Connor O’Brien
@cojobrien
Research @InnovateEconomy. Thinking about: progress studies, high-skilled immigration reform, industrial policy, the NY Mets. Definite optimist.
The Trump administration is developing a rule for weighted selection of H-1B petitions. #immigration #visas #H1B #tech news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-re…
Exciting personal news: I've just signed a book contract with Princeton University Press. My book will be about China's industrial policy, from EVs and batteries to AI and robotics. It's aimed at both general readers and researchers, in the style of my High Capacity newsletter.
Couldn't have said it better myself: “And you know he has these think tanks. And they build buildings for people that think. And it’s really not thinking. It’s a little bit of a combination of thinking. It’s something you sort of have or you don’t have.”
Trump: "He has these think tanks. They build buildings for people that think."
You shouldn't be drinking Coca-Cola, whether it's sweetened with cane sugar or corn syrup. Try water instead.
A lot of people are blaming AI for grads’ poor outcomes, but I find the evidence for this claim is surprisingly thin. Excited to release a new analysis w/ @employamerica on the labor market performance of recent college grads. 🧵
Big opportunity here to fix our main skilled immigration program.
“Eliminating the H-1B lottery in favor of a system that prioritizes higher earners first is a no-brainer,” @cojobrien tells @Newsweek. “Giving away these visas randomly is an enormous, missed opportunity to attract truly scarce talent that would benefit American businesses and…
The economic value of the H-1B program could be increased by 88% without changing the number of visas if we stopped giving them away at random.
An elected official not automatically endorsing an extreme nominee is totally normal politics and the thing that gives endorsements any meaning in the first place.
A party leadership that doesn’t even endorse its own nominees doesn’t deserve to lead anything, much less a party
🚨💼I'm hiring! And so are many other organizations I like. If you’re looking for a career in AI policy, now is an excellent time. I've selected a list of my favorite roles and if you like my tweets you're likely the target audience!
I'm 6 years out of college. I literally don't remember a time when I wasn't being constantly blasted with the message of "you don't need to go to college to make a good living." Feels like the overwhelming consensus. Yet people still keep going!
There is a bit of mythologizing about how we forced all young people to go to college and now they are economically ruined. Around 60% of people in their 30s do not have a college degree. And the college wage premium remains near a historical high.
A totally unbiased, apolitical "MechaHitler"
The White House is preparing an executive order requiring AI models to be 'politically neutral and unbiased' according to a report by the WSJ. Compliance will determine eligibility for federal contracts, so this is a big deal for all the labs. The EO is expected next week.
Wealth-to-income ratios unsurprisingly rise with higher incomes (high-earning workers accumulate more wealth *per dollar of income*). In our new guest essay for The American Worker Project, economists @PavelBrendler and @kuhnmo look at which factor accounts for the trend. [1/4]
Let's demand that Iran adopt its own NEPA so they can never rebuild their nuclear facilities even if they want to.
Well, look at this. From NYT: 'Iran’s deeply buried nuclear enrichment plant at Fordo was badly damaged, and potentially destroyed, by the 12 massive bombs that U.S. Air Force B-2 bombers dropped on it last month, according to a new American intelligence assessment. Two other…
We at Stripe are looking for someone to work for us as a sort of internal journalist, finding interesting stories within the company and writing about them. Seems like a great job for a good writer with a sense of what’s interesting. stripe.com/jobs/listing/i…
Yes. Go to bed.
I guess The Late Show itself is ending, which is wild. End of an institution, end of an era. Wonder what’s to become of late night, is that over too?
But, plot twist: The much-discussed contraction in entry-level tech hiring appears to have *reversed* in recent months. In fact, relative to the pre-generative AI era, recent grads have secured coding jobs at the same rate as they’ve found any job, if not slightly higher.