On May 28, Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani announced the convening of a Charter Revision Commission called COGE, or the Commission on Government Efficiency. My friend has written a splendid primer for on what COGE, Charter Revision Commissions, and the sources of law the Mayor derives his authority from to convene them, and you should probably read his piece before mine if you are new to the idea of a Charter Revision Commission.

Throughout the summer, COGE will be hosting a series of public hearings, inviting members of the public to testify on their plethora of ideas of innovating the City’s statecraft and expanding its administrative capacity to build our world, as we once did, and as we are obliged to continue to do. It is plausible to claim that the roots of this initiative, which have undoubtedly been percolating in the new Mayor’s head for some time, are in then-candidate Mamdani’s podcast conversation with Derek Thompson, co-author of Abundance with Ezra Klein.

I had not started the week planning on testifying to COGE this early in the hearing schedule, but three events this week coalesced into my written testimony that I plan to submit to the fourth COGE public hearing, to be held later today at Brooklyn Law School (if you also are attending, please say hello):

• Two days ago, I attended an informative roundtable call hosted by and Maximum New York on COGE, and how one goes about testifying to the Commission. These are not only fantastic organizations and publications to learn New York City civics from, but additionally beneficial in the compounding network effects of being around highly ambitious, agentic, and smart people in politics.

• In most opportune timing, BetaNYC, a civic tech organization, recently launched a suite of Model Context Protocol servers, or MCP, for integrating large language models like Claude or ChatGPT. Sans technical parlance, MCPs are tools that act as a plug between AI large language models and data; in this case, the data is the sources of New York City law: the Charter, Administrative Code, and Rules. These are radically force-amplifying tools for legal analysis that compress research timelines from months to mere hours.

• Anthropic’s Claude Mythos-class Fable 5 model dropped earlier this week, which appears to be so apotheotic in its abilities that it recreated Minecraft in a single prompt.

Taking the trifecta of peer inspiration, new toys, and a entirely new class of model to tinker with, I wanted to see how far I could push legal and policy analysis in the compressed timeline of a single night.

I facetiously tell people I am semi-retired from legislative politics. There are other endeavors I wish to pursue with my life, but inevitably I find myself returning to a legislative forum one way or another. But in my past life, I spent half of my twenties as a legislative staffer in the New York State Assembly, and cut my teeth in legislative policymaking through the paroxysm of the pandemic.

In those days I authored a fair share of legislative bill drafts, the most impactful of which was a bill that subtracted, not added statute: the repeal of legal immunity for nursing home operators, surreptitiously inserted into the state budget at the outset of the pandemic in 2020 by the Cuomo administration. That said, like two-thirds of members of Congress, I am bereft of any formal legal credential. Everything I know about law was learned on the job, or in my reading of cases and American law books over the years.

Moreover, in my day, we had no sophisticated LLMs to conduct legal research with. Only this lovely interface! During my first week of the legislative session in 2020, I applied for a staffer New York State Library card, and in my unadulterated naivety, I searched for a physical set of McKinney's Consolidated Laws of New York Annotated to own and markup and study from, only to lament its prohibitive pricing. Legal research was painstaking and tedious, with no obvious on-ramp to acquaint oneself with the institution.

Today, the landscape is unrecognizable.

At its core, law is code. There have even been academic attempts at building machine programming languages for law, like Catala, which translates statutory law into implementable code. Treating bodies of law as disparate as the United States Internal Revenue Code and the French family benefits system as algorithmic in nature, the authors attempt to formalize law as a self-consistent logic, akin to the architecture of a machine programming language.

Central to the mechanics of a coherent law, and arguably to the notion of justice itself, is predictability. Particularly, it is the guarantee that the same facts in a case beget the same legal holdings. Morton Horwitz, one of the nation’s preeminent legal scholars, writes in the magisterial first volume of The Transformation of American Law about the enshrining of consistent precedents in 1790s maritime commercial arbitration cases, a prerequisite to the reliable development of the young American Republic’s fledgling sailing industry. As anyone who has interfaced with investors knows, there is nothing that makes the titans of commerce more skittish than unpredictability in business contracts.

Code, categorically, functions similarly. You would not want most of your computer functions to exercise probabilistic or otherwise inconsistent behavior: imagine if clicking on your mouse or tabbing on your keyboard led to a different outcome each time. Such a device would have its utility only in comic relief. The internal logic of code, like law, is premised on determinism to work.

Code as Law, Law as Code

Accepting that law is analogous to machine code in its internal logic, one natural yet provocative experiment follows: if code generation can be automated with large language models, can legislative drafting?

In my experience, the thought tends to stir up strong aversion. But there is no doubt that frontier large language models simply outclass any human programmer, no matter how innate and formidable their talent. Where an LLM can rapidly build context and understand dependencies and relationships within a codebase’s architecture, a human’s cognitive tax grows with the codebase’s sprawl.

Law is no different, with definitions, dependencies, and constraints imposed by one body of statute on another running rife throughout any corpus. Appealing to an argument of scale, the Code of Federal Regulations alone spans nearly two-hundred-thousand pages of text. It is at best a colossal waste, and most realistically cognitively impossible, to expect a group of people to successfully parse through the accumulation of law across all tiers of United States government, identifying its internal inconsistencies.

Therefore, I hypothesize: a frontier LLM, like Claude Fable 5, can do it better.

The experiment

To test this hypothesis, I installed BetaNYC’s MCP for New York City law, spun up a new agent in the command line, and thought about data interoperability problems I have been experiencing in my fiscal policy research. Specifically, New York City budget data is not clean to work with when conducting longitudinal studies of granular budget items, as labeling for certain budget codes can be inconsistent over time. Additionally, documents like the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR) do not have accompanying spreadsheets prior to 2022, which means a researcher is consigned to attempt to extract the desired data from a PDF. Naturally, my curiosity went to wondering if the City Charter has any mention of “machine-readable” or “structured” data.

Ergo, I gave the following prompt:

And after a minute or two, Claude came back with an amazingly satisfying output:

In no more than two minutes, Fable 5 returned the key clause I was searching for: Section 93(l), which is one part to the promulgation of the New York City Comptroller’s duties in the organic law. After some more volleying and uncovering additional relevant language in the Charter, I prompted Claude to summarize our discussion into a list of proposed amendments to the Charter itself. In other words, I asked Claude to play a legislative drafter.

The abridged result, which is filtered through my (human, and therefore imperfect) understanding of how the Charter works, is what I have appended to my written testimony to the Charter Revision Commission. You can view Claude’s handiwork here, which will be the final document I plan to submit to COGE. Again, I am no lawyer, but a substantial chunk of my twenties was spent reading legalese, and Claude’s ability to write in legalese is stunning prima facie.

I do not ever use AI to write my Substack posts, emails, or any writing meant to have soul, wit, and compassion for people. But from my twelve-hour experiment, with one hour expended on a frontier model with an unfathomably large number of machine neurons and weights, and the remaining time composing my testimony and this post, with my biological neurons that I’ve known and loved for life, I cannot deny the advent of a paradigm shift that those of us at the crossroads of science, technology, and policy find ourselves in.

Whether my (or Claude’s) thoughts have any value in this Charter Revision Commission will solely be left to the commissioners — and whichever questions they converge on, the New York City electorate come November. That human element is here to stay. Where some in our line of work may be wont to reflexively retreat from the inexorable march of the future, I argue that we cannot ignore it, and that if we are to be duly intentioned in our service to the body politic, we must embrace it.

Finally, my testimony below.

Testimony to the New York City Charter Revision Commission — Brooklyn Hearing 1: Modernizing Government and Streamlining Government Technology

Transparency and accessibility to public data are the paramount priorities of effective digital governance. In the recent decade, the City has made strides towards the ideal of intuitive data infrastructure, particularly in the enactment of Local Law 11 of 20121 (the “Open Data Law”) under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, giving rise to NYC Open Data. Subsequent statutes, such as Local Laws 37 and 38 of 20142, mandated digital and machine-readable publication of the sources of City law (the Charter, Administrative Code, and Rules of the City) and The City Record, respectively.

In the spirit of continuing to maintain the inexorable march towards full data openness and facilitating efficiency of governance in the digital realm, I propose three amendments to the Charter for the Charter Revision Commission to consider. These proposals are intended to provide a systematic approach towards building a state-of-the-art data infrastructure fit for the age of AI, and to offer an incremental step towards fully empowering New Yorkers to understand and hold their City government to account.

1. Impose machine-readability requirements for the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report in adherence to federal law. Under § 93-l of the Charter, the Comptroller is required to “publish a statement” detailing the City’s revenues and expenditures and its sources, the state of the general fund stabilization reserve fund, debt service and other matters pertaining to the City’s fiscal state. This document is commonly called in public finance lingo the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report, or ACFR, and has historically been an unwieldy document largely inaccessible to all but devoted disciples of fiscal policy minutiae.
   
   Critically, the ACFR is the only source in the myriad of the City’s fiscal policy publications that lists the actual revenues and expenditures of the City for each fiscal year, a level of specificity that none of the Preliminary, Executive, and Adopted budgets published by the Office of Management and Budget under the mayoralty reach.
   
   The motivation for this proposal is not exclusive to the public interest. There is also an impending federal requirement to publish ACFR data in structured and machine-readable format. Pursuant to the Financial Data Transparency Act of 20223, which amends the Securities Exchange Act to require machine-readable data for municipal securities disclosures, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is in the process of promulgating data standards that all municipalities in the business of bond issuance must adhere to. As home to several such bond-issuing authorities (the Transitional Finance Authority and the Municipal Water Finance Authority, to name two), the City and its authorities extensively file with the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB) Electronic Municipal Market Access (EMMA) system.
   
   Although the rulemaking4 process by the SEC remains underway with the specifics of data structuring requirements still outstanding, in anticipation of new rules, the City should enshrine in its charter clear mandates for data standards to accompany publication of the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report by the Office of the Comptroller. Fortunately, former Comptroller Brad Lander instituted for the FY2022 ACFR the practice of providing the financial and statistical tables available for download.5 However, due to the importance and centrality of the ACFR in crafting fiscal policy, specifying structured, machine-readable publication of ACFR data as a Charter requirement should be taken into consideration by this Commission.
   
   Recommendation:

   • Amend § 93(l) of the Charter to mandate the publication of bulk structured and machine-readable data alongside the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report.

2. a. Require more granular subdivisions of expense budget data beyond the unit of appropriation.
   
   b. Mandate consistent data ontology that facilitates long-term studies of City fiscal policy; particularly, stable labeling of units of appropriation and budget codes over time through the creation of a schema crosswalk.
   
   Data for the expense budget, published by the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), is structured in varying levels of granularity. The hierarchy, beginning at agency-wide summaries, progresses down to units of appropriation (U/A), consisting of personal service (PS) and other than personal service (OTPS) spending, which subdivides once more into discrete budget codes.
   
   In certain publications, such as the Expense Funding — All Source document6, the budget code subdivision is absent. Budget data that is bereft of total disaggregation of a unit of appropriation’s components inhibits the City’s objective of transparency. A simple amendment to the corresponding Charter clause, codified in § 100, can rectify this omission of critical budget data presentation.
   
   Furthermore, longitudinal studies of fiscal policy trends in New York City are profoundly complicated by inconsistencies in the OMB’s labeling of units of appropriation and budget codes. This makes true semantic consistency of similarly-named U/As an unnecessarily laborious matter to resolve, and risks introducing inaccuracies into the analyses on which fiscal policy decisions rest. A budget ontology that rigorously links budget items to their hierarchy, source of funding, and otherwise makes these semantic relationships unambiguously clear would greatly aid policymakers and the public in coming to informed conclusions about the budgetary process.
   
   Recommendations:

   • Amend § 100(c) of the Charter to require subdivisions beyond the unit of appropriation in all budget publications.

   • Add a new section § 100(i) of the Charter to establish a rigorous ontology for budget data.

3. Eliminate bottlenecks in inter-agency data-sharing that are created by the requirement for memoranda of understanding. Data must not only be transparent; it is semantically useful only when it is interoperable between systems. Agencies must frequently engage in data-sharing among themselves in rendering service delivery. Institutional frictions, however, hinder the effectiveness of the state. Consequently, the aggregate administrative capacity of the government is weakened with personnel consigned to duplicative data management efforts, cross-agency collaboration incurs steep transaction costs due to the paucity of interoperable data, and government responses to acute crises (such as the COVID-19 pandemic) become sclerotic.
   
   Currently, city agencies codify data-sharing agreements in the form of a memorandum of understanding (MOU). Although these can help establish guardrails to protect individual privacy and safeguard personally identifiable information (PII), the process of negotiating an MOU is lengthy and tedious, and sacrifices agility and force-amplifying response to acute problems for sluggish procedure.
   
   A City & State article from November 20227 underscores that the appetite to substantively implement a unified data sharing infrastructure was strong as recently as the last mayoral administration. The tension between ubiquitous data sharing and constituent privacy, however, need not be seen as zero-sum at all. In this, Jennifer Pahlka writes8 in Eating Policy about how the tension between privacy and fluidity in data flows can be balanced with thoughtful engineering of application programming interfaces, or APIs:

   But not being able to export all the data in a system is why APIs exist. APIs are designed to provide specific, limited functionality through predefined endpoints with proper authorization controls. They’re meant to facilitate secure, controlled data exchange between systems. Properly designed APIs include: authentication (verifying identity), authorization (permission levels), rate limiting (preventing excessive requests), data filtering (returning only necessary information), and audit logging (tracking all access). A core principle of API design is to return only the data needed for a specific task, not entire databases. (For example, an agency might need to know if a company filed taxes in the previous year. An API might return a simple yes or no without divulging other sensitive information.)
   

   Recommendation:

   • Amend chapter 48 of the Charter to include a new § 1077 on inter-agency data sharing, minimizing institutional and legal frictions in coordinating and standardizing semantic interoperability, while protecting constituent privacy.

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I’m also trying out an AI-generated banner image. Do you like it? Is it too cringe?

Last Tuesday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani released his administration’s $124.7 billion executive budget. The executive budget will serve as our baseline through the final stretch of this year’s budget negotiation process through June 30th, which is the deadline for the Mayor and the City Council to ratify the budget.

Recall that in his Preliminary Budget, the Mayor unveiled a budget accompanied with a dire warning: that the City was facing a shortfall as extreme as $12.6 billion between fiscal years 2026 and 2027. Initially, the Mayor put forth plans to hike property taxes by 9.5 percent and withdraw $1.2 billion from the City Revenue Stabilization and Retirement Health Benefit Trust funds; these proposals have since been scuttered.

In the months since, between optimistic forecasts from City Hall of Wall Street windfalls that eliminated several billions of the projected deficits, and commitments from Albany, including a $1.2 billion allocation for expanding child care programs, the initial shortfall was whittled down the outstanding amount to $5.4 billion. The remainder is accounted for by the Citywide Savings Program, which identified $1.77 billion in savings from City agencies, including the cancellation of wasteful contracts and insourcing that work to City agencies, the levying of a pied-à-terre tax on non-primary residences with a valuation of $5 million or greater ($500 million), waiving the class size mandate on New York City schools ($508 million), and re-amortization of City contributions to the New York City Public Pension Funds totaling $2.3 billion.

As we await the final leg of the City’s budget negotiations, it behooves policymakers and engaged citizens to understand the comprehensive consequences of one of the more controversial of the Mayor’s cost-savings measures: re-amortization of City contributions to the pension system.

What are the New York City Public Pension Trusts?

Say you are a life-long public servant of the City of New York (thank you for your service!). While private sector employees are often enrolled in a 401(k) retirement plan, you, as a municipal worker, receive something better: a legal entitlement to post-retirement payments, accrued from contributing a portion of your paycheck into one of the City’s retirement systems throughout your career. Depending on your tier of retirement vesting, you are legally entitled to a monthly payout from your pension system for the remainder of your life.

The Administrative Code outlines the sources of contributions to three different types of pension funds: the annuity savings fund, which is financed by monthly contributions from City employees themselves, and the pension and contingent reserve funds, which are capitalized with direct contributions from the City. The Mayor’s Executive Budget proposes changes to the latter: the City’s contributions to the pension fund.

What is re-amortization?

Simply, it is changing the schedule on which payments are deferred.

Imagine that you owe $100, and you opt to pay $10 a month to your creditor with a regular interest rate of 1 percent. In this scenario, it takes you 11 months to pay off the debt, with an additional $5.91 in interest on top of the original $100 principal. The trade off made in this decision was to accept a higher money outflow per month, but in exchange for less total money owed over the amortization schedule of this debt.

Now, consider the exact same terms, except you now pay $5 a month (see Figure 1):

Figure 1:

From only one variable change, it now takes two years to pay off the liability, with $18.16 paid in interest. By repaying less money per month, you traded off the ability to save more in the long-run. That is one choice of re-amortization. Two ways to make good on a debt, but contrasting trade offs in each decision.

The City’s pension trusts work similarly. The Office of the Actuary derives complex formulae that enable the City to accurately compute the valuation of the five pension trusts. Two integral pieces of information are fed into these actuarial models: the estimated lifespan of existing members, and the discount rate, or the future value of liabilities to pensioners in terms of present-day value.

To illustrate the concept of a discount rate, suppose that in 30 years you want $100 dollars. What amount of money and growth rate is needed to make that hand you want to convert that future $100 into its current value today? A 5 percent discount rate means that you could take $23 today, grow it at 5 percent every year for the next thirty years, and accrue $100 in the end.

Herein lies the problem: it is, naturally, impossible to perfectly prognosticate the future. Our knowledge of the distant future will always be limited. Discount rates are assumptions, encoded with expectations for what the future holds.

The intertwining of discount rate-setting and politics is a fascinating niche history in policymaking. For instance, an 8 percent discount rate on municipal pensions predominated throughout the 1990s, only for the double-whammy of the dot-com bubble and the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 to induce policymakers to downwardly revise these discount rates. Notably, then-Governor Andrew M. Cuomo in 2013 ratified a bill reducing the discount rate of the City’s pension trusts to 7 percent. The cost of the adjustment in assumptions was eased by allowing the city to re-amortize the unfunded actuarial liability, stretching the final payment till 2032. More recently, the Adams’ administration considered a re-amortization last year.

What does this mean for pensioners? The disbursements of the City’s pension system must ideally keep pace with increases in the cost of living. Conversely, it would be injudicious for the City to contribute excess funds to the pension at the expense of infrastructural and social service spending in the present. In particular, a balance must be struck to ensure that all anticipated and legally obligated liabilities to pensioners can be satisfied. When pension liabilities are unfunded, the City must be prudent with ensuring that the macroeconomic environment will be conducive for meeting these liabilities.

When will the City have Enough in the Pension Trusts?

Last year, the New York City Independent Budget Office (IBO) published a report on legislation pending the State legislature regarding re-amortization of the NYCERS, TRS, and BERS trusts. In it, the IBO asks: when will New York City have enough in the pension trusts to satisfy all existing liabilities?

At the time of the publication, the IBO’s answer was 2032, at which point the “contribution cliff” kicks in. Upon fulfillment of the unfunded accrued liabilities (UAL), the remaining amount of liabilities to bring the pension trusts to 100 percent capable of meeting its funding obligations, the pension trusts would begin to owe a credit to the City, starting off as $961.3 million in 2033. For now,all of the City’s pension trusts have a majority of their liabilities funded, ranging between 75 to 97 percent (see Figure 2). But the remainder of the UALs needs to be obtained one way or another. Crucially, implicit in the assumptions behind the current amortization schedule is if the pension trusts meet their targeted investment return goals, for which there is never any guarantee. In light of the volatile macroeconomic environment the world finds itself in today, the Mamdani administration would be judicious to engage in restraint, not risks, with the pension trusts.

Figure 2:

By re-amortizing annual required contributions to a lesser amount, the City immediately would have freed up fiscal space with higher long-run interest service. Of course, it is far from the simplicity of switching from $10 to $5-a-month, nor is the re-amortization nearly as drastic. But the logic of the trade off is very real, and on the scale of New York City’s $124.7 billion financial plan.

The question we face is: how will Mayor Mamdani’s cost-savings plan for the pension system pan out?

Looking Ahead: The Symphony of New York’s Economy

Balancing the needs of the body politic against the macroeconomic realities the world faces requires absolute synchronization between a plethora of moving components, like a conductor directing a symphony orchestra.

But when done incorrectly, the harmony of the symphony disintegrates into cacophony. Undoubtedly, the Mayor’s plan is a non-trivial risk, and a gamble that can very well prove to falter. It is imperative for City Hall and fiscal policymakers to pay heed to a number of variables in play.

1. Intergenerational trade offs are at play by forcing future generations of taxpayers to bear the brunt of re-amortized pension costs.
   Given that the trade off of lower monetary outflows today for higher costs tomorrow is at the heart of the administration’s proposal, City Hall ought to be mindful of the tax burden that it places on future generations of taxpayers.
   

2. Proportionally higher interest service on re-amortized pension costs “crowds out” the City’s fiscal space to pursue the ambitious and expansionary agenda of the Mamdani administration.
   Budgeting is necessarily a zero-sum endeavor: the opportunity cost of diverting more funds towards service on debt and accrued interest is funds that do not go into infrastructural and social service investment. Mamdani’s City Hall should be aware that deferring costs may “crowd out” the fiscal space to pursue the core of the Mayor’s signature proposals to expand services, like universal child care and free buses, none of which are fully funded in this year’s budget and will require significant future revenue.
   

3. Will Wall Street windfalls persist?
   Amidst widespread concerns of the impacts of AI on the broader economy, the war in Iran, and labor market woes facing new graduates, record-setting windfalls persist in Wall Street profits. Importantly, these windfalls are projected to sustain themselves for the foreseeable future by the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget. But there is no Iron Law that bull markets remain bulls forever, and policymakers should not assume that good fortune in the financial markets will perpetuate indefinitely.
   

4. Donald Trump and a dysfunctional Congress are constant institutional constraints until at least 2029. Albany is also likely to see constrained fiscal space in the event elevated state assistance to New York City continues to be warranted.
   Cuts in federal aid to states and localities are no longer just threats made by President Trump; many have become a reality. Even if the Democratic Party succeeds in retaking one or both chambers of Congress in this year’s midterm elections, City Hall should assume that substantive federal assistance to buoy the City’s balance sheet remains out of the question for now.

   Fiscal space in Albany to provide support to the City should also not be taken for granted. Between proposals to reform Tier 6 of the state retirement system to closing major fiscal gaps in Medicaid and Essential Plan reimbursements – each amounting to billions of needed spending – City policymakers should not assume that current or additional increases in State aid are guaranteed.

The challenges facing this new generation of leaders at City Hall are as historic as the paradigm shift that has been ushered into the story of New York City. While there are concerns that the re-amortization could set the city up for extraordinary problems, there is also the possibility that prudent and responsive management and commitment to meeting obligations the city could manage. How the early savings would be used is also a critical factor in judging the appropriateness of going ahead with the re-amortization.

The Mayor who offered a promise in his inaugural address to overcome every moment of fiscal challenge with “ambition, not austerity” may well find himself in contradiction to that pledge.

On July 3, 1844, Caleb Cushing, President John Tyler’s representative to China from the United States, and Keying, a mandarin of the Qing Dynasty, signed the Treaty of Wangxia at the Kun Iam Temple in Portuguese Macau.1 Wàngxià is an anachronistic name; today Macauans call this part of town Mong-Há (storefronts, for instance, bearing Portuguese names like Comidas Mong-Há).

I visited the Kun Iam Temple to witness this historical site, although as far as I could tell, there was no inscription marking the location of the treaty’s signing. Among the earliest formal interactions between the neophyte American Republic and the centuries-old veteran Qing Dynasty. the Treaty of Wangxia constituted one of the “unequal treaties” established between China and western powers, imposing unfavorable trade terms and foreign extraterritoriality on the Qing. An act that, unquestionably, perpetuates its mark on the contemporary dealings of these storied powers.

All space has historical memory. At home, I’ll stand around at timse and contemplate all that transpired on that plot of land in the Cretaceous period or in the Dutch colonial era of New York. In motivating travel, I drift towards those sites where the courses of nations were forged. My obsession with “spatio-temporal” memory need not be confined to the grandiose. Among the conglomerate of Chinese and Portuguese signage to the spoken chorus of Cantonese in the streets, I wonder about the stories of the shopkeepers (Macau, rich in dense urban zoning and its high-rise tenement housing, is also prolific in small businesses), their experiences, and all that they have seen in life.

Macauans venerate space and the land on which it exists, for Tou Tei (土地) Kun, or small shrines to the earth god in the traditional folk religion (a syncretic whole of Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian elements), are commonplace outside residential areas, stores, and even within supermarkets.2 The Chinese name of the city, Àomén (奧門), means “inner gate”, or as the Portuguese colonists at the height of Macau’s Senado period euphemistically termed “the gateway to the cross.”3 Indeed, the inner gate has always existed as a juncture of spaces: “east” and “west,”4 “core” and “periphery,” strands of religious influence, and trade spanning from Goa to Malacca to Japan.

Here’s to, as Tyler Cowen puts it, being a travel addict, and finding those spaces with deep historical memory that resonate with us.

-David

My modus operandi is to bring scientists and policymakers in the same room, because technical people need to be working on big problems. I’m extremely elated to have had the opportunity to help out some brilliant colleagues at Columbia University’s Learning the Earth with Artificial Intelligence and Physics (LEAP), Nvidia, Starr Whitehouse Architects and Planners, and the American Museum of Natural History on this front.

For the last half year, we have been planning a hackathon around using data tools to assist New Yorkers in building a city resilient to extreme weather catastrophes. One component of this is climate model downscaling, and assembling policymakers, scientists, builders, and community organizers at the frontier of urban solutions to extreme weather. Time for an aside.

What is climate model downscaling?

Imagine your favorite 8-bit video game (the correct answer is The Legend of Zelda, 1986). It may not be aesthetically terrible, but visual detail is not the forte of these games. Now, let’s go to 1987 for Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. We have some marginal improvement! Iterating on this process, we can improve the pixel resolution to get a crisper Link.

Climate downscaling functions on analogous lines. We are not necessarily illustrating a new image with superior detail, but rather enhancing the resolution on an existing field for any climate variable of our choosing. The advantage? Low-resolution climate and weather models can be improved to yield high-resolution field data, enabling extraordinarily precise geospatial data for specific resiliency planning. In other words, if each pixel represents a geographic area spanning 25, 50, or 100 km, downscaling can improve the spatial resolution of each pixel to be much finer, even along single-digit kilometer distances.

To achieve this, my colleagues have been employing a diffusion model1 from Nvidia called CorrDiff, which is capable of taking in data at a resolution of 25 km, learning the complex, nonlinear relationships between the input features, and output a downscaled map on the order of 2 km. It’s a remarkable tool, and principal motivator for me to get back to writing my solutions manual to Larry Wasserman’s All of Statistics2 to appreciate the gorgeous mathematics powering diffusion models.

Event Details

If you are a New Yorker and do not subscribe to climate doomerism, this hackathon is for you. Fear not if you are bereft of technical knowledge on coding or climate physics — this event is designed for knowledge transfer between different bodies of expertise and experiences.

The event will be held on January 15-17, 2026. The deadline to apply to join is this Friday, December 12, 2025. You can apply and learn more about the hackathon here. It will be held in-person at the American Museum of Natural History.

During the event, teams will be formed and composed of individuals from the aforementioned backgrounds, ideally with each team member having plenty to learn from their partners about their expertise. Throughout the hackathon, community organizations from the five boroughs will provide input and guidance to the teams on specific needs for climate resiliency data tools. At the end of the three days, judges will select one of the teams as the winner, with prizes I am not privy to as of yet. :-)

I hope to see some of you at the hackathon! It will be wonderful fun, and my aspiration is this will be the outset of many more fruitful collaborations on the climate crisis between folks in science research, government, and community organizing.

Here I am with this past year’s LEAP hackathon participants:

— David

• In May, I joined the research staff of the Ocean Transport Group led by Professor Dhruv Balwada at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, where I’m working on machine learning techniques in physical (coastal) oceanography.

• In July, I also joined the research team at the Center for New York City Affairs as a Budget and Economic Policy Analyst, where I am working on issues related to New York State and City fiscal policy.

• I am now back teaching at Adelphi University, albeit with a smaller teaching load: one seminar course in Environmental Economics.

It’s an exciting time in my personal life and the world, and I’m hoping to be more galvanized in writing in the months to come. For this article and all others forthcoming, my opinions are strictly my own and are not representative of any of my employers.

Happy Climate Week, New York. Summer is now over. These months of 2025 will be historic for many reasons: from cultural apotheosis in the engagement of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, to the viral and kitsch like Honey Deuces at the US Open, culminating in outright turmoil from the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, to all else rocking US macropolitical stability.

It was also the second-hottest summer on record in my home city of New York. Oh, and the summer of Zohran Mamdani, the ascendent democratic socialist and near-certain mayor-to-be.

In my seven years of doing politics in New York, Mamdani’s victory is the pinnicle of surprise and awe. I was on AOC’s inaugural campaign in 2018 and am in some scenes of Knock Down the House. Later on when I went on to work for Assemblyman Ron Kim, my work in investigating nursing home improprieties during COVID would lead to my former boss’s feature in The New York Times, and the beginning of the end for Andrew Cuomo, New York’s long-reigning imperial governor. But none of my experiences compare to what I felt on Tuesday, June 24 this year — on that oppressive, sweltering day in excess of 100 degrees Fahrenheit — when I saw my old New York State Assembly colleague vault into the worldwide limelight.

I knew Zohran; not well enough to be the best of friends, but sufficiently so to be in each other’s contacts and for me to have received a fundraising call from him in January. (I couldn’t pick up — sorry, Mr. Mayor-to-be.) Here’s one attempt at returning the mayor-ascendant’s overture: with summer’s farewell, it’s time we discussed what in the fiery scorchers of hell happened with New York’s temperatures that felt like, well, a fiery scorcher from the pits of hell?

The Heat Dome

According to the National Weather Service Automated Surface Observing System (ASOS) station in Central Park, New York, the hottest day this summer was Tuesday, June 24, peaking at a maximum measurement of 99 degrees Fahrenheit. Coincidentally, June 24 was also the day of our city’s primary elections for mayor, city council, and other local offices. If you were street canvassing on that day, this is not merely a number — you felt it.

The culprit behind the brutal heat campaign volunteers (and just about everyone else) suffered that day? A heat dome.

Imagine a bundle of hot air concentrated at the Earth’s surface and “trapped” by a “dome” placed all around it. That “dome” is high pressure from the atmosphere. This prevents the transfer of heat to the upper layers of the atmosphere, and consequently, cloud formation when that warm air cools down at higher altitudes. All of us unfortunate enough to be stuck in the heat dome roast under the blazing sun.

Extreme heat is the prime killer of all extreme weather events. Per NOAA, the annually-averaged deaths directly due to heat in the United States from 2013 to 2022 was 153. When we get local, we find that on average from 2018 to 2022, five individuals in New York City died directly from heat, while 520 more succumbed to heat-exacerbated deaths, in which extreme temperatures aggravated an underlying medical condition. This past summer saw a record number of single day emergency room visits due to extreme heat, the highest since 2019.

As a public health matter, New Yorkers should be appalled, and find this state of affairs unacceptable. What are we to do about it?

The First Line of Defense: New York City Emergency Management

In catastrophic events, New York’s organizational apparatus for coordinating disaster response and relief efforts is New York City Emergency Management, or NYCEM (formerly the New York City Office of Emergency Management, or OEM). Its mandate (from the NYCEM website) is:

The agency is responsible for coordinating citywide emergency planning and response for all types and scales of emergencies. It is staffed by more than 200 dedicated professionals with diverse backgrounds and areas of expertise, including individuals assigned from other City agencies.

Many iterations of an emergency response agency existed throughout the city’s history, but the most recent incarnation is traced back to the administration of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who established the then-named OEM by executive fiat in 1996. The young OEM’s greatest test came on that dark day in September 2001, where its Director, the late Richard “Richie” J. Sheirer, shepherded the plethora of local, state, and federal agencies in the formidable task of rescue and recovery in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. There are days of world history that test the fortitude and lifetime of experience in career bureaucrats trained in disaster response; September 11, 2001 was that day for Mr. Sheirer and all who served in OEM then.

In recent years, under Mayors Bloomberg and de Blasio, OEM operated at the heart of two major acute crises since 9/11: Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and the coronavirus pandemic beginning in 2020. Eric Adams came along and rechristened OEM to New York City Emergency Management, alongside severe criticism over his attending a campaign fundraiser in lieu of handling the city’s response to extreme precipitation. As we progress through the rest of the 2020’s and beyond, and as the climate crisis is bound to become more acute in its physical effects, the next mayor of New York will have an arduous task ahead of him: overhauling NYCEM to protect the city from extreme weather altogether.

There are several components to this challenge:

1. Firstly, extreme heat is immediately threatening to human health and livelihood.

2. As a second-order effect, extreme heat imposes existential risks on the ability of critical infrastructure — like electricity transmission — to function.

3. To mitigate these two threats, the mayor and his team will need to be aggressive and creative with

   1. staffing NYCEM with stellar talent to model, monitor, and communicate to New Yorkers about extreme heat events,

   2. source the capital and personnel funding to rapidly hire talent and commence strategic infrastructure investments to weatherize the city against heat, and

   3. mobilize NYCEM to better coordinate with our state (and federal, should they be willing) partners in the face of heat-driven disaster.

A natural place to begin is to ask the following: how is NYCEM structured, and what is its place relative to the rest of the city bureaucracy?

According to the city government’s organizational chart, NYCEM falls under the remit of the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety. It is led by a Commissioner and a First Deputy Commissioner, and houses six internal bureaus:

• Community Engagement

• Response

• Planning & Resilience

• Readiness

• External Affairs

• Administrative, Strategy, Operations (ASO)

Moreover, as part of its mandate for upholding public safety, NYCEM is also a constituent of the Citywide Incident Management System, or CIMS. The CIMS functions as a framework for directing the command structure of specific city agencies in responding to an abundance of bad things that can happen, spanning between a hostage situation (NYPD) to extreme heat (NYCEM, NYPD, FDNY, and the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene). It also outlines the core competencies of each participating agency, for which NYCEM’s include

• Interagency coordination and support

• Coordination of emergency public messaging

All of this is standard par for the course and what one might expect an emergency response agency to fulfill. But in an era where crises of human and natural origin seem to proliferate, there’s more to be done with this critical corner of the city government.

Who funds NYCEM? (in big part, the Feds)

Government is only worth its salt if you bring the money and talent. It behooves us to ask: what is the current staffing and funding situation at NYCEM?

To answer the latter, we go to the best source for data on the city government: NYC Open Data. Here, I queried New York City’s Expense Budget Funding document to identify expenditures to OEM / NYCEM since 2016. Some definitions of nomenclature are needed:

• The Expense Budget incorporates all salary, pension, debt service, and operational expenses of the city government. It is the legally binding set of appropriations approved by the city council and the mayor. The types of spending in the expense budget are decomposed into two categories:

• Personal Service (PS) spending is all salaries and fringe benefits of city employees.

• Other Than Personal Service (OTPS) encompasses operational and contractual expenses.

• The Total Adopted Budget Amount, typically agreed on by the mayor and city council prior to the start of New York City’s fiscal year on July 1st. You can think of the adopted budget as a blueprint estimate of anticipated revenues and expenditures for the upcoming year.

• The Total Current Budget Amount gives us the actual spending of each agency, which is bound to fluctuate due to the true amount of revenue inflows. This is often referred to as the “revised” or “modified” adopted budget — that is, the adopted budget as amended to take into account revenue actuals. I look at this metric to get the best sense of the spending reality of NYCEM.

Graphing the time series of the total current budget amounts, along with its decomposition into federal and city contributions (the state contribution is not terribly significant), we find some interesting stories.

Most visually apparent is the enormous spike in federal funding OEM received from 2020-2022, which naturally coincides with the apex of the coronavirus pandemic. It is a staggering increase, with a nearly two-fold surge in PS spending, and a whopping twenty-five-fold surge in OTPS.

One clear insight we can gather is the degree to which federal spending on PS consistently outpaces the city’s in each fiscal year. In fact, more than half of NYCEM’s full-time positions are funded by the federal government. Don’t assume that this is entirely budgeted money. Many of these jobs — 125 in the aforementioned fiscal year — are paid for through Homeland Security grants like the Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI). These public servants address the kinds of threats Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Sheirer faced on that September morning in 2001: terrorism.

Recall that the current budget gives us the actual spending, and the adopted budget is inherently an estimate. When comparing adopted and current budget figures, the latter always outpaces the former.

But when you decompose the comparison into their federal and city funding constituents, it’s evident that the contour of the total spending pattern is near-entirely driven by federal funding sources. Accordingly, one benefit that federal money confers is that these NYCEM positions are immune to city hiring freezes.

With respect to city funding, we can observe a general upward trend, with particularly steep increases throughout the 2020’s. Hikes in headcount here are attributed to the city delegating the response to the influx of asylum seekers to NYCEM.

All in all, we are illuminated by two insights:

• NYCEM funding is substantially influenced by grantmaking by the Department of Homeland Security.

• While the city has spearheaded personnel expansion in recent years, the highly politicized migrant crisis remains the primary driver.

That’s a wrap for Part I of this post, where my goal was purely descriptive: to simply explain the science of heat waves and the mechanics of how New York City finances and operates its emergency management agency.

For Part II, I’ll make the following normative argument, and argue for how we New Yorkers can lobby our political leadership to implement it:

As Mayor, Zohran Mamdani should bolster funding and agency capacity at the New York City Emergency Management office.

A parting gift to my readers: five sublime hours of 90’s aesthetic, retro Weather Channel Vaporwave.

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My only cohesive memory of the first grade is the events of September 11th.

I was nary a week into the first grade when I returned home from school to the sound of the television. It was a curious oddity, as I recall my family being particularly strict with no TV after school. Then I saw why — one of the earliest images of my life, forever seared into my head at six years old: the sight of those harrowing towers of smoke, in place of those majestic structures that proudly stood.

The second image would come tomorrow, when a classmate brought a copy of that day’s The New York Times for our teacher, Ms. Occhiogrosso. I regret that my eyes wandered to the bottom of that front page, with its dire all-caps and italicized headline, to a woman smothered in blood and soot.

I regret that these images stand among my earliest memories.

Six years earlier, I was born in New York City. As an infant, my parents took me to Windows on the World in the North Tower, a moment I fervently wish was my paramount memory of the towers. But most of my childhood was spent in a halcyon, conservative town called Somers, an hour’s drive up Interstate 684. I am fortunate to have no memory of witnessing the collapse of the Twin Towers, and even more so to have not lost anyone in my immediate world that day.

Unfortunately, I knew someone who did. My classmate’s father, who served in the FDNY, was one of the 2,606 people to perish at the World Trade Center on that solemn day. May his courage and service to the FDNY, the City of New York, and our Nation live eternally in our memory.

I pray my classmate and their family are well. I pray the woman in The New York Times is well.

In spite of the potency of the memory of that day, I have no recollection of watching President Bush’s address to the Nation that night. In youthful rebellion I bucked the conservatism of my hometown to become a liberal; to this day I’ve been a lifelong Democrat. That speech by George Bush is the Republican speech I have studied and listened to the most. Though my life has been bereft of religion, forever are the words of Psalm 23 etched into my being — its sixth verse engraved into my paternal grandparents’ tombstone, and fourth spoken by the President on that evening:

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for you are with me.

Fall 2003

It was around this time I learned my cousin and her husband were deploying to Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively.

My eight-year-old cerebral cortex too undeveloped, I didn’t know what this meant. What I remember are the late Peter Jennings, the nonstop broadcasts on the wars on ABC World Nightly News, and conspicuous absences from Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings.

In adult life, I think of the lineage of war my family history is intertwined with. I ruminate on the early childhood of my paternal grandmother, who passed last year after her ninety-eight years on this Earth, and her youth in Japanese-colonized Korea. The thought of her learning of the atomic bombing of the Empire, later fleeing to the South from her native Pyongyang during the Korean War, perplexes as much as it fascinates me.

In my generation, war came home in a dual void. In one sense, the literal, physical void of my cousin ceasing to be a fixture at our holiday gatherings for years. In another, the void of what happened, the sense I had as a child that to inquire about war was improper, and the grave apprehension I had about ever broaching the question. Most of all, it is the deep quietness from my cousin’s husband that I remember, and my shyness in piercing it. A quietness not of introversion, but of having seen what most others have not.

We were blessed in that everyone came home from their deployment. For a myriad of reasons, it has been many years since I have spoken to that part of my family. Every September 11th, I am reminded of the life-changing decision they, and thousands of other young people in the aftermath of the terror, made for this country.

I think about the world then, children of immigrants from Queens, New York sent to the graveyard of empires by greater powers, to fight two wars that will be endlessly enshrined in disgrace as colossal foreign policy catastrophes. History is made magnificent in retrospect. But when it is lived and observed, it is people in our lives thrust into extraordinary situations. The Global War On Terror is not merely a grand narrative of the epochal decline of America’s international stature. It is also the memories with my cousin that could have been, but never happened.

I pray my cousin, her husband, and their children are well.

September 11th, 2025

Twenty-four years later.

I need not re-litigate, as many others have, that our society is suffering from a deep malaise. Nor do I wish to leave you on a dim note.

Instead, I want to convey the local history I love most about my home city: the stories of strangers who helped one another on September 11th. In the words, spirit, and charity of the late and great Fred Rogers, that giant of humanity among mortals: “look for the helpers.”

The best of New York, and indeed, the best of humanity was found in people like the friends of John Abruzzo, a quadriplegic, who collectively carried him down sixty-nine stories in Tower One on a combination sled and chair. Once they reached the lobby, Abruzzo’s friends carried him over scattered debris and glasses, finally escaping the collapsing tower. Even when FDNY firefighters offered to rescue Abruzzo on the tenth floor, his friends turned down the firefighters’ offer, pushing through to ensure their friend made it out of the North Tower safely. And escape, John Abruzzo did.

That same humanity was found in Moira Smith, the only woman NYPD officer to make the ultimate sacrifice on that day. Officer Smith, waving her flashlight, guided hundreds of people out of the towers to safety, urging people “Don’t look! Keep moving!”. From one account:

I came to the end of the ramp and I was standing squarely in front of Moira, I leaned to the left to try look past her to see the plaza. She quickly matched my motion and blocked my vision saying "don't look." Our eyes made direct contact. My eyes said to her, "I know how bad it is and I understand what you're doing." Her face was full of pain and her eyes said to me, "In this horrific situation, this is the best and only thing I can do.

Her heroism in keeping others calm and resolutely directing people before the tower’s collapse exemplifies the best of our city. God rest her spirit forever, and all those first responders who made the ultimate sacrifice.

I do not purport to have easy answers to our chronic malaise, to this vile pestilence of terroristic political violence, because there aren’t any. There will be many who peddle the farce of cheap ideology, and proffer vulgar simplisms and silver bullets to our social ailments.

Let me suggest at least a small action that will not make America whole in full, but we have the agency to make good on.

Today, on this twenty-fourth anniversary of that calamitous day, I hope we can begin to know camaraderie afresh. I yearn for the day that we all not only know, but feel in our core goodness and charity towards our neighbor. Don’t give up on the American people, and live knowing that even if our collective decency is temporarily forgotten, through willful service to each other, we can rekindle that sacred togetherness as a country again.

I pray that the American Republic is made well once more.

In the last year, I’ve invested a great deal of energy into getting involved in atmospheric and oceanographic research vis-à-vis the climate crisis. I also spend considerable time reading about international relations, so the natural question for me to pose: where does climate change fall into great power conflict?

If you haven’t seen the term before, great power conflict is what it sounds like: powerful nations engaged in competition with one another (for a myriad of reasons). Some, like John Mearsheimer, characterize great power competition as tragic. Collaboration between countries is inherently elusive, if not futile, and our modern existence in the system of nation-states is condemned to perpetual conflict.

This is too pessimistic of an outlook for me. Still, it behooves us to ask: how do societal stressors, such as climate change, disrupt the (relative) era of international peace largely upheld after the Second World War? Put differently, much has been written about the causal direction of geopolitics exacerbating climate change. Militaries consuming extraordinary quantities of fossil fuels and the like, or environmentally destructive tactics in warfare. What about the reverse direction: when climate change aggravates capital-g Geopolitics?

The “Struggle for Existence”

Nearly every invocation of the phrase “climate change” carries with it — rightfully — the threat of the end of humanity’s existence (and that of a plethora of other lifeforms in Earth’s biosphere). When I was more involved in community organizing in the late 2010’s, grassroots activists insisted on framing action on climate change as the moral equivalent of war, alluding to the late President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 speech on the energy crisis of that decade.

Now, climate action is far from the only collective endeavor routinely cast as a struggle for humanity’s future. Critically, geopolitics originates from a comparable framing.

I recommend readers to check out Gerard Toal’s latest publication: Oceans Rise Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hastens Climate Catastrophe. Toal’s work served as one of the sources of inspiration for this piece, but more importantly, he weaves a compelling origin story for how the term “geopolitics” emerged to begin with.

Toal begins his account with the imperial geographers of the late 20th century: the likes of Halford Mackinder, a geographer, Tory parliamentarian, and advocate for Britain’s imperial ambitions. Akin to many of his contemporaries, Mackinder is not a likable individual, having subscribed to thoroughly racist notions of what the world order should constitute. Nevertheless, Mackinder’s theories on geopolitics have withstood to the present, and must be engaged for that reason.

Not unlike commentators of our time, Mackinder espoused a “great power” view of the world. Great powers are states — in his day, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States — that command the greatest influence on Earthly affairs. Be it through economic or military projection of might, we find similar formulations of the distribution of power today, most of all with the United States and China.

What are these great powers interested in? Mackinder’s words, in a school book no less:

The most important facts of contemporary political geography are the extent of the red patches of British dominion upon the map of the world, and the position of hostile customs frontiers. They are the cartographical expression of the eternal struggle for existence as it stands at the opening of the twentieth century.

Even in our political milieu, one might find these are chilling, even eschatological, apocalyptic words. Once again, British schoolchildren may have read these words a century ago. Certainly in our time, the vibes — and indeed, the truth — is that the stakes are dire, not only on climate change, but on the great power conflict our world is embroiled in. There is no denying that the two world-historic crises are interwoven.

Inaction on climate change is sure to beget horror. Although those who witnessed the horrors of the twentieth century are fewer in number with each day, our historical memory ought to know well the horrors that the epochal “struggle for existence” by empires begot in the twentieth century. As much as I and most others desire to see international collaboration on mitigating climate change, the sobering reality we must contend with is there was never, nor is, a guarantee for peaceful collaboration.

Which is not to say we foreclose on diplomacy to redress climate change. It is to be sober to the fact that we must mitigate not only the changing climate, but the very real potential of catastrophic warfare induced by climate change — prosecuted by the great powers of our day in the struggle for existence against the climate crisis.

The Risk Society

One compelling idea is German sociologist Ulrich Beck’s notion of the risk society. (Toal also invokes the thoughts of Beck frequently in his aforementioned text.) It’s a sufficiently big idea to warrant its own eponymous book, published in 1986. Beck’s idea here is not simply that bad things happen in the world and to society; that’s been (and will be) true for all time. It is that with the ever-evolving structures of organizing society, and our relationship with these structures, novel risks emerge — like anthropogenic climate change.

One structure of world society is that of the sovereign state, which collectively comprise the inter-national community of countries and institutions that mediate relations between these states. (For you international relations nerds, you know this as the Westphalian system, and it’s been with us since at least 1648.) In Beck’s framework of the risk society, modernizing forces such as industrialization impose profound transformations of the institutional and social relations by which people live and interact. In turn, these transformative and modernizing forces engender new risks, threatening to disrupt or even usurp the status quo of societal governance.

Okay, that’s our scaffolding for examining these ideas. Let’s look at some tangible studies.

Does extreme weather start wars?

The short answer: it’s an open question.

The better answer: Cullen Hendrix of the Peterson Institute for International Economics has a fascinating one. In a 2024 working paper with the PIIE, Hendrix examines the relationship between the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, and global geopolitical risks. ENSO is the fluctuation of winds and sea surface temperatures (SSTs) over the equatorial Pacific Ocean, with many implications for global climate. It’s a topic of intense study by climate scientists, as ENSO is a fiendishly difficult physical phenomenon to predict.

You’ve likely heard of El Niño and La Niña as distinct climate phenomena. The “oscillation” in ENSO refers to the phasal changes between El Niño and La Niña — when equatorial Pacific waters are warmer or cooler than average, respectively. One metric we have for determining the phase the Pacific is currently in is the Oceanic Niño Index (ONI). The vertical axis tells us how far away SSTs at a given time are away from the average over several decades.

(An aside: If you have some Python chops, or are inclined to get into quantitative climate modeling like the pros, the Climatematch Academy is a fantastic resource. The tutorials here will walk you through Xarray, the premier Python package for modeling weather and climate with high-dimensional data, and employing said data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Forecasting to do so.)

Back to geopolitics. The second index Hendrix examines is the Geopolitical Risk (GPR) Index by Dario Caldara and Matteo Iacoviello. The GPR is tabulated by analyzing an assortment of newspaper articles over the years, and identifying the relative frequency of topics pertaining to national security crises, such as the instigation of war, terrorist attacks, and military buildup. (I highly suggest checking out the authors’ presentation for details.)

Incorporating the two into several statistical models, Hendrix derives some fascinating results. These results, however, are sensible only when we ask how ENSO transmits its physical effects to specific geographic regions. For my earth scientist readers, you may have been wondering when I’ll bring up teleconnections, or relationships in regional weather patterns connected by large-scale climate dynamics. They are critically important for one simple question: which countries are most likely to be hit hardest by extreme ENSO phases?

Physically, teleconnections are very difficult to model. There’s a lot of heavy-duty mathematics involved. Nevertheless, Hendrix draws on existing research to pinpoint the top ten most probable countries with the strongest teleconnections — largely equatorial nations:

The second column corresponds to the strength of the teleconnection (the higher, the stronger), and the third is the correlation between ENSO effects and geopolitical risk. His specific choice of statistical model — convergent cross-mapping — is a tool of causal statistics, which endows these results with stronger merit for ENSO causing escalations in geopolitical risk than a merely correlative result.

That being said, the correlations for the countries with the strongest teleconnections aren’t terribly strong, which is quite an interesting result. By far the strongest and most statistically sound correlation is on the global scale. When plotting ONI values against the GPR, something intriguing happens: GPR tends to be most escalated during normal, non-extreme ENSO phases.

Hendrix offers the hypothesis that in periods of more extreme weather induced by El Niño, countries tend to focus inward on infrastructural resilience, rather than outward in broadsides of foreign aggression or sabre-rattling. Still, as Dale Copeland is wont to remind us, building statistical models to draw general relationships between causal factors of human conflict is fiendishly hard. Case studies (we will reclaim this phrase from the MBAs!) may be better suited. Another (co-authored) paper of Hendrix’s is more targeted, examining militarized fishing disputes in the East and South China Seas — instigated, in part, by ENSO.

Going through Hendrix’s oeuvre of research is going to be a priority of mine, as he’s one of few out there seriously investigating the climate → war direction of causality.

For now, do I believe that extreme weather can cause war? Uncertain, with much to learn, observe, and scrutinize. Regional conflict is one matter, but one persisting question will be how Ulrich Beck’s risk society of interdependent nation-states metamorphoses in a climate change scenario.

US-China Cold War 2.0: are we really fighting over weather?

Apparently?

What I like about this is its meta-nature. Extreme weather is not only geopoliticized — its study and surveillance, by worldwide meteorological agencies, is too. Per Bloomberg, China has been surging its public expenditures to their national weather agency (the China Meteorological Administration, 中国气象局) for years. Meanwhile, President Trump and his Project 2025 ilk aspire to torpedo NOAA into smithereens.

Prima facie, it seems absurd that weather prediction would emerge as an arena of great power competition. But if you’ve been following technical trends in weather modeling, it makes sense (whether you agree with it or not).

Traditionally, agencies like NASA or NOAA employ enormously computationally-intensive models that simulate very complicated geophysical equations to model aggregate climate trends. In recent years, climate and machine learning scientists have been innovating on deploying AI to accomplish just-as-good, if not superior modeling, consuming far fewer compute to boot. Google’s GraphCast and Nvidia’s Earth-2 are leading contenders for the Americans. Huawei’s Pangu-Weather, for the Chinese.

AI modeling of weather and climate will near-certainly be a subset of the broader strokes of antipathy between the United States and China on AI, national security, and the extraordinary material supply chains (e.g. semiconductors) needed to uphold these national ambitions. The details of which, we are likely to see in due time.

Science is an international effort, transcending borders and the lassitude of foreign policy, until geopoliticians come knocking at the door.

What I want to read

I’d like to end these posts with books I come across my initial round of research, particularly those that either a) look promising for fleshing out incipient ideas, or b) address topics I hadn’t considered before. These will be more tangential than primary reads germane to the topic at hand, but nevertheless critical in my view to examine.

Two topics on my mind are: US-NATO policy in the Arctic, and mineral supply chain resiliency in the climate crisis. The simple explanation: as the Arctic polar ice melts, maritime passages in the extreme north open. This opens a Pandora’s box of national security dilemmas. On the latter, solar panels and wind turbines only get built after securing the requisite material inputs. What’s the thought process on that?

• The Arctic and World Order, Kristina Spohr and Daniel S. Hamilton, Editors; Jason C. Moyer, Associate Editor

• Confronting the Curse: The Economics and Geopolitics of Natural Resource Governance, Cullen S. Hendrix and Marcus Noland

That’s all for today, folks. If you’ve made it to the end, thanks so much for your time. I hope you took something away from this piece. Should you have, please consider subscribing and spreading the word!

-David

Koyaanisqatsi.

In the Hopi language,“life out of balance.” Perhaps more familiarly to you, the 1982 cult classic by Godfrey Reggio, scored by Philip Glass.

It’s a vibes-y film, without question. For eighty-six minutes, the viewer is induced into a trance-like state, awash in cinematographic images of nature and the seeming cacophony of 20th century life (though undoubtedly quaint by our terms). The entire film is absolutely bereft of dialogue, relying only on the imagery and contemplative score by Philip Glass in driving its dramatic arc forward.

My introduction to Koyaanisqatsi was serendipitous. During COVID, I indulged in my curiosity to peruse a relative’s school papers at a music conservatory, dating nearly forty years. One syllabus for a film class entailed a screening of Koyaanisqatsi. By no means was I ever, or am, a film connoisseur. But I do love a solid Glass score (The Hours, anyone?), and I was nevertheless intrigued.

I really do recommend viewing the film, although it may not be everyone’s cuppa tea. Still, it’s a provoking experience. One perennial notion — the incongruities of “nature” and “technology” — is quite in-your-face.

I won’t litigate that debate today. What I do take away from Koyaanisqatsi, however, is the rationale for why I write here. In the ending title card for the film, several translations for the eponymous film are given. Any of these definitions could describe The Vibes © today. Many of you would probably find uncontroversial the idea that the vibes are off.

The inimitable Kyla Scanlon notably coined the phrase “vibecession” in 2022 to characterize the divergence between the extraordinary strength macroeconomic aggregate statistics during the Biden presidency, and the prolific pessimism of people’s economic sentiments. Among the most telling of economic sentiments throughout the Biden years is survey participants reporting great optimism about their financial straits, and yet, experiencing a bitter outlook on current and future trends.

Clearly, something’s off. And it’s making people uncertain, confused, and angry. All natural emotions to feel! It’s only human to do so. But it’s unsatisfactory to only feel, we must strive to understand why we feel this way.

Ergo, my first mandate in writing this Substack: What does it mean for life to feel — and perhaps to be — out of balance?

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The World of Yesterday

Astute readers will observe that the title of this post bears resemblance to the 1942 memoir of Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) titled The World of Yesterday: Memoires of a European (Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers). I would be hard-pressed to find a final benediction of one’s life story more harrowing than that of Zweig’s; to date, it is the only nonfiction work I have wept at. Zweig would take his own life one day after its publication.

An Austrian Jewish playwright, Zweig writes of the bard’s and the intellectual’s life at the apex of European society under Habsburg hegemony. Even as a translation, it is a work of melodious, florid writing, where every bit of minutiae of boyish life in the high culture of Viennese society is savored. Brilliant, and above all, wonderfully human writing flourishes in its pages.

The work is as much of an insight into the sweeping changes of eras — the world-historic innovations, horrors, and traumas that accompanies epochal shifts — as it is a lament of the old world lost. Doomscrolling through TikTok will beget attempted analogies to the interbellum between the world wars of the last century, self-assured influencers (and haute finance CEOs) foretelling a third global conflict to come. I do not think it’s healthy, nor rigorous nor true, to assume the inevitability of doom (as a reassurance to you, I’m often so guilty of this, but I promise I will try to not do this on Alphabet Agency).

But what is clear is the world of yesterday — our world of yesterday — is, in many respects, fading away into our collective memory. Political, social, and economic mores minimally appear to be undergoing profound paradigm shifts, if not outright structural evolution. The foreboding polycrisis of climate change, geopolitical and domestic turmoil, disease, and the malaise of our cultural and governance institutions looms.

How we understand our responses to the changing of the seasons of eons, in the rigor of institutional structure and in our humanity, and how all those who came before us did the same, is my second mandate.

The World of Tomorrow

Oracle-ing is sexy. Dragging people who are bad at oracle-ing on X is fun (for some).

I can’t predict the world of tomorrow. I’m sorry, I really can’t.

But what I hope to provide to my readers is a sense of reassurance that in times of cynicism, distrust, and heightened reactions to the vicissitudes of the world, we can at least try to make sense of the madness together.

I am as confused about many facets of our world as perhaps you may be.

My third mandate is to say let’s not be confused alone, left to broil in the despair of isolation.

Let’s work through this great mystery of life and our world together.

In his closing words, of The World of Yesterday and of life, Stefan Zweig leaves us his parting words, his final testament to the human spirit:

The sunlight was full and strong.

As I walked home, I suddenly saw my own shadow going ahead of me, just as I had seen the shadow of the last war behind this one.

That shadow had never left me all this time, it lay over my mind day and night.

Perhaps its dark outline also lies over the pages of this book.

But in the last resort, every shadow is also the child of light, and only those who have known the light and the dark, have seen war and peace, rise and fall, have truly lived their lives.

We need not exercise hubris that war and pestilence and calamity is sure to come. We can, nonetheless, find solace that in spite of all to come, in all of the turbulence life tends to impose on us, we will have truly lived.

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