Friday assorted links
1. Turning baseball pitching into more of a science.
2. Are LLMs getting too smart for their human teachers?
3. Scott Sumner reviews Dan Wang.
4. Douthat interviews Ezra (NYT).
5. Chunk Ducks, Blatherskites, Butterballs, and Slug-toots.
6. New issue of Works in Progress.
7. Albania’s AI minister addresses parliament.
8. Agnes Gund, RIP (NYT).
German political parties remain too far from the median voter
Our estimates indicate that the AfD’s vote share would shrink by as much as 75% if the CDU adopted its immigration stance. These results suggest that the electoral success of populist parties is strongly linked to genuine policy preferences, rather than being driven solely by dissatisfaction with political elites or protest voting.
That is from a new paper (or try this link) by Laurenz Guenther and Salvatore Nunnari. A simple observation, and you may or may not like these voter attitudes, but it is the first point European elites need to recognize before they can climb out of their current political mess.
Academic Human Capital in European Countries and Regions, 1200-1793
We present new annual time-series data on academic human capital across Europe from 1200 to 1793, constructed by aggregating individual-level measures at three geographic scales: cities, present-day countries (as of 2025), and historically informed macro-regions. Individual human capital is derived from a composite index of publication outcomes, based on data from the Repertorium Eruditorum Totius Europae (RETE) database. The macro-regional classifications are designed to re ect historically coherent entities, offering a more relevant perspective than modern national boundaries. This framework allows us to document key patterns, including the Little Divergence in academic human capital between Northern and Southern Europe, the effect of the Black Death and the Thirty Years’ War on academic human capital, the respective contributions of academies and universities, regional inequality within the Holy Roman Empire, and the distinctiveness of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Here is the full paper by Matthew Curtisa, David de la Croix, Filippo Manfredinib, and Mara Vitale. Via the excellent Samir Varma.
Does China push out African growth?
We study the relationship between international trade and development in a model where countries differ in their capability, goods differ in their complexity, and capability growth is a function of a country’s pattern of specialization. Theoretically, we show that it is possible for international trade to increase capability growth in all countries and, in turn, to push all countries up the development ladder. This occurs if (i) shifting employment towards more complex sectors raises capability growth and if (ii) foreign competition is tougher in less complex sectors for all countries. Empirically, we provide causal evidence consistent with (i) using the entry of countries into the World Trade Organization as an instrumental variable for other countries’ patterns of specialization. The opposite of (ii), however, holds in the data. Through the lens of our model, these two empirical observations imply dynamic welfare losses from trade that are pervasive, albeit small for the median country. The same economic forces also suggest that the emergence of China has held back capability growth for a number of African countries who are pushed away from their most-complex sectors, which China exports, and into their least-complex sectors, which China imports.
That is by David Atkin, Arnaud Costinot, and Masao Fukui, in a recent issue of Review of Economic Studies.
Does automation reduce stigma?
By removing human cashiers, self-checkout registers may alter feelings of embarrassment experienced by customers. Using high-frequency scanner data from supermarkets in the Washington, D.C. area with staggered adoption of self-checkout, we conduct event study analyses on consumer purchasing behavior. On the extensive margin, we find positive but noisy effects of self-checkout adoption on sales of some stigmatized items. On the intensive margin, we show that stigmatized items are much more likely to be purchased at self-checkout than at cashier registers, especially condoms and pregnancy tests. We estimate that customers are willing to pay 8.5 cents in additional time cost for the privacy of purchasing stigmatized items at self-checkout.
Here is the full paper by Rebecca Cardinali., et.al. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
I even draw distinctions across automated models. For instance, if I have “a stupid question,” I am more likely to ask Grok, since I would rather GPT maintain a higher opinion of what I do and do not know.
Thursday assorted links
1. The strange shape of liberal England.
2. Short AI optimism interview podcast: “we’ve published our podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and posted it on X on the Palantir brand account.”
3. NIH grantmaking back on track.
4. Economist J. Zachary Mazlish on more radically transformative scenarios for AI.
Is it the phones?
Or perhaps we should just credit Sydney Sweeney? That is from Chris Said.
My excellent Conversation with David Commins
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf are the topics, here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
David Commins, author of the new book Saudi Arabia: A Modern History, brings decades of scholarship and firsthand experience to explain the kingdom’s unlikely rise. Tyler and David discuss why Wahhabism was essential for Saudi state-building, the treatment of Shiites in the Eastern Province and whether discrimination has truly ended, why the Saudi state emerged from its poorer and least cosmopolitan regions, the lasting significance of the 1979 Grand Mosque seizure by millenarian extremists, what’s kept Gulf states stable, the differing motivations behind Saudi sports investments, the disappointing performance of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology despite its $10 billion endowment, the main barrier to improving its k-12 education, how Yemen became the region’s outlier of instability and whether Saudi Arabia learned from its mistakes there, the Houthis’ unclear strategic goals, the prospects for the kingdom’s post-oil future, the topic of David’s next book, and more.
And an excerpt:
COWEN: Now, as you know, the senior religious establishment is largely Nejd, right? Why does that matter? What’s the historical significance of that?
COMMINS: Right. Nejd is the region of central Arabia. Riyadh is currently the capital. The first Saudi empire had a capital nearby, called Diriyah. Nejd is really the territory that gave birth to the Wahhabi movement, it’s the homeland of the Saud dynasty, and it is the region of Arabia that was most thoroughly purged of the older Sunni tradition that had persisted in Nejd for centuries.
Consequently, by the time that the Saudi government developed bureaucratic agencies in the 1950s and ’60s, the religious institution was going to recruit from that region of Arabia primarily. Now, it certainly attracted loyalists from other parts of Arabia, but the Wahhabi mission, as I call it — their calling to what they considered true belief — began in Nejd and was very strongly identified with the towns of Nejd ever since the late 1700s.
COWEN: Would I be correct in inferring that some of the least cosmopolitan parts of Saudi Arabia built the Saudi state?
COMMINS: Yes, that is correct. That is correct. If you think of the 1700s and 1800s, the Red Sea and Persian Gulf coast of Arabia were the most cosmopolitan parts of Arabia.
COWEN: They’re richer, too, right? Jeddah is a much more advanced city than Riyadh at the time.
COMMINS: Somewhat more advanced. Yes, it is more advanced, it is more cosmopolitan than Nejd. There is the regional identity in Hejaz, that is the Red Sea coast where the holy cities and Jeddah are located. The townspeople there tended to look upon Nejd as a less advanced part of Arabia. But again, that’s a very recent historical development.
COWEN: How is it that the coastal regions just dropped the ball? You could imagine some alternate history where they become the center of Saudi power and religious thought, but they’re not.
COMMINS: Right. If you take Jeddah, Mecca, and Medina — that region of Arabia, known as Hejaz, had always been under the rule of other Muslim empires. They were under the rule of other Muslim powers because of the religious value of possessing, if you will, the holy cities, Mecca and Medina. From the time of the first Muslim dynasty that was based in Damascus in the seventh and early eighth centuries, all the way until the Ottoman Empire, Muslim dynasties outside Arabia coveted control of that region. They were just more powerful than local resources could generate.
Hejaz was always, if you were, to dependency on outside Muslim powers. If you look at the east coast of Arabia — what’s now the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf — it was richer than central Arabia. It’s the largest oasis in Arabia. It is in proximity to pearling banks, which were an important source for income for residents there. It was part of the Indian Ocean trade between Iraq and India. The population there was always — well, always — for the last thousand years has been dominated by Bedouin tribesmen.
There was a brief Ismaili Shia republic, you might say, in that part of Arabia in medieval times. It just didn’t have, it seems, the cohesion to conquer other parts of Arabia. That’s what makes the Saudi story really remarkable, is that they were able to muster and sustain the cohesion to carry out a conquest like that over the course of 50 years.
COWEN: Physically, how did they manage that? Water is a problem, a lot of transport is by camel, there’s no real rail system, right?
Recommended, full of historical information about a generally neglected region, neglected from the point of view of history at least rather than current affairs.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Big industrial jobs cuts in Germany.
2. Kevin Bryan economics of AI multi-book review, self-recommending.
3. Google AI agents that can use stablecoins.
4. Ezra Klein talks with Ben Shapiro (NYT). Recommended.
5. “Finnish tech firm Bluefors, a maker of ultracold refrigerator systems critical for quantum computing, has purchased tens of thousands of liters of Helium-3 from the moon — spending “above $300 million” — through a commercial space company called Interlune. The agreement, which has not been previously reported, marks the largest purchase of a natural resource from space.” Link here.
6. “Just now: @arcinstitute reports the first viable genomes designed using AI.” Link here.
New print edition of Works in Progress
Amazing, here is the site: “The print edition contains everything you can get online, plus a lot more: print-exclusive columns, beautiful art and design, letters from our readers and editors, and visual explainers of technology.”
Celebrate Vishvakarma: A Holiday for Machines, Robots, and AI
Most holidays celebrate people, gods or military victories. Today is India’s Vishvakarma Puja, a celebration of machines. In India on this day, workers clean and honor their equipment and engineers pay tribute to Vishvakarma, the god of architecture, engineering and manufacturing.
Call it a celebration of Solow and a reminder that capital, not just labor, drives growth.
Capital today isn’t just looms and tractors—it’s robots, software, and AI. These are the new force multipliers, the machines that extend not only our muscles but our minds. To celebrate Vishvakarma is to celebrate tools, tool makers and the capital that makes us productive.
We have Labor Day for workers and Earth Day for nature. Viskvakarma Day is for the machines. So today don’t thank Mother Earth, thank the machines, reflect on their power and productivity and be grateful for all that they make possible. Capital is the true source of abundance.
Vishvakarma Day should be our national holiday for abundance and progress.
Hat tip: Nimai Mehta.
The weight of research opinion against minimum wage hikes continues to shift
This piece is by DuckKi Cho and is titled “Downward Wage Rigidity and Corporate Investment”:
Firms reduce investment when facing downward wage rigidity, the inability or unwillingness to adjust wages downward. To document this behavior, I exploit staggered state-level changes in minimum wage laws as an exogenous variation in downward wage rigidity. Following a 1-standard-deviation increase in the minimum wage, firms reduce their investment rate (the ratio of capital expenditure to capital stock) by 3.08 percentage points. The negative impact is more acute for firms with a higher fraction of minimum wage workers, stronger employment protections, or higher labor intensity. The investment reductions cannot be explained by labor adjustment under capital-labor complementarities. Rather, I identify the aggravation of debt overhang and increased operating leverage crowding out debt financing as two mechanisms by which downward wage rigidity impedes investment. The findings highlight the unintended consequences of minimum wage policies on corporate investment.
From the Journal of Law and Economics. I fear that for the next thirty years people still will be claiming that Card and Krueger showed that minimum wage hikes do not damage employment. After numerous recent revisions, many of them catalogued here, that is no longer such a plausible belief.
Summary of a new DeepMind paper
Super intriguing idea in this new @GoogleDeepMind paper – shows how to handle the rise of AI agents acting as independent players in the economy.
It says that if left unchecked, these agents will create their own economy that connects directly to the human one, which could bring both benefits and risks.
The authors suggest building a “sandbox economy,” which is a controlled space where agents can trade and coordinate without causing harm to the broader human economy.
A big focus is on permeability, which means how open or closed this sandbox is to the outside world. A fully open system risks crashes and instability spilling into the human economy, while a fully closed system may be safer but less useful.
They propose using auctions where agents fairly bid for resources like data, compute, or tools. Giving all agents equal starting budgets could help balance power and prevent unfair advantages.
For larger goals, they suggest mission economies, where many agents coordinate toward one shared outcome, such as solving a scientific or social problem.
The risks they flag include very fast agent negotiations that humans cannot keep up with, scams or prompt attacks against agents, and powerful groups dominating resources.
To reduce these risks, they call for identity and reputation systems using tools like digital credentials, proof of personhood, zero-knowledge proofs, and real-time audit trails.
The core message is that we should design the rules for these agent markets now, so they grow in a safe and fair way instead of by accident.
That is from Rohan Paul, though the paper is by Nenad Tomasev, et.al. It would be a shame if economists neglected what is perhaps the most important (and interesting) mechanism design problem facing us.
Banks’ Images: Evidence from Advertising Videos
This paper examines how banks strategically develop brand images and how these efforts influence franchise value and the transmission of monetary policy. Analyzing TV advertisements via video embeddings, we measure banks’ images along three dimensions: pricing advantages, service quality, and building trust and emotional connections. Banks with high local market shares highlight service and trust. Banks lacking pricing or service advantages lean on emotional appeals. Banks tailor images to demographics, increasing minority representation in targeted areas. A border discontinuity design helps identify that banks’ images affect deposit growth, spreads, and loan demand, leading banks to respond differently to monetary policy.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
Tuesday assorted links
2. Smartphone bans had no positive effects in a series of English schools. You don’t have to believe it, rather consider it a challenge to come up with better research. In the meantime you should be agnostic, and also think more broadly about how hard it is to get significant treatment effects on adolescents. There is a reason why so many experts in this area are skeptical, or sometimes even scathing, about the Haidt-like arguments. The studies cited at that link are not the most rigorous ones, but they should show you just cannot will your way into the results you might like to find. Most likely smartphone bans in schools have some modest benefits, and still unknown costs.
3. “Trump administration officials on Monday responded to the activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination by threatening to bring the weight of the federal government down on what they alleged was a left-wing network that funds and incites violence, seizing on the killing to make broad and unsubstantiated claims about their political opponents.” NYT link here. One of the worst things the Trump people have threatened to do.
4. Greenland woman fails Danish parenting test and loses her baby (NYT). There was no evidence of pending violence or abuse.
5. Another unlawful strike on a Venezeulan drug boat. If you thought this kind of interdiction could solve or even significantly alleviate the drugs problem, I could understand the case for it. But it won’t.
6. Yum.