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I’m writing a book for @stripepress 🎉
THE PRICE CODE is (shockingly) about price theory and teaches the power of rigorous economic reasoning.
The book will explain how prices move, what they reveal about the world, and why most popular explanations are just empty
I’m writing a book for @stripepress 🎉
THE PRICE CODE is (shockingly) about price theory and teaches the power of rigorous economic reasoning.
The book will explain how prices move, what they reveal about the world, and why most popular explanations are just empty
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Brian Albrecht retweeted
Young people may find this hard to believe but people used to say Walmart lowered prices and that was a bad thing
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If only there were a mechanism for sorting thing by value
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes people owning RAM for their own PCs is a waste and instead should be saved for data centers
"It’s quite terrible to have everyone have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer."
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Brian Albrecht retweeted
It is under-appreciated how much of a failure the SFI agent-based modeling agenda has been in economics. Someone should write a history about that, and an explainer so that those doing agent-based modeling with AI don't repeat the same mistakes.
Nice (although SFI-centric) interactive history of agent-based modelling in social sciences.
santafe.edu/features/agent…
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Can I say something without people getting mad?
Bob Chitester would have turned 89 today.
In the late 1970s, he brought Milton and Rose Friedman a proposal: a 10-episode television series about free markets. His wager was simple. People will watch a program about economics if it tells a good story.
Free To Choose proved him ducer, Bob brought Friedman's ideas into millions of living rooms, and he founded Free To Choose Network to carry that work forward. He spent the rest of his life making the case that freedom is worth understanding and worth explaining well.
That work continues in every program we make today.
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Brian Albrecht retweeted
Tell your grad students: NBER Digital Economics and AI tutorial, deadline November 3: nber.org/calls-papers-a…
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Brian Albrecht retweeted
The notion that one can predetermine the “victim” and the “violator” during the pendency of a proceeding kinda frustrates the whole point of the legal system, no?
If you want to make policy, go to the legislature. If you want to settle particularized disputes, save the moral outrage and stick to the law.
If you want to make policy, go to the legislature. If you want to settle particularized disputes, save the moral outrage and stick to the law.
Dear (most) Law Professors, when you submit an amicus brief pertaining to antitrust and ancillary subjects like IP, is there any chance you can actually care about the victims rather than the violator.
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It’s easy to dunk on SZ. And it should continue.
But I’m left wondering how can we harness new checking systems to avoid the problems in our own work going forward.
Any ideas?
But I’m left wondering how can we harness new checking systems to avoid the problems in our own work going forward.
Any ideas?
Anyone surprised that Saez and Zucman’s errors/assumptions/choices go overwhelmingly in the direction of supporting their priors has not been paying attention for the past quarter century.
…z-zucman-audit-replication.vercel.app
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“Companies do stuff I find icky” (A/B testing) luckily isn’t merger review
A grocery company that experiments on shoppers to see how much it can overcharge them is merging with a delivery company that tracks their every click and scroll to do the same.
Two of America's biggest ripoff machines should not become one.
The FTC must block this merger.
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Brian Albrecht retweeted
You can win consumers by being more efficient. That’s competition.
You can always do that by being smarter about pricing. That’s also competition.
Price discrimination is competition.
economicforces.xyz/p/price-discri…
You can always do that by being smarter about pricing. That’s also competition.
Price discrimination is competition.
economicforces.xyz/p/price-discri…
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Brian Albrecht retweeted
I get that Groundwork's schtick is to find Surveillance Pricing under every rock -- but merger reviews hinge on competitive analysis, not vibes.
We're calling on the FTC to block this merger.
As @owenslindsay1 calls out, DoorDash is openly touting plans to combine the companies' AI-powered pricing tools.
"Two of the biggest ripoff machines should not be allowed to become one."
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My earliest work (first on firms, then on markets) was on coordination. It is just so fundamental, but implicit in much economics.
I still think it’s one of the most underappreciated parts of how firms and markets work.
Glad to see it at the center of this work.
I still think it’s one of the most underappreciated parts of how firms and markets work.
Glad to see it at the center of this work.
I joined @GoogleDeepMind to develop a research program on the economics of AGI. Today, together with Andrew Koh (@andrewjkoh) and Shane Legg (@ShaneLegg), we are incredibly excited to release The Economics of Intelligence, the first in a series of projects from our group on how nomy.
How do capability improvements transform the economy, and when? In this project, we define thresholds of economic capabilities, e.g., minimal AGI, based on how they transform the economy. We then track how the economy–market structure, employment, and wages–changes during the transition across capability regimes.
We have seen exponential increases in what AI agents can do but the broader economy seems almost remarkably unchanged. Part of the reason is that the solo AI agent is the wrong economic object; economic transformation is an equilibrium outcome where organizations compete. Looking at how intelligence functions within organizations, transformation will depend on when two key capability thresholds are crossed: competence (gains on individual skills, e.g., coding, math) and coordination (gains on ability of agents to cooperate and work together).
We show that what economic transformation looks like depends on whether AI becomes supercompetent, supercooperative, or both—the regime of artificial superintelligence (ASI). Tracking this transition shows why the real visible transformation may come from improvements in coordination—a capability most benchmarks don’t yet track. Past a certain threshold, AI capabilities can break the Coasian ceiling on firm size and lead to an economy that looks drastically different than the one we see today.
Two main takeaways:
1. To understand the path of transformation, we should be tracking agentic coordination more closely.
2. The impact of AI will likely show up in wages before market structure or employment.
We are really excited about this paper. Excited to hear people’s thoughts.
Link: institute.deepmind.com/essays/the-eco…
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My work grew out of this paper from @NicolaiFoss academic.oup.com/icc/article/10…
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Brian Albrecht retweeted
@Sherman1890 There is also immense confusion about dynamic pricing vs personalized pricing. But I think proponents of regulation are deliberately confusing people. This is pure politicization. Even the FTC seems not to care about economics (or logic) anymore.
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Shameless plug on AI and the socialist calculation debate economicforces.xyz/p/how-much-inf…
WILL AI MAKE CAPITALISM OBSOLETE?
In today's newsletter, I wrote about a brief moment at the end of our chat with @sunraysunray (actually it was kind of after the end of the episode, but our producers left it in, which is good) about AI and central planning.
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Brian Albrecht retweeted
New: “Permission to Learn: An Economic Approach to AI Copyright” by @joshgans.
Licences for AI training cannot be negotiated in advance. So let training proceed, and compensate creators once outputs actually substitute for their work.
networklawreview.org/gans-ai-copyri….
Licences for AI training cannot be negotiated in advance. So let training proceed, and compensate creators once outputs actually substitute for their work.
networklawreview.org/gans-ai-copyri….
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Brian Albrecht retweeted
Join Works in Progress at Building Abundance: How Britain can flourish in the age of AI, a day of ideas for rebuilding Britain’s economy and state so it can adapt to and embrace artificial intelligence and other opportunities for growth.
luma.com/ria1khmw
Sessions 6 and Morgan McSweeney in conversation on the decline and fall of British state capacity,
- @JohnFingleton1 on the Nuclear Taskforce and its implementation by the government, one year on from its pledge to implement it in full.
- @bswud, @SCP_Hughes and me on why nearly every attempt to get Britain building has failed;
- @rachelwolf on what the public really thinks about economic growth and AI;
- @lugaricano on messy jobs and Britain’s labour market;
- @jujulemons on why Britain needs gigawatt-scale compute, and how to get it built here;
- @salonium on why fixing clinical trials is the best industrial policy Britain could have;
- @MichaelDnes1 on building the first new tunnel under the Pennines since 1954;
- @RobertBoswall on how to finance and power the data centre buildout; and
- @daisychristo on why VAR matters for state capacity.
It will be held on Thursday 3rd December at the LSE, from 1pm to 7:30pm (doors open 1pm for a 1:20pm start). We're hosting it in association with the LSE Law School and School of Public Policy. Tickets are free.
See you there!
luma.com/ria1khmw
luma.com/ria1khmw
Sessions 6 and Morgan McSweeney in conversation on the decline and fall of British state capacity,
- @JohnFingleton1 on the Nuclear Taskforce and its implementation by the government, one year on from its pledge to implement it in full.
- @bswud, @SCP_Hughes and me on why nearly every attempt to get Britain building has failed;
- @rachelwolf on what the public really thinks about economic growth and AI;
- @lugaricano on messy jobs and Britain’s labour market;
- @jujulemons on why Britain needs gigawatt-scale compute, and how to get it built here;
- @salonium on why fixing clinical trials is the best industrial policy Britain could have;
- @MichaelDnes1 on building the first new tunnel under the Pennines since 1954;
- @RobertBoswall on how to finance and power the data centre buildout; and
- @daisychristo on why VAR matters for state capacity.
It will be held on Thursday 3rd December at the LSE, from 1pm to 7:30pm (doors open 1pm for a 1:20pm start). We're hosting it in association with the LSE Law School and School of Public Policy. Tickets are free.
See you there!
luma.com/ria1khmw
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