Noah Smith ๐๐บ๐ธ๐บ๐ฆ๐น๐ผ
@Noahpinion
Writes about economics, posts about rabbits.
For serious opinions/analysis, read my blog:
1.8K Following 954.4K Followers
The bull case for Anthropic is that intelligence is such a general technology that producing it allows you to control all other technologies โ that by having the smartest AI model, Anthropic basically has the One Ring to Rule Them All.
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In the end, AI cyber defense will probably win out against AI hacking.
But for AI bioterror, the calculus is reversed. Human bodies can't be patched like code. And even a short period of catastrophic chaos in bio could mean we all die.
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Black October shows that "pacing the frontier" is just not going to happen anytime soon. The AI arms race between the U.S. and China just went from hypothetical national posturing to a matter of immediate economic survival.
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Being one of the last "AI is fake" holdouts must be so blissful. You just live in a little cloud of your own fantasies.
Everything bad in American society, culture, and politics is partly a Russian op
Huge drop in Google searches for various health disinformation topics following the Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centers.
It makes you wonder how much of the โturbo cancer, ivermectinโ nonsense is really fueled by Russian bots, & how many Americans theyโve killedโฆ
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Hell yeah
The latest issue of Brutus, a Japanese style magazine, is devoted to dogs. Features include menswear writer @wdavidmarx and his dog, tips on coordinating outfits with your dog, and guides to Japanโs best dog-friendly restaurants and parks.
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Huge congratulations to Bob Hall and Mike Woodfordโ this prize was long overdue for their incredibly important and influential work in macroeconomics!
Economics Nobel: Bob Hall and Mike Woodford, congratulations!
Iโve always been a huge fan of both. Not an obvious matchup, but both richly deserved.
There were screams of joy in the Nakamura-Steinsson household this morning when we saw this news!
This yearโs prize in economic sciences uses microfoundations to deliver macro insights.
Traditional Keynesian models built upon statistical and historical relationships between macroeconomic variables. The New Keynesian models are based on microfoundations, decisions that are made by individuals and businesses.
The 2026 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded to Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford โfor microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation.โ
#NobelPrize#
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My thoughts on the much-deserving Michael Woodford:
This Hall & Jones paper is a favorite. People want to spend more on healthcare as they get richer. We should expect that healthcare as a percentage of spending should continue to increase as AI gets better. A year of life is a lot more valuable than a marginal unit of material consumption.
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2026 economic sciences laureate Michael Woodfordโs economic model has made it possible to respond to supply shocks more effectively.
Various types of shocks can disrupt the balance between supply and demand. A negative supply shock could be a commodity shortage, while a positive supply shock could be a technological breakthrough that makes the production of large volumes cheaper and easier. A positive demand shock could be good news about the future that increases householdsโ consumption, and a negative one the opposite news. If the balance is disrupted, it can be reset using a stabilisation policy that reduces demand (to the left) or increases it (to the right).
#NobelPrize#
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How wonderful! A Nobel prize for research that has transformed the practice of macro policy in the world. Congratulations to Bob Hall and Mike Woodford. My Ph.D. class at Princeton got the first preview of Mike's 2003 Nobel winning textbook when Mike taught us the unpublished chapters back in 1996. What a privilege!
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To give you a sense of how badass Bob Hall is, he won a Nobel for his 2nd and 6th most cited papers.
Hall and Jones?
Hall and Jorgenson?
The topic of the day has been the strikes on Yandex data centers and whether they affect the Russian bot/troll army.
There have been some initial research done on this, and the most interesting finding comes from Reddit: after the strikes, many US-related subreddits lost a lot of traffic. Same happened in German and Irish subreddits.
As most of you know, Reddit is one of the most popular sources of information for LLMs, and I have zero doubt that Russians are actively trying to steer conversations across the platform to favor their narratives.
Full analysis and methodology here:
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2026 economic sciences laureate Robert E. Hallโs hypothesis was that changes in consumption could not be predicted because they depend on new โ and thus unpredictable โ information.
Hall presented his results in an article in 1978, which was something of a eureka moment for research. His work became key to the development of modern research on consumption.
#NobelPrize#
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I woke up early this morning โ though perhaps not as early as Bob Hall & Mike Woodfordโso that I could explain to the historical context of their Nobel, the work that won the prize, their contributions to the world, and who they are.
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40 years ago, the legendary Frank Fisher told me (and the rest of our class in the MIT PhD program) that Bob Hall was the most brilliant economist that he'd ever worked with.
It took too long, but I'm glad to see the @NobelPrize Committee recognize what the rest of the field has long known.ย
Congrats, to Bob Hall
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America shouldโve blown up Russian data centers ages ago. Their relentless meddling in our elections made them a valid target long before they invaded Ukraine
