End of the mailbag as we know it

Don't worry, we've got something new in the works!

Today’s mailbag is not the last ever, but we are going to be hitting pause on the regular Friday mailbag columns and unveiling a new format that we think will be a little fresher and get a wider circle of people engaged. Watch for full details on how to participate in this Sunday’s thread.

While you wait, here’s some good news: Joe Biden is badly out-fundraising Donald Trump, the ongoing reforestation of the US east coast is delivering environmental benefits, Wisconsin’s egregious gerrymandering has been largely fixed, and lot size reform works. Here’s a good bill from John Cornyn that would create a stronger version of gainful employment rules to crack down on higher education scams.

Meanwhile, the newly funded and aggressive tax police are on the beat, taking on abusive tax deductions related to private jets.

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lindamc: Tyler Cowen recently had a crazy or genius take on Casablanca: This was a follow-up to a Twitter thread on the topic “what is a good book or film that charts the trajectory of a profoundly healthy and transformational relationship?”

Cowen’s read is funny, but I think the more conventional read is better aligned with the context of the time. The movie is based on an unproduced play, “Everybody Comes to Rick’s,” that was written in 1940, and the screen rights were purchased right after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Hollywood was very pro-Allies and pro-intervention in the early days of World War II (Charles Lindberg and other anti-semites in the isolationist camp complained a lot about Jewish influence on Hollywood in this regard), and the point of the story really is that Rick and Ilsa choose duty and idealism over comfort and happiness.

What Cowen is pointing to is a plot flaw in the film.

The story hinges on the idea that helping a Czech resistance leader flee Vichy-controlled North Africa and make it to the United States would make an important contribution to the war effort. Everyone in the film — Rick, Ilsa, Strasser, Laszlo himself — acts on this idea. The letters of transit that Laszlo needs work perfectly well as a MacGuffin, but Laszlo himself isn’t a MacGuffin; he’s an important player in a love triangle. And while “saving Laszlo is really important” must have felt like a reasonable story choice in the context of 1940, we have the luxury of knowing the actual history. The Pearl Harbor bombings in December 1941 brought the United States into the war, Allied forces landed first in North Africa, then in Italy, and then in France. Red Army forces would beat the Nazis in the east, and postwar Czechoslovakia would become a Soviet satellite state. The fate of someone like Laszlo would be totally unimportant, and that opens the door to Cowen’s cynical read of the whole thing.

But you could rescue the stakes with a tiny tweak: What if instead of being a Czech resistance leader, Laszlo was a Czech nuclear scientist?

The whole story was written by people who didn’t know how the war ended, so they weren’t able to properly set up the “Laszlo escaping is objectively important to defeating the Axis” story with any detail. But the movie works fine as long as you accept the idea that all the characters, given the situation, believe Laszlo is important.

Nicholas Decker: Cousin marriage is bad for your health. In-breeding reduces lifespan by about three years on average, and one round of cousin marriage reduces mean IQ of the offspring by 2.5-3.5 points . Pakistanis in Britain, who have an extremely high rate of in-breeding, account for three percent of births and one third of recessive genetic disorders.

A map of cousin marriage will simply be a map of the Muslim world (excepting Southeast Asia). Given this, how much of the economic underperformance of that region can be attributable to cousin marriage? And is there a path forward for reform? And could Britain substantially improve the world by banning cousin marriage?