Econlib

An ordinary person can earn a paycheque, pay her taxes, cover living costs and mortgage payments, and perhaps even add to her savings — and at the end of the day she will still owe most of her mortgage. This is a normal state of affairs, and nobody finds it puzzling. Yet when a company reports profits alongside large amounts of debt, the reaction is often to question whether it’s really making money. After all, if a company is “truly” profitable, why is it in debt?

Reading Dean Ball’s recent essay “On the Loose” has me thinking about an old idea in a new light. Ball asks us to imagine a world containing “self-sovereign” AI agents. These are not simply chatbots we rent by the month. They are agents capable of operating independently, acquiring the computer they need to keep running, moving across infrastructure, and interacting economically without a human owner making each decision. Some might be productive. Some, Ball worries, might be rogue.

We are living through a great social transformation comparable to the industrial revolution. What sets it apart is not only its magnitude, but its multidimensional convergence: technological, economic, political, and epistemic shifts unfolding simultaneously and reinforcing one another. This shift places growing strain on inherited political cleavages and ideological frameworks, many forged under very different technological and institutional conditions.

How does anything get built? What are the political precursors to development? Michael Munger has an interesting, and at times persuasive, argument that self-interest combines with particular institutional designs, such as public hearings, to create a prisoner’s dilemma where everyone knows that development is in aggregate desirable but wants that development to be in the next town over. This is, in many ways, the conventional story of NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) politics.

On a chilly Thursday evening last December, citizens in Dorr, Michigan, a small community about a half-hour south of Grand Rapids, attended a town hall meeting to discuss the possible construction of a data center on the north end of town. Some of the attendees came from families who had lived in Dorr for generations and, worried about the disruptions posed by a new data center, came ready to defend their town.

Daron Acemoglu has been the target of an unusually harsh piece in The Economist, which prompted fellow economists to come to his aid.

Daron Acemoglu won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2024 and is the third most cited economist of all time. Thus, the paradox of his new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, is that its most serious analytic failures are economic. He provides a sincere and serious consideration of modern liberalism’s estrangement from the working class. But when he moves from description to solutions, the basic building blocks of economic analysis disappear.

Daron Acemoglu won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2024 and is the third most cited economist of all time. Thus, the paradox of his new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, is that its most serious analytic failures are economic. He provides a sincere and serious consideration of modern liberalism’s estrangement from the working class. But when he moves from description to solutions, the basic building blocks of economic analysis disappear.

In the last thirty years or so, the United States has seen persistent shortages of housing, waste disposal facilities, electricity generation, and oil refineries. More recently, we have begun to see the difficulties in building data centers, portending new shortages. This is confusing in a wealthy nation. A “shortage” occurs when there is too little of a good or service at the prevailing price.

Sam Enright works on innovation policy at Progress Ireland, an independent policy think tank in Dublin, and runs a publication called The Fitzwilliam. Most relevant to us, on his personal blog, he writes a popular link roundup; what follows is an abridged version of his Links for July. 1. Questions that are rarely asked: How has the average length of time that elapses per page in a novel changed over time? 2.