Intriguing Similarities.
No damping effect.
“It’s the first thing I read every morning.“ — Rob Manfred, Commissioner, MLB.
1. Declining birth rates around the world have gotten many people worried about the economic impact, with predictions of slower growth and less innovation. But a new paper finds that the opposite may be true. Aging and shrinking populations have historically raised an economy’s output per worker and had no damping effect on overall gross domestic product, according to a new study by Daron Acemoglu — who won the Nobel economics prize in 2024 — David Autor, Keelan Beirne and Andrew Scott. It finds that workers and companies turn to technology to augment a reduced labor force, raising the productivity of each worker. “Our findings challenge the prevailing pessimism: lower birth rates, and the aging and shrinking populations they have produced, have raised rather than lowered GDP per ‘worker,’” the authors write in a paper distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research. That gain “has been large enough to fully offset the negative effect of population decline, leaving aggregate GDP broadly unaffected.” (Sources: bloomberg.com, nber.org. We noted the paper in a separate post yesterday.)
2. In March 2020, fears about unemployment spread evenly across the American workforce. Every income bracket, every education level, and every age group expected the same collapse. The pandemic made almost no one feel safe. Unemployment expectations have climbed again, but this time the fear is concentrated among educated, higher-income Americans, the group that has historically felt most insulated from it. This shift amounts to a kind of class shock, hitting millions of workers who never expected to feel this exposed. (Source: qz.com)
3. Anthropic said Monday that it has identified a small internal workspace Claude uses to hold and manipulate ideas without putting them into words—a structure the company says bears intriguing similarities to how humans consciously access thoughts. Anthropic hasn’t shown that Claude feels or experiences anything. But it has found a surprisingly human-like division between information used for deliberate reasoning and the far larger volume of automatic computation occurring beneath it—giving fresh ammunition to the debate over what would count as machine consciousness. (Sources: axios.com, claude.ai)
4. Javier Blas:
What I am sure of is that whatever Beijing does next could determine the oil price for years. If it buys again with gusto, prices will probably rise toward $80 a barrel. If it doesn’t, the current mini-glut in the market could become a structural change, keeping prices lower later in 2026 and 2027, possibly in the $60-$65 range.
