Category: Uncategorized

1. Ezra Klein on whether AI is likely to lead to mass unemployment (NYT).

2. There is a great Kentucky Derby stagnation.

3. Is open source AI overrated?

4. The deadweight loss of the human capital in prison?

5. How AI is transforming China’s entertainment industry (NYT).

6. “Twelve free, citation-rigorous tools for the students, debaters, and policy desks the textbooks forgot. From AP free-response grading to live tariff modeling to a Shadow Fed with a public track record, every formula shown, every dataset cited.”  Link here, made by a Colorado high schooler.

7. How Britain lost its dye industry.

1. “data centers are now responsible for nearly half of county tax revenue in Loudon County, VA”

2. The emerging role of competition in health care markets.

3. Did the Swedes boost tax revenue by abolishing their inheritance tax?

4. WSJ profile of Reihan Salam.

5. Are NJ diners doomed? (NYT)

6. How far back does European family structure go?

7. Why Coase needs Hayek, AI essay and the limits of the firm.

1. How an oil refinery works.

2. How is it that Jakarta has improved so much?

3. The Coasean perspective at Stripe.

4. Becker-Posner blog has been put back online.

5. Raoul Dufy and cortisone.

6. Competition in health insurance markets.

7. A Stockholm cafe run by AI?

This coming Tuesday at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, here is the event information, with three others as well.  With debate partner Brandon Ogbunu I will be arguing the “yes” side, science is too risk-averse.  Self-recommended!

Here is the Open to Debate Substack.

1. Does trade cause peace? (FT)

2. Where the goblins came from.

3. The next big advance to come from AI?

4. Georg Baselitz, RIP.  And now in English.  I am happy to own a print of his, one of the upside-down eagles.

5. Okie-dokie, USG edition.

6. In spite of what polling says, political events do not much affect voter attitudes?

AI-powered mental health apps have attracted growing interest as a low-cost way to expand care. Yet questions remain about their effectiveness, safety, and whether they may crowd out psychotherapy. We evaluate one such app in a randomized controlled trial among 1,964 Mexican women with mild to severe psychological distress. Over six months, app access improved mental health by 0.3 standard deviations with no evidence of harm, improved sleep quality, increased healthful behaviors, and reduced missed work, yielding considerably larger benefits than costs. Treated participants were also more likely to seek traditional psychotherapy, but this increase does not explain most of the mental health gains. App use was high in the first month but then declined, as is common in digital interventions. Despite this drop in use, treatment effects persisted. Participants continued to implement practices promoted by the app, suggesting that even short-term engagement can produce durable improvements through sustained behavioral change.

That is from a new paper by Manuela Angelucci, Raissa Fabregas, and Antonia Vazquez.  Those are some pretty strong results for a cheap intervention, let us hope they hold up.  Via John Holbein.

1. “Olympiaders were 1500x more likely to be billionaires and 4000x more likely to be unicorn founders than the average person!”

2. An SRO approaching to regulating AI.

3. Dwarkesh: “We don’t talk enough about how any state or group which is harvesting encrypted packets right now will be able to read those contents once quantum computers arrive. There’s a huge espionage and transparency overhang on any information that is currently “secret” and hasn’t been encrypted using post-quantum cryptography.”

4. Craig Venter, RIP.  Here is the NYT obituary.

5. What happened to Haiti?

6. With the UAE’s departure, OPEC will become much more an instrument of Iranian power (FT).  But also weaker.

1. How to euthanise a whale.

2. Will MacAskill and Rob Wiblin podcast.

3. Citation cartels?

4. Nick Pope died too early (NYT).

5. Estimating the returns to education, adjusting for genes.

6. Professor Slop.

7. On the UAE leaving OPEC.

8. Beyond the valley of the goblins.

One of the best selling points of a night out at the movies has long been how cheap it was for two hours-plus of entertainment. Not so much when it costs $50 a ticket.

That is how much Regal Cinemas recently charged for opening night seats in the best theaters to see December’s “Dune: Part Three.”

1. AI as palm reader?

2. “why we need to train models to learn their own capabilities, and how this will help them bid for work!”

3. Labor markets effects of AI.

4. Is Bob Dylan a liberal?

5. Retirement accelerates cognitive decline.

6. The natural resource sector in Africa is overrated (2023).

7. Productivity penalties from pivoting?

1. Does monopsony power induce firms to stay small?

2. Currentzis conducting the War Requiem.

3. “You survived because your opponents were correct, and this says something about the way our world is built.”

4. Did three different groups settle South America?

5. The China-shocked towns are coming back? (NYT)

6. What housing bubble?

7. Sam Enright links.

8. PC on Arab novels.  And a response from Hussein Mansour.

9. What is Progress Engineering?

10. Milei’s popularity is falling.  I am a fan and he has done many great and good things, but the victory march has been premature for some while now.  Quite simply it is hard to overcome a bad political culture.

1. Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness.

2. Why you should start a company instead of working in aid.

3. Evidence that tennis has become less interesting?

4. A smidgen more on wet market origins.

5. Who is most (least) opposed to European immigration?

6. John Burn-Murdoch on the Jevons paradox and AI employment effects (FT).

7. Can plants sense the sound of rain?

8. Zena.

A tenth of a percentage point of extra productivity growth — well within the range of plausible near-term AI effects — raises the fundamental value of U.S. government debt by $1.3 trillion. If markets fully priced this in, nominal Treasury yields would fall by about 70 basis points.

Half a percentage point of extra growth would raise the value of the debt by $6.5 trillion. For context: under the CBO baseline, the debt-to-GDP ratio rises from 100% today to 172% by 2055. Under the +0.5pp scenario, it stabilizes near 124%. Debt-to-GDP stops exploding. That is an enormous change in the fiscal outlook, and it comes from a rate of growth only modestly above the post-2000 average…

There is a second, subtler point. Because revenue scales as GDP^1.07, the fundamental value of the debt is a convex function of productivity growth. A +1pp growth shock raises value by 108%; a −1pp shock only lowers it by 87%.

That asymmetry means bondholders gain from uncertainty, not just from higher expected growth. If markets become more uncertain about AI’s long-run productivity impact, and that uncertainty is mean-preserving, Treasury valuations should still rise. Holding expected growth fixed, ±0.5pp of growth uncertainty is worth about $0.7 trillion in convexity value. Treasuries embed a long call option on AI, and the option is valuable even when the strike is out of the money.

Here is more from Hanno Lustig, with Howard Kung and James Paron.  Here is the full paper.  These are of course very important results, kudos to the authors.  Via the excellent Samir Varma.

1. Hedging the singularity?

2. Claude doing stand-up comedy, the video is AI too.

3. Thirty more lines from Empedocles have been found.

4. Latin America’s oil resurgence.

5. 25 dead at the Haitian Citadelle.

6. A paean to the earlier University of Chicago law school.

7. Can AI agents read a social science paper and write the code from scratch to reproduce its results?

8. Papers of Hayek are now accessible online.