Has anyone come up with a better allegory of 2025’s AI craze yet?

Switzerland refines 70% of the world's gold. For over 2,000 years, this precious metal has shaped the history of the alpine confederation, transforming it from a poor rural land into the precision pioneer it is today.

Après 80 ans, les archives de la dénazification sortent de l’ombre actualitte.com/a/69AkE2yi

From the @WSJ: “Economic fortunes of low- and high-income Americans are diverging—same pattern happening with companies.” #economy #inequality #divergence #dispersion

DOGE was A LOT less likely to cancel contracts from companies that donated money to Republicans than companies that donated to Democrats.

Important work using U.S. tax data shows businesses have absorbed minimum wage increases without affecting employment, and through higher revenue-likely reflecting price & productivity offsets. Also shows how reallocation towards more productive firms offers another margin of adjustment.

Economics and economic sociology are two fields divided by their mutual fascination with the same subject matter. #econsky #sociology marketdesigner.blogspot.com/2025/12/mich...

There is no possible justification for limiting e-bikes to 15mph but not cars.

Love to see more economists doing systematic reviews! New from @manimetrix + Theiss in JAE #econtwitter #econsky: preprimary education programs in sub-Saharan Africa have small but positive effects on both cognitive and socioemotional development (0.1 standard deviations)

“Re-inventing the wheel” should mean exactly the opposite of what it means, given that there is a decent chance that the wheel for transportation was invented just once, in the Carpathian Mountains around 3900 BC & apparently was never independently re-invented by other societies afterwards.

Martin's analysis implies that DSAs going forward will need to pay special attention to ratio of disbursements to commitments as a hint of problems. findevlab.org/what-we-lear...

‘about 1/3 of AI-related capital expenditure is being sunk into shortlived assets such as graphics processing units. But GPUs [have] a useful life for frontier applications of about 3 years. That implies that AI companies’ investments must generate a return within a few years…’ on.ft.com/43cu0z6

"Shell is responsible for 2% of historical global greenhouse gases.... The company has "materially contributed" to human driven climate change, the letter says, that made the Typhoon more likely and more severe."

I was disappointed with several elements of The @economist.com recent articles on minimum wages. To their credit, they've published my response. Here are some links to the research I reference and to some other research which had to be cut from the published letter 1/N

China’s open-source AI is a national advantage on.ft.com/48XybSx | opinion

One year after al-Assad’s fall, nearly 1.8 million displaced Syrians and 780,000 refugees have returned home.

Fears of Brits all moving to Dubai are overblown says @economist.com economist.com/britain/2025...

Buying Time Warner is now an official point in every bubble

“A new European law known as the Digital Services Act forces tech companies to quickly remove posts considered illegal in the countries where the content appears. It also requires that tech companies provide users with information about how their algorithms work” www.npr.org/2022/10/31/1...

[1/8] Pierre Breteau montre pourquoi le train reste structurellement + cher que l’avion. L’article compare coûts, fiscalité et infrastructures. Il explique que l’aérien bénéficie de prix artificiellement bas grâce à des exonérations fiscales qui faussent la concurrence. #geography #transport #train

RIP to one of the all-time greats... Jack DeJohnette has passed away at age 83. The legendary drummer is pictured here at the September 24, 1965 recording session for Jackie McLean's "Jacknife," which marked his first appearance on a Blue Note record.

Great interview with New Zealand anthropologist and @britishacademy.bsky.social Fellow Anne Salmond including this on life as a female academic www.nowtolove.co.nz/celebrity/da...

Bitcoin champion Strategy launches ‘dollar reserve’ amid crypto sell-off on.ft.com/3Y16mm6

Repeated increases in the real minimum wage in early-2000s Argentina – implemented amid moderate inflation and an economic recovery – did not lead to higher job destruction. Firms were able to absorb higher costs without resorting to terminations.

Vietnam's solar boom was built on three key pillars: 1⃣ Foreign direct investment (FDI) (mostly from China) 2⃣ Access to subsidised Chinese inputs 3⃣ Productivity spillovers from multinationals to domestic suppliers. Learn more ⤵️

AI doesn’t add up if you neglect the mathematicians on.ft.com/4rB8BKH | opinion

Aurélien Saïdi, @cescoeco.bsky.social & I have a new JEDC paper on Michel Juillard's contribution to macro, aka his role as architect & curator of open-source Dynare software—used worldwide to estimate and simulate DSGE models It's important for 2 reasons: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

What is the most profitable industry in the world, this side of the law? Not oil, not IT, not pharma. It's *scientific publishing*. We call this the Drain of Scientific Publishing. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Background: doi.org/10.1162/qss_... Thread @markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy 👇

Meet Grok, the artificial sycophant

Le nombre de féminicides conjugaux reste toujours élevé. En 2024, 107 femmes ont été tuées dans leur couple. ➡️ Décryptage dans notre graphorama : https://www.altereco.media/oST

Bossuet’s oft-cited quote comes to mind.

(Bloomberg) - Sanae Takaichi’s spending plans have sent Japan’s bonds and currency tumbling, raising the specter of an unruly capital flight reminiscent of the turmoil that nearly broke the UK bond market in 2022, according to Deutsche .. @bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

This was already demonstrated over half a century ago with the banning of DDT. Why are we on repeat here? share.google/tX0kljiyYfOn...

The beginning of a secular stagnation in the Econ PhDs job market?

New data on the #EconJobMarket as of Nov 2. Based on total # of job listings on JOE, this year continues to be even weaker (by 11%) than during COVID (2020). 1/many #EconSky

An Imbens retrospective on experimental v. non-experimental methods — looks like a must-read www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

It is far more cost-effective for Europe and China to help emerging markets and developing economies expand through renewable energy than to pay for rapidly increasing climate-related costs, @pisaniferry.bsky.social and Beatrice Weder di Mauro find. bit.ly/4hSz3uO

Quick thread on the BBC and the political and societal significance of recent developments: One of the main reasons the UK has historically been so much less polarised than the US, is that Britain has a shared source of information, consumed and trusted by most people regardless of their politics.

this post will publish tomorrow at 7:30 am www.gelliottmorris.com/p/you-should...

‘When Adam Smith wrote “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner but from their regard to their own interest,” he omitted any discussion of the unpaid work of his mother (& later his sister) that went into cooking his dinner.’ on.ft.com/4olyOut

This is a cool paper showing that first-gen college students don't realize a lot of unwritten rules that lead to success (the value of internships, student clubs, letters from professors). But giving them access to an LLM for guidance significantly closes the gap. mgcuna.github.io/website/JMP_...

Leveraged bets on cryptos are turning sour as bitcoin is down 15% in the past month, erasing most of the gains of the past 6 months www.wsj.com/finance/curr...

“At a recent Wall Street Journal tech conference, OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar suggested that a government loan guarantee might be necessary to fund the enormous investments needed to keep the company at the cutting edge.”

‘Al could end scarcity, end humanity - or boost trend growth by 0.2 percentage points’ Well that’s the best chart of the year in this @johnthornhill.bsky.social column and basically sums up where we are on.ft.com/4qMMkJd

Life tip: Type "-ai" (minus AI) at the end of your Google search to disable the AI summary.

Pour avoir travaillé sur bulles/autoréalisation il y a lgtmps, j'ai la ferme conviction qu'il s'agit de phénomènes centraux des marchés fi et que donc @dovalfon.bsky.social n'exagère en rien Et comme le FMI le dit: "une brutale réévaluation des valeurs techno pourrait menacer la stabilité macrofi"

broke: age differential voting woke: age differential in turnout

Another example of the increasingly common situation where AI helps an academic with intellectually challenging work (solving a 42-year-old open math problem). Seems like real value in combining expert human guidance and increasingly powerful LLM. arxiv.org/abs/2510.23513