Erlend MF

Female Track Athlete of the Year finalists 🙌 Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone 🇺🇸 Femke Bol 🇳🇱 Winner will be announced on 30 November. #AthleticsAwards

.@ezraklein and @DKThomp are right about one thing: the US has lost its ability to deliver public goods, from clean energy to infrastructure. But, @JFrankelEcon (@Harvard) warns, the idea of "abundance" is not the way to restore it. bit.ly/4oL0NUk

The AIU has banned Ruth Chepng’etich (Kenya) for 3 years from 19 April 2025 for the Presence/Use of a Prohibited Substance (Hydrochlorothiazide). DQ results from 14 March 2025. Details here: bit.ly/Press-Release_… bit.ly/Ruth-CHEPNGETI… bit.ly/First-Instance…

Before I interviewed @Lewis_Bollard, I had assumed that factory farming was on its way out (especially given new tech like cultivated meat around the corner). Unfortunately this is far from inevitable: factory farms are already incredibly efficient machines for making meat (the most efficient broiler chickens convert 1.38 kg of grain into an astonishing 1 kg of flesh). I'd previously assumed that cultivated meat will soon trounce factory farming just on raw economics. Growing meat around a whole creature and mind cannot be the most efficient way to produce tasty flesh, right? Lewis thinks we may be many decades away (at least) from this outcome. Evolution has spent on the order of tens of millions of years optimizing human intelligence. And in order to try replicating this feat, AGI labs have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Evolution has spent far longer than that (basically the entire time) figuring out how to convert food into meat efficiently. Of course, tech on farms historically has favored more suffering (think gestation crates, battery cages, and overgrown broiler chickens). Improving the conditions on factory farms also requires corporate commitments and regulations against the most cruel practices. Every year we're factory farming about 2% more land animals globally. On the default trajectory, the amount of raw suffering in the world is likely to keep increasing. But there are reasons to think this can change. New technologies like in-ovo sexing have already saved hundreds of millions of male chicks from gruesome fates, with the potential to save billions more. And corporate commitments to go cage-free have already spared well north of 500 million hens from torturous battery cages (again, with the potential to help tens of billions more). Full episode with @Lewis_Bollard out tomorrow.

Recently accepted by #QJE, “Lives Versus Livelihoods: The Impact of the Great Recession on Mortality and Welfare,” by Finkelstein, Notowidigdo (@profNoto), Schilbach (@FrankSchilbach), and Zhang: doi.org/10.1093/qje/qj…