Balaji: “The Overton Window has been smashed. If everything is now legal, many startups will try raising funds by issuing tokens as explicit cryptoequity. As context, the SEC distorted the market for the last decade by forcing founders to obscure the obvious analogy between tokens and equity. But there is nothing *morally* wrong with moving equity from spreadsheets and NASDAQs to blockchains. Indeed, from a *technical* perspective it’s far better to represent equities onchain. You can hold them in a wallet, price them with an API call, and track them on an explorer. You can also easily issue dividends, execute buybacks, and manage vesting schedules.”
WSJ: ““We’re entering a new age of conquest,” said Sumantra Maitra, director of research at the American Ideas Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. “Great powers are the ones calling the shots again. Some countries have realized it early, and some have not, but they will soon too.” The current revival of imperialist thinking represents an abrupt reversal of the post-Cold War order of the last three decades. After the fall of the Soviet Union, it seemed possible that humanity could finally learn to live by a set of universally recognized rules, with a few nasty exceptions on the periphery. Today the concept of a rules-based international order looks more and more utopian—and the survival of the United Nations increasingly uncertain.”
Donald Boudreaux: “A business has no standard of living; it’s a tool for transforming inputs into outputs in order to raise its owners’ standard of living by increasing their ability to consume. The people of a county, in contrast to a business, do have a standard of living, and it rises as their access to goods and services for their consumption rises. America succeeds economically only insofar as her people’s standard of living rises – that is, only insofar as the value of the goods and services that we receive from those with whom we trade, domestically and abroad, is greater than the value of the goods and services that we give in exchange. Because protectionists like Trump mistakenly think of America as a business, they try to run it in a way that we sell as much as possible to foreigners while receiving in exchange as little as possible. These protectionists don’t see that by thereby artificially reducing our access to goods and services they reduce our standard of living and make our economy less successful.”
McKinsey: “Every company discovered gen AI at the same time—early 2023. The leaders set up the chairperson’s task force; prioritized a set of use cases; developed policies; and ran a number of pilots. Many are still steering these big portfolios of pilots. But those making money stopped this “pilot purgatory” mid-year, realizing that gen AI impacts every aspect of the organization. They changed from approaching gen AI “use case by use case.” Instead, they picked a business domain to focus on, approached it as a business problem, identified a financial target to deliver against, created reusable technology, and then spread that to other areas in the organization. We saw gen AI applied most often to four areas: customer journeys; the coding and engineering of software; the creation of “concision engines” to process and assemble content; and the powering of virtual knowledge experts.”
Economic Strategy Group: “From 1880 to 1960, workers moved out of agriculture jobs. In 1880, 41 percent of all workers in the US economy were employed as farmers or farm laborers. This share fell consistently by 4 percentage points per decade, and by 1960 only 6 percent of US employment was in agriculture. From 1960 to 1980, jobs moved from the factory to the office. The share of workers employed in blue-collar jobs like manual labor, construction, production and manufacturing, transportation, and maintenance and repair remained relatively constant at 40 percent from 1880 to 1960, then fell ten percentage points by 1980. It has experienced a slower decline since, reaching 20 percent by 2010..With respect to white collar-jobs, AI will contribute to the ongoing decline in back-office administrative jobs and rise in management and business operations occupations. As AI technology improves, innovations like pricing algorithms and automated scheduling may lead to declining employment in sales and administrative-support occupations. On the other hand, while AI helps with certain tasks of professional and managerial workers, the demand for good ideas and cogent analysis of complex counterfactual thought experiments may be nearly unlimited. In this way, at least in the near term, AI is more likely to ratchet up firms’ expectations of knowledge workers than it is to replace them.”
