49 Comments

There's an argument to be made that fertility is declining because all you men are podcasting all the time! (I write this at my daughter's house, babysitting her toddlers, they want a third or fourth but it's hard work!) I'm joking and yet not. Taking care of children is incredibly time consuming and doing it well is time consuming x 100. I'm reading your podcast notes because I didn't have time to listen. :)

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6d
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Are you a parent?

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I'd bet a lot that the answer is "no".

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I want to hear more about your views on robots replacing labor. I am pretty skeptical that robots will replace a lot of blue collar skilled trade jobs for at least a few decades.

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I'll write more about that!

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I think it will depend on the trade and on the mode of production. We already have robots adept at brick-laying, welding, dry-walling. Most of the building trades that can be performed in a factory using prefabrication tech can be automated. When I watch electricians pulling wires, completing circuits and wiring outlets, the work seems easily replaceable with a well trained robot. I don't see a lot of technical barriers, but the economics are unclear. If AI leads to fewer jobs in the high-cognitive sectors, competition for blue collar skilled trade jobs increases, lowering labor costs, which may depress interest in developing replacement techs

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6dEdited

A few decades?!? We're very likely to have super intelligence this decade, at which point it can just design much better robots, even if we don't manage to do it ourselves.

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My dude, if that isn't sarcasm, you are in for a BIG surprise.

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5dEdited

It's not, but it was a horrendous typo. Fixed. Not sure what was going on there.

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Children are not considered fellow members of society, but a luxury commodity that you acquire either as a foolish indulgence or a feather in your cap of mid-life. People 'don't like' kids, they don't want to see them, they don't want to hear them, and they definitely don't want to pay for anything for kids, they were 'smart enough' not to have kids in the first place.

Of course if you swapped 'kids' in the 'I don't like kids' for any other category of human (blind, poor, black, white, old), those same people would look at you like you're a sociopath and probably report you to HR.

In general, I think we've seen language policing is annoying and counter-productive, but we need better ways to talk about children as members of our society instead of products produced by parents. Because if they are actually humans, and they are part of our society, then we need to have better conversations about what children contribute to society and what society owes them in return.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2025/01/kids-commodities-dont-like-reductive-language/681525/?gift=_h_vvcYLNrL7iK2sKJRDpyUuwm4D6Y42BiCz57LW_gg&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

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Vestigial sentence fragment at the start of section 2?

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This was great. Thank you. I’d forgotten how quickly Patrick’s brain works :-) my gosh

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Is that interview going to wind up posted on the Econ 102 feed?

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I think so yeah

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Awesome! I’m weirdly partial to my podcast app and always have issues with the Substack audio/video on my phone.

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"One of progressives’ worst ideas ..."

That's a high bar.

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So nothing this week about Musk and his cronies seizing the office of management and budget?

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Wait for tomorrow!

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Actually make that the day after tomorrow. Today I'm going to write about tariffs.

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Maybe I’m in the minority of people in terms of aesthetics who prefer new and shiny buildings over the old and withering buildings in Paris, with exception of tourist attractions. I thought even the Eiffel Tower looked ugly during the day and only looks nice at night when it’s lit up.

I’m glad that the study you linked to makes the distinction between the reason for fertility rates falling in the past (more women going to college, entering the workforce, delaying marriage and kids, etc.) and the present (fewer couplings). There’s a lot of misinformation going around on X about how the current issue explains everything. Obviously that’s not true for the developing world where the previous dynamic is still playing out more than fewer couplings.

One of the failings of the federal education policy was to not penalize universities (by withholding or reducing funding) for not increasing student intake based on student population growth. If elite colleges want to remain more exclusive based on tuition and private donations, that’s their choice but they should not receive public funding.

I hope you’re right about solar and the momentum from the last few years carries it forward in the next few years in spite of an unsupportive administration.

Just like you, I don’t see any hopeful signs that the progressives (who’ve hijacked the term liberal without actually being so) will reform themselves in the near future. The incentive to let Trump overreach and win by default when the anti-incumbency factor kicks in is too great. Progressives still don’t feel that they’re wrong because they don’t see the distinction between influencing the Biden administration to enact their far left policies by proxy (and failing) and one of their own doing it directly. I was hoping for some change but reports from the DNC event yesterday killed those expectations. These are completely out of touch and unserious people living in their own bubbles. There’s no sane, rational party in the US at this time.

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All very interesting stuff!

My anecdotal observation on the supposed “relationship recession” from Europe: That study claims non college educated women dont want to marry non college educated men because of income.

What I see around me living for a long time in a European city is more and more (single?) women compared to men. Maybe more women move to the city (for education but also work in care or services) while more men stay back in the countryside. And this might make it harder to meet up.

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Regarding AI teams - I think it's going to happen where humans have jobs managed by AI - will be sort of like a reverse Mechanical Turk (I can't be the first person with this observation).

The AI team will be like, *sigh* I can't quite go out into the world and gather this data, let's hire a human in meat space for us. These jobs may pay quite well, depending on the supporting intelligence required to do the task.

There is also Noah's previous post about humans can still work via comparative advantage as AIs are compute constrained.

Maybe our AI managers will be great! Having a shitty manager sucks, and if you can have every manager be like the best manager you ever had in terms of being a good communicator, looking out for your personal development etc, I dunno, maybe it will be less weird that it sounds?

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>One chief way that Europeans cope with the fact that Americans are much much richer than them

I didn't know that wanting to live in a society with less crime, less inequality, more affordable higher education is coping.

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6dEdited

I know for the Krugman one, I managed to figure out how to get a subscription into my podcast app, to listen to the recording as audio. I also have subs in there for Volts, Politix, and Slow Boring (which recently had an interview with Ritchie Torres)...

I can't seem to find where to do that for Noahpinion, though. Is the audio of this not posted? Or only posted from Patrick Collison's page?

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The long-term impact of AI is going to be the AIs wiping out humanity and then turning the universe into molecule-sized paperclips or something equally stupid and pointless. :/

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Pointless to us!

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Indeed. An ASI with a goal chosen at random from all of the goals it could possibly have is almost certainly going to end up with a pretty terrible goal. We all know that a *human* wanting something isn't enough to make it good, and the same is true for artificial superintelligence.

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On 5. How to make sure the poor get a good education: AI being tried in Nigeria, conclusions may be a bit premature. "The control group seems to have received neither the AI NOR the after-school tutoring, which would make this just as much an experiment on the efficacy of after-school tutoring as the efficacy of AI." waiting to know more !

see https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dan-meyer-02922a109_the-ai-guys-got-very-excited-last-week-about-activity-7288628027930947585-evfV?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

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A couple things happen on the way to the Dwarkesh vision of self-replicating, evolving and growing "firms" of limitless capacity and presumably voracious appetite for consuming the financial assets of the world and all the people in it. One is obviously mass unemployment in the sub-C-suite (firing 30,000 "middle managers" to replace them with CEO-AIs, etc).

But I suspect another is the widespread questioning about the distributional justice of these arrangements. At some level, we only tolerate the vast disparity in income and wealth distribution between low-level workers and tech CEOs, investors, etc. because we are native meritocrats -- we believe they have "earned" these superior rewards because they are somehow "better", whether smarter or harder-working or more creative, etc. But I think this tolerance of the mal-distribution breaks down when it becomes purely a function of copying data onto chips.

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