Benjamin Wolf 🇺🇦

Hear ye, hear ye 🥁🙌 So happy and proud to announce that we won the Jean Monnet Prize for European Integration 2020 for our project “Home Is Where the Herz Is” europeanconstitution.eu/2020-jean-monn… Check it out ☺️❤️ metropole.at/herz So proud of our team at @metropole_vie 🤩

@BirthGauge @HEAVY_SLAYER One can doubt that the J shape has much to do with income, it might well be different circumstances and policies. But it's not only the US.

@BirthGauge @HEAVY_SLAYER That's not really correct. Most of developed Europe has significantly higher birth rates than emerging Asia (by up to 0.4 points or more). France has had a higher TFR than the US for about 40 years since 1945.

The J shape of this graph suggests a low TFR in the medium term as the worldwide GDP per Capita PPP worldwide approaches $40,000 and then a gradual recovery from then on.

The political difference EU membership makes in 2026 is the difference between Hungary and Turkey

nice

Really interesting deep dive into the way the (inter)national accounting system gets made from @NewLeftEViews. I learned a lot from this. Sparked a memory of something Jon Faust told me once: “most macroeconomists don’t know what’s actually in the statistics, they just download plug and chug, but all the great ones do.” > The things that make America morbidly unique among advanced countries enter at market prices, so the same underlying service shows up at higher valuations.

Does have the attribute of increasing the fiscal burden on the top tier cities with the most fiscal space (and the most monetizable financial assets) while reducing it on many fiscally challenged rural areas

Menorca, the Island of light. Some milky way shots I took through the years.

. One of the most interesting AI labor market datasets right now may be this one: Which occupations are people transitioning from into AI-related jobs? Featuring countries: Austria, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, and Hungary Because AI expanded extremely rapidly, there was initially no large, standardized “AI education pipeline” producing enough specialized workers. As a result, many AI occupations were filled by people transitioning from adjacent fields that already possessed partially compatible skills. The similarities across countries are striking, but the differences are equally revealing. Source: @oecd 🇦🇹 Austria Austria stands out for the strong transition from Software Engineer roles into Data Engineer and Data Scientist positions. Research-oriented occupations such as Postdoctoral Researcher and Research Assistant also contribute noticeably

Significant push by Spain, France, Italy, Netherlands and Lithuania on tackling “overcapacity” after 1mn EU jobs lost since 2019. Rare for them to agree on China - Germany has not joined yet. via @FT ft.com/content/3c70d1…

The Lithuanian, Spanish, Dutch, French and Italian cavalry join forces. Good diplomatic work.

@ernietedeschi @Raonoid @tolstoybb The numbers are complete nonsense, though. x.com/benbawan/statu…

@Raonoid @tolstoybb When you adjust for population, which you should do, the rates are about even, which is still shocking to me.

Slovenia vs Albania

I strongly agree with @FraserNelson there’s lots going on in British tech not to merit the catastrophism and gloom of the parties. But the companies here don’t prove a real AI economy Brexit dividend. In fact they show the City’s and British talent’s enduring appeal for companies that want to serve the European market — and that means operating under EU regulations. Instead of demonstrating a Brexit dividend, the London AI financing and incorporation boomlet is now vulnerable to EU policy cutting them out. ➡️ DeepMind was founded in 2010, long before Brexit and was bought by Google in 2014. It’s in London as a condition the US firm agreed to at the time to acquire it and doesn’t tell us anything about Brexit. Hassabis, it’s worth noting at the time was part of a group of scientists who warned against Brexit and its impact on UK AI. Its location in London doesn’t speak of any Brexit dividend. ➡️ Nscale is a classic example of the companies now receiving funding in London. They are headquartering here for funding, talent and incorporation reasons from the City and are building companies to serve the EU market — so will be operating under EU rules. Nscale’s biggest infrastructure investment is in Portugal and it has a multi-billion dollar deal to build infrastructure in Norway, under EU rules in the European Economic Area. ➡️ Wayve again is a business predicated on access the EU and thus under its regulations. Its entire commercial premise is deploying AI driver software into the EU from 2027 and that’s why it’s opened a development hub in Stuttgart last year. Scale is what its valuation is about and that requires the EU. Again, this is a company that’s picked London for financing, talent and incorporation reasons with the EU as the target market. ➡️ This kind of business model is actually now at risk as the EU hardens its borders, risking cutting the UK out from even more of its supply chains, with the looming “Make in EU” agenda. This legislation explicitly lists AI as a sector for EU procurement preference. Bad for companies like Nscale making sovereign infrastructure pitches to the EU. This is not pocket change. EU public procurement equals 15% of the bloc’s GDP. ➡️ Now let’s check out ElevenLabs. The same ElevenLabs whose co-founder was at Davos on stage with an EU Commissioner discussing EU tech sovereignty. This company’s whole model follows EU compliance as that’s the market. That’s why it’s got EU data residency for enterprise customers, stores data on EU servers and relies on EU companies like Deutsche Telekom, Bertelsmann and Bild. It’s got teams in Berlin, Paris, Warsaw and Dublin. What’s going on here again is this company choosing to be UK based is a story about the enduring success of the City, the ease of UK incorporation and rich talent. Those aren’t Brexit dividends. ➡️ But surely the UK is doing something right with AI? Yes it is, we have a strong policy mix. But almost all the big levers of which from the AI Action Plan, our compute subsidies, fast-trackedplanning and the AI Security Institute we could have done inside the EU. ➡️ But surely the EU’s onerous legislation means they can’t develop cutting edge tech? Wrong again. France, operating under the EU AI Act has built Mistral, the continent’s only frontier-model at any scale and the most valuable European AI company. It was actually founded by researchers from DeepMind and Meta: going to the EU to build not fleeing it. We simply don’t have one. ▶️ Why? Brexit dividends from divergences on training data matter little to future growth. UK is not a player in frontier training which is a China-US duopoly. We just don’t have the compute. This is structural. UK simply won’t catch up on the build out and doesn’t have cheap energy whatever you do with Net Zero or the North Sea to challenge US or Chinese industrial electricity. What we do is research for mainly US firms and finance AI services heavily dependent on EU access. thetimes.com/comment/column…

𝗘𝗹𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗹𝗱 𝗯𝗲𝘄𝗶𝗿𝗸𝘁 +𝟮𝟮% 𝗚𝗲𝗯𝘂𝗿𝘁𝗲𝗻 𝗯𝗲𝗶 𝗔𝗸𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗺𝗶𝗸𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗻. 𝗘𝘀 𝘄𝘂𝗿𝗱𝗲 𝘀𝗲𝗶𝘁 𝟮𝟬𝟬𝟳 𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗵𝘁 𝗲𝗿𝗵ö𝗵𝘁. 1.800 Euro monatlich: Das ist der Höchstsatz beim Elterngeld. Seit 19 Jahren unverändert. 🧵

Und natürlich haben die Länder deutlich unterschiedliche Beschäftigungsquoten und Produktivität, deshalb ist der Vergleich nur begrenzt aussagekräftig. Aber doch ein enormer Wandel von den Jahren der Euro- & Schuldenkrise.

Österreich 🇦🇹 hat aktuell eine niedrigere Arbeitslosenrate als Dänemark 🇩🇰, aber eine höhere als Italien 🇮🇹 - beides nicht unbedingt den intuitiven Erwartungen entsprechend.

Across the EU, the unemployment rate is currently highest in Finland, Spain, Greece and Sweden - and lowest in Czechia, Bulgaria, Poland and Malta.

The company said the majority of the weight loss—around 84%—came from losing body fat while preserving muscle function and improving muscle health on.wsj.com/4dYrKkE

Der Strompreis für die Industrie sinkt weiter und liegt mittlerweile unter dem Niveau von 2017!

“We want to replicate in Germany what we did in Italy.” Can the former chairman of Ferrari disrupt Europe’s biggest railway market? economist.com/business/2026/…

Golden Light in Kyrgyzstan. One of my favourite countries.