Artificial intelligence and automation is taking over more and more jobs. Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo recently produced research confirming that: the recent stagnation of labor demand is explained by an acceleration of automation, particularly in manufacturing, and a deceleration…
Blog Archives
1/3 of Bloomberg articles are written by artificial intelligence!
Posted in Globalization & International, Inequality
Gravity equation of trade
Suppose you have a big import-export business in Puerto Rica located between the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. What countries would you want to trade with most? The most convenient locations would be the closest nations, but the closest…
Posted in Globalization & International
Corporations see a high-income world even though it is mainly middle-income
OpenStax is another high-quality open-source economics textbook provider and they produced a graph comparing the distribution of global income versus the distribution of global population. Hans Rosling found that most people incorrectly think that most of the world is poor,…
Posted in Development, Globalization & International
Odd patterns in American foreign investment
Core Economics is an open-source economics textbook project based in Europe which has produced an innovative approach to teaching economics. They produced the graph below which shows “the destination of investments by US companies when they invested directly in other…
Posted in Globalization & International
Peak globalization?
The first wave of globalization happened due to technological advances in transportation and communication that dramatically reduced transactions costs in the 1800s: Railroads, steel-hulled ships, the screw propeller, telegraph, etc. Then politicians raised tariffs, restricted immigration, and went to war…
Posted in Globalization & International
What are the cheapest countries to visit? See the Travel Cost Index.
There is a lot of interest on blogs and discussion forums about the cheapest nations in the world to visit, but I found no good hard data on the internet. This is a bizarre hole in the world’s collective knowledge…
Posted in Globalization & International
The expected value of potential lives lost during atomic testing
Rob Reid wrote a great explanation of the horrible risk taken during the Manhattan Project, when American nuclear scientists took a chance estimated at one-in-three million that the first atomic test would create a chain reaction that would ignite the…
