With Skin-in-the-Game Urgency, Wexler Sought Cure and Was Enrolled in RCT in Spite of Age

I argue that a person who has a disease, or has a relative who has a disease, sometimes has a skin-in-the-game sense of urgency in seeking a cure for the disease. The urgency sometimes energizes them to ignore perverse incentives, and to overcome obstacles and constraints, that slow or block the efforts of academics, pharma firms, or government regulators, to fight the disease. The passages quoted below suggest that Nancy Wexler has a skin-in-the-game urgency to cure Huntington’s disease.

An important side-note to her story is that investigators conducting an RCT to test a possible drug to fight Huntington’s disease, decided to enroll Wexler in their RCT, despite her being older than the upper limit set in their RCT protocol. This illustrates my claim that in the actual messy real-world there are many ways that RCTs, as implemented, deviate from the ideal “gold standard” RCTs that are discussed in the theoretical literature.

(p. D1) At age 80, Nancy Wexler has Huntington’s disease, a dreaded brain disease that destroys a person’s ability to control movements. There is no treatment. There is no cure.

. . .

Nancy is not just any Huntington’s disease patient. For decades, she led a research effort in a remote area of Venezuela that found the gene responsible for Huntington’s. That work yielded a blood test that enable at-risk people to find out if they are destined to get the disease.

. . .

(p. D5) After graduating from Radcliffe College, she was in Europe on Fulbright fellowship when she was called home to learn her mother had the disease.

. . .

When his wife’s slide into the disease could no longer be denied, Milton called both sisters home and sat them down in his bedroom. The 50-50 chance now hung over both of them, too. He gave them some advice they never forgot: Don’t waste your life.

Alice decided to ignore Huntington’s and her own risk. “I didn’t want to have anything to do with it,” she told me. She became a historian.

Nancy had a different reaction. She would make Huntington’s the focus of her life, getting a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan. Her thesis subject: the experiences of people with Huntington’s, and of those at risk for getting it. She thought of that choice as a way of coping with her situation. She wrote that it was a version of something the American Psychiatric Association called implosion theory — “a technique used in behavior therapy where the client is flooded with experiences believed to be relevant to the client’s fear.”

“I could talk about Huntington’s without seeming selfish and whiny,” she explained. “I could talk about how people felt in the context of helping them.”

. . .

On frequent trips to California, Nancy was also helping her father lead the Huntington Disease Foundation. The group’s gatherings couldn’t be further from the staid scientific meetings that are the main staple of academic life. There were no traditional talks, no slides. Instead, Nancy and her father invited creative scientists — who may or may not have ever thought about Huntington’s before — to brainstorm about ways to find the gene, scrawling their ideas on a whiteboard. The meetings always included a Huntington’s patient, or the family member of a patient, so the scientists could understand what was a stake.

. . .

The search for the gene began in earnest in 1980, focusing on three communities around Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela, that had the greatest prevalence of Huntington’s disease in the world.

. . .

Nancy led the research team, returning to Venezuela regularly for 22 years and collecting more than 4,000 blood samples from Venezuelans. She cared deeply for them, and even helped establish a nursing home for Huntington’s patients.

For the full article, see:

Gina Kolata. “Carrying On After Choosing Uncertainty.” The New York Times (Tues., June 23, 2026): D1 & D5.

(Note: ellipses added. In the original article, the phrase Don’t waste your life is italicized for emphasis.)

(Note: the online version of the article has the date June 11, 2026, and has the title “The Researcher Who Didn’t Want to Know.”)

In the Actual Messy Real-World, RCTs Can Be a Fool’s Gold Standard

George Stigler used to emphasize that when we compare markets to the government we often make an unfair comparison. We compare the ideal theoretical government, with the actual messy real-world market. We do the same thing in comparing methods of reaching medical truth. In this analogy the role of the government is played by double-blind randomized clinical trials (RCTs). In ideal theory, RCTs are the “gold standard.” The story quoted from below, shows that a lot can go wrong when RCTs are conducted in the actual messy real-world.

Note that the flaws in the RCT were NOT caught in the peer-review process, but were caught by “online sleuths and physicians,” practitioners with a sense of urgency and mission.

(p. D2) Early this year, a medical journal article caught the attention of cancer patients and doctors worldwide because of its extraordinary conclusion. Simply changing the time of day that immunotherapy was administered appeared to produce a stunning benefit for lung cancer patients.

Those who received IV infusions in the morning had their cancer kept at bay for twice as long as those who got it in the afternoon, according to the results from a clinical trial in China and published in the journal Nature Medicine in February [2026]. The study also reported that the patients lived nearly twice as long.

. . .

But on Wednesday [June 24, 2026], Nature Medicine retracted the study, citing a list of inconsistencies and irregularities in the trial’s design and results.

. . .

Among the issues that the journal cited in its retraction notice: Records that were supposed to be locked before the study started were changed midway through. There were discrepancies between the Chinese version of the study’s plan and the translated version. Every patient remained treated and tracked in the study’s first year, and no one dropped out because of side effects — highly unusual in an oncology study. And unusual patterns were found in the timing of follow-up scans.

“Due to the amount and nature of the problems identified, the editors no longer have confidence in the integrity of the results,” the journal said.

. . .

China’s critics often question the reliability of its biomedical research. Experts said that, similar to studies in the United States, China’s research output spans a wide range in quality: Some Chinese scientists run their studies at the most meticulous standards. Others were said to cut corners.

. . .

The study had enrolled 210 patients with advanced lung cancer at Hunan Cancer Hospital in Changsha, a city in south-central China. Patients were randomly assigned to receive infusions of an immunotherapy — Merck’s blockbuster drug Keytruda or Tyvyt, which is not approved in the United States — either before or after 3 p.m.

The study reported that tumors did not progress for 11 months in patients who received the earlier infusions, compared with six months for those given the later infusions. Patients receiving the earlier infusions lived for 28 months, compared with 17 months for those infused later in the day.

. . .

Dr. Anil Makam, an epidemiologist and health services researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, said such a drastic benefit, if real, would have prompted infusion clinics to overhaul staffing and scheduling to shift appointments to earlier in the day.

“If we believed the effects, it would be malpractice not to,” he said.

But within days after the study’s publication in Nature Medicine, online sleuths and physicians like Dr. Makam began raising concerns on social media and in blog posts. Less than three weeks after the study was published, the journal published an editor’s note saying it was investigating the issues.

In a statement on Thursday [June 25, 2026], Dr. João Monteiro, chief editor of Nature Medicine, which is published by Springer Nature, said, “We are grateful to the research community for bringing these concerns to our attention.”

For the full article, see:

Rebecca Robbins. “‘Too Good to Be True’: Chinese Study on Cancer Therapy Is Retracted.” The New York Times (Tues., June 30, 2026): B3.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed dates, added.)

(Note: the online version of the Houreld article was updated June 25, 2026, and has the title “‘Too Good to Be True’: A Chinese Study on Timing Cancer Therapy Is Retracted.” Where there is a slight difference in wording, the quotations above follow the print version.)

Scientists Find “64,000 Square Miles of Climate Resilient Ocean” Where “Corals Are More Likely to Survive”

When environmentalists want to highlight the harm from global warming they frequently present the dire plight of the world’s coral reefs as a prime example. Now, in The New York Times Science section, Katharine Houreld reports that a new scientific study documents that the plight is far less dire than environmentalists had previously thought:

(p. D2) As spiking ocean temperatures are devastating reefs around the world, a handful of scientists have found a reason for cautious optimism. They’ve used artificial intelligence to detect sheltered pockets where cool currents, reduced exposure to sunlight and locations outside cyclone paths mean corals are more likely to survive.

The study, led by the Wildlife Conservation Society and presented at the Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa, Kenya, is currently undergoing peer review for publication in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

Five scientists identified 42 factors that create the conditions for the coral havens, called refugia, and then ran those through a program with nearly 38,000 human observations of coral cover and composition gathered over 65 years. The program identified more than 64,000 square miles of climate-resilient ocean in 72 countries.

The work found three times as many refugia as a landmark 2018 assessment known as the 50 Reefs Study, the first paper to systematically identify areas around the globe where coral might still be saved.

Houreld’s article is:

Katharine Houreld. “Cooler Currents: Down in the Reefs, Uplifting News About Global Warming.” The New York Times (Tues., June 30, 2026): D2.

(Note: the online version of the Houreld article was updated June 29, 2026, and has the title “Climate: There’s a Bit of Good News for Coral Reefs.” Where there is a slight difference in wording, the quotations above follow the print version.)

The academic preprint summarized in Houreld’s article is:

Zawada, Kyle J. A., Emily S. Darling, Stacy D. Jupiter, Timothy R. McClanahan, and Joseph M. Maina. 2026. Machine-Learning and Prioritization Models Reveal Climate Refugia for Coral Reefs into 2050. EcoEvoRxiv (May 20).

An Innovative Entrepreneur Respects Nozickian Moral Side-Constraints

In Openness to Creative Destruction, I distinguish the “innovative entrepreneur” from the “free-agent entrepreneur”: “a ‘free-agent entrepreneur’ is her own boss as she does something that has been done before; an ‘innovative entrepreneur’ is her own boss as she creates a new good or a new process” (Diamond 2019, 2). Here I add a qualification that an entrepreneur is only an innovative entrepreneur if she respects Nozickian moral side-constraints as she creates her new good or process. Libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick defended an individual’s right to seek their own goals, subject to the moral side-constraint (Nozick 1974, 33) that the seeker not make use of “force, theft, fraud” (Nozick 1974, ix). For instance when the executives at Purdue Pharma claimed that OxyContin was nonaddictive, they committed flagrant fraud, violating the Nozickian moral side-constraint, and so while they may have been exemplars of what William Baumol called “destructive entrepreneurship” (Baumol 1990), they have no claim to have been exemplars of “innovative entrepreneurship.”

    References:

Baumol, William J. 1990. Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive. The Journal of Political Economy 98, no. 5, Part 1 (Oct.): 893–921.

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. 2019. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, Inc.

How Regulations Harm the Worst Off

In my “Innovative Entrepreneurs Replace Despair with Hope” paper (currently undergoing a second round of revision in response to referee requests), I argue that the worst off will benefit if we strengthen a redundant labor market by unbinding innovative entrepreneurs.

Regulations harm the worst off in other ways besides fewer jobs for the worst off. They disproportionately increase consumer prices in the categories, like food, that are most heavily consumed by the worst off (Chambers et al. 2019). They reduce wage growth (Bailey et al. 2019), increase poverty rates (Chambers et al. 2019b), generally increase inequality (Choudhury 2023; Chambers and O’Reilly 2019, 2022), and specifically increase inequality by disproportionately increasing salaries of regulation compliance workers, such as accountants, lawyers, and managers (Bailey et al. 2019, 92-93; Chambers et al. 2019a; Mulholland 2019). Finally, regulations increase mortality (Broughel and Chambers 2022).

Here are the sources cited above:

Bailey, James B., Diana W. Thomas, and Joseph R. Anderson. 2019. Regressive Effects of Regulation on Wages. Public Choice 180, nos. 1-2: 91-103.

Broughel, James, and Dustin Chambers. 2022. Federal Regulation and Mortality in the 50 States. Risk Analysis 42, no. 3 (March): 592-613.

Chambers, Dustin, Courtney A. Collins, and Alan Krause. 2019. How Do Federal Regulations Affect Consumer Prices? An Analysis of the Regressive Effects of Regulation. Public Choice 180, no. 1 (July): 57-90.

Chambers, Dustin, and Colin O’Reilly. 2019. Entry Regulations and Income Inequality at the Regional Level. Journal of Regional Analysis & Policy 49, no. 1: 31-39.

Chambers, Dustin, and Colin O’Reilly. 2022. Regulation and Income Inequality in the United States. European Journal of Political Economy 72 (March): 102101.

Chambers, Dustin, Patrick A. McLaughlin, and Laura Stanley. 2019a. Barriers to Prosperity: The Harmful Impact of Entry Regulations on Income Inequality. Public Choice 180, nos. 1/2 (July): 165-90.

Chambers, Dustin, Patrick A. McLaughlin, and Laura Stanley. 2019b. Regulation and Poverty: An Empirical Examination of the Relationship between the Incidence of Federal Regulation and the Occurrence of Poverty across the US States. Public Choice 180, nos. 1–2 (July): 131–44.

Choudhury, Sanchari. 2023. The Causal Effect of Regulation on Income Inequality across the U.S. States. European Journal of Political Economy 80 (Dec.): 102471.

Mulholland, Sean E. 2019. Stratification by Regulation: Are Bootleggers and Baptists Biased? Public Choice 180: 105–30.

An earlier draft of my “Innovative Entrepreneurs Replace Despair with Hope” paper can be found at:

Diamond, Arthur M., Innovative Entrepreneurs Replace Despair with Hope (March 13, 2026). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6412238 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6412238

Satisfy the Nozick’s Lockean Proviso by Universal Basic Income (UBI) or by Unbinding Entrepreneurship?

The philosopher John Locke gave an account of how it could be just for a person to appropriate land as personal property, when the land previously was open to the common use of everyone. He said that this could be justly done if the appropriator had mixed their labor with the land, say by farming it, so long as there remained an equal amount and quality of land for others to likewise appropriate (Locke [1689] 1963, II sect. 33 p. 333). Many, including Robert Nozick, Matt Zwolinski, and me, find this a plausible account. The problem is how to satisfy what Nozick called “the Lockean proviso” (Nozick 1974, 178-182) that there be an equal amount and quality of land for others to likewise appropriate. Usually the best land will be acquired first, and what remains will be of lower quality. (For example, by the time the German Mennonites came to the U.S. from Russia, the only land left open for them to homestead (mix their labor with) was the prairie of Oklahoma that already was barren and was soon to turn into an unfarmable dust bowl (Egan 2006, 62-72).) So a conscientious political philosopher would seek to preserve the spirit of the Lockean proviso by saying that it could be met if the worst off had some other way, besides mixing their labor with good enough land, that would allow them to support their family and find a path to a better future. Zwolinski (2015) argues that the best other way to satisfy the Lockean proviso is by instituting Universal Basic Income (UBI). I argue that the best other way is for the worst off to have good enough job opportunities, what I call a “redundant labor market,” or else to have good enough free-agent entrepreneurship opportunities.

The books referenced above are:

Egan, Timothy. 2006. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Locke, John. [1689] 1963. Two Treatises of Government. 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, Inc.

Zwolinski, Matt. 2015. Property Rights, Coercion, and the Welfare State: The Libertarian Case for a Basic Income for All. The Independent Review 19, no. 4 (Spring): 515–29.

A Stable Macroeconomy, and the Agglomeration Benefits of Cities, Allow Redundant Labor Markets to Flourish

In my “Innovative Entrepreneurs Replace Despair with Hope” paper (currently undergoing a second round of revision in response to referee requests), I argue that the worst off will benefit if we strengthen a redundant labor market by unbinding innovative entrepreneurs.

Besides unbinding innovative entrepreneurs, two other conditions can strengthen redundant labor markets: a stable macroeconomy and the agglomeration benefits of urban areas.

Many believe that inevitable recessions must periodically undermine the first of these conditions, a stable macroeconomy, and thus threaten an otherwise redundant labor market. But a plausible contrarian view argues that recessions are not inevitable, since they usually are caused by policy mistakes that can be avoided (Furchtgott-Roth 2026; Glynn 2018; Goodspeed 2026; Irwin 2016, 2019a, 2019b; Rudebusch 2016).

For example, Australia achieved 29 years without a recession, allowing a flourishing redundant labor market to attract energetic, smart, young French citizens who could not find jobs in a sclerotic labor market in France (Rubin and Breeden 2015). Australian workers could often move seamlessly between entrepreneurship and jobs (Bradsher 2016). Australian lockdown policies during the Covid-19 pandemic may have contributed to Australia’s first recession in 29 years (Kwai 2020).

In the couple of years before the pandemic, the U.S. economy, though far from a perfect exemplar of a redundant labor market, was strong enough to allow more workers to quit their jobs to seek better jobs (Cutter 2018; Harrison and Morath 2018). The strong economy also allowed more low-skilled workers to find jobs (Ip 2019; Modestino et al. 2016, 2020).

A second condition that contributes to the flourishing of redundant labor markets consists of the agglomeration benefits of urban areas, where firms and workers are both numerous and diverse. The positive effects of this density and diversity are called “agglomeration forces” (Moretti 2013, 124). Unfortunately, these positive forces are weakened by regulations, including zoning and regulations that restrict the construction and development of housing, and thereby limit the extent to which low-skilled workers can move to, and benefit from, redundant labor markets (Herkenhoff et al. 2018; Hsieh and Moretti 2019).

For example, in New York City regulations limit the height of skyscrapers (Glaeser 2011) and require apartments to exceed a minimum size (Bertaud 2018, 11, 47, 231-234, and 258-259). When Alain Bertaud and his wife were young and poor, they were only able to move from Paris to Manhattan because they found a tiny apartment that they could afford. They were delighted because they valued all that Manhattan could offer. But today a Manhattan developer who built such tiny apartments would be violating the law (Bertaud 2019, about an hour into interview).

Some of those who are among the worst off might improve some of their circumstances by moving to one of the few cities (most notably Houston) that have better jobs and do not have zoning laws and other regulations that discourage newcomers (Gray 2022; Siegan 1972). But the increase in hope from a distant job is sometimes countered by the need to commute back to the home community where a spouse, children, or parents have deep roots. When the GM plant closed in Janesville, Wisconsin many of the workers could only find comparable jobs at GM plants hundreds of miles away. Many of them became “GM gypsies” commuting back and forth to Janesville on a weekend, when they could, to see their family (Goldstein 2017, 105). As Amy Goldstein describes them, they persevere less from any hope for a better life, than from a sense of pride, a work ethic.

Here are the sources cited above:

Bertaud, Alain. 2018. Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Bertaud, Alain. 2019. Alain Bertaud on Cities, Planning, and Order Without Design. EconTalk, interviewed by Russ Roberts, June 3. https://www.econtalk.org/alain-bertaud-on-cities-planning-and-order-without-design/.

Bradsher, Keith. 2016. Money from the Dust. New York Times (Sept. 25): 1 & 4–5.

Bregman, Rutger. 2017. Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

Cutter, Chip. 2018. For Job Recruiters, These Are Trying Times. Wall Street Journal (Dec. 20): B6.

Furchtgott-Roth, Diana. 2026. The Events That Cause Recessions. Wall Street Journal (Sat., June 6): C7–C8.

Glynn, James. 2018. The Outlook; Keeping an Economic Boom Going. Wall Street Journal (July 16): A2.

Goodspeed, Tyler Beck. Recession: The Real Reasons Economies Shrink and What to Do About It. New York: Basic Venture, 2026.

Gray, M. Nolan. 2022. Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.

Harrison, David, and Eric Morath. 2018. Economy Spurs Job Hopping. Wall Street Journal (July 5): A1-A2.

Herkenhoff, Kyle F., Lee E. Ohanian, and Edward C. Prescott. 2018. Tarnishing the Golden and Empire States: Land-Use Restrictions and the U.S. Economic Slowdown. Journal of Monetary Economics 93 (Jan.): 89-109.

Hsieh, Chang-Tai, and Enrico Moretti. 2019. Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation. American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 11, no. 2 (April): 1-39.

Ip, Greg. 2019. Capital Account; Long Expansion Lifts Low-Skilled Workers Too. Wall Street Journal (July 11): A2.

Irwin, Neil. 2016. Expansion Is Old, Not at Death’s Door. New York Times (Oct. 28): B1 & B2.

Irwin, Neil. 2019a. An Economic Boom That Might Be Changing the Rules. New York Times (May 4): A13.

Irwin, Neil. 2019b. What America Can Learn from Australia’s Economic Miracle. New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (April 7): 1 & 6.

Kwai, Isabella. 2020. Covid-19 Knocks Australia into First Recession in Decades. New York Times (Sept. 3): B4.

Modestino, Alicia Sasser, Daniel Shoag, and Joshua Ballance. 2016. Downskilling: Changes in Employer Skill Requirements over the Business Cycle. Labour Economics 41 (Aug.): 333-47.

Modestino, Alicia Sasser, Daniel Shoag, and Joshua Ballance. 2020. Upskilling: Do Employers Demand Greater Skill When Workers Are Plentiful? Review of Economics and Statistics 102, no. 4 (Oct.): 793-805.

Moretti, Enrico. 2013. The New Geography of Jobs. pb ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co.

Rubin, Alissa J., and Aurelien Breeden. 2015. Song for French Charity Strikes Discordant Note. New York Times (March 4): A6.

Rudebusch, Glenn D. 2016. Will the Economic Recovery Die of Old Age? FRBSF Economic Letter, # 2016-03 (Feb. 4): 1-4.

Siegan, Bernard. 1972. Land Use Without Zoning. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

An earlier draft of my “Innovative Entrepreneurs Replace Despair with Hope” paper can be found at:

Diamond, Arthur M., Innovative Entrepreneurs Replace Despair with Hope (March 13, 2026). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6412238 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6412238

Innovative New Goods Can Radically Improve Lives

In my Openness book I argue that the kind of economic growth that matters most is not the greater accumulation of old goods like shoes, but the creation of innovative new goods. The story quoted below gives a case-in-point, documenting how driverless cars radically improve the lives of blind passengers.

(p. A20) Mr. Brunt, 28, was born with a rare eye disorder. He can’t drive himself, and had never experienced the feeling of being alone in a car — until Waymo’s self-driving vehicles started navigating San Francisco’s hilly streets two years ago.

Now Mr. Brunt will occasionally make the hourlong journey across the bay from his home in Solano County, Calif., just to ride in one. “It’s that feeling of independence and actually having the control,” he said. “Being able to play whatever music you want, feeling like you’re in your own car.”

. . .

Claire Stanley, who is legally blind and uses a guide dog, said she had also had to “battle” for Uber and Lyft drivers to pick her up at home in Washington, D.C. When she travels to a city with autonomous ride shares, she and her dog, a yellow Labrador named Tulane, jump into them without a struggle.

“When you don’t have a driver, there’s no driver to say no,” she said.

. . .

On a drizzly day last month, Mr. Brunt was heading to the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. He had some trouble finding his Waymo’s precise location, so he pressed a button on the app to play a melody from the car and followed the noise.

He hopped into the passenger seat, and his Spotify account immediately connected to the car’s stereo system, blasting his electronic music.

As the steering wheel began to turn, moving the car onto the road, Mr. Brunt, ready to enjoy the ride, leaned his seat back and fiddled with the temperature until it was set to 70 degrees.

“That feeling of independence is amazing,” he said. “It’s something I never thought I would have growing up.”

For the full story see:

Sonia A. Rao and Rachel Bujalski. “Blind Waymo Users Revel in the Joy of Riding Alone.” The New York Times (Mon., May 25, 2026): A20.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 24, 2026, and has the title “Blind Waymo Riders Savor the Solitude of Independence.”)

My Openness book, mentioned in my opening comments, is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Entrepreneurial Apple Finds Uses for “Defective” Chips “That Might Otherwise Be Thrown Out”

I am currently revising my “Innovative Entrepreneurs Replace Despair with Hope” paper in which I argue that if we unbind entrepreneurs from regulations they will be free to find new uses for labor that is currently unemployed or underemployed. In the paper I present as proof-of-concept, examples where entrepreneurs found uses for the previously useless, such as the startup that uses milkweed floss as insulation in parkas. I just ran across another example, in the passages quoted below, in which Apple has found uses for defective processor chips that previously would have been thrown out.

(p. A1) Apple, long revered for its premium-priced products, has managed to develop a booming business selling cheaper devices when most gadget makers are being hammered by rising costs.

One of its secrets: using chips with slight defects that might otherwise be thrown out.

The strategy is apparent in the technical minutiae of the newly released $599 MacBook Neo, which early data suggest is a hit with customers.

The chip powering the Neo is Apple’s A18 Pro, the same chip first used inside the iPhone 16 Pro two years ago, but with one key difference. The Neo version of the chip has a “5-core” graphics processor, one less than the version inside the 2024 iPhones, indicating that Apple was able to save some of the A18 Pro chips with a defective core for future use.

Defective cores can be disabled, leaving a chip that still functions perfectly well to power different, often cheaper devices—in this case an entry-level laptop instead of a top-of-the-line iPhone.

. . .

(p. A5) “If you can take the stuff that doesn’t meet highest level specs and still use it, you can save money, scrap and time,” says Tim Culpan, a supply-chain analyst who has written about Apple’s Neo chip orders. “Also you can reach a lot more customers you might not otherwise be able to sell to.”

Apple has used its flexibility with its own silicon to develop lower-priced iPhones and computers, many of which have sold well. The Neo is so popular that Apple is running low on leftover chips and has been forced to order new ones, according to people familiar with its supply chain.

. . .

Using chips in the Neo that might otherwise be tossed is one way Apple was able to deliver its first entry-level laptop.

For the full story, see:

Rolfe Winkler and Yang Jie. “Imperfect Chips Power Apple Products, Profits.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., May 19, 2026): A1 & A5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 17, 2026, and has the title “Apple Is Making Hit Products and High Profits From Imperfect Chips.”)

A working draft of the paper I refer to in my opening comments is:

Diamond, Arthur M., “Innovative Entrepreneurs Replace Despair with Hope” (March 13, 2026). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6412238 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6412238

Seven 2023-2025 Books That Suggest Cutting Regulations

In my “Innovative Entrepreneurs Replace Despair with Hope” paper, I claim to have identified seven books (in addition to the Klein and Thompson book) published from 2023-2025 “that either explicitly advocate, or implicitly imply, that regulations should be cut back.” In revising my paper for possible publication, I need to cut about 5,000 words due to the journal’s article word-limit, so I wrote that I would post the list of seven books here on my blog.

Here is that list (including the Klein and Thompson book).

Caplan, Bryan, and Ady Branzei. 2024. Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation. Washington, DC: Cato Institute.

Dunkelman, Marc J. 2025. Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress―and How to Bring It Back. New York: PublicAffairs.

Hamel, Gary, and Michele Zanini. 2025. Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them. Revised & Updated ed: Harvard Business School Press.

Howard, Philip K. 2024. Everyday Freedom: Designing the Framework for a Flourishing Society. Garden City, NY: Rodin Books.

Howard, Philip K. 2025. Saving Can-Do: How to Revive the Spirit of America. Garden City, NY: Rodin Books.

Klein, Ezra, and Derek Thompson. 2025. Abundance. New York: Avid Reader Press.

Lam, Barry. 2025. Fewer Rules, Better People: The Case for Discretion. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Potter, Brian. 2025. The Origins of Efficiency. South San Francisco, CA: Stripe Press.

An earlier draft of my “Innovative Entrepreneurs Replace Despair with Hope” paper can be found at:

Diamond, Arthur M., Innovative Entrepreneurs Replace Despair with Hope (March 13, 2026). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6412238 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6412238