Niall Ferguson

“Inside the Final Push to Free the October 7 Hostages.” Adapted excerpt from BRINK in @TheFP — including the partnership with Steve Witkoff after the election. Book is out now.

 thefp.com/p/inside-final…

Ross Douthat is joining the Free Press as a new weekly columnist!

Read more here: thefp.com/p/ross-douthat…

Pro-Palestine student demonstrators march through the Glasgow University campus behind signs reading “students for Palestine” and “Glory to our Martyrs”

- @LBC

Doing a land acknowledgment in Germany is so funny

The elites of Victorian Britain got up late, drank ceaselessly, worked short hours, partied through the night, and knew nothing about science, technology or engineering. And yet, by their own lights, they were hugely effective.

worksinprogress.co/issue/the-seve…

The Victorians are often held up as a model against the supposedly soft, feckless, humanities-educated elites of today. But I argue that the genius of their system may have been its drastic weighting towards soft skills, team-building and intra-elite networking:

- A Victorian’s gentleman’s office hours typically began about 11am and finished about 5pm, including a multi-course lunch with wine.

- Upper-class Victorians drank ceaselessly. Conduct guides recommended four or five glasses of wine at dinner *for married women*. Port was often served in pints.

- Party culture was intense and nocturnal. Balls started at about 10pm, peaked after 1am, and continued till dawn. During the social season, bankers, judges and politicians might go to several balls per week.

- Elite Victorians learnt almost no STEM at school or university. At least half of class time was given over to ancient languages, often as much as 80 percent. One leading educationalist remarked that it was not worth teaching science to gentlemen because it does not involve ‘continued reasoning’.

- Sports and character formation were valued far above transmitting facts. A top headmaster described his school’s priorities as ‘First – character, second – physique, third – intelligence, fourth – manners, fifth – information’.

This cannot have made elite Victorians more productive individually, but maybe the dense social and emotional network it created helped them to work as a sort of extended team.

Perhaps we should think again about what makes groups of people effective.

How much do disruptions to U.S.-bound shipping routes matter for the U.S. economy? A lot, and far more than conventional trade models suggest.

To make this point, I just circulated a new paper, “Shipping to America,” with my dear coauthors Xiwen Bai, @YiliangLi_, @RicardoVMarto, and Francesco Zanetti:

sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Shipp…

Using satellite vessel-tracking data, we build route-level measures of potential and effective capacity for all U.S.-bound container ships from 2016 to 2025. In recent supply disruptions, utilization losses ran 20 to 40 percentage points, and they began months before port congestion became visible. That is a lot.

We then embed these measures in a general equilibrium model in which shipping firms reallocate a common fleet across routes, price above marginal cost, and ignore the congestion they create, while importers shift their sourcing in response to route profitability.

The key result is that the reallocation triggered by a disruption has first-order welfare effects, so a route’s Domar weight is not a sufficient statistic for its welfare cost. Here we depart from conventional models, where some form of Hulten’s theorem holds and the welfare costs of supply disruptions are often small.

But what I find most interesting is that the model lets us measure the economic value of military operations that keep sea lanes open. The 2023–2024 Red Sea attacks cost 0.35% of US output. Combining data on the cost of the U.S. Navy’s protection of Red Sea shipping with the model, we estimate that the Navy’s intervention delivered benefits of 0.04–0.08% of US output at a fiscal cost of 0.02%. While the Navy did not fully reopen the Red Sea, it cut the losses by a tenth to a quarter. The operation paid for itself two to four times over.

The figure shows how we can track these operations: it plots the movements of the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Gravely (DDG 107) from AIS data. Because U.S. Navy ships usually switch off AIS during active operations, the data are sparse and cluster around the ship’s departures for operations and its returns to port.

The punchline is clear: freedom of navigation is of the utmost strategic importance for the U.S. It has been so for every thalassocracy: Athens, Carthage, Venice, the Dutch Republic, Britain, and now the U.S. Let us not forget it.

I sometimes think the fact that we actually have to say these things might mean it's hopeless.

Today, on Constitution Day, UATX is announcing a new initiative to build the future of legal education, with support from the Federalist Society.

uaustin.org/law