Carlos Esquivel retweeted
1. My non-expert opinion is that Zucman’s work on this topic is biased
2. I find AI to be incredibly useful in my research
3. Zucman is entirely right about Tyler being lazy and degrading the conversation with a dump of unvetted AI criticisms
Hello @elonmusk and @tylercowen ,
You have just decided to publicly attack our research, six days before the vote on the California billionaire wealth tax.
Your attempt to discredit our work and that of our numerous academic colleagues is pathetic.
Let’s take a look. 🧵
Carlos Esquivel retweeted
Belatedly, my heartfelt congratulations to Bob Hall and and Mike Woodford for their richly deserved Nobel Prize!
Wonderful to see the value of microfounded macro, too many times maligned by press and bloggers, recognized at the highest level.
Carlos Esquivel retweeted
The classic case: you start with a weak idea. If you talk and think about it with others, you make progress to better ideas.
If you talk and think about it with AI, it dresses up your idea in economic jargon, contract theory etc., now you have the same bad idea, but it's expressed in enough jargon that it's a little harder to tell that it's a bad idea.
It also looks very impressive, look at all that economic logic! You feel like you're really progressing as an academic thinker and writer, but in fact you're in a much worse place than when you started. 4/
Carlos Esquivel retweeted
I think Zuck might have produced facemash irrespective of the tax system. But why did facemash explode while, say, lunarstorm did not? An important factor was that the US had Silicon Valley while other countries did not, and venture capitalists were willing to pour money in. And those venture capitalists certainly do think about tax rates.
Carlos Esquivel retweeted
A quick reaction. Both well deserving of the prize. Research styles could not be more different. Woodford is a cathedral builder, building stone by stone. His main book is an encyclopedia. Hall is an intellectual butterfly, looking for new angles. His main contribution is a superb insight, which changed the way we think about consumption. It takes both to make a field advance. Congratulations.
BREAKING NEWS
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2026 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford “for microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation.”
#NobelPrize
Carlos Esquivel retweeted
🚨 2026 Nobel Prize in Economics goes to Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford 🚨
"for microfoundations of macroeconomic stabilisation"
Such a good macro prize. So happy to see Robert Hall, not mentioned as much as Woodford in this discourse
Carlos Esquivel retweeted
I think of my goal as a mathematician as something like: to better understand the fundamental concepts “shape” and “number,” and to convey that understanding to others. I think this is a valuable goal for many reasons. The primary reason discussed on social media is the (admittedly slow, but I think very real) diffusion of mathematical ideas into technologies that better our lives. There are others, though: production of human capital (which plays some role in this diffusion), and diffusion of mathematical understanding into culture, for example. It is not obvious to me that even the bare technological need for mathematics can be filled without human experts; this seems to me to be a tricky question of institutional design.
For me the most compelling reason is simply that we feel a pressing need to understand. While deep understanding is largely limited to professional mathematicians, the existence of mathematicians and of the institutions they make up is a huge part of what makes mathematical understanding available to those who want it. I believe that the capacity to understand mathematics (and the universe as a whole) is part of a good life, and we should try to provide people with a good life.
We operationalize the goal of understanding in a number of ways, problem-solving and theorem-proving among them. My own research is oriented around certain open questions that I believe measure our lack of understanding (of numbers, shapes and so on), and I think resolving those is genuinely important. I would welcome a solution with any provenance. But I think proof is only a measure of progress—what actually matters (for technology, human capital, culture, a good life) is a bit harder to get at.
Crucially it is very hard to measure progress—plausibly theorem-proving is used in large part because it is easy to measure rather than because it is a perfect proxy for what we care about. I worry a bit that we may automate many easy-to-measure things without automating the correlates we care about for which they are proxies. This presents a clear problem for the design of institutions aimed at achieving progress.
In part because I think problem-solving is a proxy for something else, I don’t feel that my goal of understanding “shape” and “number” is particularly threatened by a machine that is good at problem solving. I expect that machine to be a substantial boon, instead. Ultimately I think we will operationalize mathematical progress in better ways. But how to do this is a difficult question and I think many on here are too quick to dismiss concerns about it.
Carlos Esquivel retweeted
A general principle: when you interact with AIs, you should know that you are interacting with AIs.
Tech like this that helps disguise AI makes us all worse off.
Working on camouflaging AI use should be viewed as unethical. This doesn't help anyone.
The whole point of building Tavus has been simple: talking to a machine should feel as natural as talking to a friend or coworker.
It’s hard to describe all the tiny nuances that make a conversation feel human. The little expressions. Moving around in your chair. Knowing when to speak and when to listen. The dance of it all.
Griffin is by far the closest anyone has come to a model that can capture those nuances. The first time I saw it being used, I had no idea I was watching our model rather than just a normal video call.
I’m so incredibly proud of this team and what they’ve built.
Carlos Esquivel retweeted
Etihad threatening to sue. UAE reportedly intimating that UK investment could be pulled. A Prime Minister couching any criticisism. If this sorry saga doesn't convince you that state ownership of football clubs should never be allowed, nothing ever will.
Carlos Esquivel retweeted
Important reading given all the discussion regarding third party evaluations of frontier AI labs
Carlos Esquivel retweeted
Today I presented my joint work with @ManuelMacera, “Born to Lose: The Political and Fiscal Arithmetic of Argentine Social Security” at the 3rd @bid research conference. Paper available at neumeyer.es/research. It was nice to see old friends, meet new ones and talk about economics, aging, and fertility.
Slides available here
dropbox.com/scl/fi/4593rl6u1…
Carlos Esquivel retweeted
I suggest simply enforcing penalties for gross negligence due to damages caused by your half-baked products. That would generate a pause without any new regulations or cartel-like agreements.
Carlos Esquivel retweeted
El señor Pichetto habla con desaprobación de la "peruanización del Banco Central" —el "viejo recetario del Fondo", como tan sabiamente nos explica— lamentando que, bajo las reformas propuestas a su Carta Orgánica, el Banco Central "solamente tiene que velar por cuidar la moneda".
Aquí quizás valga la pena repasar algunos números, para que podamos ver lo desastrosa que resultó la peruanización del Banco Central de Reserva para los propios peruanos:
Tasa de inflación promedio en Perú en este milenio: 3% anual.
Soles por dólar en diciembre de 1999: 3,484.
Soles por dólar hoy: 3,344.
Reservas internacionales netas del BCRP en diciembre de 1999: 8.404 millones de dólares.
Reservas internacionales netas hoy: 97.034 millones de dólares.
Tasa de crecimiento del PIB real per cápita entre 1999 y 2025: 2,93% anual.
Los peruanos, dicho sea de paso, no reciben un centavo del FMI desde 1997, cuando recibieron su último desembolso. La deuda con el Fondo se canceló por completo en 2007.
Al señor Pichetto, sin duda, todo esto le resulta bastante desagradable en comparación con las tantas cosas maravillosas que logró la Argentina durante este período en materia monetaria, especialmente desde que en 2012 se le encomendó al BCRA proveer todas las cosas buenas y se expurgaron de su Carta Orgánica los últimos resabios restrictivos del neoliberalismo.
Carlos Esquivel retweeted
Forthcoming in the AER: "Default and Interest Rate Shocks: Renegotiation Matters" by Juan Nicolini, Victor Almeida, Carlos Esquivel, and Timothy J. Kehoe. aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.12…
Carlos Esquivel retweeted
In 2028, the median person on Earth will live on more than $10 a day for the first time in history (figures adjusted for inflation and for differences in purchasing power across countries).
In the last decade alone, the share of people above this threshold has risen from 41.3% in 2016 (3.11 billion) to 48.7% in 2026 (4.03 billion). Think about that for a second: we have pushed nearly 900 million people over this threshold in ten years, around 90 million people a year (slightly above the population of Turkey).
At the very bottom, we have also seen progress, though slower. In 2016, 12.6% of the world lived below $3 a day (947 million people). In 2026, the figure fell to 10.0% (826 million). This fall is harder to achieve because the poorest countries also have fast population growth. As fertility falls there, and I think it is already falling, we will cut poverty much faster.
You are probably thinking that $10 a day is not a demanding threshold. True. But in 1990, yesterday in historical terms, only 1.42 billion people lived above it. And this is not just China: 2.6 billion people have crossed the $10 line. On the other hand, in 1990, 2.20 billion people lived below $3 a day.
I checked these figures today because I start teaching Global Economic History at Penn this Wednesday, and I wanted to update the numbers I use. As Joel Mokyr instructs us:
“The responsibility of economic historians is to remind the world what things were like before 1800. Growth was imperceptibly slow, and the vast bulk of the population was so poor that a harvest failure would kill millions. Almost half the babies born died before reaching age 5, and those who made it to adulthood were often stunted, ill and illiterate.”
(“What Today's Economic Gloomsayers Are Missing,” 2014.)
This will be my first lesson to the students on Wednesday: we live in times of historically unprecedented prosperity, and, by and large, things are getting much better every year.
Carlos Esquivel retweeted
(2/n) The answer, of course, is quite simple - there are distributional consequences to exorbitant privilege. External demand for the safe asset appreciates the domestic currency, and purchasing power rises but wages in the tradable sector fall.
Carlos Esquivel retweeted
Econ-Journal editing, weekend story. I was a referee, ok with editor's decision, read the other reports: strongly suspect that AI wrote a superficial report designed to reject.
I wrote a letter to the editor with my view. I think other academics should also do this.
More 👇
