This week in , we decided to make economists angry by pointing out that they should do more qualitative work.

There’s a new $100k fee on H-1Bs.1 I’m so tired.

GovAI is looking for entrepreneurs in residence. The “AI Bellingcat” idea seems particularly useful.

BREAD and IGC have a free PhD-level course in political economy. I’m v tempted to show up to the crime session.

Yale is hiring an econ comms person, and you get to work with the awesome Jeff Mosenkis.

Via , this is a lovely essay about love in a country where a quarter of the population is a carrier of a genetic disease.

• Also: recessive genes often do affect phenotype a bit.

Pocketbook voting is alive and well in southern Africa.

When people are looking for a job, they edit their LinkedIn profiles to emphasize AI and de-emphasize DEI.

analyzes why economists and technologists disagree on the growth boost from AI in .

Free idea: instead of Inkhaven, where everyone has to produce an essay a day, a progress-y writing workshop where you spend two weeks writing one really good essay.2

’s story this week focuses on disaster data - and how it is probably worse than you think.

gave a TED talk! I was privileged to be on the trial audiences for this talk, and it is indeed excellent.

Some of USAID’s data was saved because a high school student was doing a school project and had saved 4000 PDFs.

There’s a new David Roodman (and Maxim Massenkoff) meta-analysis (on job retraining).

AI might read our science fiction and use that to determine its behavior.

Some advice on how to maintain long-distance friendships.

finds we are all breaking French law.

Someone did poll childless cat ladies on how they feel about JD Vance. Spoiler alert: they’re not fans.

Our essay of the week is by Dan Honig, on the management practices that make governments work better.

The blockbuster essay of the week is clearly ’s piece on catch-up growth in developing countries and how AI could increase the gap between rich and poor countries.

Though is giving Rafa competition for essay of the week with her piece on how every disease is a policy failure.

Talking to an AI chatbot does not relieve loneliness; it actually increases it.

Akhil Bansal writes on fractional dosing for the mpox vaccine.1

has announced their 2026 fellows. Excited to see some development writers in there!

The county my family is from is the one county in western Kansas that voted against women’s suffrage. No comment.

The more you procrastinate, the less money you make and the more medical problems you have. Yikes.

Supposably is apparently a word - it means “as may be conceived or imagined”.

There is a neologism in China to describe “women perceived to have no money, employment, education, prospects, looks, friends, or sophistication”. It is 沒女.

This week’s story is by , on the mystery of short Indian children.

The Trump administration is considering adding a $100,000 fee to OPT. OPT is the program that allows non-citizen graduates of US universities to stay and work in the US for one year after graduation.1 This would be catastrophic for both US universities and US competitiveness. No one is going to pay $100,000 to employ a new grad,2 so this makes it much harder for international students to stay in the US after their degree. I’ve written before on how much of US innovation has come from immigrants; this fee would be an excellent way to harm the US economy.

• Relatedly, we have a new paper this week showing that H-1B exposure raised native wages.

LMICs spend roughly twice as much on energy subsidies as they do on social protection.

A new paper argues ~50% of lead exposure globally comes through diet.

argues that AI philanthropists should endow institutes at universities in the Global South.

More evidence that the UK is London with some irrelevant things attached:3 the borough of Bromley4 collects more income tax than the city of Birmingham.5

It is taking longer and longer to become wealthy. That is, we are transitioning from an income society to a wealth society - where high income may not be enough to make you wealthy.

says you should meet your mutuals. I endorse this message, largely because Larissa is one of my mutuals who I met through the internet, and now she is one of my best friends.

The M1 motorway has higher net favorability in the UK than AI does.

The Home Office has suggested that asylum seekers should pay a £10k fee to reimburse the UK state for part of their costs. Or… asylum seekers could just be allowed to work and not be kept in forced inactivity for a year?

outlines what Ed Miliband can do to make British aid more effective without spending more money.

The US has changed regulation around duration of status for international students. In practice, this means that international students will have to get a new visa after four years in the country. Given that PhD programs are six years, this is incredibly disruptive to international graduate students and will likely reduce the number that choose to study in the US. Since immigrants make up a large percentage of the innovation workforce, this will ultimately be bad for the US.

The US is moving towards requiring colleges to show that their graduates make more than they would if they had not gone to college in order for students to be eligible for financial aid. This seems largely sensible; I’ve never bought the argument that one goes to college simply to expand one’s mind. That’s lovely, I’m sure, but I’m not paying 200 grand for it.1

In the US, 65% of homes are owner-occupied. But due to the rise of young adults living with their parents, this does not mean 65% of people own their homes; actually, only 53% of people live in a home they own.

begs us to stop saying “correlation is not causation”. I second this; I’d get this comment all the time on QI facts. Any time I’d report on a causal paper and use causal language, someone would comment that correlation is not causation. Yes, I know, that’s why I went through the identification strategy to see if I thought it was good…

This is old, but it is good to remember that you are a crazy person and should choose your career based on your particular kind of crazy.

Li Keqiang’s wife translated a book on Yes, Minister into Chinese…

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.