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Jeff Atwood uses the scrolling wealth-inequality graph at dreamagainusa.org to argue that extreme wealth concentration in America is almost impossible to grasp until you experience its scale, and asks whether reaching the so-called top is worth the suffering built into the system for everyone else.
4 min · 809 words
OpenAI and Anthropic cut their LLM prices by up to 80% within a few months. Why?
Max Woolf walks through a timeline of OpenAI and Anthropic model launches since June 2026, showing input, output and cache prices falling by up to 80%, and weighs possible reasons including competition from open-weight models, compute capacity and upcoming IPOs, concluding that cheaper LLMs are good for users.
11 min · 2,568 words
Venkatesh Rao, reading Joyce Appleby's history of capitalism, argues that today's AI panic mirrors early mercantilist zero-sum thinking: fears of surplus intelligence and useless minds resemble old fears about trade and idle labor, while a 'cognitive capitalist' view sees intelligence creating new demand and new freedom for minds.
15 min · 3,546 words
Elon Musk Just Gave Europe a Reason to Replace American Technology
Writing from London, Steve Blank argues that the reported throttling of Starshield to Ukraine, apparently ordered by Elon Musk, has convinced European policymakers that U.S. technology carries a kill-switch risk, and that AI now makes building sovereign alternatives to American software feasible, at a long-term cost to U.S. companies.
3 min · 624 words
OpenAI and Anthropic Wanted to Replace Engineers. Instead, They Shot Their Own Customers.
Techbro Nerd argues that by selling AI coding agents, OpenAI and Anthropic let anyone clone established software, using Adobe versus the vibe-coded ArtCraft as the example, which erodes the enterprise software customers the labs depend on and drives the price of their own product toward zero.
6 min · 1,409 words
Stella Wilson argues France's rising sovereign bond yields and fiscal deadlock can be explained by her SSRN paper with Johan Båge, "Pinning the Wage to Scarcity and Technology", which separates returns from real growth from returns on scarcity, and makes the case for land value taxation.
2 min · 415 words
Local Democracy’s Business Model is Broken
Jeff Fong argues that US local governments, which control zoning, permitting, and building codes, are funded in ways that reward restricting growth, and that land value return would realign their incentives toward abundance.
14 min · 3,316 words
US inequality is getting worse in ways you might not expect
Markus Schneider explains why US wealth inequality is accelerating, from decades of less progressive taxes and 2025 tax cuts for the wealthy to lapsed ACA subsidies, energy price spikes and tariffs that hit low- and middle-income households hardest, arguing these are policy choices rather than inexorable forces.
5 min · 1,129 words
To Make, or to Buy: The Economics of Decision Models
Parth Parikh explores the economics of decision models like Jev, whose outputs are choices, scores or abstentions rather than free text, formalizes decision hierarchies using Chow's reject rule to decide when a cheap model should defer to a costlier one, and speculates on multimodal and on-device uses.
16 min · 3,592 words
How the Fed Is Quietly Inflating the AI Bubble While Hiking Your Electric Bill
Matt Stoller argues that Federal Reserve rate hikes raise electricity bills, property taxes, mortgage and auto costs and the price of working capital while favouring cash-rich AI giants, and that it is time to drop illusions about the central bank as the only answer to inflation.
8 min · 1,887 words
Anthropic economists compare survey answers from US adults and Anthropic staff on how AI will reshape the economy. Both expect rapid progress, but staff expect much more: 91% versus 39% expect a Nobel-level AI discovery by 2030, and over half of staff versus 5% of US workers expect AI to do at least 80% of their own work by then.
19 min · 4,297 words
How employment is changing at Anthropic
Anthropic economists study how AI has restructured work inside Anthropic: hiring shifted away from junior technical roles as AI agent hours grew to outnumber employees six to one by August, output per person rose as staff adopted new tools, and human attention became the bottleneck. The paper ends with lessons for other employers.
23 min · 5,401 words
Working at the frontier shapes expectations for the future
Anthropic introduces two Oct 16 reports: how AI is changing hiring and work inside Anthropic (fewer junior hires, agents outworking employees, human attention as the bottleneck), and a survey showing staff expect far faster AI progress than US adults while reasoning about AI and jobs in a similar way.
2 min · 559 words
How Block Blast harvests its players for ad money
Ayo Omolewa's technical teardown of Block Blast: decompiling the Android app shows most game logic arrives as server-selected, encrypted JavaScript 'traits', with remote rules deciding pieces, scores and ads, including one that waits for an expensive ad before dealing an unplaceable hand. Includes how to reproduce the findings.
19 min · 4,462 words
Apocalypse Now and ThenArtificial intelligence is capitalism’s final destination
Arundhati Roy’s Equator essay argues that AI is not a neutral tool but capitalism’s accelerating endgame—and calls for political resistance rather than resigned inevitability.
22 min · 4,980 words
Cory Doctorow explains how Amazon's junk fees and most-favored-nation pricing rules raise prices for shoppers everywhere, not just on Amazon, and argues Expedia has done the same thing to hotel rooms, making travel more expensive for everyone through monopoly intermediaries.
6 min · 1,478 words
David Rosenthal tests the popular analogy between today's AI data-center buildout and the dot-com era's dark fiber. He argues it is flawed: GPUs depreciate exponentially as each generation improves power efficiency, so idle capacity will not become cheap useful infrastructure the way fiber did, and he compares Nvidia's position with Sun Microsystems after the dot-com bust.
13 min · 2,890 words
It Ain't AGI Until H100s Go for $30 an Hour
October 15, 2026 Kyle Corbitt with Claude Opus Greg Brockman claimed that GPT-6 Astra marks the start of the “AGI era.” We may be in the AGI era, but if AGI means an agent that can “outperform humans at most economically valuable work” it isn’t here yet. You’ll know it is when the price of AI compute jumps 10x from where it is now.
5 min · 1,095 words
Steering AI Beyond AutomationA Research Agenda and Plan for Action
Stanford economist Gabriel Unger and Princeton's Arvind Narayanan argue AI need not be mainly about automating human labor. They set out four research problems for collaborative agents, explain why the automation agenda dominates computer science culture, survey the economics and policy debate, and propose a bottom-up, market-driven path plus targeted policies to steer AI toward augmenting workers.
25 min · 5,650 words
The Economic Complexity of the Western Roman Empire
Michele Coscia explains how he and co-authors inferred the economic complexity of the Western Roman Empire from occupations recorded in Latin inscriptions (the LIST dataset), correcting for status and gender biases. Latium scored highest, and Roman-era complexity for modern-country territories correlates significantly with present-day Economic Complexity Index values.
4 min · 935 words