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Writes The Diff, a newsletter on inflections in finance and tech read by hedge fund managers, founders and VCs. Previously worked in finance at SAC Capital/Point72.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Time spent on bureaucratic paperwork is a real economic cost even though it doesn't appear in government budgets.

  government

  Their words

  it is simply ridiculous that a ruinously expensive policy can be budget-neutral if the expense consists of wasted time rather than wasted money. But that's still a cost!

  Longreads + Open Threadthediff.co

Economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. Author of Slouching Towards Utopia and writer of the Grasping Reality newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  More than half of the rise in the top 1% income share since 1985 came from pass-through business tax structuring, not tech or finance.

  Their words

  And more than half the rise in the top 1% share since 1985 flowed through the pass-through businesses that was a "tax efficiency innovation" feature of the Reagan Revolution.

  braddelong.substack.com

Economist specialising in global income inequality; formerly lead economist in the World Bank research department, now at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of the Global Inequality and More newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI will raise capitalists' incomes and the capital share of income, increasing inequality.

  Their words

  Income of capitalists is likely to increase because AI companies are owned by actual people and these people, like shareholders in general, are well-off. Thus the rise in the capital share also means rising incomes of the rich and higher inequality of income.

  branko2f7.substack.com

Founder of Trilogy Software and principal of Alpha School, the private school network built around two hours a day of AI-delivered mastery learning.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Family income, not IQ, is the single biggest predictor of a child's academic performance in America.

  America

  Their words

  The single biggest indicator of your performance is your family income. You can predict somebody's test scores basically.

  youtube.com

Founder of Platformer, a newsletter on tech platforms and the people they affect, and co-host of the Hard Fork podcast at the New York Times.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Universal basic income alone will not address the economic gap created by AI-driven job displacement.

  AI and jobs

  Their words

  I don't think that universal basic income on its own will address the gap that's widening.

  platformer.news

Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  After a European exit tax, the EU will try to tax its citizens' worldwide income wherever in the world they live.

  Europe

  Their words

  European governments and thus the EU too is losing lots of tax income from Europeans fleeing Next on the agenda is the European Exit Tax and after that I think they will try to add Worldwide Income Tax (like the US already has) meaning it doesn't matter where you live in the world as a European citizen, the EU will tax you for your entire income!

  levels.io

Writer and podcaster; co-author of Abundance with Ezra Klein, a staff writer at The Atlantic from 2008 to 2025, and host of the Plain English podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Public stadium subsidies rarely generate enough economic benefit to justify their cost

  Their words

  economic research has repeatedly found that they rarely generate enough marginally income, employment, or tax revenue to justify the subsidy.

  The American Sports Plutocracy Is Bullshitderekthompson.org

Founder of Scale AI and, since 2025, Chief AI Officer at Meta, where he leads the company’s superintelligence lab.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Systems thinking will never go out of style, so going all in on words at the expense of rigorous quantitative thinking is a mistake.

  Their words

  But um but I think systems thinking is never going to go out of style. So, I think it's definitely a mistake to go all in on Word Cell. Like, I think you need to you need to shape rotate.

  youtube.com

Economic historian at Columbia; writes Chartbook on economics, geopolitics and history, and wrote Crashed and The Deluge.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Europe's carmakers spent the early 2020s raising prices and profits at their customers' expense, and narrowed their own market doing it.

  Europe

  Their words

  To put this same story another way, the European car industry in the early 2020s was a prime example of greedflation i.e. companies taking advantage of the COVID shock and other disruptions and to hike profits at the expense of consumers.

  adamtooze.substack.com

Economist at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute; works on what advanced AI would do to growth, saving and the long-run economy.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The share of income spent on things only a human can do will stay negligible, because new things to buy keep being invented faster than we satiate on the old ones.

  Their words

  but of course, that's not what's happened, because as we've accumulated more wealth and you know, more advanced machines and and so on, we've expanded the range of things other than singers to spend our money on, and the share spent on singers has stayed sort of negligible. Um so likewise, that's sort of my central prediction about how future unfolds, though I it could go either way.

  youtube.com

Behavioural economist at Chicago Booth, professor of behavioural science and economics and director of AGI economics at Google DeepMind.

From one piece The better AI gets, the smaller its share of the economy might get – Alex Imas and Phil Trammell 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The biggest gap in economics right now is that almost nobody is thinking about what AI does to middle-income developing countries.

  Their words

  I think the biggest lack of resources that we have allocated in the economic profession is thinking about middle-income developing countries in the in the age of AI.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A universal basic income is a dangerous power-sharing arrangement, because it puts everyone's basic needs at the mercy of whoever holds office.

  AI and jobs

  Their words

  Like right now we're endowed with labor that can turn into uh that can turn into income. When that is no longer the case and we are now at the mercy of the of the elected official for like basic needs, right? So that to me feels like a power sharing arrangement that's really dangerous.

  youtube.com

Canadian bootstrapper and writer on small software businesses. Co-founder of the podcast hosting company Transistor.fm and author of the book Marketing for Developers.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Bootstrapped founders should keep another source of income to sustain themselves while grinding on a long, hard venture.

  startups

  Their words

  If you're bootstrapping, you should probably have another source of revenue to sustain you.

  Necessary but not sufficientjustinjackson.ca

Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic; previously VP of research at OpenAI.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  If AI permanently drives down demand for labour, long-term income support for a significant fraction of the workforce will likely become necessary.

  Their words

  If AI-driven labor displacement ends up being large in magnitude and permanently drives down the demand for labor, it will likely be necessary to go beyond mere incentive programs to long-term income support for a significant fraction of the labor force.

  Policy on the AI Exponential (June 2026)darioamodei.com

Author of Recoding America; founded Code for America and was US deputy chief technology officer from 2013 to 2014. Writes Eating Policy on why governments cannot do what they decide to do.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Being skilled at tracking project requirements doesn't make someone skilled at product management.

  Their words

  But being good or even excellent at that does not automatically make you good at understanding user needs and making informed judgement calls about what features will meet those needs and how they should be designed.

  The Digital Service Was Never the Pointeatingpolicy.com

Researcher on distributed systems and local-first software at the University of Cambridge; wrote Designing Data-Intensive Applications.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Work that runs against companies' commercial incentives will only get done by people whose income does not depend on those incentives.

  Their words

  there I feel like in academia, I have the freedom to work on things that go against this commercial incentive of companies and say like, "Actually, no, I'm going to do what I think is right for the users."

  youtube.com

Developer and podcaster; created Instapaper and Overcast, co-founded Tumblr, and co-hosts the Accidental Tech Podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The tech industry today is dominated by scale-driven optimization and growth at the expense of the idealism that once drove it

  Their words

  Immense scale, soulless optimization, and an insatiable thirst for growth dominate its behavior and discourse, leaving little room for the spirit and principles embodied by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

  A letter to John Ternusmarco.org

Indian software engineer working on Android and React; writes about his setup and side projects at ishubhamsingh.dev.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Apple Watch Series 6

  Their words

  Perfect iPhone companion, use it for sleep & fitness tracking

  ishubhamsingh.dev

Engineer writing about the physical economy — oil and gas, manufacturing, batteries, drones and what it costs to build things.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Industrial robots are not the fix for American manufacturing, and betting on automation misreads why production sits elsewhere.

  America

  Their words

  The robot arm base case saves some hourly labor at the expense of adding more skilled labor, and can easily be negative if it needs reprogramming more than a few times per year.

  Speed Can Reindustrialize Americaaustinvernon.site

Demographer; writes on fertility, marriage and population, and directs the Pro-Family Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.

From one piece Falling Fertility Is Not About Opportunity Cost 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Richer countries have fewer children than poor ones, but within a country a boom raises births and a bust lowers them.

  Their words

  Although the cross-sectional relationship between national income and fertility is negative, the longitudinal relationship between national income and fertility is positive: economic booms create baby booms, economic busts create baby busts.

  Falling Fertility Is Not About Opportunity Costlymanstone.substack.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Earning more does not make a woman less likely to have children, except at the very bottom of the income distribution.

  Their words

  the shift from 50th to 99th percentile earnings has no negative effect on women’s fertility, and unearned income for women has a neutral-to-positive effect

  Falling Fertility Is Not About Opportunity Costlymanstone.substack.com

Founder of Telegram, and before it of VK.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Government is people with goals, so it grows by nature; there must be very strict limits on how far it can expand its power at the expense of citizens.

  government

  Their words

  That's how you end up in an endless loop of ever-increasing taxes, ever-increasing regulation, which ultimately suffocates free market, free enterprise, and free speech. So, you do want to have very, very strict limitations on the extent the government can increase its powers at the expense of citizens.

  youtube.com

Runs global health R&D at Open Philanthropy; writes about the science and medicine that could exist and does not.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Infectious diseases get far less industry R&D per death than non-communicable ones, because they mostly kill people in countries where a cure pays less.

  Their words

  Infectious diseases as a category receive vastly less R&D spending from industry than non-communicable diseases, per death they cause, because they disproportionately kill people in lower- and middle-income countries where the payoff for making a cure is less lucrative.

  A Quantitative Approach to Vaccine Fundingblog.jacobtrefethen.com

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Oura Ring Gen 4

  Their words

  Oura Ring Gen 4 — for fitness and sleep tracking.

  jeffpaul.com

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Strava

  Their words

  Strava — for tracking runs, rides, and swims.

  jeffpaul.com

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Paprika

  Their words

  Paprika — for recipe tracking and grocery lists.

  jeffpaul.com

Energy and decarbonisation analyst; publishes an annual chart deck on the state of the transition, and was chief content officer at BloombergNEF.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  There is no such thing as a high-income economy with low electricity consumption.

  energy

  Their words

  there is no such thing as a high-income, low-electricity economy.

  Programming Notesnathanielbullard.com

Executive coach for product leaders. Previously a partner at GV (Google Ventures) and a product manager at Google. Writes at Bring the Donuts, including a standing essential-reading list for product managers.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A product leader's position at the intersection of every function in the C-suite comes at the cost of belonging to any one group.

  Their words

  Product's unique identity in the C-suite-at the intersection of everything-often comes at the expense of belonging to anything.

  Product Leadership is Lonelybringthedonuts.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Resisting the discomfort of not knowing leads people to jump to conclusions or decide before they have enough information.

  Their words

  When we resist not knowing, we often leap to conclusions, make decisions without all of the information, or simply guess. Of course, that might make it even more likely that we're wrong, the very thing our subconscious is trying to avoid. Needing to be right comes at the expense of curiosity.

  The Power of Not Knowingbringthedonuts.com

Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Whoop

  Their words

  Summarizing all of that into my advice right now: Get Whoop for 9.5/10, reliable, convenient sleep tracking with an excellent app (once you get to know it a bit). Get Oura for 10/10 tracking, if you're ok with the ring form factor.

  karpathy.bearblog.dev

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Oura

  Their words

  Summarizing all of that into my advice right now: Get Whoop for 9.5/10, reliable, convenient sleep tracking with an excellent app (once you get to know it a bit). Get Oura for 10/10 tracking, if you're ok with the ring form factor.

  karpathy.bearblog.dev

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  8Sleep Pod 4 Ultra

  Their words

  I didn't find 8Sleep to be very reliable in its sleep tracking. The scores don't make as much sense to me when I wake up, and as we saw above they don't correlate very strongly with Whoop or Oura.

  karpathy.bearblog.dev

+ 1 more

• Dislikedrcmnd.app

  AutoSleep

  Their words

  AutoSleep is basically a random number generator. Maybe there is a better app on Apple Watch for sleep tracking, but I haven't found it. Do not use.

  karpathy.bearblog.dev

Writer and former McKinsey/BCG strategy consultant; author of The Pathless Path and Good Work, about leaving the default career track. Publishes the Boundless newsletter and podcast.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Dirtbag Rich: High Freedom, Low Income, Deep Purpose

  Their words

  This book is a short but inspiring take on living life on your terms while being pragmatic about money and how to make it happen. Reminds me of a less travel-centric Vagabonding.

  pathlesspath.com

• Usesaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Personal Capital

  Their words

  Personal Capital is a financial tracking tool that I started using in mid-2013, and I still use it almost daily to get a snapshot of my "net worth", just as a fun way to remind myself to relax about money and make the most of life.

  mrmoneymustache.com

• Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Vanguard

  Their words

  For most of my investing life, Vanguard was THE one-stop shop for index funds of all types. They have the lowest expense ratio and the utmost respect for their customers.

  mrmoneymustache.com

Development economist; writes Global Developments, on growth, history and the numbers behind them.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  South Korea and Taiwan began their miracles with far more schooling than their income implied, and African states with far less.

  Their words

  At independence, South Korea and Taiwan had far higher rates of primary education than most of Sub-Saharan Africa.

  global-developments.org

Historian at Stanford and the Hoover Institution; wrote Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative and Goddess of the Market, on Ayn Rand.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Friedman's universal minimum income went nowhere precisely because it was pure and free of moral judgment, which made it beautiful and politically impossible.

  Their words

  And Friedman advanced a policy that was really abstract and really it was devoid of judgment. It was pure and beautiful in that way but utterly impractical.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Universal basic income is at most a small part of the answer to AI-driven job loss.

  AI and jobs

  Their words

  It could be as simple as a large universal basic income for everyone, although I suspect that will only be a small part of a solution.

  Machines of Loving Grace (October 2024)darioamodei.com

Thai software engineer; publishes a public digital garden at garden.narze.live and builds developer and productivity tooling.

• Dislikedrcmnd.app

  Timing

  Their words

  Timing - Time tracking app. It eats Gigabytes of space when I use it for 2-3 years.

  garden.narze.live

Pseudonymous essayist. Writes at gwern.net on AI scaling, statistics, genetics and long-running internet research, with heavy citation and a habit of revising old essays in place rather than leaving them wrong.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Kedi

  Their words

  Thoroughly enjoyable, stuffed with beautiful shots of Istanbul and cats, with particularly clever ankle-level tracking shots following the semi-feral cats around.

  gwern.net

Moroccan senior frontend developer writing at smakosh.com; builds side projects and client work under Smakosh LLC.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Linear

  Their words

  Linear - for tracking issues on some serious personal projects

  smakosh.com

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Google sheets

  Their words

  Google sheets - for calculating expenses/income

  smakosh.com

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Notion

  Their words

  Notion - for tracking everything

  smakosh.com

Journalist and author writing on politics, liberalism and ideas; a contributor to Quillette and co-author of a book on Christopher Hitchens.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Spending on existential risk cannot be held accountable, because there is no measurement that would ever show it failing.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  Unlike other interventions EA has sponsored, there are scant metrics for tracking the success or failure of investments in existential risk mitigation.

  How Effective Altruism Lost Its Wayquillette.com

Social scientist turned small-scale farmer; wrote A Small Farm Future and argues against the case for feeding the world from factories.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Fifteen years of running a small organic market garden in England returned its owners a few thousand pounds a year between them.

  Their words

  My wife and I have averaged a joint annual income of £5,500 from the market garden over the last ten years.

  chrissmaje.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Meat substitutes have to become clearly cheaper than meat, not merely as cheap, before most people will switch.

  Their words

  Meat substitutes need to be quite clearly cheaper, especially if we want them to break into middle- and low-income markets.

  hannahritchie.substack.com

Musician and writer; answers readers' questions weekly at The Red Hand Files, and fronts Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Mechanising the imagination commodifies the human spirit, because it makes a person's own part in making things look valueless.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  ChatGPT is fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imagination. It renders our participation in the act of creation as valueless and unnecessary.

  theredhandfiles.com

Programmer; founded comma.ai and tinygrad, and was the first to unlock the iPhone.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Survival can be guaranteed without a universal basic income, by making housing, food and above all energy dirt cheap.

  AI and jobsenergy

  Their words

  You can make survival guaranteed without UBI. What you have to do, is make housing and food dirt cheap. Right? And that’s the good world. And actually, let’s go into what we should really be making dirt cheap, which is energy.

  youtube.com

Science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist; writes the daily blog and newsletter Pluralistic, and coined the term enshittification.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  There is no attention economy: attention cannot serve as money, so a platform must always convert it into cash at somebody's expense.

  Their words

  "Monetize" is a terrible word that tacitly admits that there is no such thing as an "Attention Economy." You can't use attention as a medium of exchange.

  Tiktok's enshittificationpluralistic.net

American backpacking guide, writer and endurance athlete who has hiked more than 30,000 miles; author of The Ultimate Hiker's Gear Guide and publisher of gear reviews and trip-planning tutorials at andrewskurka.com.

• Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Black Diamond Alpine Carbon Cork Trekking Poles

  Their words

  At $180 MSRP, the Alpine Carbon Corks are among the most expensive poles in the market, and they will not be a trivial expense for most backpackers. But I still recommend them if you:

  andrewskurka.com