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Interesting Links YTD
A running list of things that stuck with me this year. No theme, just ideas worth knowing.
Wagner’s Law. As economies develop and get richer, government spending tends to grow as a share of GDP. Not just in absolute terms, but relative to the size of the economy. The 19th-century economist Adolph Wagner observed this pattern across industrialising nations, and it’s held up remarkably well. The intuition: richer societies demand more from the state (infrastructure, welfare, courts), and those demands scale faster than income. Worth keeping in mind whenever someone argues a country has “too big” or “too small” a government without reference to its stage of development.
How do elite groups form? - Aporia Magazine. The answer, this article argues, is mostly selection. The Samurai and Kazoku in Japan maintained their elevated status long after their formal privileges were stripped away. The Parsis, Zoroastrians who fled persecution in Iran, became one of the most accomplished ethnic groups in history partly because the selective pressures of emigration filtered for certain traits. The implication is uncomfortable but interesting: elite groups are often less a product of structural advantage than of who ends up in the group to begin with.
Hauser’s Law. The US federal government has collected roughly 19–20% of GDP in tax revenue every year since WWII, almost regardless of what the top marginal income tax rate was. 91% in the 1950s, 28% in the Reagan era, doesn’t much matter. Revenue as a share of GDP barely moves. Named after W. Kurt Hauser, who pointed this out in 1993. It’s one of those empirical regularities that makes ideological tax debates feel a bit beside the point, though economists still argue hard about the mechanism.
Going Founder Mode on Cancer. A remarkable piece about the billionaire founder of Gitlab, who decided to approach his own treatment like a startup founder: move fast, build a team, don’t wait for the system to catch up. A “CEO of his care” was recruited full-time, a clinical and scientific advisory board assembled, and computational biologists analysed his single-cell data to identify fibroblast markers driving differential gene expression. A blueprint for what aggressive, personalised medicine might actually look like.
Brazil vs Romania. In 1990, Brazil was richer than Romania. Within 30 years, Romania overcame communism and became roughly 2× richer in GDP per capita terms. See for yourself on Our World in Data. No conclusion, just thought provoking as to what causes economic development. Strong EU-style institutions and rule of law are clearly important.