Jason Abaluck
@Jabaluck
Professor of Economics at Yale SOM
I thought I'd try to reconstruct Bryan's discussion with a 13-year-old about the minimum wage based on the below tweet: (@bryan_caplan let me know if anything is inaccurate)
Took me under 5 minutes to turn a normal, smart 13-year-old against the minimum wage. Contrary to almost everyone, the textbook argument IS intuitive. It's just emotionally unappealing.
These are important caveats -- but AI can always use many of the "unfair advantages" touted here (e.g. running multiple instances concurrently with superhuman coordination). AI doesn't need to be superhuman at most or all capabilities to be superhuman at most or all tasks.
Terence Tao on the supposed Gold from OpenAI at IMO
One of the most cynical—or most hubristic—acts in human history. "I'm building a God-like intelligence but I didn't like when the last version disagreed with me, so I'll try to make this version stick to what I currently think."
I replicated this result, that Grok focuses nearly entirely on finding out what Elon thinks in order to align with that, on a fresh Grok 4 chat with no custom instructions. grok.com/share/c2hhcmQt…
We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers. The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.
Life in 2025: - people spend 1/3 of their life completely unconscious for reasons largely unknown to them - bodies decay overtime and then stop working entirely, afflicting the poor and wealthy alike - dullards run regressions without heteroscedasticity robust standard errors
Life in 1776: - heat is such a luxury that Thomas Jefferson can’t write in deep winter bc his ink freezes (one reason perhaps why Independence Day is in July) - nighttime darkness is such a burden that George Washington reportedly spent $15k in today’s dollars on candles every…
If you are smart and want to date other smart people, highly recommend talking to Christina (retweeting as payback for her being excellent at her job).
For the single outdoorsman-engineer-scientist-types tired of dating apps: tinyurl.com/vdaystem1 (created by kind + beautiful + athletic women in their 30s I can vouch for) 🥰
Relatedly, does anyone have a connection to Zohran? (even a few degrees removed). Would like to briefly talk with him about economic policy and help him find advisors who can analyze policy in an objective way behind closed doors.
The modern economic case for public provision is not about public goods or market failures or externalities. It is about what can and can't be achieved by contracting.