Costco facts of the day
Costco sold 157.4mn rotisserie chickens worldwide last year, almost double the number of a decade ago. “It’s $4.99 and for Costco members, that’s one fantastic deal. I don’t think you can produce it for that,” said Walt Shafer, who oversaw the construction and management of the Nebraska site before he retired from Costco this year.
Roasted in ovens in the rear of the retail giant’s hundreds of cavernous stores, the birds have cost only $4.99 since 2009 even as the US retail price of chicken almost doubled. The product has become a textbook “loss leader”, buttressing the loyalty of Costco customers who pay membership fees for the right to shop there…
Rotisserie accounts for only a portion of the chicken processed in Nebraska. The plant also cuts breasts, thighs and other cuts delivered in six-pouch “saddle packs” to stores. Raw breast meat, for example, sells for $2.99 a pound, helping make up for losses on rotisserie.
Here is more from Gregory Meyer at the FT. Via Mike Rosenwald.
*Visions from San Francisco Bay*
European and American capitalism were different. The violence of human clashes in America took place on the surface, in the open. The violence in Europe became formalized, coalesced with class divions hallowed by centuries; it was interiorized, ingrained, or baked in, if one may use such an expression. American capitalism was founded on daring, resourcefulness, largesse, waste; European capitalism was founded on one powerful passion — miserliness. These patterns, which still endure, explain why America succeeded in creating a vast, new sector of the economy adapted to needs that become increasingly evident the closer we come to the twenty-first century: the sector of the universities, research institutes, laboratories, with billions of dollars invested in them. Western Europe, where education always has been the preserve of a narrow elite, failed to produce anything like it. The prodigality of private capital in America made the beginnings possible; money from taxes joined in at the next stage. Miserliness with capital in Europe effectively prevented the laying of foundations for this new sector, and it is doubtful whether the government treasuries will ever be able to over come ever-widening gap.
That is from Czeslaw Milosz’s Visions from San Francisco Bay.
Tysons Corner (Alaska) fact of the day
The centerpiece is Tysons Corner Center, today the eighth largest mall in the country, and one of the largest sub-city-sized markets for office space. It is half-owned by the Alaska Permanent Fund, which is the state-owned corporation that invests oil revenue on behalf of Alaska’s citizens, and half-owned by Macerich, a giant REIT, which is in turn owned by hundreds of large institutional investors and many individuals.
This very interesting essay by Joseph Lawler argues that liquid real estate markets, and distanced ownership, militate against beauty.
Friday assorted links
A Big Bet on Explosive AI-Driven Growth
Wow! The excellent Ben Moll has put together a high-stakes bet on US economic growth.
A bet on near-term explosive AI-driven growth: whether U.S. real GDP per capita will grow by at least 15% within a single year (measured relative to prior peak) by the end of 2033. Agreed on X, 15–16 August 2026. This document summarizes the agreed terms.
1. Parties and stakes
Fast-growth side (wins if the growth condition in Section 2 is met):
● William MacAskill https://www.williammacaskill.com/ — $10,000
● Samuel Albanie https://samuelalbanie.com/ — $25,000
● Tom Cohen https://x.com/tomcohen — $25,000
● Total: $60,000
No-fast-growth side (wins otherwise):
● Benjamin Moll http://benjaminmoll.com/ — $40,000
● Andrew Ho https://andrewho.xyz/ — $200,000
● Total: $240,000Odds: 4:1 — every $1 staked by the fast-growth side is matched by $4 from the no-fast-growth
side. Implied probability of the fast-growth scenario: 20%.
I’m known for quipping that a bet is a tax on bullshit but I don’t think either side is BSing. We have a genuine and important disagreement. I’d side with Moll, for what it is worth.
Luke Burgis interviews Patrick Collison on aesthetics
It was very fun talking to @patrickc about New Aesthetics at the @ClunyInstitute ‘s conference last month.
We talked about:
—The origin story of the New Aesthetics grants — and why he and Tyler Cowen disagree on almost everything aesthetic (1:00)
—Why culture is “stuck”: a 1926 Bauhaus building could pass for last year’s (2:30)
—Modernism’s explicit, stated mission to tear down beauty — “they weren’t hiding it” (3:30) —Solzhenitsyn: you can fake goodness and truth, but beauty “bears within it its own verification” (6:30)
—Is beauty objective? Why everyone visits Toledo, Spain and no one visits Toledo, Ohio (7:30)
—Detroit was rich for ~25 years and built the DIA. Silicon Valley’s been rich for 50. “We could do the Silicon Valley art tour in a coffee break” (14:30)
—Was Y Combinator secretly modeled on the art atelier? (18:30)
—The highest-leverage point for aesthetic renewal used to be churches. What is it now? (27:00)
—The sacred as an “endangered species”
— and Patrick’s alternative theory of WTF happened in 1971: we lost the sacred, so we can’t have nice things (28:30)
—I asked him about Vatican II and technological stagnation. He (wisely?) passed. I didn’t. (34:30)
—”Can anyone name a work of art made with AI?” Silence. (37:30)
—Why Germany is preeminent in music, literature, and philosophy — and its food is so bad. (A demand-side problem.) (41:30)
—”Biology is so ugly, man.” Physics is beautiful; biology is a tower of hacks (43:30)
—The “anti-beauty conspiracy” of the last century — and the massive latent demand waiting to be uncorked (52:30)
—Patrick reacts live to beeswax art (56:30)
Here is the link. And on YouTube, Brian Eno intro.
Polling results on capitalism and socialism
The results suggest that the public is feeling down about capitalism but is still wary of full-blown socialism. And many are deciding whether a few socialist candidates might help shake up the system. We found that:
—Just a third of Americans privately say they have a positive view of capitalism.
—Less than half of Republicans privately express a positive view of capitalism, though two-thirds support it in public.
—Almost half of women privately say they would consider voting for a socialist.
—Nearly a third of Gen Z publicly say that America would be better off as a socialist country, but only 14 percent say so in private.
—The majority of blacks publicly say capitalism is the cause of America’s social ills, but only 37 percent say so privately.
—Of people earning more than $150,000 a year, 58 percent privately say they are open to voting for a socialist, though only 42 percent say so publicly.
What should I ask Yiyang Zhuge (诸葛一杨), also known as Zhong Shu (仲树)?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her. She is best known to Western audiences for her interview with Christopher Nolan, but she has numerous other achievements:
Yiyang Zhuge is a political theorist, political columnist, and a translator of German and Greek philosophical texts. She is an instructor at Brandeis University, and a PhD Candidate at Boston College.
Yiyang is a major translator of Hannah Arendt into Chinese. She has translated The Human Condition, Life of the Mind, Men in Dark Times, collected poetry, Die verborgene Tradition, and Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess. She has given numerous lectures and published numerous public-facing articles on Arendt.
Yiyang published the first Greek-to-Chinese translation of Plutarch’s Moralia, a best-selling philosophy book in 2025.
She runs Princeton University Press’s Political Philosophy Book Club, where she interviews important Western academics for the Chinese audience.
Yiyang is a public intellectual in China. She reports on American higher ed monthly at print magazine Caixin Weekly. She is a political commenter on Hong Kong’s Phoenix TV (here and here). She hosts great books programs on vistopia and has contributed essays on Machiavelli, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Arendt at vistopia. She hosts the most popular Mandarin political philosophy podcast “Monologues of a Committed Observer” with 1m+ subscribers.
So what should I ask her?
Thursday assorted links
1. Data centers in space? Good Anton Leicht essay on the different considerations in the political economy.
2. More whales and Dr. Doolittle stuff.
3. Rohit on the AI hacks. And Peter Wilderford.
4. Is Australia the most resilient country to global catastrophic risk?
5. Dolly Parton’s philanthropy (NYT).
6. Why has New Zealand education so declined? (and other questions about the country)
The Antitrust Academy
The Antitrust Academy is an online platform hosting hundreds of videos comprising a complete course in antitrust law and economics. Teachers include Judge Douglas Ginsburg, Jon Klick, Joshua Wright and others. I am an advisor. A great resource whether you are learning this material for the first time or need to brush up on some legal or economic doctrines.
Important results on economic mobility
We use more than 900 million linked employer–employee records covering the entire formal workforce of Brazil to examine when cities provide upward mobility for the initially poor. We find that upward mobility for low-wage workers is strongest in workplaces that combine low-wage individuals with high-wage workers. This association is particularly pronounced in Brazil’s southern cities, where more complex industries include workers with a wider range of skills. The association is weaker in northern cities, where formal employment is dominated by the public sector.
Here is the paper by Radu Barza, Edward Glaeser, César A. Hidalgo, and Martina Viarengo. And here is a useful thread on the paper. This is one of the best and most important economics papers I have seen in the last few years.
The least bad way to regulate AI?
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column. Excerpt:
The key is to create some basic safeguards, but without stifling broader AI progress. To do so, we must defy the conventional wisdom about public oversight and instead trust the AI labs to be their own primary regulators.
My version of the proposal starts with defining a private not-for-profit body for AI regulation. An ideal body would draw some features from FINRA (the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority): a consortium of financial firms that examines the trade practices of each and makes recommendations, helping the federal Securities and Exchange Commission with oversight and regulation. The AI version would include the major labs and would be authorized and overseen by Washington, perhaps through the now-fledgling Center for AI Standards and Innovation.
This body would periodically audit major AI companies and their models, judging their conduct and safety. In the short run at least, much of this would be focused on issues of cybersecurity, and whether the new models created more cyber risk than they help to solve. If a company passed the audit, it would be exempted from standard liability law, at least provided that it had shown basic, reasonable care, as opposed to extreme or deliberate negligence. That would free the AI labs from the fear that courts might derail their business by granting huge awards to plaintiffs for ill-defined harms that could not reasonably have been prevented. And it would give the labs a strong incentive to meet the safety standards of this body.
It is reasonable to wonder whether such a body, composed of industry players, would issue fair and equitable judgments of safety. Maybe not. Yet there are many upsides and no better alternative.
For one thing, each company knows that a dangerous model from another company could cause a harmful incident and damage the prospects for the entire industry. Consider the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979, which contributed significantly to the mothballing of the entire U.S. nuclear industry. Few people can name the company (Metropolitan Edison) behind the malfunctioning plant; the reputational penalty attached to the industry as a whole.
Another incentive for safety is that the top companies do not want too much competition from lower-price, lower-quality upstarts. That too will induce those companies to support fairly tough standards, perhaps excessively tough in some cases. Still, we are choosing from imperfect alternatives. The concrete truth, whether we like it or not, is that there is far more expertise within the companies for judging AI safety than we can expect to find in the federal government anytime soon.
I am indebted to some ideas from Dean Ball, noting that his proposal is somewhat different. And here are some comments from Brendan McCord.
Daddy’s Girl
Using Danish registry data, we study how managers’ gender attitudes shape gender inequality in the workplace by exploiting the birth of a daughter – as opposed to a son – as a plausibly exogenous shock to male managers’ gender attitudes. Comparing within-firm changes in women’s labor outcomes depending on the gender of the manager’s newborn child, we find that women’s relative earnings and employment increase by 4.4% and 2.9% respectively following the birth of the manager’s first daughter. These effects are driven by an increase in managers’ propensity to substitute male hires with female hires that have comparable education, hours worked, and earnings. Consistent with this substitution channel, we do not detect any significant effect on firm performance. Because these effects emerge rapidly and persist over time, we can rule out the need for prolonged exposure to gender issues or for personal incentives tied to improving conditions for their own daughters as prerequisites for managers to promote gender equality within their firms.
That is by Maddalena Ronchi and Nina Smith, forthcoming in Review of Economic Studies.
Wednesday assorted links
1. At least one in four NFL players, and possibly much higher, ends up with brain disease (NYT). As I read the results, probably most of them do.
2. On the LLM flooding of governmental services.
3. Joe Walker podcast with Andrew Charlton on the future of AI in Australia.
4. The bread culture that is the German regulatory state.
5. Data on the placement of economics PhDs.
6. The Nvidia thing is now under dispute. And here is a defense of the original.
Data Centers and the Open Access Order
The US discussion over datacenters is depressing. Datacenters do not use a lot of water, they produce very useful outputs, they are not a blight on the landscape. All of this is obvious. But I don’t want to restate the obvious. What bothers me most about the discussion is that people seem to think this is or should be a collective decision. No.
We have a simple set of rules that everyone must follow. You buy land from someone willing to sell it. You contract for electricity. You hire workers who want the job. Your obligations to your local neighbors come from the same laws that govern everyone else. We do not ask what the land, electricity and labor is for. If you follow the rules, that is nobody’s business.
This is the distinction North, Wallis and Weingast make in Violence and Social Orders (paper here) between limited access orders or the natural state and open-access orders. For most of recorded history large-scale economic activity depended on access to political power. In the natural state, “people outside the coalition have only limited access to organizations, privileges, and valuable resources and activities.” The dominant coalition controlled entry into valuable activities and created rents by granting privileges.
An open access order works through general criteria. Organizational formation is “open to everyone who meets a set of minimal and impersonal criteria.” In economic life, the transition entails “the ability to create economic organizations at will, open entry and competition in many markets.”
The key word is impersonal. The same conditions apply regardless of who wants to build or whether public officials admire the proposed use. The state is not necessarily laissez-faire but its role ends once you have complied with the impersonal rules.
Now look at how a data center actually gets built. Rezoning, special use permits, comprehensive plan amendments, a negotiated “community benefits agreement” of school donations, fiber, soccer fields, and payments in lieu of taxes, public comment and then more public comment. These are not general rules. They are terms of admission negotiated with whoever holds the veto. Calling them community benefits doesn’t change the structure. Access to economic activity has become something that must be bargained for, argued for in the collective sphere, and paid for–with success determined by rents and political access. The natural state returns.
(The subsidies, by the way. are the same error wearing the other hat. A sales tax exemption written for datacenters and a county moratorium aimed at datacenters both replace a general rule with a judgment about whether this industry deserves to exist. An open access order offers neither special favors nor special burdens. It offers a rule.)
Opponents often complain that communities deserve more of a say. No, they do not. You did not vote on the bakery and the baker did not vote on you. That is the deal.
Datacenters happen to be where this is most visible today. Their size and novelty make them easy targets for vilification and rent extraction. But the big issue is not datacenters. It is whether building depends on following impersonal rules or on securing permission case by case from those who control access. The natural state was the human default for ten thousand years. The open access order that displaced it is the foundation of our prosperity and our political strength, and it is younger and more fragile than we like to think.