The biggest news today should probably be about one of the Executive Orders from yesterday evening.
Trust me, it's big.
The President just authorized DOGE to start cutting regulationsđź§µ
This order starts off huge.
Remember those recently-created DOGE Team Leads going into every agency? They're going to work with agency heads and the OMB to review all of the regulations across a number of huge categories.
The first category is those rules and regulations which violate the law of the land: unlawful and unconstitutional regulations, things that agencies enacted but which they shouldn't have been able to.
Now you might ask: Who decides what's lawful or unlawful, constitutional or unconstitutional, a good or a bad interpretation of statutes, prohibitions, and the law writ large?
Try to keep up, because the administration outlined this a few days ago:
The next category of regulations that DOGE will be purging is sizable.
DOGE was tasked with purging the federal government of socially significant regulations that Congress didn't roll out, and regulations that are costly for private entities without benefitting the public more.
This next category of regulations is where things get huge.
DOGE will be purging all regulations that impede innovation and infrastructure, make it harder to response to natural and manmade disasters, and just generally anything unnecessarily standing in the way of business.
Now obviously this is a major task, but don't worry: the next section says which regulations to focus on first.
It says to focus on regulations that are particularly important. This is totally logical: get rid of the big barriers to growth first, and then move down the list.
The next section might be my favorite part of this whole Order.
This section calls for an end to bureaucratic overreach.
It says that if a bureaucrat is doing more than they're required to, they need to stop it. This means fewer bureaucrats abusing their 'authority'.
Additionally, if agencies are currently engaged in overreach in the enforcement of rules and regulations, they're going to stop.
This can also apply to rules and regulations that the President does not want enforced in a given way based on his valid interpretation of said rule.
And finally, the Order says what to do with new regulations:
Run them by DOGE, and if they're a barrier to business or a burden on the public, they won't go into effect.
Every new regulation will be reviewed and every existing regulation will be reviewed too, and all barriers to growth that can be extirpated from the Federal Register will be extirpated from it.
This authority is expansive and unprecedented, and the admin was building to this.
And just to be sure, there's still more to come.
DOGE is enabling the digitization of records, the installation of modern systems and tools that will enable the U.S. to be governed in a modern, rapid, and flexible way.
That's its purpose, is making a 21st-century government.
And why?
Well obviously because regulations are burdensome, the spending has been too high, and so on, but this Order contains another clue.
One of Trump's goals is ending the secret fourth branch of government that persists between Presidencies and ensures Democrats are always in power.
It is an explicit goal of this Administration to end the "Administrative State."
In their Fact Sheet on this Executive Order, the Presidency stated that it is their goal to end the extreme burdens on the American people from this unconstitutional fourth branch of government, and to stop them from prying into American lives forevermore.
It is hard to overstate how huge this Order is.
There are hundreds of thousands of federal regulations, and a very large portion of them can be stripped back with executive authority alone.
And now, DOGE has been enabled to start that process, with all that entails.
That entails a lot, but I'll cut myself off here. And keep in mind, this is just the first month of this administration.
Smart people tend to earn higher educations and higher incomes, and to work in more prestigious occupations.
This holds for people from excellent family backgrounds (Utopian Sample) and comparing siblings from the same families!
This is true, meaningful, and the causal relationship runs strongly from IQ to SES, with little independent influence of SES. Just look at how similar the overall result and the within-family results are!
But also look at fertility in this table: quite the reverse!
The reason this is hard to explain has to do with the fact that kids objectively have more similar environments to one another than to their parents.
In fact, for a cultural theory to recapitulate regression to the mean across generations, these things would need to differ!
Another fact that speaks against a cultural explanation is that the length of contact between fathers and sons doesn't matter for how correlated they are in status.
We can see this by leveraging the ages parents die at relative to said sons.
The internet gives everyone access to unlimited information, learning tools, and the new digital economy, so One Laptop Per Child should have major benefits.
The reality:
Another study just failed to find effects on academic performance.
This is one of those findings that's so much more damning than it at first appears.
The reason being, laptop access genuinely provides people with more information than was available to any kid at any previous generation in history.
If access was the issue, this resolves it.
And yet, nothing happens
This implementation of the program was more limited than other ones that we've already seen evaluations for though. The laptops were not Windows-based and didn't have internet, so no games, but non-infinite info too
So, at least in this propensity score- or age-matched data, there's no reason to chalk the benefit up to the weight loss effects.
This is a hint though, not definitive. Another hint is that benefits were observed in short trials, meaning likely before significant weight loss.
We can be doubly certain about that last hint because diabetics tend to lose less weight than non-diabetics, and all of the observed benefit has so far been observed in diabetic cohorts, not non-diabetic ones (though those directionally show benefits).
The reason why should teach us something about commitment
The government there has previously attempted crackdowns twice in the form of mano dura—hard hand—, but they failed because they didn't hit criminals hard enough
Then Bukele really did
In fact, previous attempts backfired compared to periods in which the government made truces with the gangs.
The government cracking down a little bit actually appeared to make gangs angrier!
You'd have been in your right to conclude 'tough on crime fails', but you'd be wrong.
You have to *actually* enforce the law or policy won't work. Same story with three-strike laws, or any other measure
Incidentally, when did the gang problems begin for El Salvador? When the U.S. exported gang members to it