Archie Hall

IS THE ECONOMIST ALWAYS WRONG? Scandalously, in some circles @TheEconomist has a reputation as a contrarian indicator. This week we fessed up to getting a big call on oil prices from April wrong. Obviously our goal is not perfectly-hedged (and perfectly boring) predictive accuracy: often it is to stimulate, provoke, and challenge. But I did want to test that wider allegation, so I ran a series of LLM scorers across our full leader database since 2000 (7,000 leaders in all.) You can see the results in the chart below: each dot is one of the 1,400 leaders where we identified concrete and falsifiable predictions that were central to the argument. Higher = more accurate, further to the right = more contrarian. We do well, unsurprisingly, when aligned with conventional wisdom. We often do worse when truly out on a limb. But actually, on average, we are a bit likelier to be right than wrong on our somewhat-out-of-consensus calls. All round, a respectable performance. And as @ecurrnomics points out an accompanying leader, there is no shame at all in being beaten by the market: as good free-marketers we believe deeply in the aggregated wisdom of prices. Take a look at my piece here, which includes a canter through our best and worst calls of the last quarter-century: economist.com/interactive/fi…

How doomed are sovereign AI efforts? What can third countries do to escape total dependence on the US and China? My bid: diffusion, deregulation and data centres, as I lay out in a leader in this week's @TheEconomist. economist.com/leaders/2026/0…

And the leader in question economist.com/leaders/2026/0…

(From nrc.nl/nieuws/2026/07…, via the esteemed Dutch-media-watcher @pietergaricano)

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Excellent @TheEconomist leader this week on what countries outside the US and China can do about AI dependence, drawing on work I've been developing at Carnegie with @alasdairpr, @TawilTeddy, and @anton_d_leicht

@ericwallerstein @MattZeitlin Troubled by how often this is getting sent my way…

@MattZeitlin @ArchieHall

Sorry babe I can’t go out this week it’s the third last week Fable is included on all paid plans.

Many people have been crapping on Prosperity2030's mad tax blueprint. Just to point out that large chunks also appear to have been written by AI - although some of the worst-written bits are entirely human...

Enjoyed chatting with @misssaxbys about AI and writing! eleanot.es/p/should-polit…

@TheEconomist And a closer look at the issue in the Britain section from @JamesFransham and Tom: economist.com/britain/2026/0… economist.com/britain/2026/0…

Do read Tom Carter's excellent @TheEconomist leader on social housing in Britain, and why Andy Burnham has the issue entirely backward. economist.com/leaders/2026/0…

Even in the data where a K-shaped economy looked visible, the K now seems to be closing

Excellent piece in the Britain section on the UK's social housing distortions this week. Enormous effective subsidies and lifelong tenancies encourage tenants to cling on to units, especially in London, causing an enormous misallocation of scarce stock. economist.com/britain/2026/0…

England needs fewer council houses rather than more, @TheEconomist argues this week 'Rather than spending vast sums on building new council homes, Mr Burnham should instead raise all social rents to market rates.' Read the leader here: economist.com/leaders/2026/0…

New leader from me in @TheEconomist—on Trump Accounts, which launched last weekend. $1,000 per baby won't solve America's inequality. Deficit-funded stock-buying is hardly sound fiscal policy. But... beneath all that gold is the seed of a good idea. economist.com/leaders/2026/0…

One of the biggest current failures of elite universities is a failure to teach students the value of honesty. If we reward dishonesty in the institutions building tomorrow's leaders, then tomorrow's leaders will be dishonest. This is one of the the most formative periods in their lives. It will be catastrophic to let this be an environment where cheating is rife (starting with admissions!!). Brown University's feckless approach: "faculty need to de-emphasize punishment." Don't call it punishment then, call it incentives. If you don't incentivize honesty, you will not get it. I'm with Prof Serrano here: We cannot afford to have a society in which a significant fraction of our best young minds think that cheating is OK... we cannot choose to become idiots.

@duncanrobinson India? Though there sheer scale buys you something too, as does a rich diaspora. But not many! And especially not many in the fancy-culture pool Europe is trying to swim in…

@ArchieHall Which countries are poor but culturally massive? Jamaica? Not many tho, you’re right

What Joe's argument misses, I think, is that cultural prestige is more downstream of economic success than we admit. Is it a coincidence that Korean skincare, music and high-end dining are all having a moment? Or that sushi went worldwide after Japan's boom in the 70s/80s? Not clear to me that a stagnant Europe's museums would command the same glamour they do today in an AI-dominated future. (To say nothing of, e.g. French luxury.) Might Poland or China end up looking more glam? Or, heaven forbid, America?

@ahall_research @ArchieHall In my data, Dem and Rep survey respondents separated on AI attitude after November 2024. New data daily at jasonjones.ninja/social-science…

The question I'm still wrestling with is how much it's the AI and how much it's the billionaires in that framing. If people are mad at the ultra-rich and AI happens to be the in-the-news example at the moment, that (maybe) implies something quite different to a big bottom-up anti-AI surge. (On the other hand it also suggests that if AI-specific hostility does grow, it would be on pretty fertile soil--at least among Dems.)

oh really interesting to see the actual data/examples on 3. I also sort of suspect the specific issues are less important than the “AI is a billionaire-led project to reshape society without peoples consent,” which is why quibbling specific facts on e.g. jobs or data centers and water doesn’t really change views

My new research: I analyzed 280,000 fundraising emails to track the recent, sharp rise in anti-billionaire populist rhetoric among Democratic politicians, and to show how it's slowly merging with a new kind of anti-AI populism. We know from @davidshor, @jasminewsun, @ArchieHall and others' writing and research that American voters are skeptical of AI, but we know less about how politicians at large are thinking about it. Fundraising emails are a super useful way to measure, in roughly real-time, what politicians are saying to their most devoted followers about key issues. Here are some of my main findings: (1) Anti-billionaire rhetoric took off sharply in 2025 among Democrats, driven by anti-Elon fundraising appeals and now including a variety of tech themes. (2) Anti-AI content is only a small fraction of Dem emails even today---but it's rising quickly. (3) Anti-AI Dem emails don't tend to focus on job loss or x-risk; they're focused on how AI is the next thing that billionaires are "doing to us"---the latest symptom of an oligarchy rigging the economy against us. (4) The spike in anti-billionaire populism looks similar to a previous spike in anti-social-media rhetoric among Republicans around 2021. That spike never really turned into meaningful policy. (5) On the other hand, the adoption of the AI topic among Dems is on a similar trajectory to their previous embrace of anti-billionaire rhetoric---so it could be a major focus in the near future. Lots more details in the full write-up here: freesystems.substack.com/p/ai-is-the-de…

This is v cool, and in line with the polling-- AI isn't all that high-salience an issue, but rising fast. And early innings of assymmetric party-polarisation on it?