Farewell, dear readers. This is the last issue of my newsletter. I’ve enjoyed writing it for the past three-and-a-half years and interacting with all of you. Some of you have practically become pen pals. (Zbigniew, Orin, Nana, Jack, Roy, Hiroshi — it’s been real.)
For this last issue I went back and reread, or at least glanced over, everything I’ve written since August 2021. Here’s a link. Anyone’s writing is inevitably going to reflect both what’s happening in the world and the writer’s personal obsessions. That’s true for me. As this bar chart shows, I wrote a lot about inflation because it was the biggest story of the day. I also wrote about things that I easily could have passed over but was drawn to like catnip, including eclipses, accident prevention, Colombian land reform and my great-grandfather.
My time at The Times roughly coincided with Joe Biden’s term in office. I started half a year after he did and have outlasted him by less than a month. I liked Bidenomics more than a lot of people did, but I agreed with many that he clung to hopes for re-election way too long.
Early on I was still writing a lot about Covid. Then came a burst of inflation pieces. More recently it’s been artificial intelligence, Donald Trump and Elon Musk. The rain of news fell consistently. Since Trump’s second term began, it’s been a deluge.
Readers responded enthusiastically to my newsletters on personal finance, which covered when to claim Social Security, how much to spend in retirement, long-term care insurance, and (just this past Friday) Roth I.R.A. conversions. If I managed to help some people with those pieces, which relied on the advice of experts, I’m happy.
When I wrote about business, it was very often about tech companies, including Apple, Amazon and Intel, although I also did pieces on Disney and the airlines, among others. I fondly remember “The Day Rosa Santana Got Her Big Break,” about a woman whom Toyota helped to start a company that assembles truck beds.
I wrote a lot about the Federal Reserve, partly because it’s important and partly because it’s a relatable gateway to difficult concepts such as real interest rates. One of my favorite newsletters was also the shortest: A humor piece imagining Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, as a car salesman pitching the Meta 4 (“Lots of legroom and seats 335 million.”)
Speaking of the Fed, I owe the institution an apology for repeatedly predicting that its interest rate increases would cause a recession. Lots of forecasters were saying that when the increases began, but I (not a forecaster) stuck to the warnings far too long.
Some journalists are crusaders. I admire them. I am more of an explainer. I like learning new things and sharing them with readers. I loved writing about iron-air batteries, which release energy by rusting. And the nutmeg island that Britain traded for Manhattan — sort of — in 1667. And the artist named Penny Pinch, who used a descending-price auction to sell his works.
It wasn’t until I counted and categorized my work for The Times that it dawned on me how many newsletters I wrote about strategies for living. The similarity between golf and life, for example. How to run really big projects. And how to split the difference in negotiations. I have a pair of couches that I’ve named Barry and Nalebuff after Barry Nalebuff, the Yale School of Management professor who walked me through how to negotiate for them.
I was also surprised and gratified to realize how many newsletters I wrote about what I’ll call well-being. That may seem squishy for an economics newsletter, but as I see it, the ultimate purpose of economics is to improve people’s well-being, or at least remove the obstacles that get in the way of their own pursuit of it. My first Thanksgiving here, I wrote about gratitude. When our son was getting married, I wrote about the economic benefits of marriage. I wrote about social capital in Manchester, Vt. Also patriotism, heroism and humility.
I could go on but I won’t. A lot of blue here. Not just the color of the links, but my mood as I say goodbye to you and to The Times. Still not sure where I’ll fetch up next, but I’m hoping to keep doing this kind of stuff somewhere for a good long time. Meanwhile, I have a book in the works and a free Substack channel.
Goodbye.
Elsewhere: How Will A.I. Change Occupations?
Artificial intelligence appears likely to become another “general-purpose technology” — namely, a disruptive technology like steam power and electricity that is widely used, that can be steadily improved and that enables complementary innovations around it. What’s less clear is how it will change employment in various occupations — will it augment workers and increase the number of jobs, or automate jobs out of existence?
One clue comes from history, according to David Deming, Christopher Ong and Lawrence Summers of Harvard’s Kennedy School in a recent paper from the Aspen Institute’s Aspen Economic Strategy Group, “Technological Disruption in the U.S. Labor Market.” As the chart above, taken from their paper, goes to show, technological advances over the past 140 years reduced the amount of labor needed in agriculture, but led to increased employment in professional occupations.
“History tells us that we should expect the occupational upgrading of office work to continue,” the authors write. “At least in the near term,” they add, “A.I. is more likely to ratchet up firms’ expectations of knowledge workers than it is to replace them.”
Quote of the Day
“Possibilities do not merely add up. They multiply.”
— Paul Romer, “Economic Growth,” as collected in “The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics” (2008)
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