Scott Alexander's Adumbrations Of Aducanumab is a great review of FDA snafus -- with deeper lessons about regulation in general. Yes the outcome is dumb, but incentives are to blame. That's important to understand if we are ever to fix this mess.

WWII started badly for the United States. Our tanks blew up. Our torpedoes were duds. Our airplanes were outclassed. Many commanders were incompetent, soldiers green, supplies chaotic. We lost a lot of battles. But we learned. The lessons of each mistake were incorporated, incompetent commanders sacked, soldiers learned their terrible craft.

[Subscription Required] On YouTube, you can watch a video clip of Volkswagen’s chief executive, Herbert Diess, denying that he knows what’s going on in Xinjiang. When the BBC correspondent interviewing him helpfully spells it out – “re-education camps” for one million Uyghurs – the VW boss responds: “I’m not aware of that.”

TEG Working Paper 21101

The nearly coincident announcements in December 2020 by Silicon Valley giants Hewlett Packard Enterprises, Oracle, and Tesla that they all were relocating their headquarters and future operations to Texas brought international headlines to businesses, particularly high technology businesses, leaving California. This paper documents business and household exits over time and analyzes why they are occurring.