I loved your talk about AI and wanted to bounce an idea off you.

I think AI may be bad for corporate profit margins.

A lot of companies make money because their customers can’t be bothered to monitor them more closely, or to insource something. Customers let the company make some money in exchange for doing a decent-enough job and making the problem go away.

Bank of America has $2 trillion of deposits, not a penny of which is optimized. Most enterprise software vendors could be switched out far more often, or displaced by home-built software, but it’s too much of a pain. I could run a 12-party RFP for an Uber ride or a pair of socks, but I don’t.

In a sense, many professionals are an extension of the same idea. I could research my own real estate law, or my own insurance, whether business or personal, but I don’t because it would be too hard.

Google Search might be the biggest example. It makes money because advertisers know they need to be at the top of the results to be found. But my agent will happily search all the results across multiple search engines.

AI agents should change all this. By acting as incredibly rational and vigilant sourcing agents, CFOs, and experts for their users, they will take rents previously collected by these toll-takers and redistribute them to consumers.

And I don’t think the AI stack itself necessarily makes much profit. Commodity and open-weight models are hot on the heels of the major model companies, and competition in GPUs should intensify. Indeed, making a GPU is in some ways similar to making software, so perhaps it can commoditize substantially. Chip manufacturing may remain high-margin, but there are now plenty of entrants drawn in by the shortage who could make TSMC’s market more competitive over time.

Some companies will win. Low-cost providers may gain share as customers switch more often. Richer consumers may consume more high-end goods. Companies with genuinely advantaged business models and limited competition will be able to become more efficient. But my overriding sense is that the equilibrium outcome is lower margins for companies.

Of course, people will build new businesses, and maybe they will use AI to generate very high margins in ways I haven’t considered. That would prove me wrong.

But if this lower-margin hypothesis is true, the knock-on effects are probably positive for AI adoption, since it will make the models more popular with consumers.

And if your view is that AI drives GDP growth to be only 5–10% higher over the next decade, it’s possible that a 100–200 bp decline in corporate margins from roughly 12% would mean companies in aggregate don’t see much benefit — or in fact lose — even as consumers are better off.

The post Might AI hurt corporate profits? (from my email) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

2. Redux of a 2009 essay by me on poverty and a documentary film.

3. Shruti on AI and copyright law.

4. Will the number of lawyers go up or down?

5. One view on where Somalia stands right now.

6. Alan Riding, RIP (NYT).  His Distant Neighbors remains a great book on Mexico.

The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

This paper estimates the regional economic impact of high-skill immigration restrictions by analyzing the 2017 “Buy American, Hire American” (BAHA) policy as a quasi-experimental policy shock. By significantly tightening H-1B visa adjudication, BAHA caused new employment petition denial rates to double from 7% to 17%, while STEM-specific rejections tripled to 31%. Using a difference-indifferences framework, this study finds that states highly dependent on H-1B talent experienced a statistically significant 2.8% relative decline in value-added output. This implied a productivity loss totaling roughly $218 billion across the most affected regions. While concurrent tax cuts and deregulation likely offset the impact on employment and wages, the loss of specialized STEM expertise adversely impacted total factor productivity. These findings suggest that policies based on conventional employment metrics may overlook the “hidden damage” to productivity and innovation that drives the broader economy, thereby underestimating the true economic cost of immigration restrictions.

That is by Caroline Y. Su of McLean High School.  Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

The post How High-Skill Immigration Restrictions Eroded Regional Productivity: Evidence from the 2017 BAHA Executive Order appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Pierre-Edouard Sterin, founder of Smartbox and worth about €1.4 billion, told French senators he wants to disinherit his five children and donate everything to charity. French law, under the Napoleonic Code, mandates that with five children, three-quarters of his estate must go to them, leaving only one quarter freely disposable. Sterin argued for complete freedom to decide the fate of one’s assets, saying it is ‘a real freedom to start with nothing in life’.

The post Let Me Disinherit My Children, S’il vous plaît appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Some thoughts [referring to my recent Free Press piece on marijuana]. My feeling is that you read quickly enough that I can dump words on you and it will not be an imposition. So I have not really edited this. I am writing more now

1. Drugs are fun.

2. They open new ways of perceiving, sometimes by adversely impacting other ways of perceiving, particularly by adjusting attention response, and particularly for perceiving experiences that are sensory (what experiences aren’t sensory, ridiculous, I know, but here of course I mean art primarily.

3. Since the experiences I am inadequately categorizing above are profoundly influential on people’s meaning-making, drugs can be as well, of course.

4. Most people are not going to be as economically viable as they are now as producers of goods or services, and many, if not most, are going to be economically viable only to the extent that they generate demand, and here I think specifically demand for pleasure. Drugs are important in this social equation. People will use many more drugs of increasing variety and quality. This train has left the station, or, rather, these trains have left their stations. You will not call them back.

5. People prefer not to work. Most folks are lazy. As you know. People usually only work because they have to, and this is a perpetual source of human misery, the having to work part. Rich people like to say things like: “work gives you purpose” but that really is only for work in which you can create meaning for yourself. Most people do not have this work, cannot get this work, and will never experience meaning-making through work in a positive way.

6. The other ways people derive meaning are becoming more expensive, and prohibitively so for many, and here I mean specifically children. It always puzzles me why folks like Musk and Thiel advocate for more reproduction when it should be clear to all that (many) fewer humans will be required to generate (radically) more economic activity. Generating and raising new humans is already much more expensive than it was in previous generations, and fewer people are able to achieve the kind of economic security that predicts good parenting outcomes.

7. Tesla is a company that makes cars like Netflix is a company that mails you DVDs. You know this, it’s obvious, and has been since he put AI in his cars. Tesla makes robots, his cars are robots, and he will soon have many many other kinds of robots. SpaceX will solve the electricity and cooling issues around AI rapidly. The bottom line here is that all economic pressure points to people working less, not more. They will do more drugs.

8. This confluence of pressures (human desire for rest and relaxation, declining access to traditional means of meaning making — through work, through children — and the powerful economic pressures to replace human labor with AI and robotics) and the rapid evolution of much much better drugs (my boyfriend knows as much about pot as I do about wine, and here in the PNW pot is extremely high quality, and gets better literally all the time — there is a new nano-emulsified tech for drinkable live rosin marijuana products now available in Oregon, and let me tell you, that stuff is great) means that drug use will continue to rise, continue to improve in terms of its absolute value as a substitute for other meaning making activities, and continue to be blended in with other medical chemical use.

9. Mental health is health. Drugs do help with anxiety and pleasure, which is why people use them. Better drugs will help with these better.

10. I have an anxiety disorder (I never mind sharing this, I am also a type 2 diabetic and don’t mind sharing that) and am, at my heart, a bohemian libertine. As I get richer and richer, I use drugs to carve out space to disconnect from others. I create space for myself and my internal thinking with drugs. My internal thinking space is generally far more interesting than others’, though, and generally far more interesting than conversation with all but a few others.

11. I play an outstanding video game that replicates for me the experience of being a child playing with legos, except I never have to clean up my room. Marijuana enhances my video game experience by creating a sense of stasis while my mind wanders and i engage other bits of my mental engine on creation. Some of my best ideas, including many that have made clients millions of dollars, have occurred to me in this state, and I know no other state in which I am so open to new ideas. Many are lousy, but I successfully monetize enough of them to be getting richer than I need to be.

12. I spend more on classical music, theater, and other live performing arts than most people. I often use drugs to enhance the experience. Before a recent Bruckner 8, I bought pot two blocks from the hall in a store selling it openly but illegally — this was in one of those states with a world-class orchestra and outdated cannabis laws. Sitting in prime seats, high as a kite, I lost myself completely in Bruckner’s profound torrent of cosmic meaning. What I am saying is even my most cherished experiences can be improved by drugs. Many reasonable people feel the same, including Elon Musk.

13. I strongly recommend taking marijuana while hiking through the Olympic National Park in the rain. You will never experience olfactory sensations like that in any other setting or mindstate.

14. So, almost everyone is already using drugs almost all of the time, deriving great value from them in private, public, artificial, natural, and introspective spaces. You cannot replace that value with nothing, other competing forms of value are becoming much more expensive or require high levels of discipline (I get great value from my personal trainer who helps me get high on endorphins twice a week, now that’s a GREAT drug, so much clarity) and so I just don’t think there is any future in which you will put this genie back in the bottle.

The post Why drugs are here to stay (from my email) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Relative to those in nonremotable jobs, workers in remotable jobs spent approximately one additional hour alone per workday after the pandemic. Those in remotable jobs also differentially increased days spent entirely alone and decreased after-work socializing. The rise in isolation was sharpest for those living alone, whose likelihood of spending the whole day without social contact rose by 7 percentage points (83%).

Mental distress simultaneously increased: Scores on the Kessler (K-6) measure of generalized psychological distress rose by 0.1 standard deviations for those in remotable jobs relative to those in nonremotable jobs. The increase in distress was roughly twice as large for those living alone compared with those living with family. Alternative measures of mental distress—such as the frequency of depression, mental health care utilization, and antidepressant prescriptions—show similar trends. In contrast, workers in remotable jobs did not differentially increase visits to non–mental health care providers or non–mental health prescriptions (statins, for example), suggesting that the change was not merely driven by increased flexibility for doctor visits.

That is from a recently published paper by Natalia Emanuel, Emma Harrington, and Amanda Pallais.

The post Is work from home bad for your mental health? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

2. The (other) man who reads books for a living.

3. Did the credibility revolution skip public management?

4. Excellent Scott Sumner post on epistemics.  But how do I know it is good?

5. How long does it take to plan a bridge?

6. Is a compute tax a good idea?

7. A.I. internship with Rick Rubin.

8. David Sacks.

The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

We record first-person cleaning footage to help train the next generation of household robots. That data is valuable enough for us to offer cleaning services free of charge for a limited time.

Here is the link, via Glenn Mercer.

The post Barter markets in everything appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

My name is Josh Neuman, and I’m writing from Buenos Aires, Argentina where Peter Thiel’s move is all over the news here. He lives in [redacted], only a xx minute drive from my own apartment in Recoleta.

I want to pitch a piece…arguing that Thiel is right to be in Argentina, but wrong about why. The libertarian revolution he thinks he’s found simply doesn’t exist in the way it’s being advertised in the international press. Milei has accomplished some real things since December 2023, such as lower inflation and a fiscal surplus, in part underwritten by Washington. But the effect of many of his policies has been exaggerated by both supporters and opponents alike, with widespread pessimism across all parts of society.

Much of the Argentine status quo he sought to abolish remains intact, such as retenciones on agricultural exports, union control over the labor market, while many of his reforms have had little impact beyond Buenos Aires, particularly in the northern provinces still dominated by entrenched Peronista governors. Distrust of the peso remains high, while much of the economy is still black market, with the informal sector still being around 40-50% of employment. The lines outside the Spanish and Italian consulates of Argentines reclaiming European citizenship are as long as ever, while major business figures like Marcos Galperin still live in neighboring Uruguay. Peronism as I’m sure you know has mutated several times throughout its history to each contemporary crisis, and will prove far more durable in the long run as a social identity as much as a political machine.

Argentina’s retenciones are export taxes levied on agricultural commodities like soybeans, wheat, and corn at the point of sale, before producers receive any income, which goes towards the government, and is how Argentine governments (especially Peronista ones) have historically paid for the country’s welfare state. The system also functions as a price mechanism because by taxing exports, the government keeps more supply in the domestic market, suppressing local food prices. The retenciones are deeply unpopular among the crop producers and landowners, and Milei campaigned on eliminating them. He has largely kept them, because he needs the revenue to maintain the fiscal surplus that is the centerpiece of his program.

But I think there’s a deeper cultural dynamic that I’m not sure Thiel understands. Argentine youth aspire much more towards la dolce vita than towards Weber’s protestant work ethic. They essentially want their country to be like Spain or Italy, with a chill work-life balance,  high leisure and consumption, underwritten by a generous welfare state, even if that model is becoming fiscally and demographically unsustainable in Europe. I think it’s a completely reasonable and in many ways admirable goal, but companies like Paypal, Palantir, and Facebook did not come out of Spain or Italy.

Among my Argentine peers, I hardly meet anyone who aspires to move to the United States. When I tell friends that the American economy has been growing at twice the rate of Europe in recent years, I am met with genuine disbelief. I think Thiel may have been captivated by a small teleological elite in Milei’s inner circle who do not necessarily represent the country they govern. The average Argentine who voted for Milei did not vote for Austrian economics or for a libertarian revolution. They voted out of exhaustion with Peronism, as many of Milei’s supporters were former Peronists themselves, much as many Trump supporters in the American Rust Belt were former Obama voters.

Argentina’s genuine case for Thiel rests on things that have nothing to do with Milei: a younger demographic than Europe, world-class human capital, abundant lithium and rare earths, and geographic isolation from great power conflict. He may be right for entirely the wrong reasons, on a longer timeline than he expects, through considerably more turbulence than the current narrative suggests. Argentina’s laid-back mentality is precisely what makes it exciting to foreigners. But as a project for civilizational renewal? Unless you’re talking about surviving a nuclear war, absolutely not.

I’m an Argentine-American master’s student in international relations at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella…

Best,
Joshua Raoul Neuman

The post Should you move to Argentina? (from my email) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

2. Books Arnold Kling has reread.

3. Wemby and Star Wars.

4. Even (especially?) for ontologists, supply is elastic.

5. SSRN is getting worse.

6. Major layoffs at The New School.

7. New forthcoming Ethan Mollick AI book.

8. “Scientists at Columbia University have edited the DNA of early human embryos with unprecedented accuracy, an achievement that could open the way to babies engineered with particular characteristics.” (NYT)

9. How much is AI boosting productivity anyway? (FT)  A much-needed dose of sanity.

The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The post Tyler and Alex Speak to OpenAI appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Overall, the Western Hemisphere now produces more oil than the Middle East did before the crisis. Canada is the world’s fourth-largest oil producer. Brazil produces four times as much oil as Venezuela; and in Guyana, where production began only seven years ago, output almost equals Venezuela’s. In Argentina’s Vaca Muerta region, shale oil production has grown sixfold since 2020. The current disruption will propel more oil and gas investment in the Western Hemisphere and Africa.

Here is more from Daniel Yergin in the WSJ.

The post Western hemisphere fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

When during the meetings the Americans offered that at most they could convert 15 percent of U.S. auto plants to military production, Beaverbrook replies that 100 percent of British automobile factories had been converted, and encouraged Roosevelt to aim higher.  He did, and on January 1 he ordered U.S. auto production halted by late Februrary.  Within weeks the dearth of new cars became moot when rubber, 90 percent of which came from Malaya and Indonesia, was rationed.  The U.S. had no synthetic rubber factories to make up the shortfall.  Americans soon learned what Britons had long known: without a spare tire or three stashed in the garage, the family car had a very limited range.  Passage by rail — where for fifty years the Pullmans had been Americans’ preferred means of conveyance — was soon limited to troops and businessmen on official war business.  And then the airlines — their routes and the national fleet of 434 aircraft — were commandeered.  By spring, gasoline ratioining, as a mean to preserve rubber more than oil, dribbed on to the Eastern Seaboard and in the following year spread nationwide, guaranteeing that Americans in the heartland could no longer take their vacations at east or west coast beaches even if their bald tires could carry them there.  That proved okay with most because by summer, oil and bilge tar and decomposing bodies — the U-boats’ harvest — regularly washed up onto America’s eastern beaches.

That is all from the excellent The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965.  As I’ve said before, you can always keep on reading books about World War II and you will continue to learn interesting and important things.

The post Rubber rationing in World War II appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The post My twenty-minute AI talk for the Swedish company Sana appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

2. Some comments on the new federal framework for AI regulation.

3. This guy is skeptical about doing things in space.

4. Is Chairman Mao underrated, and why did India not get rich too?

5. “Between 1985–2023, MIT’s faculty grew 9%. Administrative staff grew 189%.”

6. “What it means for the Korean economy and people when Samsung and SK Hynix are about to pay $430 BILLION in taxes in FY26-28. That’s half the Korean public debt.“

The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.