If you want to comment on events, comments are open…
Yes they are.
Poland’s PPP income is likely to exceed that of Japan by 2026.
Here is the link.
Saturday assorted links
1. Review of Hannah’s Children.
2. Lookism with Hadza and Tsimane hunters. And lookism for scars and palsies.
3. Those new service sector jobs: banter merchant for a Scottish hotel.
4. Angry birds are fighting drones that patrol for sharks on NYC beaches. It’s the oystercatchers!
5. AI finding copper for itself (NYT).
6. Edward A. Tenenbaum and the Deutschmark: How an American Jew Became the Father of Germany’s Postwar Economic Revival.
7. John van Reenen to lead economic advisory council to boost UK growth.
8. It’s happening.
Managing AI Employees
Lattice is a platform for managing employees. I believe this announcement from the Lattice CEO is real:
Today, Lattice made history: We became the first company to give digital workers official employee records in Lattice. This marks a huge moment in the evolution of A1 technology and of the workplace. It takes the idea of an “AI employee” from concept to reality — and marks the start of a new journey for Lattice, to lead organizations forward in the responsible hiring of digital workers. Within Lattice’s people platform, AI employees will be securely onboarded, trained, and assigned goals, performance metrics, appropriate systems access, and even a manager. We know this process will raise a lot of questions and we don’t yet have all the answers, but we want to help our customers find them. So we will be breaking ground, bending minds, and leaning into learning. And we want to bring everyone along on this journey with us.
On the one hand, this is wild. On the other hand, it makes perfect sense to use our current system of managing employees–performance reviews, training, feedback, yearly bonuses and so on–to manage AIs. In essence, human management systems become the interface for AI workers.
Every team will soon include AI workers. At first, this will be the AI stenographer who keeps the minutes, the admin who reminds everyone of their tasks, and the PowerPoint designer who puts together presentations but quickly this will evolve and some AIs will naturally take on supervisory roles until, my boss is an AI, will not seem strange.
What should I ask Tobi Lütke?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is Wikipedia:
Tobias “Tobi” Lütke (born 1981) MSC is a German/Canadian entrepreneur who is the co-founder and CEO of Shopify, an e-commerce company based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He has been part of the core team of the Ruby on Rails framework and has created open source libraries such as Active Merchant
Born in Koblenz, and he is on the board of directors of Coinbase. So what should I ask him?
How to feed the Olympics, a problem in procurement
It’s a daunting task to feed 15,000 people no matter what, but if food is fuel, the chefs feeding the athletes at Olympic Village are somewhat responsible for how these athletes perform. Events management and catering group Sodexo Live takes that responsibility seriously. What results is an incredible feat of logistics, combining sustainable sourcing, diversity of options, and ensuring all athlete’s nutritional needs are met by some combination of the 500 dishes that will be served.
But it’s not just baseline nutritional needs that need to be met — athletes are coming from all over the world, with their own culinary traditions. The Olympics are supposed to be a place of cultural exchange, and this extends to the food. Sodexo Live has brought on partner chefs Amandine Chaignot, Akrame Benallal, and Alexandra Mazzia to serve dishes like quinoa muesli, chickpea pommade, and gnocchi in chicken sauce to showcase modern French cuisine. Other chefs on the team are charged with creating everything athletes will need to eat, both before and after the competition.
And:
One of the funny parts that we’ve learned is that we think they’re all athletes and in their physical prime, so distance doesn’t matter. But actually it does, because our dining hall is extremely large, it’s over 220 meters long and 24 meters wide. Walking from one side to the other takes five minutes. And these competitors, they’re not going to go that far, they’re going to really ensure the minimum steps so they don’t spend too much energy. Nobody expected that.
And:
Bananas are an athlete’s favorite thing. We anticipate getting two or three million bananas. At peak time there will be 15,000 people living in one place. So that means per day, at peak time, we’re going to go up to 40,000 meals. At the end of the entire journey, it’s over 1.2 million meals. I was working on quantifying the volume of coffee, how to produce it. And then someone said, “Can we get the coffee grinds back to us to use as a fertilizer?” So what’s the volume of grinds we’ll produce? I’’s 20 tons of coffee, so that means it’ll be 40 tons of coffee residue. But all of this is going to be used to grow mushrooms.
Finally:
Americans have been extremely vocal about what they want. They were more picky and sensitive about having a lot of gluten-free items, and a more vegetable-based diet.
The piece and interview is by Jaya Saxena, the reproduced answers are from Estelle Lamont. Here is the entire piece, via the ever-excellent The Browser.
The class gap in academic career progression
There is a new and excellent paper by Anna Stansbury and Kyra Rodriguez on this topic:
Unlike gender or race, class is rarely a focus of research or DEI efforts in elite US occupations. Should it be? In this paper, we document a large class gap in career progression in one labor market: US tenure-track academia. Using parental education to proxy for socioeconomic background, we compare career outcomes of people who got their PhDs in the same institution and field (excluding those with PhD parents). First-generation college graduates are 13% less likely to end up tenured at an R1, and are on average tenured at institutions ranked 9% lower, than their PhD classmates with a parent with a (non-PhD) graduate degree. We explore three sets of mechanisms: (1) research productivity, (2) networks, and (3) preferences. Research productivity can explain less than a third of the class gap, and preferences explain almost none. Our analyses of coauthor characteristics suggest networks likely play a role. Finally, examining PhDs who work in industry we find a class gap in pay and in managerial responsibilities which widens over the career. This means a class gap in career progression exists in other US occupations beyond academia.
Here is a first-rate tweet storm by Stansbury on the paper. Via Aidan Finley.
Friday assorted links
1. MIE: “Shake Shack’s Crinkle Cut Fries Have Been Reimagined as a Body Pillow That’s Oddly Chic.”
2. Grocery store MIE: bullets in vending machines.
3. There is talk of a possible Three Mile Island restart.
4. New architectural citations.
6. MIE: Oregon puffin license plates.
7. For the third time in recent memory, a 15-uear-old is Norwegian chess champion, model that.
Update on the Supervillains (maybe that’s you)
The law’s price controls will also deter companies from developing new medicines. A study I co-authored estimated that 135 fewer drugs will come to market through 2039 because of the Inflation Reduction Act. Research firm Vital Transformation’s forecast is even bleaker, predicting that the U.S. could lose 139 drugs within the next decade.
Dozens of life-sciences companies have announced cuts to their research and development pipelines because of the 2022 law. These announcements have come in earnings calls and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission—where deliberate misstatements would expose executives to civil and criminal penalties—so they can’t be chalked up to political posturing.
That is from Tomas Philipson at the WSJ. It is worth noting this kind of academic research has not been effectively rebutted, rather what you usually hear in response is a bunch of snarky comments about Big Pharma and the like.
And to repeat myself yet again: if you are ever tempted to cancel somebody, ask yourself “do I cancel those who favor tougher price controls on pharma? After all, they may be inducing millions of premature deaths.” If you don’t cancel those people — and you shouldn’t — that should broaden your circle of tolerance more generally.
Matt Yglesias on neoliberalism and economic growth
And it’s worth asking: Is it true that since 1974, policy debate in the United States has been dominated by a “growth-at-all-costs” brand of “free-market fundamentalism”?
I don’t think that actually is true. Technically, the biggest pieces of environmental legislation passed just outside that window — the Clean Air Act in 1970, the Clean Water Act in 1972, and the Endangered Species Act in 1973. But it’s pretty clear that environmental regulation is a lot stricter in 2024 than it was in 1974. The Americans With Disabilities Act was passed in 1990. Land use regulation — which was explicitly called “growth control” when it was new — has grown dramatically stricter since the seventies.
The idea that for the last 50 years we’ve been on a manic quest for growth is confused. In reality, we’ve seen during that time period increasing levels of political influence wielded by people (mainly environmentalists and NIMBYs) who are skeptical of economic growth. It’s true, as skeptics of growth sometimes note, that internal policy disputes in the 1950s and 60s rarely featured pushback on the grounds of the necessity of focusing on economic growth. But that’s not because anti-growth sentiment was stronger in the past — it’s because back then there was almost no one in a position of power who was arguing for explicitly anti-growth policies. Degrowthers have obviously not dominated American politics since the 1970s — we have had economic growth — but growth has been slower because anti-growth ideas have gotten some real purchase over the last 50 years. The Hewlett thesis statement about this is backwards.
Here is the full post, gated but worth paying for.
Narco-pentcostalism in Brazil?
Reports that a powerful Rio drug lord known for his extremist religious beliefs ordered Catholic churches near his stronghold to close have spooked worshipers and security experts and exposed the advent of a “narco-pentecostal” movement made up of heavily armed evangelical drug traffickers.
Claims emerged in the Brazilian press over the weekend that Álvaro Malaquias Santa Rosa – a notorious gang boss known as Peixão (Big Fish) – had determined that three places of worship should shut down in and around the agglomeration of favelas that he controls in northern Rio.
Since Peixão – whose nickname comes from the ichthys “Jesus” fish – took power in 2016 of five favelas that have become known as the Complexo de Israel, an allusion to the evangelical belief that the return of Jews to the Holy Land is a step towards the second coming of Christ and Armageddon.
A neon Star of David has been erected at the top of the complex and at night can be seen for miles around – an unmissable symbol of Peixão’s force and his faith. The roofs of the favelas’ redbrick houses are dotted with blue and white Israel flags demarcating the territory the gangster controls [emphasis added]. When police raided one of his hideouts in 2021 they found a swimming pool framed by a mural of the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem and the words: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.”
In the past, Peixão’s troops have been accused of ransacking Afro-Brazilian temples and banning Afro-Brazilian celebrations in the Complex of Israel, where more than 100,000 people live. But this week’s reports were the first relating to Catholic places of worship.
Here is the full story.
Bryan Caplan on YIMBY in the NYT
Here is one excerpt:
What few appreciate is that the overregulation of housing has blocked a classic American path: moving to a higher-wage part of the country to secure a better life. A paper by the economists Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag shows that housing costs now routinely outweigh wage gains: While janitors and waiters do indeed earn higher salaries in the Bay Area, they have to spend much more than their extra pay on rent. Programmers and lawyers who move to gold-rush regions still come out ahead, but the rest of the workforce is gradually getting out of Dodge. In a functional society, self-interest inspires workers to relocate to wherever they are most productive. In our society, strict housing regulation has decoupled movement and value, leading to the mass migration of lower-income residents away from geographic centers of technological progress and economic growth.
Here is the entire article, and don’t forget about Bryan’s new book on housing deregulation Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation.
Thursday assorted links
1. Singapore fact of the day uh-oh.
2. Benjamin Schneider on robotaxis.
3. Jon Hartley interview with Edmund Phelps.
4. The $150,000 dog.
5. Greg Mankiw on inflation and the Phillips curve.
6. Doctors using AI for rent-seeking (NYT).
7. America’s younger Catholic priests are more conservative? (NYT)
8. RIP, Sigrun Øen, mother of Magnus Carlsen.
The polity that is Hawaii
From an MR reader:
The most Democratic legislature in the country passed two market-friendly bills this session.
1) HB2404 CD 1 represents the largest income tax cut in the State’s history (description and analysis here).
2) SB 3202 forces the counties to allow more construction of Accessory Dwelling Units on residential properties (news article here).
As somebody who works on HI state policy, looking at the supply-side constraints is a new way of thinking here. People are starting to recognize that the same old demand-side approaches are not working. I expect more laws like this in the coming years.
Hawaii has always been a small-c conservative state, in part due to the large Asian population. The Leg once again struck down a Cannabis legalization bill this year despite a big push from Progressives.
It will be interesting to see what happens next.
My excellent Conversation with Brian Winter
Here is the video, audio, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
It’s not just the churrasco that made him fall in love with Brazil. Brian Winter has been studying and writing about Latin America for over 20 years. He’s been tracking the struggles and triumphs of the region as it’s dealt with decades of coups, violence, and shifting economics. His work offers a nuanced perspective on Latin America’s persistent challenges and remarkable resilience.
Together Brian and Tyler discuss the politics and economics of nearly every country from the equator down. They cover the future of migration into Brazil, what it’s doing right in agriculture, the cultural shift in race politics, crime in Rio and São Paulo, the effectiveness and future consequences of Bukele’s police state in El Salvador, the economic growth of Colombia despite continued violence, the prevalence of startups and psychoanalysis in Argentina, Uruguay’s reduction in poverty levels, the beautiful ugliness of Sao Paulo, where Brian will explore next, and more.
And here is one excerpt;
COWEN: What’s the economic geography of Brazil going to look like? All the wealth near Mato Grosso and the north just very, very poor? Or the north empties out? How’s that going to work? There used to be some modest degree of balance.
WINTER: That’s true. Most of the population in Brazil and the economic center, for sure, was in the southeast. That means, really, São Paulo state, which is about a quarter of Brazil’s population but roughly a third of its GDP. Rio as well, and the state of Minas Gerais, which has a name that tells its history. That means “general mines” in Portuguese. That’s the area where a lot of the gold came out of in the 18th and 19th centuries. That’s gone now, so it’s not as much of an economic pull.
You’re right, Tyler, though, that a lot of the real boom right now, the action, is in places like Mato Grosso, which is in the region of Brazil called the Central West. That’s soy country. I’m from Texas, and Mato Grosso is virtually indistinguishable from Texas these days. It’s hot. It’s flat. The crop, like I said, is soy. There’s cattle ranching as well.
Even the music — Brazil, as others have noted, has gone from being the country of bossa nova and the samba in the 1970s to being the country of sertanejo today. Sertanejo is a Brazilian cousin of country music with accordions, but it’s sung by people — men mostly — in jeans, big belt buckles, and cowboy hats. They’re importing that — not only that economic model but that lifestyle as well.
COWEN: What is the great Brazilian music of today? MPB is dead, right? So, what should someone listen to?
Recommended, interesting throughout.