10 Friday AM Reads

My end-of-week morning reads: • Has AI impacted the labor market yet? Evaluating the state of the evidence: Alex Imas and Jacob Schaal review the impact of AI on the labor market with a focus on early-career workers. The more important lagging indicators, unemployment and layoffs, have hardly shown any effect of AI in the labor market so far: the impact of AI on the overall labor market has been consistently muted. At the same time, there is some evidence of impact on entry-level hiring. (Ghosts of Electricity) • Why I Outsource My Biggest Decisions to a Chatbot, and None of the Small Ones: Lauren Leek’s chatbot told her to quit her jobs, travel Australia and leave London. She did all three, and explains why she lets AI weigh in on big choices but not small ones. It chose my job, my two months in Australia and my city, but I never let it pick my lunch. It took me six experiments and a few thousand simulated versions of my life to figure out why. (Lauren’s Data Substack) but see I Tried to Outsource My Chores to a Robot. It Was a Total Fiasco. Meta’s Muse app is supposed to do all of your internet tasks. Big Tech is already resisting. (Slate) • Muni Managers Tout Equity-Like Returns After Historic Selloff: Aashna Shah: after the beating in municipal bonds, managers say yields are now high enough to rival what stocks typically deliver. (Bloomberg) • A tale of Elves and Orcs Elf-land tends to get richer with time. But most of the recent productivity gains have been intangible, hard to monetise, top of the Maslow Hierarchy style things. Their working time has become more leisurely, as they spend more of it clicking “go ahead” to a computer, idly sending one another memes, watching videos of golden retrievers. You only need to sneeze in Elf-land and you get half a day off. They take their productivity in going home earlier, bidding up the price of fancy artwork, increasing the size of cinema seats, paying their footballers ever higher amounts, eating more cake AND diet pills. In Orc-land the productivity goes towards adding ever more barbs onto their arrows, and building horrible catapults that they load up with rocks and dead cows. And imprisoning one another. (Giles Wilkes) • Disney World Solved a Problem That Could Save America Billions Every Year: Every time a contractor digs, they risk hitting the tangle of cables, pipes and gas lines under American streets. Sara Herschander on the Magic Kingdom’s utility tunnels as the fix. (Vox) • What Does Growing NIMBY-ism Mean for Data Center Investing? Consultants say the trend is strong, but they are ‘advocating for caution and a diversified approach.’ (Chief Investment Officer) but see A.I. Is Going Rogue. Who Should Be Held Responsible?: After a string of escalating attacks since July involving models from the major labs, an unlikely coalition wants AI companies held legally liable when their systems go off the rails for their runaway technology. But legal scholars say applying existing law could be messy. . David McCabe reports. (New York Times) • She’s Spent Two Decades Talking to Parents Who Don’t Vaccinate Their Children. Here’s What She’s Learned: Nicholas Florko on what twenty years of conversations with vaccine-skeptical parents reveal about trust in science. A sociologist on why some families skip immunizations, and why ‘misinformation’ isn’t really to blame (Stat) • The New Forever War Why America and Iran Fight On Without Victory. (Foreign Affairs) • Gravity Seems Holographic. What Does That Mean for Reality? The biggest breakthrough in modern theoretical physics is the discovery that gravity can collapse the dimensions of space. Physicists don’t yet understand the implications. (Quanta Magazine) • The New York Yankees’ Old-School Plan to Conquer October: In an age of short stints on the mound, the franchise hopes that trusting its starters to go long can lead them to a first championship since 2009. (Wall Street Journal) Video of the day: Ben Affleck on AI and Hollywood Economics Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Omar Aguilar, President, Chief Executive Officer, and Chief Investment Officer of Schwab Asset Management, which runs more than $1 trillion across over 100 ETFs, mutual funds, and separately managed account strategies. He has held both the CEO and CIO titles since 2022 Your Geopolitical Risk Radar | Oct–Dec 2026 Source: Deutsche Bank Research Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.