Good job people, congratulations…
“Sonnet 4.5 does complete replication checks of an econpaper.”
That is Kevin Bryan, here is more from Ethan Mollick.
David Perell interviews Dan Wang
I am flattered that they dedicated the conversation to me…
Addendum: And a full transcript is here.
Monday assorted links
1. The real secret and meaning of The Beatles.
2. Large-brained humans have been around longer than we had thought?
3. Tallest bridge in the world opened, with coffee shop at the top.
4. John Searle, RIP. And a defense of John.
6. DeLong on AI and existential risk.
7. Secretary-General of NATO says it is Russian drones. I guess that is what you would expect when they have no transponders on, do not respond to communications, and have no records of landing or taking off at other airports?
Mark Skousen on recession warning signs
The White House and Wall Street were exuberant last week when the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis revised upward its second-quarter estimate of gross domestic product to show 3.8% growth in real terms, compared with a negative number in the first quarter. “US economy notches fastest growth pace in nearly two years in second quarter,” reported Yahoo Finance, “suggesting robust growth despite uncertainty set off by President Donald Trump’s tariff policy.”
Dig into the numbers, however, and you find the trade war is in fact wreaking economic havoc. Buried in last week’s BEA report is a much more reliable measure of the economy—gross output, or GO. It measures spending at all stages of production, totaling an estimated $63 trillion this year—more than twice GDP of $30 trillion.
GO revealed that economic growth is slowing to a crawl, ahead only 1.2% in real terms. If you include all transactions in wholesale and retail trade, the adjusted GO is up only 0.3%. More important, overall business spending fell sharply, by an annualized 5.6% in real terms. These results are much more consistent with the weak labor-market data.
Here is more from the WSJ.
New issue of Econ Journal Watch
The End of Truth: In 1944, Friedrich Hayek warned that traveling down the anti-liberal road would lead us into serfdom under rogue government. One chapter, “The End of Truth,” explained the kit necessary to sustain the new feudalism, the kit of propaganda and clientelism promoting big lies that must be protected by censorship, intimidation, and persecution. Republished by permission.
Isaiah Berlin on Karl Marx: An earlier exchange (1, 2, 3, 4) touched upon whether Karl Marx’s having become a big deal was adventitious or destined. Two selections from Isaiah Berlin are here republished, by permission, to suggest that it was rather destined: (1) a selection from Berlin’s book Karl Marx; (2) “Marxism and the International in the Nineteenth Century”. Daniel Klein provides a Foreword.
Housing supply liberalization and recent research: Jason Sorens examines three recent papers that might lend support to opponents of liberalization. One paper finds that housing supply has no long-run effect on local rents, while two others find that restricting housing supply might translate into amenities. Sorens argues that the evidence so far still supports the conclusion that supply-side zoning liberalization typically lowers local rents over meaningful time horizons without generating disamenities substantial enough to overcome the welfare benefits of liberalization. Greg Howard and Jack Liebersohn, the authors of one of the commented-on papers, reply to Sorens.
Bubble Talk: An American Economic Review article by Jianjun Miao and Pengfei Wang purports to “provide a theory of rational stock price bubbles.” In the previous issue, Tomohiro Hirano and Alexis Akira Toda argued that Miao and Wang’s ‘bubble’ talk is inapt. Now, Miao and Wang reply, and Hirano and Toda rejoin.
Incorporation and productivity in Russia 1894–1908: A 2020 American Economic Review article by Amanda Gregg compares factory productivity among corporations and non-corporations in late Imperial Russia, and finds that corporations outperformed. Here, Nikita Lychakov scrutinize Gregg’s data and methods and suggests that the claimed causal relationship between the corporate form and productivity remains unestablished. Amand Gregg replies.
Online grocery shopping in Russia: In a 2024 article in Sustainability, Michael Olumekor, Harman Preet Singh, and Ibrahim Abdullah Alhamad explore factors driving the regional uptake of online grocery shopping in Russia. Here, Muzaffarjon Ahunov and Leo Van Hove suggest that their analysis has multiple serious weaknesses and that their results should be disregarded. Ahunov and Van Hove show, for example, that internet access does play a critical role.
The Impartial Spectator Rises: Daniel Klein, Nicholas Swanson, and Jeffrey Young (KSY) comment on twelve scholars: T.D. Campbell, Samuel Fleischacker, Fonna Forman-Barzilai, Gilbert Harman, Gavin Kennedy, A.L. Macfie, James Otteson, Maria Pia Paganelli, D.D. Raphael, Eric Schliesser, Craig Smith, and Jack Russell Weinstein. KSY allege that they misunderstand “impartial spectator” in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments—specifically, that they flatten significations of “impartial spectator.” KSY explain a paragraph in which Smith distinguishes “the man within the breast” and “impartial spectator”— a paragraph elided by most of the commented-on authors. Those authors are hereby invited to respond for publication in the next issue (March 2026) of this Journal.
EJW Audio:
Jason Sorens on Housing Supply Liberalization and Recent Research
*Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000*
By Avner Greif, Joel Mokyr, and Guido Tabellini. Due out in November, likely to be excellent.
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?
Zambia fact of the day
It is worse than you think:
Of 360,000 children aged 15 in Zambia only five (not 5%, 5 total) could read at “globally proficient levels.”
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.