@UMich Philosopher Elizabeth Anderson argues the American workplace isn't just hierarchical, it's unaccountable, and that quitting is not the remedy people think it is. Check out the full Capitalisn’t podcast with @zingales and @bethanymac12 below 👇

One element of the story of billionaires buying political influence always bothered me: The Kochs didn't always win. Neither did Soros. Eric Zwick offers another narrative. About a quarter of Congress comes from a class we don’t often pay attention to: piped.video/watch?v=qHha_z-0…

It was fun to work with @jimpoco, who edited my Enron story some 25 years ago - EEEEEKS - on this.

For decades economic theory told governments their job was to fix market failures. If that is all you do, all you need is bandages. So we stopped investing in the state capacity to deliver the goals we set. Spoke to @zingales and @bethanymac12 on @StiglerCenter's Capitalisn't about my new book, The Common Good Economy. Links in reply.

Should someone tell him he’s supposed to be dignified?

🦔Three private equity firms have moved to sell data center assets to public investors in the last four months. Blackstone went first with a $2 billion IPO in May. Brookfield followed with $1.2 billion in July. Now Blue Owl Capital wants to package $6.5 billion of its own data centers into a publicly traded fund. While Blue Owl is building this new vehicle for retail investors, its own credit fund just watched a loan collapse from full value at year end to 5 cents on the dollar in six months. Moody's flagged a possible bankruptcy. My Take If that many firms rush to sell the same type of asset to retail investors at the same time, I don't think it's because they believe the best returns are still ahead. I think they've done the math on what these assets are worth today versus what they'll be worth in two years and they'd rather you hold that risk. Blue Owl is doing this while their own credit fund just blew up on a single loan. Loparex isn't a data center, but it's the same Blue Owl team picking investments. Their stock is down almost 30% this year and trades at 99x earnings. If I'm a retail investor being asked to buy into a $6.5 billion data center fund, I want to know why the people running it couldn't see a loan going from par to 5 cents in their own portfolio. Hedgie🤗

Is anyone else thinking gremlins?

As someone who wrote about the financial crisis, I found this very eye opening. H/T @ritholtz groundbrkr.com/p/the-teaser-…

We assumed chess was one of the hardest thing a mind could do, but it was the first thing computers mastered. @lugaricano on what that inversion means for your career, and why he thinks the panic about AI and jobs is misplaced—well, somewhat misplaced. piped.video/watch?v=Vnp8yFsS…

Podcast with Renée M. Jones about her book Untamed Unicorns. Argues private market deregulation fuels fraud and poor governance in startups and shifts risk to ordinary investors. @zingales @bethanymac12 thepodcastbrowser.com/renee-…

Everybody has heard of the Luddites, but few know Sir Thomas Maitland, the man who defeated them. Rather than using brute force to take them all out, Maitland simply identified the men he took to be ringleaders, had them arrested on evidence that was often thin, and executed them. Hit one, educate a hundred. This is the strategy that the British magazine The Economist seems to have adopted toward the new version of the Luddites: AI critics. Rather than the public execution, they use the public humiliation of the anti-AI ringleaders, with equally scant evidence. Whatever its editors intended, the critical piece against @DAcemogluMIT, published by the magazine on August 17th, functions less like a conventional assessment of scholarship than like an act of intellectual discipline. I have long criticized important parts of Daron’s work, and I am not afraid to expose weaknesses in his reasoning, as I have in the latest episode of my Capitalisn’t podcast: piped.video/watch?v=rOnrvBzJ…. But I would never have written that piece. If The Economist had objections to his Nobel Prize, it should have raised them when it was awarded. But it did not. If it had objections to his paper on demography, it should have raised them when the paper came out. But it did not. Why does the British magazine raise these questions only now? Why does it do a review of a book that is not about AI, but only reviews the half-chapter he wrote about AI? I have read The Economist for more than thirty years. I cannot remember it ever attacking a living economist in this ad hominem way, let alone one of Daron's caliber. The piece is not really about Daron. It is a warning shot. If the Economist can humiliate the leading economist of my generation, imagine what it can do to anybody else who criticizes AI. Criticize the new incarnation of the latest technological wonder, and your weakest paper becomes your body of work. Praise it, and your weakest paper is never mentioned at all or even celebrated like a great piece of scholarship. If AI delivers even half of its promises, it will be transformative, ushering in a new era of productivity and growth, as the first industrial revolution was and possibly even more. Many professional economists only see these long-run benefits. Yet, the path to Nirvana is littered with the bodies of the people hurt during the transition. It took between 50 and 70 years after the start of the First Industrial Revolution for workers' wages to begin rising. In the meantime, life expectancy stagnated, and average height declined, a clear sign that the Dickensian stories of squalor and misery were not the product of their author’s imagination but a real account of what the country went through. Criticizing AI is not necessarily resisting progress; it is pointing out the costs it entails. Unlike 19th-century Great Britain, today, the democratic West is not forced to maximize the speed of innovation at all costs. We need a serious public debate on the costs and benefits of acceleration, with concrete proposals for minimizing transition costs. This debate needs critical voices like Daron’s. In the undemocratic Great Britain of the early 19th century, Lord Maitland was not serving the British people, but the British merchant elite, who had only to gain by putting the innovation pedal to the metal, since the costs were borne by others. In the interest of whom is The Economist publicly humiliating Daron?

Let them eat screens. nytimes.com/2026/08/18/techn… via @NYTimes

A tool that makes you better at your job can also make you poorer? @DAcemogluMIT and @zingales and I discuss why “AI will empower workers" may be misleading on our latest Capitalisn’t podcast: piped.video/watch?v=rOnrvBzJ…

Is there anyone out there who’s running a startup and trying to decide between ongoing VC funding or going public? I’d love to chat if so. Please DM me.

If AI lets every nurse do a doctor's work, will the nurse get a raise or the doctor a wage reduction? In our latest Capitalisn’t podcast, @Bethanymac12 and I discuss with Nobel economist @DAcemogluMITabout the impact AI will have on wages and jobs. Listen to this clip from the latest Capitalisn’t podcast on Daron Acemoglu’s new book "What Happened to Liberal Democracy?" and catch the full episode here: piped.video/watch?v=rOnrvBzJ…

I learned a lot from @timkhiggins and @edels0n in this very fun conversation.

Most people believe China just makes cheap, copycat drugs. But many biotech insiders know better. China’s rapid rise as an industry force has the earmarks of its takeovers of other U.S. industries, writes Bethany McLean. thefp.com/p/china-biotech-ph…

A herd of elephants in Boston! How delightful.

"Labor is just another word for people." Not a sentence you’d expect from a conservative. That's what makes this conversation with @zingales and @chris_griz worth your time. piped.video/watch?v=GAnKzBnZ…

More evidence for your theory of the world @zingales