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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
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
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
Call Center Jobs Are Declining, but 14,000 Calls Show Humans Still Outperform AI
Bold Agent Kit analyzes roughly 14,000 inbound calls and finds human receptionists delivered about four times stronger intake outcomes than AI voice agents on the metrics they tracked, even as call-center employment trends down—arguing deployment quality still matters more than raw automation.
7 min · 1,723 words
Our World in Data's Hannah Ritchie shows that while global electricity generation per person has grown by more than 50% this century, the UK's peaked in 2003 and has fallen by over a third, explaining the roles of deindustrialization and energy-efficiency gains such as LED lighting and appliance standards.
1 min · 208 words
Epoch AI finds the cost of a given level of AI performance has fallen about 47% per quarter since 2023—roughly 13× per year—faster than DNA sequencing, compute, batteries, or electricity, across math, science, and skill-game benchmarks.
40 min · 9,215 words
The Economics of Scientific Publishing
NYU Stern’s Vishal Singh maps scholarly publishing economics across 13 years and 4.2M articles a year: unpaid manuscripts and peer review, margins above Apple’s, and why third-party intermediaries prove so hard to dislodge.
16 min · 3,775 words
The Economics of Open-Weight Inference
How open-weight demand can support the useful life of NVIDIA GPU families. Selected figures and tables, limitations, and the full PDF.
9 min · 1,996 words
Companies hire more after AI adoption
Ramp lead economist Ara Kharazian summarizes the Ramp Economics Lab and Revelio Labs working paper on 21,000+ US firms: heavy AI adopters grew headcount about 10% and entry-level headcount 12% in the two years after adoption, low-intensity adopters saw no significant change, and gains were uneven across firms.
5 min · 1,148 words