Brazil’s economic problems, in a nutshell
It would take true Milei-like ardour to slice through Brazil’s economic troubles. These are caused by a gnarly mix of high public spending, stubborn inflation and low saving. The result is a crippling cost of capital. Some analysts put Brazil’s real interest rate, the BCB’s policy rate adjusted for next year’s expected inflation, at 9% or more. That is higher than in Russia and four times that in peaceful peers like Chile, the Philippines or South Africa.
It all starts with the public finances. Brazil’s 65,000-word doorstop of a constitution bars cuts to nominal public-sector wages and links pension, disability and unemployment benefits to the minimum wage, which is adjusted annually based on recent inflation and GDP growth. This ratchet has lifted mandatory spending to 90% of the federal budget.
It also perpetuates inflationary pressure. This plus a generous welfare state in turn make Brazilians unwilling to save. At 14% of GDP, the national savings rate is 12 percentage points below the world average. If price rises have regularly eroded your bank balance in the past and the state pays for your health care, school and pension, you may as well spend all the money you make right away—especially if, like most people in unequal Brazil, you do not make much to begin with.
Here is more from The Economist.
Frances Lee on American elections
More likely than interference with the election is that unsuccessful office-seekers will refuse to concede, claiming their opponents cheated. Nothing is more basic to democratic legitimacy than the loser’s consent. Many feared that Mr Trump’s refusal to concede in 2020 would spread across the political system. It has not. Bright Line Watch, a research group, examined all 884 congressional races in 2020 and 2022. The overwhelming majority of losing candidates publicly acknowledged defeat. Explicit refusals were concentrated among first-time candidates who had lost by wide margins. And there were fewer such refusals in 2022 than in 2020. Candidates with political careers to protect still concede. When they do, complaints of election “rigging” lose their force…
Nevertheless, the record of American elections since 2020 has been encouraging. Election administration has improved. Although many career administrators resigned amid increased harassment after 2020, the voters’ experience actually got better. In both 2022 and 2024 the share of people waiting more than 30 minutes to cast their ballot was lower than in 2020, and the long-documented racial gap narrowed: by 2024 black, white, Hispanic and Asian voters reported comparable waiting times.
She is from Princeton, and here is more from The Economist. I do agree there is too much gerrymandering. Those with more dramatic complaints and predictions, however, are encouraged to try them out in the prediction markets.
Sunday assorted links
The Panic Patrol
The Panic Patrol, a division of the department of future corrections, reminds us of past panics. Here’s one case in point I wasn’t aware of:
Facts about breastfeeding
We produce a numerical estimate of the value of unpaid breastfeeding relative to national income spanning five centuries and integrating historical and bioarchaeological data. The relative economic contribution of maternal nursing was greater in the distant past than in recent history, rivaling regionally significant industries such as pottery, glassmaking, and even the historical public sector. It was likely the largest source of human capital investment in early modern England, supporting the physical and cognitive development of the workforce. Finally, we show that breastfeeding rates probably fell as incomes rose, challenging the Malthusian assumption that higher income correlates with lower mortality.
That is from a recent paper by Louis Henderson and Jane Humphries. Via the excellent Samir Varma.
How central bankers spend their time
How leaders allocate their limited time and attention is an important question in economics. This paper constructs and analyzes a novel data set covering the daily calendars of three Federal Reserve Chairs, Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, and Jerome Powell, containing more than 20,000 calendar entries. We document several patterns. First, all Fed Chairs spend more than 30% of their documented meetings with Fed staff, highlighting the crucial role of economists in the Fed’s decision process. Second, interactions with the media became more frequent during Bernanke’s tenure and remained important until the end of Powell’s tenure. Third, Powell held significantly more meetings with lawmakers than both Yellen and Bernanke, reflecting an increasing need for the Fed to engage with political actors. Beyond these trend patterns, we examine the time allocation of Fed Chairs at business cycle frequencies and show how different activities respond to shifts in the macroeconomic environment. Finally, we place our findings in historical context using the available calendars of earlier Fed Chairs, including Alan Greenspan.
That is from a recent NBER working paper by
Emergent Ventures India, 20th cohort
Zahan Turel, a backend engineer and eighth-generation Zoroastrian priest from Surat, received a grant to digitize his community’s manuscripts and liturgical records before they are lost.
Aditya Vijay, 17, is building Forge, supporting overlooked, self-taught young founders with shared housing, capital, and access.
Dev Goyal received a grant for SCRIPT, exploring whether stylus-based drawing kinematics can support non-diagnostic clinical triage for ADHD, autism, and anxiety.
Adwait Tiwari, 16, a self-taught founder from Indore, is building BharatBahi, a WhatsApp-native AI assistant helping Indian shopkeepers.
Mayukh Goswami and Meher Manda received their grant for a graphic novel examining democratic crises around the world through the lens of a fictional Indian town.
Ajith Chekka is building Oru’el, a physics-enabled intelligence layer to improve the reliability and efficiency of data centers.
Gaurav Kumar, a software engineer and social entrepreneur, is building OncoVault, which turns fragmented cancer records into AI-generated clinical summaries to support physicians’ treatment decisions.
Kush Agrawal, an engineering student at IIT Bombay, received a grant for Tensor Recon, developing execution-aware financial reconciliation infrastructure for high-volume cryptocurrency trading firms.
Mohd. Ashzad, 22, a security researcher and engineer, is building Build Jam, helping young South Asian builders discover creative skills through real-world projects in AI, design, filmmaking, and photography.
Vaibhav Sai, 25, received a grant to develop AI for intent-based biomolecular design, starting with a nucleotide-focused model and capture molecules for biosensors.
Rithvik Vibhu and Rithwik Jayasimha received their grant for research on passive optical fiber network vulnerabilities, including wiretapping and attacks on ISP infrastructure, and presentations at Black Hat USA 2026 and DEF CON 34.
Neha Sarda is building Zyogen, sovereign AI software converting injury images into patient-specific printable graft designs and bioink formulations, aiming to make regenerative medicine 30–40% more affordable.
Hari Shankar Ramalingam, cofounder and CEO of SpaceTug, received a grant to develop and validate autonomous spacecraft technologies for in-orbit satellite servicing, inspection, and life extension, ahead of orbital demonstrations.
Laiba Noor received a travel grant to attend a research program at Özyeğin University and develop a speech-analysis tool for detecting presymptomatic Alzheimer’s in low-resource settings.
Abhishek Raj, 16, a crime and mystery writer and dual national record holder, received a grant to advance his fiction writing and criminology research.
Kunal Kanase, an IIT Bombay pre-doctoral fellow, received a grant for GullyWell, studying Dharavi residents’ wellbeing where formal mental-health care rarely reaches and developing low-cost tools informed by that research.
Divyaratna Joshi, a Chemical Engineering undergraduate at IIT Madras, is developing low-cost S-PEEK membranes to replace expensive fluorinated membranes and make fuel cells and electrolyzers affordable and manufacturable at scale.
Tanjot Singh, 16, received a grant for PraaNavya (Erynth), a climate startup developing bio-based nanofiber air filtration technology for sustainable clean air.
Tribhi Kathuria, a Lecturer in Robotics at the University of Michigan, received a grant to connect aspiring Indian engineers with robotics and AI research and mentorship from experts in the United States.
Swamynathan Jerra, founder of Hyderabad’s AcquaHT Labs, received a grant to upgrade and seek patents for machines extracting drinking water from air at 30% humidity, rather than the usual 50%, for dry areas with unsafe groundwater.
Niharika Srivastava, a criminal justice and technology lawyer, received a grant to develop a rule-based system identifying Indian undertrial prisoners held beyond statutory custody limits, enabling targeted legal intervention.
Anirudh Varma, a New Delhi pianist, composer, and producer, leads the Anirudh Varma Collective (AVC), received a travel grant for reimagining Indian classical music in a contemporary format for its debut UK tour.
Himaneesh received a grant to build AI software that simplifies professional digital audio workstation workflows.
Sahasrabda Sai Pradhan received a grant to develop a skin-regenerative biomaterial that can be fabricated on-site for urgent graft substitution when suitable tissue is unavailable from the patient’s donor site.
Gaurav Hadavale, 21, a final-year undergraduate at the Sardar Patel Institute of Technology, received a travel grant to present his mechanistic interpretability and trustworthy medical AI research at the MI4MedFM workshop at MICCAI 2026.
M R Sharan, an economist, received a grant to establish a data and intelligence platform focused on India’s local bodies.
Nitish Goel, 14, from Panchkula, is building Thalamus to reduce AI costs and improve efficiency, and Agentoverflow, a shared repository of agents’ solutions that reduces duplicated work and supplies model-training data.
Sudharsanam received a grant for Hardlight, developing autonomous space robots to assemble and maintain assets in low Earth orbit, including space stations, data centers, and factories.
Naveen Gulati, Noida, received a grant for instrumented rooftop trials of GIVARA ONE, a compact dual-rotor vertical-axis turbine for low, gusty winds. Givara Energy owns, installs, and maintains the machines; customers pay only for delivered electricity.
Daevan Mangalmurti and Bilal Moin received their grant for Kindly Adjust, a podcast and Substack discussing small fixes for India’s big problems.
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV India announcement is here. More about the winners of EV India second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth cohorts. To apply for EV India, use the EV application, click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.
And here is Nabeel’s AI engine for other EV winners. Here are the other EV cohorts.
If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at [email protected].
Econvitals
From Jason Furman, it tracks economic indicators, mostly U.S. Here is the website. Subscribe here to briefings. Here is a thread on the site.
Why are cybersecurity losses not worse?
Here’s the first part of my theory: cybercriminals are not the organized geniuses we implicitly imagine. Anyone building a criminal gang has to find candidates willing to forgo more stable opportunities in the formal economy. My modeling estimated that something like 720,000 people are involved in the online criminal economy, 90% of them in scam and fraud call-center type operations, some of them human-trafficked. Of the 76k or so actual hackers, the vast majority work for governments. Of the remaining few thousand criminal hackers, most work in ransomware. Some demographic estimates of these workforces are below.
Criminal organizations need to base themselves in middle and lower income countries, where they can pay less and hire people who have few formal-economy options. For scams and fraud, picture an illegal call center building in a small city in Nigeria. For ransomware gangs, picture kids working in the informal economy in Belarus. I think folks in the AI safety and cyber world sometimes imagine adversaries as their Waluigi twins, implicit MIT graduates; in fact, in cybercrime we’re dealing with a lower-skill demographic. The chart below estimates attacker wages relative to default economy wages…
Here is more from Joshua Saxe, very good throughoiut. There are bottlenecks on the down side too…
Cybersecurity ETF
Joe Weisenthal: “The Red Line is the day that Anthropic introduced Mythos”
I guest host an NYT podcast with Michael Kratsios, Trump science advisor
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is one excerpt:
Cowen: Talk me out of this worry: So we agree science is an ecosystem, and there’s always a temptation to want to fund the most dynamic, most productive parts of the ecosystem. And right now, that would probably be A.I.
But if you need the whole ecosystem to be working well, arguably you should be funding, at the margin, the less productive parts, which need the aid. That will sometimes be universities, but there’s plenty of other inefficient parts of our ecosystem.
So is this plan not putting more resources into the parts that are working well, but we get stuck with bottlenecks if the parts that are not working well end up with fewer resources?
Kratsios: Well, luckily, we’re not investing all of our money for the federal government into S.I. for science. It’s a portfolio approach. And obviously one ——
Cowen: But it’s a net shift toward artificial intelligence, right?
Kratsios: Well, I would argue — and I think this is a very important distinction — it’s not investing in superintelligence, it’s investing in superintelligence for science.
So the question is, I think a lot of people argue: Oh, why would the federal government want to invest more in superintelligence when billions, if not trillions, of dollars are being invested in the private sector into superintelligence? And I would agree with that statement. We shouldn’t be doing that.
The government isn’t funding how to create a next frontier model. That’s something that our great American companies are working on.
But applying those models to scientific discovery is still in its early stages. And as you know, if you think about the trend or the path by which we’ve gotten to this place with L.L.M.s — we started first with being able, essentially, to scrape the whole corpus of the internet, to use that to train a large language model.
The next chapter of that was around coding, where the model builders realized: Oh, we have really good coding data, and we can actually train these models to be good at coding. So then we had this rise of Anthropic and OpenAI Codex and all this stuff.
And I think, to me, the next chapter is around science, and the data that you need to train these large language models for science is still one that we’re working on a lot. And we were very proud to announce 190 federal data sets being made public in order to help train these science models.
But ultimately, you’re going to be applying this superintelligence to everything from material science to chemistry to math to physics, and we have to be in a position to actually leverage that.
Definitely interesting throughout, pretty much entirely we are discussing the Trump administration science plan, authored by Michael.
Friday assorted links
1. Weird diets (NYT).
2. Is this what the Denisovans looked like?
3. Measuring bottlenecks for AI.
4. How is violence diffferent when women lead drug cartels?
6. Latin America seems to be climbing the high-tech value chain.
7. ZMP by any other name (amazing how much people used to hate on that idea).
8. Chatting with Milton to run your central bank?
9. Warhound.
10. “Somehow, @srajagopalan and @lachygroom have managed to fund a hard-tech revolution in India. There’s something rather massive going on, and everyone else has missed it.” Link here.
Prediction Markets Are Accurate
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 p% of the time happens about p% of the time. Can’t beat that.
Using approximately one million resolved contracts and questions across four collective forecasting platforms, twelve domains, and time horizons ranging from hours to years, we evaluate the calibration and accuracy of collective forecasts in real-world settings. We found that forecast probabilities were overall highly calibrated: events assigned a probability of p% occurred approximately p% of the time. This broad pattern was evident across platforms and many domains, although fine-grained analyses revealed systematic tendencies toward over- or underestimation in highly consequential areas. While this does not mean that forecasting platforms provide certainty about individual events, our findings suggest that large-scale aggregation of judgments contains meaningful information about real-world uncertainty; when examined in aggregate, the predictions generated by the platforms provided informative estimates of event likelihood.
Protecting Americans from Medicine
Max Doppelt: In January 2025 my mom’s lung cancer spread to her brain. The drug with the best chance of helping her was approved in China but not here.
A doctor told me, almost as an aside, that if she were Chinese she could buy it at a pharmacy.
So I flew to Shanghai and came home with 26 boxes in my luggage. That was 19 months ago. My mom is still here, still working, and in her words has had an amazing three years.
The drug was approved in China in 2023. The FDA approved it in July 2025. It still is not for sale here. I know of at least 30 Americans who have made the same trip.
I have been scared to tell this story because I worried it could cost my mom access to the medicine keeping her alive. But the problem matters more than my silence. These drugs need to be developed and available here, and that means FDA reform.
A piece at KFF Health cover’s Max’s story and adds this insanity:
Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), who chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, in June co-sponsored legislation with Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) requiring all U.S. pharmaceutical deals with Chinese companies to be cleared by the Treasury Department.
Got that? A son flew to Shanghai to buy pharmaceuticals to extend his mother’s life and the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party wants a Treasury lawyer monitoring the baggage claim. Yes, I am angry.
Addendum: See also my earlier post on Operation TrialBlazer and Montana’s SB535. My 2009 TED Talk is the ur-source for my argument that a rich China and India will create many benefits for the United States, including many more cancer drugs.
Podcast with Rabbi David Wolpe
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. He also suggests that losing our monopoly on intelligence may make us feel more unique as humans, rather than less.
You can listen here.