Category: Web/Tech
The social media ban in Australia, how is it going?
In December 2025, Australia became the first country to ban youth under 16 years old from holding accounts on major social media platforms, a policy now under consideration in more than a dozen countries and in numerous states. Because social media use is inherently social, the effectiveness of a ban that is easy to circumvent may depend on whether compliance reaches a tipping point: a share of compliant peers high enough to make it optimal for individuals to comply themselves. We surveyed 835 Australian teenagers four months after the ban took effect and find that only about one in four 14–15-year-olds comply. The social environment around use has barely moved: most banned teens believe that their peers are still using banned platforms and cite social reasons for continuing use. Sustaining high compliance requires two ingredients: the share of compliers must be high enough and those who comply must find it preferable to continue complying. The current ban achieves neither. Teenagers report that they require roughly two-thirds of peers to stop using social media to stop themselves, far above the share currently complying. They also perceive compliers as less popular than non-compliers, so the more influential teens disproportionately stay on the platforms. Together, these patterns suggest that compliance is more likely to diminish than to rise. Sustaining higher compliance will likely require pairing the ban with instruments that act on social norms and individual incentives directly.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
A few days ago I was talking with a very smart fifteen year old in Australia (really). He was of the opinion that it was quite ineffective, though he noted he could no longer access LinkedIn. I would note there are more stringent measures, requiring more governmental monitoring and control of the internet, that perhaps could have a greater effect.
Do Americans really hate AI?
We might be heading towards a populist backlash towards AI, but we’re not there yet. Outside the tech bubble, Americans really don’t care about AI yet.
AI is Americans’ 29th most important issue, according to the fantastic survey @davidshor ran that everyone is rightly looking at.
It’s not surprising that Americans will answer sentiment questions about AI negatively, as they’ve been negative towards tech for a while. But it’s a big leap from negative sentiment to meaningful political action.
Americans have been negative on social media for 10 years, and there has been no meaningful political action. And that’s despite all the other hallmarks of backlash people are saying about AI—violent extremists (people forget there was a shooting at YouTube HQ), protests, etc.
My prediction: we will get real populist backlash to AI when the unemployment moves by, say, 2 percentage points and people see it as caused by AI.
That is part of a longer tweet from Andy Hall.
AGI Could Lower Interest Rates
Standard models predict that expectations of artificial general intelligence (AGI) should elevate long-term interest rates. I show that this prediction need not hold. I develop a heterogeneous-agent asset pricing model in which AGI, or more broadly, transformative AI (TAI) capable of automating most human labor, can lower interest rates even as it dramatically accelerates growth. Under baseline calibrations, the risk-free rate falls to near zero despite growth rising from 2% to 11%, and the equity premium expands from 6% to over 20%. The effect on yields is negative and muted for all maturities, even under aggressive assumptions about the speed of AI adoption. These results advise caution when interpreting long-term bond yields as a signal of market expectations of transformative AI.
That is from a new paper by Caleb Maresca of NYU. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The best study to date on school phone bans
Schools across the U.S. have sharply restricted student use of phones during the school day. We evaluate one type of restriction—lockable phone pouches—using nationwide data combining large-scale surveys, GPS pings, standardized test scores, and school administrative records, along with sales records from the largest pouch provider. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design, we find that pouch adoption substantially reduces phone use as measured by GPS pings and teacher reports. In the first year after adoption, disciplinary incidents increase and student subjective well-being falls, consistent with short-term disruption. However, effects on well-being become positive in later years and disciplinary effects fade. For academic achievement, average effects on test scores are consistently close to zero. High schools see modest positive effects, particularly in math, while middle schools see small negative effects. We find little evidence of effects on school attendance, self-reported classroom attention, or perceived online bullying.
In sum, it is fine to want to run a school that way, but do not expect huge educational gains, if any. The evidence on this is accumulating, but many seem unable to accept the results. In any case it is not worthy of a major moral crusade.
Here is the NBER working paper, with top-tier researchers involved I might add, namely .
Have online worlds become the last free places for children?
Major public intellectuals and politicians have responded by arguing that children should rarely, if ever, participate in digital spaces. As a result, many schools in the US now demand that students seal their smartphones in magnetic pouches. A number of countries, including Australia, the United Kingdom and France, are even considering or have already implemented bans on social media accounts for children and teenagers.
Such restrictions, however, are not the tools of liberation we may imagine them to be.
In fact, for some children, the internet may be one of the last remaining spaces where they can grow up doing what children everywhere have evolved to do: independently play and explore with their peers.
Here is more from anthropologist Eli Stark-Elster. I would add a point. I do accept the evidence suggesting that limiting or banning cell phones in schools brings marginally better academic results. Yet the people who advocate such policies never point out that so many schools are just deadly dull and not very intellectually stimulating? Often what is on the phone is in fact more interesting and sometimes more instructive as well, even if the students do worse in terms of the standards set by the school.
The collapse of teen fertility in the digital era
Teen fertility collapsed globally starting around 2007. This affected countries across the income and policy spectrum. This paper argues that smartphones changed how teens spend time with each other, and that this change in turn drove the collapse in teen fertility. Once enough teens are on the phone, being on the phone is where the peer network is; in-person time falls sharply, and with it the unstructured contact in which most unintended teen conceptions occur. A coordination model formalizes this tipping: as the smartphone price falls, the in-person equilibrium ceases to exist and the economy moves to a phone-mediated one. Within the United States, terrainruggedness variation in broadband and 4G coverage identifies a causal effect on teen fertility, and time-use diaries show in-person socializing among teens roughly halving while digital leisure roughly tripled. A parallel design for England and Wales recovers the same acceleration and the same effect of mobile coverage on teen conceptions, ruling out country-specific contraceptive-access and welfare-reform stories. The model predicts that the shift towards the phone-mediated equilibrium affects multiple aspects of teen behavior. The same instrument that produces a collapse in teen fertility produces a surge in teen suicides.
That is from a recent paper by Nathan Hudson and Hernan Moscoso Boedo.
My very charming Conversation with Craig Newmark
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Craig discuss why webpage design has gotten worse for 30 years, what Craig’s “obsessive customer service disorder” taught him about human nature, why trusting people and maintaining a nine-second rule for scams aren’t as contradictory as they sound, why roommate ads are a better way to find love, why Craigslist never added seller evaluations, why Leonard Cohen speaks to him more than Bob Dylan, what William Gibson’s Neuromancer got right about the internet, why Jackson Lamb is now one of his role models, why large foundations lose accountability, what two painful Ivy League grants taught him philanthropy, what he gets from rescuing pigeons, the hard lesson he learned about confronting people who lie for a living, his favorite TV shows and movies, the one genuine luxury he can’t go without, what he still needs to learn, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: What is scarce in your life then? You’re giving away money. You don’t have to run the company on a day-to-day basis. We’d all like more years to live, but what is it that if you had more of it, you could be more effective with?
NEWMARK: I guess, ideally, I would have more social skills—meaning, some.
COWEN: We’re simulating social skills just fine here.
NEWMARK: That’s the phrase I use. At least on my part, what looks like social skills is just fakery. I can do it for short amounts of time, maybe 90 minutes. I’ve given up, though, on actually accumulating social skills, getting better at it. More to the point, I try to get into positions where other people can show social skills.
COWEN: One journalist once described you as having “obsessive customer service disorder.” Isn’t that a social skill?
NEWMARK: That’s more obsession, so it’s pathological, but a good one. I believe that you should treat people like you want to be treated. Think of the many times that you needed customer service. Sometimes you can get good customer service, but that’s the exception. That’s no reason for us not to provide a good customer service. Like earlier today, someone sent in a grant proposal, and I had to tell them that they forgot to sign the thing, a very minor thing. More importantly, I’m telling people they need to do some planning for good communications because their work is much less valuable if they can’t talk about it effectively.
COWEN: According to Susan Freese, who wrote about you, in one year, you answered 40,000 customer service emails. Is that possibly true? If so, what did you learn about humanity doing that?
Recommended, charming and engaging throughout.
talkie: an LM from 1930
Here is the link, with explanation.
Will AI end anonymity?
Like many journalists, I have a bunch of unpublished fiction lying about, so I tried Claude on the first chapter of a romance novel that I started almost 20 years ago, during the hysterical, mawkish phase of a particularly bad breakup. “Megan McArdle,” said Opus 4.7, after a few seconds of thought. Fascinated, I kept feeding it smaller and smaller passages to see how little prose it needed for identification. The answer, apparently, was 1,441 words…
Would Claude do better or worse with something more modern? I fed Claude a different opening chapter from an unpublished science fiction novel I started right before the pandemic — I contain multitudes — and this time Claude needed only 1,132 words. The eulogy I gave for my mother, lightly edited to remove some too-specific biographical details, was even faster: Depending on the passage, Claude was able to peg me as the author in as few as 124 words.
Here is more from Megan McArdle.
Generative AI and Entrepreneurship
This paper studies how Generative AI (Gen AI) is reshaping the U.S. startup ecosystem. Exploiting the release of ChatGPT, we show that startups with greater pre-release Gen AI task exposure reduced employment within two quarters, primarily among junior and implementation roles. Displaced workers experienced longer unemployment spells and moved to lower-paying but less exposed jobs. Conversely, exposed startups increased productivity, scaled faster, and accelerated through financing rounds. Venture capital shifted toward frequent, smaller investments, boosting new firm formation. Overall, incumbent contraction was offset by new firm formation, leaving aggregate employment unchanged but shifting composition to senior roles.
That is from a new and important paper by Abhinav Gupta, Franklin Qian, Elena Simintz, & Yifan Sun.
From the UAE
Under the directives of the President of the UAE, we launch a new government model.
Within two years, 50% of government sectors, services, and operations will run on Agentic AI, making the UAE the first government globally to operate at this scale through autonomous systems.
AI is no longer a tool. It analyses, decides, executes, and improves in real time. It will become our executive partner to enhance services, accelerate decisions, and raise efficiency.
This transformation has a clear timeline. Two years. Performance across government will be measured by speed of adoption, quality of implementation, and mastery of AI in redesigning government work.
We are investing in our people. Every federal employee will be trained to master AI, building one of the world’s strongest capabilities in AI-driven government.
Implementation will be overseen by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, with a dedicated taskforce chaired by Mohammad Al Gergawi driving execution.
The world is changing. Technology is accelerating. Our principle remains constant. People come first. Our goal is a government that is faster, more responsive, and more impactful.
Here is the link. While there is typically a certain amount of PR in such pronouncements, I do not think this one is only PR.
Imagegen 2.0
Created by Alex T., and of course GPT as well.
A Comparison of Agentic AI Systems and Human Economists
This paper compares agentic AI systems and human economists performing the same causal inference tasks. AI systems and humans generally obtain similar median causal effect estimates. While there is substantial dispersion of estimates across model instances, the human distributions of estimates have wider tails. Using AI models as reviewers to compare and rank “submissions,” the following ranking emerges regardless of reviewer model: (1) Codex GPT-5.4, (2) Codex GPT-5.3-Codex, (3) Claude Code Opus 4.6, and (4) Human Researchers. These findings suggest that agentic AI systems will allow us to scale empirical research in economics.
I enjoy the name of the author, namely Serafin Grundl. Here is the paper, via Ethan Mollick. You could interpret these results as showing the AIs have fewer hallucinations. And just to reiterate a key point from the paper:
The second part of this paper is an AI review tournament in which “submissions” (codes and write-ups) from humans and the AI models are compared and ranked against each other. The reviewers are the following AI models: Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview, Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4. For each review the reviewer is asked to write a report comparing four submissions (human, Opus 4.6, GPT-5.3-Codex, GPT-5.4). Each reviewer model writes comparison reports for the same 300 comparison groups. The average rankings are strikingly similar across reviewer models: (1) Codex GPT-5.4, (2) Codex GPT-5.3-Codex, (3) Claude Code Opus 4.6, and 2(4) Human Researchers.
Who comes in last? Hi people!
Self-driving vehicles and the cross-country drive
Following my post on cross-country driving, a reader asked me about this prospect but I suppose I am skeptical.
First, self-driving vehicles make it too easy to read a book or stare at your phone. Driving yourself fixes your attention on what is unfolding before your eyes, and forces you to keep it there. You might be bored for an hour, but you will catch periodic gems by always looking at the road before you and to the side.
Second, at least for a while self-driving vehicles will not be allowed to exceed speed limits. Good luck with that. A lot of America is marked at 25 mph when you can go 36 mph or maybe even 37 mph in a responsible manner.
Third, many of the best moments in cross-country driving come from the unexpected swerve — “hey, that looks interesting!” And half of the time it is not. Will the self-driving vehicle know when you might wish to swerve and pull over?
Fourth, there is something to be said for integrating the rhythms of your body with those of the car. When you drive yourself, you feel the trip in a way the Waymo does not give you. I would stress this point is a negative for most car trips, though perhaps not for a cross-country drive. If you do not enjoy driving through the USA, maybe do not do the cross-country thing at all? Walking through Paris or Istanbul remains a lovely alternative.
Automation and better AI might eventually solve or address some of those problems. But the next available round of self-driving vehicles probably will not.
My dialogue with Jonathan Zittrain
At Harvard Law School, Jonathan is consistently excellent.