1. Rewarding failure? 2. An excellent Brian Potter explainer on how matrix algebra is used in both LLMs and robotics. 3. Chat with Mircea Cărtărescu. 4. It seems the expansion of remote work reduced births? 5. “Living Science uses an AI agent to reproduce key findings from seminal papers in economics, document what holds up […]

One of the titans, and yes from the BRD.

In the past year American markets have digested the largest-ever initial public offering (SpaceX), equity raise by a public company (Google) or a foreign firm (SK Hynix), private-funding round (OpenAI) and private-debt deal (Broadcom), as well as most of the biggest bond issue in history (Amazon). There was the first $1trn exchange-traded fund, or ETF […]

Volume 23, Issue 2, September 2026 In this issue: “China shock” fragility: According to David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson (2013), the “China shock” hit the United States from 1990 to 2007. When corrections by Kirill Borusyak et al. (2022) are fully applied, Joseph Francis argues, the harm of Chinese imports to unemployment, labor force […]

For taxes too: Using administrative data from Scandinavian countries, we provide evidence on international migration responses to wealth taxes and evaluate their aggregate economic implications. We find significant migration responses among the wealthy: A 1 percentage point increase in the top wealth tax rate decreases the stock of wealthy taxpayers by about 2 percent. A […]

1. How rich was Anglo-Saxon England? 2. New game theory paper on AI races. 3. Scott Sumner movie reviews, please note he is always correct and thus the greatest film critic in the world, at least by that metric. 4. What should the AI safety movement be? 5. The frontier models are beating licensed accountants. […]

Computer scientists Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor wrote AI as Normal Technology The statement “AI is normal technology” is three things: a description of current AI, a prediction about the foreseeable future of AI, and a prescription about how we should treat it. We view AI as a tool that we can and should remain […]

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him.  Looking at Wikipedia: Thomas L. Griffiths (born c. 1978) is an Australian academic who is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Information Technology, Consciousness, and Culture at Princeton University. He studies human decision-making and its connection to problem-solving methods in computation. His book with Brian Christian, Algorithms […]

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary: Tyler and Luis start their conversation with Spain — housing, NIMBYism, and the productivity crisis; Spanish literature and why the Civil War still looms so large; and what Chicago taught Luis about party discipline in European politics. Then to the EU’s […]

Singapore has launched a dating platform, the latest social-engineering experiment by the city-state’s government to tackle its fast-declining fertility rate. The initiative, known as FirstDate, opened under a pilot scheme this month for public sector employees aged 21-35 and uses a Nobel Economics Prize-winning matchmaking algorithm. An additional tool suggests date activities and allows users […]

1. Cato’s Vision for Liberty award for 50k. 2. Gross output signals an economic surge (WSJ). 3. Echo, a new AI site to mimic the styles of particular writers or writing styles.  Thread on it here. 4. “Open USD (OUSD), the new stablecoin from Coinbase, Mastercard, Stripe, Visa and others launches…” 5. Are men or […]

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him, live at the Roots of Progress event next week.  From Wikipedia: Moxie Marlinspike is an American entrepreneur, cryptographer, and computer security researcher. Marlinspike is the creator of Signal, co-founder of the Signal Technology Foundation, and served as the first CEO of Signal Messenger LLC. He is […]

Here is the link.

We introduce an open-source workflow that enables an LLM to reproduce, improve, and extend an economics article using the article’s published replication package. First, the workflow attempts to reproduce the original calculations, checks for discrepancies with published findings, and performs automated sensitivity analysis. Across 4,452 published replication packages for five economics journals, the workflow flags […]

Police in Singapore have charged a man who is accused of posting an AI-generated image of a saltwater crocodile in a popular reservoir. Ye Lin was charged with communicating a false message and obstructing the course of justice for allegedly deleting the picture and the application he used. The fake image caused public concern, authorities […]

1. It seems there is no evidence for the concept of a fertility rebound. 2. We will tell children nasty stories, but mostly only show them positive images. 3. Deregulation in Idaho. 4. Weather risk is reflected in Florida home prices. 5. Have we discovered where Aristotle taught Alexander the Great? 6. How to keep […]

The New Republic writes “President Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans.” Yes, but do note that no student is banned from any major and the lending rule is mild. Undergraduate programs must show: that their graduates earn more than the typical high school diploma […]

The author is Sam Bloch, and the subtitle is The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource.  An interesting book on a neglected topic, here is one excerpt: Shade is not part of L.A.’s modern identity.  In the 1930s, the city was rezoned to Federal Housing Administration design standards and banned high-density developments like row houses.  […]

That is the topic of my latest Free Press column, here is one excerpt: I do not think the skeptics would put it this way, but as I read Conti, I find he has a pretty bleak fundamental view of humanity. Are we all really just looking to veg out and abandon curiosity and inquiry, […]

The vulnerability of our shipping routes remains underdiscussed, perhaps that is in some ways a good thing: We study the macroeconomic and trade-policy implications of disruptions to U.S.-bound shipping routes. Standard models treat them as iceberg-cost shocks, conflating the shock with the response to it. Using satellite vessel-tracking data, we construct route-level measures of potential […]

1. Comment section arbitrage.  This is what the AIs do too, right? 2. Claims about New Zealand. 3. Good Bryan Caplan post on Effective Altruism. 4. Reported female bisexuality is in retreat? 5. Sadly, now a fringey view, yes.  But not with me. 6. Fewer and fewer are defecting from North Korea.

Also known as Why I Do Not Believe in the Housing Theory of Everything: Development accounting is the search for proximate sources of cross-country income differences. This article describes how knowledge in this field has evolved over the two decades since the influential work of Caselli (2005). There have been large advances in the measurement […]

We measure how artificial intelligence (AI) affects the economy through its impact on software engineering productivity. We use information from financial markets to develop a forward-looking measure that is available in real time. We estimate the sensitivity of each firm’s stock return to an AI stock market index, and how this sensitivity depends on the […]

When it comes to bear encounters in or near the wild, dogs are the aggressors in 54 percent of incidents, according to a recent study conducted by bear experts at Brigham Young University and other institutions, and published in the Journal of Wildlife Management. In approximately 36 percent of the encounters, dogs did not come to […]

1. Should more men move to Alaska? 2. The world’s oldest known peace treaty found. 3. In praise of Joyce, Whitman, and Crane. 4. Background explainer on the Chinese AI ecosystem. 5. YIMBY working in Portland (WSJ). 6. Profile of Helen DeWitt. 7. Human frailty.

Here is the NYT obituary.

An updated version of our Marginal Revolution University (MRU) video on defining the unemployment rate. Free to use for anyone but goes best, of course, with Modern Principles of Economics, the best principles of economics textbook.

At times we forget what an amazing wonder the Bundesrepublik Deutschland was.  At the end of the World War II, Germany was one of the sickest and cruelest human societies in history, ever.  Not too many years later, it was one of the best and most successful societies ever. By the 1980s, living standards had […]

Scientific progress is a key driver of economic growth and prosperity. There is great excitement- but also concerns- about the impacts of AI on science, but so far little data. We provide early insights on this from three data sources: a sample of 15 million Gemini interactions, an inventory of over 2,600 specialized AI models […]

1. AI-related efforts in higher education in Morocco (ChatGPT). 2. Intelligence explosions are social. 3. The speech-processing skills of dogs. 4. Kalshi market in economics Nobel. 5. Why are Indian weddings with dancing gorillas going viral? Pakistan too. 6. Eminem, and some German guy. 7. On the UAP council. 8. On higher interest rates.

The shortages have gone on for so long that they are aggressively driving down how much carbon is being released into the atmosphere, a Washington Post analysis of data from the International Energy Agency shows. People worldwide are using significantly less oil and gas, which means less climate pollution… Such an annual decline has not happened since […]

The US federal government owns and administers 472,892,659 acres or 21% of the land area of the lower 48 states, the country’s largest landowner. The resource is held and managed as a collective resource, the Federal Lands, through political and bureaucratic interpretation of the Multiple Use principle and generally, the biological aim of maximum sustained-yield. […]

Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him.  And he has a new book coming out Six Math Essentials.  So what should I ask him?

1. One way to use screens less, will it catch on? 2. Roon as cultural critic. 3. The Greenland deal sounds pretty good for America? 4. The cultures that are New England? 5. Yet newer results on AI-driven labor demand. 6. Ayn Rand as movie extra.

Here, in five waves of panel data (N = 1,966 US adults), we examined associations between life satisfaction and self-reported use of ten common social technologies measured every 3 months on a six-point frequency scale from ‘I did not use’ to ‘multiple times daily’. At this measurement level and timescale, Bayesian and frequentist random-intercept cross-lagged panel models showed […]

That is the title of my latest Free Press column, here is the closing bit: Sick and elderly Americans will go to Chinese companies for their AI-invented and AI-tested medical devices and drugs. America still will be a wealthy country, so China will charge the highest prices possible, yet prioritize Chinese citizens for treatment. Large […]

It pains me to say this, but if we actually “get AGI,” the resulting boom in industrial capacity from robotics and massive society-wide wealth creation will look like a total vindication of neoliberalism. The discourse about financialization and offshoring being a generational mistake may be replaced by a very different historical interpretation: that the late […]

1. “We find a significant and highly robust empirical relationship between gender conservatism and protectionism. That relationship has been evident since 2008 and it decidedly is not a product of Trump-era politics.” 2. More than half the world’s top AI talent comes from China. 3. Argentina now at 1.0, Mexico at 1.2. 4. China is […]

By Egana Djabbarova of Azerbaijan.  A wonderful short novel, and as described by Olga Grjasnowa “An extraordinary novel that translates corporality and estrangement into language.”  Here is the Amazon link. This has been a fantastic year for fiction, and in November I will be writing up a report.

I strongly recommend a trip to Armenia, now is a great time to go.  Here are a few things I noticed: 1. The country remains intellectual.  The book fair is well attended.  The classical music season is excellent, with good concerts multiple times a week, and the theatre scene, in both Armenian and Russian, is […]

An average of 72 percent of respondents said they felt curious, happy or excited about A.I., compared with 41 percent who felt worried, sad or angry.’@nytimes‘s Damien Cave uses @Gallup data to remind us the rest of the world digs AI. It is 93 percent positive from China.  That is from Nick Gillespie.  Snap out of it […]

1. Shruti on Coltrane. 2. On the drop in Pisa scores.  Quite exaggerated, it turns out. 3. Hope you all reoptimize your views accordingly, on AI agreements with China. 4. Dutch economy is picking up. 5. One professor’s AI-assisted output.  Hey people, solve for the equilibrium… 6. Brisket is now too expensive for this Texas […]

Carl Danner writes to me with a political economy mystery. On Sept 9, 2026, The California Public Utilities Commission announced a set of clean energy grants but only “for eligible organizations headquartered in ZIP Code 91326.” I decided to investigate with ChatGPT. The first thing we discovered is that: The ZIP-code restriction is about the […]

The author is Omri Ben-Shahar, and the subtitle is How Privacy Panic Led Tech Regulation Astray — and How to Fix It.  I would describe this book as bracing, and full of substantive engagement.  Basically the author wishes to give privacy considerations less weight in social decisions.  Excerpt: What is the concrete evidence for the […]

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary: Gita Gopinath has spent the last several years inside the room where the world’s monetary plumbing gets fixed — or doesn’t. As first deputy managing director of the IMF and, before that, the Fund’s chief economist, she worked on sovereign debt restructuring, followed […]

Believing that AI will be incorrigible leads us to proposing the wrong solutions, including ones which are likely to increase the danger than decrease it. I think that an AI pause is using the wrong method to fix an ill-posed problem. The point of a pause would be to research AI until we have a […]

How much liability should AI providers bear when their services enable both attack and defence? Liability can improve welfare while increasing harm. Providers sell a common input to productive users, attackers and defenders. Within a defended contest, a higher common price reduces effort without changing attack success or attacker profits, saving resources and improving the […]

1. Diving northern gannets. 2. Guatemala update. 3. Tech-utopian project coming in Uruguay? 4. “Toy sales among adult-only households have now outpaced households with children for toy sales, growing 16% through June, according to a market research group.” 5. Do stock buybacks bring harm? 6. How AI competition works in China. 7. Economist column on […]

An amazing Epoch AI report from Emberson and Roodman: Over the past three years, the cost of a given level of AI performance has fallen an average of some 47% per quarter. That is a 13-fold drop every year – a faster rate than any other transformative technology in history. To give an example, OpenAI […]