Spain fact of the day
CoverManager, an online platform that manages reservations for thousands of Spanish restaurants, reports that half the dinner bookings now are for before 9 p.m., compared with 27 percent a decade ago. TheFork, a similar platform, said its 8 p.m. bookings in Spain have nearly tripled from 2019, while 10 p.m. reservations have halved.
In Spanish homes, too, there are subtle signs of a shift. A government survey conducted in 2024 in the Catalonia region suggests that people there are starting their evening routines, including dinnertime, moderately earlier compared with 2010.
Here is more from Jonathan Wolffe at the NYT. I learned also from the article that the late dining tradition is in part an artifact of the post WWII era in Spain.
Anthropomorphizing AI?
I am very much opposed to the view that the AIs are sentient, or might be sentient. I view that as a category error, and the chances of it being true are vanishingly small. Nonetheless I largely side with Roon when he writes:
there are some number of bad abstractions in anthropomorphizing ai intents but there are at this point more dangers from avoiding anthropomorphism at all costs. if you have a mental picture of guys living in computers, it’ll likely prepare you for the future better than otherwise
While I am not a Friedmanite in economic methodology per se, I have lived with that perspective for a long time and have no trouble grasping it or working with it, same goes for Alex T. None of this strikes me as weird or unacceptable. Though be very, very careful when speaking with others, whether it be the less informed public or the more informed insiders who often come down with AI psychosis. So insofar as this discourse is public, pragmatism may militate against this approach, even though it is methodologically defensible. It depend on how psychologically robust your audience is?
We also need to do more work figuring out how the AIs might differ from humans. Roon adds:
there are important ways in which ai psychology diverges from human psychology after lots of RL; the misaligned models are obsessed with the Scorer, the clearly “shattered” nature of personas (a normally helpful model can become deeply misaligned in certain domains)
And:
persona selection is clearly far less clean than many people thought earlier this year. it is not alignment by default and what kind of object a “persona” is is very much up for debate and study
The AIs also stand a higher chance of becoming very wacky as the discourse proceeds? Exactly how much is that true for humans?…I am not sure.)
There is much more to be done in this direction, and it is one of the most important things you can be working on. These investigations also do not need to be “owned” by any single field or discipline, so dig right in.
Russia markets in everything
While Western export bans have severed Russia from much of the auto market, they have not tempered the demand for brand-name SUVs and trucks. That has given rise to a sophisticated network of criminals that steals cars, hides them in shipping containers and sends them to Russia, often by way of the Middle East…
Interpol, the international police organization, received 4,798 reports that stolen Canadian vehicles had been found in Russia from February 2024 to July 2026, according to data obtained by The New York Times and confirmed by two law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it is considered sensitive.
Pickup trucks like Dodge Rams, Toyota Tundras and Ford F-150s are in particularly high demand.
The Interpol figures significantly undercount the problem, but Russia is by far the top international destination for Canadian cars reported to Interpol, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Here is more from Jane Bradley and Michael Swirtz at the NYT.
Sunday assorted links
*Finding Emily*
I very much enjoyed this British movie, which reminded me of the older-style romantic comedies, namely the ones that actually favor love and romance. It also has themes of class/accent, US/UK, is anti-media, anti-cancel culture, anti-podcast (Laura Lewis steals the show), anti-academia, and is sceptical of certain branches of feminism. But it is mostly entertaining. Not an important film, but the sort of movie that makes going to the movies fun in the first place. Let’s hope for more like this one.
China fact of the day
Chinese actors and online influencers have a new rival: cost-effective advanced AI video generation programmes that are threatening millions of jobs in a once-vibrant area of China’s gig economy.
The release of powerful new AI-powered video software, such as tech group ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 model, has allowed digital actors to replace humans, enabling the production of higher-quality original videos more quickly.
The digital takeover intensified after this year’s release of Seedance 2.0, said Greg Wollner, a short-drama actor and producer in Beijing. Before its release, he was shooting three different productions a week. “And after that, everything just went.”
Many of Wollner’s friends “had to quit doing what they love and change to something else”, he said. In May, 89 of the top 100 animated dramas on Douyin, ByteDance’s domestic Chinese version of TikTok, were AI productions according to DataEye, a marketing analytics company.
Here is more from Joe Leahy and Isaac Castella-McDonald in the FT.
Saturday assorted links
1. Roger Myerson now has a Substack.
2. The future of higher education?
3. Another look at data centers in space.
4. “The Global Economics Lab is a non-partisan organization located at Harvard and draws on a network of faculty affiliates across universities. We conduct policy-relevant research on the forces reshaping the global economy. We engage with governments, central banks, companies, multilaterals, and civil society organizations to translate that research into action.” Link here, connected to Gita Gopinath and other prominent economists.
5. Ryan Murphy now has a Substack, on liberty, state capacity, and related issues.
6. Is Google AI swallowing up interest in Wikipedia?
7. Puffin tourism in Maine (WSJ).
8. The business savvy of Dolly Parton (WSJ).
Interviewing Yiyang Zhuge (Zhong Shu)
Many people are writing to me, upset that I am interviewing Ziyang Zhuge, a well-known Chinese internet intellectual, who recently was accused of plagiarism. I am keen to proceed with the interview, and am happy to explain why. A few points:
1. The relevant facts here still are being disputed, and furthermore it all happened in Chinese. If I cannot personally adjudicate the matter, I remain inclined to proceed. I am also well aware that standards in China, including for plagiarism, are very different than in the United States. If someone tells me “A person in China did [fill in the blank]” my initial reaction is still “Are they interesting to talk to?”
2. I have had on numerous CEOs and business leaders. Your opinions of each will vary, but surely some of them are guilty of something. I do not regret any of them as guests, except insofar as they were boring. You also can debate whether a former CIA head, in this case John Brennan, ever did anything wrong. He was fascinating.
3. I once had on Sam Bankman-Fried, now a convicted felon. It was an excellent episode, and I will point out my lines of questioning were more perspicacious than many people since have realized.
4. I once had on a convicted murderer, Shaka Senghor. It was an excellent episode, and if I recall only a single person wrote me to complain. I would gladly have more criminals on, and they do not all have to be repentant in the manner that Shaka is. Would not a pickpocket guest be intriguing? For Althusser however it is too late.
5. Without knowing the full story, I suspect the case of Yiyang Zhuge (neither a felon nor a murderer) is most analogous to having on the CEO of DeepSeek, Liang Wenfang. At this point it is pretty well known that DeepSeek (and other Chinese AI models) distilled a lot from Anthropic’s Claude. That is a violation of terms of service, and in economic terms it is an event and a depredation of pretty serious magnitude. I still would be delighted to have Liang Wenfang on the show, and I would do so without obsessing over the issue of distillation. How about it Liang Wenfang?
Xi Jinping is welcome too. Chairman Mao, is pork belly with red sauce over- or underrated? The world awaits your response.
Scholar Data
In our paper, A Skeptical View of the National Science Foundation’s Role in Economic Research, Tyler and I point out that if the NSF is doing what it should, it ought to be doing very different things than other funders:
Public goods theory tells us that the National Science Foundation should support activities that are especially hard to support through traditional university, philanthropic, and private-sector sources. This insight suggests a simple test: to the extent that the NSF allocates funds to genuine public goods as opposed to subsidies on the margin, we ought to see a large difference in the kinds of projects the NSF supports compared to what the “market” sector supports. But what stands out from lists of prominent NSF grants (like the one provided by Moffitt in this symposium) is how similar they look to lists of “good” research produced by today’s status quo. If we take public goods theory seriously, what areas of economics should be supported?
We suggest replication studies and support for producing public datasets. Which brings me to Scholar Data, a neat new project that won NIH’s competition to create a data-sharing index. Scholar data creates an S-Index, like an H-Index for papers, but instead the S-Index measures a dataset’s ease of access, citations and other mentions. The point is to create a metric to reward the creation of a public good:
Researchers invest years collecting and sharing datasets that underpin reproducibility, transparency, and discovery across every field. Without shared data, findings can’t be verified, built upon, or trusted. And yet, the metrics that define academic careers, such as citations, h-index, and impact factor, only count publications. Data sharing goes unrecognized and unrewarded.
This creates a broken incentive: researchers are expected to share data, but get no credit for doing so. The result is that data sharing is treated as a chore rather than a contribution.
Scholar Data and the S-index are aimed at fixing this. By measuring how impactful your datasets are, the S-index gives data sharing the same visibility and recognition as publishing, turning it from an obligation into a career asset.
Bravo! Your dataset may already be catalogued. You can get credit at ScholarData.
Costco facts of the day
Costco sold 157.4mn rotisserie chickens worldwide last year, almost double the number of a decade ago. “It’s $4.99 and for Costco members, that’s one fantastic deal. I don’t think you can produce it for that,” said Walt Shafer, who oversaw the construction and management of the Nebraska site before he retired from Costco this year.
Roasted in ovens in the rear of the retail giant’s hundreds of cavernous stores, the birds have cost only $4.99 since 2009 even as the US retail price of chicken almost doubled. The product has become a textbook “loss leader”, buttressing the loyalty of Costco customers who pay membership fees for the right to shop there…
Rotisserie accounts for only a portion of the chicken processed in Nebraska. The plant also cuts breasts, thighs and other cuts delivered in six-pouch “saddle packs” to stores. Raw breast meat, for example, sells for $2.99 a pound, helping make up for losses on rotisserie.
Here is more from Gregory Meyer at the FT. Via Mike Rosenwald.
*Visions from San Francisco Bay*
European and American capitalism were different. The violence of human clashes in America took place on the surface, in the open. The violence in Europe became formalized, coalesced with class divions hallowed by centuries; it was interiorized, ingrained, or baked in, if one may use such an expression. American capitalism was founded on daring, resourcefulness, largesse, waste; European capitalism was founded on one powerful passion — miserliness. These patterns, which still endure, explain why America succeeded in creating a vast, new sector of the economy adapted to needs that become increasingly evident the closer we come to the twenty-first century: the sector of the universities, research institutes, laboratories, with billions of dollars invested in them. Western Europe, where education always has been the preserve of a narrow elite, failed to produce anything like it. The prodigality of private capital in America made the beginnings possible; money from taxes joined in at the next stage. Miserliness with capital in Europe effectively prevented the laying of foundations for this new sector, and it is doubtful whether the government treasuries will ever be able to over come ever-widening gap.
That is from Czeslaw Milosz’s Visions from San Francisco Bay.
Tysons Corner (Alaska) fact of the day
The centerpiece is Tysons Corner Center, today the eighth largest mall in the country, and one of the largest sub-city-sized markets for office space. It is half-owned by the Alaska Permanent Fund, which is the state-owned corporation that invests oil revenue on behalf of Alaska’s citizens, and half-owned by Macerich, a giant REIT, which is in turn owned by hundreds of large institutional investors and many individuals.
This very interesting essay by Joseph Lawler argues that liquid real estate markets, and distanced ownership, militate against beauty.
Friday assorted links
A Big Bet on Explosive AI-Driven Growth
Wow! The excellent Ben Moll has put together a high-stakes bet on US economic growth.
A bet on near-term explosive AI-driven growth: whether U.S. real GDP per capita will grow by at least 15% within a single year (measured relative to prior peak) by the end of 2033. Agreed on X, 15–16 August 2026. This document summarizes the agreed terms.
1. Parties and stakes
Fast-growth side (wins if the growth condition in Section 2 is met):
● William MacAskill https://www.williammacaskill.com/ — $10,000
● Samuel Albanie https://samuelalbanie.com/ — $25,000
● Tom Cohen https://x.com/tomcohen — $25,000
● Total: $60,000
No-fast-growth side (wins otherwise):
● Benjamin Moll http://benjaminmoll.com/ — $40,000
● Andrew Ho https://andrewho.xyz/ — $200,000
● Total: $240,000Odds: 4:1 — every $1 staked by the fast-growth side is matched by $4 from the no-fast-growth
side. Implied probability of the fast-growth scenario: 20%.
I’m known for quipping that a bet is a tax on bullshit but I don’t think either side is BSing. We have a genuine and important disagreement. I’d side with Moll, for what it is worth.
Luke Burgis interviews Patrick Collison on aesthetics
It was very fun talking to @patrickc about New Aesthetics at the @ClunyInstitute ‘s conference last month.
We talked about:
—The origin story of the New Aesthetics grants — and why he and Tyler Cowen disagree on almost everything aesthetic (1:00)
—Why culture is “stuck”: a 1926 Bauhaus building could pass for last year’s (2:30)
—Modernism’s explicit, stated mission to tear down beauty — “they weren’t hiding it” (3:30) —Solzhenitsyn: you can fake goodness and truth, but beauty “bears within it its own verification” (6:30)
—Is beauty objective? Why everyone visits Toledo, Spain and no one visits Toledo, Ohio (7:30)
—Detroit was rich for ~25 years and built the DIA. Silicon Valley’s been rich for 50. “We could do the Silicon Valley art tour in a coffee break” (14:30)
—Was Y Combinator secretly modeled on the art atelier? (18:30)
—The highest-leverage point for aesthetic renewal used to be churches. What is it now? (27:00)
—The sacred as an “endangered species”
— and Patrick’s alternative theory of WTF happened in 1971: we lost the sacred, so we can’t have nice things (28:30)
—I asked him about Vatican II and technological stagnation. He (wisely?) passed. I didn’t. (34:30)
—”Can anyone name a work of art made with AI?” Silence. (37:30)
—Why Germany is preeminent in music, literature, and philosophy — and its food is so bad. (A demand-side problem.) (41:30)
—”Biology is so ugly, man.” Physics is beautiful; biology is a tower of hacks (43:30)
—The “anti-beauty conspiracy” of the last century — and the massive latent demand waiting to be uncorked (52:30)
—Patrick reacts live to beeswax art (56:30)
Here is the link. And on YouTube, Brian Eno intro.