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The last piece of our first issue is out: on the lack of opioid treatment in India. This is the kind of piece I wanted to find when I started - it covers an issue I’d never seen covered before, and outlines clear ways that the status quo could be improved.

Blog Building Intensive is accepting applications until June 1. I highly recommend this; it improved my writing practice, I met awesome and thoughtful people, and I don’t think I would have started if I hadn’t done it.

Everyone has linked to and discussed this piece, but writes about the coming wave of AI billionaires and their philanthropic intentions. It is possible that philanthropic organizations will have a lot more money in the near future (though I do think we should perhaps not count our chickens before they hatch).

argues that biology is a blue-collar job1 dependent on physical skills and should hire like it.

argues in The Washington Post that we should expand the O-1 visa.

Everything does is self-recommending, but has a new interview with him about how to make change from outside of government.

Chris Blattman has a list of books every development economist should read. Fine, I’ll finally get around to reading African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis.

What is it like to live in the Barbican? I have wanted to live there since I moved to London, but I think this article has finally cured me of that desire. That is simply Too Many Rules.

This week in : writes about why it takes so long for new medications to be submitted to major African markets - and how the African Medicines Agency hopes to fix that.1

points out that we don’t know how to make Malawi not-poor - and if we don’t know how to make countries not-poor, we should take all projections about AI-enabled growth with some salt.

and talk to Ed Glaeser on . Unfortunately for the train lovers in the audience,2 he says: “Forty years of transportation economics at Harvard can be boiled down to four words. Bus good, train bad.”

Major win: NSF announces $1.5B for X-Labs.

The San Marino televote in Eurovision is actually a synthetic control - since San Marino uses the Italian phone network, the EBU “simulate[s] a composite score using average televoting results from an undisclosed pre-selected group of countries”.3

There is a newspaper in Chennai that is still handwritten. It has a circulation of 22,000?!?

This week in : writes about Jakarta’s large expansion of transit over the last decade, and trying to tame the traffic of the world’s most congested city.

1 writes about how it would be ideal if writers on agriculture… knew anything about agriculture. An excellent quote from the piece:

They suggest that perhaps cattle producers can transition marginal rangeland used for grazing into other crops. Marginal grazing land is not a close substitute for perennial specialty crop production due to soil constraints, climate risk, and capital requirements. The piece explicitly references a conversation with an Oklahoma cattle producer who allegedly cannot afford to transition to growing stone fruit. There’s a very good reason for that!2

Nick Bloom and coauthors find that the ROI on good government statistics is 25:1 in the US. I would love to see an estimate on this in LMICs.3

has been on a roll this week: first pointing out that development aid will not reduce migration and we shouldn’t pretend it will, and secondly, addressing the ongoing debate on “should dev be more macro vs. micro”. He points out that macro research is often more useful to policymakers - though I will admit to an academic’s preference for clean causal inference.

Daniel Björkegren writes about what AI may mean for developing countries, and why the structure of these economies means it may not have similar effects to those seen in developed economies.

points out that it’s no one’s job to make sure the Prime Minister is good at his job. Shockingly, this often means they aren’t.

argues that Dulles Airport and the mobile lounges actually weren’t futuristic, because they failed to anticipate that the future would be different than present day.

The Blue Lagoon is actually… heated by a nearby geothermal plant? Based.

This week on , discusses crime in developing countries with Chris Blattman.

There’s a new LLM using only training data from before 1930.

Michael Wiebe’s replication of Moretti 2021 has finally been published. tldr: the results are likely due to a coding error; moving to an agglomeration does not improve inventor productivity.

DHS data quality varies across regions - and northern Nigeria and Niger’s data looks particularly bad.

You know how you can get melatonin over the counter but it’s prescription in the UK? Gavin Leech and team put together a database of such drugs.

Howard French reviews How Africa Works.

has a new blog about growth and development - he opens with a post about just how rare sustained growth has been. In the last twenty years, no new country has met the Commission on Growth and Development’s definition of structural transformation (sustained 7% growth for 25 years).1

Drug development is a very expensive, very risky bet with terrible expected value. explains some of the financial engineering that makes it more profitable.

Have I perhaps mentioned that In Development has launched? Because it has; our first article (Paul Niehaus on cash transfers) is live; there is another article coming Thursday; you should subscribe here.

writes about how the AI people have been right about a lot. As a certified AI Skeptic myself, Dylan is absolutely right, and I should have paid more attention to AI earlier.

and discussed what an African YIMBYism would look like with the founder of the Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa. Recommend!

argues Baumol’s cost disease is part of the reason Americans are so lonely.

GAIN is looking for mentors to help young Africans interested in graduate degrees in economics navigate the application process.

It appears to be generally better for academically precocious youth to skip grades - if they do, they are more successful later in life.1

Now would be a good time to subscribe to , because our first article launches Thursday!

Works in Progress’ summer program for ambitious 18-to-22 year-olds, Invisible College, is back this summer. I’ve had the privilege to hang out with the Invisible College participants the last couple years, and they’ve raised my ambitions. Highly recommend.

Speaking of residencies and programs, the African School of Economics Zanzibar and the Charter Cities Institute also have some exciting opportunities. Applications for their professional diploma program in urban development (2026-2027 cohort) are open and there will be a two-week fellowship for builders and technologists in Zanzibar this summer as part of Zanzalu.

Would you like to do a dumb thing to find out information about the world? Inspired by the Citrini Research employee who took a speedboat out into the Strait of Hormuz,1 there’s a fellowship for that.

The Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative is looking for a new Deputy Director. I may be biased here, but Liz (the current director) is a gem and a joy to work with.

writes on kinship cultures and how they make economic development hard. I do think that 2 has a good counterpoint, though; East Asia also has a strong kinship culture and has seen extremely rapid economic growth.

writes on what a development economics of growth would look like.

writes for about how life has become low-variance for the American upper-middle class (and what that means for having a child).

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.