“expected to contain new rules around the use of artificial intelligence, such as licensing for AI training”

Handed a task to an undergraduate intern that is pretty difficult, but I’m trusting her to use AI to figure it out. AI has turned undergraduate RAs into something more like PhD RAs.

polymers in general rock

If you have used Claude Code or similar for research, I'd love to pick your brain on two issues I have been wondering about:
- Data confidentiality: what kind of data do you give it access to?

- Data security: how do you deal with the risk that the agent does something stupid with your data?

Summary of You Wouldn’t Steal a Car I have a new working paper with Bart Wilson titled: “You Wouldn’t Steal a Car: Moral Intuition for Intellectual Property”  This quote from the introduction explains the title…

Online summary: economistwritingeveryday.com/2026/01/03/s...

Our moral intuitions about “theft” are grounded in rivalry and perceived harm, not legal definitions.
This helps explain why digital piracy remains morally contested and why it is more difficult to enforce intellectual property laws.

They articulate the positive-sum logic of zero-marginal-cost copying. For example, … farmer Almond reasons, “ok so disks cant be stolen so everyone take copies,” explicitly rejecting the application of “stolen” to discs.

Participants never instruct one another to stop taking disc copies, yet they frequently urge others to stop taking seeds. The objection targets the taking away of rivalrous goods. Player Almond explains, “cuz if u give a disc u still keep it."

To test the moral intuition for taking ideas, we create an environment where people can take from each other and we study their freeform chat. The people in the game each control a round avatar in a virtual environment.

In our experiment, participants produce:
🌱 Seeds (rivalrous: if I take yours, you lose it)
💿 Discs (nonrivalrous: zero marginal cost copies, like digital files)
Some sessions allow unauthorized taking. Check out the manuscript for more details on the environment.

In the early 2000s the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) released an anti-piracy trailer. Media companies tried to create a moral equivalency between taking physical goods and pirating digital goods.

🚨New paper: You Wouldn’t Steal a Car: Moral Intuition for Intellectual Property
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Updated List of Top posts for 2025 In August, I listed the Top EWED Posts of 2025.  Here are a few more highlights. This list is roughly based on web traffic, starting with the highest number of views for 2025, since the A…

economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/12/13/u...

Maybe the mirror gives people the idea

Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things

Really grateful to @aeacswep.bsky.social for organising a mentoring workshop ahead of #SEA2025
Thank you so much for the opportunity and building a community of early career economists! Highly recommend checking CSWEP events

Looking for something to do tomorrow at 8am at #SEA2025?? I’m presenting my JMP tomorrow in Meeting Room 9!

End Stage Enshittification: Poop AI is Here Chat GPT, why is my stool loose?

Catching up on AI pieces from the past couple of weeks.

Recommendations:

1. End Stage Enshittification awardsforgoodboys.substack.com/p/end-stage-...

2. AI Psychosis investigation from A More Perfect Union www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkGk...

3. Open AI compute costs www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/

What’s the Best Major to Prepare for Law School? First, Pre-law literally has the word ‘law’ in the name and is marketed as preparation for law school. However, it is the undergraduate major associated with the lowest paid lawyers. For that matte…

@zacharybartsch.bsky.social wrote an article for econ profs: economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/09/19/w...

#Econsky check the Economics Department at the University of Arkansas is hiring two open-rank Economics professors, including an opening in public economics and public policy.

Public Economics/Public Policy:
lnkd.in/eQTEgPM9

Macroeconomics:
lnkd.in/ewxxNSh8

Teaching Business Statistics Graphs with Chart Crimes Many people take a basic statistics course in college. Those course usually include an overview of standard graphs and best practices for visualizing data. To keep that section from getting boring …

For friends who teach statistics economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/09/06/t...

It’s 2050 and a teen girl is torrenting a .tar.gz file of all the consciousnesses of all the tech bros who uploaded themselves into the cloud in a bid for immortality and modding them into The Sims 4

This is why total productivity isn’t rising.

Top EWED Posts of 2025 These are notable posts from 2025, roughly presented in descending order, starting with the post that got the most views. Is there a competitive threat to the NBA?  Mike Makowsky wrote, “… le…

Top posts from our blog so far in 2025 @mikemakowsky.bsky.social economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/08/09/t...

Do you also fill out the forms for their summer camps?

"Analyses have also found that some 60% of Google searches are now 'zero-click,' ending without the user visiting a single link."

America’s Never-Ending Battle Against Flesh-Eating Worms Inside the U.S. and Panama’s long-running collaboration to rid an entire continent of a deadly disease

A few years ago, I went to Panama to see the "sterile fly barrier" that keeps a flesh-eating parasite out of the U.S.

It's one of the wildest things I've ever written about it...

www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

This was just posted by @tbretc.bsky.social on another platform. The Chicago Sun-Times obviously gets ChatGPT to write a ‘summer reads’ feature almost entirely made up of real authors but completely fake books. What are we coming to?

At the library in Telluride, Colorado

a substantial part of Middlemarch is about Dorothea's realization that the man she has married in the belief that he is a genius through his 'Key to All Mythologies' has wasted his life on a futile quest because he doesn't read German and is entirely unaware of modern scholarly work.