Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0HBFWS1avb6tYY1IoLefYb

Web: https://athenaeumreview.org/podcast/aesthetics-a-conversation-with-tyler-cowen/

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/aesthetics-a-conversation-with-tyler-cowen/id1509089416?i=1000773451248

Here is basic information about art scholar Benjamin Lima, it was great fun for me to do this one.

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Some of the most impactful measures announced by Cuba’s Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Thursday include allowing:

• Private and foreign capital to purchase and sell fuel
• The creation of private corporate banking
• Private business owners to own more than one company and hire more than 100 workers
• Private businesses in agriculture and tourism
• Tourism property sales, evaluated case-by-case, for Cubans resident in the country and abroad
• Foreign investors to hire workers directly
• Foreign investment in Old Havana and other tourist spots, in state telecom ETECSA data centers, mobile networks, and other digital infrastructure
• The extension of surface rights up to 99 years and leases up to 50 years for foreign investments
• Real estate development in tourism
• Farmland lease rights for an “indefinite period”
• Wholesale and retail trade without limits by foreign entities
• The sale of state assets and state companies’ shares to the private sector and foreign companies.

Taken together, the reforms proposed significantly expand the private sector six decades after Cuba’s communist leaders forbade all private business—even frita stands— and adopted a centrally planned economy model that ended up ruining the country and dragging Cubans into a severe humanitarian crisis. Currently, the government is in such dire straits that it is even seeking to transfer the management of the country’s zoos and aquariums to private hands, another announced change.

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2. Are elite economists overpaid?  Elite economists conclude no.

3. Dialog.

4. Are you in the weights?

5. Inside the world’s first AI art museum (Los Angeles).

6. Redux of my 2023 post on AI and existential risk.

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Free Press columnist Tyler Cowen picks a biography of one of the finest poets of the 20th century, Paul Celan: A Life, by Anna Arno.

Could Celan be the very best poet of all time? When read in the German language, I think he might be. When read in English, he is still very good. No one has a poetic topic of more importance than the Holocaust. Contrary to Theodor Adorno, he decided it was possible to write poetry after it, and he took that mission very seriously.

Now we finally have a first-rate biography. Celan’s mother was killed in the Holocaust, and he took his own life in 1970, drowning himself in the Seine. How did he get to that point? How did he have the strength and wherewithal to write such powerful poetry in the first place?

I found this book gripping from start to finish. Given the topic I cannot call it a “fun” read, but it is absorbing and the translation is very accessible.

Is it possible that Anna Arno is one of our best intellectuals today? She has written on the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker and the Polish writer and activist Konstanty Jeleński, and has done important work as a translator, including of Henry James—though those works are in Polish, and thus inaccessible to me. Can we get translations as soon as possible? In the meantime, you can start with this one.

The article has many other quality selections as well.

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Sweden is continuing to reap the rewards of this mixture of fiscal rectitude and pro-market reforms. GDP is projected to grow by 1.8% to 1.9% this year; headline inflation stands at 1.5%; debt-to-GDP ratio is one of the lowest in the world, at just above 35%.

There are some flies in this ointment, of course: The economy has recently endured a bout of stagnation, unemployment is at an uncomfortably high 9.4% and Sweden has one of Europe’s highest rates of household debt. But the business environment is healthy, particularly when it comes to business to business. Sweden has a diversified business scene — the highest number of unicorns per capita in Europe, with notable successes such as Spotify, but also a healthy manufacturing and engineering sector. Many of these established companies are thriving because of a surge in demand for both server farms and military equipment…

Sweden has recently experienced its first net emigration in 50 years, thanks to higher minimum wages for labor visas, tougher citizenship tests and, most controversially, financial payouts of up to $37,000 for refugees who volunteer to leave. It has also made progress against violent crime in the immigrant-heavy suburbs, increasing police numbers and toughening the penal code, including a boost to stop-and-search powers and a lowering in the age of criminal responsibility to 14. The number of shootings fell by 63%, from 390 in 2022 to 147 by the end of 2025.

Here is the full Bloomberg column.  And here is Adrian’s new book on liberalism, self-recommending.

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Missing book: Glorious Committees of History, on great committees that accomplished great things as committees.

GPT Pro has an impressive response, here is the start:

1. The King James Bible translation companies. This is maybe the purest literary example: 47 scholars organized into six companies at Westminster, Oxford, and Cambridge, with review procedures, producing one of the monuments of English prose. The committee form mattered because it blended scholarship, doctrinal acceptability, and a shared ear for cadence.

And Henry Oliver suggests The Great Exhibition?

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2. Is the AI shock like the China shock?

3. Can AI agents be individuated?

4. Who is liked by GPT 5.5? (from a partial list, if I understand this correctly)

5. “A policy-induced rural broadband expansion lowered adolescent fertility, and the response appears to operate through the information and opportunity set rather than through new clinical capacity.”

6. Noah Smith is fearing that he and many others are having less influence.

7. Right-wing arguments against Great Books.  And two more.

8. “It is my great pleasure to confirm that the brilliant Professor Robin Hanson joined the UAP Science Advisory Council.“

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What we found was that delicensing reduced wages, reduced prices, and caused a shift towards cremation rather than the more expensive mortuary services preferred by funeral directors. Here’s a key figure.

But that is not the end of the story. In 2023 a series of gruesome abuses came to light involving the sale of body parts, rotting bodies, and worse. Newspapers repeatedly noted that Colorado was the only state not to license funeral service workers. As a result, Colorado is relicensing funeral service workers as of 2027.

The problem is that there is no evidence that abuses were worse in Colorado. It’s easy to find similar abuses—including sexual abuse of corpses—in states with heavy licensing. Pizzola and I didn’t examine the rate of necrophilia among funeral workers in our paper (silly us), but we did cite the following:

A recent US government review of occupational licensing concluded that “the empirical research does not find large improvements in quality or health and safety from more stringent licensing” (CEA, 2015). Similarly, Colorado revisited their decision in a 1990 sunrise review that considered reinstating occupational licensing. The Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies found that since the 1983 occupational delicensing: (1) “there had been incidents of malpractice within the profession but no widespread pattern of abuse,” (2) “[a]llegations of significant threats to the public health, safety and welfare perpetrated by the death care industry in Colorado regarding the improper disposal of human or infectious wastes had not been supported by verifiable evidence,” and (3) “claims that the public in Colorado had suffered or might suffer significant detriment due to a lack of trained mortuary science practitioners caused by the abolition of the Board were unsupported” (Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies, 2007).

Moreover, the licensing requirements—mandating various hours of training and so forth—have very little to do with the types of abuses that generated public support for relicensing. How many hours of “don’t have sex with corpses” training is required? And the funeral director in the worst Colorado case was in fact sentenced to 40 years in jail. Isn’t that incentive enough?

People want what cannot be guaranteed: good behavior in all circumstances. And they will reach for a licensing regime if it promises that, even when such promises are empty.

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I am a mathematician…and some of your recent comments on MR about the role of AI in Econ research as well as the (disappearing?) role of academic papers inspired this response. (It is partially but not exclusively about academia, so I hope it is ok that I’m sending it to your GMU address. Also, I’m hoping it doesn’t get flagged as spam because of the ai in the title…)

In no particular order:

-In the course of a math career, one accumulates lots of computational guesses, now one can test those with minimal effort.

-One also accumulates lots of incomplete and half formed drafts, proofs of special cases, etc, etc. Running those past claude and chatgpt can (does!) pay off. A lot of math is cleverly applying linear algebra and while I’m very good at linear algebra, I’m not as good at it as the AI’s are.

-The lower hanging fruit here are slightly off the beaten track, but not esoteric subjects. If you have a good overview of such, you can pretty quickly prod ai’s into making progress on them. (Before, you needed to have a school of grad students for that). Basic techniques (graph theory, algebra, calculus..) that ai’s are already good at can push these forward already. Making progress on truly hot topics is harder.

-There are some quite smart people trying to measure just how good autonomous ai’s are at math (e.g. the first batch project). That’s a fun game, but for practical purposes right now, what is relevant is how good an ai is when guided by a motivated human. I suspect we’ll see some remarkable things on that front in the next few years once math people really grok the good routines.

-For instance, getting claude and chatgpt to referee each other’s arguments is fun, and they genuinely have different insights on parts of the same problem.

-The kids will be all right. Right now, they are making pocket change doing ai training developed a better “feel” for the different ai’s that I probably ever will. And they learn things by asking the ai to explain an argument to them instead of trying to decipher a math book or paper.

-Which brings me to your papers point. I notice that a project informed with the right context is much more informative to me than the physical pdf of a math paper, and much easier to extract information out of by just asking the thing.

-Refereeing will look very different very soon. All the referee reports that have been collected by the journals should be valuable, hard to get data. And running all the accepted and published math papers through ai’s as the `control’ will end with quite a few people having egg on their face. It’s like self-driving cars, but there is no refereeing union.

-The last really big math revolution was all the stuff in the wake of Witten and 4-manifold stuff predicted by string theory in the early 90’s. This is going to be so much bigger than that. Buckle up.

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2. What would actually be required for “Sovereign AI”?

3. Cliff Asness on the affordability crisis.

4. How usury became more accepted.

5. New Yorker profile of Ken Griffin.

6. Refine is an amazing referee.

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A new paper provides good evidence that the shingles vaccine can prevent dementia, which strongly suggests that some forms of dementia are caused by the varicella zoster virus (VZV), the virus that on initial infection causes chickenpox.

We now have three more studies–from America, Australia and Canada–that find similar results using large numbers and credible research designs. Thus, I think we can up this to the Shingles vaccine reduces dementia.

Eric Topol summarizes the new evidence and writes:

If you are 50+ and have not gotten Shingrix vaccinated, you may want to consider that. You get protection vs Shingles (which can be dreadful), slowing of your biological aging (by methylation and RNA metrics), and ~20% reduction of dementia, predominantly related to Alzheimer’s disease. All of this benefit is magnified in women compared with men, but 3 of the studies showed some reduction of dementia in men. As a tradeoff, men appear to derive more cardiovascular benefit, but that evidence is not as compelling as protection from dementia from natural experiments.

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We study how firms built around AI capabilities-“AI-native” firms-are organized. Drawing on Y Combinator batches W20-F24 and U.S. venture-backed startups whose first financing closed between 2020 and 2024, we classify each firm’s AI-native status and link it to workforce microdata on team size, function, seniority, and hierarchy. Relative to non-AI startups in the same industry-cohort, AI-native firms are 25% smaller. Their share of engineers is 13% greater, and the shares of entry-level workers and managers are each roughly 15% lower. Their hierarchies are half a seniority level flatter-yet valuations are comparable, implying more value created per employee. We argue these patterns reflect two channels: a process channel, in which AI changes how people work inside the firm, and a product channel, in which AI capabilities are built into what the firm sells. Using text from product descriptions and job postings, we find that embedding AI into the product, beyond layering on AI tools into existing workflows, is a primary way startups are scaling “knowledge work” without large teams of knowledge workers.

The tweet storm on the new paper is especially useful.  Via Luis Garicano.  And note those results predate the very latest and best tools.

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With over 100 million daily active users and projected revenue bookings of $7 billion this year, it is one of the largest gaming economies in the world—and one that has made millionaires out of teenage developers in Argentina, South Korea, and everywhere in between.

Tyler and Dave explore why Roblox decided early against prioritizing advertising revenue, why Dave thinks the main competition of Roblox is its own execution speed rather than Fortnite, whether every mega platform inevitably becomes an everything app, how falling token costs will change the platform, why he insists all the games on Roblox are beautiful, whether Robux should have a floating exchange rate, why admitting you have kids under 13 on your platform turns out to be a competitive advantage, why he’s skeptical of blanket social media bans, what his son’s experience with bipolar disorder taught him about metabolic health, his two-year sabbatical between companies that involved a motorhome trip across North America and a stint hosting talk radio in Santa Cruz, why Mutiny on the Bounty remains one of his favorite books, what he’ll learn next, and much more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: What percentage of your games now do you feel are beautiful?

BASZUCKI: All of them.

COWEN: Some look just quite ordinary. They might be fun, but I wouldn’t say they’re beautiful, right?

BASZUCKI: Well, I was trying to go a couple levels out of the box on you there. The reason I feel they’re beautiful is when you said that, I immediately went to look and feel, but then I tried to imagine the 12-year-old or the 18-year-old or the 30-year-old struggling to build something wonderful and the human connection to those games. By that definition, I think they’re all beautiful. They are all the efforts of creation of real people trying to pour their hearts out to make something that other people love to play.

On an artistic basis, I think you could ask me what percent of paintings in the MoMA do I think are beautiful. I’d probably say 20 percent. If I had to look at 1,000 Roblox games, I wouldn’t name which is more beautiful to me because I think that’s less important than really the heartfelt work of all the creators.

COWEN: I’ve been struck when I look at gaming at how much people don’t seem to care much about the visual beauty of their games. I would have expected something different, say, 15 years ago, and they just want a game that engages them somehow. Normal standards of visual beauty seem to have fallen away. Is that incorrect? Would you correct that impression in some manner?

BASZUCKI: I think you’re absolutely correct. What I feel you may actually be describing, if we looked into other disciplines, the evolution of story from the campfire to written to audio to a movie, and the increasing fidelity; all of those stories, in a way, are beautiful, but at the time, for the vast majority of the creators, it may be that writing is just easier than producing a 4K Hollywood movie. I feel that’s a little bit like the metaphor you’re talking about right now in gaming.

For the vast majority of people, their story or their idea for their game is actually pretty beautiful. Whether it’s a fashion game like Dress to Impress or it’s a grow garden game, the games are arguably beautiful, even if they don’t look photorealistic. What I think we’ll see is, over time, as AI helps accelerate the ability to make games look really polished in any style the creator wants—could be photorealistic, could be anime, could be a Warner Brothers 2D cartoon look—you and I might say that looks more beautiful, but the core gameplay is still somewhat the original gameplay. I think we are going to see games arguably look more beautiful, even though I think they’re all beautiful.

The dialogue is a bit slow to get underway, but there are many interesting parts.

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Latin America’s momentous fertility transition is now in the domain of history, allowing a cohort perspective on the decline of completed fertility. Using census microdata from 17 Latin American countries, we track female birth cohorts from the 1920s to the 1970s by subnational region to document the extent to which cohort fertility decline coincided with other demographic and socioeconomic processes. Across cohorts within subnational regions, children ever born fell one-for-one with mortality decline. Expansions in urbanization, multigenerational living, women’s and husbands’ education, women’s employment, and the non-agricultural sector all predicted declines in ever-born and surviving fertility, but women’s education and sectoral composition were the dominant forces after covariate adjustment. Fertility decline was not systematically linked with improvements in children’s outcomes, including school enrollment, literacy, primary completion, and non-employment. These cohort facts challenge theories of fertility decline centered on women’s work and children’s education but support others emphasizing women’s education.

I fear that means the women think they are finding better and more fun things to do?  Which is hardly bad per se, but…

That is from a new NBER working paper by Regina Calles and Tom Vogl.

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