Friday assorted links
1. Liberalism and weaponized interdependence.
2. Is the AI shock like the China shock?
3. Can AI agents be individuated?
4. Who is liked by GPT 5.5? (from a partial list, if I understand this correctly)
6. Noah Smith is fearing that he and many others are having less influence.
Our colleague Vincent Geloso has a Substack
Colorado’s Funeral Mistake
Today about a quarter of the US workforce are required to have a license to work in their chosen profession, up from just 5 percent in 1950. Almost always the trend has been to add occupational licensing over time, but in 1983 Colorado did something unusual: it delicensed funeral service workers such as funeral directors. Brandon Pizzola and I analyzed what happened in our 2017 paper, Occupational licensing causes a wage premium: Evidence from a natural experiment in Colorado’s funeral services industry.
What we found was that delicensing reduced wages, reduced prices, and caused a shift towards cremation rather than the more expensive mortuary services preferred by funeral directors. Here’s a key figure.
But that is not the end of the story. In 2023 a series of gruesome abuses came to light involving the sale of body parts, rotting bodies, and worse. Newspapers repeatedly noted that Colorado was the only state not to license funeral service workers. As a result, Colorado is relicensing funeral service workers as of 2027.
The problem is that there is no evidence that abuses were worse in Colorado. It’s easy to find similar abuses—including sexual abuse of corpses—in states with heavy licensing. Pizzola and I didn’t examine the rate of necrophilia among funeral workers in our paper (silly us), but we did cite the following:
A recent US government review of occupational licensing concluded that “the empirical research does not find large improvements in quality or health and safety from more stringent licensing” (CEA, 2015). Similarly, Colorado revisited their decision in a 1990 sunrise review that considered reinstating occupational licensing. The Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies found that since the 1983 occupational delicensing: (1) “there had been incidents of malpractice within the profession but no widespread pattern of abuse,” (2) “[a]llegations of significant threats to the public health, safety and welfare perpetrated by the death care industry in Colorado regarding the improper disposal of human or infectious wastes had not been supported by verifiable evidence,” and (3) “claims that the public in Colorado had suffered or might suffer significant detriment due to a lack of trained mortuary science practitioners caused by the abolition of the Board were unsupported” (Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies, 2007).
Moreover, the licensing requirements—mandating various hours of training and so forth—have very little to do with the types of abuses that generated public support for relicensing. How many hours of “don’t have sex with corpses” training is required? And the funeral director in the worst Colorado case was in fact sentenced to 40 years in jail. Isn’t that incentive enough?
People want what cannot be guaranteed: good behavior in all circumstances. And they will reach for a licensing regime if it promises that, even when such promises are empty.
How research in math will change (from my email)
From GA:
I am a mathematician…and some of your recent comments on MR about the role of AI in Econ research as well as the (disappearing?) role of academic papers inspired this response. (It is partially but not exclusively about academia, so I hope it is ok that I’m sending it to your GMU address. Also, I’m hoping it doesn’t get flagged as spam because of the ai in the title…)
In no particular order:
-In the course of a math career, one accumulates lots of computational guesses, now one can test those with minimal effort.
-One also accumulates lots of incomplete and half formed drafts, proofs of special cases, etc, etc. Running those past claude and chatgpt can (does!) pay off. A lot of math is cleverly applying linear algebra and while I’m very good at linear algebra, I’m not as good at it as the AI’s are.
-The lower hanging fruit here are slightly off the beaten track, but not esoteric subjects. If you have a good overview of such, you can pretty quickly prod ai’s into making progress on them. (Before, you needed to have a school of grad students for that). Basic techniques (graph theory, algebra, calculus..) that ai’s are already good at can push these forward already. Making progress on truly hot topics is harder.
-There are some quite smart people trying to measure just how good autonomous ai’s are at math (e.g. the first batch project). That’s a fun game, but for practical purposes right now, what is relevant is how good an ai is when guided by a motivated human. I suspect we’ll see some remarkable things on that front in the next few years once math people really grok the good routines.
-For instance, getting claude and chatgpt to referee each other’s arguments is fun, and they genuinely have different insights on parts of the same problem.
-The kids will be all right. Right now, they are making pocket change doing ai training developed a better “feel” for the different ai’s that I probably ever will. And they learn things by asking the ai to explain an argument to them instead of trying to decipher a math book or paper.
-Which brings me to your papers point. I notice that a project informed with the right context is much more informative to me than the physical pdf of a math paper, and much easier to extract information out of by just asking the thing.
-Refereeing will look very different very soon. All the referee reports that have been collected by the journals should be valuable, hard to get data. And running all the accepted and published math papers through ai’s as the `control’ will end with quite a few people having egg on their face. It’s like self-driving cars, but there is no refereeing union.
-The last really big math revolution was all the stuff in the wake of Witten and 4-manifold stuff predicted by string theory in the early 90’s. This is going to be so much bigger than that. Buckle up.
Thursday assorted links
The Shingles Vaccine Reduces Dementia
In 2023 in Can the Shingles Vaccine Prevent Dementia? I wrote:
A new paper provides good evidence that the shingles vaccine can prevent dementia, which strongly suggests that some forms of dementia are caused by the varicella zoster virus (VZV), the virus that on initial infection causes chickenpox.
We now have three more studies–from America, Australia and Canada–that find similar results using large numbers and credible research designs. Thus, I think we can up this to the Shingles vaccine reduces dementia.
Eric Topol summarizes the new evidence and writes:
If you are 50+ and have not gotten Shingrix vaccinated, you may want to consider that. You get protection vs Shingles (which can be dreadful), slowing of your biological aging (by methylation and RNA metrics), and ~20% reduction of dementia, predominantly related to Alzheimer’s disease. All of this benefit is magnified in women compared with men, but 3 of the studies showed some reduction of dementia in men. As a tradeoff, men appear to derive more cardiovascular benefit, but that evidence is not as compelling as protection from dementia from natural experiments.
AI-Native Firms
Very important work from Hyunjin Kim and Rembrand Koning. Insead and HBS respectively:
We study how firms built around AI capabilities-“AI-native” firms-are organized. Drawing on Y Combinator batches W20-F24 and U.S. venture-backed startups whose first financing closed between 2020 and 2024, we classify each firm’s AI-native status and link it to workforce microdata on team size, function, seniority, and hierarchy. Relative to non-AI startups in the same industry-cohort, AI-native firms are 25% smaller. Their share of engineers is 13% greater, and the shares of entry-level workers and managers are each roughly 15% lower. Their hierarchies are half a seniority level flatter-yet valuations are comparable, implying more value created per employee. We argue these patterns reflect two channels: a process channel, in which AI changes how people work inside the firm, and a product channel, in which AI capabilities are built into what the firm sells. Using text from product descriptions and job postings, we find that embedding AI into the product, beyond layering on AI tools into existing workflows, is a primary way startups are scaling “knowledge work” without large teams of knowledge workers.
The tweet storm on the new paper is especially useful. Via Luis Garicano. And note those results predate the very latest and best tools.
My Conversation with Dave Baszucki
Dave is CEO and co-founder of Roblox, and here is the audio, video, and transcript. From the episode summary:
With over 100 million daily active users and projected revenue bookings of $7 billion this year, it is one of the largest gaming economies in the world—and one that has made millionaires out of teenage developers in Argentina, South Korea, and everywhere in between.
Tyler and Dave explore why Roblox decided early against prioritizing advertising revenue, why Dave thinks the main competition of Roblox is its own execution speed rather than Fortnite, whether every mega platform inevitably becomes an everything app, how falling token costs will change the platform, why he insists all the games on Roblox are beautiful, whether Robux should have a floating exchange rate, why admitting you have kids under 13 on your platform turns out to be a competitive advantage, why he’s skeptical of blanket social media bans, what his son’s experience with bipolar disorder taught him about metabolic health, his two-year sabbatical between companies that involved a motorhome trip across North America and a stint hosting talk radio in Santa Cruz, why Mutiny on the Bounty remains one of his favorite books, what he’ll learn next, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: What percentage of your games now do you feel are beautiful?
BASZUCKI: All of them.
COWEN: Some look just quite ordinary. They might be fun, but I wouldn’t say they’re beautiful, right?
BASZUCKI: Well, I was trying to go a couple levels out of the box on you there. The reason I feel they’re beautiful is when you said that, I immediately went to look and feel, but then I tried to imagine the 12-year-old or the 18-year-old or the 30-year-old struggling to build something wonderful and the human connection to those games. By that definition, I think they’re all beautiful. They are all the efforts of creation of real people trying to pour their hearts out to make something that other people love to play.
On an artistic basis, I think you could ask me what percent of paintings in the MoMA do I think are beautiful. I’d probably say 20 percent. If I had to look at 1,000 Roblox games, I wouldn’t name which is more beautiful to me because I think that’s less important than really the heartfelt work of all the creators.
COWEN: I’ve been struck when I look at gaming at how much people don’t seem to care much about the visual beauty of their games. I would have expected something different, say, 15 years ago, and they just want a game that engages them somehow. Normal standards of visual beauty seem to have fallen away. Is that incorrect? Would you correct that impression in some manner?
BASZUCKI: I think you’re absolutely correct. What I feel you may actually be describing, if we looked into other disciplines, the evolution of story from the campfire to written to audio to a movie, and the increasing fidelity; all of those stories, in a way, are beautiful, but at the time, for the vast majority of the creators, it may be that writing is just easier than producing a 4K Hollywood movie. I feel that’s a little bit like the metaphor you’re talking about right now in gaming.
For the vast majority of people, their story or their idea for their game is actually pretty beautiful. Whether it’s a fashion game like Dress to Impress or it’s a grow garden game, the games are arguably beautiful, even if they don’t look photorealistic. What I think we’ll see is, over time, as AI helps accelerate the ability to make games look really polished in any style the creator wants—could be photorealistic, could be anime, could be a Warner Brothers 2D cartoon look—you and I might say that looks more beautiful, but the core gameplay is still somewhat the original gameplay. I think we are going to see games arguably look more beautiful, even though I think they’re all beautiful.
The dialogue is a bit slow to get underway, but there are many interesting parts.
A Cohort Perspective on Latin America’s Fertility Transition
Latin America’s momentous fertility transition is now in the domain of history, allowing a cohort perspective on the decline of completed fertility. Using census microdata from 17 Latin American countries, we track female birth cohorts from the 1920s to the 1970s by subnational region to document the extent to which cohort fertility decline coincided with other demographic and socioeconomic processes. Across cohorts within subnational regions, children ever born fell one-for-one with mortality decline. Expansions in urbanization, multigenerational living, women’s and husbands’ education, women’s employment, and the non-agricultural sector all predicted declines in ever-born and surviving fertility, but women’s education and sectoral composition were the dominant forces after covariate adjustment. Fertility decline was not systematically linked with improvements in children’s outcomes, including school enrollment, literacy, primary completion, and non-employment. These cohort facts challenge theories of fertility decline centered on women’s work and children’s education but support others emphasizing women’s education.
I fear that means the women think they are finding better and more fun things to do? Which is hardly bad per se, but…
That is from a new NBER working paper by Regina Calles and Tom Vogl.
Wednesday assorted links
1. “This is a database to help you to find a forager near you!” (those new service sector jobs)
2. Apply to Coase workshop on institutional analysis in Mexico City.
3. How does a mechanical watch work?
4. New immigration debate video from Caplan-Garett Jones.
5. Do stolen French fries taste better?
7. Supply is elastic, even in the shuttered Straits of Hormuz.
8. “We registered the AI agent with the SEC as an investment advisor.”
9. Carlo Ginzburg, RIP. And the NYT obituary.
Facts about American men and women
Much of what looks like changing marriage preferences over the twentieth century is actually demographics. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in sex ratios across U.S. birth cohorts (1870, 1930, 1950), we jointly identify preferences, match quality dynamics, and the costs of marriage and divorce. Demographics alone explain two-thirds of cross-cohort differences. Women’s premium for older husbands collapsed across cohorts; men’s preferences barely changed. Love that survives its early years becomes permanent, but the odds of surviving fell from 97% to 44%. Divorce costs fell six-fold and depend on life stage. A horse race across behavioral channels shows that the match quality process—not mate-age preferences—is the primary dimension of generational change. Declining divorce costs and fragile match quality are substitutes: either alone fits the data, but together they reveal two independent dimensions of social change. The model validates out of sample on the 1910 and 1970 cohorts.
That is from a recent paper by Jose-Victor Rıos-Rull, Shannon Seitz, and Satoshi Tanaka. Via the excellent Samir Varma.
Do teens regret their social media use?
A new study by Irish researcher Eoin Whelan attempts to answer this. Dr. Whelan told me he was specifically inspired by Haidt’s 2024 claims and sought to examine them rigorously and in the context of other regrets. This is a great use of science…testing dramatic public claims. So…do they hold up?
In Dr. Whelan’s study, 389 young adult participants (20-24) who were social media users as teens were asked about their regrets regarding their teenage years. A list of 20 possible teenage regrets was asked of all participants, with degree of regret marked on a 7-point Likert scale. This is an interesting design…testing social media regrets against other possible regrets, putting them in better context than the crude survey Haidt relied on.
So how did social media regrets hold up? Out of 20 possible regrets, too much time on social media ranked 13th. The top regrets were 1.) not sticking up for oneself, 2.) being too self-conscious, 3.) not documenting memories, 4.) not learning practical life skills and 5.) not getting help with mental health. Girls were slightly more likely to regret time on social media than boys (ranking 11th vs 13th) though this effect was very small (I estimated it at about r = .11) so hardly the big “vulnerable girls” narrative some have peddled.
Further, regrets over time spent on social media as a teen did not predict current young adult life satisfaction for either boys or girls. Thus such regrets may be more a symptom of current panics over social media than anything of actual life importance2. Of the regrets, only not working harder in school and not exercising negatively predicted young adult life satisfaction. Interestingly, having regrets over socializing with friends positively predicted life satisfaction.
As Dr. Whelan noted in his study, “The objective of this study was to critically examine the commonly held belief that social media use during teenage years is a significant source of regret and a predictor of diminished well-being in early adulthood…Contrary to dominant narratives in the public domain, our results suggest that regrets over time spent on social media are not among the most potent regrets reported by young adults…As such, these results align with prior research indicating that the harmful effects of social media may be overstated.”
Here is the full Chris Ferguson Substack.
Can Online Activity Be Regulated? Evidence from Adult Websites
The consequences of online regulations depend on the extent to which users can circumvent restrictions or substitute toward noncompliant platforms. Since 2023, 25 U.S. states have implemented age verification laws that caused prominent adult websites (including Pornhub) to restrict local access for all users. We study how these restrictions affected browsing activity using individual-level panel data. Access restrictions reduced overall time spent on adult sites by roughly 10%. Specifically, for every 100 hours spent on top adult sites before restrictions, about 50 hours remained accessible at noncompliant sites that never restricted access, 30 hours persisted through VPN-based circumvention, 10 hours were substituted from compliant sites to noncompliant sites, and 10 hours were no longer spent on adult sites.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Matthew Brown, Emily J. Davis, and Devin G. Pope.
Tuesday assorted links
Montana’s SB535 and a Potential Biotech Renaissance in America
In 2024, China’s NMPA approved 83 new drugs, the FDA approved 50. China’s share of new commercial clinical trials jumped from 8% globally in 2013 to 30% in 2024, just behind the US at 35%. Last year, China-based Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals overtook AstraZeneca as the top clinical trial sponsor in the world.
What’s remarkable is how China is winning: deregulation and capitalism. It’s faster and easier to set up a clinical trial in China than in the United States. China is even experimenting with the peer approval model I’ve long advocated. The Medical Tourism Pilot Zone on Hainan island lets medical institutions import and use any pharmaceutical or device approved in the EU, US, or Japan — no separate Chinese approval needed. China is using our own regulatory judgments to get treatments to its patients faster than we do.
The core problem is that our clinical trial and drug approval system is slow and expensive. Getting a new drug to market in the US takes billions of dollars and a decade or more of clinical trials — and all of that before a company earns a single dollar. The consequence is drug lag and drug loss and also learning loss. Innovation is a dynamic process. You must build to build better.
It’s not over for the United States, however. Montana’s SB535, signed into law in May 2025, is the most important regulatory innovation in drug approval in my lifetime. The law authorizes investigational drugs and therapies that have cleared Phase I trials to be prescribed and sold — bypassing the traditional FDA approval pathway. It makes Montana the first state to license experimental treatment centers, “one stop shops” for otherwise hard-to-access care.
This is a very big deal.
SB535 makes Montana the only state in the nation where firms can move more quickly from a successful Phase I trial into limited commercialization. This positions Montana as a highly attractive location for biopharma, biotherapeutics, and other life sciences companies that want to accelerate time-to-market while continuing the federal FDA approval process.
Montana’s regulatory system creates the possibility of a self-funding clinical pipeline: companies using early commercial revenues to finance the path to full FDA approval. You get treatments to patients faster, and you keep companies alive long enough to prove their treatments work. Experimental treatments are not for everyone–these treatments are cash based–no Medicaid or Medicare and probably no private insurance either–but after conventional treatments have failed experimental treatments should be available for some patients, both for their benefit and for ours.
Montana is not alone. Florida now allows non-FDA approved stem cell therapies:
A new law in Florida, CS/CS/SB 1768, allows physicians to market and administer stem cell therapies that have not been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for orthopedic conditions, wound care and pain management.
These experiments in regulatory federalism are vital and not just for patients but also for geopolitical competition. I am thrilled China is pursuing medical innovation (I predicted and applauded this in my TED talk) but I also don’t want to see America falling behind.
The Trump administration has been supportive. I would like to see HHS and the FDA working with companies operating under state right-to-try frameworks — sharing data, clarifying federal-state boundaries favorably, and treating these experiments as the biotech competitiveness infrastructure they are.
The FDA approval process has long been treated as the only legitimate path to market. The cost of that orthodoxy is measured in companies that never reached viability, innovations that never got off the ground, and patients who died when they didn’t have to. I have spent thirty years trying to get people to see the invisible graveyard. That’s hard. Most remain blind. But China’s bursting pipeline of new drugs is visible — could this be a Sputnik moment for biotech?
An American biotech renaissance — driven by AI, federalism, and regulatory innovation — is possible. The path forward is to double down on what makes America great: the laboratories of democracy are working, and in Montana and Florida, so are the labs.