Donald Boudreaux: “It’s no astonishing coincidence that Wealth of Nations appeared in the same year as America’s Declaration of Independence,
Thomas Jefferson’s manifesto, which Milton and Rose Friedman described as
“the political twin of Smith’s economics” (1989). Both works are products of the liberalism that was just then beginning to free humankind from its ages-old self-imprisonment within an ideology that treats most individuals as inferior to the nobility, treats commerce with contempt, and treats innovations that threaten traditional economic arrangements as intolerable. The fruits of Smith’s and Jefferson’s quills not only reflected the liberalism of the age; they also nourished that liberalism. Indeed, perhaps no other single work—except maybe John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government—has done as much as have Wealth of Nations and the Declaration to advance the cause of liberalism.”
Tyler Cowen book “The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution”: “Tyler traces the birth, triumph, and quiet decline of marginalism — the idea that made modern economics possible. Beginning with the 1871 Marginal Revolution and ending with the AI tools transforming research today, this is a book about how ideas are born, why they take so long to arrive, and what happens when machines begin to see around corners that humans cannot.”
WSJ: “The question isn’t whether AI is cognitively dangerous, the question is whether you’re using it as a crutch or as a coach. Memory consolidates through a process called elaborative encoding. The deeper and more actively you process information, the stronger the trace. Shallow engagement (skimming, passively consuming, letting AI summarize for you) leaves faint impressions. Active struggle—retrieving, connecting, questioning—builds durable knowledge. This is sometimes called the “desirable difficulty” principle, and it’s one of the most robust findings in cognitive psychology. Easy learning is often the least sticky. Struggle is what makes knowledge hold. AI, when used badly, is a desirable-difficulty machine running in reverse. It removes friction, smooths edges, and hands you the answer before you’ve had a chance to reach for it yourself. Every time you ask it to summarize a book you haven’t read, recall a fact you could have retrieved yourself, or draft a thought you were about to form, you’ve skipped a cognitive rep.”
FT: “Private credit is distinct from the public market credit plotted out in our treemap. Both are credit, but the public bit is typically tradeable bonds that pay fixed interest rates. That’s all the red stuff in the chart. Meanwhile private credit doesn’t trade (at least not much), usually pays a floating rate — say, 5 percentage points above benchmark interest rates — and is covered in stickers saying how senior it is in the borrower’s capital structure. In other words, it ranks more highly if the borrower collapses. It might even have some bespoke terms and conditions attached to protect lenders, and include specific ring-fenced assets supposedly backing the loan.”
