For America’s 250th birthday, listed 25 times the United States has been a force for good in the world. I agree with most of this - particularly the US’ place as a creedal nation.

To quote Ronald Reagan, “you can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

There is a paper that finds the median married Indian woman leaves the house for only 30 minutes a day. There have been some methodological criticisms of this paper, but another paper finds that only 16% of the people on the streets of Mumbai are women. I don’t really have witty commentary on this; life is more than household production.

writes about the migration hump - and how people who would most benefit from migrating for work can’t afford to do so.

has a reading list to understand Chinese biotech. I know very little about Chinese biotech, but can endorse many of the books listed.

It is likely that 20,000 Europeans died because of the recent heat wave. Seems bad.1

I love Kazakhstan so much. According to the constitution, you can only be president for one seven-year term. The current president would like to run again. So the constitutional court ruled that this rule applies once per constitution, and Kazakhstan just passed a new constitution. So Tokayev is all good to run again.2

Pitches for issue 3 (or 4) for close tomorrow! Information here.

is also accepting pitches on the theme of flourishing. If I was not busy running a magazine of my own, I would be pitching them.

has announced the awardees for their Research Revival Fund - including one translating and uploading Soviet science.

wrote on how we got COVID vaccines so far - and included some very excellent footnotes.

has a post about AI writing - and why it should be shunned.

• He also has a fun chart for the types of AI use he thinks are acceptable vs. the type of writing it is used for.

finds that Arnold Ventures spends about $35k per new collaboration created via convenings.

argues that more evidence couldn’t have saved USAID. He’s right, but is also correct that more evidence can save some lives.

Stripe has announced a new fund trying to end respiratory diseases. As an immunocompromised person living in a major city, this day cannot come fast enough.

You may have noticed that Europe had a heat wave last week. In London, temperatures were in the low 90s,1 with the heat index peaking around 100.2

• 11% of Britons planned to use air conditioning to combat the heat.3 Only 3% of households containing a person over 75 have AC. This is… too few.

• This is at least partially because most British homes have no ductwork - making retrofitting AC much more expensive than it is where there are existing ducts for heating.

• I have previously written about how air conditioning is a survival technology, and how it is actually useful for Britain’s Net Zero goals. If I was God of All UK Policy, I would remove all planning restrictions on AC installation and increase the air-to-air heat pump Boiler Upgrade Scheme subsidy.

The Economist encounters Indian government websites: “Before you read beyond this paragraph, grab a glass of water and 1,000mg of paracetamol. Walk over to your laptop—the supercomputer in your hand is not up to the task—and make yourself comfortable. Now navigate to indianvisaonline.gov.in and see if you can figure out how to apply for a visa.”

is still taking pitches.

Coefficient Giving has a new RFP for projects to improve global health and well-being in an era of transformative AI.

Current AI systems appear to make it much easier to break into (US) classified systems. Given that the US almost certainly has more robust cyber defenses than almost any other country,1 I would feel very nervous if I were India or Pakistan…

Young biomedical scientists are much less likely to want to stay in academia than they were pre-Trump, and they are much more likely to want to leave the US. Seems bad.

The speed of progress is determined by bottlenecks, not the most-accelerated fields.

is branching out into reported stories.2

is doing microgrants in hyperspectral biology.

Legalizing sports betting resulted in 284,000 more households becoming food-insecure. Seems bad.

In Argentina, if you’re behind on child support, you can’t buy soccer tickets. This seems good.

Almost half of G- or PG-rated movies contain torture????

The application for Managing Editor of In Development closes TODAY (at 11:59 PM Anywhere on Earth). Apply! If I may say so myself, we’ve assembled a rockstar editorial team and a hell of a contributor list; it’ll be a fun time.

I forgot to link this last week, but Jonathan Portes and I have a new paper about the disconnect between the UK’s labor force need for immigrants and the UK population’s concern about too much immigration. It was cited in this FT piece.

Global migration has tripled since 2000.

Speaking of migration, has a post about where migrants1 in the UK work and what they make. Her dataset is tech-biased but in general: they make a lot and live in London. Americans apparently are particularly likely to live in Kensington and Chelsea.2

I largely agree with this essay by Jason Crawford on using AI as a public intellectual.

• My essays are 100% human produced not because I hate AI, but because I think AI can’t produce what I want. AI can’t make fun jokes in the footnotes,3 and the fun jokes in the footnotes are a load-bearing part of my work.4

There’s a new AI microsite - Europe 2031 is about what happens if Europe gets left behind in AI.5 Given recent developments with Fable, I wish this was less prescient…

• There is a less serious version by Tim Hwang - he projects such things as “The High-Level Expert Group on Expert Groups delivers its finding: there are too many expert groups.”

argues AI probably won’t be a leapfrog technology. I largely agree with this; the lack of training data seems particularly likely to bite in LMICs.

Standard deviations of learning are not comparable across studies.

The Social Market Foundation has a new proposal to allow Brits to shift state spending earlier in life. It would allow people to take out one year of their state pension in their 30s - for instance, for a down payment - in exchange for delaying the start of their state pension.

This seems broadly sensible;1 in general, state spending in the UK is very skewed to pensioners, while people often struggle to buy property and afford children.

The Economist argues we should spice up soccer by allowing the goalie “to use less and less of his body to make saves” as the match progresses, specifying that “if a player is judged to have feigned injury, the next foul on them will be unpunishable”, and making referees able to “award a green card to any player who dribbles past an opponent in games played on American soil”. I would watch this game.

Labour voters think they’re richer, smarter, kinder and funnier than the average Brit.2

is hiring! If you are a self-starter, care about development, and enjoy shaping pieces, apply here.

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.