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.

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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 models fared worse. However, no model located a true error without substantial human guidance, and data contamination complicates interpretation. I argue that a competent human paired with a frontier model can outperform current peer review, but AI cannot yet refute economic theory on its own.

That is from a new piece by Alexis Akira Toda.

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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.

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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 a trillion dollars in cumulative value. https://abundanceandgrowth.org/p/a-little-progress-is-worth-a-trillion

When people talk about pausing AI development, I can’t help but think about the enormous cumulative value that would get lost over time, the higher rates of absolute poverty that would persist across the world, and the needless deaths from delayed medical advances. There may be worlds where some version of this is something to consider, but the evidentiary bar for delaying technological development should obviously be pretty high.

Here is the link.

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Country and Western music, in their Brazilian incarnations, are very popular.

It does not feel like the next Pelé will be coming from Brazil.

Sao Paulo as a city is much improved.  The murder rate has plummeted, and the nice neighborhoods are very nice and are growing in size.  The business community is strong, interesting architecture abounds, and there is a real arts scene.  It is arguably Latin America’s number one city, with only Mexico City as a rival.  It has, along with Mexico City, evolved into a “must know” global city, though it is rarely treated that way by outsiders.  In the three days I spent there, going around to many places, I did not see a single person who was evidently a foreign tourist.  That is crazy, but also a sign there is good value here.

Sao Paulo has food to die for.  It is top tier for Brazilian (of course), meat/steak, Japanese, and Italian, and pretty good in many other offerings as well.  I had a wonderful fifteen-course omikase for $110 at a Michelin star restaurant.  The establishment, Kan Suke, has only eight seats, but I could get a table by inquiring only an hour in advance.

For Italian food it is probably the second best country in the world?  For meats it might be number one, at least if you are willing to put aside the small country of Uruguay.  For beans it is top two, and the fruits are excellent as well.  Chocolate ice cream and gelato abound.  All constraints considered, I would rather spend a week dining out here than in London or Paris or Rome, or for that matter New York City.

People are very friendly, surprising few speak decent English, and Brazilian warmth still abounds.

I was very pleased with my stay at Hotel Unique, due to its architecture and also a perfect location.

Observers should be more optimistic about the Brazilian economy.  Yes it is overregulated and the government is locked into far too much spending.  But hyperinflation is now a distant memory, a reasonable fiscal consolidation occurred in the 1990s, and the country has plenty of its own energy.  Keep in mind that for emerging economies, years of negative growth are a major problem.  Brazil now has sidestepped most (not all!) of those risks.  Slow, steady growth should be able to get them somewhere, albeit at a langorous pace.

My biggest worry about Brazil is demographics and shrinking population.  In recent times TFR has been in the 1.3 to 1.4 range, hardly satisfactory.  A shrinking population is bad per se, and also it will hurt many regions of the country due to imperfect market integration, both nationally and globally.  More importantly, the country does not have an obvious and easy option for pulling in a higher number of desirable immigrants, at least not relative to its size.  There is Venezuela and Bolivia, but the former of those may go away as a major source of people.

Will Brazilian fertility tick back up?  Will Brazil re-attain its status as a highly influential culture on the world scene, as it was in the 1960s through early 1990s?  Unclear.  But if the question is “should you go visit?”, the answer is a definite yes.

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2. Claims about soil (speculative).  Here is GPT Pro analysis.

3. Stepping up.

4. An interactive feature for AI and economic growth.

5. The strange allure of the single-sentence novel.  From Totei.

6. Where is the Indian diaspora population?

7. The Pope in Spain cites Salamanca and liberty.

8. “We’re hiring two Research Fellows to study the future of scientific discovery.“

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Is Marxian economics the only economic lens one can apply to literature? What would a Hayekian literary criticism look like? The place to start is the great Paul Cantor’s pioneering essay on Thomas Mann’s “Disorder and Early Sorrow,” a slight-seeming story set in Weimar Germany during the hyperinflation. Cantor shows that when one reads the novella through Hayek and Mises rather than Marx, the story opens up.

Start with inflationary psychology and its ramifications. Inflation shortens time horizons. When money loses value by the hour, saving is foolish and the rational move is to spend as fast as you earn—Mises’s “flight into real goods.” Prudence, discipline, and respect for the past become maladaptive. Speed, improvisation, risk-taking, and a certain youthful irresponsibility become survival traits.

Thus, Cantor/Mann tell us that inflation changes psychology and inverts the authority of age over youth. The old are set in their ways and often living on fixed incomes that inflation has wiped out; they cannot adapt. The young have known nothing but instability and go with the inflationary flow effortlessly. So the conservative virtues that once commanded respect are in decline while youthful recklessness starts to look like competence. Thus, Mann’s world has “gone mad in the worship of youth”: the children call their father by his first name, the teenagers are “the big folk,” and Professor Cornelius literally crouches down to his children’s height as the hierarchy collapses around him.

Money is a society’s primary measure of value, so Cantor/Mann argue that when you shake a people’s faith in their money, you shake their other faiths. Thus Cantor ties the conviction-less skepticism of Cornelius—and the broader Weimar nihilism and disequilibrium that helped feed the rise of Nazism—to monetary disequilibrium.

In short, inflation converts economic disorder into moral, social, psychological, and finally ontological disorder. Prices become unstable, then values, then identities, then reality. The modern feeling of absurdity and inauthenticity that critics reflexively pin on capitalism, Cantor/Mann argue is due to government-created inflation and paper money.

A Marxist could read the same story and find the inevitable contradictions of capitalism. Cantor reads it and finds the consequences of the state debasing the currency. Both are economic readings of literature. Only one of them has the economics correct.

Cantor is the place to begin but a Hayekian literary criticism could go much further. Atavism, the impossibility of social justice, products of human action but not of human design, spontaneous order, the fatal conceit, subjectivism, the sensory order–there is a lot of Hayekian ideas that literary interpretation could draw upon.

A Hayekian criticism would ask questions like how do characters acquire and process knowledge? Which institutions transmit information successfully, and which corrupt it? How do money, law, language, and custom function as social coordination mechanisms? Why do some attempts at rational redesign end in disaster? Read War and Peace as a critique of the great-man theory of history, Brazil and The Lives of Others as the fatal conceit degenerating into ignorance, fear, and absurdity. The Wire as a Hayekian epic of spontaneous order that demonstrates the illusion of social justice. Cantor’s essay on Mann shows the method, the broader project remains underdeveloped.

Hat tip: Hollis Robbins for discussion.

Addendum: Don’t forget my earlier WSJ piece, Capitalism: Hollywood’s Miscast Villain which gives an economic, one might even say Marxist, explanation for why film directors in particular disdain capitalists.

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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, provides a natural experiment: from June 2007 through February 2011, the device was sold only on AT&T, allowing us to identify its effect from variation in AT&T’s mobile broadband coverage. Entropy-balanced Poisson and synthetic difference-in-differences event studies imply that access to the iPhone reduced births by 4.5–8.0% at ages 15–19 and 3.2–6.6% at ages 20–24, with statistically significant but smaller declines among older cohorts. Placebo analyses applied to Verizon and Sprint’s pre-2011 coverage footprint are null. Taken together, these cohort effects imply that the diffusion of the iPhone deepened the decline in births among women under 30 while suppressing the rise in births among older women. Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15–44. National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use, and reducing sexual frequency.

That is from Caitlin K. Myers & Ezekiel Hooper.  An interesting and difficult to discuss question is how much we actually want teen fertility rates to decline, and to what extent we should consider such declines a good thing.

Note also that as this study is set up it does not discriminate against the ” the iPhone effect on fertility is mainly a thing of timing” hypothesis.  And a Paul Novosad comment.

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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 in exchange for doing a decent-enough job and making the problem go away.

Bank of America has $2 trillion of deposits, not a penny of which is optimized. Most enterprise software vendors could be switched out far more often, or displaced by home-built software, but it’s too much of a pain. I could run a 12-party RFP for an Uber ride or a pair of socks, but I don’t.

In a sense, many professionals are an extension of the same idea. I could research my own real estate law, or my own insurance, whether business or personal, but I don’t because it would be too hard.

Google Search might be the biggest example. It makes money because advertisers know they need to be at the top of the results to be found. But my agent will happily search all the results across multiple search engines.

AI agents should change all this. By acting as incredibly rational and vigilant sourcing agents, CFOs, and experts for their users, they will take rents previously collected by these toll-takers and redistribute them to consumers.

And I don’t think the AI stack itself necessarily makes much profit. Commodity and open-weight models are hot on the heels of the major model companies, and competition in GPUs should intensify. Indeed, making a GPU is in some ways similar to making software, so perhaps it can commoditize substantially. Chip manufacturing may remain high-margin, but there are now plenty of entrants drawn in by the shortage who could make TSMC’s market more competitive over time.

Some companies will win. Low-cost providers may gain share as customers switch more often. Richer consumers may consume more high-end goods. Companies with genuinely advantaged business models and limited competition will be able to become more efficient. But my overriding sense is that the equilibrium outcome is lower margins for companies.

Of course, people will build new businesses, and maybe they will use AI to generate very high margins in ways I haven’t considered. That would prove me wrong.

But if this lower-margin hypothesis is true, the knock-on effects are probably positive for AI adoption, since it will make the models more popular with consumers.

And if your view is that AI drives GDP growth to be only 5–10% higher over the next decade, it’s possible that a 100–200 bp decline in corporate margins from roughly 12% would mean companies in aggregate don’t see much benefit — or in fact lose — even as consumers are better off.

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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 great book on Mexico.

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This paper estimates the regional economic impact of high-skill immigration restrictions by analyzing the 2017 “Buy American, Hire American” (BAHA) policy as a quasi-experimental policy shock. By significantly tightening H-1B visa adjudication, BAHA caused new employment petition denial rates to double from 7% to 17%, while STEM-specific rejections tripled to 31%. Using a difference-indifferences framework, this study finds that states highly dependent on H-1B talent experienced a statistically significant 2.8% relative decline in value-added output. This implied a productivity loss totaling roughly $218 billion across the most affected regions. While concurrent tax cuts and deregulation likely offset the impact on employment and wages, the loss of specialized STEM expertise adversely impacted total factor productivity. These findings suggest that policies based on conventional employment metrics may overlook the “hidden damage” to productivity and innovation that drives the broader economy, thereby underestimating the true economic cost of immigration restrictions.

That is by Caroline Y. Su of McLean High School.  Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

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Pierre-Edouard Sterin, founder of Smartbox and worth about €1.4 billion, told French senators he wants to disinherit his five children and donate everything to charity. French law, under the Napoleonic Code, mandates that with five children, three-quarters of his estate must go to them, leaving only one quarter freely disposable. Sterin argued for complete freedom to decide the fate of one’s assets, saying it is ‘a real freedom to start with nothing in life’.

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Some thoughts [referring to my recent Free Press piece on marijuana]. My feeling is that you read quickly enough that I can dump words on you and it will not be an imposition. So I have not really edited this. I am writing more now

1. Drugs are fun.

2. They open new ways of perceiving, sometimes by adversely impacting other ways of perceiving, particularly by adjusting attention response, and particularly for perceiving experiences that are sensory (what experiences aren’t sensory, ridiculous, I know, but here of course I mean art primarily.

3. Since the experiences I am inadequately categorizing above are profoundly influential on people’s meaning-making, drugs can be as well, of course.

4. Most people are not going to be as economically viable as they are now as producers of goods or services, and many, if not most, are going to be economically viable only to the extent that they generate demand, and here I think specifically demand for pleasure. Drugs are important in this social equation. People will use many more drugs of increasing variety and quality. This train has left the station, or, rather, these trains have left their stations. You will not call them back.

5. People prefer not to work. Most folks are lazy. As you know. People usually only work because they have to, and this is a perpetual source of human misery, the having to work part. Rich people like to say things like: “work gives you purpose” but that really is only for work in which you can create meaning for yourself. Most people do not have this work, cannot get this work, and will never experience meaning-making through work in a positive way.

6. The other ways people derive meaning are becoming more expensive, and prohibitively so for many, and here I mean specifically children. It always puzzles me why folks like Musk and Thiel advocate for more reproduction when it should be clear to all that (many) fewer humans will be required to generate (radically) more economic activity. Generating and raising new humans is already much more expensive than it was in previous generations, and fewer people are able to achieve the kind of economic security that predicts good parenting outcomes.

7. Tesla is a company that makes cars like Netflix is a company that mails you DVDs. You know this, it’s obvious, and has been since he put AI in his cars. Tesla makes robots, his cars are robots, and he will soon have many many other kinds of robots. SpaceX will solve the electricity and cooling issues around AI rapidly. The bottom line here is that all economic pressure points to people working less, not more. They will do more drugs.

8. This confluence of pressures (human desire for rest and relaxation, declining access to traditional means of meaning making — through work, through children — and the powerful economic pressures to replace human labor with AI and robotics) and the rapid evolution of much much better drugs (my boyfriend knows as much about pot as I do about wine, and here in the PNW pot is extremely high quality, and gets better literally all the time — there is a new nano-emulsified tech for drinkable live rosin marijuana products now available in Oregon, and let me tell you, that stuff is great) means that drug use will continue to rise, continue to improve in terms of its absolute value as a substitute for other meaning making activities, and continue to be blended in with other medical chemical use.

9. Mental health is health. Drugs do help with anxiety and pleasure, which is why people use them. Better drugs will help with these better.

10. I have an anxiety disorder (I never mind sharing this, I am also a type 2 diabetic and don’t mind sharing that) and am, at my heart, a bohemian libertine. As I get richer and richer, I use drugs to carve out space to disconnect from others. I create space for myself and my internal thinking with drugs. My internal thinking space is generally far more interesting than others’, though, and generally far more interesting than conversation with all but a few others.

11. I play an outstanding video game that replicates for me the experience of being a child playing with legos, except I never have to clean up my room. Marijuana enhances my video game experience by creating a sense of stasis while my mind wanders and i engage other bits of my mental engine on creation. Some of my best ideas, including many that have made clients millions of dollars, have occurred to me in this state, and I know no other state in which I am so open to new ideas. Many are lousy, but I successfully monetize enough of them to be getting richer than I need to be.

12. I spend more on classical music, theater, and other live performing arts than most people. I often use drugs to enhance the experience. Before a recent Bruckner 8, I bought pot two blocks from the hall in a store selling it openly but illegally — this was in one of those states with a world-class orchestra and outdated cannabis laws. Sitting in prime seats, high as a kite, I lost myself completely in Bruckner’s profound torrent of cosmic meaning. What I am saying is even my most cherished experiences can be improved by drugs. Many reasonable people feel the same, including Elon Musk.

13. I strongly recommend taking marijuana while hiking through the Olympic National Park in the rain. You will never experience olfactory sensations like that in any other setting or mindstate.

14. So, almost everyone is already using drugs almost all of the time, deriving great value from them in private, public, artificial, natural, and introspective spaces. You cannot replace that value with nothing, other competing forms of value are becoming much more expensive or require high levels of discipline (I get great value from my personal trainer who helps me get high on endorphins twice a week, now that’s a GREAT drug, so much clarity) and so I just don’t think there is any future in which you will put this genie back in the bottle.

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Relative to those in nonremotable jobs, workers in remotable jobs spent approximately one additional hour alone per workday after the pandemic. Those in remotable jobs also differentially increased days spent entirely alone and decreased after-work socializing. The rise in isolation was sharpest for those living alone, whose likelihood of spending the whole day without social contact rose by 7 percentage points (83%).

Mental distress simultaneously increased: Scores on the Kessler (K-6) measure of generalized psychological distress rose by 0.1 standard deviations for those in remotable jobs relative to those in nonremotable jobs. The increase in distress was roughly twice as large for those living alone compared with those living with family. Alternative measures of mental distress—such as the frequency of depression, mental health care utilization, and antidepressant prescriptions—show similar trends. In contrast, workers in remotable jobs did not differentially increase visits to non–mental health care providers or non–mental health prescriptions (statins, for example), suggesting that the change was not merely driven by increased flexibility for doctor visits.

That is from a recently published paper by Natalia Emanuel, Emma Harrington, and Amanda Pallais.

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