Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Is Getting Healthy Overrated?

Howard Chua-Eoan’s essay on his effort, at age 66, to fight the aging process and get healthy triggers both admiration and sympathy. It also prompts the question of whether healthy living is all that it’s cracked up to be:

The past six months have messed with my head and self-confidence. Abstinence from alcohol (160-plus days so far, or more than four Lents) has resulted in some weight loss I’m grateful for, though I’m still 10 lbs. away from my 30-something self. I awake with an energetic clarity I can’t quite remember from my exhausting decades of career-building. But lucidity is overrated: It forces you to contemplate mortality without blinkers. And all that vim makes it hard to escape into sleep.

2. Europe Is Hot

Don’t envy your colleague’s European vacation. Temperatures are rising and air conditioning is scarce. Tyler Cowen explains the EU’s cool deficit:

 European governments do a great deal to discourage air-conditioning, whether central AC or window units. You might need a hard-to-get permit to install an AC unit, and in Geneva you have to show a medical need for it. Or in many regions of Europe, the air conditioner might violate heritage preservation laws, or be illegal altogether. In Portofino, Italy, neighbors have been known to turn each other in for having illegal air-conditioning units. The fines can range up to €43,000, though most cases are settled out of court by a removal of the unit.

3. Made-in-China Swamps Europe

Brad Setser, trade expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, arguesthat the US-China trade war has a surprising victim: Europe’s industrial sector. He explains:

 [China] hasn’t quite mastered top-of-the-line chips, protecting Taiwan. But it has mastered autos—both EVs and ICEs. And construction equipment. And industrial robots. And most specialty chemicals. And batteries, permanent magnets, solar PVs and their chemical precursors, industrial diamonds, wind turbines, and high-speed rail...In other words, China’s continued manufacturing boom is eating into core European export strengths. Exports have been in steep fall as a share of Europe's economy since 2022.

4. Britania Is Not Ruling the Waves

Martin Wolf, the veteran economics columnist for The Financial Times, identifies three failures Britain must confront: its politics, state, and economy. At the root of all three is the loss of productivity:

When economies cease to grow, everything becomes zero-sum: more for one group of people means less for others. The problem is even greater if demographic change increases the number of beneficiaries of fiscal transfers relative to that of productive taxpayers. The overwhelming questions in politics become how to contain the discontent when much of the population has stagnant real incomes.

5. Stop Blaming Social Media

In a wide-ranging piece in The Asterisk, Dan Williams throws cold water on the notion that social media is the cause of political polarization, disinformation, and demagoguery. He argues that social media does not, in fact, fuel conspiratorial thinking:

There is little evidence to suggest that rates of conspiracy theorizing have increased in prevalence in the social media age. In a recent study, political scientist Joe Uscinski and colleagues conducted four separate analyses to test for possible changes over time. They conclude: “In no instance do we observe systematic evidence for an increase in conspiracism, however operationalized.” 

6. Deserted

Saudi Arabia’s NEOM, the Kingdom’s wildly ambitious construction company funded by its sovereign wealth fund, is dramatically cutting its staff. Initial costs of its massive development project were estimated to $500 billion. Now they’ve soared to $1.5 trillion, becoming one of the biggest government white elephants in history. Semaphor reports that the punch bowl has been taken away:

NEOM moved its headquarters to northwest Saudi Arabia in 2020, forcing staff to relocate to what was then — and, except for the people actually working on it, largely still is — a remote and mostly uninhabited site. Employees were put up in temporary cabins and provided round-the-clock canteens, gyms, and schools. The cushy lifestyle broke through in viral videos last year, with residents showing off the camps, to the chagrin of management.

Websites Worth Reading

Earthquake Map: Visualizing 2.2 Million Earthquake Records

Haters Guide to AI: A Very Long Read by Edward Zitron

Forgotten New York: Pictures and Stories

Feeds We Follow

@Brad_Setser: TTrade views

@hsu_steve: Trade views

@SharkoTennis: Tennis stats for US Open