The Trump administration is once again proposing massive cuts to science.

says death to the policy report.

writes on how RCTs may not be enough to capture the effects of AI on development.

My friend and contributing editor Akib Khan is the International Economic Association’s featured economist for April.

My friend Oscar Sykes has a new article out about the history of instant coffee.

• He appears to have established a niche writing about things invented in New Zealand, so expect an article on Zorbing soon.

Coefficient Giving has open RFPs on biosecurity and effective careers.

IFP is hiring for an editorial director and operations coordinator.

is launching a new think tank on self-driving cars - launch event in London on Thursday. Come!

There’s a species of spiders with the scientific name Hotwheels sisyphus.

Are you a person with a master’s degree who wants to work in development? You should probably apply to be an ODI Fellow (by the end of today).

Claudia Goldin is a mensch: “after Claudia Goldin became the first woman to win a solo Nobel in economics in 2023, she received hundreds of invitations and requests. She accepted just three. One of them was advising the WNBA players union as the women prepared to negotiate a new labor deal with the league.”

launched “Fast Biology Bounties” to surface ideas to “speed up or reduce costs for wet-lab experiments”. He found the experiment more successful than anticipated, and says that “good ideas are cheap and can be surfaced for a small amount of money.”

• This makes me want to do something similar with at some point.

On a sadder note: Asimov Press is pausing for now (as goes to Astera and to Anthropic). This is a tremendous loss for the scientific community, even as I’m very excited to see what Niko and Xander do next.1

argues that we need both a macro- metascience and a micro-metascience. Andrew Gerard (who writes ) wrote up a few thoughts.

The average flat in Manila costs twenty times the median income. This is considerably worse than famously unaffordable London, where the median home is about 14x the median income, or San Francisco, where a home is 10x median income.

An Irish guy created an AI voice agent to track the price of a pint of Guinness across Ireland. Good use of AI.

• The national average price of a pint of Guinness is €5.95. The modal price is €5.50. But also: Guinness still isn’t tasty and you’re better off having a nice glass of wine.2

Via Matt Yglesias: “69%3 of all criminal cases in New Haven between 1710 and 1750 were for premarital sex.”

Recommend this thread of British nicknames. Some examples: Keth for a man named Keith missing an eye, an electrician who looks like Elton John nicknamed “Socket Man”, and a man nicknamed “Minty” because he always gets to work after eight.4

shows that people are more likely to support legal immigration when they know how difficult it actually is to legally immigrate.

writes a bear case for AI in Britain. Unfortunately, I worry Archie is right: Britain’s labour market does move very slowly and it is very exposed to services. This doesn’t look great for the future.

Astera is having an essay contest on systemic bottlenecks to science.

A point-counterpoint pair on AI and automation: on why doing tasks does not mean doing a job, and on why the ATM didn’t kill the bank teller, but the iPhone did.

India’s recent growth may have been less impressive than stated.

1Day Sooner is hiring for a policy lead for clinical trial abundance.

China is not a young country - the median age is now the same as the UK, and will shortly overtake it.

The US Post Office has simply defined the Pentagon (geographically very much in Virginia) to be in DC.

One in four gay and bisexual men1 intend to vote Reform. has written a very funny taxonomy of them.

Doug Rand and friends have launched a new immigration podcast: The Melting Pod. A must-listen.

My friend Josh Martin is launching Peace Per Dollar - a GiveWell for conflict reduction.1

New York is considering banning chatbots from giving medical advice. Look, ChatGPT is already vastly better than my GP.2

Being tough on crime… works? And lowers all-cause mortality.

Abortion bans reduce housing prices.

Residents of Istanbul are 2.4x likelier to search “Tinder” than “prayer times”.

Ezra Klein makes the case for Just Doing The Intellectual Work. Just sit down and read all the things. Do The Work.

People are more likely to apply to a particular college if they visit when the weather is good. This is basically UCSD’s entire recruitment strategy and honestly, it works.

has an op-ed in the FT arguing for universal lead screening. has put together a tool to examine lead exposure levels in your community.

This feels weird to put in a link list, but if you identify as an effective altruist, or spend time around the EA community, you should read ’s account of trying to report sexual harassment.

is starting a program for Fast Biology Bounties - $10k for good ideas to speed up wet lab experiments.

The Centre for British Progress has outlined what an actual contributory migration system would look like.

is writing about living in Doha, watching the war happen.

Chris Blattman has shared his workflow with AI agents.

Ryan Briggs argues selection on precision would be better than selection on significance.

Telework doesn’t appear to make people lonely.

Dario Amodei is right: “Disagreeing with the government is the most American thing in the world.”

Every year, Paris holds a blind taste test for the best baguettes. The winner gets to supply the Élysée Palace for a year. The last two winners have been Sri Lankan immigrants. That’s integration!

Aishwarya Khanduja, , and Analogue Group have launched the Research Revival Fund - focused on reviving research that has been neglected due to funding loss or other similar situations.

• I’m particularly keen on their work on translating forgotten-but-still-relevant Soviet work. I’ve had more than one conversation with people in the nuclear industry where someone told me that their technology was reliant on an obscure paper written by a Soviet physicist in 1970.

George Borjas has a new paper where he lays out the empirics behind the $100,000 H-1B fee. The Economic Innovation Group says he’s made data errors.

disagrees with the Cato study that finds strongly positive fiscal impacts from immigration. (Cato has responded.)

argues that it should be easier to fire workers in Europe.

The UK graduate premium has declined. This is not true in other rich countries.

• This appears to be driven by two things: the UK’s real GDP/capita has only now recovered from the financial crisis and relative wages for non-graduates have risen (probably due to a rising minimum wage). Mechanically, if overall wages are not rising, but wages for non-graduates are rising, the graduate premium will decline.

Some journals require paper “highlights” in addition to the abstract. Dean Karlan is having fun with the form:

In a Blank Space of rural finance, new platforms quietly entered.
Fearless farmers invest when digital credit is carefully tailored.
But Out of the Woods we are not — lending seems best when swift."
So Shake It Off, Begin Again: more innovation would be a gift.

Car accidents increase on days with major music releases, because people are more likely to be using Spotify while driving.

Bald eagles are suffering lead poisoning from accidentally ingesting bullet fragments. This feels… symbolic.

Let’s end with a poem by Su Tung-Po:

"Families when a child is born
Hope it will turn out intelligent.
I, through intelligence
Having wrecked my whole life,
Only hope that the baby will prove
Ignorant and stupid.
Then he’ll be happy all his days
And grow into a cabinet minister."

India has similar residential segregation to the US.

Rural electrification does not increase employment or incomes, even in the medium-term (~10 years).

• I do wonder how much of this has to do with poor reliability. Like much of the region, Rwanda has poor power reliability, limiting the usefulness of power for commercial applications.

London housebuilding has collapsed to a degree not seen elsewhere in the developed world.

Thomas Malthus’ students were less supportive in fiscal emergencies than students of other economists. (h/t )

The British public believe Nigel Farage would be a terrible date who would make you pay and then ghost you.

The Cato Institute finds that immigration has reduced the US deficit by a third since 1994.

DIV is baaaaack!

There’s a new database of econ PhD placements.

Merely having choices is a source of utility.

This is old, but: Isaac Asimov was a serial harasser of women. As a woman who grew up on Asimov, I just… it’s bleak.

Apply for the NBER Innovation Research Boot Camp!

In 2014, Mark Carney had contraband cat food confiscated after he tried to smuggle his cat’s favorite food into the UK. We love a devoted cat owner who also loves econometrics.

Considering going on a pilgrimage to the site of the invention of ibuprofen.

Recommend the New Statesman on the other UK tax trap1 - unpaid carers face a cliff edge losing £4,331 the second they make over £10,192 (per year).

• This obviously disincentivizes people from working! Also… we know how to create benefit tapers; we don’t need to have cliff edges.

London is the startup capital for non-Americans.2

The modal degree for a cabinet minister is economics.

There’s a class gap in academia. PhD graduates whose parents don’t have PhDs place less well and make less.

Dina Pomeranz lets students from low- and middle-income countries join her global policy analysis class. Ask to join here.

writes about cities.

• She describes why I love cities perfectly: “This is what cities are for: to create bigger and better things, to experiment, to aspire, to push boundaries.”

The share of life spent in retirement has been stable since 2000 - improvements in life expectancy have been offset by later retirements.

• It still seems wild that people spend ~50% of their lifespan not working - the first 20 years in education and then another 20 years being retired.

Here’s a website that turns architectural renders into what they will actually look like on a random Tuesday in November.

Greenland sharks live to 450 and have a gestation period of perhaps 18 years.

writes about the pro-immigration “noble lies” in the discourse. I don’t agree with everything in this post - I’m more willing to make assumptions about external validity than Alexander is, for a start - but I think it’s good to criticize your own “side”!

Data cleaning: maybe the most important part of doing economics?

coins a new term: YIMPS (Yes In My Preprint Server).

shows that the share of pregnancies in England and Wales that end in abortion is now the highest in Europe. She thinks this may be related to lower use of contraception and easier access to abortion.

Recommend this piece on “the official population number for the Democratic Republic of Congo might be basically fictional, and other Census issues” by

The Institute for Progress has an RFP for projects that will help prepare the world for advanced AI.

Moderna is scaling back investment in vaccine trials due to anti-vax sentiment. Seems… not great.

There were fewer births in China in 2025 than in 1776.1

Eating fava beans can destroy the red blood cells of 5% of the world population. To quote Gavin Leech, “species dreamt up by the utterly deranged”.

explains why the US continually encourages foreign uprisings and then… doesn’t back them in any meaningful sense.

argues there should be more general managers for world problems.

The US should have fewer bus stops.

writes about the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference.

Violent crime is down. Petty crime is up.

We have another Michael Clemens v. George Borjas immigration argument.

Innovation needs to be matched to the particular context for it to be effective (evidence from agriculture).

This week’s amazing historical story: in 1892, Emma Goldman decided to fund an assassination attempt by becoming a prostitute. Her first client “took her into a saloon, bought her a beer, gave her ten dollars, informed her she did not have ‘the knack,’ and told her to quit the business”.

Usually these post on Tuesdays, but you’re getting this today because In Development’s open call for pitches closes today!1

• I’d be particularly excited to see any pitches about China.

• One caveat: it may take us longer than two weeks to get back to accepted pitches. Each pitch is read by at least two humans, and we’ve had about 375 pitches submitted so far. We are therefore a bit behind.

and write about how we should use forecasting in R&D decision making. A must-read for anyone interested in doing science better.

Everyone’s read ’s Africa in 2026, right?

writes on burnout.

• It’s very annoying how right Cate Hall is about things.

writes about how working class people talk about driving for Uber.

• This piece really brings home a point I think we should consider more. Sometimes a “bad” outcome is still better than the counterfactual.

The majority of Britons outside of London think London is unsafe. The majority of Londoners think they’re wrong.

• 58% of Reform voters think London is “very unsafe”. I mean, it might be unsafe for your pocketbook; I walk outside and suddenly I’ve spent £20, but otherwise, I have no idea what they’re talking about.

Tenure-track professors aren’t amazing at teaching, news at 11.

Reminder: In Development has an open call for pitches!

• This is closing in one week, January 12.

has a review of medical breakthroughs that happened in 2025.

has a list of evidence gaps in development economics.

Adding transit increases property values near the transit (now shown in a developing country city).

Coefficient Giving staff is blogging more: you should subscribe to and .

The market cap of Thermo Fisher is larger than the market cap of Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin combined.

A new paper shows immigrants switch jobs more and make more money when they do not require sponsorship.

• As someone who has recently been approved to no longer need sponsorship in the UK, this feels like News I Can Use.