2026-05-01 23:42:10
1. Does trade cause peace? (FT)
2. Where the goblins came from.
3. The next big advance to come from AI?
4. Georg Baselitz, RIP. And now in English. I am happy to own a print of his, one of the upside-down eagles.
6. In spite of what polling says, political events do not much affect voter attitudes?
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2026-05-01 17:35:17
The subtitle is How the Nature of Belief Shapes the Fate of Societies. Here is Ryan doing a podcast with Brink Lindsey. As Brink writes:
All of the blessings of modernity, Ryan Avent argues in a fascinating new book, rest on faith. It is our faith in others, our ability to trust strangers we will never meet, that makes possible the large-scale cooperation that has given us science, modern economic growth, and liberal democracy. But if everything depends on our ability to weave and maintain particular webs of complex meaning, what happens when we allow those webs to weaken and fray? In his book In Good Faith, Ryan contends that the dysfunctions and discontents plaguing 21st century democracies reflect such underlying neglect.
I am pleased to see “thought books,” as one might call them, headed in this direction and I was happy to blurb Ryan’s latest effort.
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2026-05-01 15:30:42
AI-powered mental health apps have attracted growing interest as a low-cost way to expand care. Yet questions remain about their effectiveness, safety, and whether they may crowd out psychotherapy. We evaluate one such app in a randomized controlled trial among 1,964 Mexican women with mild to severe psychological distress. Over six months, app access improved mental health by 0.3 standard deviations with no evidence of harm, improved sleep quality, increased healthful behaviors, and reduced missed work, yielding considerably larger benefits than costs. Treated participants were also more likely to seek traditional psychotherapy, but this increase does not explain most of the mental health gains. App use was high in the first month but then declined, as is common in digital interventions. Despite this drop in use, treatment effects persisted. Participants continued to implement practices promoted by the app, suggesting that even short-term engagement can produce durable improvements through sustained behavioral change.
That is from a new paper by Manuela Angelucci, Raissa Fabregas, and Antonia Vazquez. Those are some pretty strong results for a cheap intervention, let us hope they hold up. Via John Holbein.
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2026-05-01 13:04:16
Do market-oriented reforms cause economic growth? This paper revisits this question using a cross-country panel of reform episodes identified from various changes in well-known economic freedom and structural reform indices. We exploit the timing of reforms using distributed-lag and event-study frameworks that trace the dynamic response of per-capita GDP. We find little evidence of immediate growth gains and some short-run adjustment costs following reform. However, growth rises gradually and persistently over time, with economically meaningful effects emerging after several years. These patterns are robust across alternative measures of reform and specifications. The results reconcile conflicting findings in the literature by showing that market reforms generate long-run growth gains despite short-run disruptions. Overall, the evidence supports the view that institutional liberalization operates through slow-moving channels that accumulate into sustained improvements in economic performance.
That is from a recent paper by Jon Hartley and Brian Wheaton.
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2026-05-01 02:07:39
2. An SRO approaching to regulating AI.
3. Dwarkesh: “We don’t talk enough about how any state or group which is harvesting encrypted packets right now will be able to read those contents once quantum computers arrive. There’s a huge espionage and transparency overhang on any information that is currently “secret” and hasn’t been encrypted using post-quantum cryptography.”
4. Craig Venter, RIP. Here is the NYT obituary.
6. With the UAE’s departure, OPEC will become much more an instrument of Iranian power (FT). But also weaker.
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2026-05-01 00:07:35
Teen fertility collapsed globally starting around 2007. This affected countries across the income and policy spectrum. This paper argues that smartphones changed how teens spend time with each other, and that this change in turn drove the collapse in teen fertility. Once enough teens are on the phone, being on the phone is where the peer network is; in-person time falls sharply, and with it the unstructured contact in which most unintended teen conceptions occur. A coordination model formalizes this tipping: as the smartphone price falls, the in-person equilibrium ceases to exist and the economy moves to a phone-mediated one. Within the United States, terrainruggedness variation in broadband and 4G coverage identifies a causal effect on teen fertility, and time-use diaries show in-person socializing among teens roughly halving while digital leisure roughly tripled. A parallel design for England and Wales recovers the same acceleration and the same effect of mobile coverage on teen conceptions, ruling out country-specific contraceptive-access and welfare-reform stories. The model predicts that the shift towards the phone-mediated equilibrium affects multiple aspects of teen behavior. The same instrument that produces a collapse in teen fertility produces a surge in teen suicides.
That is from a recent paper by Nathan Hudson and Hernan Moscoso Boedo.
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