of sensitivity, "slower kids" was a fairly widespread euphemism. And it was reality based; those kids learn slower than average, but many of them can actually learn what is needed, provided that they have enough time for that.
Holding slower kids back is a good thing, but for whatever ideological reasons, the educational system is going to have to re-invent an already existing tool.
I'm not opposed to holding kids back, but holding a kid back can lead to better results in the short term for one of (at least) two reasons:
(1) It could be that they needed the extra year's instruction to catch up or that they needed to be more mature to be in a position to take in the instruction, and after that, they will advance at the normal rate through graduation.
(2) All else being equal, older kids are going to do better on a given curriculum than younger kids, so an 11-year-old 4th grader is going to do better than a 10-year-old 4th grader. But I'd expect these benefits to fade over time, since you haven't actually changed anything and, while a 11 yo is significantly more mature than a 10 yo, a 19 yo isn't much different than an 18 yo.
2. It makes perfect sense to claim that the children who are held back would improve on their own, whether or not they were in school, because they get a year older and therefore smarter.
Holding students back isn’t exactly dropping the bottom 5% of your sample. But it is giving the bottom 5% of your sample a mulligan with an extra year of mental development added to basic regression-to-the-mean effects. Clearly, that’s going to have an impact.
On the first topic, of basic income: I'm not sure, from a society level, that's as much of an L as you say. Labor income remaining steady or even dropping can mask some desirable social phenomena:
- People staying home to care for their children
- People engaging in entrepreneurship or taking risks they otherwise might not
- People taking lower-paying jobs than they otherwise might, including art, or deferring income by going back to school
I've admittedly only skimmed the paper, but it doesn't appear to me that they analyzed the prevalence or impact of those behaviors. Possibly it's just out of scope to consider less-tangible social benefits, but it seems germane if they're going to focus on negative social impact in the form of crime. If I had a guaranteed income and health insurance, I'd probably quit my well-paying job and write full-time. That would look like an L by the metrics of that paper (and if you don't like my work) but I would argue that it's part of the point of basic income.
I am, however, fascinated by the crime results. I would absolutely have predicted that violent and property crime rates would have gone down, and even broken out separately from traffic crime, to see it unchanged is very interesting. That might only hold in Finland, though: culture has a big effect on who commits crimes and why (and even what's considered a crime) so I could see that changing a lot country by country.
Regarding the Nick Fuentes thing. We as a society really need to make it our mission to do something about the bots and that starts with all forms of social media gating access to verified people and entities - KYC for the Internet. It is imperative that we do this for so many reasons. It is not in the business interests of Meta at al to do this. So, therefore it should be legislated. Eyes on Australia.