July 2026 links

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I put the reply to Fable at the end, so those who are bored of the discussion can skip it. (Although please check out my brief reply.) Here are some links for July:

1. Tyler Cowen compares AI to pets:

Tyler: (12:48) So far, the AIs seem to be evolving in a manner similar to pets: coexistence and mutuality with humans. That’s the better-case scenario. I don’t see that changing soon, but it may not be that way forever. I once joked that the AIs you really need to worry about are the Wall Street AIs, because they’re not really taught to cooperate with humans. The normal AIs that everyone talks about are just going to be like puppy dogs, more or less forever.Jackson: (13:15) Do you think current competition is making OpenAI and Anthropic AIs more likely to trend toward being what you mean by Wall Street AIs, though?Tyler: (13:23) No, it’s making them more like pets, really. Like Spinoza the dog. He’s hanging around the house; he’s so nice, he’s so sweet. He’ll come over, he wants to be petted, he’ll wag his tail at you. Yeah, I think that’s what we’re seeing.

1. Here’s an interesting quote to think about:

Does Trump wish to make housing more expensive by things like zoning restrictions, which make us poorer, or things like free trade and enhanced immigration of high skilled workers, which make us richer? Never reason from a house price change.

1. More evidence that big cities often impoverish the poorer parts of their state, a point I used to argue over at Econlog.
2. I keep saying that trade is not the problem, and evidence keeps coming in to support that claim. Here Noah Smith reports on a study by Richard Baldwin:

America did actually outsource a fair amount of its final goods production, but this was almost balanced out by onshoring of intermediate goods production (at least, in terms of monetary value). Almost all of America’s…