Stian Westlake

British people like to tell themselves that no matter how bad things get, at least they're governed better than the United States. But this is wrong. It's complete cope. The United States is governed much better than Britain.

The Problem with Urban Planning: a professional silo is gatekeeping our nation's growth. My new essay w/ @inflectionptswk The problem at the heart of planning is not political—it's professional. 🧵

Official results are in - Gemini achieved gold-medal level in the International Mathematical Olympiad! 🏆 An advanced version was able to solve 5 out of 6 problems. Incredible progress - huge congrats to @lmthang and the team! deepmind.google/discover/blog/…

We are hiring a growth marketing person to grow Works in Progress's online audience and sell Stripe Press books (and, soon, WIP magazine subscriptions). Come help us reach our next million readers! London-based, and base pay is £75,200 – £112,800. stripe.com/jobs/listing/g…

6. These are the framings that make me lose sleep over solar, wind, and Britain’s energy future. We either need to migrate south or split some atoms.

Excellent blog post by @jacobkimmel on why pharma progress has slowed down over the last many decades, and why some people are optimistic about a big speedup over the next few years. Eroom's Law (coined by @jackscn) says that the number of drugs per billion dollars decline…

NEW: There’s been a lot of discussion lately about rising graduate unemployment. I dug a little closer and a striking story emerged: Unemployment is climbing among young graduate *men*, but college-educated young women are generally doing okay.

We’re hiring a sociological research scientist @GoogleDeepMind! Work with the inimitable @KLdivergence, @weidingerlaura, @iamtrask, @canfer_akbulut, Julia Haas & many others 🙌

New Post: Datacenter Delusions Among middle powers, the UAE has the clearest AI strategy: become an 'AI oil state' with meaningful global compute share. Most other countries are building datacenters without targeting viable sovereignty thresholds. 🧵

The UK and US used to be much, much more similar in terms of economic output and prosperity per person. In But from 2008 on, a large gap started opening, and from 2020 on it's become more like a vast chasm. Now, US GDP per capita is *40%* higher than the UK's.

Crikey, they demolished 1 Victoria Street!

I got tired of work. So I went to McDonald's and got a McFlurry (it's cool again now, so the ice cream machines work) and listened to the (first 21 minutes of the) new @WorksInProgMag podcast episode with @stianwestlake and I shall now get some OECD data and make a graph,.....

the way some economists advocate for industrial policy is akin to picking the performance of the top decile of hedge fund performers (ex post) as evidence that active management adds alpha in asset management, and then simply forgetting about the bottom 90%.

Some great reflections on what think tanks actually do, which highlight the value of institutional diversity in the social science ecosystem.

My guess is that big tech companies increasingly opting to poach key personnel without acquiring the whole startup is driven by antitrust concerns. If true, this means that antitrust regulation adds meaningful equity risk for startup employees, which is unfortunate.

There’s an interesting story of intangibles and antitrust to be told here (thanks to @ns_whit for spotting!)

🚨Open Phil is hiring for some awesome roles to build out our >$120m Abundance and Growth Fund 🚨 Apply for a chance to work with @mattsclancy on accelerating scientific & technological progress and boosting economic growth x.com/mattsclancy/st…