Dave is CEO and co-founder of Roblox, and here is the audio, video, and transcript.  From the episode summary: With over 100 million daily active users and projected revenue bookings of $7 billion this year, it is one of the largest gaming economies in the world—and one that has made millionaires out of teenage developers […]

Latin America’s momentous fertility transition is now in the domain of history, allowing a cohort perspective on the decline of completed fertility. Using census microdata from 17 Latin American countries, we track female birth cohorts from the 1920s to the 1970s by subnational region to document the extent to which cohort fertility decline coincided with […]

1. “This is a database to help you to find a forager near you!” (those new service sector jobs) 2. Apply to Coase workshop on institutional analysis in Mexico City. 3. How does a mechanical watch work? 4. New immigration debate video from Caplan-Garett Jones. 5. Do stolen French fries taste better? 6. New minimum […]

Much of what looks like changing marriage preferences over the twentieth century is actually demographics. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in sex ratios across U.S. birth cohorts (1870, 1930, 1950), we jointly identify preferences, match quality dynamics, and the costs of marriage and divorce. Demographics alone explain two-thirds of cross-cohort differences. Women’s premium for older husbands […]

A new study by Irish researcher Eoin Whelan attempts to answer this. Dr. Whelan told me he was specifically inspired by Haidt’s 2024 claims and sought to examine them rigorously and in the context of other regrets. This is a great use of science…testing dramatic public claims. So…do they hold up? In Dr. Whelan’s study, 389 young […]

The consequences of online regulations depend on the extent to which users can circumvent restrictions or substitute toward noncompliant platforms. Since 2023, 25 U.S. states have implemented age verification laws that caused prominent adult websites (including Pornhub) to restrict local access for all users. We study how these restrictions affected browsing activity using individual-level panel […]

1. On trading with AIs. 2. A treasury of book dedications. 3. Abdullah Ibrahim, RIP (NYT). 4. One part of the Iran equilibrium. 5. Economists report on Fable 5. 6. Another estimate of the productivity gains from AI. 7. Until the 1970s, Algeria was the world’s largest wine exporter. 8. Mosquito drone for surveillance?

In 2024, China’s NMPA approved 83 new drugs, the FDA approved 50. China’s share of new commercial clinical trials jumped from 8% globally in 2013 to 30% in 2024, just behind the US at 35%. Last year, China-based Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals overtook AstraZeneca as the top clinical trial sponsor in the world. What’s remarkable is […]

Is it really all about the networking? Some people think so, and they are taking action: Justin Helman didn’t get his dream acceptance from the University of Florida. But that isn’t stopping him from pursuing the classic college experience there. The recent high-school graduate from Park Ridge, N.J., is set to move into a private apartment […]

Most of my Free Press column deals with Mythos, but here are some remarks on Europe: There is yet another huge problem behind all these first-order problems. Let us say, for instance, that France’s Mistral AI develops very nicely and serves as an EU counterpart of Anthropic and OpenAI. Well, then the other European countries […]

Perhaps rewatching The Omen is better prep for this movie than thinking about UFOs?  In this regard Disclosure Day is somewhat more interesting than I had been expecting. Peter Thiel, Ross Douthat, telephone! And yet I have plenty of quibbles.  It was a little too long.  The acting is entirely serviceable, but none of the […]

Champions of a European AI model should ask themselves if a European effort would be more effective than Meta, which this year will spend more on chips ($125 billion) than Germany spends on defense ($114 billion) and offer salaries of over $100 million to attract the best researchers, and is still failing to catch up. Here is […]

1. A survey on slow Mexican economic growth. 2. Jason Furman on Social Security (NYT). 3. Markets in everything, customized water edition. 4. AI progress in Rio de Janeiro. 5. Satya Nadella does Oliver Williamson. 6. A shared feed of my guest appearances. 7. Results on the Great Recession and U.S. fertility. 8. Nice words […]

Sam Enright emails me: In the most recent census (2022), 1,017,437 people in Ireland were born abroad. Even if you classify people from Taiwan as “foreigners”, there are 845,697 + 157,886 = 1,003,583 immigrants to China. There are now more foreigners in Ireland than in China in absolute terms, despite having a population that is 260 times smaller.

A fascinating paper and result: This paper studies the causal effect of being the oldest within a school cohort on social capital. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design and data from Facebook, we find that boys who are older than their classmates make 11% more friends in high school. This social advantage is associated with […]

This result does not surprise me at all.  Here is part of the abstract: Frontier LLMs outperformed clinical AI tools in all three evaluations. Clinical AI tools performed comparably to auto-enabled Google Search AI Overview on the RCQ. These findings highlight the need for independent, real-world evaluation of AI tools before they enter clinical settings. […]

A truly excellent movie, one of the best of the year.  Specifically, it concerns the meteorological forecasts (!) leading up to the D-Day invasion.  Thematically, it is about the differences between Americans and Brits, how bureaucracy operates, the nature of leadership, and the proper role of science in government.  It is like an old-style Hollywood […]

1. Chinese overtake Dominicans as NYC’s most numerous foreign-born group. 2. David Hockney embraced tech (NYT).  And do not forget his writings, not to mention his persona and also his role in gay history and liberation.  He was truly one of the great Englishmen, as he had been doing first-rate work since what, 1954? 3. […]

Kevin Bryan riffs on on my post The Nationalization of American Science. He is rightfully incensed: AT is right this is a red tape-filled science policy of “losers”. If you think “cut funds from DEI-driven professors in the small departments no one cares about” is more important than “make sure the world’s strongest fundamental science […]

From Drew Crawford: Start with the most important number in economics, even though no one on Wall Street talks about it: calories per acre. Human civilization runs on food. Ten billion people will inhabit this planet by 2050. The amount of arable land is not growing. It is shrinking, every year, to urbanization, desertification, salinization, […]

1. Soccer and economic growth. 2. The AI scenario for Europe? 3. The smart version of the AI is a bubble argument. 4. Ken Opalo reviews Studwell on Africa. 5. The influence of AI on non-fiction books? 6. The economics behind the San Antonio Spurs. 7. On the new Macca album.

Probably you all know about this: The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must […]

…GOLEM’s behavior is unpredictable.  Sometimes it converses courteously with people, whereas on other occasions any attempt at contact misfires.  GOLEM sometimes cracks jokes, too, though its sense of humor is fundamentally different from man’s.  Much depends on its interlocutors.  In exceptional casese GOLEM will show a certain interest in people who are talented in a […]

It’s deeply odd to me that America is a far less 24/7 hour society today than it was 10, 20, or even 30 years ago. I vividly remember friends from the UK back in 1996 marveling at the fact that in the mid-sized Indiana town where I went college it was possible to buy groceries, […]

That is the topic of my latest Free Press column, here is one excerpt: Consider the special nature of Mexican politics. First and foremost, Mexico is still not a mature nation-state. By one estimate, drug gangs may control as much as one-third of its territory. That might sound bizarre, but from the standpoint of Mexican history, […]

1. Is there too much free parking in NYC? (NYT) 2. New Malcolm Gladwell book forthcoming on violence in America.  Ready for pre-order. 3. Manufacturing requirements are killing gene and cell therapy. 4. “Long-term exposure to urban air pollution damages the heart even at the relatively low levels found in many developed countries, a cardiac […]

I have been banging on about FDA delay in approving new sunscreens since 2013. Well it has finally happened. Twenty six years after being approved by the European Union and thirteen years after then-FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg told lawmakers that sorting out the sunscreen issue was “one of the highest priorities” the FDA has […]

From Xudong Han: ‘Recently, I came across a paper co-authored by 37 authors from Stanford, CMU, Michigan, and elsewhere: *The Last Human-Written Paper*. The core argument is pretty brutal: the paper format we’ve been using for centuries might already be obsolete in the AI era. The authors point out two “invisible taxes” that we’ve long […]

What is more striking, in a seemingly ‘progressive’ radical, is that he is not mechanically minded. He shows no interest either in the details of machinery or in the things machinery can do. As Gissing remarks, Dickens nowhere describes a railway journey with anything like the enthusiasm he shows in describing journeys by stage-coach. In […]

Here is the background to the debate.  Here is more from Noah.  Here is a thread from researcher Caitlin Myers.  And here is some basic information: In 2008, 1.9% is the share of the mobile-subscribing population with an iPhone wireless subscription.  As a percent of all adults that is 1.6%. In 2009, it is 4.3%.  […]

1. Fable 5 describes humanity.  And Anthropic policy proposals, including for economics. 2. “Can you build a working chess board which then illustrates and can play the moves of the famous “Evergreen game”?”  The response.  Much better yet is Fable 5 explaining Riemann. 3. Marcus Nunes on Chile vs. Argentina. 4. In the video world, […]

OMB, joined by some forty grantmaking agencies—NSF, HHS, DOE, NASA, DOD among them—has proposed a sweeping rewrite of the rules governing all federal grants, the Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance. American science has long been state funded but not state directed. Since Vannevar Bush, money has flowed through many agencies to independent universities, allocated largely […]

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary: Tyler and Katja discuss why communism made East Germans more loyal to the system while it bred dissidents in Poland and Hungary, how happy or unhappy life in the GDR actually was, Tyler’s own bleak day-trip to East Berlin in 1984, […]

Asked to answer as a typical human, every cutting-edge model rated us markedly more neurotic, less open, less agreeable and less conscientious than they rated themselves. The gap on Neuroticism alone is 1.69 points on a 5-point scale. Here is more material of interest.  And this: Across 31 models from those seven labs they answer […]

That is the topic of my latest Free Press column.  I will spare you the discussion of the AIs, but here is what I have to say about the humans: I am here to tell you that there is no ghost in the machine. But perhaps more importantly, there is barely a “ghost” in your […]

1. New edition of Copernicus on money. 2. Denazification of the United States?  Denazification actually consisted of: “…dissolution of Nazi organizations, licensing/control of new political organizations, individual classification by denazification tribunals, and temporary or permanent disabilities on voting, standing for office, party membership, officeholding, public speech professions, and public/private employment.” 3. Faster replies increase your […]

The share of Gross Domestic Income accruing to labor has been declining in recent decades while the share accruing to capital has been rising. In the graph below, I show labor compensation as a share of GDI (left axis). Labor share has indeed been trending down–some of this could be an artifact of the data, […]

Here is the Nature article.

This was published in English (and Polish) in 1986 under the title One Human Minute: So it was not humanoid automata that former the new armies but synthetic insects (synsects) — ceramic microcrustacea, titanium annelids, and flying pseudo-hymenoptera with nerve centers made of arsenic compounds and with stingers of heavy, fissionable elements…The flying synsect combined […]

My prompt: Write your own exam question and answer it, for microeconomics. Not a math question, but a high level PhD level question. You will be graded on the quality, interest, and creativity of the question as much as by your answer. The answer.  Here is Ethan Mollick on Mythos.

Can artificial intelligence (AI) refute economic theory? I document experiments in which I asked several AI models (Gemini, Refine, Claude, and ChatGPT) to check the correctness of four published papers in economic theory, each containing an error that I helped identify or correct. ChatGPT Pro performed best, occasionally constructing counterexamples and corrected proofs, while other […]

1. Birthing a child in South Korea. 2. Those new service sector jobs (NYT). 3. Britain launches AI Economics Institute. 4. House Committee makes effort to speed up clinical trials. 5. Those new manufacturing sector jobs. 6. More comments on phones and fertility. 7. Gordon Wood, RIP (NYT), his books are great.

I really loved this article. A one-time increase in per capita growth from 2% to 2.1% for a single year, then dropping back to 2%, would permanently raises the level of GDP per capita – and because that small gain recurs and compounds every year afterward across the population, it would add up to roughly […]

The old saw “Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be” now seems so wrong.  The place feels increasingly conservative, and it is aging rapidly.  In the domestic airport you see couples with only a single kid, not two or three kids, never mind four. Country and Western music, in their Brazilian […]

1. It seems Piketty has become a degrowther.  And other views.  Maybe it is rude to say this, but some of our best-known economists basically have a negative-valued understanding of how the world works.  And a bit more. 2. Claims about soil (speculative).  Here is GPT Pro analysis. 3. Stepping up. 4. An interactive feature […]

Everyday Abundance it is called, self-recommending…sponsored by the Abundance Institute.

In economics, Marx is relegated to the history of thought as his ideas were an economic dead end and a political disaster. Yet Marx-influenced literary criticism is a dominant mode of analysis in nearly every English department in the country. It’s not that the English professors are all Marxists, it’s that even the non-Marxists reach […]

The U.S. general fertility rate has fallen by 22% since 2007, a sustained decline not readily explained by economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing or childcare costs, or other commonly cited factors. We assess the potential role of a different shock: the diffusion of the smartphone. The U.S. rollout of the iPhone, the first modern smartphone, […]

From Clifford Sosin: I loved your talk about AI and wanted to bounce an idea off you. I think AI may be bad for corporate profit margins. A lot of companies make money because their customers can’t be bothered to monitor them more closely, or to insource something. Customers let the company make some money […]

1. The Hyman Rickover corpus. 2. Redux of a 2009 essay by me on poverty and a documentary film. 3. Shruti on AI and copyright law. 4. Will the number of lawyers go up or down? 5. One view on where Somalia stands right now. 6. Alan Riding, RIP (NYT).  His Distant Neighbors remains a […]