2026-04-10 00:06:10
1. The “estrangement” from philosophy of economics.
2. Investing in scientific instruments.
3. New book coming on Carlsen vs. Niemann.
4. Houston economy growing at more than ten percent (and that is even without moving forward on bike paths).
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2026-04-09 19:18:11
Imagine I told you that AI was going to create a 40% unemployment rate. Sounds bad, right? Catastrophic even. Now imagine I told you that AI was going to create a 3-day working week. Sounds great, right? Wonderful even. Yet to a first approximation these are the same thing. 60% of people employed and 40% unemployed is the same number of working hours as 100% employed at 60% of the hours.
So even if you think AI is going to have a tremendous effect on work, the difference between catastrophe and wonderland boils down to distribution. It’s not impossible that AI renders some people unemployable, but that proposition is harder to defend than the idea that AI will be broadly productive. AI is a very general purpose technology, one likely to make many people more productive, including many people with fewer skills. Moreover, we have more policy control over the distribution of work than over the pure AI effect on work. Declare an AI dividend and create some more holidays, for example.
Nor is this argument purely theoretical. Between 1870 and today, hours of work in the United States fell by about 40% — from nearly 3,000 hours per year to about 1,800. Hours fells but unemployment did not increase. Moreover, not only did work hours fall, but childhood, retirement, and life expectancy all increased. In fact in 1870, about 30% of a person’s entire life was spent working — people worked, slept, and died. Today it’s closer to 10%. Thus in the past 100+ years or so the amount of work in a person’s lifetime has fallen by about 2/3rds and the amount of leisure, including retirement has increased. We have already sustained a massive increase in leisure. There’s no reason we cannot do it again.
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2026-04-09 14:43:40
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has grown 66% this century, fueled in part by a record-breaking number of convert baptisms in 2025.
The church had 10,752,986 members at the end of 1999. The church had 17,887,212 at the end of 2025, according to an annual statistical report released Saturday during the church’s 196th Annual General Conference.
Furthermore the growth is coming in every part of the world (as a qualifier I am not sure what the outflow is). Here is the full article, via Tyler Ransom.
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2026-04-09 12:45:38
Important work is just flowing these days, and much of it (of course) concerns AI:
We study whether AI methods applied to large-scale portfolio holdings data can improve financial regulation. We build a state-of-the-art, graph-based deep learning model tailored to security-level data on the holdings of financial intermediaries. The architecture incorporates economic priors and learns latent representations of both assets and investors from the network structure of portfolio positions. Applied to the universe of non-bank financial intermediaries, covering nearly $40 trillion in wealth, the model substantially outperforms existing approaches in out-of-sample forecasts of intermediary trading behavior, including in crisis episodes. The model has more than ten times the explanatory power for the cross-sectional variation in asset returns during stress events compared to traditional approaches, and it outperforms existing systemic risk metrics at the institution level. Its learned representations show that the holdings network encodes rich, economically interpretable information about firesale vulnerability. The architecture is fully inductive, producing informative estimates even when entire asset classes or investors are withheld from training. We embed our empirical approach into a macroprudential optimal policy framework to formalize why these objects matter for policy and welfare. We show that even in an equilibrium environment subject to the Lucas critique, the predictive information from the model improves welfare by sharpening the cross-sectional targeting of policy interventions, and we demonstrate a complementarity between prediction and structural knowledge.
That is a new paper by Christopher Clayton and Antonio Coppola, of Yale and Stanford respectively.
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2026-04-09 00:38:11
1. Waymo rollout in NYC is halted.
2. Back “plus” is the better answer (NYT). I am glad this is now settled, Alex T. can attest I have been insisting on this for a while. Note my earlier prediction.
3. Nicholas Decker on Ludwig Straub.
4. Crypto and quantum computing. Likely an important piece, here is GPT Pro on that paper.
5. “The Suno upgrade for song generation seems quite good as well.” So much is new!
6. Hollinger on NBA tanking (NYT).
7. Is there an evolving Iran bargain with China? (speculative, mostly we still do not know what is going on, you should discount most of what you are reading on this topic).
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2026-04-08 21:51:33
Here is Dean Ball on Mythos. And now more from Dean. Here is John Loeber. While I am seeing some likely overstatement, probably this is a real turning point nonetheless, and we need to think further about what is best to do. No b.s. on data center slowdowns and algorithmic discrimination, rather actual thought on how to regulate something that actually will matter. And be glad we got there first. But how long will it be before an open source version, even if somewhat inferior, is available? Will OpenAI and Google soon be showing similar capabilities? (And how will that shift the equilibrium?) Should we upgrade our estimates of the returns to investing in compute? How will the willingness of attackers to pay for tokens evolve, relative to the willingness of defenders to pay for tokens? Which are our softest targets? As a side effect, will this also lead to higher economic concentration, as perhaps only the larger institutions can invest in quality patches rapidly enough? How many things will be taken offline altogether? It was the government of Singapore that started moving in that direction in 2016 with their Internet Surfing Separation. Which of the pending hacks and leaks will embarrass you the most?
And if nothing else, this is proof we are not all going to be jobless, albeit for reasons that are not entirely positive.
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