Harvard grad and Army general regrets restrictions on sending service members to top universities

 General Monty Montague (Harvard '95) writes eloquently about the mutual benefits of allowing service members to study at top universities, in the face of new government bans.  He thinks both that the current administration's war on universities is misguided, and that universities haven't properly appreciated the benefits that soldier/scholars bring.

I’m an Army general. My education shouldn’t be unexpected.
Elite universities and the military should be friends, not foes. By Monty Montague

"Americans — both soldiers and civilians — simply do not connect elite education with military service. It is equally concerning that the two domains are connecting less and less with each other.

"Academia and national security represent two fundamental pillars of American life. The first represents hope; the second, safety. You cannot have hope without safety, and safety without hope is not worth much. 

...

"The [mutual] benefits are easy to see, for both sides. For instance, some late-career officers forgo service war colleges to attend prestigious national security and international relations graduate programs, such as at Princeton University or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The officers, who may not have had their opinions challenged in a dozen years, can learn to better articulate their positions to classmates who might not understand or agree with them, while civilian students can grow to respect officers’ intellect, not just their service. Many of these officers will reach the highest ranks of the service, while their civilian counterparts may find themselves in boardrooms, courtrooms or legislative bodies. All leave campus with a diverse and talented set of contacts — a two-way street indeed.

"But the pavement is crumbling. Beginning in the fall, the services are pulling their students from these graduate programs out of fear of indoctrination and the undermining of American values — as if those bright, brave patriots need protection. The move is touted as a transition to more “rigorous and relevant” schools, but it only drives the wedge deeper. "

Two economists on the Behavioral Scientist’s Summer Book List 2026

The Behavioral Scientist’s Summer Book List 2026 By Heather Graci and Evan Nesterak includes two economists:

 

"

Bringing data to a gunfight

Economists Alvin Roth and Jennifer Doleac share the conviction that using a data-driven approach to answer moral questions is itself a matter of morality. 

In Moral Economics, Nobel-winner Roth shows how conceptualizing divisive social issues like drugs, abortion, and organ donation as markets can expose new ways to make progress in contexts where both sides refuse to compromise. And in The Science of Second Chances, Jennifer Doleac illuminates how many criminal justice policies—no matter how well-meaning—are far from just. But she also shows that where our intuition fails, science can succeed in helping us build a system that leaves everyone better off.

In Doleac’s words: “I see a lack of rigor as unethical. Policies that don’t work don’t help people. If we are serious about improving lives, we need to test our policies carefully to ensure they’re effective.”

Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work
By Alvin E. Roth

From the back cover: “Some of the most intractable controversies in our divided society are, at bottom, about what actions and transactions should be banned. . . . Disagreements are fierce because arguments on both sides are often made in uncompromising moral or religious terms. But in Moral Economics, Nobel Prize–winning economist Alvin E. Roth asserts that we can make progress on these and other difficult topics if we view them as markets—tools to help decide who gets what—and understand how those markets can be fine-tuned to be more functional. Markets don’t have to allow everything or ban everything. Prudent market design can find a balance between preserving people’s rights to pursue their own interests and protecting the most vulnerable from harm.”

The Science of Second Chances: A Revolution in Criminal Justice
By Jennifer Doleac

From the back cover: “When criminal justice expert Jennifer Doleac thinks about reform, she’s not just hopeful, she’s optimistic that second chances are possible—for the justice-involved population and the system as a whole. In The Science of Second Chances, she reveals her powerful approach to reducing crime and incarceration. Drawing on cutting-edge economic research and real-world experiments, the book presents a blueprint for reform that runs all the way through the system . . . From DNA databases that increase the likelihood of catching reoffenders to leniency programs for first-time defendants, she reveals a series of surprising interventions that actually work, along with cautionary tales about great ideas that never panned out.”

Read an excerpt from The Science of Second Chances in Behavioral Scientist: “It’s as if they’re standing at a fork in the road, considering what to do next. One direction leads toward more criminal behavior and criminal justice involvement, and the other leads toward a productive, law-abiding life. It turns out that many first-time defendants will choose the better path if we simply get out of their way.”

Economists watching A.I.: an open letter, and an edited version

My sense is that many economists are optimistic about the long term development of A.I., while being cautious about some of the shorter term transitions that it will initiate. (This is a different set of worries than the species-extinguishing fears that can also be heard.)

Yesterday an open letter was published, signed by many economists: 

We Must Act Now: A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy 

1. AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years.

2. This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame. It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards.

3. Economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.

 #############

Here's the coverage from Stanford:

Stanford Digital Economy Lab / July 13, 2026  “We Must Act Now”: Sixteen Nobel Laureates Join Leading Economists and AI Researchers in Call to Prepare for AI’s Economic Transformation

"STANFORD, Calif. – July 13, 2026 – Today, a group of leading economists and AI researchers, including sixteen Nobel Laureates, released “We Must Act Now: A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy,” calling for urgent preparation for the economic impacts of radically more powerful AI.

The statement, organized by economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Ajay Agrawal, Anton Korinek, and Tom Cunningham, warns that increasingly capable AI systems could reshape the economy at unprecedented speed. While AI offers enormous opportunities to improve productivity and living standards, it also raises important questions for workers, firms, and public institutions.

The statement calls on economists, policymakers, and technology leaders to deepen research on AI’s economic impacts and to begin building the policies and institutions needed to ensure AI complements human capabilities and benefits society.

“AI capabilities are advancing far faster than our understanding of the economic implications. In that gap lie the greatest opportunities of our era. We must act now to guide AI to complement humans rather than simply imitate them — and to generate prosperity for the many, not just the few,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.

“The scale, scope, and speed of the advances in AI, combined with a high level of uncertainty about the magnitude and timing of the impacts across many parts of the economy, call for an ‘all hands on deck’ approach to steering AI in beneficial directions,” said Michael Spence, Nobel Laureate and Professor Emeritus at New York University.

“I’m so happy to join other leading experts in calling for the urgent need to redirect AI so that its risks are minimized and it can work for the benefit of workers and society,” said Daron Acemoglu, Nobel Laureate and Institute Professor at MIT.

“Steam, electricity, and computers each gave societies decades to adapt; AI may give us only a few years. We cannot improvise our strategy and institutions in the middle of the transformation; waiting for certainty means arriving too late,” said Anton Korinek, Professor at the University of Virginia, currently on leave at Anthropic.

“Whether rapidly advancing AI broadly elevates global living standards or severely concentrates wealth is not predetermined; it depends on how we choose to re-architect our political and economic systems today. We cannot afford to wait for the full transformation to arrive and in the meantime rely on institutional scaffolding that was optimized for a pre-high-fidelity-prediction world,” said Ajay Agrawal, Professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

“We are driving in the fog, and it is extraordinarily difficult to anticipate what will happen next. It’s the right time for a coordinated effort to bring clarity to a confusing situation.” said Tom Cunningham, Researcher at METR.

The statement has been signed by more than 200 economists and AI researchers from leading universities and AI research organizations around the world. The full statement and the current list of signatories are available at http://wemustactnow.ai/." 

##############

Here's the story in the NYT:

Nearly 200 Economists and Tech Leaders Warn of A.I. Threats
A letter calls for policymakers to do more to understand and respond to potential disruptions from artificial intelligence. 
By Ben Casselman

"“A.I. may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years,” the researchers wrote in a statement released on Monday, adding that the technology “could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards.”

"The statement, titled “We Must Act Now,” was signed by nearly 200 people, including 15 Nobel laureates and the chief economists of two of the leading A.I. labs, Open AI and Anthropic. Other notable signatories include Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic; Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google; and Vinod Khosla, a prominent venture capitalist." 

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And here's an edited version of the letter, that I also like. (Inevitably, when you're asked to sign open letters, they don't read exactly as you would have written them yourself. (Even if you are one of the main authors of an open letter, it may reflect compromises that were required to reach consensus among your constituency.) 

Why I Didn't Sign the AI Open Letter: Instead, I edited it. by Andrew McAfee 

Here's his version (the big change is in item 3; his explanation is at the link):

1. AI is likely to become radically more powerful over the next 10 years.

2. Like previous world-changing technologies, AI will bring major gains in living standards. But it will also bring new risks, harms, and disruptions. And because of its extraordinarily fast improvement, AI’s benefits and shocks might come quickly.

3. So economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI, and to build the capabilities needed to respond quickly and effectively to the challenges it will bring.

 

 

Why markets fail — and how to fix them, a conversation about market design, among Scott Kominers, Tim Roughgarden and Al Roth

 I've now been the guest on many podcasts, aimed at many different kinds of listeners. This is the one for people with an academic interest in market design as a growing part of economics (as well as Scott Kominers' academic origin story, and an inside joke about a colleague at HBS:)

Why markets fail — and how to fix them, a conversation among Scott Kominers, Tim Roughgarden and Al Roth 

 

Why markets fail — and how to fix them (ft. Nobel economist Alvin Roth)
22.7K subscribers
Jul 10, 2026
Long before crypto made coordination programmable, Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth was designing markets where coordination could save lives.

In this episode of First Principles, Roth tells the story of how he helped build systems for some of the hardest matching problems in the world, from where doctors train and where students go to school to how kidney donors can reach the patients who need them.

He joins Tim Roughgarden, Head of Research at a16z crypto, and Scott Kominers — Harvard Business School professor, a16z crypto research partner, and one of Roth’s former students — for a conversation about how market design moves from theory into the real world.

They explore how economic theory becomes practical engineering, whether that's matching riders to Ubers, doctors to medical residencies, students to New York City high schools, or organ donors to people whose lives depend on it. They also cover how these same problems show up in today’s crypto networks. 

Roth explains why markets are not just natural forces, but engineered systems; why the details of timing, congestion, incentives, and trust can make or break a marketplace; and why some of the most important markets are the ones where simply exchanging money can’t do the work.

This is a conversation about economics at its most practical and profound: how to design systems that coordinate people, solve real problems, and sometimes save lives.

00:00 Intro: Why market design matters
04:18 The economist as engineer
08:09 When theory meets the real world
07:02 Fixing the medical residency match
15:32 Why markets unravel
18:22 Redesigning NYC high school admissions
28:05 The hidden problem of congestion
34:47 How kidney exchange saves lives
45:26 How the internet changed market design
48:25 Airbnb, Uber and smarter marketplaces
51:28 Repugnant transactions and moral economics
53:32 When markets need social support
54:32 The unexpected effects of criminalizing surrogacy
01:04:58 Preference signals and the job market 01:18:53 A broken market: resettling refugees and other migrants
 

Hear more from: Tim Roughgarden:   / tim_roughgarden   Scott Kominers:   / skominers   Follow a16z crypto: X:   / a16zcrypto   LinkedIn:   / posts   YouTube:    / @a16zcrypto   Substack: https://a16zcrypto.substack.com/subsc...

The enemy in the war on drugs is no longer agriculture, but chemistry

 One drug future may be happening first in Estonia, hard on the Russian border.

The NYT has the story :

Estonia Won the War on Fentanyl. What Came Next Was Even Worse.
By 2018, fentanyl overdoses in Estonia had plummeted. But powerful new drugs are appearing fast, with the authorities racing to respond.  By Azam Ahmed

“We wish we still had a fentanyl problem,” said Raigo Aas, the chief prosecutor for organized crime in Estonia.

"The first new drugs to arrive, known as nitazenes, sent mortality rates skyrocketing again, proving even more addictive and harder to treat or quit. New varieties keep popping up, too, some more than 40 times stronger than fentanyl.

...

"Exceedingly powerful substances are being churned out with such speed that the agencies created to stop them are baffled, racing to keep up. 

...

"Just as science has made plastics, medicines and foods phenomenally more varied and abundant, it has revolutionized illicit substances. Once grown in the soil, dependent on rain, sun and crop cycles, illicit drugs today are increasingly formulated in laboratories, with very few constraints.

"And with each iteration, the drugs grow more terrifying. It’s not just the overdoses and deaths they bring: Their incredible potency makes recovery much harder, deepening addiction and, by extension, the crisis it creates.

...

“We really thought the fentanyl period had taught us how to handle an opioid crisis,” said Kristin Mikko, a health coordinator in Estonia’s Ministry of Social Affairs. But the new drugs, she said, are “something different. They are so much more lethal.” 

 

and this:

"Yet cychlorphine was so new at the time that it wasn’t even illegal yet in Estonia; the authorities couldn’t charge him for it. The drug didn’t become banned in Estonia until this past spring.

“It makes our work harder,” Rait Pikaro, a former drug police head, said of the constantly shifting drug landscape. “It never stops.” 

 

 

The Economics of Repugnant Transactions, with Felix Salmon on Slate

  Felix Salmon talked to me about Moral Economics:

Money Talks: The Economics of Repugnant Transactions, with Felix Salmon on Slate.

"Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth explains what we learn when markets are shaped by big ethical questions." 

Transcript here 

Here's one snippet: 

"Speaker A: You have a pretty long chapter on same sex marriage in the book where you go through the sort of legislative history both in various states and the country. And after, like reading so much of the history of this, I would say, like, this is so Slate, I’m going to just come out and say that 95% plus of our listeners are perfectly fine with same sex marriage. It seems perfectly normal to us. It’s kind of hard for us to imagine why it was that we ever had a problem with it in the first place. But you went back, you Were looking at a bunch of contemporaneous literature. Do you have a sympathy for the anti side of the debate? Do you see where they were coming from?

Speaker B: Well, I think I see where they were coming from. I can do that without having necessarily a lot of sympathy for them. But they were tooled up quite early on. So for a long time in the United States, there were laws against sex that sometimes had the names unnatural acts in them. And in California, and I’m going to fudge the dates now, but sometime in the 1970s, long before there was any same sex marriage, they decided that laws against same sex sex violated the equal rights provisions of the California constitution. And so they changed them. They made those laws unconstitutional. And almost immediately after, like two years after, in the 1970s, the California legislature passed a law against same sex marriage. That is, the people who were looking into the far future and thinking that they really hated same sex marriage had felt protected by the laws against consensual sex between adults of, you know, say, sodomy. And all of a sudden they felt unprotected. So long before any same sex marriage became legal in the United States, there started to be laws against it.

Speaker A: That’s kind of wild. You’re just, you’re sort of like cutting it off at the past. It’s not legal anywhere. No one’s even trying to make it legal. We’re going to make it illegal just in case. And we saw that at the federal level as well.

Speaker B: Absolutely. When the state of Massachusetts finally, when its courts finally legalized same sex marriage in Massachusetts, the federal government passed a law called the defense of marriage act, which was intended to defend marriage against same sex marriage. So that’s a really unusual state of affairs. And again, when I say that’s a repugnant transaction, One of the things I emphasize in the book is I don’t mean that I disapprove of it or that you should, but that some people do. And the long political fight makes it clear that the people who objected to it objected very strongly. 

Speaker A: I mean, I was around for a lot of these court cases and legislative moves, but even at the time, I didn’t entirely understand where the opponents were coming from. So is it mostly like a biblical thing?

Speaker B: So I think it’s partly a religious thing and some of that is biblical. There were some passages in Hebrew Bible even that could be interpreted as disapproving of same sex relations. And when you look back at the long history of humanity, there were lots of taboos about sex. And I think one way to think of them is, for most of human history, sex between a man and a woman often resulted in pregnancy, and pregnancy often resulted in a live birth in a baby. And society has and had some interest in making sure that babies were taken care of. And one way to do that is to say babies should be born into families, and therefore before people have sex, they should be married to each other. And so there are a whole set of taboos that might be thought of as society’s way of trying to take care of babies. But of course, technology changes. And contraception, reliable contraception, means that it’s possible to have sex without too much risk of a baby. In vitro fertilization, IVF means that it’s possible to have babies without sex. So all of a sudden, some of those barriers that may have seem essential to the orderly running of society didn’t seem so essential. And I think that opened up room for us to think more about who could have sex with whom and who could form a family with whom. 

What crops compete with wine grapes? (Spoiler, it's houses.)

 As the wine business faces headwinds, both from climate change and from reduction in American alcohol consumption, vineyards are changing hands.  What is the new crop?  Houses...

The Mercury News has the story:

Housing plans in pricey Saratoga get lift from $100 million-plus deal
Homes are slated to be built on site of century-old vineyard By George Avalos

"The group bought the land in June 2025 for $30.6 million and embarked on a process to secure approval for a residential project on the property, which began operating as a vineyard around 1920.

Initially, the Wilson-led group proposed a 231-unit project known as Vineyard One at the corner of Chester Avenue and Allendale Avenue.

A series of negotiations with Saratoga planners and leaders eventually downsized the project to the current proposal that envisions a 64-unit housing development.

Of the 64 homes, 52 will be single-family residences for sale and 12 will be accessory dwelling units. Six of the ADUs will be rented to very low-income households, and six will be rented to moderate-income households, planning files show. 

...

"The purchase and development plans have materialized at a time when the median price of a home in Saratoga is around $3.9 million, far higher than the California median price of $930,260 and the Santa Clara County median home price of $1.6 million, according to Redfin.