Category: Uncategorized
What should I ask Brendan Foody?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. He was a Thiel fellow, now CEO and co-founder of Mercor, I believe he is still only 23 years old. GPT-5 gives this summary of Mercor:
Mercor is a San‑Francisco–based startup that runs an AI‑driven talent marketplace: companies building frontier models use it to source, screen (via automated AI interviews), and pay domain experts and engineers for contract or full‑time work. Beyond traditional recruiting, Mercor supplies specialists—doctors, lawyers, scientists, and software/AI engineers—to help train and evaluate AI systems for top labs (TechCrunch reports OpenAI is among its users), charging an hourly finder’s fee. Founded in 2023 by Thiel Fellows Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha, the company raised a $100M Series B in February 2025 at a ~$2B valuation, following a $30M Series A in September 2024.
Here is Brendan on Twitter. So what should I ask him?
China understands negative emotional contagion
China’s censors are moving to stamp out more than just political dissent online. Now, they are targeting the public mood itself — punishing bloggers and influencers whose weary posts are resonating widely in a country where optimism is fraying.
The authorities have punished two bloggers who advocated for a life of less work and less pressure; an influencer who said that it made financial sense not to marry and have children; and a commentator known for bluntly observing that China still lags behind Western countries in terms of quality of life.
These supposed cynics and skeptics, two of whom had tens of millions of followers, have had their accounts suspended or banned in recent weeks as China’s internet regulator conducts a new cleanup of Chinese social media. The two-month campaign, launched by the Cyberspace Administration of China in late September, is aimed at purging content that incites “excessively pessimistic sentiment” and panic or promotes defeatist ideas such as “hard work is useless,” according to a notice from the agency.
Here is more from Lily Kuo from the NYT. If you are spreading negative emotional contagion, there is a very good chance that, no matter what you are saying, that you are part of the problem. A more fundamental division these days than Left vs. Right.
Ian Smith’s memoir *Bitter Harvest: The Great Betrayal*
Yes he used to run Rhodesia, and yes it is costly to buy this book because no one wants to reprint it, for obvious reasons. Nonetheless it is a fascinating look into an era and its dissolution.
Smith is a wonderful writer, and remarkably erudite, more so than virtually any politician today. He also is delusional almost beyond belief. As the title of the memoir indicates, the story is all about the different parties who betrayed him. The British, the South Africans, and also some of his fellow Rhodesians. He blames almost everybody else, without considering the possibility that the Rhodesian system of “one white for every seventeen blacks, and without equal rights” (as was the ratio circa 1960) simply was never going to work.
He calls the Rhodesian human rights record “impeccable,” but you will find another perspective from GPT-5.
He loves to inveigh against South African apartheid, which he considered very bad publicity for the broader project of civilizing the southern cone of the African continent. He insisted that Rhodesia had nothing similar.
Unlike many contemporary writers, he often is willing to tell you what he really thinks, for instance:
Hilgar Muller certainly put on a good performance, full of drama and emotion, the kind of thing these foreign-affairs types have got to perfect if they are going to do their job. He need not have bothered as far as I was concerned, for I am far too experienced and down to earth to be influenced by such tactics.
The closest he ever comes to blaming himself, his party, or his decisions is when he writes:
Our crime was that we had resisted revolutionary political change.
Or he writes:
I myself certainly prefer having dealings with some of these honest-to-goodness black people, than with the two-faced liberals of the Labour Party or the Fabian Society.
“Recommended” is not exactly the word I wish to use here, but I can report that I read the whole thing.
Friday assorted links
Lookism sentences to ponder
Despite there being no systematic age differences between women and men in the workforce according to the US Census, we found that women are represented as younger than men across occupations and social roles in nearly 1.4 million images and videos from Google, Wikipedia, IMDb, Flickr and YouTube, as well as in nine language models trained on billions of words from the internet. This age gap is the starkest for content depicting occupations with higher status and earnings.
Here is the full paper, by Benjamin Thompson and Nick Howe. Note that even AOC’s apology to Miller is full of indirect lookism. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
More on Trumpian equity stakes
Their number keeps on growing, as I point out in my latest column for The Free Press:
Viewed as a stand-alone incident, the Intel deal could be dismissed as unimportant. There are state-owned or partially state-owned companies around the world, after all, and some are more efficient than others.
Unfortunately, this is not a one-off. The federal government also decided to take a 15 percent share in MP Materials, a company that mines rare-earth minerals that are essential for everything from smartphones to guided missiles. You might think that is essential for America’s national security, because China has such a large presence in that sector and the military applications of these rare-earth minerals are many.
Just last week, however, the Trump administration announced it would be taking a 5 percent stake in two different lithium mining ventures. The good news is that major lithium deposits are being discovered around the world, making this kind of U.S. government involvement unnecessary for national security reasons. The bad news is that our government still is treating this as a national emergency…
Last week, the Trump administration announced an arrangement in which Pfizer would cut pharmaceutical prices in return for some tariff relief. Reuters has reported that the Trump administration is now planning various kinds of deals with up to 30 industries.
To make sure the new deals stick, there is a plan in the works to formalize them and make it so this is how the U.S. government deals with businesses going forward. To that end, the Trump administration wishes to greatly expand the financing and authority of what was previously a minor institution, namely the International Development Finance Corporation (DFC).
The DFC was created in 2018 to help finance projects in developing nations. But under the proposed expansion, it would establish an equity fund to cement federal government ownership of key parts of American industry. This means that our federal government would move away from its longstanding and beneficial stance of letting private ownership stay private.
There is more at the link.
Thursday assorted links
1. Jonathan Lear obituary (NYT).
2. Parody costume markets in everything.
3. Can Large Language Models develop gambling addiction? They just need to be reminded that the Washington Wizards do not have a single player in the NBA top 130.
4. Why are so many pedestrians killed by cars in the US?
5. French spending on pensions.
6. Important Dean Ball post on rare earths.
7. There is a new The Free Press new books podcast, hosted by Shilo Brooks. In the first two episodes, he discusses Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea with Admiral James Stavridis and Jim Harrison’s Wolf with Steve Rinella.
From the Forecasting Research Institute
When will AI forecasters match top human forecasters at predicting the future? In a recent @cowenconvos podcast episode, @NateSilver538 said 10–15 years while @tylercowen predicted 1–2 years. Who was right? Our updated AI forecasting benchmark, ForecastBench, suggests that Tyler Cowen is more likely to be right.
Here is the tweet, here is the associated Substack. Phil Tetlock informs me their best guess is probably sometime in 2026.
Is the earned income tax overrated?
This policy has been so popular with economists on a bipartisan basis, yet a recent piece in ReStud raises some doubts, as the wage subsidies induce many to drop out of school:
As a complement to the federal earned income tax credit (EITC), some states offer their own EITC, typically calculated as a percentage of the federal EITC. In this paper, we analyse the effect of state EITC on education using policy discontinuities at US state borders. Our estimates reveal that an increase in the state EITC leads to a statistically significant increase in the high school dropout rate. We then use a life-cycle matching model with directed search and endogenous educational choices, search intensities, hirings, hours worked, and separations to investigate the effects of EITC on the labour market in the long run and along the transitional dynamics. We show that a tax credit targeted at low-wage (and low-skilled) workers reduces the relative return to schooling, thereby generating a powerful disincentive to pursue long-term studies. In the long run, this results in an increase in the proportion of low-skilled workers in the economy, which may have important implications for employment, productivity, and income inequality. Finally, we use the model to determine the optimal design of the EITC.
That is by One simple lesson is that policy economics is often not easy. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Andrew wants new Singapore recommendations
From my email:
I will be in Singapore soon. Do you have any up-to-date recommendations? I notice there is this old post: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/12/how-to-visit-singapore.html
Comments are open…
Wednesday assorted links
Share repurchases do not discourage investment
Theory tells us that, and the empirics tell us that too:
Our study examines the claim that share repurchases lead to reductions in real investments. Repurchase opponents argue that managers forego valuable investments to conduct opportunistic repurchases, while proponents argue that repurchases return excess cash to shareholders. We compare repurchasing firms’ real investments in capital expenditures, R&D, and employment to public and private non-repurchasing firms—holding constant their growth (i.e., investment) opportunity sets. Our results provide no support for the claim that repurchases lead to lower real investments. Consistent with these findings, we also show that financial analysts do not revise downward their capital expenditure forecasts following repurchases.
That is from a recent paper by Paul Brockman, Hye Seung (Grace) Lee, and Jesus M. Salas. You see the opposing argument in the media all the time, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong. As in “not correct.”
Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Black Veterans and Civil Rights After World War I
Nearly 400,000 Black men were drafted into the National Army during World War I, where they toiled primarily as menial laborers in segregated units. Leveraging novel variation from the WWI draft lottery and millions of digitized military and NAACP records, we document the pioneering role these men played in the early civil rights movement. Relative to observably similar individuals from the same draft board, Black men randomly inducted into the Army were significantly more likely to join the nascent NAACP and to become prominent community leaders in the New Negro era. We find little evidence that these effects are explained by migration or improved socioeconomic status. Rather, corroborating historical accounts about the catalyzing influence of institutional racism in the military, we show that increased civic activism was driven by soldiers who experienced the most discriminatory treatment while serving their country.
That is from Desmond Ang and Sahil Chinoy, newly accepted into the QJE. Are we so sure the postulated mechanism is the correct interpretation for the results here? Being in the military can have other intellectual influences too. Via Alexander Berger.
Tuesday assorted links
1. For different states, where the main immigrant group comes from.
2. NBA rookies do worse when they end up on very good teams.
3. Yale Budget Lab study claims AI is not having much of an effect on labor markets.
4. Twenty-five questions university presidents, provosts, and deans need to be asking themselves.
5. Is there a college radio revival?
6. Data centers have a great ratio of tax revenue brought in to electricity price boost.
7. The revolution in New Hampshire electricity policy (WSJ).
Singapore fact of the day
For every Singaporean who has left Christianity, about three others have become Christians.
About 3.2 in fact, if you look at the exact numbers. Buddhism in Japan and South Korea is being depopulated, also. Here is the Pew piece on defections from religions.