Chart of the Day: England and Argentina Revisit Past Grievances
England and Argentina are both revisiting past grievances in preparation for today's World Cup semifinal. This graph is of Google Trends data from each country's respective
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AI Capex Boom Now Exceeds All Prior Non-War Booms
New work confirms our own ongoing analyses, that the current AI capex exceeds all prior ones. In terms of the pre-boom spending vs peak spending, inflation-adjusted, the current
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Hyperscaler CapEx Sits on Thin Implied Equity
Remarkably little economic value sits beneath the massive AI capital expenditure backlog. The net present value of future rental payments—after deducting the capex required to provide the compute—equals
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Roundup: South Korea, China, Microsoft, & Memory
Four things worth thinking about this evening: 1. South Korea leverage unwind. The following Scooby Doo statistic made the rounds today, and, while an exaggeration, it is directionally useful in
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A Modest AI Proposal
Something I wrote recently in another context and shared with some friends. Its inherent homage to clergyman Jonathan Swift will be obvious. Have a good weekend. Paul A Modest Proposal
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China Models Now More Than a Third of Enterprise Market
Chinese large language model usage among U.S. companies (on OpenRouter) has soared in the first half of 2026. After being in the low single digits through early 2025, token
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Technology and the Baby Bust Paradox
Falling birth rates shrink the workforce and slow economic growth. This has been economic orthodoxy since Adam Smith. New research finds the (almost) opposite, however. Countries with larger baby busts
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AI, Immigration, and Collapsing Labor Force Participation
The U.S. labor force participation rate has quietly returned to levels last seen in the 1970s (outside the recent pandemic). It increasingly seems to signal a structural shift in
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Five Things to Think About: Taiwan, Crypto, Hateful Eight, Agentonomics, etc.
A quick roundup of five things I'm thinking about and have been discussing with clients and others lately. 1/ Taiwan is now the world's fifth-largest
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America's Science No Longer Underlies China's Tech
Chinese patents are mostly built on Chinese science rather than American science, according to a new working paper. Across every "critical technology area" shown, the U.S. share
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On Capital Market Constraints, Historical Parallels to the Current AI Moment, and More
I did a lengthy interview a little while back, and it is now out. Folks may find it a helpful restatement of some of my views on the current situation,
Why Americans Are Such AI Antipathy Outliers
I have a short essay in the NY Times today on why Americans are such global outliers in their AI antipathy. Hating AI is, as I say in the piece,