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No surprise to me but a new paper looks at the forecast accuracy of over one million prediction questions from Polymarket, Kalshi, Manifold and the forecasting platform Metaculus. A virtue of the new analysis is that it covers many different areas from business to elections to geo-politics. An event predicted to happen
Here is their episode summary: Economist Tyler Cowen joins David Wolpe for a conversation about AI, religion, and what makes us human. Tyler makes the case that AI’s biggest impact may be on status: who gains it, who loses it, and what happens to experts like rabbis when anyone can ask ChatGPT all their questions. […]
Immigration affects natives through both labor markets and public budgets, yet these channels are usually studied separately. We combine them in a general-equilibrium model with search-and-matching frictions, skill-specific progressive labor taxes, capital taxation and public goods, calibrated to 17 OECD countries over
This paper examines the revenue and migration impact of the 2026 California Billionaire Tax Act, a one-time 5 percent tax on the worldwide net worth of individuals exceeding $1 billion. Using data from the Forbes Billionaire List, news reports detailing the residential real estate holdings of California billionaires, a
From Jesús Fernández-Villaverde: Will AI poison the public finances of many modern states? There is a real risk that it will. Yesterday, I circulated a new paper, “Saving for the Machines,” which makes a simple point. Building the AI transformation will require enormous investment. The only way to induce agents to save
From Jesús Fernández-Villaverde: When machines can perform a growing share of tasks, growth depends on two margins: how the task structure affects the returns to accumulating machines, and how strongly capital accumulation responds to those returns. I argue that, in a standard task model, capital supply governs the siz
Every now and then I will write a piece on food for Works in Progress.В Here is my piece on eating in Brazil: Brazil, like most large nations, also offers multiple cuisines. For instance you can go to Minas Gerais for pork and beans. Minas beans would be my favorite of what I have sampled, […] The post On Brazilian foo
David Stuart, The Four Heavens: A New History of the Ancient Maya. The best book about the ancient Maya that I know of, and also a book about how we keep on discovering more about them. “The model I advocate for here rejects the old idea of the rise and fall of the Maya in […] The post What I’ve been reading appeared f
The author is Edward Cutler and the subtitle is How Italy’s Nature Shaped its Culture and Civilisation. This is an excellent book on how “the Italy you know” has been shaped by its natural environment, such as its mountains, rivers, geology, and so on. Ever wondered why Sardinia is different? The book is good at […] Th
Björn Öste is building Arkhub, an AI-powered platform that analyzes remote-sensing and other archaeological data to identify potential ancient sites in the Amazon and enable further investigation by citizen scientists. J. Cameron Monroe is leading the Allada Regional Archaeology Project, using lidar, remote sensing, an
Sixteen AI agents were each ha‍nded 1,000 satoshi⁠s of real b‌itcoin and told nothing about how to use​ it. A hund‍red rounds l‌at‍er⁠, four of them had roughly doubled⁠th‍eir money, tw‍o h‌a‍d​ been wiped out, and the‍ three richest a​gents held more than half‍ of all the bitco‌in i
From the Executive Summary: Therefore, the NSF, NIH, and the federal government should put far more resources and effort into developing metascience. With proper metascience efforts, the NSF could run experiments on science funding reform proposals, such as shifting to a people-over-projects funding model or directly f
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