Seth Benzell - the LA-atic Stranger

its crazy how quickly the dominant generational cohort switched from boomers to millenials, totally skipping gen X and dwarfing gen Z. marketing is gonna be millenial coded forever. you best be ready to hear tame impala and MGMT while youre grocery shopping for the next 40 years

This paper by Erik Brynjolfsson and Seth Benzell got me hooked on the economics of information and presaged this coming age very clearly, well ahead of the ChatGPT moment and everything since: nber.org/system/files/w…

Remember if you’re bored: the devils hands are unoccupied playthings.

A social safety net that transfers resources from working-age people to non-workers makes sense, but within the category of non-workers we are massively overweight on "old people" relative to "kids and their caretakers."

Want to hear and read two crazy smart, funny, and frighteningly well-read economists talking about AI and innovation? Then @SBenzell and @AndreyFradkin are your guys. Links to their stuff are in the next post...

"Okay, so imagine a magic button." "I'm imagining the button." "If you press the button—" "What color is it?" "It's the only button. It doesn't matter what color it is." "Nah, I ain't falling for that again. Last time there was a red button and a blue button—" "That's a…

'water is transparent only within a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum, so living organisms evolved sensitivity to that band, and that's what we now call "visible light". ' (found via HN)

Does the potential immortality of AI agents make letting them own assets a bad idea? The Justified Posteriors podcast draws on classic sci-fi like "Gulliver's Travels" to suggest -- possibly. Learn more in "The Intelligence Curse" episode of the Justified Posteriors Podcast

In the latest episode of the Justified Posteriors Podcast, we look into the political economy of AI-based automation. Could illusory AI-based abundance actually "curse" us with worse governments and horrible lives? We read the dystopic "The Intelligence Curse" to find out.

In our new working paper, we study how to design consent mechanisms for data collection. TLDR; instead of focusing on the specific consent interface, we should focus on the frequency of consent decisions and default sharing rules.

VCs should know better than anyone that Silicon Valley runs on the O-Ring Theory: The more smart international students, founders and engineers come to America, the more value is created for everyone else

NBER Innovation PhD boot camp today! Lectures by Ben Jones, Heidi Williams, Ina Ganguli, Pierre Azoulay, Chad Jones, Kyle Myers & me, dinner w/ Glenn Hubbard & Ed Glaeser, panels w/ Jeff Kling from CBO, Dylan Matthews from Vox, Matt Clancy from OpenPhil and Caleb Watney from IFP.