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Maximum Progress

maximum-progress.com

Maximum Progress is a blog by Max Tabarrok on economics, science, philosophy, and progress. Click to read Maximum Progress, by Maxwell Tabarrok, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.

Society / politics / economyAI / MLEssays / personal

’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
126 from 10 Jan 2021 to 18 Sep 2026
Posting
monthly (6 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://www.maximum-progress.com/feed

2026 5

  1. The Best Philosophy Article of 2025 is Bad Economics
  2. Contra Weisenthal on Highways
  3. The End of the Endangered Species Act?
  4. The Causal Effect of Income is (Often) Zero
  5. The Timeless Way of Building

2025 27

  1. The Florida Japan-handle
  2. Does Economics Flip-flop on the Minimum Wage?
  3. One Battle After Another as Biden Era Centrism
  4. Should We Have Kept The American Empire?
  5. Is Air Travel Getting Worse?
  6. AI Copyright Cases Will Shape the Future
  7. Notes On Northern Italy
  8. Does CPS Investigate One Third of All Children in the US?
  9. The Puzzle of Historical Preservation
  10. Evolutionary Models of Fertility
  11. How to Find Ancient Assyrian Cities Using Economics
  12. Post-Malthusian AI
  13. Kyle Harper on the Roman Industrial Revolution
  14. Jane Jacobs Can Fix American Cities, Even Though She Helped Break Them
  15. New Results on Fertility and Growth
  16. Even Acts of God Can't Fix Permitting Anymore
  17. The Straussian Message of Abundance
  18. Contra MacAskill and Wiblin on The Intelligence Explosion
  19. Most Externalities are Solved with Technology, Not Coordination
  20. Grad School Applications
  21. The Single Clearest Metascience Reform
  22. Why Japan Succeeds Despite Stagnation
  23. A Review of The Case for Colonialism
  24. What About The Horses?
  25. Does Stagnant Male Income Explain Falling Fertility and Marriage?
  26. AGI Will Not Make Labor Worthless
  27. Maximum Progress 2024 Review

2024 48

  1. How Scientific Incentives Stalled the Fight Against Antibiotic Resistance, and How We Can Fix It
  2. How much of "Ideas Getting Harder To Find" is due to declining researcher skill?
  3. Anti-car Urbanists Should Be More Pro-Market
  4. Is The Great Stagnation Actually Just a 'So-So' Stagnation?
  5. Literacy Rates Haven't Fallen By 20% Since the Department of Education Was Created
  6. A Theory of Equilibrium in the Offense-Defense Balance
  7. The Internet is Good, Actually, And Other Assorted Links
  8. Do Presidents Affect the Stock Market?
  9. Prices are Bounties
  10. Unions are Trusts
  11. The Offense-Defense Balance of Gene Drives
  12. Should Sports Betting Be Banned?
  13. Economics is a Field of Software Engineering
  14. How the FAA Is Keeping Flying Cars in Science Fiction
  15. Congressional Insider Trading
  16. Investigating the Chart of the Century
  17. Two Hypocrisies of Conservation
  18. Four Randomized Control Trials In Economics
  19. End Single Family Zoning by Overturning Euclid V Ambler
  20. Romae Industriae
  21. The Best Bits From Build, Baby, Build
  22. An AI Manhattan Project is Not Inevitable
  23. Contra Acemoglu on AI
  24. The Long View on AI
  25. Four Futures For Cognitive Labor
  26. The NIH Doesn't Fund Small Crappy Trials
  27. Tax Cuts and Innovation
  28. Low Fertility is a Degrowth Paradise
  29. Is There Really a Child Penalty in the Long Run?
  30. Against Student Debt Cancellation From All Sides of the Political Compass
  31. Links For the Week
  32. Two Vernor Vinge Book Reviews
  33. AI Regulation is Unsafe
  34. A High Decoupling Failure
  35. The 2nd Demographic Transition
  36. Metascience of the Vesuvius Challenge
  37. American Acceleration vs Development
  38. Claude vs GPT
  39. Boomer NIMBYs vs Zoomer NIMBYs
  40. Don't Endorse the Idea of Market Failure
  41. We Need Major, But Not Radical, FDA Reform
  42. When Should Copyright Get Shorter?
  43. A Puzzle in Voter Behavior
  44. Practicing my Handwriting in 1439
  45. Surgery Works Well Without The FDA
  46. Against the Burden of Knowledge
  47. Land Reclamation is in the 9th Circle of Stagnation Hell
  48. Rabat, Morocco

2023 18

  1. Two Short Movie Reviews
  2. AI Girlfriends
  3. Contra Scott on Abolishing the FDA
  4. The Offense-Defense Balance Rarely Changes
  5. Why Did NEPA Peak in 2016?
  6. Fertility as Metascience
  7. R&D is a Huge Externality, So Why Do Markets Do So Much of it?
  8. Geoengineering Now!
  9. Spatial vs Temporal Externalities
  10. Time Off in Old Times
  11. How to Imbue the Basic Models of Biology With a Positive Vision of the Future
  12. Something Is Getting Harder But It's Not Finding Ideas
  13. Does the Vegas Sphere Mark the End of Monument Stagnation?
  14. Corporations Aren't A Good Analogy For Superintelligence
  15. Grading Extropian Predictions
  16. A Model of Quality Control in Strong Link Science
  17. How Did Natural Selection Get Around Alignment?
  18. The Jones Act Doesn't Work Like You Think

2022 13

  1. Does Cannabis Cause Schizophrenia?
  2. Parfit + Singer + Aliens = ?
  3. Overfitting In Academia
  4. The Most Important Century Is Not Unlikely
  5. Arrow's Impossibility Theorem Disproved?!
  6. Enlightenment Values in a Vulnerable World
  7. 2072: SpaceX Annual Shareholder Report
  8. Interland: The Country In The Intersection
  9. Number: The Language Of Science
  10. How Many People Are In The Invisible Graveyard?
  11. Mathematics In The Neolithic Revolution
  12. Progress Studies in Mathematics
  13. Can Growth Solve The Public Goods Problem?

2021 15

  1. Stubborn Attachments From Behind The Veil
  2. Patents vs Prizes
  3. Extinction And Invasive Species
  4. Google's 21st Century Corporate Research Lab
  5. The Virtual World Is Realer Than You Think
  6. Olympic Charter Cities
  7. Re: Crypto for People Who Don't Follow Crypto
  8. The AI Apocalypse Is Coming
  9. Re: Founding vs Inheriting
  10. Intergenerational Mobility Part II
  11. Intergenerational Mobility Part I
  12. The Printing Press, NFTs, and the End of Copyright
  13. The Mauritius Miracle
  14. RCTs, Epistemology, and the Minimum Wage
  15. Stoicism is not a Philosophy