There’s no such thing as “social welfare”

RT @JessicaBRiedl: They also have the least poverty, the least personal debt, the least expenses, the highest financial satisfaction, and h…

If this was one-shotted by Claude (and I think it was), just entirely insane. A Broadway style song about how AI-as-normal-technology, bottlenecks-in-production is wrong where the content is just dead on. Incredible.

@UNC_econ is hiring this year. We have two tenure-track openings (1 Assistant, 1 Assistant or Associate) in any field of economics, plus a Teaching Assistant Professor position with particular interest in macro. Excellent research environment and a beautiful college town in the Research Triangle. Apply here: aeaweb.org/joe/listing.php?J… aeaweb.org/joe/listing.php?J… #EconTwitter #EconJobMarket

I recently asked ChatGPT to improve the efficiency of some simulations from a few years ago. To my amazement, its code ran in a few seconds instead of 3 hours. It turns out it went into the GitHub repository, downloaded my final results, and used it as a starting guess in the optimization. I then tried running it on a new set of parameters. It’s been 15 hours.

GW Economics Department is recruiting for four (!) tenure-track positions: • Macro (junior): aeaweb.org/joe/listing.php?J… • Trade (2 positions; mid-level/senior AP strongly considered): aeaweb.org/joe/listing.php?J… • Applied micro (junior): aeaweb.org/joe/listing.php?J… Come join us!

We're hiring an Asst Prof in Macro at NC State, preferably overlapping adjacent fields (international, labor, IO etc). Ideally experienced; fresh PhDs welcome. Great Duke/UNC interactions in Research Triangle. Review begins Sept 28. Let me know if you have questions. Links below.

I'm not upping my p(doom), but this is a catchy tune.

Holy shit now it’s my turn to say FSD just saved my family tonight. It’s on the 71 freeway in California. $TSLA @Tesla_AI

This is the per-pupil funding for the elementary school Nikole Hannah-Jones sent her daughter to. If you subscribe to the funding theory of education, how much would have been enough? It's already crossed the average per capita annual income threshold. Maybe $100k? $200k?

RT @vimacro_org: Next week, @SakiBigio (@UCLA) will present his paper "The heterogeneous bank lending channel of monetary policy" @vimacro_…

Current estimate for Taiwan is 15.4% eng.stat.gov.tw/News_Content…

Data-based social science using text data is going to become as subjective as the humanities when we realize you can get whatever conclusion you want by coding the LLM-text extraction a certain way

> colleges give A's to everyone. > firms need to scale up intensive interviews and assessments, to figure out who is good. > students spend all their time preparing for firm interviews and assessments, and none of it on classes. > profs: Why don't my students work anymore?

Excited to see this paper finally out in ReStud! 🎉 See the original thread about the paper by Hannes below.

Another incredibly creative paper from Jacob Moscona. Patents on plants didn't exist until 1985. You can test their effect by comparing hybrid and non-hybrid plants—hybrids have de facto IP protection because they are very difficult to copy. IP helps innovation AND farmers.

If you want a mini-break from The Doom, check out how much more prosperous these nine African countries got over about one generation. There's a lot of happiness and flourishing (and avoided misery) represented in these charts.

When we were the only intelligent things on earth, we made intelligence part of our identity. Those of us in academia perhaps did this most of all. Time to start identifying more strongly with thumbs.

Interesting question: Who is taking the other side in a P(doom) bet? What Jakob is saying: if we ever see liquid prediction markets with implied P(doom) substantially >0 (after adjusting for fees etc), THEN that’s when we should be really worried because the counterparty is likely AI

some advice for the current moment

$10.2 million in Iowa vs $10.9 million in Palo Alto