Dan Drezner has a plea for the Wall Street Journal to stop publishing “steaming piles of horseshit” until they figure out what is actually going on with the op-ed contributors. (1/4)

...Ellis argues that the faculty moved left and therefore socialists win. Drezner notes that Ellis, a former German professor, provides no causal evidence to support this claim... (3/4)

There are signs that corporate AI spending has stopped growing. Usage is still rising, but token prices are falling. OpenAI cut its own prices by about a third, both to compete with Anthropic and to keep firms from building on cheap or free models. (1/4)

...Companies are being driven to be AI-adopters out of the fear that if they do not have natural-language interfaces, or if they are too slow or error-prone, competitors will insert themselves between the laggard company and its customers and profits will evaporate.... (3/4)

I set up an email ‘bot’ to honor #handcarry, a tag meaning do not file this, bring it to me NOW! It is my escape hatch from the bureaucracy. But the bot drifted. (1/4)

Unlike surly agents, this failure was silent and obedient. It was a model bureaucrat whose output reached no one. It did not refuse, it was not idle, and it did not sulk. It simply turned my escape hatch into a new filing cabinet. (3/4)

Past waves of automation have followed a script. Agriculture mechanized, got cheap, and shrank as a share of GDP, and value moved to manufacturing. Manufacturing automated and shrank, and value moved to services. Ben Moll and Alex Imas argue AI will follow that script... 1/

...rather than break it. Cheap cognition will push spending toward what stays scarce: nurses, teachers, waiters, local knowledge, power plants, Zeiss mirrors: **CROSSPOST: Ben Moll & Alex Imas: Will AI Soon Lead to Double-Digit [Annual Economic] Growth?** The subheadline... 2/

Freddie deBoer says everyone ignores high-quality evidence that pedagogy and policy make little difference. Test-score gains fade. And, indeed, I could not come close today to the scores I got long ago on my linear algebra exams without a lot of boning-up on the subject... 1/

...year. Papers on the other side suffer from weak instruments, file drawers, and forking paths. Policy matters. Pedagogy matters. The question is which ones, and how… **In Which a Pedagogical Decision to Keep People from Majoring in Economics Has Massive Consequences... 3/

It was Engels who paid both his and Marx’s bills: **CROSSPOST: LARRY MacDONALD: How Karl Marx Achieved Financial Independence** Marx wrote for newspapers and went into the market for a quick £400; Engels ran mills and traded cotton and held railways, gas companies and... 1/