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Sunday assorted links
1. Toby Ord on infinities in ethics.
2. Malicious-Looking URL Creation Service.
3. Multiple talent agents are trying to sign thisn AI actress.
4. Will Russian oil output be declining? (WSJ)
5. Some Microsoft bonds now offer a slightly lower yield than comparable Treasuries (WSJ).
6. Forthcoming Robin Holloway book on the history and nature of classical music, UK publication only.
7. Review of One Battle After Another. Exactly which “best movie” awards should it win?
Chinese rap music, by SKAI ISYOURGOD
Is fourteen million views a lot or a little?
Here is further information on the creator, including this article from The Economist.
*Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History*
That is the forthcoming book by Andrew Burstein, who is also author of the excellent Madison and Jefferson (with Nancy Isenberg). I am sent many books on the founding and Founding Fathers, and while I find their average quality to be high, usually they do not grab my attention. I have already read plenty in that area. I also have consumed many books on Jefferson in particular,s Dumas Malone boring or magisterial? But this one I read straight through, as it is simply…compelling. Excerpt:
Three thousand copies of Esquisse were issued in 1795, nine years before the publication of Condorcet’s Collected Writings in twenty-one volumes [TC: when is the AI-assisted translation coming?]. As a systematic compendium of the philosophe’s outlook on all matters of human intervention and the “perfectability” of the species, the book advances through the stages of social development from early times in order to address the need for liberation of the progressive spirit through all available means of encouragement. He applaus every perceptible advance toward closing the economic gap between the wealthy and everyone else, as well as equality under the law, rights of conscience, decolonization, and universal suffrage. It is difficult to find another Enlightenment figure who went as far as Condorcet in envisioning a just society.
And:
President Thomas Jefferson, self-styled champion of republican methods, was putting his finger on the scale here. It is hard to pretend otherwise. With an unwarranted exercise of power aimed at weakening the Supreme Court, he was acting from a private need to humiliate a man who treated a nonelective position as a partisan platform. While the emotion is quite understandable, Jefferson’s justice was purely retributive.
Recommended, you can pre-order here.
Saturday assorted links
2. How much would mothers earn if they did not have children?
3. Mick West is still out to lunch. The drones are from Russia duh, noting that there are usually imagined sightings as well. Oddly, his problem is not downgrading what “the kooks” have to say (they are indeed kooks), but simply refusing to recognize inside information that is held and openly admitted by respectable elites.
Innovation and the Great Divergence
Abstract: Recent developments in historical national accounting suggest that the timing of the Great Divergence hinges on the different trends in northwest Europe and the Yangzi Delta region of China. The positive trend of GDP per capita in northwest Europe after 1700 was a continuation of a process that began in the fourteenth century, while the negative trend in the Yangzi Delta continued a pattern of alternating periods of growing and shrinking, but reaching a new lower level. These GDP per capita trends were driven by different paths of innovation. TFP growth was strongly positive in Britain after the Black Death, in the Netherlands during the sixteenth century and again in Britain from the mid-seventeenth century. Although TFP growth was positive in China during the Northern Song dynasty, it was predominantly negative during the Ming and Qing dynasties, in the Yangzi Delta as well as in China as a whole.
By Stephen Broadberry and Runzhuo Zhai, via the excellent Samir Varma.
*One Battle After Another*
That is the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie, inspired by Pynchon’s Vineland. I do not usually like Anderson’s films (apart from Magnolia), but this so far is the best movie of the year? It takes the “Days of Rage” themes and connects them to our current predicament, weaving them into a unified whole, where the world has some characteristics of the 1970s and some of today. Some scenes are flawed, but overall the cast, soundtrack, and cinematography are the best I have seen in some while. We are doing cinema again, or at least he is. Recommended, noting that it can be dispiriting and difficult to watch. Here is the Yglesias review.
Markets in everything
A new app offering to record your phone calls and pay you for the audio so it can sell the data to AI companies is, unbelievably, the No. 2 app in Apple’s U.S. App Store’s Social Networking section.
The app, Neon Mobile, pitches itself as a moneymaking tool offering “hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year” for access to your audio conversations.
Neon’s website says the company pays 30¢ per minute when you call other Neon users and up to $30 per day maximum for making calls to anyone else. The app also pays for referrals. The app first ranked No. 476 in the Social Networking category of the U.S. App Store on September 18 but jumped to No. 10 at the end of yesterday, according to data from app intelligence firm Appfigures.
On Wednesday, Neon was spotted in the No. 2 position on the iPhone’s top free charts for social apps…
However, Neon’s marketing claims to only record your side of the call unless it’s with another Neon user.
Here is the full story, via Mark.
Friday assorted links
1. Five reforms for science funding.
2. Canon of art works about Washington, D.C. They forgot to list “No Way Out,” one of the best DC movies, with Gene Hackman.
3. Private equity in the hospital industry.
5. The Economist on talent and spotting geniuses.
6. How common is accidental invention?
7. Evaluating LLMs on real world tasks.
Mick West, by the way, initially was dismissing “drones over Denmark” reports, he is not a reliable source rather a reflexive nay-sayer.
Why is Milei begging for a bailout?
There are two primary reasons.
First, he pegged Argentina’s real exchange rate too high, hoping this would appease voters by getting inflation down more quickly. That was a miscalculation. It also was a violation of market or libertarian principles. The problems here are not an instance of market failure, rather Milei forgot his own principles.
Second, the opposition did very well in a recent election. So everyone is afraid the reign of Milei, or like-minded leaders, is not going to last for so long. That precipitated a crisis in the markets. But that is hardly an argument against Milei, even though it happened on his watch. It is an argument against the likely alternatives to Milei.
So it is a mistake to read recent events as somehow a repudiation of market or libertarian principles.
Pulse
Today we are launching my favorite feature of ChatGPT so far, called Pulse. It is initially available to Pro subscribers.
Pulse works for you overnight, and keeps thinking about your interests, your connected data, your recent chats, and more. Every morning, you get a custom-generated set of stuff you might be interested in. It performs super well if you tell ChatGPT more about what’s important to you.
In regular chat, you could mention “I’d like to go visit Bora Bora someday” or “My kid is 6 months old and I’m interested in developmental milestones” and in the future you might get useful updates.
Think of treating ChatGPT like a super-competent personal assistant: sometimes you ask for things you need in the moment, but if you share general preferences, it will do a good job for you proactively.
This also points to what I believe is the future of ChatGPT: a shift from being all reactive to being significantly proactive, and extremely personalized.
That is from Sam Altman.
Is a mild stagflation coming?
That is the topic of my latest article for The Free Press. The general picture is not altogether encouraging:
How about unemployment?
The labor market has been deteriorating, albeit slowly, since the waning days of the Biden administration. Indeed, for the first time since 2021, there are more unemployed Americans than there are open jobs.
Economists can only guess as to why this is happening. Some like to argue that labor markets are “taking a pause” or have “run out of steam,” two metaphors that may hold some truth but should not be mistaken for well-reasoned explanations. Another popular hypothesis is that artificial intelligence has slowed new hiring. That may be true for some sectors, such as mid-tier tech programmers or call center workers, but it is unlikely to have a large enough effect to account for most of the recent labor market slowdown.
As the Bureau of Labor Statistics has revised job creation numbers, it has become increasingly clear that the American economy has not been creating many new jobs for some time. For instance, revised numbers show that between April 2024 and March 2025, the economy generated 911,000 fewer jobs than the initial monthly calculations. Revisions to the June figures even showed a loss of 13,000 jobs. That is bad news in its own right, but it is also a negative harbinger for the future.
Once workers begin losing their jobs—and job creation weakens more generally—a kind of cumulative unraveling can take place. For instance, jobless workers have less money to spend, which decreases demand in the economy, and that usually translates into further job loss. Once the job loss dynamic is set in general motion, it can accelerate rapidly.
Uncertainty surrounding the Trump tariffs has also discouraged private sector investment, which weakens future job creation. So the best bet is that the economy, a year or two from now, will have noticeably higher unemployment.
Note that gdp growth might remain fine, so it will be a funny kind of stagflation…
Thursday assorted links
1. Energy projects delayed or cancelled.
2. Roger Scruton, predicting 1997 for Britain.
3. One definition of “the South.” This guy should get a job gerrymandering?
5. Takatoshi Ito, RIP. Japanese advocate of inflation targeting.
6. Per year.
Reading Orwell in Moscow
In this paper, I measure the effect of conflict on the demand for frames of reference, or heuristics that help individuals explain their social and political environment by means of analogy. To do so, I examine how Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 reshaped readership of history and social science books in Russia. Combining roughly 4,000 book abstracts retrieved from the online catalogue of Russia’s largest bookstore chain with data on monthly reading patterns of more than 100,000 users of the most popular Russian-language social reading platform, I find that the invasion prompted an abrupt and substantial increase in readership of books that engage with the experience of life under dictatorship and acquiescence to dictatorial crimes, with a predominant focus on Nazi Germany. I interpret my results as evidence that history books, by offering regime-critical frames of reference, may serve as an outlet for expressing dissent in a repressive authoritarian regime.
That is from a job market paper by Natalia Vasilenok, political science at Stanford. Via.
What of American culture from the 1940s and 1950s deserves to survive?
In the comments, Elijah asks:
Would love to read a post about which movies and novels from this era do and do not deserve to survive and why.
I do not love 20th century American fiction, so maybe I am the wrong person to ask. I started with GPT-5, which gave this list of novels from those two decades. I’ve read a significant percentage of those, and would prefer:
Raymond Chandler, J.D. Salinger, Nabokov, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, and lots of science fiction. The I, Robot stories are from the 1940s, and the book published in 1950. A lot of the “more serious” entries on that list I feel have diminished somewhat with age.
Great Hollywood movies from that era are too numerous to name. In music there is plenty of jazz, plus Elvis, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Buddy Holly, doo wop, “the roots of rock” (includes some one hit wonders), Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, the Everlies, the Louvin Brothers, Johnny Cash, lots of country and bluegrass and blues, and many other very well known names from the 1950s. It is one of the most seminal decades for music ever. The 1940s are worse, perhaps because of the war, but still there is Rodgers and Hammerstein, lots of big band, and Woody Guthrie.
Contra Ted Gioia, much of that remains well-known to this day, though I would admit Howard Hanson and Walter Piston have fallen by the wayside. Overall, I think we are processing the American past pretty well.
Why we should not auction off all H1-B visas
I am fine with auctioning off some of them, but it should not be the dominant allocation mechanism. The visas work best when they support young talents who are unproven and perhaps liquidity constrained. Sundar Pichai was not a big star when he received his H1-B.
How about the business paying? Well, that is hard for a lot of start-ups. McKinsey, the employer who got Sundar his visa, might have coughed up the 100k, but Sundar did not stay there very long, only about two years. Which is what you might expect from the most talented, upwardly mobile candidates. That will discourage even well-capitalized businesses from making these investments, or they might try to lock in their new hires more than is currently the case.
So a pure auction mechanism probably is not optimal here, even though again it is fine to auction off some of the slots.