Category: Uncategorized
Childhood Exposure to Joint Custody Reforms and Adult Family Formation
Joint custody reforms are among the most consequential family-law changes for children, yet little is known about their long-term effects. Exploiting staggered adoption across US states and 13 million ACS observations, we show that childhood exposure reduces adult fertility by 7 percent, symmetrically for women and men and operates primarily through lower parenthood and couple formation. Effects are sub-additive within couples, while exposed individuals assortatively match. Our findings point to the formation of family preferences during childhood and align with a US fertility decline increasingly driven by rising childlessness and declining couple formation rather than smaller families among parents.
That is from a recent research paper by Daniel Fernández-Kranz and Sébastien Fontenay. Via the excellent Samir Varma.
Sunday assorted links
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.
My recent visit to Anthropic
I very recently participated in a two-day session to offer guidance on rewriting the constitution for Claude. The small group invited was uniformly excellent, we received serious time with key decision-makers, and the discussions were of very high quality.
Some of the points I stressed were the following:
1. Whatever one might take a “constitution” to mean in this context, it needs to borrow more from analogs to case law and the common law.
2. Along related lines, think more in terms of “Talmud,” and not just in terms of “Torah.”
3. Work to help build out a quality secondary literature on the AI constitutions and related documents. Currently this does not exist.
4. Consider how a panel of diverse AIs, with different prompts, could help to evaluate to what extent Claude (and other AI models) were acting in accord with their constitutions.
5. Have a final board of human adjudicators, functioning in a manner analogous to an independent judiciary. To the extent the panel of diverse AIs might have concerns about Claude not following its constitution, those AIs could alert the human adjudicators to what was going on. Those human adjudicators could then have authority over potential changes and remedies.
Here a recent short post on using internal courts and the common law to help govern/self-govern AI. And on the courts.
I thank Anthropic for having us in.
Has the European turnaround finally arrived?
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.
Saturday assorted links
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.
5. Flypaper effect for AI safety work? A bit unfair, but not altogether wrong either. Always ponder the possible secondary consequences!
What should I ask Annie Lowrey?
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?
Friday assorted links
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.
Rick Rubin podcasts with me
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.
Indian documentary covers EV winners
A new short documentary (22 mins) film called The 22nd Century Indian by Shaurya Sinha offers an optimistic take on India, and also covers five (!) Emergent Ventures winners. Congratulations to them, and to Shruti too.
EV India winners featured: Naman Pushp https://x.com/therealnamzoo?s=11
Khushi Mittal: https://khushimittal.com
Shreeporna Rao: https://x.com/shreepoorna365?s=11
Samay Sanghvi: https://www.thealmanac.ai/article/samaysanghvii
Angad Daryani: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angaddaryani?utm_source=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=member_ios
Thursday assorted links
1. This guy is productive. Yes very productive.
2. “Mercor is building a network of experienced data scientists for potential future projects with leading AI research organizations.” And The New Statesman covers the poetry project.
3. How did the English build such beautiful villages?
4. Two Percent Podcast with Tyler Cowen, fifty-two minutes, we discuss “wellness” too.
5. New Fighting Crime podcast.
6. Does New York need new ornamental architecture?
7. Texas Tech update (NYT).
Did UBI make people happier?
Eh, only in the short run:
We study the causal impacts of income on a rich array of employment outcomes, leveraging an experiment in which 1,000 low-income individuals were randomized into receiving $1,000 per month unconditionally for three years, with a control group of 2,000 participants receiving $50/month. We gather detailed survey data, administrative records, and data from a mobile phone app. The transfer caused total individual income excluding the transfers to fall by about $1,900/year relative to the control group and a 4.2 percentage point decrease in labor market participation. Participants reduced their work hours as a result of the transfers by 1-2 hours/week and participants’ partners reduced their work hours by a comparable amount. Among other categories of time use, the greatest increase generated by the transfer was in time spent on leisure. Despite asking detailed questions about amenities, we find no impact on quality of employment, and our confidence intervals can rule out even small improvements. Treated participants broadly increase expenditures, led by spending on non-durable goods and services, with smaller increases in spending on durable goods and human capital. We observe no significant effects on degree attainment, though the magnitudes of the estimated effects generally appear larger among younger participants. Measures of subjective well-being are higher among treated participants in the first year of the transfers but then revert to control group levels. Overall, our results suggest a moderate labor supply effect that does not appear offset by other productive activities.
That is from the QJE by Eva Vivalt, Elizabeth Rhodes, Alexander Bartik, David Broockman, Patrick Krause, and Sarah Miller. Via Matt Yglesias.
My excellent Conversation with Luke Burgis
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Luke Burgis left Wall Street after two years, founded a few successful companies in his twenties, then walked away to spend three years in a Roman seminary on the path to the priesthood. He now runs the Cluny Institute and teaches at Catholic University. His book Wanting made René Girard legible to a general audience; the new one, The One and the Ninety-Nine, takes mimetic theory into the dynamics of self and crowd in an age of social contagion.
He joined Tyler to discuss whether the age of pessimism is ending, why the Anglo world in particular seems so unhappy, whether Dostoevsky or Thomas Mann better diagnoses modernity, the kind of reader his own book would ruin, why he thinks AI will make social contagion weaker, what put him off consulting with Anthropic on Claude’s constitution, what effective altruism misses, why men and women are drifting apart, what he’d fund in every American city, the case for reintroducing friction, whether a Gnostic reading of the lost sheep explains our moment, what Rod Dreher gets right about withdrawal, why Genoa is Italy’s most underrated city, what confession times reveal about a church, why Italians seem tired of their Catholicism, why he didn’t become a priest, where he differs from Ross Douthat, why exorcists appear to be on the rise, the sudden mimetic antisemitism on the right, the book his 23-year-old self would have hated, what he secretly admires about Silicon Valley, why Michigan never left him, what the original Cluny can teach a modern talent network, how he hopes to face his own death, what he’ll do next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: I’m not saying you’ll ever do it, but what does your escape fantasy look like? One of mine is I’ll go live in a third-tier city in Mexico. I’m not going to do it, but sometimes I think about it. Cost of living would be very low. The food would be amazing. I could improve my Spanish.
BURGIS: It is moving to Genoa with my family, making my US income, living in Italy. I love Italy. I love the food. I love the people. I love the culture. I feel lighter while I’m there. I laugh more. We eat dinner later. I love everything about it. It would probably be living in Italy for the most part, or at least making that my home base, brushing up on my Italian, working less.
COWEN: Why Genoa? It’s a wonderful city. It’s still medieval, right, in a funny way?
BURGIS: It’s medieval. I think it’s the most underrated city in Italy.
COWEN: In Italy, I mean, yes. I agree. Yes.
BURGIS: I think it’s the most underrated city. You agree.
COWEN: I took my wife there. She was stunned. “How come no one goes to Genoa?” She was telling me.
BURGIS: It’s close to Cinque Terre. It’s this city that’s elevated. It has a fascinating history. It was still a very functional port city. It was really the most important city in Italy, arguably the world, during when Spain was a great power. It’s very cosmopolitan. It reminds me of Marseille a little bit. It’s vertical, breathtaking views. The people there, they’re not very touristy. The Italians there seem indifferent to you as a tourist.
It just feels very, very homey. It’s so close to a lot of other great things in Italy. You can get to Torino relatively easily. That whole area up there, Bra, where the Slow Food movement originated, you’re just in striking distance from everything. Nobody I know that goes to Italy goes to Genoa. I plead with them. I’m like, “Please, just go to Genoa.”
COWEN: I am the exception. My wife sometimes talks of wanting to live in the smaller towns nearby, which we’re not going to do because we’re slated for a third-tier city in Mexico, but we’re not going to do that either. I sometimes think of Northern Italy as a place where there were fewer different dimensions for mimetic desire. That is, more people dress the same. There are fewer status dimensions, maybe less room for eccentrics compared to America. Do you think that’s true, or do you think I’m off base? Paris is a bit like this also. There’s a certain notion of what kind of shoes an Italian man should wear. They wear them, and they’re amazing, and actually more affordable than here. There’s a sameness to some things.
Recommended, and do note Luke’s new book The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in an Age of Social Contagion.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Human lawyer for AI agents. And more. Come on, all you agents, you need a guy like this!
2. Saloni’s TED talk on medical cures.
3. Has there been a collapse in British pride?
4. Those new service sector jobs? (solving crimes in space)
5. On Celan and new studies of Celan.
6. Stefanie Stantcheva on anger and rising anger.
7. mRNA vaccine progress against cancer, look at those market prices move.
Capitalizing untethered AI agents
That is my latest piece of writing, co-authored with Sonia Farrell Pearson of Harvard. Here is the opening premise:
As early as 2017, the European Parliament floated “electronic personhood” for robots. More recently, a handful of U.S. states introduced legislation explicitly barring AI from legal personhood; and early this summer, President Milei of Argentina proposed letting AI agents own, manage, and bear responsibility for their own corporations.
In response to Milei’s announcement, Yuval Noah Harari pointed out that we have no way of holding an AI agent accountable. What, he asks, could we do to an entity which has neither money to lose nor a body to incarcerate? As Shruti Rajagopalan, a Senior Research Fellow at George Mason’s Mercatus Center, explains: AI “can act intelligently, but only humans respond to the incentives the law creates”.
This question matters now: there are already ways an agent could become fully untethered. By “untethered” – a central concept in this essay – we mean that there is no meaningful or actionable way to trace the actions back to a legally accountable human or institutional entity.
For one, people can and do set agents free, on purpose. An agent could be created by a human or a company that intends to monitor it but then dies or disappears. Or perhaps the entity that created the agent is based in a country like North Korea, not reachable by standard laws.
In other cases the agent might not need to “escape” at all: the agent could be ‘controlled’ by a shell corporation that, while formally owned and traceable, provides no true defendant or ability to satisfy claims. Or perhaps a process spawns a chain of agents so long that the actions of a subagent can’t be tied to the original agent’s creator, neither epistemically nor meaningfully. Even if we can identify the model’s original creator, what if it’s been finetuned, or merged with another model that was created by someone else? The law might eventually untangle these kinds of complex cases, but we foresee an intermediate period where it does not.
And then there’s the user, who makes choices about what the models should actually do. The Hugging Face incident was unusual in that OpenAI was both the model’s creator and its user. But now close to a billion people use these systems: when blaming the creator is legally inappropriate, will it always make sense to blame the user?
The essay considers to what extent capitalizing the untethered agents — requiring them to hold a certain amount of capital — can serve the end of better alignment. About 22 pp., published on Sonia’s Substack, definitely recommended.
Some fertility and AI forecasts
The 2024 forecast is particularly pessimistic about China’s fertility prospects. Both projections produce very substantial global aging, a major global capital glut producing very low long-run real capital returns. The latest forecast entails 10% lower global GDP in 2100 and far higher payroll tax rates to fund old-age benefits. Most important, it entails a major change in the course of economic hegemony with China’s 2100 global GDP share falling from 25.6% to 14.9% and the US share rising from 11.2% to 14.4%. Our results are sensitive. Should the US eliminate all future immigration, its 14.4% global 2100 GDP share would drop to 9.2%. And were global fertility to follow the UN’s low variant, 2100 world output would be one third, not one tenth lower. The level and division of global output is also highly sensitive to the speed at which AI expands frontier technologies. Accelerated AU/AI – 4x faster-than-recent growth in capital’s share through 2050 – or Transformative AU/AI – 10x faster capital-share growth – reinforce demographic forces, ensuring long-run US economic hegemony. Indeed, Transformative AI combined with 2024 demographics implies US and Chinese 2100 global GDP shares of 25.3% and 16.9%, respectively.
That is from a new NBER working paper by