Latest news with #TylerCowen
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Matthew Lau: Toronto the Good's continuing downward slide
Toronto, where I have lived my whole life, certainly has high points. There is the financial district, which is the second largest financial centre in North America and home to several good coffee shops. Toronto also features some excellent cuisine. Tyler Cowen, who in 2011 was listed among Foreign Policy's top 100 global thinkers and whose blog with Alex Tabarrok Time magazine ranked third-best financial blog, once concluded after a restaurant tour of Scarborough plus rolls from a Sri Lankan locale and lots of driving around, 'Scarborough is the best ethnic food suburb I have seen in my life, ever, and by an order of magnitude.' With all it has going for it, Toronto really should be a world-class city. But I fear if it continues on its current path, it will instead become an honorary third-world city — certainly with respect to the unreliability of its public transit system, its inept municipal management, its descent into lawlessness and social dysfunction, and its NHL team's dismal playoff performance. On this last point, explanations and proposed solutions vary; for the first three the causes are quite clear. If Milton Friedman's classic 1993 essay Why Government is the Problem were being written today, Toronto could feature prominently in it. The unreliability of the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) has recently become intolerable. Last Wednesday during evening rush hour the TTC shut down a significant stretch of its Line 1 subway for two and a quarter hours. Just before 5:30 p.m., service was suspended from Lawrence to St. Clair due to a track-level injury at Eglinton (three stations spanning five kilometres of track). Also around that time, northbound passengers at a major interchange, Bloor-Yonge, were kicked off their train, causing significant overflow that took some time to clear. Later the initial service suspension was extended south to include Bloor-Yonge — making seven stops in all. Service was not restored until around 7:45 p.m. This was the second serious subway outage in less than a week: the previous Thursday, a significant part of the other major line was shut down for much of the day due to an oil leakage from a subway work car. Mass public transit chaos has become almost commonplace since last winter. In mid-December, the TTC experienced lengthy shutdowns during the morning rush hour on no less than three days, with varying causes, including a trespasser on the tracks, multiple signal issues and a lost raccoon wandering the rails. Then in February, extensive TTC delays were blamed on snow and ice. In a further demonstration of the City of Toronto's inability to provide basic municipal services, snow piled up everywhere, with some sidewalks taking three weeks to clear. It was later reported that of the city's 59 pieces of winter sidewalk-clearing equipment, nearly half were out of commission on average during the three days of heaviest snowfall. More evidence of a city headed towards third-world status: increased lawlessness. The joke is that TTC really stands for 'Take The Car,' but last year that became the police's recommended phrase for homeowners to tell criminals. Amidst rising car thefts, one police officer suggested homeowners leave car keys at the front door to prevent a home invasion by criminals: just let the criminals take the car. After reaching all-time highs, car thievery now seems to be abating, but there are other trends in the wrong direction. Matthew Lau: Minimum wages are even more harmful than we thought Matthew Lau: Lessons for Canada in Argentina's newly freed markets There has been an explosion of antisemitic hate crimes in Toronto in the past two years. In recent weeks mobs have continued to attack Jewish businesses and block streets, in one case forcing police to divert an ambulance. There are increasingly common news stories of attacks on and vandalism of synagogues and Jewish businesses, and even antisemitism in public schools. Don't get me wrong. It is still possible to live a good life in Toronto. Trudging 20 or 30 minutes every so often, even in snow or rain, because the TTC has again broken down is not that great a hardship for me. I am only a very casual Leafs fan, Sportsnet turfing Don Cherry in 2019 having dulled my hockey enthusiasm, while the sight of empty arenas during the pandemic killed off most of the rest. But for many other Torontonians, the unreliability of the TTC and other municipal services, the hapless Leafs, the increased crime and the growing antisemitism weigh much more heavily. Toronto still has much to offer, but only if these problems are solved. Solid political leadership and better hockey players are needed. Matthew Lau is a Toronto writer. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Time Magazine
20-05-2025
- Business
- Time Magazine
Tyler Cowen
Philanthropic organizations are often mired in bureaucracy that can make the process of applying for funding lengthy and tedious. Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, is pioneering a different approach. Since 2018, Cowen has run Emergent Ventures, a fellowship and grant program for entrepreneurs working on highly scalable ideas for meaningfully improving society. Applicants answer a handful of questions and get a response in a week or two. To date, the program, which is backed by donors such as Schmidt Futures, has supported over a thousand people—many still in their teens—working on ventures ranging from scientific innovation to personal development. The 2025 cohort includes a University of Chicago research director working on a non-invasive blood glucose monitor and a Vanderbilt University student developing prosthetics and bionic arms. 'I've focused on trying to mobilize talent that otherwise is not discovered or inspired,' says Cowen, who screens most applications Ventures' successes include funding one of the first COVID-19 saliva tests via its Fast Grants program and a prison reform startup that used data analysis to identify over 150,000 safe candidates for early release. With dedicated tracks for applicants in India, Africa and the Caribbean, Ukraine, and Taiwan, grantees have regular meet-ups across the world. Says Cowen, 'Anyone who wins has a direct line to me.'
Business Times
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Business Times
Slowing innovation is ruining American politics
IF THERE'S one thing every American agrees on, it's that politics has become vicious. There are plenty of explanations for why that is, from gerrymandering to the partisan sorting that has made both parties increasingly ideologically homogenous. One I'd add – but which often gets overlooked – is the slowdown in US technological progress outside of computing. Technology is the most important driver of economic growth, and its rapid progress allows political disputes to centre on how best to distribute gains. That's easy. What's hard is when technology stagnates, growth slows and politics become zero-sum. The last few years have seen the promise of new technologies that could help us escape that trap – but the Trump administration is throwing that opportunity away. The idea that technological progress has slowed might seem counter-intuitive when you consider the smartphone you probably have in your hand right now. But George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen has mustered convincing evidence that that's exactly what's happening in nearly every field other than computing. For example, the Wright Brothers made their first flight in 1903; both the Boeing 747 and the Concorde appeared less than 70 years later. If you had shown either jet to the Wrights, they would have thought they were hallucinating. Fast forward another half century and the differences between the 747 and a modern passenger plane are subtle, while no civilian aircraft approaches the Concorde's speed. Life expectancy The problem stretches far beyond aviation. The most basic measure of social well-being is life expectancy. Advances in technology, such as vaccines and antibiotics, constantly increased our life spans during the 20th century. Yet American life expectancy peaked more than a decade ago. Why is innovation in such a slump? Government is certainly part of the problem. Across many areas (particularly housing), bad policy is crippling growth, as shown by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in Abundance and Marc Dunkelman in Why Nothing Works. But there's more to it. Science has, in Cowen's words, plucked the 'low-hanging fruit'. You can only invent penicillin or jet engines once. In drug development, progress has become so difficult that it's governed by 'Eroom's Law' (Moore's Law spelled backwards), which posits that the cost of bringing a new treatment to market doubles every nine years. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up Similarly, since the 1970s, innovation has shifted away from material technologies and towards digital ones which are far less constrained by energy requirements and physical limits. Largely unchecked by antitrust laws, dominant technology companies such as Alphabet and Meta Platforms have been able to form durable monopolies and capture the gains from these digital innovations, securing multi-decade positions atop a sector that was once characterised by constant ferment. Technological advances can make everyone better off. If you're reading this, you have more access to information and medical care than the wealthiest and most powerful people on Earth did when your grandparents were born. These gains make reform easier by creating a surplus, which can be used to compensate interest groups hurt by the changes. When kerosene replaced whale oil for light, it devastated the whaling industry. But the benefits were so large that everyone, even (eventually) the communities that used to be supported by whaling, ended up better off. When that surplus goes away, people end up fighting much harder to avoid losses than they do to secure gains, making it difficult or even impossible to fix broken systems. Healthcare reform, for example, has stalled at least in part because any change to the system would hurt someone. If healthcare technologies were still leaping ahead as quickly as they were when antibiotics first rolled out, improvements in quality and efficiency would create the slack to compensate those hurt by the reforms. Recently, however, science and technology have offered the promise of revolution once again. On the energy front, the cost of utility-scale solar cells declined by 88 per cent from 2009 to 2024. Similarly, the price of lithium-ion batteries declined by 97 per cent from 1991 to 2021. This makes new renewable energy cheaper than new fossil fuels – and prices will continue declining. Further in the future, breakthroughs in nuclear fusion pioneered by companies such as Commonwealth Fusion Systems (an MIT spinout) might offer energy abundance of the sort once imagined by 1950s science fiction. Miracles discarded There are other examples throughout the sciences. Merck & Co's Keytruda and other immunotherapy drugs have transformed the way we treat cancer. SpaceX has cut the cost to put a satellite in orbit by a factor of 10. And AI may supercharge our ability to innovate, ranging from biological and drug-discovery research to improvements in materials science that may drive advances in the field, including superconductors and quantum computing. All these potential miracles, however, are being discarded. The administration's new budget proposes a 55 per cent cut to the National Science Foundation (the government's primary arm for research outside medicine) and a 40 per cent cut to the National Institutes of Health (America, and the world's, foremost medical research institution). These build on massive cuts to universities (most prominently Harvard, where I taught for many years, but others as well) where much of America's most important research happens. Even the flow of scientific talent into the US – long one of the nation's greatest advantages – is reversing, with top AI minds no longer coming here and the EU allocating almost US$600 million to lure away top American researchers. Science and technology can do amazing things. If we let them, they might even help fix our broken politics. The recent wholesale assault on science isn't just a threat to the American economy or health. It's a threat to the functioning of democracy, and perhaps our best shot at making it work better. BLOOMBERG The writer teaches leadership at the Yale School of Management and is the author of 'Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter'
Yahoo
28-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The Demise of Outdoor Dining Isn't Really Anyone's Preference. So How Did We End Up Here?
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. In the uncertain post-pandemic days, there were few sights that announced New York City's rise from the ashes quite like a stroll down the block of West 32nd Street known as K-Town. At one point, this little stretch of noodle bars, Korean bakeries, and karaoke spots had 22 restaurants with tables strewn across the sidewalk and stacked up in elaborate 'streeteries' in the curb lane. On warm nights, it was as lively as a festival. The K-town sheds, wrote Nancy Groce of the American Folklife Center, were 'outstanding examples of folk architecture.' The economist Tyler Cowen wrote that while he had never seen Lower Manhattan so alive, 'the most vibrant single street for both food and socializing was slightly further north in Koreatown.' It is all gone now. Where there were once 22 outdoor dining setups, today there is one, a bright-red pavilion hung with string lights and lined with freshly planted flowers, overseen by a plastic owl to keep the pigeons away. It belongs to the restaurant Shanghai Mong, whose owner Tora Yi told me that it had been a struggle to get it even conditionally approved. Elsewhere on West 32nd Street on a sunny Thursday spring afternoon? A Ram truck with a yellow barnacle on its windshield, a handful of mopeds under rain covers, and a lot of empty parking spaces. Quiet. As K-Town goes, so goes New York. During the pandemic the city counted 13,000 outdoor dining setups generating $373 million in wages and nearly $10 million in tax revenue each year. But as the 'temporary' program concluded its third summer, the typical NIMBY concerns (noise, parking) were compounded by unaddressed problems like rats, sidewalk obstructions, and ramshackle structures. After much debate, the city sought a reset by offering a 'permanent' outdoor dining program that required the streeteries and sidewalk cafés to be dismantled each fall. In its first spring, this diminished program has given final approval, as of Wednesday, to just 67 restaurants. 'This rollout has been nothing short of disastrous,' Julie Menin, a council member from the Upper East Side, said at a hearing this week. Chi Ossé, a council member from Brooklyn, said the execution was so bad it amounted to sabotage: 'I believe the intention was to kill the program.' Lincoln Restler thought the plan was so bad he didn't vote for it. And now? 'It's a failure.' New York isn't the only city to have pulled back from the outdoor dining phenomenon. As virus fears faded and health restrictions fell away, many big-city residents watched outdoor dining disappear too, done in by some combination of policy change and attrition. What separated New York was the program's scope, popularity, and political support—a product of the sheer value of all that 'new' space in a famously cramped city. Those converted parking spots produced 2.4 million square feet of new commercial space, the equivalent of a new Empire State Building diced up outside 10,000 storefronts. Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller and a candidate in June's Democratic mayoral primary, told me the issue was bigger than where we put tables and chairs. 'People are fed up with a city government that doesn't work,' he said. 'That's how I read why more people voted for Trump [in New York]. So when something like this happens, and the city can't get its act together, it keeps weakening trust in government at a time when trust in government is so weak.' In Lander's view, there are problems with both the law and its execution. He blames the city council's program—which requires professionally drawn plans, community board review, hefty fees, and seasonal disassembly—for whittling applications for the program down to just 3,000 last summer. He blames the Eric Adams administration for getting less than 100 of those applications over the line this winter. Some 2,600 establishments (such as Shanghai Mong) are allowed to operate with 'provisional' Department of Transportation approval. Diners may not notice the difference, but it's risky ground for a big investment. It may also pose problems for serving drinks when pandemic-era alcohol rules expire this summer, since the State Liquor Authority will only recognize completed approvals. Restaurant advocates say the onerous application has led to a familiar pattern: outdoor restaurants in rich neighborhoods, and the rest of the city left out (or, really, in). Even the conditional approvals have yielded just 78 outdoor setups in the Bronx, the city's poorest borough, down from more than 1,000 in recent years. Naturally, in the hearing, staffers at the city's Department of Transportation, which administers the certification, took the view that the problem was the council's own procedure. And several members of the City Council seem to agree. As the local news site Hell Gate put it: 'After Passing Legislation That Decimated Outdoor Dining, NYC Council Demands to Know What Killed Outdoor Dining.' Then the question is: Who is ready to design a new, more lenient law to facilitate outdoor dining, without the 'seasonal' requirement that analysts have described as a poison pill because of the required storage costs and staffing changes? It wouldn't be unheard of—Toronto, for example, successfully revised its program after participation dropped following post-pandemic changes. Restler, the Brooklyn councilman who has been one of outdoor dining's biggest supporters (and refused to vote for the current program), said he is drawing up just such a law. But the urgency of the post-pandemic period has faded, and larger problems loom in the form of confrontations with an increasingly hostile Trump administration. It's not clear the whole council will want to reopen the subject before this year's mayoral election, let alone vote for a year-round dining option it rejected just 24 months ago. It feels good to say 'I told you so'—but not as good as having lunch outside.
Yahoo
17-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Perspective: Progressives are starting to come around on the importance of marriage and fatherhood
Progressives and conservatives rarely agree. But there's a growing consensus about this one data point: America's men are not OK. This isn't exactly a political phenomenon — although men are changing politically, too. Last summer, economist Tyler Cowen detected a 'vibe shift' in American culture, noting people were drifting rightward. Among his 19 reasons for the shift, Cowen noted the falling fortunes of males were driving men, including Black and Latino men, 'into the Republican camp.' His insight was prescient: President Donald Trump gained more Latino men's votes and nearly double the share of Black male support in 2024 than he had in 2020. Changing political preferences isn't necessarily a sign of crisis. But the fact that a growing number of American men are clearly dissatisfied with the male status quo has forced some otherwise progressive thinkers to admit something's changing. Recently on 'Real Time with Bill Maher,' former Congressman Tim Ryan, a Democrat from Ohio, said his party has been 'asleep at the switch' regarding the problems facing young men. 'What are we going to do with our young men and our boys that are struggling so much with depression … with suicide?' Ryan said. 'I'm pro-women … [but] we need a national agenda for our boys, too.' Another major Democrat turning his attention to the floundering fortunes of males is Maryland Gov. Wes Moore who recently committed his administration to 'begin implementing targeted solutions to uplift our men and boys.' He did this because he's seen the data indicating males are in trouble. 'On every single indicator we care about,' Moore said to the Washingtonian, 'young men and boys are falling off.' Until very recently, it may have been considered sexist — or at least politically tone-deaf — to suggest American men are suffering. Particularly in the wake of the #MeToo movement, the progressive line has been that men are modernity's winners: They're hired for the best jobs (and with the highest pay), they control the cultural institutions and they're never held responsible for breaking the rules. But the data paint a different picture; and it's getting much harder to ignore. In his landmark 2022 book 'Of Boys and Men,' Richard Reeves chronicled the falling fortunes of America's young men. He found that men aren't attending college at the same rate as women — higher ed is now about 60% female. In elementary and high school, boys make up two-thirds of the worst-performing students. And we know that 1 in 4 men without college degrees are not employed full-time. Most importantly, men are between two and three times as likely as women to suffer 'deaths of despair' — death by alcohol, drug use or suicide. Hundreds of thousands of men have died from deaths of despair in the past two decades. Half a century ago, anthropologist Margaret Mead memorably argued that a healthy nation must have a place for its men. 'The recurrent problem of civilization,' Mead wrote, 'is to define the male role satisfactorily enough.' Men need a mission. When they can't find it in family life, societies flounder. This couldn't be more visible for our kids. Our research at the Institute for Family Studies has demonstrated the catastrophic social consequences of absentee fatherhood and family breakdown. When children are raised outside of an intact family, those children are markedly more likely to struggle in school, to tangle with the law and to struggle in the workforce. The data show a clear 'two-parent advantage' for kids, especially boys. Our most striking finding is that boys raised outside of an intact family with two biological parents are more likely to go to prison or jail than they are to graduate from college. By contrast, boys raised by their two married, biological parents are about twice as likely to graduate from college as they are to land in prison. But there's another surprising discovery in the data. Stable marriages don't just benefit kids. Married fatherhood greatly benefits the men in those marriages, too. First, the obligations of family life motivate men to work harder and smarter; fathers literally make more money when they have kids, provided that they are married to the mother of their children. But the benefits of marriage and family life transcend economics. The data suggest being a married family man also protects men from self-destruction. Deaths of despair, for instance, are markedly lower in places where more men (and women) are married, economist Jonathan Rothwell at Gallup recently found. Opioid overdose deaths for men are about six times higher among never-married and divorced men, according to the Social Capital Project analysis of CDC data. Suicide is also lower among men who are fathers. Margaret Mead's insight may help us explain the data: Marriage and fatherhood are the most profound mission on offer for most men. Maybe economist Tyler Cowen sensed this, too, when he wrote about the political 'vibe shift' last summer. Economists, after all, are well-versed in what's called the 'perceived value' effect: We value something more highly when we pay more for it. Protecting and providing for a wife and children exacts a high cost from men. When married dads rise to the occasion, they no doubt value their own lives more highly than they might otherwise. Men need to feel needed, and our country needs more men who know that they are on a mission to serve their families. In fact, the anthropologist Nicholas Townsend has observed that, for most men, 'marriage, work, and fatherhood' go together as a 'package deal.' When Reeves wrote 'Of Boys and Men' in 2022 as a center-left scholar, he did not connect the dots between the crisis in American masculinity and the distance too many boys and men have from married family life. In fact, he argued that we needed to develop a model of fatherhood apart from marriage. But like Cowen's 'vibe shift,' that may be changing. Here's Reeves writing just a few weeks ago in Medium: 'Without the positive pressures that come from being a father and husband, men are even less likely to really go for it on the work front. They are more likely to be unemployed. They become more vulnerable to addiction, more socially isolated. All of which makes them less attractive as potential spouses. Boys raised in single-mother households then struggle in school and in life, and they have difficulty finding a mate and forming a family, too. And so the cycle turns. The economic struggles of boys and men become entrenched across generations.' The masculinity crisis looms large, but the solution is remarkably clear: More American men need a shot at marriage, work and fatherhood. And it looks like more progressives may just be coming around on the importance of reviving this package deal. Brad Wilcox is the Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia and the author of 'Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families and Save Civilization.' Maria Baer is a journalist and co-host of the 'Breakpoint This Week' podcast with The Colson Center for Christian Worldview.
