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What are we talking about this week?
"I Hope You are Doing Well." Do you? I submit that we stop using that term immediately. Updated Sundays. These are the ideas, articles, examples, and provocations that may shape office-hour conversations this week.
New additions: a provocative argument that the United States may have obtained much of the strategic value of “buying” Greenland without buying it at all; and new evidence asking whether the standard social-media-causes-misery story is much weaker than everyone thinks. Also on tap: the college advantage may be breaking at the first rung of the career ladder, Friday nights with friends are disappearing, childhood is becoming high-tech but low-play, and parents are now hiring paid “campus moms” to check on, feed, clean up after, medicate, and supervise their college-age children.
Rochester Economics: What Does a $109,324 Median Tell Us?
The New York Times comparison shared here reports median earnings of $109,324 for Rochester economics graduates, versus $93,367 for Rochester Business/Commerce, General — a gap of $15,957, or about 17%. The all-institutions, all-majors benchmark shown is $64,500. The screenshot credits The HEA Group and identifies the 2017–18 and 2018–19 graduating cohorts.
For discussion: How much of that gap reflects skills learned in economics, and how much reflects who chooses the major, career choices, geography, or further education? What would we need to know to estimate what the same student would earn under either major? And how should students weigh earnings alongside the work they want to do and the lives they want to lead?
Hot Discussion: AI Sludge
The Politics of Slowing Down a Race Nobody Knows How to Stop.
Can America actually slow frontier AI? Would a unilateral pause make the world safer—or merely slow the most visible U.S. labs while development continues elsewhere? We pulled the whole argument into one cleaned discussion: the strongest case against a unilateral slowdown, whether a slowdown is technically possible, the China problem, the strongest counterargument, and a forecast of what Washington is actually likely to do.
AI Political Economy Knowledge Problem China Regulation Existential Risk
This Week’s Big Theme
The decline of small private colleges. Is this a buying opportunity? Should some of them close? What is actually being lost? And is this just demographics, or is something deeper happening in the university marketplace?
Now put an even more uncomfortable higher-education question beside it: what if the college payoff has not simply disappeared, but the entry ramp into the professional labor market is breaking? Among 22- to 26-year-olds, workers with a bachelor’s degree or more now have a 6.1 percent unemployment rate, above the 5.4 percent rate for young workers with some college or an associate degree. Older graduates look much closer to normal. Is this a temporary hiring freeze, AI attacking junior white-collar tasks, too many degrees chasing too few entry-level professional jobs, or the beginning of a structural change in the college-to-career pipeline?
Also on tap: the collapse of Friday night as a distinctive time for being with friends. If people are spending less time with friends, is that mainly a change in preferences, or did we lose some of the institutions, schedules, habits, and informal coordination technologies that made recurring social life easy?
And now add childhood itself: American kids are spending large amounts of time online while also being tightly restricted in the physical world. This is not just a screen-time story. It is an autonomy, social capital, childhood, parenting, risk, class, and coordination story.
Finally: what happens when that low-autonomy childhood follows students to college? A new service sector is emerging in which parents hire local “campus moms” to do wellness checks, clean dorm rooms, bring soup, pick up prescriptions, sit with students in emergency rooms, coordinate exterminators, and send updates home. Is this simply specialization and gains from trade—or evidence that adulthood itself is being outsourced?
Higher Ed Human Capital Labor Markets AI Institutions Markets Creative Destruction Political Economy Social Capital Time Use Coordination Childhood Technology Play Autonomy Parenting Service Sector
Main Questions
Fun economics question, if you take the "AI will kill all of humanity in 10 years" idea seriously,
... then ... what does this do for your estimates of the damages coming from climate change, and what appropriate climate policy might be?
“People like immigration with conditions more than they like immigration without any conditions!” … “A politician who advocated a more open immigration system, conditional on learning English, banning welfare use, and zero-tolerance for crime, would be more in line with public opinion than either Republicans or Democrats”
Side question: What would “keyhole solutions” to other contentious, seemingly unsolvable problems look like—for example, abortion? Can we target the specific harm or objection at issue in a way that people on opposing sides might accept?
One of us (Mr. Fryer) released a study in 2016—later published in the Journal of Political Economy—finding that police aren’t more likely to shoot black Americans than white Americans, after accounting for the relevant context. Colleagues who read the draft warned him not to publish: “You’ll ruin your career.” The paper was denounced on social media within minutes of release, and Mr. Fryer needed armed protection for more than a month. Privately, scholars who read the study called it rigorous, honest work. Publicly, many of the same scholars said nothing. No single study settles a question this large—but silence isn’t how science advances.
The Wall Street Journal: “An Award for Scholars Who Tell the Truth”
For discussion: If scholars privately call a study rigorous but won’t say so publicly, what incentives are shaping the knowledge the rest of us receive? What do scholars owe one another—and the public—when a finding is unpopular? How do we keep disputed findings open to criticism without making the act of studying the question a career risk?
Parents are now hiring local concierge services to act as a kind of paid mother for their college-age children: wellness checks, laundry, dorm cleaning, chicken soup when sick, prescription pickup, ER companionship, landlord and doctor recommendations, exterminator coordination, even photos sent home when parents have not heard from their child.
For discussion: Is this just a marvelous example of specialization and a market responding to demand? Or is it an astonishing continuation of the low-autonomy childhood problem into adulthood? What exactly are parents purchasing: convenience, insurance, surveillance, peace of mind, or avoidance of letting their children fail? And if students can outsource the mundane responsibilities through which people historically learned adulthood, what does that do to human capital formation?
“So why not take $1 billion out of Elon’s bank account and parcel it out to 10,000 random working-class people? Elon wouldn’t even notice, and the 10,000 people would get a lot more of what they want in life — better health care, an education for their kids, nicer food, a bigger house, or whatever. Utilitarianism is the foundation of redistribution.
How far can you push that principle, though? The above example — redistributing just 0.1% of the wealth of the world’s richest man — seems clear enough. But you can just keep designing more extreme thought experiments, until you end up asking whether bugs’ lives matter more than humans’ lives, and everyone just starts laughing at you.”
The linked thread’s argument, in summary:
- The US secured a permanent military foothold that even an independent Greenland would inherit whether it likes it or not.
- The US now has veto power over any non-NATO military presence in Greenland, and over who can invest in its strategic infrastructure and resources beyond NATO and the EU.
- Denmark signed away its say over the principle of new US bases, retaining only the right to discuss the “implementation details.”
- Danish authorities no longer set the rules for US military movement across the island.
- And all of it is now justified by the defense of “the American continent.”
The thread then asks how this squares with language that “recognizes the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Kingdom and the Greenlandic people’s right to self-determination.” If a foreign country can put bases on your soil, move troops under special rules, and shape who else can gain military or strategic access, what exactly does sovereignty mean in practice?
Links Worth Your Time
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What’s Better Than the US Buying Greenland? Getting it for free!
A deliberately provocative thread about the gap between formal sovereignty and practical strategic control: US basing rights, military movement, outside military access, and investment in strategic infrastructure and resources. -
Social technology use and subsequent life satisfaction
A Nature Human Behaviour paper finding little credible evidence that social-technology use predicts later life satisfaction. Texting is associated with higher life satisfaction across people, while YouTube and TikTok use are associated with lower life satisfaction—an excellent reminder that association, prediction, and causation are not the same thing. -
Marginal Revolution: “Those new service sector jobs”
Tyler Cowen flags the remarkable growth of paid “campus mom” services for college students: wellness checks, dorm cleaning, laundry, medicine pickup, hospital companionship, birthday balloons, food when sick, local recommendations, and updates sent back to parents. A nearly perfect discussion item about markets, parenting, autonomy, class, higher education, and whether adulthood itself is becoming a purchasable service. -
Gad Levanon, “For young workers, the college advantage is breaking down”
A striking labor-market inversion. Using CPS data through July 2026, Levanon shows unemployment among 22- to 26-year-olds with a BA or more at 6.1 percent, versus 5.4 percent for those with some college or an associate degree. The deterioration is concentrated at the bottom of the white-collar career ladder rather than among graduates generally: older graduates look much more normal, overall unemployment remains low, and layoffs are rare. Levanon points to depressed entry-level hiring, AI exposure in junior knowledge-work tasks, and a long-run increase in the supply of graduates as plausible parts of the story. -
High Tech, Low Play: The Life of American Children
Institute for Family Studies report brief by Michael Toscano, Lyman Stone, and Grant Bailey. Based on a large national survey of parents and children, the report finds high device use, weak restrictions, low unsupervised outdoor play, and striking limits on children’s physical mobility. -
Neal Caren, “The End of Friday Nights with Friends”
The underlying paper. Using American Time Use Survey data from 2003 to 2024, Caren shows that time with friends has fallen by more than half and that the old Friday-night social peak has nearly vanished. -
Marginal Revolution discussion: “The End of Friday Nights with Friends”
Tyler Cowen flags the paper and its central point: the decline is not only about less socializing overall, but about the temporal reorganization of social life. Friday night now looks much more like an ordinary weeknight. -
American Time Use Survey
The source data family behind the result. The survey records how Americans spend their time and who they are with, which makes it possible to study the weekly rhythm of social life rather than just aggregate loneliness. -
The Small Private Colleges Dying in a Winner-Take-All University Marketplace
Starting point for thinking about institutional decline, market sorting, demographics, and what small colleges used to do. -
John Wallis on rules, privileges, and political order
Useful background for thinking about impersonal rules, elite coalitions, identity rules, and why losing must be survivable. -
Sebastian Junger on power, public opinion, and fascism rhetoric
A useful counterweight to lazy political catastrophe language. What constrains leaders in practice: courts, public opinion, institutions, and political incentives? -
NASCAR Doesn’t Have a Monopoly on Left Turns
A study using large language models to classify the ideological orientation of social science abstracts over time. -
Artificial Intelligence–Powered (Finance) Scholarship
Robert Novy-Marx and Mihail Velikov on AI-generated finance scholarship, research productivity, and the danger of industrialized HARKing. -
Electric school bus mandate costs and reliability
A practical implementation case: what happens when green mandates collide with budgets, reliability, and local service delivery? -
The nonprofit racket?
Public money, nonprofit contracting, fraud risk, and the difference between compassion as intention and governance as implementation.
Provocations / Things to Argue About
Campus moms: the service sector comes for adulthood
This may be the cleanest possible bridge between the low-autonomy-childhood discussion and the economics of services. A market has emerged because some parents value being able to purchase a local adult who will monitor and care for their college-age children from afar. There is nothing mysterious about the economics: willingness to pay meets entrepreneurial supply.
There are at least two ways to read it. The benign reading is gains from trade: parents with money buy peace of mind; students get help when they need it; entrepreneurs earn income providing valuable services. The darker reading is that childhood dependence is being extended by purchasing substitutes for the ordinary failures, hassles, discomforts, errands, illnesses, and emergencies through which young adults historically became competent adults. The class angle matters too: affluent families can now purchase an additional layer of individualized support around institutions already designed to serve young adults.
The first rung of the white-collar ladder is disappearing?
The weirdness of the current labor market is what makes Levanon’s result so useful. Overall unemployment is only 4.1 percent. Employers are not broadly firing people. Young workers without bachelor’s degrees are doing reasonably well by their own historical standards. The weakness is concentrated among young graduates trying to enter professional work, while older graduates look much closer to normal.
Levanon’s explanation combines a sudden shock with a slow-moving background condition. The sudden shock is weak hiring in graduate-heavy sectors and possible AI substitution for exactly the junior tasks that used to justify entry-level knowledge workers. The background condition is decades of rising BA attainment, meaning more graduates competing for the professional jobs a degree is supposed to unlock. That raises a deeper question: are we watching a recession-like hiring pause that will clear, or a permanent repricing of the first years after college?
High tech, low play
The most incredible fact for students: by age 14, a majority of American kids are not allowed to travel beyond their own street without an adult. Even at age 17, more than 60 percent cannot go beyond their own neighborhoods unsupervised. This is the age right before college, legal adulthood, jobs, cars, dating, roommates, alcohol, debt, and voting. Yet many teenagers are still being treated as if ordinary neighborhood movement is too risky.
The report’s even sharper social point: 14- to 17-year-olds who cannot leave the family home or yard have barely more unsupervised social time with friends than 5- to 9-year-olds under the same restrictions. Autonomy is not just about danger or convenience. It may be a necessary input into friendship.
The end of Friday nights with friends
American Time Use Survey data covering 243,095 people show time with friends falling by more than half from 2003–2024, with the once-distinctive Friday-evening peak nearly disappearing.
Why it matters: interventions aimed only at loneliness may miss the coordination technology that made recurring social life inexpensive. Plausible mechanisms include remote work weakening after-work rituals, declining alcohol use, suburbanization, childcare costs, and group chats or streaming providing incomplete substitutes. These are possible mechanisms, not identified causes.
Democracy, rules, and losing
The word “democracy” gets tossed around carelessly. A more serious question is whether people on all sides believe losing is survivable under impersonal rules. If losing means your opponents can use institutions to destroy you, politics becomes total war.
One-party jurisdictions
Think about localities or states where one faction dominates. Are elections enough to discipline power if the real rule for getting elected is acceptability to a powerful local coalition?
Legalization and regulation
“Legalize it” often means “create a taxable, regulated, inspectable category.” The Humboldt County shed story is useful for thinking about how legalization can expand administrative control rather than reduce it.
Grade inflation
What are the long-run costs of making students feel better in the short run? If grades stop communicating information, who pays?
Green mandates and implementation costs
Electric school buses sound clean in theory. But what should we do when operating costs are higher, reliability is lower, and the people bearing the risk are school districts and children?
AI and HARKing
AI may make scholarship faster. It may also make it easier to manufacture plausible explanations after results are known. Is this a productivity miracle, an epistemic disaster, or both?
Loose Threads
- Greenland without buying Greenland: How much does formal sovereignty matter if another state possesses durable military access and substantial influence over who else can gain strategic access?
- Text your moms / social-media causality: If longitudinal models find little evidence that social-technology use predicts later life satisfaction, which familiar claims about social media survive—and which were mostly correlation dressed up as causation?
- Campus moms / outsourced adulthood: If parents can buy wellness checks, dorm cleaning, medicine pickup, and proof-of-life photos for their college-age children, is that just another useful service market—or are we monetizing the postponement of adulthood?
- The college-to-career bottleneck: If the labor market no longer needs as many junior analysts, coders, researchers, and other entry-level knowledge workers, what should students do differently — and what should colleges stop pretending?
- High-tech, low-play childhood: If teenagers cannot go places, is the phone a cause of isolation, a substitute for missing freedom, or both?
- Friday nights and friend time: What happens when the recurring social slots disappear? Can friendship survive without shared schedules, third places, work rituals, and cheap defaults?
- Cell phone bans: Who wants them, who benefits, and what problem are they actually trying to solve?
- Nonprofit fraud and public contracting: When does compassion become a racket?
- Data centers: Infrastructure, poor regions, energy politics, and fake concern for the working class.
- Social science ideology: What would count as evidence that a discipline is ideologically homogeneous, and why would it matter?
- Greenpeace and pipeline litigation: Protest, property rights, torts, and the cost of “dissent.”
- Yachts and cow methane: What should we make of high-consumption elites funding anti-consumption policy agendas?
For Lunch Bunch / Nerd Club
These are the more speculative, weird, philosophical, or fun discussion items. They may not belong in class, but they are perfect for conversation.
- Is paying for a “campus mom” simply excellent specialization—or does it destroy part of the point of going away to college?
- Is democracy a set of procedures, a culture of losing gracefully, or both?
- Are elite institutions becoming more winner-take-all, or are we simply noticing the sorting more clearly?
- If AI eliminates the jobs where young professionals learn by doing, who becomes the expert ten years from now?
- When does regulation solve a real externality, and when does it become a tax-and-control machine?
- What is the difference between corruption as individual moral failure and corruption as institutional design failure?
- Can AI improve research without destroying trust in research?
- Did Friday night disappear because people changed their preferences, or because the world stopped cheaply coordinating them?
- Did phones make kids less free, or did less freedom make phones more dominant?
- What is sovereignty worth when another country controls much of the strategic access that actually matters?
- How many confident claims about social media collapse once you demand longitudinal evidence rather than vibes and correlations?
How to Use This Page
You do not need to read everything. Pick one item, think seriously about it, and bring a question or objection to office hours.
The standard is not agreement. The standard is good faith: understand the strongest version of the argument before attacking it.
Archive
- Week 1: Small private colleges, the weakening college advantage for young workers, rules versus relationships, democracy rhetoric, AI/HARKing, nonprofits, mandates, institutional failure, the end of Friday nights with friends, high-tech, low-play childhood, and the rise of paid campus-mom services.
A new Nature Human Behaviour paper reports “scant evidence of a meaningful relationship between social technology use and subsequent life satisfaction.” Across the models, social-technology use did little to predict later life satisfaction; in the reverse direction, greater life satisfaction predicted only modest increases in video calling for some groups.
In comparisons across people, texting was associated with higher life satisfaction, while YouTube and TikTok use were associated with lower life satisfaction. For discussion: how much of what everyone “knows” about phones, social media, and misery is causal evidence—and how much is vibes, cross-sectional correlation, selection, and a story we already wanted to believe?