Ben Thomas

Links from July 2025

4 min read

1: Yoto USA - The Screen-Free Audio Platform for Children — parents get the coolest toys.

2: The Rising Cost of Child and Pet Day Care - Marginal REVOLUTION — this chart changed my mind almost instantly on something important: it looks like the main reason childcare costs are up is the Baumol Effect more so than regulation. Is there really this much low-hanging fruit in economics commentary? Had no one run this series on FRED before Tabarrok did?

3: Introducing the 2025 Roots of Progress Institute Fellows — I’m biased but wow, looks like an exciting group. Lots more Substacks to subscribe to!

4: The Outsize Impact of AI Logistics - Austin Vernon’s Blog — along with the possible cost advantages, pallet-size autonomous EVs for shipping might be more palatable for safety vibes. Driving past tractor trailers is stressful; for many people it will be more stressful knowing most are self-driving (even if that’s backwards).

Logistics robots will have a much bigger impact than production robots. The pure manufacturing cost in the phone case example might be $0.50. Most mass-produced products drive labor and capital expenditures to relatively small shares of production cost. A robot arm to load cases into containers or automatically change a mold might save a few cents per unit. It seems more likely that production robots will increase variety, shrink minimum scale, and compress development times. Low and high volume item costs can converge. Convergence has many interesting implications and benefits, but the cost floor will remain the same.

5: Your Review: Alpha School - by Scott Alexander — I hope somebody rigorously figures out the right system before my kids are old enough.

Roland Fryer, who has done extensive work on what works in incentivizing students, quotes a 2010 Gallup poll that found that only 23% of American parents support the “idea of school districts paying small amount of money to students to, for example, read books, attend school or to get good grades” (76% opposed the idea with only 1% undecided).

There are not many things that 76% of Americans agree on. Only 69% of Americans believe another Civil War would be a bad thing. Only 78% agree that American independence from Britain was the right choice. People REALLY don’t like paying kids to read books.

6: How to reason from first principles – Casey Handmer’s blog — “The method is called “the seven Ds and the little s”, comprising (in descending order of importance) Diagram, Directions, Definitions, Diagnosis, Derivation, Determination, Dimensions, and substitution.”

7: Angels of Bataan - Wikipedia — US Army Nurse Corps POWs in the Philippines.

8: On Self-Respect | Joan Didion — to-read.

9: What exactly is going on with total factor productivity — TFP stagnation is mostly about GDP stagnating. The other components have pretty much stayed the same. Sometimes people wonder about measurement error, but if there’s any it’s mostly in the GDP data.

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11: Ramp AI Index — Ramp estimates 42% of US business have paid subscriptions to AI tools. But how representative is the Ramp customer base?

12: Related:

13: What Does Consulting Do? | NBER

Using difference-in-differences designs exploiting these sharp consulting events, we find positive effects on labor productivity of 3.6% over five years, driven by modest employment reductions alongside stable or growing revenue. Average wages rise by 2.7% with no decline in labor’s share of value added, suggesting productivity gains do not come at workers’ expense through rent-shifting.

14: No Longer a Coin Toss: Less than Half of Marriages Predicted to End in Divorce | Institute for Family Studies — makes sense with marriage rates going down, so there’s some selection effect. Still good.

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16: American Pride Slips to New Low — Bummer.

Disclaimer: Something something sharing a link is a recommendation but not necessarily an endorsement or a sign of agreement something something.

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