Luca Mazzone

A fundamental lesson from my posts these last two weeks on modernization, industrial policy, and development is that development economics should be about understanding why South Korea got rich but Bolivia did not. The current field has largely given up on that question. Sharply identified RCTs on small micro programs are a fine way to publish in the AER and get tenure at a fancy university, but a profession that knows everything about microfinance impact evaluations and almost nothing about industrialization has misallocated its own intellectual capital on a pretty heroic scale. Four images of Seoul:

La raison pour laquelle les Etats-Unis consacrent une part plus importante de leur PIB à la santé est que cette dernière est un bien supérieur: une forme de consommation dont la part dans le budget des ménages croit plus que proportionnellement avec leur niveau de revenu. À travers l’ensemble des pays de l’OCDE, une hausse de 1% du PIB se traduit par une hausse de 1,8% des dépenses de santé. La relation log-linéaire des dépenses de santé avec le PIB par habitant est très robuste et les États-Unis sont au niveau attendu étant donné leur richesse. C’est vrai à travers tant de systèmes différents que ça n’a à l’évidence pas de rapport avec la thèse de Boris Vallaud. Ce qui ne dit rien de l’efficacité de leur système ou du nôtre par ailleurs.

Going to Madrid next week, there are 36 daily round-trip trains to Barcelona: 3 hours, ~$60. Then you look at Toronto–Montreal and LA–SF with four combined daily trips and wonder why we still debate the need for high-speed rail.

Once you start thinking about deep learning and fertility, it's hard to think about anything else.

I concluded my Henry Family lecture at the University of Miami last Thursday by saying: “Two things are important right now in life: deep learning and fertility. Everything else is noise.” We are only starting to glimpse what these two forces will do to global life over the next fifty years. And they interact: deep learning will reshape demographics, and demographic collapse will reshape automation. Nearly all my posts on X (except some parochial commentary on Spanish economic policy) revolve around these two facts. So does most of my current research. Even work that does not seem directly connected turns out to be, once you look carefully. My papers on geoeconomics and international macro are about figuring out some of the consequences of deep learning and fertility. For example, my work on China focuses on its abysmal demographic future and how the U.S. is positioning itself (rightly or wrongly) to address it. And my work on political polarization and the welfare state is about the consequences of decades of low fertility in Western Europe. When people talk about political change in Western Europe, they are talking about low fertility, whether they know it or not. It is not clear that modern representative democracy can survive sustained fertility rates of 1.3. I do not say that with glee. The reason I decided to spend my life on academic work in economics is that I realized, when I was much younger, that daily events are irrelevant. The things that concern the media and 99 percent of commentary on X are largely irrelevant. One political party does better or worse in the next electoral cycle because of internal fights or a good campaign. At a fundamental level, none of it matters: the political outcome 25 years from now will not depend on those accidents. As Alexander Gerschenkron said, Clio is not a tidy housewife. The rise of any political movement is always full of advances and retreats. Social change waxes and wanes. But at the end of the day, as my favorite historian Fernand Braudel put it: “The events of history are merely surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs.” or in the much better original: “Les événements de l’histoire ne sont que des agitations de surface, des crêtes d’écume que les marées de l’histoire portent sur leur dos puissant.” The tides of history today are deep learning and fertility.

stop pitting the sciences against each other biology is AMAZING chemistry is ENJOYABLE physics social science is INTERESTING computer science is FUN

Great cross-national AI use survey. EU, esp. outside N. Europe, uses AI much less than US in 2025. AI use heavily correlated w/ sector-specific productivity gains, even within Europe. No effect on employment - it appears complementary.

I shall refrain from Hickel-posting today. But please remember that we, Europeans, decided to spend EUR 9.9 million over 72 months on degrowth studies (ERC Synergy Grants 2022).

A new paper shows that neoliberal austerity policies implemented by the World Bank and the IMF in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s and 1990s were associated with a *20% decline in real incomes.* The destruction caused by these organisations across the Global South is staggering.

Prime Minister Mark Carney: “Four times as many Indians study in Canada as in the UK. Twice as many as in the U.S. Yeah, we have a lot of people coming to Canada to study.”

Following the ongoing situation in Iran, I am convening a special Security College on Monday. For regional security and stability, it is of the utmost importance that there is no further escalation through Iran’s unjustified attacks on partners in the region.