What should I ask David Baszucki?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. From Wikipedia:
David Brent Baszucki (/bəˈzuːki/ buh-ZOO-ki; born January 20, 1963) is a Canadian-born American entrepreneur, engineer, and software developer. He is best known as the co-founder and CEO of Roblox Corporation. He co-founded and was the CEO of Knowledge Revolution, which was acquired by MSC Software in December 1998.
Roblox (/ˈroʊ.blɒks/ ⓘ, ROH-bloks) is an online game platform and game creation system developed by Roblox Corporation that allows users to program and play games created by themselves or other users. It was created by David Baszucki and Erik Cassel in 2004, and released to the public in 2006. As of February 2025, the platform has reported an average of 85.3 million daily active users. According to the company, their monthly player base includes half of all American children under the age of 16.
So what should I ask him?
Monday assorted links
1. Arbitrage?
3. Minimum wage hikes boost restaurant food prices.
5. Martin Heidegger clip. Not impressive to me.
6. Canvas unrolls AI teaching agent.
7. “This essay has tried to frame what we need to build around AI.“
Oil versus Ice Cream
When Tyler and I were writing Modern Principles of Economics, we wanted examples that were modern, specific, and grounded in the real world. That has been a bit of a headache, because we have to update them with every new edition. Our biggest competitor uses the ice cream market as its central example and never has to revise. Smart! But for us, the extra work has been worth it.
We chose the oil market as our central example. Oil is always in the news, and it works really well across a wide range of textbook topics: the elasticity of demand and supply; oligopoly and cartels; the shutdown condition; shocks; expectations, speculation and futures markets; and oil prices have macroeconomic implications that connect micro to macro.
Yes, keeping the examples current takes more work. But when a student sees that the price of crude has surged past $100 a barrel because Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz—choking off 20% of the world’s oil supply—they have the framework to understand what is happening. Supply shock, inelastic demand, expectations and speculation, the macroeconomic transmission to GDP—it’s all right there in the headlines. Try doing that with the ice cream market.
See the Invisible Hand. Understand Your World. It is not just our slogan. It’s our method.
When will “the research paper” disappear in economics?
Soon enough you will be able to take any published research paper and tweak it, or improve it, any way you want. Just apply a dose of AI.
Using Refine, you already can judge the quality of all past papers, once you get them in uploadable form. We now can rewrite the entire history of modern economics with the mere investment of tokens. Which papers in the 1993 AER were really the good ones? Which are simply false and do not replicate?
Refine, or some service like it, will only get better, and cheaper.
Do we even need the AER any more to certify which are the best papers? Just ask the AIs, including about influence not just quality.
Why not write a program, or have an AI write it for you, that will take your favorite papers and improve them, and change their evaluations over time, as new results come in? Of course people will do this, at least to the extent they care. These papers will keep on morphing.
Will economics become a branch of software engineering? There are important papers in software engineering, but very often the most important advances are embodied in actual software, AI included.
Will the future advances in economics come from producing evaluative systems and producing systems, rather than papers?
What if you submit to a journal a data set and some code? Who needs “the paper” per se? Just issue some commands to the “data set plus code” and get the paper you want. How about “I am Tyler Cowen, what is it you think I will find interesting in this data set?”
Or publish a method for simulating human behavior, to run AI-simulated experimental economics, a’la Horton and Manning? Publish “the box,” and do not worry so much about the individual paper.
Will highly productive researchers, who publish a lot of papers, become far less valuable? The individual paper no longer seems scarce, or will not be in another year or two.
Give tenure to people who build capabilities and who build “boxes”?
How about an economics Nobel Prize for Anthropic and Open AI?
I thank Alex T. for useful discussions on this point.
Paraguay trend of the day
Lured by low taxes, entrepreneurs from across Latin America are plowing in money and taking up residence, with applications surging more than 60% in 2025. Sleek towers and luxury car dealerships now dot Asunción, a city where infrastructure is still struggling to catch up. And Wall Street investors are snapping up Paraguay’s bonds as its conservative president, Santiago Peña, aligns his government with the Trump administration.
Though roughly the size of California, Paraguay’s $47 billion economy is about 1% of the Golden State’s. But rapid growth and economic reforms in recent years helped the country win investment-grade credit status from Moody’s Ratings in 2024 and from S&P Global last year.
…Paraguay’s embrace of sound fiscal and monetary policies after its 2003 financial crisis is now paying off, with single-digit inflation and annual growth averaging around 4% over the past two decades.
Here is more from Bloomberg, growth last year was six percent. Southern Cone remains underrated.
Dwarkesh chats with Terence Tao
Sunday assorted links
Some more slow take-off, driven by start-ups
So far, however, the predictions that the mass automation of coding will leave outsourcing firms obsolete seem overblown. Their clients often hope AI will create huge productivity gains by, for example, using the technology to quickly and cheaply build a new internal HR tool. But such improvements in productivity are only possible in “greenfield” environments with “clean architecture”, argues Atul Soneja, chief operating officer at Tech Mahindra, an IT firm. Deploying AI in “brownfield” environments—with legacy code, a lack of documentation and multiple systems that must all continue to operate in real time—is far trickier. In the end, clients often realise that their AI dreams were too ambitious and end up hiring as many outsourced coders as before, say executives.
What is more, the AI boom may present an opportunity for the consultancy arms of India’s outsourcers. They argue that they can now fulfil more of a strategic role for their clients: getting the most out of AI requires understanding all of the context around the problem, something that consultants with experience across businesses can offer. Nandan Nilekani, one of the founders of Infosys, reckons that such services related to AI could be worth $300bn-400bn by 2030.
Here is more from The Economist.
How much more will oil prices have to go up?
[Robin] Brooks: So let me give you two ways of thinking about what’s going on, both of them are really about trying to think about what kind of risk premia need to be priced in oil, given all the massive uncertainty that we have. The first way that I’ve been thinking about this is—I spent a lot of time working on Ukraine and Russia and sanctions after the invasion four years ago. Russia produces about 10 million barrels of oil per day. It exports, of that, about 7 million barrels of oil per day. The Strait of Hormuz has transit of about 20 million barrels of oil per day. So the Strait of Hormuz is roughly 3 times what Russia could have been. And remember, in the days right after the invasion, markets were really worried about Russian oil being embargoed. There was a whole discussion about that. So the rise in Brent, which is the global benchmark oil price, is about 70% from two weeks before the outbreak of war in the Gulf to now. On a similar time horizon back in ‘22, it was 20%. So we have roughly a 3X in terms of the rise in oil prices. So when people come to me and say “$150 or $200 for oil prices” and we’re currently at $115, roughly, then I think, “why, what’s the rationale?”
The second perspective is on the supply shortfall that we have and using price elasticity of demand to think about: “how much does the price need to rise if demand has to do all the adjusting in the short term,” which it does. And “what kind of numbers do we come up with if we make reasonable assumptions?” So I put out a Substack note today—thank you so much for reading my Substack, I’m incredibly flattered and stressed as a result— if you assume that the Strait of Hormuz goes from 20 million barrels of oil per day to 10, it’s basically oil from the Gulf is running at half of its normal capacity, and you assume a price elasticity sort of in the middle of the range that the academic literature has, which is about 0.15, then you get that this would generate a rise in oil prices of between 60 and 70%. So again, if I think about what we’re pricing in markets now versus what basic back-of-the-envelope-calculations tell you, then I think we’re roughly in the right ballpark.
That is from his interview with Paul Krugman. Via Luis Garicano.
Little Darlin’
By The Diamonds. The video is not what I was expecting.
Saturday assorted links
More on the David Lang opera version of Wealth of Nations
In 18 parts, Lang explores some of Smith’s central themes, including one of the book’s most famous passages, where Smith uses a wool coat worn by a very poor Scottish worker as a way to examine trade. “He asks, ‘Did you ever think of how many people need to be employed in order to make that coat?’” says Lang, whose movement “the woolen coat” names all the artisans and laborers who contributed to the garment in song:
the shepherd
the sorter of the wool
the wool-comber or carder
the dyer
the spinner
the weaver
the fuller
There are also the workers on the ship that brought in the dye and all the people who built the ship. An ordinary coat is revealed to be a kind of miracle of skilled labor and global collaboration, the product of “many thousands” of workers coming together in (selfish) harmony. Part of me wanted to run out of the theater right then and buy something … perhaps a coat… for America.
Here is more from Bloomberg, via John De Palma. The opera seems to be ultimately a rather gloomy view of the book?
Canada facts of the decade
From 2014 to 2024, Canada’s real GDP per capita adjusted for purchasing power parity grew by just 3.2 percent in total, an anemic 0.4 percent per year on average, and the third lowest among 38 advanced nations. Over the same period, the United States posted 20.2 percent total growth (1.9 percent annually), and the OECD average reached 15.3 percent (1.4 percent annually). The measurement shortcomings cannot explain five-to six-fold differences in growth rates.
And:
The analysis estimates that a substantial share of Canadians who would rank among top earners in Canada have emigrated to the United States—roughly 40 percent of potential top 1 percent earners and 30 to 50 percent of the next nine percentiles. Canadian-born individuals in the United States are more educated than native-born Americans, earn substantially more, and cluster disproportionately in top income deciles.
Canada is effectively exporting its inequality to the U.S. The brain drain simultaneously lowers our average income while raising American income, accounting for a significant share of the persistent GDP gap.
Here is the full piece.
Those new service sector jobs?
An AI memory startup called Memvid is offering $800 for a one-day, eight-hour shift for one candidate to “bully” AI chatbots by telling them what to do on camera.
Business Insider reported this week that Memvid wants someone to spend eight hours testing and critiquing the memory of popular AI chatbots, effectively paying $100 an hour for what they have branded as a “professional AI bully” role. The worker’s job is to examine where chatbots lose track of details, forget context or misrepresent data, and then feed those findings back to Memvid so the startup can improve its products.
“You’ll spend a full 8-hour day interacting with leading AI chatbots — and your only job is to be brutally honest about how frustrating they are,” the job listing reads.
The draw is that the role doesn’t require a computer science background, AI credentials or any kind of work experience. “No prior AI bullying experience required — we all start somewhere,” the listing reads.
The requirements are deeply personal. The first requirement is an “extensive personal history of being let down by technology,” and the second desired trait is “the patience to ask a chatbot the same question four times (and the rage when it still gets it wrong).”
Here is the full article, via the excellent Samir Varma.