Category: Uncategorized

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.

1. How to run a start-up with AI agents and zero employees (video talk).

2. Elon of the bird world (Times of London).

3. Swiss judge using AI to help set sentences (in German).  And in French.

4. Arguably EA philanthropists should obsess over fertility decline at least as much as X risk.

5. Much of Nvidia’s contribution has been missing from U.S. gdp figures.

6. One set of worries about Treasuries, possibly exaggerated.  And Druckenmiller on the bond market (WSJ).

7. Governing AIs by law?

In 1914 Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and David Ben-Gurion, the president and prime minister of Israel after 1948 respectively, were in the Ottoman capital studying law at Istanbul University.  They had studied Ottoman Turkish and embarked on their legal studies in the hope of one day serving in the Assembly of Deputies as elected representatives from Jerusalem.  With war on the horizon, they made their way back to Palestine, where they volunteered for military service in the Ottoman army.  They also proposed the formation of a Jewish legion to fight under the Ottoman banner, but their intiative fell on deaf ears…We have no way of knowing how things might have turned out had Ben-Zvi and Ben-Gurion been allowed to suit up in Ottoman uniform…

Moshe Sharett, another future prime minister of Israel and said to have been fluent in both Arabic and Turkish, served in the Ottoman army during the Balkan Wars and all through the First World War, even beyond the announcement of the Balfour Declaration and the British occupation of Jerusalem in December 1917.

That is all from the quite good The War That Made the Middle East: World War I and the End of the Ottoman Empire, by Mustafa Aksakal.

1. There is now a formal 150 kph (93.2 mph) speed limit in one part of Czechia.

2. Why does the Japanese prime minister spend so much time in seclusion?

3. Decker defends academia (noting I do not think the “only the peaks” defense quite works.  I also worry about very high quality research that ends up being too context-specific to be very useful.  That is no fault of the researchers, but…the world is not wrong to be less than totally impressed in response.  Economists, when they discuss what they are up to, are far too taken in by “the quality of the work” as a relevant variable.  I think they can be fairly delusional as to how much progress they actually are making, even though along the “research quality” dimension the work is much better than what people were doing say thirty years ago.  In fact we train economists to make precisely this kind of mistake.)

4. Rhine Group.  More European optimism.

5. Entrepreneurs in state government improve state government.

1. “Underestimating something that has an AI “accent” by reflexively dismissing it as slop rhymes curiously with underestimating someone because they have a funny accent in your native language (and it isn’t one of the accents that you think signals superiority, like the BBC British accent for English).”  V. Rao.

2. Profile of Joe Lonsdale.  And from the NYT, mostly on Cicero and homelessness.

3. Graceland just isn’t that impressive.

4. Mill, Hayek, and liberalism.

5. Interview with Peter McCrory, Head Economist at Anthropic.

6. Will AI intensify or weaken market competition?

7. This economist is not a nominalist.

Europe just had its best reporting season in years. Companies in the benchmark Stoxx Europe 600 index boosted earnings per share by 18% on average in the second quarter compared with a year earlier. Earnings barely grew at all in 2025 and 2024 as the strongest companies in the index were offset by weaker players.

Growth is now widening beyond a narrow group of AI and bank stocks, according to Gerry Fowler, who leads the European equity strategy team at UBS. Government spending and private investment in priorities like infrastructure, energy security and defense are creating real opportunities.

The Stoxx Europe 600 is up 10% so far this year, a bit less than the S&P 500’s 12% gain. European stocks have underperformed the U.S. since the mid-2000s, but the gap has narrowed lately.

Here is more from the WSJ.

1. New publication analyzing AI constitutions.

2. Niall Ferguson vs. Iain Banks, and against some other stufff too (TFP).

3. NYT obituary for Victor Niederhoffer.

4. “Engineered systems known as harnesses largely complete contracts in real time, make external work more observable than employment, and carry context and control across the firm’s edge.” (speculative)

5. Flypaper effect for AI safety work? A bit unfair, but not altogether wrong either.  Always ponder the possible secondary consequences!

6. Amended results on prediction markets.

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her.  She has a new and very interesting book coming out, namely The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time―and How to Fix It.  More generally, from Wikipedia:

Annie M. Lowrey…is an American journalist who writes on politics and economic policy for The Atlantic. Previously, Lowrey covered economic policy for The New York Times and prior to that was the Moneybox columnist for Slate. She was also a staff writer for the Washington Independent and was on the editorial staffs of Foreign Policy and The New Yorker. She is a proponent of universal basic income.

So what should I ask her?

1. Profile of Julian Gough and his evolutionary cosmology.  And the Substack version.

2. New Spanish-language edition of Bioy Casares on Borges coming out.  The older edition was, among other things, too heavy to lug around or bring on a trip.

3. The market for data is the market of the future.

4. If Uzbekistan were excluded, the damages would look similar to earlier work.

5. James Broughel on capitalizing AI agents.  And more on the same.

6. How calibrated are Kalshi prediction markets?

Two hours, thirty-four minutes, Rick and I recorded this session not too long ago in Tuscany.  It was everything Rick wanted to ask.  Self-recommending of course, and there is more to come.