Greg Mankiw on whether economics is a science (WSJ)

Even better, use AI to make custom books, complete with illustrations. With adventures and characters your kids help come up with, and morals chosen by you to help with your parenting challenges. It’s a hit around here! Fun for everyone.📕

Clearly Wojtek Kopczuk 🇵🇱🇺🇦 and 🇺🇲 needs to amp up his cooking game beyond just salmon in the dishwasher.

I have a great and really novel new idea for a Marvel movie. It’ll have hulk, but a *blue* one this time. The bad guys will have mind control like all the other movies. But it will be subtly *different* mind control. A hero who can fly and has really strong armour will fight

Poor job market candidate never even got past the motivation slide.

Jonathan Pincus argues a zero-tax baseline should be used to measure superannuation tax burdens. On this basis, upper-income earners will have paid over 50 cents for every dollar in their Superannuation Guarantee balances over 25 years. austaxpolicy.com/despite-conces…

Nice article by Richard Holden on productivity, including AI. Knee-jerk over-regulation would be a mistake that Australia can’t afford. afr.com/policy/economy…

Heard a rumor the US is going to abruptly pull out of its submarine deal with Australia and build non-nuclear subs with France.

The year my son got cancer. DISCLAIMER: THIS IS A PRO BONO PIECE WRITTEN IN COLLABORATION WITH THE CHILDREN'S CANCER FOUNDATION.

1/ Treasury says the CGT discount is a $22.7b “tax expenditure”. When is the last time you read an article considering it full taxation of nominal gains (ie no discount or indexation) is a reasonable alternative? Helpfully, the OECD provides an alternative comparison point.

We talk about literacy and math, but I want a school that doesn’t tell my kids the primary colors are red, yellow and blue.

So many complaints about AI sound like someone who tried this fancy new invention called a “car”, but when they drove it into the ocean it didn’t even float.

A large part of why LLMs are great is that you can get all the helpful stuff StackOverflow used to provide, but without the dreadfully annoying judgmentalism and snark. Or if you miss that, you can add it back in.

If you think of a little web app that should exist, you can literally just tell Gemini about it, and suddenly it does. Amazing stuff.

Folks, don’t you there is a market for lemons?

“We are really interested in talking about tax reform. We need it to improve productivity. Please tell us your ideas. But we won’t actually do any of them. We already know what we want to do.” — The Government

Zero percent of the benefit of HECS debt forgiveness goes to people in the bottom 40% of the wage earner distribution. 1% goes to people below the median. 99% accrues to people earning over the median wage.

This is not my experience with Americans. Though to be fair, all the Americans I know are economists.