The post *Finding Emily* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Chinese actors and online influencers have a new rival: cost-effective advanced AI video generation programmes that are threatening millions of jobs in a once-vibrant area of China’s gig economy.

The release of powerful new AI-powered video software, such as tech group ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 model, has allowed digital actors to replace humans, enabling the production of higher-quality original videos more quickly.

The digital takeover intensified after this year’s release of Seedance 2.0, said Greg Wollner, a short-drama actor and producer in Beijing. Before its release, he was shooting three different productions a week. “And after that, everything just went.”

Many of Wollner’s friends “had to quit doing what they love and change to something else”, he said. In May, 89 of the top 100 animated dramas on Douyin, ByteDance’s domestic Chinese version of TikTok, were AI productions according to DataEye, a marketing analytics company.

Here is more from Joe Leahy and Isaac Castella-McDonald in the FT.

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2. The future of higher education?

3. Another look at data centers in space.

4. “The Global Economics Lab is a non-partisan organization located at Harvard and draws on a network of faculty affiliates across universities. We conduct policy-relevant research on the forces reshaping the global economy. We engage with governments, central banks, companies, multilaterals, and civil society organizations to translate that research into action.”  Link here, connected to Gita Gopinath and other prominent economists.

5. Ryan Murphy now has a Substack, on liberty, state capacity, and related issues.

6. Is Google AI swallowing up interest in Wikipedia?

7. Puffin tourism in Maine (WSJ).

8. The business savvy of Dolly Parton (WSJ).

The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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• In reply to Brett. The regulatory landscape has changed here ... by Alan
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1. The relevant facts here still are being disputed, and furthermore it all happened in Chinese.  If I cannot personally adjudicate the matter, I remain inclined to proceed.  I am also well aware that standards in China, including for plagiarism, are very different than in the United States.  If someone tells me “A person in China did [fill in the blank]” my initial reaction is still “Are they interesting to talk to?”

2. I have had on numerous CEOs and business leaders.  Your opinions of each will vary, but surely some of them are guilty of something.  I do not regret any of them as guests, except insofar as they were boring.  You also can debate whether a former CIA head, in this case John Brennan, ever did anything wrong.  He was fascinating.

3. I once had on Sam Bankman-Fried, now a convicted felon.  It was an excellent episode, and I will point out my lines of questioning were more perspicacious than many people since have realized.

4. I once had on a convicted murderer, Shaka Senghor.  It was an excellent episode, and if I recall only a single person wrote me to complain.  I would gladly have more criminals on, and they do not all have to be repentant in the manner that Shaka is.  Would not a pickpocket guest be intriguing?  For Althusser however it is too late.

5. Without knowing the full story, I suspect the case of Yiyang Zhuge (neither a felon nor a murderer) is most analogous to having on the CEO of DeepSeek, Liang Wenfang.  At this point it is pretty well known that DeepSeek (and other Chinese AI models) distilled a lot from Anthropic’s Claude.  That is a violation of terms of service, and in economic terms it is an event and a depredation of pretty serious magnitude.  I still would be delighted to have Liang Wenfang on the show, and I would do so without obsessing over the issue of distillation.  How about it Liang Wenfang?

Xi Jinping is welcome too.  Chairman Mao, is pork belly with red sauce over- or underrated?  The world awaits your response.

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Public goods theory tells us that the National Science Foundation should support activities that are especially hard to support through traditional university, philanthropic, and private-sector sources. This insight suggests a simple test: to the extent that the NSF allocates funds to genuine public goods as opposed to subsidies on the margin, we ought to see a large difference in the kinds of projects the NSF supports compared to what the “market” sector supports. But what stands out from lists of prominent NSF grants (like the one provided by Moffitt in this symposium) is how similar they look to lists of “good” research produced by today’s status quo. If we take public goods theory seriously, what areas of economics should be supported?

We suggest replication studies and support for producing public datasets. Which brings me to Scholar Data, a neat new project that won NIH’s competition to create a data-sharing index. Scholar data creates an S-Index, like an H-Index for papers, but instead the S-Index measures a dataset’s ease of access, citations and other mentions. The point is to create a metric to reward the creation of a public good:

Researchers invest years collecting and sharing datasets that underpin reproducibility, transparency, and discovery across every field. Without shared data, findings can’t be verified, built upon, or trusted. And yet, the metrics that define academic careers, such as citations, h-index, and impact factor, only count publications. Data sharing goes unrecognized and unrewarded.

This creates a broken incentive: researchers are expected to share data, but get no credit for doing so. The result is that data sharing is treated as a chore rather than a contribution.

Scholar Data and the S-index are aimed at fixing this. By measuring how impactful your datasets are, the S-index gives data sharing the same visibility and recognition as publishing, turning it from an obligation into a career asset.

Bravo! Your dataset may already be catalogued. You can get credit at ScholarData.

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Costco sold 157.4mn rotisserie chickens worldwide last year, almost double the number of a decade ago.  “It’s $4.99 and for Costco members, that’s one fantastic deal. I don’t think you can produce it for that,” said Walt Shafer, who oversaw the construction and management of the Nebraska site before he retired from Costco this year.

Roasted in ovens in the rear of the retail giant’s hundreds of cavernous stores, the birds have cost only $4.99 since 2009 even as the US retail price of chicken almost doubled. The product has become a textbook “loss leader”, buttressing the loyalty of Costco customers who pay membership fees for the right to shop there…

Rotisserie accounts for only a portion of the chicken processed in Nebraska. The plant also cuts breasts, thighs and other cuts delivered in six-pouch “saddle packs” to stores. Raw breast meat, for example, sells for $2.99 a pound, helping make up for losses on rotisserie.

Here is more from Gregory Meyer at the FT.  Via Mike Rosenwald.

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• Things you cannot buy in America?

 

European and American capitalism were different.  The violence of human clashes in America took place on the surface, in the open.  The violence in Europe became formalized, coalesced with class divions hallowed by centuries; it was interiorized, ingrained, or baked in, if one may use such an expression.  American capitalism was founded on daring, resourcefulness, largesse, waste; European capitalism was founded on one powerful passion — miserliness.  These patterns, which still endure, explain why America succeeded in creating a vast, new sector of the economy adapted to needs that become increasingly evident the closer we come to the twenty-first century: the sector of the universities, research institutes, laboratories, with billions of dollars invested in them.  Western Europe, where education always has been the preserve of a narrow elite, failed to produce anything like it.  The prodigality of private capital in America made the beginnings possible; money from taxes joined in at the next stage.  Miserliness with capital in Europe effectively prevented the laying of foundations for this new sector, and it is doubtful whether the government treasuries will ever be able to over come ever-widening gap.

That is from Czeslaw Milosz’s Visions from San Francisco Bay.

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The centerpiece is Tysons Corner Center, today the eighth largest mall in the country, and one of the largest sub-city-sized markets for office space. It is half-owned by the Alaska Permanent Fund, which is the state-owned corporation that invests oil revenue on behalf of Alaska’s citizens, and half-owned by Macerich, a giant REIT, which is in turn owned by hundreds of large institutional investors and many individuals.

This very interesting essay by Joseph Lawler argues that liquid real estate markets, and distanced ownership, militate against beauty.

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2. The Monterrey spirit.

3. Is Aaron Renn the biggest superinfluencer on the New Right?

4. Two Dan Sullivans on the Alaska Senate ballot, let us see how the voters do (NYT).

5. Virginia Postrel on our Anthropic visit and discussions.  Good post.

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A bet on near-term explosive AI-driven growth: whether U.S. real GDP per capita will grow by at least 15% within a single year (measured relative to prior peak) by the end of 2033. Agreed on X, 15–16 August 2026. This document summarizes the agreed terms.
1. Parties and stakes
Fast-growth side (wins if the growth condition in Section 2 is met):
● William MacAskill https://www.williammacaskill.com/ — $10,000
● Samuel Albanie https://samuelalbanie.com/ — $25,000
● Tom Cohen https://x.com/tomcohen — $25,000
● Total: $60,000
No-fast-growth side (wins otherwise):
● Benjamin Moll http://benjaminmoll.com/ — $40,000
● Andrew Ho https://andrewho.xyz/ — $200,000
● Total: $240,000

Odds: 4:1 — every $1 staked by the fast-growth side is matched by $4 from the no-fast-growth
side. Implied probability of the fast-growth scenario: 20%.

I’m known for quipping that a bet is a tax on bullshit but I don’t think either side is BSing. We have a genuine and important disagreement. I’d side with Moll, for what it is worth.

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We talked about:

—The origin story of the New Aesthetics grants — and why he and Tyler Cowen disagree on almost everything aesthetic (1:00)

—Why culture is “stuck”: a 1926 Bauhaus building could pass for last year’s (2:30)

—Modernism’s explicit, stated mission to tear down beauty — “they weren’t hiding it” (3:30) —Solzhenitsyn: you can fake goodness and truth, but beauty “bears within it its own verification” (6:30)

—Is beauty objective? Why everyone visits Toledo, Spain and no one visits Toledo, Ohio (7:30)

—Detroit was rich for ~25 years and built the DIA. Silicon Valley’s been rich for 50. “We could do the Silicon Valley art tour in a coffee break” (14:30)

—Was Y Combinator secretly modeled on the art atelier? (18:30)

—The highest-leverage point for aesthetic renewal used to be churches. What is it now? (27:00)

—The sacred as an “endangered species”

— and Patrick’s alternative theory of WTF happened in 1971: we lost the sacred, so we can’t have nice things (28:30)

—I asked him about Vatican II and technological stagnation. He (wisely?) passed. I didn’t. (34:30)

—”Can anyone name a work of art made with AI?” Silence. (37:30)

—Why Germany is preeminent in music, literature, and philosophy — and its food is so bad. (A demand-side problem.) (41:30)

—”Biology is so ugly, man.” Physics is beautiful; biology is a tower of hacks (43:30)

—The “anti-beauty conspiracy” of the last century — and the massive latent demand waiting to be uncorked (52:30)

—Patrick reacts live to beeswax art (56:30)

Here is the link.  And on YouTube, Brian Eno intro.

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The results suggest that the public is feeling down about capitalism but is still wary of full-blown socialism. And many are deciding whether a few socialist candidates might help shake up the system. We found that:

—Just a third of Americans privately say they have a positive view of capitalism.

—Less than half of Republicans privately express a positive view of capitalism, though two-thirds support it in public.

—Almost half of women privately say they would consider voting for a socialist.

—Nearly a third of Gen Z publicly say that America would be better off as a socialist country, but only 14 percent say so in private.

—The majority of blacks publicly say capitalism is the cause of America’s social ills, but only 37 percent say so privately.

—Of people earning more than $150,000 a year, 58 percent privately say they are open to voting for a socialist, though only 42 percent say so publicly.

That is from Mene Ukueberuwa at The Free Press.

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Yiyang Zhuge is a political theorist, political columnist, and a translator of German and Greek philosophical texts. She is an instructor at Brandeis University, and a PhD Candidate at Boston College. 

Yiyang is a major translator of Hannah Arendt into Chinese. She has translated The Human Condition, Life of the Mind, Men in Dark Times, collected poetry, Die verborgene Tradition, and Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess. She has given numerous lectures and published numerous public-facing articles on Arendt. 

Yiyang published the first Greek-to-Chinese translation of Plutarch’s Moralia, a best-selling philosophy book in 2025. 

She runs Princeton University Press’s Political Philosophy Book Club, where she interviews important Western academics for the Chinese audience. 

Yiyang is a public intellectual in China. She reports on American higher ed monthly at print magazine Caixin Weekly. She is a political commenter on Hong Kong’s Phoenix TV (here and here). She hosts great books programs on vistopia and has contributed essays on Machiavelli, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Arendt at vistopia. She hosts the most popular Mandarin political philosophy podcast “Monologues of a Committed Observer” with 1m+ subscribers.

So what should I ask her?

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2. More whales and Dr. Doolittle stuff.

3. Rohit on the AI hacks.  And Peter Wilderford.

4. Is Australia the most resilient country to global catastrophic risk?

5. Dolly Parton’s philanthropy (NYT).

6. Why has New Zealand education so declined? (and other questions about the country)

7. Yayoi Kusama, RIP.

The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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