Category: Uncategorized
Sunday assorted links
1. Context is that which is scarce Africa and mining.
2. Refine, a new tool for research papers.
3. Conservative renaissance at Stanford?
4. Growing up with economic growth makes you trust government more.
5. Those old and new service sector jobs.
6. What is psychological solipsism correlated with?
7. Early Justin Wolfers piece on point shaving in NCAA basketball.
Are new data centers boosting electricity prices?
But a new study from researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the consulting group Brattle suggests that, counterintuitively, more electricity demand can actually lower prices. Between 2019 and 2024, the researchers calculated, states with spikes in electricity demand saw lower prices overall. Instead, they found that the biggest factors behind rising rates were the cost of poles, wires and other electrical equipment — as well as the cost of safeguarding that infrastructure against future disasters.
“It’s contrary to what we’re seeing in the headlines today,” said Ryan Hledik, principal at Brattle and a member of the research team. “This is a much more nuanced issue than just, ‘We have a new data center, so rates will go up.’”
North Dakota, for example, which experienced an almost 40 percent increase in electricity demand thanks in part to an explosion of data centers, saw inflation-adjusted prices fall by around 3 cents per kilowatt-hour. Virginia, one of the country’s data center hubs, had a 14 percent increase in demand and a price drop of 1 cent per kilowatt-hour. California, on the other hand, which lost a few percentage points in demand, saw prices rise by more than 6 cents per kilowatt-hour.
Here is the full story, via Cliff Winston.
What should I ask Andrew Ross Sorkin?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. From Wikipedia:
Andrew Ross Sorkin (born February 19, 1977) is an American journalist and author. He is a financial columnist for The New York Times and a co-anchor of CNBC’s Squawk Box. He is also the founder and editor of DealBook, a financial news service published by The New York Times. He wrote the bestselling book Too Big to Fail and co-produced a movie adaptation of the book for HBO Films. He is also a co-creator of the Showtime series Billions.
In October 2025, Sorkin published 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History–and How It Shattered a Nation, a new history of the Crash based on hundreds of documents, many unpublished.
Most of all I am interested in his new book, but not only. So what should I ask him?
Saturday assorted links
Are the ACA exchanges unraveling?
After all, that is what economists predicted if the mandate was not tightly enforced. Here is the latest reprt:
Premiums for the most popular types of plans sold on the federal health insurance marketplace Healthcare.gov will spike on average by 30 percent next year, according to final rates approved by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and shown in documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
The higher prices — affecting up to 17 million Americans who buy coverage on the federal marketplace — reflect the largest annual premium increases by far in recent years.
Here is the full article.
Who Pays for Tariffs Along the Supply Chain?
This paper examines the effects of tariffs along the supply chain using product-level data from a large U.S. wine importer in the context of the 2019-2021 U.S. tariffs on European wines. By combining confidential transaction prices with foreign suppliers and U.S. distributors as well as retail prices, we trace price impacts along the supply chain, from foreign producers to U.S. consumers. Although pass-through at the border was incomplete, our estimates indicate that U.S. consumers paid more than the government received in tariff revenue, because domestic markups amplified downstream price effects. The dollar margins per bottle for the importer contracted, but expanded for distributors/retailers. Price effects emerge gradually along the chain, taking roughly one year to materialize at the retail level. Additionally, we find evidence of tariff engineering by the wine industry to avoid duties, leading to composition-driven biases in unit values in standard trade statistics.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
Friday assorted links
1. Should AI surrogates of you make your life and death decisions?
2. “According to Federal Railroad Administration data, the Brightline has been involved in at least 185 fatalities, 148 of which were believed not to be suicides, since it began operating, in December 2017. Last year, the train hit and killed 41 people—none of whom, as best as authorities could determine, was attempting to harm themselves.” Link here.
3. The Recoding America Fund, from Jennifer Pahlka.
4. Dean Ball on the call for a superintelligence ban, Dean is right once again. Mainly (once again) a lot of irresponsibilitiy on the other side of that ledger, you will not see them seriously address the points that Dean raises. If you want to go this route, do the hard work and write an 80-page paper on how the political economy of such a ban would work.
The Peter Principle and exploiting overconfident workers
This paper studies a long-term employment relationship with an overconfident worker who updates his beliefs using Bayes’ rule. Once the worker has proven to be a good match, exploitation opportunities disappear. Then, it may be optimal to either end the relationship or promote/transfer the worker to a different role, especially if the new position offers fresh opportunities to exploit his overconfidence. In doing so, we offer a novel microfoundation for the “Peter Principle,” rooted in this dynamic of overconfidence exploitation. Our analysis addresses key limitations in previous explanations, particularly those related to the findings of Benson et al. (2019), where the Peter Principle was observed among highly confident workers.
Look at it this way: you can always promise the worker, at each new switch, a career trajectory that probably he or she will not be able to attain. So you boost them in the hierarchy, with such promises, they are incompetent for the new roles they receive, but you pay them in promised trajectory rather than cold hard cash. That is from Matthias Fahn and Nicholas Klein, now out in the Journal of Labor Economics. Offer them a deanship now, or at least chair of the department. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
When will quantum computing work?
Huge investments are flowing into QC companies today. IonQ has a $19B market cap, Rigetti has a $10B cap, and PsiQuantum recently raised $1B.3D-Wave is not relevant, despite high qubit counts. Their machines are annealers, rather than gate based, and have less computational power than the QCs that IonQ, Rigetti, PsiQuantum, etc. are working on. This is a lot of money for an industry generating no real revenue, and without an apparent path to revenue over the next 5 years. Qubit counts have not been doubling each year, but even if they did, we’d have 32 kq machines in 2030.4If qubits double each year, 1,000 qubits today grows to 32 kq in 5 years’ time. There are few – if any – commercial applications for machines of that size. Will these companies keep raising larger rounds until they achieve 100 kq? Or have they got some secret sauce we don’t know about that investors are betting on? If there has been a true breakthrough, we should see much faster growth in qubit count, as well as larger and larger quantum processors, running increasingly massive programs. Note that the QC ecosystem is reasonably public and both private companies and university labs are competitive players. Advances tend to get published rather than stowed away.
Here is more from Tom McCarthy.
Thursday assorted links
1. Is the rebellion against cognitive elites?
2. Zvi on Dwarkesh and Andrej.
4. Knausgaard on Dostoyevsky (New Yorker).
5. David French on feminization (NYT).
6. Chauncey, say it ain’t so! Wemby as recompense. Here is my 2021 Bloomberg column on the NBA and gambling.
Red Rooms, a 2023 Quebecois movie
Highly disturbing, so I do not recommend it to most of you. It concerns a murder trial, and while violence is never shown on screen it is harrowing to watch. Much of the movie is about the spectators at the trial, and you can think of it as one vision for how online life will evolve for a particular class of people. Even in 2023, the movie had “LLM psychosis” as a subtheme. Grossly underrated, so I am passing this information along, which originally comes from Eugene. Here is the Wikipedia page, here is the trailer.
*Why Live: How Suicide Becomes an Epidemic*
That is the new Helen C. Epstein book, which I found very instructive and useful. My main wish is that it would be longer, in any case here is one very interesting excerpt of many:
If Nunavut, the semi-autonomous Canadian territory that is home to roughly 28,000 indigenous Inuit people, were an independent country, it would have the highest suicide rate in the world. The suicide rate in Greenland, whose population is mostly Inuit, is 85 per 100,000; next highest is Lithuania, at 33 per 100,000. Nunavut’s rate is 100 per 100,000, ten times higher than the rest of Canada and seven times higher than the US. When I visited Nunavut’s capital, Iqaluit, in July, virtually every Inuit I met had lost at least some relative to suicide, and some recounted as many as five or six family suicides, plus those of friends, co workers ,and other acquaintances. Three people in my small circle of contacts lost someone close to them to suicide during my nine-day visit. Acquaintances would direct my attention to passersby on the street: “his older brother too,” “his son.” Almost one-third of Nunavut Inuit have attmpted suicide, and most Inuit I met confided, without my asking that had done so at least once.
This book also is important for understanding the key phenomenon of negative emotional contagion.
Wednesday assorted links
1. “…town leaders successfully convinced a court to force ICE to remove a fence around the immigration processing facility because it was erected without a permit.” (NYT)
2. Knausgaard on Dostoyevsky (New Yorker).
3. Chat with AI Ray Dalio in your spare time.
4. Rebuilding American corporate research.
5. Country rankings for AI freedom of speech.
6. 21st century civilization curriculum. A look at where one part of “the intellectual new right” is these days.
Ads as cues
Why do we see both advertising and powerful consumer habits for well-known and intrinsically similar brands? We offer an explanation based on the idea that, as in Bordalo et al. (2020), a consumer is more likely to demand a good if she recalls the pleasure it gave her in the past. In turn, the consumer is more likely to recall goods that are consumed more frequently and more similar to cues, subject to interference from other goods. Our model yields context-dependent brand habits where ads work as memory cues. It predicts that ads: i) are more effective for more habitual consumers and ii) exhibit spillovers, within and across products, that are stronger for more habitual consumers and for goods with more similar ads. Using data from NielsenIQ and Nielsen we find support for these predictions in 20 undifferentiated and highly advertised product categories. Memory offers new insights on how advertising affects market competition and consumer welfare.
That is from a new paper by Pedro Bordalo, Giovanni Burro, Nicola Gennaioli, Gad Nacamulli and Andrei Shleifer.
Podcast with Filippo Gaddo
Here is the link, it runs about forty minutes, with links to Spotify and Apple versions as well. Lots of economics and tech talk in this one, UK productivity, the School of Salamanca, and a discussion of GOAT and the history of economic thought as well, more too. Here is a Twitter thread on the chat.