2026-01-11 02:31:53
Third was the bleak labour market for newly minted PhD economists, which Wendy Stock of Montana State University told me could be one of the toughest ever. Hiring freezes helped to halve the number of US full-time academic postings between 2019 and 2025. In the most recent year alone, listings fell by more than during the Great Recession. And according to the most recent comparable data, since 2019 recruitment has shrivelled faster for economists than philosophers or linguists. Oof.
Here is the full FT piece, oof throughout.
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2026-01-11 00:46:29
1. A new approach to pain management?
2. Geoengineering the ocean? (NYT)
3. Some dogs learn words by eavesdropping on the conversations of humans (NYT). I know one such dog.
4. John Ford’s American justice.
6. A practical guide to a PhD in economics.
7. GronlandsBANKEN.
The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-01-10 15:59:54
There is a new and optimistic paper by Lukas Althoff and Hugo Reichardt:
Artificial intelligence is changing which tasks workers do and how they do them. Predicting its labor market consequences requires understanding how technical change affects workers’ productivity across tasks, how workers adapt by changing occupations and acquiring new skills, and how wages adjust in general equilibrium. We introduce a dynamic task-based model in which workers accumulate multidimensional skills that shape their comparative advantage and, in turn, their occupational choices. We then develop an estimation strategy that recovers (i) the mapping from skills to task-specific productivity, (ii) the law of motion for skill accumulation, and (iii) the determinants of occupational choice. We use the quantified model to study generative AI’s impact via augmentation, automation, and a third and new channel—simplification—which captures how technologies change the skills needed to perform tasks. Our key finding is that AI substantially reduces wage inequality while raising average wages by 21 percent. AI’s equalizing effect is fully driven by simplification, enabling workers across skill levels to compete for the same jobs. We show that the model’s predictions line up with recent labor market data.
Via Kris Gulati.
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2026-01-10 13:49:14
More recently, his research has found new attention and urgency in President Donald Trump’s second term: Borjas, 75, worked as a top economist on the Council of Economic Advisers, a post he stepped down from last week.
Borjas is an immigrant and refugee who escaped Cuba for the United States in 1962 and later obtained citizenship — a point of tension he has referenced in his writing.
“Not only do I have great sympathy for the immigrant’s desire to build a better life, I am also living proof that immigration policy can benefit some people enormously,” he wrote in a 2017 opinion piece for the New York Times. “But I am also an economist, and am very much aware of the many trade-offs involved. Inevitably, immigration does not improve everyone’s well-being.”
One of Borjas’s direct contributions to the Trump administration this past year was his extensive behind-the-scenes work on Trump’s overhaul of the H-1B visa system for highly skilled workers that added a $100,000 fee, according to three people familiar with his work and a White House official, who all spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to share internal deliberations. Borjas had previously written about the “well-documented abuses” of that program over the years.
The White House official said Borjas was among many Trump administration members involved in redesigning the H-1B visa program and confirmed that Borjas provided intellectual support for other Trump immigration initiatives last year.
Here is more from The Washington Post.
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2026-01-10 02:55:42
France will delay this year’s Group of 7 summit to avoid a conflict with the mixed martial arts event planned at the White House on Donald Trump’s birthday.
Here is the article.
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2026-01-10 00:38:06
1. The New Aesthetics and a call for new stories.
2. Seb Krier.
4. How Dean Ball uses coding agents.
5. The golden age of vaccine development.
6. Why is British politics so chaotic?
7. Update on the political science paper written by Claude.
8. “EU countries have approved the Mercosur trade deal after 25 years of talks.” And winners and losers. There are still plenty of restrictions in the deal of course, but better than nothing.
9. Milei fully repays currency swap.
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