Tyler Cowen
FollowSaturday assorted links
1. How Roman concrete lasted for so long. 2. All restaurants in Germany are worthy of five stars? 3. They are making improvements to Refine. 4. New limits on graduate student visas?
The future belongs to AI maniacs
That is the theme of my latest Free Press column, excerpt: An AI maniac is someone who is obsessed with working with the latest AI models.
Cataloging Growth: A Re-Evaluation of 1900–1990
From Verónica Bäcker-Peral and Benjamin Wittenbrink of MIT: Measuring real GDP growth requires distinguishing changes in prices from changes in product quality and composition, yet systematic quality…
Friday assorted links
1. David Wallace-Wells on the status of reading (NYT). 2. Very good, very positive Kimi ad. 3. Balaji update. 4. An eighth-century Mayan mathematician. 5. Yet another balloon. 6.
Why crime will decline in (most of) Brazil
The system, introduced in 2024, uses facial recognition to spot people wanted by police on São Paulo’s streets. It issues alerts and officers are dispatched to pick them up.
Thursday assorted links
1. On the decline of sumptuousness in cinema, part II. 2. Funding canonical visions. 3. Thiel and Wolfe on the Pope and the Antichrist. 4. Claims about blue eyes. 5.
Governing agentic AI
From a new paper by Shruti Rajagopalan: AI agents now transact, publish, and act on external systems without contemporaneous human approval, creating new regulatory challenges.
Spreading AI to the rest of the world
Another job we’ll have, I call this imperialism, but I mean that in a value neutral way. But AI comes to different parts of the world at different speeds.
My excellent Conversation with Chase Koch
Here is the audio, video, and transcript.
Interview with Joel Mokyr: Big Topics in Long-Run Growth - Conversable Economist
Tyler Cowen serves as interlocutor in "Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth" (Conversations with Tyler, July 8, 2026).