Category: Uncategorized
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.
Tuesday assorted links
1. I am pleased to see Emergent Ventures make The Deseret 50 Changing Philanthropy.
2. The true purveyors of AI slop?
3. Peanut allergies have plummeted in children (NYT).
4. Is major reform coming to Opus Dei?
Harvard graduate admissions
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences slashed the number of Ph.D. student admissions slots for the Science division by more than 75 percent and for the Arts & Humanities division by about 60 percent for the next two years.
The scale of reductions in the Social Science division was not immediately clear, though several departments in the division experienced decreases over the coming two years ranging from 50 percent to 70 percent.
The reductions — detailed by five faculty members and in emails obtained by The Crimson — stipulate smaller Ph.D. admissions quotas across dozens of departments. Departments were allowed to choose how they would allocate their limited slots across the next two years.
Here is the full article, via Chris Brunet.
Monday assorted links
1. Why is Argentina not a great nation?
2. The evolution of the Singapore health care system.
3. Vanderbilt in West Palm Beach? (NYT)
4. Forethought is looking to hire on AI safety.
5. What if we ranked colleges on the basis of whether or not they help you become more wise? And a separate file with rankings.
What should I ask Diarmaid MacCulloch
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. He has a recent book out on the history of sexuality and Christianity, but of course is renowned for a much longer series of books and writings on Christianity, the Reformation, and Tudor British history, just for a start.
Here is his Wikipedia page. So what should I ask him?
Sunday assorted links
1. Cass Sunstein names some GOATs.
4. A theory: “Everyone under 30 is prematurely old (worried about savings, career, FIRE). Everyone over 50 is desperately young (Burning Man, psychedelics). My theory: Information abundance aged the young by showing them all future problems all at once. Information abundance also made the old young by showing them all missed experiences all at once. So now Gen Z talks like retirement planners and boomers act like teenagers. It’s so over.”
5. Further cuts at the Department of Education.
6. Spanish town bans black cat adoptions during Halloween.
7. Topkapi is a good movie. And John Woo’s Once a Thief remains underrated.
Saturday assorted links
Some simple economics of AI and macro cycles
Has AI been propping up the American economy? For instance “the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s category for investment in information processing equipment and software accounts for over 90 percent of economic growth in the first half of 2025.”
The key question is what would have been done with those resources otherwise. Regardless of their specific allocation, it is reasonable to assume they would have been allocated with considerable less urgency than the AI resources. That means more resources sitting around, with their owners exercising a bit more option value. It is probably also the case that the alternate allocations would have, on the whole, been less risky and less correlated than the AI allocations. They would have been bets on a variety of different technologies, rather than a single technology. After all, what else on the table could have been as “big” as these AI bets?
So without the AI boom yes we would have had a lower gdp growth number, but by no means do those resources just disappear. We also would have lower expected returns from the alternate resource allocations and lower risk.
Since these resource allocations seem large enough “to matter” and to create systemic risk, the American economy would have had lower returns and also lower risk. But we, collectively, opted for the scenario with higher expected returns and higher risk. (Do not think you had no role in this! You could have bid ridiculously high dollars to have the economy experiment with some new breakfast cereals instead.)
This is risk-based business cycle theory, people, much of it derived originally from Fischer Black. I wish us luck people!
The Economic Geography of American Slavery
What would the antebellum American economy have looked like without slavery? Using new micro-data on the U.S. economy in 1860, we document that where free and enslaved workers live and how much they earn correlates strongly—but differently—with geographic proxies for agricultural productivity, disease, and ease of slave escape. To explain these patterns, we build a quantitative spatial model of slavery, where slaveholders coerce enslaved workers into supplying more labor, capture the proceeds of their labor, and assign them to sectors and occupations that maximize owner profits rather than worker welfare. Combining theory and data, we then quantify how dismantling the institution of slavery affected the spatial economy. We find that the economic impacts of emancipation are substantial, generating welfare gains for the enslaved of roughly 1,200%, while reducing welfare of free workers by 0.7% and eliminating slaveholder profit. Aggregate GDP rises by 9.1%, with a contraction in agricultural productivity counteracted by an expansion in manufacturing and services driven by an exodus of formerly enslaved workers out of agriculture and into the U.S. North.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
Friday assorted links
1. More on US pedestrian deaths.
2. Helen Andrews on the Great Feminization.
3. How the swap with Argentina will work.
4. Adda in NYC is a very good Indian restaurant. And SRV in Boston is very good, get the Venetian dishes such as the pork and beef meatball and then the crab pasta with chile and breadcrumb.
5. Koyama on Mokyr.
6. The striking liberalism on the chatbots. Are they the number one force for liberalism in the world today?