Monday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Andrew Hall on improving the operation of prediction markets.

2. A new aesthetic for San Francisco.

3. Intelligent AI delegation.  And Seb Krier.  And Abigail Shrier.  All of this can change your life.

4. Krugman on tariff incidence.

5. The century of the maxxer (“How many apricots can fit in your mouth?”).  Excellent piece.

6. Andy Goldsworthy (New Yorker).  Ditto.

7. Claims.

8. Chris Arnade on Duluth.

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Jim

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4. Why do so many Trump supporters support tariffs when for decades they were on the opposite side? Most of the arguments they make today protectionist Democrats made in earlier times. Do you know you are adopting the same views on trade as Bernie Sanders? What is your defense for the change in views on trade? Fixating your defense of tariffs on China doesn't cut since Trump put tariffs on every country in the world. The deals he has gotten are decidedly weak, Japan and South Korea are not investing in America at the hundreds of billions Trump claimed. The rest of the world are making trade deals left and right without America. I just don't get the support for this policy. Fine it doesn't contribute to inflation but it does raise the price level and what did the policy achieve in the process? This is as dumb as the democrats discussing rent control and thinking it will work this time. I am not a partisan, Trump has done plenty of things I generally support (Iran, Venezuela, Gaza, most of the OBBBA, etc) but this tariff policy is just dumb. Americans are going to end up paying 80-90% or higher of the incidence rate to achieve nothing. Downvote me all you want.

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Hazel Meade

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What? Republicans have ALWAYS been in favor of tariffs. Nothing to see here. Also, we have always been at war with Oceania.

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Mitchell

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I see it as an indirect way to levy a consumption tax. The effects (intended or not) are to increase supply chain uncertainty (to harm China) and to encourage domestic import substitution (effective or not). Link it up with foreign policy goals (the soundness of which are certainly debatable). So, you selectively hammer individual countries into doing what you want - effective or not.

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Jim

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People keep saying it is just a consumption tax but it isn't. I am not going to explain this for the millionth time.

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Wayfaring Stranger

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Thank you for not explaining it for the millionth time.

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Sure

7 9

Once upon many times life was hard, margins were slim, and communities that did not both take care of themselves and police their members were murdered, enslaved, and outcompeted by ones who did.

So most societies for most of human history developed to be some form of social conservative/fiscal liberal. Wealth, by some mechanism, was regularly shared because the luck of life could be lethal (e.g. if a band of army outriders takes your animals you will likely lose family members over the winter). But freeriding would quickly destroy such setups so groups developed concurrent means to exercise controls (preferably ones without heavy enforcement costs, like genuine belief in punishment by a higher power) lest expenses spiral out of control.

Then the world changed. Something kicked off the modern agricultural revolution and surpluses grew. Margins expanded dramatically.

And then the great political question for the ages entered. What to do with the surplus. One side said "we could be free" - free to cast off these social shackles that limit our personal expression. Our communities are rich and even if people catch avoidable diseases, create dead weight loss in the economy, or the rest ... we can afford it. With some redistribution people can be who they want and not have to live with crushing worry.

Another side said, "we could be free" - free from redistribution, free to make our own choices to enjoy the fruits of our labors today, compound them for tomorrow, fund attempts to radically change the world, or free to pass on life altering wealth to our progeny. With just a bit of responsible behavior, our way of life shall be secure forever more and our progeny shall master all before them. We can cast off the inefficiencies of the old way and each take responsibility on their own.

And yet a final side arose and said "we can be free" - free to do anything and bear all consequences. We are so rich we can afford to both eschew wealth redistribution and social coercion. All may do whatever is right in their own eyes and we may live as gods upon the earth.

And thus were born, in some degree, the long running battle lines of all modern politics. A set of folks who revert to the old way - redistribution and social control because it is comforting and the victor of a thousand generations of selection. Social and fiscal conservative because the worst sin is pride and greatest virtue is industry. Social and fiscal liberalism because the worst sin is greed and greatest virtue is empathy. And social liberalism and fiscal liberalism because we have no limits.

With the last, libertarian population being the smallest in natural adherents, elections tend to won by whomever can convince the residual ancestral cross pressured blocs to vote their way. Vote liberal - protect everyone from the vagueness of the market; indulge in whatever sex, drugs, or rock and roll you like. Vote conservative - protect everyone from poor personal choices; indulge in whatever economic aspirations you wish excluding only those that risk common morality. Vote libertarian - do whatever the hell you want; we face no real constraints.

Repulicans have won when they sacrifice on this new fangled fiscal conservatism (Trump protecting Social Security, GWB giving us Medicare Part D, Reagan offering us guns and butter and debt) and rack up votes from voters who do not like some aspect of this ever more glorious new dawns of self expression. Tariffs? Protecting our own buy taxing somebody else? The campaign ads all but write themselves.

And, of course, we have the other probem is that conservatives are now prone to hating liberals more than loving their country. Trump sticks it to the educated, urban, and above all liberal elite in way that few other politicans ever could. And such efforts cover over a veritable multitude of sins.

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4. Jim, Reciprocity and Game Theory

4 12

Even Adam Smith, when warning about tariffs, saw a limited role for them. Tariffs are not just taxes but essential tools for justice and long-term cooperation in a competitive global system. Alternatively, you can learn to take the punches.

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Phil S.

14 1

#7 (British overrepresentation in EA)

While one can find much to fault the UK with, historically and at present, there has been a longstanding segment of the British culture at the forefront of trying to make the world better, even at non-trivial cost to self-interest:

* Wilberforce and the anti-slavery movement
* Parts of the colonial enterprise that really *tried* to make things better for the uncivilized world (a very non-PC view now, but they existed, and the ultimate cost/benefit of the enterprise as a whole, and specific parts of it, is subject to discussion)
* Fighting on through and after May 1940, at enormous cost to Britain itself, for ultimate results that benefited the world far beyond Britain

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mkt42

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"8. Chris Arnade on Duluth."

"I don't know exactly when I became unnaturally interested in Duluth"

I know when I became accidentally interested in Duluth. I arrived a couple of days early for a conference in Minneapolis so I could tour the old iron mine several hours north. My plan was to find a cheap motel in Hibbing, which is less than an hour from the mine, and the small towns looked pretty much the same on the map so I figured why not visit the hometown of Bob Dylan, Kevin McHale, and other notables.

But when I tried to get a reservation, the motels were either full or had seemingly unnaturally high prices. Not just Hibbing but other nondescript towns. There were no special festivals, so I deduce that on summer weekends a substantial part of the population of Minneapolis heads north for outdoor recreation and fills up the motels in those small towns.

Defeated in my initial hotel search, I looked for a motel room in Duluth, which with its larger population has a large stock of motel rooms and I had no problem getting one.

So I was an unwilling visitor to Duluth; many of the motels are on a strip on the highway leading to the city and once I arrived I figured I might as well take a look at central Duluth.

Duluth turns out to have a fantastic lakefront, with an aquarium, multiple museums, a large pier filled with restaurants and stores, a sandy beach, and its signature bridge (depicted in some of the photos in the OP's post), a rare vertical lift bridge (several of the bridges over the Willamette River and Columbia River in Portland OR are also vertical lift). The bridge crosses a narrow waterway to an odd flat island that reminds me of the islands and peninsulas around Boston, small flat places that are so close to the mainland that they're more like neighborhoods with limited road access than islands. With the inevitable scenic park at the far end where you can stand and contemplate the immensity of Lake Superior.

Duluth is also at the foot of surprisingly tall and steep hills that descend to the lake. So from the bottom you can enjoy the view of the scenic forested hills, or from the top you can enjoy the lake scenery. Duluth is also where the Superior Hiking Trail starts, a 310 mile long hiking trail that goes up the coast of Lake Superior.

l was there as a summer tourist, not a winter logistics-and-industry fan as the OP was. But from the tourist-friendly Duluth lakefront one can look down the shore at the immense shipping and transportation facilities, including those of Superior WS because the state border is just a few miles away.

The OP could've mentioned that it was from Superior WS that the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sailed with its load of iron ore on its final fatal voyage.

Of all the places that I've visited, Duluth has one of the highest ratios of "interesting place to visit" relative to "my expectations of how interesting it is". To be sure, much of this is due to the tiny size of the denominator in that ratio; I had no intention of going to Duluth at all. And after a day there you'd start running out of places to see. But it's definitely worth a visit.

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Peter

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The farthest inland seaport in the world, though there are some size limits on oceangoing ships because of the Welland Canal between lakes Erie and Ontario. There is a fleet of much larger ships that operate entirely on the Great Lakes, excluding Ontario, mainly carrying iron ore. As the hulls of these ships are never exposed to the corrosive effects of salt water their lifespans are decades longer than oceangoing ships.

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mkt42

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Excellent, thanks. I didn't know about the larger-sized freshwater cargo ships, despite doing some reading about the role of the Great Lakes in shipping and manufacturing.

Until the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald and the famous song about it, I hadn't realized how stormy and dangerous the Great Lakes were, I'd thought they were merely big. They're almost their own separate nautical world, including paddle-wheeled aircraft carriers during WW 2 (for training new pilots, obviously not for combat) and arms races to build fleets of small naval ships by the US and Britain through the War of 1812. The area was still largely wild then so they didn't have great shipyards to build ships of the line (the battleships of their day), instead they could only build smaller warships with at most 20 cannon (the USS Constitution carried more than twice as many, and had about four times the displacement as the largest naval ships on Lake Erie -- and the Constitution was a frigate, not a monster-sized ship of the line).

But naval battles such as the Battle of Lake Erie though small in scale were ferocious and bloody.

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mkt42

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P.S. My minor disappointments from my Duluth visit. I figured what place could be better to try whitefish, at a seafood restaurant on the lakefront pier. But the fish was disappointingly bland.

Since then I've tried whitefish at a couple of other restaurants, another midwestern one (I forget where, maybe Chicago) and a west coast one. Both disappointing. 0 for 3 with whitefish, that's a strikeout and I'll probably stop trying it.

I asked an acquaintance, who used to live in MN (and IL and IA) and who does a lot of fishing an he suggested that better fish to eat are ... IIRC he recommended northern pike. And another fish but I forget which one -- muskie? Walleye? Shad? I may've had shad but I don't think I've ever had those other sorts of fish.

P.P.S. The Soudan Iron Mine tour was very good too. But I don't think any mine tour matches the tour of the coal mine in Beckley WV.

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SC

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Stay away from pike. It is always a bad choice to eat a fish that could easily be older than your grandmother.

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buttonmolder

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Your acquaintance must have recommended walleye. It's the best-tasting of all freshwater fishes.

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Quigley

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I’ll put yellow perch slightly ahead, but walleye is quite good. Both in the Percidae family.

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mkt42

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Okay, I'm seeing thumbs up for walleye and thumbs down for pike.

I've lived in multiple places on the West Coast as well as New England, seafood is plentiful and popular in those places. But the stores and restaurants there rarely sell the well-known fish that come from the Midwest. So until my next visit to the Midwest it'll take some hunting to find walleye in Portland. Yelp claimed to show me a list of the top 10 places to get walleye in Portland but clicking on the first several links, it's far from clear that they actually have walleye.

I do see catfish fairly often in stores here, as well as trout, so it's not as if freshwater fish are verboten. But walleye, etc. are scarce here.

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Matt

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"so I deduce that on summer weekends a substantial part of the population of Minneapolis heads north for outdoor recreation and fills up the motels in those small towns."
A _long_ time ago I was driving around the US (and parts of Canada) w/ a friend during a summer in college. We were driving through northern rural Minnesota, and needed to stop to get gas. It was about 6:30pm, and we wanted to driver further before stopping for the night. But, the only gas station in town closed at 6pm. The map showed another small town - maybe even smaller - close enough that we could get to it, but not go much further. There was no reason to think the gas station there would be open, either. So, we stayed at the local motel. It was completely full soon after we got our room. I think some people may have been sleeping in cars in the parking lot. I wondered, but didn't find out, if the motel owner also owned the gas station.

(As a side note, this is often a problem while driving in Australia - in small towns, the only service station will often close by 5 or 6pm, and you typically can't pay at the pump anywhere in Australia. So, it's not that unusual to have to stay somewhere you'd rather not, if you've not been careful in planning the trip.)

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Ultra-far-right-libertarian

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4. Who pays for subsidies?

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Rob

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A lot of manufacturers are paying for what might amount to some small convoluted Steel manufacturing subsidy, but given that the current tariffs could be repealed or changed at any time I dont think anyone is jumping at investing in a large steel mill that would take years to build and longer to recoup any investment

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MikeP

6 2
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5. “How many apricots can fit in your mouth?”

How many people can you fit in a Volkswagen Beetle?

It depends on whether you can use a blender.

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Uair01

1 0

Thanks for the laugh!
Also:
Clavicular will never be a female sex symbol; that role goes to men like Slavoj Žižek ...

I'm afraid that's true :-)

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MikeP

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#7. Claims.

Effective Altruism, as an *organization*, is extraordinarily British. They’re very overrepresented. I think this is due to having a culture that truly, deeply believes that nothing can ever get better, and we can only give and take. They are right, but for unhealthy reasons.

Huh. I don't know Effective Altruism except what I see here. They appear to be terrible judges of their own intelligence and wisdom, which I would say is not British at all.

The aspects I see that appear to be British are their modern-day version of the white man's burden and that their culture is to raise the standard of the disinterested and uncivilized.

Thinking that it is British to believe that nothing can ever get better and that we can only give and take is a phenomenally short-sighted view of the long arc of history and civilization and demonstrates an utter ignorance of economics and the British.

Is this guy a critic? Tell me he's a critic. Because he is either a bad Effective Altruist or a bad critic.

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Dismalist

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"I think this is due to having a culture that truly, deeply believes that nothing can ever get better, and we can only give and take. They are right, but for unhealthy reasons."

Trying to explain something with culture is meaningless. Culture is convergence on certain behavior. Since we are human, that is buttressed by words. Culture is what we do. A would-be analyst focuses on what we say.

If I were living in Britain, and I know it well, but not intimately, I might say a belief in non-improvement is entirely rational.

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Sashoir

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Re #8: is it Duluth which is famed for its promotional speeches? I had half suspected it wasn't a real place.

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Scott Sumner

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"Thought I’d shaken the wonder and the phantoms of my youth

Rainy days on the Great Lakes, walkin’ the hills of old Duluth"

Bob Dylan

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Fergus

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Yeah, I was gonna say; Duluth is famous for Bob Dylan...

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Wayfaring Stranger

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Dylan is from Hibbing.

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Sashoir

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Ah. I'm not a Bob Dylan fan. While cooking dinner, I recalled what it was: a speech in the US Congress (against extending a railway). I found a transcript (pp 70 et seqq): https://storage.googleapis.com/mnhs-org-support/mn_history_articles/34/v34i02p067-078.pdf

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mento

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#3 Agents. Open Claw is an operating system for agents . Here is a good overview here :
https://x.com/SiVola/status/2021675436452028914?s=20

In other news, Peter Steinberger (the father of OpenClaw) was hired by OpenAI this weekend. Hopefully he can work his magic overthere. This is definitely the year of agents.

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Mark C

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The Google paper states that, "the current paradigm of ad-hoc, heuristic-based delegation is insufficient." Are they referring to Open Claw? IDK. The framework Google proposes in the paper is described as more dynamic and adaptive and their flowchart of Task Decomposition and Task Assignment appears to bear that out. I don't know enough about OpenClaw to compare, but it's at least encouraging that Google is considering concepts like the principle-agent problem and transaction cost economies when thinking about scaling AI agents. In any case, LLMs still have to improve at planning, long-term memory, tool selection, and continual learning if we want to see significant GDP growth.

At any rate, we’re moving into a world where AI automates a lot of work, but humans still bear all the responsibility. Lawyers might manage twice as many matters because drafting is automated, yet they will still face personal responsibility for each one. Physicians might review twice as many cases per day because AI pre-screens charts, yet they remain accountable for every misdiagnosis. Professionals may feel less like experts and more like liability absorbers for systems they only partially control.

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mento

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2026 is the " year of agents" It's a work in progress. I think the correct frameworks/standards/safeguards will take time to emerge. This is a very active area.

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Kaz Stanczak

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# 4
Who is paying and how much in tariffs is, of course, very important. But the other important effect of tariffs is that on wages, as per the Stolper-Samuelson Theorem (1941). Any evidence of that?
Grok: The Stolper-Samuelson theorem (1941) predicts that, under standard Heckscher-Ohlin assumptions (e.g., two factors like labor and capital, perfect mobility, and constant returns), a tariff on imports raises the real return to the scarce factor used intensively in the protected import-competing sector (e.g., potentially raising wages for low-skilled labor in a skill-abundant country like the US) while lowering the real return to the abundant factor.
Reference: Stolper, Wolfgang F., and Paul A. Samuelson. "Protection and Real Wages." The Review of Economic Studies 9, no. 1 (November 1941): 58–73. https://doi.org/10.2307/2967638 (available via JSTOR).

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Dismalist

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Excellent! For political purposes the short-run version is more apt. It devolves on fixed skills by industry and unskilled labor. I think Trump is quite consciously pursuing a policy to raise his voters' real wages. This will work before the next presidential election.

The great value of these two versions of the model is the gain in understanding. The cost is in extreme elasticity assumptions. To get a quantitative grip on this stuff you need a computable general equilibrium model. Unfortunately, I don't have one. I believe however, that the venerable models get the direction of effects correct.

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mkt42

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"1. Andrew Hall on improving the operation of prediction markets."

A rare post by a backer of prediction markets who's willing to acknowledge their weaknesses and pitfalls. In the end he's more optimistic about them than I am (I think the problems of moral hazard and insider trading are immense), but it's a carefully considered optimism.

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amar caballero

1 0

1. "people don’t lie with their money"

Literally all of propaganda and most of PR, and no small fraction of legal fees, throughout history and across geography, represents money spent on promoting lies.

How much is it worth to Russia to invest in rigging prediction markets to convince the world of an expert consensus that Ukraine must inevitably lose?

If they aren't doing so already, it's because hardly anyone takes seriously the prediction markets' inflated views of their own consequentialness.

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Jim

4 4

4. All I know is when the White House is worried about high prices like beef they immediately resort to increasing imports.

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Donald Pretari

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#5... "The realist novel, the personal essay, the strip-mining of ordinary life for patterns and insights. Our century will not make nearly as much sense. All of us will be held hostage to the obsessions of a small group of mentally deranged and self-destructive freaks. Someone will emerge out of nowhere and start tonguemaxxing, and suddenly entire political orders will rise and fall on the density of the President’s circumvallate papillae."

Sounds too good to be true.

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Mason masters

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#5 I used to despise kiss for his politics, but either he or I chilled out and at least one of us has improved his writing ability immensely. He's often hilarious, always poignant.

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Two Supply Chains

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1. Agree we need more institutional hedgers in Prediction Markets, but I think some of the mechanisms on how to increase it is lacking. There's a robust set of institutions and exchanges for commodity futures that is defined and operated by huge players (really taking off with the Chicago Board of Trade), which has provided liquidity and pricing to investors and enterprises. It seems underlying this analysis is a need to restructure this market from B2C to B2B to get the right levels of liquidity to improve predictions, at least to get the flywheel started. And as is obvious with every product, B2C and B2B products have different requirements and GTM strategies. Enterprise grade curation (mentioned) and strategies for developing money-pooling mechanisms through B2B business models or highly curated/marketed exchanges (not mentioned) proactively need to be developed.

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Community College Prof

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3(c). Most interesting as an example of how people become corrupted by catering to their audience.

I didn't read either book, but it seems to me that Abigail Shrier had something worthwhile to say about transitioning and about therapy. This piece just seems pointless and cruel. She's responding to a young woman who's looking for encouragement to get back in the dating scene - that should be a layup.

Calling her a narcissist and implying she has a toxic relationship with her mother (Bad Therapy, anyone?) is probably not what Sure means when he talks about improving the image of married life.

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Okay

1 1

4. Great. Now do corporate income taxes. Or any tax.

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mkt42

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"2. A new aesthetic for San Francisco."

Ani interesting project, to interview and listen to and watch San Francisco and then draw or paint and write about it. And give the resulting works away for free, thanks at least in part to an Emergent Venture grant. Or is her EV grant large enough to literally support her for a year, i.e. it makes it possible for her to give her work away?

Not the typical project that we see described when Tyler lists his EV grantees. I couldn't find Tyler's announcement of her grant; the post suggests her name is Shani but that name doesn't show up in the MR search box.

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Wayfaring Stranger

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Do people actually pay to read Krugman? It's sad what's happened to our education system...

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Dismalist

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I don't. He was wonderful before he joined the New York Times. I stopped reading him then.

For his present substack, he is claiming things that are political, not economic. Who pays tariffs is well understood, as Krugman well understands, No economist would say that foreigners pay 100% of the tariff, but all would say that foreginers pay some, which is what is happening. By bringing inflation in, he is going down the same road, perhaps relying on archaic macro. Tariffs change relative prices, not the price level.

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Kaleberg

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Economics is political. It's like medicine. We can pretend some people don't like cancer or polio, but whether and how we fight cancer or polio comes down to politics.

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MikeP

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And yet some medicine works and some medicine doesn't, just as some economics works and some economics doesn't.

Politics can choose the wrong economics, such as tariffs, just as establishments can choose the wrong medicine, such as blood letting.

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stickler boy

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Wasn't leech therapy redeemed in a white coat?

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MikeP

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Doctor: You know the leech comes to us on the highest authority.
Edmund: Yes. I know that. Dr. Hoffmann of Stuttgart, isn’t it?
Doctor: That’s right, the great Hoffmann.
Edmund: Owner of the largest leech farm in all of Europe?
Doctor: Yes. Well, I cannot spend all day gossiping. I’m a busy man. As far
as this case is concerned I have now had time to think it over and I
can strongly recommend...
[Together]: ...a course of leeches.
Edmund: Yes. I ‘ll pop a couple down my codpiece before I go to bed?
Doctor: No, no, no, no. Don’t be ridiculous. This isn’t the Dark Ages. Just
pop four in your mouth in the morning and let them dissolve slowly.

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Cancelled for wongthink

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Trump’s tariffs have clearly prolonged the Fed’s inflation battle and so it doesn’t really matter what you believe because we are paying more interest on the debt at higher rates because of tariffs and so they are counterproductive. I would suggest everyone read the Fed transcript from March of 2008 while all the Fed governors were laughing it up as the economy imploded. So all thought it was so hilarious that all of their actions had zero influence on the economy but they all believed they must still act as though their pulling levers and spinning wheels and pushing buttons was giving Americans confidence in them…where was Toto the dog when we needed him??

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OldTrader

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The Fed prolonged the inflation battle by pushing rates too low for too long and then waiting too long to raise them. Since the latest round of cuts started, CPI has gone sideways and the yield curve has steepened casting doubt on the advisability of those cuts.

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Cancelled for wongthink

1 4

Had Kamala won the fiscal situation would be much better and GDP growth would be the same. The Fed did a fine job because a recession was avoided and the deficits now are on Trump. But Trump was already president and screwed up the fiscal situation in that term and so I don’t know why you would have thought this term would be different?? Republicans are more about standing on principles than results and have been since the 1990s…high taxes are immoral and BJs from interns are immoral regardless of the president’s impact on deficits or GDP growth.

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rayward

4 5

4. The true believer (he is a Mormon) behind Trump's trade war: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/business/economy/jamieson-greer-trump-trade.html

Trump's tariffs work politically but not economically. But with Trump the point is the politics not the economics. Then Trump enlists true believers to implement and enforce what Trump knows himself he promotes for the politics not the economics. Thus, Trump's true believer in Trump's trade war. We have lost our way.

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rayward

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7. England has a small man complex: it's a small island among many nations on the continent. Maybe that's why they adopted the common law system, rather than rely on codes as they do on the continent. I suppose I am sympathetic to the British: I am always waiting for the next shoe to drop. Horribilizing my friends call it. Cheerio!

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MikeP

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I follow your logic, but for me it does not elicit sympathy: rather it elicits admiration and gratitude.

Being the small island among many nations, and being a nation whose government was taken over by new ethnic group after new ethnic group, is likely what yielded the common law -- how people behave is how people should be judged, regardless of who is governing them today -- and broader individual rights in toto.

The government is ephemeral. The individuals are the point of it all.

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rayward

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The sun never sets on the British Empire. That's because they can't be trusted in the dark. But seriously, I relate to the British, just as a lawyer I relate to the common law. "Common law and civil (code) law require distinct reasoning approaches: common law relies on inductive, precedent-based reasoning ("stare decisis") to adapt rules from past cases to new facts, while code law uses deductive, top-down reasoning to apply comprehensive, pre-written statutory codes to specific situation." There, now you know. Anyone who says American law is about calling balls and strikes is a liar. American law is based on common law.

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MikeP

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American law is based on common law.

I don't use the word 'hero' very often, but you are the greatest hero in American history.

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mkt42

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"being a nation whose government was taken over by new ethnic group after new ethnic group, is likely what yielded the common law"

Yep, and not just common law but also more openness to trade and cross-cultural encounters. Globalization and yes immigration. The part about getting conquered by foreign powers is not something that we can recommend (though colonial infrastructure and education systems have arguably helped some former colonies develop more quickly than if they'd remained independent). But the outward rather than inward-facing stance was part of Britain's successful economic rise. (And part of their rise to power too.)

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&

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common law evolved. it was not “implemented.” so the why is the same as for any evolutionary process.

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