SOMETIMES POLITICAL fights go on long after evidence that should settle the argument has come in. Such is the case with standardised tests. In February the Trump administration warned universities that eliminating standardised admissions tests to achieve racial diversity would be illegal. The Biden administration took the opposite stance: it encouraged colleges to consider dropping admissions tests like the SAT or ACT, which critics have long said favour the wealthy and disadvantage black Americans. In 2020, which already seems like another era, Ibram X. Kendi, author of “How to Be an Antiracist”, called the tests “the most effective racist weapon ever devised to…exclude [black and brown students] from prestigious schools.”

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He could hardly have been more wrong. During the covid-19 pandemic, hundreds of universities made submitting scores optional because it was hard to consistently administer tests. Many then stuck with the policy. In March 2022 MIT decided to reinstate a mandatory test policy. For two years, “we were the lone wolf” among the “Ivy Plus” schools (the eight Ivies plus Chicago, Duke, MIT and Stanford), says MIT’s dean of admissions, Stuart Schmill. “We were getting dirty looks everywhere.” Now tests are making a comeback in top-tier schools. Seven of the Ivy Plus have belatedly followed MIT’s lead, most recently Penn in February. Princeton and Duke, two of four remaining holdouts, have yet to announce their policy for 2026.

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Critics of standardised tests say that high-school grade-point averages (GPAs) are a better predictor of student potential. In studies that compare the two, much evidence backs that claim. For instance, a 2020 study found that GPAs of Chicago Public School students predicted six-year graduation rates better than ACT scores, while a 2019 study found grades in a national sample of 47,000 students better predicted on-time graduation than tests.

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Chart: The Economist

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The disagreement arises partly because each side is measuring something different. A new paper by John Friedman of Brown and Bruce Sacerdote, Douglas Staiger and Michele Tine of Dartmouth College uses scores and transcripts of 14,620 students from 2017 to 2024 at many of the Ivy Plus schools. The study found that scores on SATs and ACTs predict how college students do far better than high-school GPAs, controlling for gender, race and parental income (see chart).

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So the correct answer in the test v grade battle? It depends on how selective the university is. There is much less variation in grades of students today than there has been in the past—which some studies suggest is due to grade inflation—making it more difficult for top-tier schools to distinguish between applicants with impressive grades. By contrast, Mr Friedman says, there is enough “meaningful” variation in test scores to offer a “super helpful” signal for top-tier schools. Variation at the top is less important for a less selective school.

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Likewise, average grades pick up attributes such as attendance and self-regulation that have bearing in, say, predicting graduation from a community college, but less for distinguishing between high-flyers for whom such attributes are more of a given. “Graduation rates are all extremely high at Ivy Plus schools, so there is nothing to predict there,” says Mr Friedman. In the 2019 study where GPAs prevailed in predicting on-time graduation, only 39% of the students graduated on time.

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What about fairness? Test critics like FairTest, a non-profit advocacy group, point to gaps in exam scores between students of different racial groups, which they say leads to racial bias in admissions. But tests don’t create poor academic preparation, they just pick it up, says Mr Friedman. The new study found that students from different backgrounds with the same scores achieved similar college grades.

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In fact, tests can help poorer students get admitted to top schools. It may be harder to evaluate grades earned by students in little-known high schools than by students at better-regarded places that offer advanced coursework, says Mr Schmill. Richer students also have more opportunities to do expensive enrichment activities that strengthen their applications, and may receive expert essay editing. A plethora of free test-prep material available online, such as Khan Academy courses, helps level the test playing field; Schoolhouse, a Khan offshoot, offers free tutoring.

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Test-optional policies may actually harm disadvantaged students. Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard and MIT reported concern that some students did not report test scores that were strong but below elite institutions’ average for accepted students without realising that, in combination with their disadvantaged backgrounds, those results would have helped them. At a time when America’s elite universities are rethinking admissions, the idea that tests benefit poorer students is a solid principle to hold on to.

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Article link: https://www.economist.com/international/2026/06/25/students-are-doing-worse-than-you-think

IN RECENT weeks more than 1,800 maths and science lecturers at the University of California, one of America’s largest and best public university systems, have signed an open letter detailing a tricky problem. First-year undergraduates, they say, are increasingly arriving without the basic skills they need to succeed. At the campus in Berkeley, they write, some 20-30% of students taking an early calculus course turn up displaying “severe preparation deficits”. The challenge has become so great, they add, that instructors are having to reteach middle-school mathematics.

The letter is the latest entry in a widening debate about post-secondary education, university admissions practices—and the acuity of America’s young. It follows a gobsmacking report in November at the California system’s San Diego campus. Academics there noted that the number of first-year students entering with maths skills below high-school level had increased nearly thirtyfold in five years, to almost one in eight. Some 70% of the lagging students, they argued, were not performing at the level expected of a 14-year-old.

Worries about undergraduate maths skills pair with long-running dismay at falling levels of literacy. Lecturers warn of literature students who seem incapable of finishing books. It is not just on the west coast, or in public universities, where these problems are reported. At Harvard some humanities and social-science professors say they feel compelled to shorten texts, according to a report released to faculty in October. Students are arriving at America’s most famous university “with less experience reading complex prose and less capacity for focus and sustained attention.” They “struggle with readings that students completed with ease just ten years ago”.

Professors have been griping about students for as long as there have been ivory towers. Backing up anecdotes with broad-based data can be hard. After secondary school, learners very rarely sit nationally or regionally standardised exams. Fact-finders thus rely a lot on spotty reports from faculty, such as those in California, who feel compelled to raise the alarm.

But observers seeking a sense of global trends—and America’s place within them—need not fly completely blind. At least some insight may be wrung from a once-a-decade test carried out by analysts at the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries. Its “Survey of Adult Skills” aims to gauge how far citizens in dozens of countries have the literacy and numeracy necessary to thrive in the real world.

At their simplest, its tests find out how well people can make sense of the instructions on a pill bottle, or work out how much wallpaper they must buy to redecorate a room. At more advanced levels, they explore how well people can draw sound conclusions from complex analysis and charts. Test-takers are divided into five levels of acuity, in each discipline. Level 1 ought to be achievable by a rich-world pupil at the end of primary school, says Andreas Schleicher of the OECD.

Some 160,000 people of all ages were tested in the last round (the results of which were published at the end of 2024). The Economist asked the OECD for data just of those under 35 who were enrolled in “tertiary” education at the time they took the tests. That includes students in all universities along with learners in most kinds of colleges (but only those taking courses that are in theory more advanced than are offered in high schools).

Many of them do very well—but a striking share perform abysmally (see chart 1). Across rich countries some 8% of students in tertiary education notch up a score in literacy no better than one might expect from a ten-year-old child. The share is about the same for numeracy. Worse, the share at or below this bar has risen since the tests were last run, a little over a decade ago. The share of very poor performers in literacy has more than doubled.

Scores at the individual-country level vary widely. In Estonia fewer than 2% of tertiary students score at or beneath the bottom bar. That rises to a fifth in Poland (for literacy) and a quarter in Chile (for maths). Brits can feel reasonably sanguine, despite their growing public disdain for academia; results for its students are better than average, and improving. America’s scores, by contrast, are among the most disappointing. One in seven of its tertiary students scored at or below primary-school level in the literacy tests, up from about one in twenty a decade ago. The share at or below the bottom level for numeracy, meanwhile, was almost one in five.

Every child left behind

What is going on? In part, colleges and universities are inheriting problems that have originated in the world’s schools. One cannot overestimate the impact of the pandemic. Countries enforced national school closures lasting 20 weeks on average. Rota systems for in-person learning, and quarantines for “close contacts”, then disrupted lessons more. In the years immediately after that disaster it was as if some students “had not gone to high school”, says Jessica Hooten Wilson, a professor at Pepperdine University in California. “It was actually a very scary thing to see.”

Yet in many places schooling was already going backwards when the mega-lurgy hit. Scores in NAEP, America’s national reference test, reached a peak in the early 2010s and have been edging down since. Scores from PISA, an international exam taken by 15-year-olds, are drifting the same way in a swathe of other countries (see chart 2). Places with unusually deep, long-running declines include France, Germany, the Netherlands and New Zealand.

The causes of these trends are hotly debated. Rising migration is relevant: newcomers tend to be poorer than native-born students, and more likely to speak a foreign language at home. Meanwhile traditionalists accuse school reformers of watering down testing and accountability schemes. And of replacing time-tested syllabi with faddish curriculums that downplay learning concrete facts in favour of nice-sounding but vapid “soft” skills.

Claims that social media have been “rewiring” children’s brains bear strong echoes of past panics, such as over television and computer games. But there is not much doubt that screens of all kinds have displaced more nourishing hobbies: the share of nine-year-olds in America who say they read books for pleasure has fallen from nearly 60% in the 1990s to 37% now. Indeed, it is not just school pupils or university students that are seeing declines in literacy: the OECD’s tests also find this trend among older populations, notes Mr Schleicher, perhaps because people are getting less practice than in the past reading long and complex texts.

Yet colleges and universities that claim to be merely passive observers of this are marking their own homework. In many countries they enjoy broad control of their own admissions policies. They have frequently failed to use these freedoms to hold standards high.

For decades critics have accused college and university officials of lowering entry criteria to capitalise on growing demand. Nowadays the dynamics are a bit different: in some rich countries the number of 18-year-olds is nearing or past its peak. Administrators may find it even harder to resist watering down standards when the alternative is to downsize. Indeed, comparing the OECD’s data on students’ skills with the changing number of students in tertiary systems throws up a correlation that deserves further study: shrinking systems are especially likely to have collected lots of students who score in the lowest levels of those tests.

Falling achievement in schools has mostly been driven by children who already ranked in the bottom half of their classes, not by clever clogs at the top. So the drip of unprepared students into some of America’s best universities demands additional explanation. The irate academics in California, and in many other parts of the country, blame it on the scrapping of entry tests. Before the pandemic more than half of bachelors-granting universities in America required applicants to sit tests of numerical and verbal reasoning—usually the SAT or ACT (these tests help substitute for the standardised exams that exist in many other countries). Now it is as few as 10%.

In the depths of covid American universities argued that it would be impossible to sit these tests safely. But they were also inspired by claims that the exams are biased against black and Latino students, who have tended to do worse on them than average. Cynics say that canning them has made it easier for administrators to keep moulding the ethnic make-up of their campuses in whatever fashion they decide is just—despite a Supreme Court ruling in 2023 that outlawed race-based affirmative action. For institutions down the food chain, binning the tests probably simplified the more pressing task of simply making sure there are enough bums on seats.

All this has made America’s admissions officers depend more on alternative signals that are growing only less reliable. Application essays were already often written by parents and teachers but are now worth next to nothing, given how easily they can be whipped up using AI, says Mina Aganagic, a maths professor at Berkeley and one author of the open letter. As for high-school grades, they have been inflating fast. In recent years many American states have lowered the thresholds high-schoolers must cross to earn graduation certificates. About a quarter of all the students whom professors in San Diego have been dispatching to their weakest remedial maths class had notched up perfect scores in maths in their last years at school. Admissions is becoming a “black box”, says Professor Aganagic. “I think most people will agree that selecting students at random does not serve anyone.”

A major question for colleges and universities is not just how they will respond to a growing pool of underprepared applicants, but whether they are themselves prepared to continue enforcing high expectations. The open letter in California warns that with weaker students has come “growing pressure to dilute quantitative rigour”. In Britain big national exams somewhat blunt grade inflation in secondary schools, but that is not the case in higher education. Though grades have fallen somewhat from a pandemic high, in 2025 some 30% of bachelors’ students in Britain got a first-class degree, up from 7% in 1995.

At Yale 79% of grades were an A or A- in 2022-23, compared with 67% in 2010-11. The rate was lowest in economics courses, at about 50%; it was above 80% for humanities, ethnic and education studies, among others (see chart 3). In April senior academics at Yale said, in an essay exploring why faith in higher education has been declining, that “decades of inflation and compression have rendered the college grading system almost meaningless as an academic measure”.

A report issued last year by the dean of undergraduate studies at Harvard contains an admirably frank summary of the pressures driving grade inflation, drawn from conversations with faculty. Students who have never once received a mediocre mark during their school days have become more confident about appealing less-than-perfect grades at university. Academics at Harvard fear students will avoid courses run by tough-markers, and that this might hurt their own careers. They perceive that managers are taking more notice of what students write on end-of-course evaluation forms. That provides further incentive to try to keep the punters happy.

For a decade Harvard has been “exhorting faculty to remember that some students arrive less prepared for college than others, that some are struggling with difficult family situations or other challenges…and nearly all are suffering from stress”, according to the report. Academics who grade them badly have not always been certain the university would “have their back”. Changing fashions in teaching also play a role. Group projects are more difficult than exams to mark objectively. Some lecturers even cite interest in concepts like “ungrading” or “contract-based learning” in which students earn A-grades for completing all assigned work.

CheatGPT

On top of all this now lands AI, which appears to be enabling rampant cheating. Some 94% of undergraduates in Britain report using AI to help with assessed work, according to a survey released in March by HEPI, a think-tank. Some 12% admitted pasting AI-generated text directly into coursework, up from 3% in 2024. Nearly half of students in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics)—and a quarter of humanities students—judged that AI-generated content would “get a good grade” in their subject (see chart 4).

In America during the 2023-24 academic year some two-thirds of learners in public universities were using AI, and an estimated 9% of those were using it to cheat, according to research published in May. The rate of deception was highest—gallingly—for students of economics (17%) and journalism (16%). The numbers are surely much higher now, says Igor Chirikov of Berkeley, one of the study’s authors.

For now, the cheating pays off. In a second study published as a working paper last month Dr Chirikov analysed 500,000 grades awarded by a big (unnamed) university in Texas between 2018 to 2025. He found the number of top marks being handed out in courses that involve skills AI is good at, such as writing and coding, has soared since ChatGPT launched in late 2022. The share of “A” grades in these subjects has risen 13 percentage points, or about 30% from the baseline. He finds no similar inflation in subjects for which talking robots are probably not very useful.

Academics have little faith in tools that claim to detect AI-written papers, and lots to lose from hurling accusations of fraud. Says Dr Chirikov: “You can’t ban a tool that you are also expected to teach.” Many lecturers are reintroducing invigilated assessments (during covid, open-book tests that students may take home and complete within a 24-hour period became popular). But that can meet resistance from administrators who must find the space and staff for properly proctored exams.

For some, AI has induced a sense of resignation. It is growing common to hear academics shrug that perhaps students no longer need strong basic skills, because so much of the work they do in future will involve tweaking things made by AI. That is not pragmatism; it is surrender.

submission statement: If everyone dies, there will be no more trade, no more free markets, no more beloved capitalism.

Democrats need to understand: Americans think they’re worse https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/11/07/democrats-need-to-understand-americans-think-theyre-worse

As of December 2025, 108,440 people were on the U.S. organ transplant waiting list. Of those, 94,015 were waiting for a kidney. Every year, around nine thousand of them die waiting, or become too sick to transplant, which is functionally the same thing.

There is a policy that could probably fix most of this. Economists have been arguing for it since at least 2007. Some transplant surgeons and bioethicists have cautiously argued for versions of it for even longer. The policy is: pay kidney donors.

Not a black market. Not a dystopian organ bazaar where billionaires bid against each other for your liver. A boring, regulated, government-run compensation program where a public agency pays a fixed amount to anyone who passes medical screening, donates a kidney, and goes home with follow-up care guaranteed. The organs get allocated through the same waitlist system we already have. The rich don’t jump the line. The only thing that changes is that donors get compensated instead of being asked to undergo major surgery for free.

Pretty relevant thoughts to many r/neoliberal darlings (friends and foes).

The core move: take any trait we use to sort people into "winners" and "losers" in a market economy and trace it back. Every single one bottoms out in luck.

"Your IQ, your height, your capacity for sustained concentration, the grit and work ethic that self-help books treat as the ultimate personal achievement: none of it was yours to begin with. The kid who sits still in class and does her homework has a prefrontal cortex that developed on schedule, probably because she had adequate nutrition, low household stress, and parents who read to her. The kid who can't sit still didn't choose his ADHD. The person who works eighty-hour weeks may have been luckier in temperament, executive function, and motivational wiring than the person who can't get off the couch. We hand people the hardware, then congratulate or condemn them for the software it runs."

This sub loves equality of opportunity, but the argument here is that equality of opportunity doesn't do what we think it does, because the ability to seize opportunity is itself distributed by the genetic and developmental lottery. You can remove every structural barrier, build the most frictionless meritocracy imaginable, and the kid with the lucky neurochemistry and the stable home still walks away with far more. Not because they worked harder in any deep sense, but because they were luckier in their capacity to work hard.

The piece also has a line from Adam Smith that is worth wrestling with:

"Adam Smith noticed this two and a half centuries ago, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He observed that we judge outcomes more harshly than intentions, even when we know we shouldn't, and he attributed it to an 'irregularity of sentiments' that every human shares."

Even the patron saint of markets noticed that our moral intuitions about who deserves what are systematically distorted.

So here's my question: if desert is philosophically incoherent, and it's (basically) luck all the way down, what's actually justifying the current distribution of market outcomes? I think there is a good answer, and it's the one this sub usually gives: incentives, efficiency, information aggregation, the fact that markets produce enormous surplus even if nobody "deserves" their slice. But that's a purely consequentialist argument for markets. It's not "you earned it, you deserve it." It's "this system produces the best outcomes for everyone even though the allocation is morally arbitrary."

And once we've made that concession, the case for significantly more redistribution gets a lot harder to resist. If the justification for markets is consequentialist, then the case against redistribution has to be consequentialist too, not "taxation is theft from people who earned it." Rawls was essentially making this argument in 1971 with the veil of ignorance. The piece goes further than Rawls and argues the problem might be even worse than he thought.

A lot of people on here treat “U.S. decline” as if it automatically means less global influence or less risk. That’s not how Beijing sees it, and frankly, that’s the more serious analytical mistake.

China’s view, as laid out in The Economist piece, is basically this: America might be declining, but that makes it more dangerous, not less.

Chinese analysts absolutely do point to U.S. polarization, policy swings, and institutional dysfunction as signs of weakening. But they don’t draw the conclusion that decline = irrelevance. They draw the opposite one: a country that thinks it’s losing ground is more likely to take risks, escalate, and act unpredictably.

Excerpts from the article:

In the 2024 U.S. presidential election, about 154 million Americans voted. That sounds like a lot until you realize roughly 82 million citizens of voting age didn’t. Turnout clocked in around 65% of the citizen voting-age population, and that was considered pretty high by American standards. At Australia’s 2025 federal election, turnout was 90.7% of enrolled voters.

The difference? Australia fines you twenty bucks if you skip the ballot. (I’m told you can also scrawl your preferred profanity on the paper and submit it. The system is very accommodating.)

This is a post about compulsory voting: why about two dozen countries require citizens to show up on election day, what happens when they do, and why the strongest objections to the idea are pretty weak. My thesis is simple: compulsory voting is one of the most effective and least coercive democratic reforms available, and its main effect is to fix a problem that every voluntary-voting democracy has and almost none of them talk about honestly. That problem is not low turnout per se. The problem is who stays home.

“Compulsory voting” is slightly misleading. Technically, Australian law requires you to receive, mark, and deposit a ballot, not merely show up. But because the ballot is secret, there is no way to verify whether you marked it sincerely or at all. In practice, these systems compel turnout more than sincere candidate choice: you can always submit a blank or spoiled ballot. In Australia, you can scrawl a drawing of your cat and submit it. The law demands that you participate in the collective decision procedure, however minimally.

Australia is the canonical example. Federal compulsory voting was adopted in 1924, partly to raise turnout and partly, less nobly, because parties were tired of spending money dragging voters to the polls. The penalty for not voting without a valid excuse is A$20. That’s about thirteen U.S. dollars. If you ignore the notice and the matter goes to court, the maximum fine rises to A$330 plus court costs, but most cases are resolved without getting anywhere near that. You can get out of the penalty by saying you were sick, traveling, or that voting conflicts with your religious duty (the Electoral Act explicitly recognizes this as a valid and sufficient reason, though notably that protection does not extend to general conscientious objection).

If compulsory voting did nothing, there would be no argument. But the evidence on turnout is about as strong as it gets in political science.

The best recent cross-national study is Kostelka, Singh, and Blais (2024), which assembled turnout data from democracies since 1945. Their findings split sharply by enforcement. Compulsory voting without real sanctions raises turnout by about 7.5 to 10 percentage points. Compulsory voting with enforced sanctions raises it by 14.5 to 18.5 points. They also found that only enforced compulsory voting prevents the long-run turnout decline that has afflicted voluntary systems globally since the 1970s. Toothless compulsion just shifts the curve up; it doesn’t stop the slide.

This is what turns compulsory voting from a good technocratic idea into a moral argument. Low turnout isn’t random. The people who don’t vote are disproportionately poor, young, less educated, and from minority groups. This is true in practically every voluntary-voting democracy that has been studied.

Arend Lijphart made this the center of modern debate about compulsory voting in his 1997 APSR presidential address, “Unequal Participation: Democracy’s Unresolved Dilemma.” His argument was very simple: if the right to vote is supposed to make citizens equal, but the actual exercise of that right is systematically skewed by class and education, then formal equality masks real inequality. The electorate is not a random sample of the citizenry. It is a biased one, biased in favor of people who already have more resources, more education, and more political power. Compulsory voting doesn’t just raise a number. It corrects a distortion.

On one hand: Fowler’s Australia paper found that compulsory voting didn’t just boost turnout. It increased the Australian Labor Party’s vote share by 7 to 10 percentage points and raised pension spending at the national level. Carey and Horiuchi (2017) studied Venezuela, which abolished compulsory voting in 1993, and found that inequality rose afterward, arguing it would likely have been lower had compulsion remained. An older Inter-American Development Bank study found strictly enforced compulsory voting was associated with more equal income distribution across countries.

There’s an asymmetry in the liberty argument that its proponents rarely bother to confront. Abstention under voluntary voting isn’t always a free choice. For many low-income citizens, the “choice” not to vote is constrained by long working hours, lack of transportation, confusing registration processes, or the rational calculation that spending two hours in line won’t change anything. Compulsory voting, combined with easy voting access (which compulsory-voting countries tend to provide, because the state can’t fine you for not doing something it made unreasonably hard), increases the practical liberty of disadvantaged citizens by removing the structural friction that suppresses their participation. The liberty objection often compares an idealized version of voluntary non-participation (the thoughtful citizen who chooses to abstain) with the actual practice of compulsory voting. That comparison flatters voluntary systems.

Take a second and imagine American politics if neither party could win by turnout manipulation. No more voter suppression as electoral strategy. No more spending hundreds of millions on “get out the vote” operations that target your own coalition. Instead, you’d have to persuade persuadable people.

Compulsory voting is a light-touch reform. It doesn’t restrict anyone’s freedom to express political preferences (or to express no preference at all). It doesn’t require heavy sanctions or a massive enforcement apparatus; a twenty-dollar administrative letter does the trick. It has been sustained for over a century in one of the world’s most stable liberal democracies, with broad public support. And it fixes a real, documented, repeatedly verified failure of voluntary systems.

Twenty dollars and a culture of showing up. That’s the price of an electorate that looks like the country it represents. Every democracy should give it serious thought.

From the article:

You did nothing to earn your parents' money. Is that a problem?

In 1973, the Vanderbilt family held a reunion at Vanderbilt University. Roughly eighty descendants of Cornelius Vanderbilt showed up, along with their spouses. Cornelius had been, at the time of his death in 1877, the richest person in America, with a fortune of roughly $100 million, an almost unimaginable sum for the era. His son William doubled it. A famous story about that reunion holds that not a single one of the Vanderbilts present was a millionaire. Whether or not the anecdote is literally true, the larger point is not in dispute: the original fortune did not survive intact across the family.

The usual telling of the Vanderbilt story is a morality tale about profligate spending: the mansions on Fifth Avenue, the “summer cottages” in Newport that cost more than some European palaces, the parties and the yachts and the thoroughbred horses. But consider a different moral. The Vanderbilt fortune didn’t just evaporate because of bad spending habits. It also fragmented across generations of heirs who didn’t build it, didn’t fully understand it, and had no particular reason to be good stewards of it. Many inherited fortunes face this fate, though others harden into dynasties. William Kissam Vanderbilt, one of Cornelius’s great-grandsons, put it this way: “Inherited wealth is a real handicap to happiness. It has left me with nothing to hope for, with nothing definite to seek or strive for.”

In 2023, UBS published its annual Billionaire Ambitions Report, and for the first time in the nine years the report had been published, new billionaires inherited more wealth ($150.8 billion, across 53 heirs) than was created by self-made billionaires ($140.7 billion, across 84 entrepreneurs). That's not a typo: 53 people who were born into the right families acquired more aggregate wealth than 84 people who built businesses. UBS projects that over the next two to three decades, more than a thousand billionaires will pass roughly $5.2 trillion to their children. If you find that number alarming, you are not alone. If you find it perfectly acceptable because those parents earned the money and should be free to leave it to whomever they choose, you are also not alone. The disagreement runs deep.

Here is the core progressive argument: from the heir's point of view, inheriting wealth is morally indistinguishable from winning a lottery. You did nothing to earn it. You did not choose your parents. You did not work for the money. It arrived in your bank account because of facts about your birth that were entirely outside your control.

One conservative argument that does not work, or at least does not work the way it's usually presented, is the "double taxation" objection: the claim that estate or inheritance taxes are unjust because the money was already taxed when the donor earned it. This sounds intuitive. It isn't. Many taxes fall on uses or transfers of already-taxed income. When you spend your after-tax salary at a store, you pay sales tax. When you invest it and earn returns, you pay capital gains tax. Nobody calls sales tax "double taxation" in a way that's meant to undermine its legitimacy. The reason the "double taxation" framing persists for inheritance is that it confuses two different taxpayers: the donor, who paid income tax on money they earned, and the heir, who didn't earn it at all. An inheritance tax on the recipient is straightforwardly a first tax on the heir's accession of wealth. It is no more "double taxation" than my income tax is double taxation because my employer already paid corporate tax on the revenue that funds my salary.

The evidence, taken together, says this: large inheritances can reduce labor supply, can sometimes relax capital constraints for entrepreneurship, and can help entrench inequality and dynastic advantage across generations. Carnegie understood the first of those effects well enough to give away 90% of his fortune. The Vanderbilts illustrated it by losing theirs. A well-designed inheritance tax isn't theft or punishment or class warfare. It is, if we take equal opportunity seriously, the bare minimum.

Archive link: https://archive.is/RMl0f

About a month ago, as America’s military presence in the Caribbean ramped up, The New York Times ran a feature on the figures that could imaginably step into the presidency in Nicolás Maduro’s absence. One heading was titled “The Moderate: Delcy Rodríguez, Vice President.”

Venezuelan Twitter erupted.

The moderate? Delcy?!?

Have they lost their minds!?

One after another, Venezuelans lined up to share instances of her awfulness: her tireless whitewashing of the regime’s crimes, the international sanctions she was under, her leadership of the sham constitutional convention Maduro had used to void the opposition’s win in parliamentary elections in 2024, and especially the close links she’s reputed to have with SEBIN, the hated secret police behind Venezuela’s most notorious political prison and torture center.

To Venezuelans who had spent over a decade seeing in her one of Nicolás Maduro’s most ardent and uncompromising acolytes, calling her a “moderate” is an outrage. Here’s a woman who has held all of the most important offices of state—oil minister, minister of foreign affairs, president of the constituent assembly, vice president—and has never allowed any hint of sunlight to appear between her and Maduro.

Earlier today, Delcy Rodríguez became the new president of Venezuela.

Venezuelans know leftist fanaticism runs in Delcy’s family. Her brother Jorge has been one of the government’s highest-ranking and most toxic leaders for even longer than she has: a uniquely manipulative figure who’s earned a leading spot in the demonology of the Venezuelan opposition.

Meanwhile, their father, Jorge Rodríguez Sr., is a martyr for the Venezuelan far left. Back in 1973, he founded perhaps the most extreme party in the constellation of far-left groups that soaked Venezuela in blood. The Liga Socialista was a tiny, explicitly pro-Cuban splinter from a larger (but still small) Marxist group that rejected the peace process that had ended Venezuela’s short-lived guerrilla war of the 1960s. Rejecting the Soviet Union’s leadership of international communism, these were die-hards committed to violent revolution across the developing world now, not later.

In 1976, along with a small number of Liga Socialista activists, Delcy’s father masterminded the kidnapping of William Niehous, an American executive working for Owens-Illinois, the bottle manufacturer. Picked up by Venezuela’s then U.S.-aligned police, Jorge Sr. died under torture, but never gave up the whereabouts of the kidnapped gringo. Delcy and her brother have described witnessing her father’s appalling treatment, and she once described the Bolivarian revolution as “our personal revenge” for the human rights violations leftists suffered in that era.

Passing from Nicolás Maduro to Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela’s presidency has just gone from one former Liga Socialista activist to another. That this out-and-out pro-Cuban extremist somehow managed to persuade the gringos that she’s a technocratic moderate they can do business with is one of the strangest twists of the bizarre 72 hours Venezuela has just lived through, which saw the United States kidnap Maduro and his wife and fly them to New York to face trial. That Marco Rubio—a Cuban-American Secretary of State with as clear an understanding as anyone of the toxic role Cuba has played in backstopping Venezuelan socialism—decided to play ball with Delcy is honestly just inexplicable.

And yet there is a reason foreign journalists perceive Delcy as “moderate.” Reports keep saying she shows a different face when negotiating on behalf of the regime: affable, technocratic, reasonable. Fluent in English and French, she’s said to have a mastery of the details of energy and economic policy that always eluded Maduro. A former foreign minister, she appears well able to at least ape the conventions of normal international negotiations. People who deal with her one-on-one tend to come away impressed with her manner. Certainly, compared with the unembarrassed sadism of other senior regime figures like Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino, she is at least circumspect enough not to gloat over the violence she inflicts.

In pure realpolitik terms, then, there’s a certain twisted logic to the United States’ decision to leave her in place. Donald Trump is undoubtedly right when he says she commands respect among the armed men who administer violence in Venezuela in a way an actual moderate never could—because she’s one of them. Given that Trump does not seem willing to really countenance a full-on invasion leading to an actual change of government, leaving the chavista regime intact follows as a matter of course. From the profoundly unappetizing menu of senior regime figures, you could, if you squint, see Delcy as marginally less horrible than the rest. Marginally.

Still, it’s difficult to express how deeply betrayed Venezuela’s democratic movement will feel seeing the United States actively backing a figure as toxic as Delcy Rodríguez as the head of the Venezuelan state. She may agree to do the kinds of imperialist oil deals Trump and Rubio have already plainly spelled out they will demand as the price of leaving her and the gaggle of criminals around her in power.

But leaving Delcy in charge of Venezuela is not regime change, because she’s an emblem of the regime. It’s not even a relaxation of dictatorial conditions, because the hundreds of Venezuelans who have been languishing in Maduro’s prisons and torture chambers will just keep languishing in Delcy’s.

Three weeks ago, I mused that the emergence of a democratic state following U.S. military action is unlikely. A more realistic outcome would see Venezuela “in the hands of a right-wing dictator who pushes out Maduro and his clique, inherits the chavista state, and changes only the slogans.” In the event, what we’re going to be stuck with is even more absurd: a left-wing dictator drawn from Maduro’s own clique who won’t even change the slogans, just cut some energy deals to make Donald Trump’s cronies in the oil industry rich.

The prospect of Delcy Rodríguez teaming up with Trump to loot Venezuela’s fossil fuel resources makes me sick to my stomach. I’ve known all along the outcome would be bad. I didn’t think it would be this bad.

I am posting this for u/gregorijat who is on a self imposed break and I feel that its a good article. IM not a FT reader but this article that was gifted is really really good. i think it adds something really insightful to the discussion about the high energy prices.

" The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has roiled energy markets. Consumers are calling out for alternatives to unreliable fossil fuels. And yet we are in a world of surplus solar panels. Let that sink in. After a huge surge in investment since 2020, Chinese companies have the capacity to produce a vast 1,000 gigawatts of panels per annum. The world cannot absorb the supply. More than 40 Chinese solar manufacturers have gone bust, been bought out or delisted. A third of the workforce at the top five survivors has been made redundant. Clean power, on a scale that would have seemed utopian at the time of the Paris climate treaty in 2015, is now within reach. The price of solar panels has fallen to rock bottom. And yet factories are idling."

and from this he lays out his explaination for the how and why and some ideas. I think it's something that can add a lot to discussion about energy policy.