Research Associate Professor @SMUCoxBridwell. Co-author of the Economic Freedom of the World index and the Human Freedom Index.
Dallas
Joined January 2010
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Ryan Murphy retweeted
Why does this keep happening
It is a strange world.
Because 5.7 million people live in three small Baltic countries (whose total size is less than a Chinese Tier II city). and whose half of the population lives in Europe, and another third are Russians who cannot get citizenship, and because they have traumas and bad memories of the Soviet rule, the entire world of 8 billion people should go into a nuclear apocalypse and die.
Ryan Murphy retweeted
There is no good reason for mosquitoes to exist in wealthy countries today.
New technologies can get rid of the mosquito species that cause diseases like dengue, yellow fever, and malaria; and others can prevent them from carrying those diseases.
worksinprogress.co/issue/mos…
So why do mosquitoes still exist?
In a new article for Works in Progress, Maya Rosen explains how state incapacity and risk aversion led to over a decade of delays and billions of unnecessary bites in the United States.
Oxitec, for example, engineered an Aedes aegypti mosquito in such a way that its female offspring would die before adulthood. Through sustained releases, they showed they could reduce local mosquito populations by 80% or more, in field trials.
They sought approval from the USDA in 2010, which then passed it to the FDA, which passed it to the EPA. In 2020, the EPA allowed them to conduct limited field trials in the Florida Keys. Two years ago, their experimental permit expired, and they still need another review before it can be used routinely. Their proposed field trial in California was withdrawn after public opposition.
Another company, MosquitoMate, developed a technique involving Wolbachia, which also suppresses local mosquitoes. They then spent over fifteen years working through the system before finally receiving commercial registration nationwide in 2024.
It seems that, sometimes, the barrier to getting rid of diseases isn’t technology at all. It’s policy and political will.
New products shouldn’t get stuck in regulatory review for so long, especially if the delays are about basic questions like which agency has oversight over the product, rather than testing for safety.
Though some of those uncertainties were being addressed, the broader changes haven’t materialized. After Biden’s 2022 executive order, the agencies planned to update how their coordinated framework was implemented. But Trump rescinded the order last year.
Meanwhile, the EPA unit that reviews new mosquito control products is still a small office backlogged in reviewing a wide range of products.
Mosquitoes are a policy choice. We can get rid of them. Will we choose to?
worksinprogress.co/issue/mos…
Ryan Murphy retweeted
Imagine for a moment just how fun it feels to say this as the Greek finance minister
Ryan Murphy retweeted
The article spends most of its time moralizing, but it includes one randomized controlled trial:
> "Studies on daycare are usually observational rather than experimental . . . One rare exception is a randomized controlled study from Tennessee in the 2000s, which investigated ordinary preschool education and followed children as far as high school. It reached similar conclusions to other studies on this topic: attending a standardized statewide preschool program benefited disadvantaged children, but the effects soon washed out as they entered school."
This isn't what the RCT found! You can read it at psycnet.apa.org/record/2022-… . "Data through sixth grade from state education records showed that the children randomly assigned to attend pre-K had lower state achievement test scores in third through sixth grades than control children, with the strongest negative effects in sixth grade. A negative effect was also found for disciplinary infractions, attendance, and receipt of special education services, with null effects on retention." As far as I can tell, this is the most recent update from the study - there's nothing further claiming this has "washed out". If you're only going to include one RCT, you need to describe its conclusions correctly!
I also don't think a negative effect from daycare would necessarily contradict JRH. The most plausible mechanism IMHO would be exposing kids to more respiratory infections early on, and there's good reason to think that early respiratory infections decrease IQ (newsnationnow.com/health/sma…) and increase psychosis risk (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/article…), with subthreshold psychosis risk probably related to risk of behavioral problems. This could potentially be mitigated by air filtration or UV-C in daycares.
Ryan Murphy retweeted
You people should be ashamed of yourselves. Point to a social indicator where Indian-Americans under-perform? This anti-Indian bs is all being marshaled against them as if Indian-Americans drag America down, but the complaint is also that they outperform the average American. Which is it? If Hinduism is so awful, why do its practitioners do better than average in school and business and are under represented in terms of crime, divorce, out of wedlock birth, etc? Pick a lane.
This country was founded upon theological diversity and moral consensus. Indian-Americans are exemplars of that ideal.
This blather about the incompatibility of Hinduism is just pretextual boob bait for bigots.
.@SteveDeaceShow is correct.
Hinduism is antithetical to our nation’s understanding of Justice because it imposes distinct moral codes on people based upon the caste system, whereas Christianity imposes a universal moral code regardless of one’s social status, age, or stage of life.
Not all cultures are compatible with ours and religious distinctions matter—especially when it comes to questions of permissible migration.
Ryan Murphy retweeted
😂 So Caltech undergrads wanted to, like barbarians at the gate, use their AI credits to destroy open math problems, but one thousand older, senior mathematicians, the established ones with Fields medals and honors under their belt were absolutely outraged that these tyros, these uneducated uncivilized barely self showering children would decimate their status symbols, raised a ruckus, and got those free credits rescinded.
We recognize that the rapid progress of AI in mathematics is disruptive. We're looking to engage with the math community more on the best way to integrate this technology and communicate its impacts. After considering concerns raised by members of the mathematics community, we’ve decided to withdraw OpenAI’s sponsorship of the Caltech Mathathon and have notified the organizers.
Ryan Murphy retweeted
Ariely and a lot of “replication crisis” social psych contributed to an erroneous view of the human world, which is that little things cause big things. Instead, big things are caused either by other big things or systematically correlated agglomerations of little things.
Ariely is a much bigger issue than Arday ever was. Arday was an aberration, but nobody with a fully functioning brain takes any of that stuff seriously anyway. He was evolving in fields that are themselves aberrations. The real issue behind Arday was the people who hired him and their political agenda, as well as the fact that nobody dares to speak up against an obvious farce. Arday himself wasn’t the biggest issue in his own story.
Ariely, on the other hand, was supposed to be a serious scholar and a real “academic star.” I actually took one of his online courses and was quite impressed. A lot of smart people not only took him seriously but also devoted years of their lives to studying behavioral economics without knowing they were building on quicksand. That’s a lot of resources and years wasted.
Ryan Murphy retweeted
Milo’s enemies on the right are gloating about him ending up in ICE custody in what looks like an instance of the federal government being weaponized to settle petty scores. It would not be an exaggeration to say that his rivals on the right would cheer if he were mistreated or killed.
Meanwhile, people outside of the right who have no love for Milo are defending him. This is the fundamental difference between the right and its critics.
The right sees everything through the Schmittian friend/enemy distinction. You’ll get laughed at for suggesting that it is possible to even exist outside that framework. And yet here are a bunch of people who have absolutely no reason to defend Milo doing just that on principle. They could apply the friend/enemy thing, like the right, but they don’t. That is why any society, any culture, any regime controlled by the right will inevitably be more corrupt and unjust. Its critics are simply more civilized and have a better claim to the moral high ground.
Ryan Murphy retweeted
Labor unions are “threatening to withhold support of candidates opposing the data-center projects.” wsj.com/economy/jobs/blue-co…
Ryan Murphy retweeted
The data center panic feels exactly like the anti-GMO movement.
A bunch of technical claims that sound scary and reasonable until you spend 10 minutes actually looking into them.
Then when one claim falls apart, it’s immediately replaced with another.
At some point it stops being about water, jobs, or the grid and starts being “I already decided this technology is evil, now help me justify it.”
Ryan Murphy retweeted
Lmao, thank you @semafor, what a gift!
Pseudoeconomist @oren_cass cannot articulate a coherent argument for his positions, which apparently include sharing JD Vance's objections to the US dollar's reserve currency status.
Instead, he just spouts ad hominems and "do you know what time it is?"
Ryan Murphy retweeted
Speaking of Acemoglu, I don't buy his argument -- now being trumpeted by Breitbart and other MAGA types -- that skilled immigration has caused America's elite to "give up" on education.
breitbart.com/economy/2026/0…
Ryan Murphy retweeted
Delighted to go on EconTalk to explain why I think the institutional reforms of the Glorious Revolution were incredibly important & that while they did not *kick off* the Industrial Revolution, they made it a lot faster than it might otherwise have been.
@EconTalker is very good at taking my rambling responses and summarising them down clearly and concisely!
What if the Industrial Revolution began not with the steam engine—but with property rights?
@BSwud joins @EconTalker to discuss how England's quiet legal revolution unlocked land, infrastructure, investment, and ultimately economic growth.
Watch a new episode of EconTalk from the @HooverInst, @Liberty_Fund, and @Econlib:
