Jardín

State capacity – the ability to collect taxes, enforce law and order, and implement government policies – is accorded an important role in explaining economi...

VDEV 71 - How Developmental States really work: Evidence from RwandaPresenter: James Robinson (University of Chicago)Co-authors: Leander Heldring and Bohan Y...

https://www.nber.org/conferences/advancing-economic-measurement-fall-2025Moderator: Constance Hunter, Economic Intelligence UnitPresented by: Nikki Czaplicki...

https://www.nber.org/conferences/advancing-economic-measurement-fall-2025Moderator: Matthew Shapiro, University of Michigan and NBERPresented by: Laurence Ba...

In this special end-of-year episode, the tables are turned: I’m the guest, and I’m interviewed by Zac Gross — an Australian macroeconomist and long-time listener of the show. We reflect on what I learned on the podcast in 2025 and what I changed my mind about. We also discuss the behind-the-scenes work of running the show, and my plans for 2026. Sponsors Vanta: helps businesses automate security and compliance needs. For a limited time, get one thousand dollars off Vanta at vanta.com/joe. Use the discount code "JOE". To sponsor a future episode, go to https://josephnoelwalker.com/sponsor/

In this final installment of our miniseries on Soviet economists and thinkers, Adam and Cameron discuss the ideas of Joseph Stalin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“” is published by Steve Yegge.

How to win the war for the soul of the internet, and build the Web We Want.

Map revealing which places in Spain offer the best opportunities for escaping poverty, according to data that follow trajectories from childhood onwards.

I am a huge fan of gistpreview.github.io, the site by Leon Huang that lets you append ?GIST_id to see a browser-rendered version of an HTML page that you have saved …

Along with other visual content, data visualizations are increasingly used within online discourse, including political communication. Though often considered to be ''objective'', data visualizations can also be created and/or appropriated to mislead. ...

César Hidalgo has spent years trying to answer a deceptively simple question: What is knowledge, and why is it so hard to move around?We all have this intuition that knowledge is just... information. Write it down in a book, upload it to GitHub, train an AI on it—done. But César argues that's completely wrong. Knowledge isn't a thing you can copy and paste. It's more like a living organism that needs the right environment, the right people, and constant exercise to survive.Guest: César Hidalgo, Director of the Center for Collective Learning1. Knowledge Follows Laws (Like Physics)2. You Can't Download Expertise3. Why Big Companies Fail to Adapt4. The "Infinite Alphabet" of EconomiesIf you think AI can just "copy" human knowledge, or that development is just about throwing money at poor countries, or that writing things down preserves them forever—this conversation will change your mind. Knowledge is fragile, specific, and collective. It decays fast if you don't use it. The Infinite Alphabet [César A. Hidalgo]https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/458054/the-infinite-alphabet-by-hidalgo-cesar-a/9780241655672https://x.com/cesifotiRescript link. https://app.rescript.info/public/share/eaBHbEo9xamwbwpxzcVVm4NQjMh7lsOQKeWwNxmw0JQ---TIMESTAMPS:00:00:00 The Three Laws of Knowledge00:02:28 Rival vs. Non-Rival: The Economics of Ideas00:05:43 Why You Can't Just 'Download' Knowledge00:08:11 The Detective Novel Analogy00:11:54 Collective Learning & Organizational Networks00:16:27 Architectural Innovation: Amazon vs. Barnes & Noble00:19:15 The First Law: Learning Curves00:23:05 The Samuel Slater Story: Treason & Memory00:28:31 Physics of Knowledge: Joule's Cannon00:32:33 Extensive vs. Intensive Properties00:35:45 Knowledge Decay: Ise Temple & Polaroid00:41:20 Absorptive Capacity: Sony & Donetsk00:47:08 Disruptive Innovation & S-Curves00:51:23 Team Size & The Cost of Innovation00:57:13 Geography of Knowledge: Vespa's Origin01:04:34 Migration, Diversity & 'Planet China'01:12:02 Institutions vs. Knowledge: The China Story01:21:27 Economic Complexity & The Infinite Alphabet01:32:27 Do LLMs Have Knowledge?---REFERENCES:Book:[00:47:45] The Innovator's Dilemma (Christensen)https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Change-Business/dp/0062060244[00:55:15] Why Greatness Cannot Be Plannedhttps://amazon.com/dp/3319155237[01:35:00] Why Information Growshttps://amazon.com/dp/0465048994Paper:[00:03:15] Endogenous Technological Change (Romer, 1990)https://web.stanford.edu/~klenow/Romer_1990.pdf[00:03:30] A Model of Growth Through Creative Destruction (Aghion & Howitt, 1992)https://dash.harvard.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/7312037d-2b2d-6bd4-e053-0100007fdf3b/content[00:14:55] Organizational Learning: From Experience to Knowledge (Argote & Miron-Spektor, 2011)https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228754233_Organizational_Learning_From_Experience_to_Knowledge[00:17:05] Architectural Innovation (Henderson & Clark, 1990)https://www.researchgate.net/publication/200465578_Architectural_Innovation_The_Reconfiguration_of_Existing_Product_Technologies_and_the_Failure_of_Established_Firms[00:19:45] The Learning Curve Equation (Thurstone, 1916)https://dn790007.ca.archive.org/0/items/learningcurveequ00thurrich/learningcurveequ00thurrich.pdf[00:21:30] Factors Affecting the Cost of Airplanes (Wright, 1936)https://pdodds.w3.uvm.edu/research/papers/others/1936/wright1936a.pdf[00:52:45] Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? (Bloom et al.)https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/IdeaPF.pdf[01:33:00] LLMs/ Emergencehttps://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11135Person:[00:25:30] Samuel Slaterhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater[00:42:05] Masaru Ibuka (Sony)https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/CorporateInfo/History/SonyHistory/1-02.html

A delivery engine for AI-generated content. Runs entirely client-side, your data never leaves your browser. Auto-fix formatting issues with one click.

I’ve been experimenting with a pattern for LLM usage recently that’s working out really well: asynchronous code research tasks. Pick a research question, spin up an asynchronous coding agent and …

Research projects

Python bindings for GitHub's cmark

Beads - A memory upgrade for your coding agent

Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share research.

jq-like command-line tool for markdown processing

You are your LLM history

We study how a large, exogenous trade shock — triggered by China’s accession to the WTO in 2001 — reshaped income, inequality, and import behavior acr…

The Art of Pivoting - Techniques for Intelligence Analysts to Discover New Relationships in a Complex World - adulau/the-art-of-pivoting

Computational Humanities brings together leading experts to consider what counts as digital humanities scholarship, offering nuanced discourse centered around theories of knowledge and power. Providing case studies of collaborations between humanities-centered and computation-centered researchers, this volume shows that data and computation are as much about power, prestige, and precarity as they are about p-values.

We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB). It’s the world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space), with 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens.