1: Tyler Cowen’s Assorted Links productivity is increasing
2: The Rising Returns to R&D: Ideas Are not Getting Harder to Find — are ideas getting harder to find, or are they just going out of date faster? It feels like the macro implication is the same, though… you need more R&D spending to get the same productivity returns. Maybe you’d want R&D spending to be invested much more broadly?
3: Committee to End Pay Toilets in America - Wikipedia — yes this seems to have really happened. Also, Ira Gessel is still alive!
4: Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — more syllabi please!
5: Energy Cheat Sheet - by Brian Potter - Construction Physics — 2/3rds of energy consumption is wasted — had no idea there was this much room for efficiency gains. (Note that “fixing this” might not, at the margin, be the next best use of resources. But at some point this is what it takes to push out the production-possibilities frontier!)
6: Similarly, is there 80 to 90% slack in construction?
Has way more to do with our internal ops.
— Garrett Scott 🕳 (@thegarrettscott) August 28, 2025
We push construction teams to decrease their construction times to a third or more of their original timeline, and then micro-manage the process to ensure they hit it.
Our last install was quoted at 4-6 weeks and completed in 4.5 days https://t.co/UljGx2vw9A
7: It’s Alpha School August — what a cool time to have kids!
- Class Dismissed - Colossus
- Building Alpha School, and The Future of Education - Colossus
- And re-upping Your Review: Alpha School - by Scott Alexander
8: Building Ultra Cheap Energy Storage for Solar PV - Austin Vernon’s Blog — I am consistently surprised recently at how much alpha there still is. You can make a battery out of a pile of dirt? And it’s hard enough that no on has scaled this yet, but also economical enough that it’s (maybe) worth doing in 2025? What a time to be alive.
9: The Technium: Everything I Know about Self-Publishing — one thing missing here is the credibility / taste-making role of a traditional publisher.
10: Is AI already affecting entry level jobs? Having been in the room for some headcount planning at multiple organizations, I buy this. Many CEOs are at least asking “should this be 2 FTE instead of 3” and I’d bet it’s adding up. This paper is legit, getting data much closer to ground truth. I am still long jobs, but the big question is how much transition friction there will be between old jobs and new jobs. The one alternative explanation I’d like to see them explore more is whether this is just evidence that young people prefer companies that don’t use ADP… Gusto has been on the rise over the sample period.
Is AI already impacting the job market?
— Bharat Chandar (@econ_b) August 26, 2025
A new paper from me, @erikbryn, and @RuyuChen at @DigEconLab digs into data from ADP.
We find some of the ***first large-scale evidence of employment declines for entry-level workers in AI-exposed jobs.***
A thread on our paper: pic.twitter.com/YPDFRgZvpb
11: Peter principle - Wikipedia — maybe more frequent retraining will fix this, though.
12: Daring Fireball: Keep Calm and Delete Your Old Emails to Conserve Water — we can and should be far more ambitious in solving problems than this! (Let alone that the numbers don’t add up). With solar and desalination, fresh water scarcity is a choice.
13: Open AI announces $1.5M bonus for every employee | Hacker News — was this real? Also GPT-5 came out this month. Feels like age ago already. Consumers are hard to please.
14: Interpretations of quantum mechanics - Wikipedia — GPT-5 keeps giving replies that I’m not smart enough to understand…
15: https://werewolf.foaster.ai — speaking of GPT-5.
Disclaimer: Something something sharing a link is a recommendation but not necessarily an endorsement or a sign of agreement something something.