We Won’t Miss Government Media

At NPR and PBS, bias has long been the biggest problem. Let 1,000 podcasts bloom

By Andy Kessler. Excerpts:

"A year ago, NPR had 87 Democrats and zero Republicans on its editorial staff in Washington, according to a senior editor there."

"Answering claims of bias, NPR CEO Katherine Maher recently told CNN, “please show me a story that concerns you.” Within hours, Sen. John Kennedy (R., La.) gave many examples on the Senate floor, including the claim that interstate highways are racist. Twitter users found boatloads more—including a managing editor saying, “we don’t want to waste the listeners’ ” time on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Ms. Maher has famously said, “Truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.” All things considered, that’s a $1.1 billion mistake."

[An NPR host said to Mr. Kessler] "“I hate that you and Silicon Valley techno-capitalists purposely destroy careers with technology. What you’re doing is awful.”"

"do we need PBS in an era of YouTube and streaming, even for “intellectual” programming?"

"Freedom of the press should mean freedom from government control that comes via funding. Spectrum license renewal still overhangs over-the-air TV network owners. The Fairness Doctrine, adopted in 1949, forced media to run opposing views. Its repeal in 1987 allowed media to pick sides and flourish, from Rush Limbaugh to MSNBC."  

Regular physical exercise is the single, most effective intervention that can improve brain and physical health

See Live Q&A: Brain Health as You Age—We Answered Your Questions by Alex Janin and Amy Dockser Marcus of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Regular physical exercise is the single, most effective intervention that can improve brain and physical health" [said Dr. Zaldy Tan, a memory disorders specialist who heads the Memory & Healthy Aging Program at Cedars-Sinai.]

"I make it a point to learn something new everyday" [said Dr. Tan]

"I try (and usually succeed) in getting seven to eight hours of restful sleep every night." [said Dr. Tan]

"45% of the risk [of Alzheimer’s disease (AD)] is from lifestyle/environment and potentially modifiable." [said Dr. Tan] 

"Higher levels of physical activity has been associated by multiple, large studies with lower risk of developing dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease. The magnitude of risk reduction can be up to 20-40% and appears to be robust even after adjusting for potential confounders such as age, gender, genetic risk, and education. At the Framingham Heart Study, we found that lower levels of physical activity is associated with higher risk for developing dementia in people aged 60 years or older. We also found that people with higher levels of physical activity not only have lower risk of developing dementia but also have bigger brains on MRI scanning. The study can be found here." [said Dr. Tan]

Related posts:

Can weight-lifting promote empathy? Can aerobic exercise improve memory? (2025) 

Facing a Cancer Diagnosis? Exercise and Diet Could Make a Difference (2025) 

For a long and healthy life, diet and regular exercise are a better bet than trendy supplements and expensive longevity clinics (2025)

How Your Midlife Eating Habits Can Help You Live Longer and Healthier: A plant-rich diet with some fish and dairy might make the biggest difference, new research suggests (2025)

Self-Control as a Performance-Enhancing Drug: Like cognitive ability, self-control predicts health, wealth, and all things good (2024)

Does Exercise Improve Survival After a Cancer Diagnosis? An Encouraging New Study (2024)

Life expectancy can increase by up to 10 years following sustained shifts towards healthier diets in the United Kingdom (2023)

Even Short Runs Have Major Health Benefits (2023)

What if the Most Powerful Way to Live Longer Is Just Exercise? (2023) 

Exercise Helps Blunt the Effects of Covid-19, Study Suggests (2023)

Carry Your Groceries, Take the Stairs: Short, Intense Movement Can Improve Your Health (plus non drug ways to fight diabetes and Covid) (2022)

Almost half of cancer deaths globally are attributable to preventable risk factors, new study suggests (2022)

New research leads to doubt over the extent or even existence of the ego‐depletion effect (the theory of the exhaustible willpower muscle) (2019)

How lifestyle changes can reduce the risk of dementia (2019)

Good health begins with individual decisions (2018)

Nearly half of U.S. cancer deaths blamed on unhealthy behavior (2017)

Regular Exercise: Antidote for Deadly Diseases? (2016)

Is Willpower An Untapped Resource? (2011) 

The Jones Act Arguably Cuts the U.S. Ship Fleet in Half

By Caleb Petitt of The Independent Institute.

"The Jones Act is a regulation that requires ships to be U.S.-built, U.S.-owned, U.S.-flagged, and U.S.-crewed if they move goods between American ports (cabotage).  For over 100 years, the Jones act has thus restricted competition in American shipping.

The U.S. only had 92 Jones Act-compliant ships in 2024. However, there were 185 U.S.-flagged ships that year. The other 93 are foreign-built ships that have been flagged in the United States. While those ships cannot engage in cabotage, they can take advantage of other programs that protect U.S. shipping, namely, the Maritime Security Program (MSP) and cargo-preference laws.

Cargo-preference laws require that a specified percentage of goods imported for government projects be brought on U.S.-flagged ships (no matter where they were built). These laws are meant to provide a stable source of demand for such ships. The MSP provides stipends to ships that participate. Currently, 60 ships do so, and as of 2022,none were Jones Act-compliant.

Thus, U.S. maritime regulations divide the fleet in half. Jones Act-eligible ships almost exclusively engage in cabotage; the monopolistic returns are needed to compensate for the high cost of the ships. Foreign-built U.S.-flagged ships enroll in MSP and take advantage of the cargo-preference laws to compensate for the higher operating costs of being U.S.-flagged, which are 2.7 times greater than those of foreign-flagged ships.

Each half of the fleet serves in a niche created by the regulatory environment and could not survive without government protection. Having an uncompetitive fleet imposes heavy costs on Americans. Dropping the domestic building requirement would be an important step in simplifying maritime regulation, expanding the merchant fleet, and reducing shipping costs.

Advocates of the Jones Act often say that it is important in fostering shipbuilding. Even a cursory look at the data on America’s annual shipbuilding capacity would show that it has failed to do so. The average annual gross tonnage of commercial ships produced from 1865 to 1914 was 286,775 tons; it was just 158,987 tons from 2014 to 2024. The Jones Act certainly has not ensured that America will maintain a robust shipbuilding capacity.

Jones Act supporters also fret that foreign-flagged ships might one day carry goods up our rivers and be used as ferries. While I do not share their concern, the domestic shipbuilding requirement for cabotage could be dropped without foreign-flagged ships taking over America’s waterways. It would double the ships that could engage in cabotage overnight and drastically lower the cost of adding ships to the merchant fleet.

Moreover, the cost of goods to Americans, especially those in Hawai’i, Alaska, and Puerto Rico, would fall as the number of ships that could bring them goods from the American mainland increased. America’s sealift capacity would grow quickly because Americans could buy foreign-built ships for cabotage. Today, that capacity is insufficient to meet the military’s needs in a crisis; ending the Jones Act domestic building requirement would quickly solve that problem.

The Jones Act cuts the current U.S.-flagged fleet in half. How could the foreign-built half be relied on for sealift operations and military supplies, but not be relied on to carry goods between American ports? Deregulating American shipping by dropping the domestic production requirement from the Jones Act would lower shipping costs, increase sealift capacity, and create consistency in America’s regulatory code."

 

The economics of the U.S. auto industry, a brief history

From Tyler Cowen.

"From Adam Ozimek:

The economic value of the cars being made has climbed substantially through the years. As a result, real value added and industrial production — two different ways of measuring actual output — are now at all-time highs.

 

And this:

What about jobs? The auto industry today employs 1 million workers. Between 1950 and the signing of NAFTA in 1993, it averaged 1.1 million workers, just slightly higher.

And this:

The deindustrialization of Detroit is typically understood as a phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s, and it is therefore blamed on the growth of trade during this period. But the fact is that auto investment and employment had started moving out of Detroit decades earlier.

I pieced together data from a variety of sources, which shows that auto manufacturing employment in the City of Detroit had already peaked in 1950, at just over 220,000 workers.

By 1970 the biggest declines had already occurred, with employment falling by more than half, to fewer than 100,000 jobs.

An important nuance is that many of these lost jobs migrated to other parts of Michigan, at least for a while. So while auto employment was collapsing in Detroit, the rest of Michigan managed to hold auto employment stable for another five decades until the 2000s, when it started falling everywhere in the state.

And:

Michigan now has about 280,000 fewer auto jobs than it did in the 1950s, a decline of roughly 60 percent.  For the United States as a whole, auto employment is only down 4.7 percent — further showing that the struggles of Detroit and Michigan are less about the decline of the American auto industry and more about its relocation elsewhere.

Another way of understanding the trend: If Michigan had simply maintained the same share of American auto jobs as it had in the 1950s, meaning it did not lose any production to other states, then it would only have lost 21,000 auto jobs since then, not the 280,000 it actually did lose.

An excellent piece, recommended." 

In which ways is the BLS biased?

By Tyler Cowen.

"No, they do not sit around changing the numbers to serve the interests of Democratic presidents, or to harm Republican ones.  The system has too many different steps, too many checks and balances, and too many people who do not want to do the wrong thing.  In a sense, you could say that the BLS is too bureaucratic to do that. They are better thought of as an agency which maximizes process, and the successful execution of process, success being defined in heavily process-intensive terms.

Their ideology, if that is even the right word, is to maximize adherence to the process.  And “defensibility of the estimate” is important there.

You might argue they are not very good at seeing “the big picture,” but that same emphasis makes it difficult for them to deviate much from established procedures.

If there were important reasons why we should be creating new, useful, but highly speculative estimates (how about “the number of jobs that were not created because of AI”?), the BLS would not be good at doing that.  They would not do it at all.  Such estimates would open them up to too much criticism, and the speculative nature of the enterprise would clash with their desire to be managing controllable and defensible processes.

Over the last twenty years, a lot of their innovations have come in the form of disaggregated, sector-specific or region-specific data, which is fine.  Or more emphasis on “work from home” issues.  Which is fine.

So they estimate “that which they can,” rather than producing unreliable estimates that might be highly interesting.

That is the sense in which the BLS — and many other parts of the government in fact — is biased. It can matter, but it is a mistake to be looking for partisan bias that skews the numbers."

Instead of trying to mitigate emissions, policymakers in low-emitting countries like Canada should focus on being resilient to climate change risks

By Kenneth P. Green of The Fraser Institute.

"In recent years, inflation-adjusted incomes have slumped in Canada, accompanied by a stagnation in productivity.

Since the sweltering summer of 1988, when climate change first erupted as a global policy concern, there have been two broad categories of public policies proposed to manage the risks of climate change: mitigation—heading off potential risks by attempting to control greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere; and adaptation, which focuses on using conventional engineering technologies and other risk-management systems to prevent imminent harms at a more local level.

Early theoretical work, particularly by political scientist Aaron Wildavsky, showed that under conditions of deep uncertainty—where risks are difficult to predict or quantify—resilience-based strategies like adaptation out-perform anticipatory efforts like mitigation.

However, as developed by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and later led by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), policy attention quickly congealed around mitigation, while adaptation was given little more than lip service.

For Canada, an early and aggressive supporter of the IPCC’s globalist mitigation agenda, this focus led to massive spending of taxpayers’ money on fanciful technologies, increased regulations, stifled key industries, and discouraged efforts to enhance Canadians’ ability to adapt to harmful climate events.

All of this has unfolded in a world where Canada’s potential to head off climate risks through domestic GHG mitigation is essentially nil. Canada contributes only about 1.45% of global emissions and had already transitioned to low-carbon electricity by the late 1980s, having picked the “low-hanging fruit” early.

Even full elimination of Canada’s emissions would not influence global temperatures, nor would it increase Canada’s resilience and, in any case, Canada’s GHG reductions would quickly be replaced in the atmosphere—and more than replaced—by still rapidly growing greenhouse-gas emissions from China."

Diocletian, the Roman Empire, and Forever Failing Price Controls

By Tarnell Brown. At EconLog.

"The Roman Empire was in trouble. During the fifty-plus years known as the Crisis of the Third Century (235-284 AD), the throne of Rome changed some 26 times, with the Roman Army engaging in a steady diet of crowning and removing claimants to the throne. These autocrats, known as “barracks emperors,” because they often came from among the ranks of the army itself, were generally disastrous in their administration of the Empire, due to a glaring lack of experience in political matters.  As they were beholden to the military, much of economic policy was geared towards keeping the soldiers happy. Severus Alexander, who while not a soldier owed his throne to the Praetorian Guard, began debasing the purity of silver coinage so that he could double the pay of his soldiers, while simultaneously paying for military campaigns against the Alamanni Germanic tribes. His occupation with the Alamanni left Rome’s other borders undefended, leading to attacks and invasions from other parties such as the Sassanids, leading to his assassination by the very Praetorian Guard which had placed him into power. This, however, is of ancillary interest to our story; what is important about these invasions is that Severus devalued the currency further to pay off his invaders so that he could concentrate on the Alemanni, laying the foundation for continued inflationary policy by his successors.

By the time Diocletian came to power in 284 CE, his (non-immediate) predecessor, Aurelius, had done much to restore some semblance of order to the Empire, reunifying what had broken into three kingdoms and expelling invaders such as the Sarmatians and Vandals from Roman territory. Diocletian expanded on these actions, even going so far as to form a quartet of governing individuals, called the Tetrarchy, which co-administered the Empire with him at the head. However, the inflation continued, and the Emperor worsened it via a massive increase in military and public works spending. Making matters worse, years of increasingly poor harvests – poor, in part, because public policy forced laborers into inefficient activities such as building a new capital at Nicomedia instead of actually farming – combined with already extant inflationary pressures from monetary devaluation to cause widespread unrest, especially within the military. Remember, given that he owed his power to the goodwill of the soldiers, it was hardly in the Emperor’s best interests to have them ragged and hungry.

Citing the influence of “evil traders,” in 301 CE, Diocletian issued his Edict on Maximum Prices, which instituted widespread price controls on over one thousand different items, from rice, to bed linens, to the wages to be paid to craftsmen (for those interested in the full scope of the price controls, and English translation of the Edict can be found here). Diocletian preemptively placed the blame for any failures of his policy on greed, launching into invective against wicked speculators and evil profiteers who conspired to rob into beggary a helpless public. Of course, he omitted the cost of increasing the number of provinces from 40 to 105, each requiring additional military and civilian officials. This alone increased the number of high-salaried public officials fivefold. Additionally, the base pay for military personal increased sixfold, newly appointed praetorian prefects and vicarii had to be accounted for, along with their staffs, palaces befitting the tetrarchs had to be erected, and the costs of a massive increase in public works projects budgeted for. All of this was being spent against a currency which, remember, was being systematically devalued, and to a degree that the government would not accept their own currency in payment, but demanded instead goods in trade.

Predictably, the impact of the Edict was disastrous. The penalty for overcharging was death. The penalty for “hoarding” goods was also death. With the value of currency declining, and no way to mitigate this decline due to fixed prices, the only way to officially sell anything at all was at a loss. As a result, producers either refused to produce any goods or services, produced just enough to appear to comply with government policy while selling off-book on the black market, or simply resorted to barter with other producers. Shortages became the order of the day, and hungry Romans soon resorted to violence in a competition to obtain whatever was available. This was especially prevalent among the soldiers that the Edict was mostly designed to benefit, as they had little to trade except for money that no one wanted for goods that scarcely existed. 

Soon, in order for some semblance of market stability to be restored, merchants, farmers and consumers simply ignored the policy; starving soldiers grateful for the return of food and clothing were hardly going to arrest the lawbreakers. Some 1200 years before the birth of Thomas Gresham, Diocletian demonstrated that bad money drives out good, and that attempting to ameliorate bad fiscal policy – whether prohibitive taxation, currency manipulation, or more contemporarily relevant, high tariff schemes – with more bad fiscal policy is never the solution. Whether in ancient Rome, the Soviet Union, or modern Western democracies with mixed economies containing a reasonably high level of free-market principles, price controls never work out to anyone’s benefit."