2026-03-23 19:16:10
When Tyler and I were writing Modern Principles of Economics, we wanted examples that were modern, specific, and grounded in the real world. That has been a bit of a headache, because we have to update them with every new edition. Our biggest competitor uses the ice cream market as its central example and never has to revise. Smart! But for us, the extra work has been worth it.
We chose the oil market as our central example. Oil is always in the news, and it works really well across a wide range of textbook topics: the elasticity of demand and supply; oligopoly and cartels; the shutdown condition; shocks; expectations, speculation and futures markets; and oil prices have macroeconomic implications that connect micro to macro.
Yes, keeping the examples current takes more work. But when a student sees that the price of crude has surged past $100 a barrel because Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz—choking off 20% of the world’s oil supply—they have the framework to understand what is happening. Supply shock, inelastic demand, expectations and speculation, the macroeconomic transmission to GDP—it’s all right there in the headlines. Try doing that with the ice cream market.
See the Invisible Hand. Understand Your World. It is not just our slogan. It’s our method.
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2026-03-23 14:35:51
Soon enough you will be able to take any published research paper and tweak it, or improve it, any way you want. Just apply a dose of AI.
Using Refine, you already can judge the quality of all past papers, once you get them in uploadable form. We now can rewrite the entire history of modern economics with the mere investment of tokens. Which papers in the 1993 AER were really the good ones? Which are simply false and do not replicate?
Refine, or some service like it, will only get better, and cheaper.
Do we even need the AER any more to certify which are the best papers? Just ask the AIs, including about influence not just quality.
Why not write a program, or have an AI write it for you, that will take your favorite papers and improve them, and change their evaluations over time, as new results come in? Of course people will do this, at least to the extent they care. These papers will keep on morphing.
Will economics become a branch of software engineering? There are important papers in software engineering, but very often the most important advances are embodied in actual software, AI included.
Will the future advances in economics come from producing evaluative systems and producing systems, rather than papers?
What if you submit to a journal a data set and some code? Who needs “the paper” per se? Just issue some commands to the “data set plus code” and get the paper you want. How about “I am Tyler Cowen, what is it you think I will find interesting in this data set?”
Or publish a method for simulating human behavior, to run AI-simulated experimental economics, a’la Horton and Manning? Publish “the box,” and do not worry so much about the individual paper.
Will highly productive researchers, who publish a lot of papers, become far less valuable? The individual paper no longer seems scarce, or will not be in another year or two.
Give tenure to people who build capabilities and who build “boxes”?
How about an economics Nobel Prize for Anthropic and Open AI?
I thank Alex T. for useful discussions on this point.
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2026-03-23 12:16:59
Lured by low taxes, entrepreneurs from across Latin America are plowing in money and taking up residence, with applications surging more than 60% in 2025. Sleek towers and luxury car dealerships now dot Asunción, a city where infrastructure is still struggling to catch up. And Wall Street investors are snapping up Paraguay’s bonds as its conservative president, Santiago Peña, aligns his government with the Trump administration.
Though roughly the size of California, Paraguay’s $47 billion economy is about 1% of the Golden State’s. But rapid growth and economic reforms in recent years helped the country win investment-grade credit status from Moody’s Ratings in 2024 and from S&P Global last year.
…Paraguay’s embrace of sound fiscal and monetary policies after its 2003 financial crisis is now paying off, with single-digit inflation and annual growth averaging around 4% over the past two decades.
Here is more from Bloomberg, growth last year was six percent. Southern Cone remains underrated.
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2026-03-23 01:47:07
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2026-03-23 00:12:12
6. Shin Hyun Song to run the Bank of Korea.
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2026-03-22 15:04:41
So far, however, the predictions that the mass automation of coding will leave outsourcing firms obsolete seem overblown. Their clients often hope AI will create huge productivity gains by, for example, using the technology to quickly and cheaply build a new internal HR tool. But such improvements in productivity are only possible in “greenfield” environments with “clean architecture”, argues Atul Soneja, chief operating officer at Tech Mahindra, an IT firm. Deploying AI in “brownfield” environments—with legacy code, a lack of documentation and multiple systems that must all continue to operate in real time—is far trickier. In the end, clients often realise that their AI dreams were too ambitious and end up hiring as many outsourced coders as before, say executives.
What is more, the AI boom may present an opportunity for the consultancy arms of India’s outsourcers. They argue that they can now fulfil more of a strategic role for their clients: getting the most out of AI requires understanding all of the context around the problem, something that consultants with experience across businesses can offer. Nandan Nilekani, one of the founders of Infosys, reckons that such services related to AI could be worth $300bn-400bn by 2030.
Here is more from The Economist.
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