Author: Joy Buchanan

The Heartwarming Sincerity of Gravity Falls

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I learned about the children’s cartoon Gravity Falls this year from my kids.  

Bluey is wonderful for kids and adults, but it does feel like a baby show since the younger dog Bingo is 4. If you are getting out of the baby stage with kids, Gravity Falls is great next step with 12-year-old twins. The jokes are funny, especially for American parents today who would have grown up with the cultural references.

Gravity Falls has emotional depth. These days the young folks are in “situationships” trying not to catch feelings (I hear). In Gravity Falls, everyone catches feelings so hard. It’s tragically beautiful like Anna Karenina.  You can watch it on Disney+ and YouTube.  

Young Scholars or Any Scholars

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The Economic Science Association has listed some exceptions to the under-40 rule for being considered a success. I approve.

– *ESA Young Scholar Prize*: This prize is to be awarded to one young scholar whose research has made a significant contribution to experimental methodology. Nominees must

  • be under the age of 40; ESA will consider nominations of individuals over the age of 40 who started their research career late, or have had career interruptions, (b) hold an untenured position, or (c) have completed their PhD at most 10 years previously.

One does start to question if we ought to use the word “young” at all, if we are going to admit all those exceptions, since Awards for young talent are antinatalist.

Perhaps the worst thing about older people is a lower willingness to move-to-opportunity geographically. That’s not so bad from the perspective of an institution that has already made a hire, but it is bad from the perspective of a subfield or with respect to graduate admissions.

Experimental Economics is a small world, so I think there was a genuine impact on the way of thinking due to the success of Gary Charness.

Claude writes:

Charness did not follow the standard trajectory of a prodigy moving seamlessly from PhD to tenure-track stardom. He earned his doctorate from UC Berkeley relatively late, in 1999, after a career in business and industry. He was in his early 40s when he entered the academic job market — an age at which many economists assume a researcher’s most creative years are already behind them.

Despite entering academia so late, Charness went on to become one of the most cited and prolific experimental economists in the world. He continued producing high-impact work well into his 60s, with no visible declining trajectory in the originality or influence of his research.

Joy again:

Notice the move-to-opportunity at the age of 50, as indicated by Wikipedia “After commuting for three years between San Francisco and Barcelona (and floating free for another year), Gary accepted a position as an assistant professor at UCSB in 2001.”

In case you are missing the reference, this is how it’s typically used: “Evaluating the Impact of Moving to Opportunity in the United States” 

Whether full-time permanent research jobs or research awards for writing papers will still exist at all in 20 years, because of changes wrought by AI, I do not know. This week a student walked into my office to ask for help with Excel, which I was happy to provide. I told her that she could have just asked AI, but she claimed that, “Claude was acting up this week.” The year 2026 is odd because I am trying to synthesize the claim that “AGI is here” with the fact that AI still cannot perform most basic tasks correctly. Do organizations need a contingency plan for when Claude is “acting up?”

Learn to Ode 2026

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

Joke: https://x.com/TheLincoln/status/2027215235103207693

Writing about the Citrini Research report on February 28 feels like a being 6 years behind (it was only 6 days ago).

“THE 2028 GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE CRISIS: A Thought Exercise in Financial History, from the Future”

Two things the white-collar chattering class fears is that their jobs will disappear or their stock portfolios will crash. The Citrini note put that feared scenario in a picture frame so we could stare at it, like Annie Jacobsen’s book on nuclear war. The post imagines a 2028 scenario: AI automates white-collar work, companies collapse, private credit blows up, mortgages default, unemployment hits 10%.

Brian Albrecht responded: “We don’t need to just make up fantasy stories: Using economics to read Citrini Research’s AI”

Tyler encouraged us to consider a response put out by Citadel “The 2026 Global Intelligence Crisis“

Even cognitive automation faces coordination frictions, liability constraints, and trust barriers. It seems more likely that AI will be a complement rather than a substitute for labor is many areas.

One barrier to AI taking all the white-collar jobs as quickly as 2028 is just physical scaling constraints.

Having done research on “learn to code” (Buchanan 2022), I always watch new developments with interest. In 2023, I told an auditorium full of students in Indiana to learn to code if they don’t hate the work too much. At that time I had forecast that AI tools would make coding less miserable but not eliminate the need for technical human workers. Even if that was good advice at the time, is it still good advice today? I wish I had time to put up a blog on this topic every week.

Adjustments can happen along the margin of price as well as quantity. Wages to programmers can come down from their previously exalted heights, which could help the market absorb some of the young professionals who listened to “learn to code” in 2023.

So, now that the value of coding skills is in question, people are turning back to the value of the maligned English degree. It has been true for a long time that employers felt soft skills were more scarce than STEM degrees. I might add that an economics degree conveys a highly marketable blend of hard and soft skills.

Buchanan, Joy (2022). “Willingness to be paid: Who trains for tech jobs?” Labour Economics,
79, Article 102267.

Learning the Bitter Lesson at EconLog

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I’m in EconLog with:

“Learning the Bitter Lesson in 2026“

At the link, I speculate on doom, hardware, human jobs, the jagged edge (via a Joshua Gans working paper), and the Manhattan Project. The fun thing about being 6 years late to a seminal paper is that you can consider how its predictions are doing.

Sutton draws from decades of AI history to argue that researchers have learned a “bitter” truth. Researchers repeatedly assume that computers will make the next advance in intelligence by relying on specialized human expertise. Recent history shows that methods that scale with computation outperform those reliant on human expertise. For example, in computer chess, brute-force search on specialized hardware triumphed over knowledge-based approaches. Sutton warns that researchers resist learning this lesson because building in knowledge feels satisfying, but true breakthroughs come from computation’s relentless scaling. 

The article has been up for a week and some intelligent comments have already come in. Folks are pointing out that I might be underrating the models’ ability to improve themselves going forward.

Second, with the frontier AI labs driving toward automating AI research the direct human involvement in developing such algorithms/architectures may be much less than it seems that you’re positing.

If that commenter is correct, there will be less need for humans than I said.

Also, Jim Caton over on LinkedIn (James, are we all there now?) pointed out that more efficient models might not need more hardware. If the AIs figure out ways to make themselves more efficient, then is “scaling” even going to be the right word anymore for improvement? The fun thing about writing about AI is that you will probably be wrong within weeks.

Between the time I proposed this to Econlog and publication, Ilya Sutskever suggested on Dwarkesh that “We’re moving from the age of scaling to the age of research“.

Telephone Classroom Game for Teaching Large Language Models

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LLM_Telephone_Game_SheetDownload

Use the above game to generate interaction in a class setting. Students collectively form an LLM and have fun seeing the final sentence that gets produced. I call this game “LLM Telephone” based on the classic game of telephone. I suggest downloading the file LLM_Telephone_Game_Sheet and handing out printed copies. However, this game could be adapted to a virtual setting.

The nice thing about passing papers in the classroom is that you can have several sheets circulating in a quite room, so when the final sentence is read allowed it comes as a surprise to most people.

If you’d like to have a handout to follow the game with a more technical explanation, you can use this two-page PDF:

LLM_Telephone_Game_ExplainDownload

The game relies on a player presenting two tokens of which the next player can select their favorite. Participants should be bound by the rules of grammar and logic when making their selection and presenting two tokens to the next player.

This game works as a fun ice breaker for any type of class that touches on the topic of artificial intelligence. It is suitable for many ages and academic disciplines.

IP Paper on Econlog

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My research on intellectual property is featured at

Everyone Take Copies (Econlog)

The title of this post, “everyone take copies,” comes from a conversation between the human subjects in an experiment in our lab, on which the paper is based. The experiment was studying how and when people take resources from one another.

Here’s a tip that doesn’t require any piracy. For those of you who are tired of the subscription economy fees, I think it’s safe to say in 2026 that anyone in the United States can find a local thrift store or annual rummage sale with oodles of nearly-free media. DVDs for a dollar. Used books for a dollar. Basically you are paying the transaction costs – the media itself is free. (I typed that dash myself, not AI!)

“Buying” a movie to stream on Amazon Prime can run over $20. Buying a used DVD is usually less than $10.

Something like the above observation probably lead to this parody news headline Awesome New Streaming Service Records Movie Streams Onto Cool Shiny Discs And You Can Buy Them And Own Them Forever

Here’s a response from the prompt “Make a picture of my office with AOL CD-ROMs decorating the wall.”

Update on School Valentines

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I have principles. One of them is that school Valentines are indulgent and bad for the environment.

I have written Markets in Everything for school Valentine’s

And here are some quotes from Do Less for Preschool

Just fail, people. Don’t even put “crazy sock day” on your work Outlook calendar…

Oh no. If AI lifts the constraint of time, then what we are going to get is more crazy sock days. To stay ahead in the status competition, families will have to do Bluey-Crazy Sock Day every week. The ocean will become a thick soup of polyester Bluey-crazy-socks, size 3T, worn only once.

On principle, I did low-effort Valentine’s last year. I spent as little of my own time and money as I could. My kids wrote their friends’ names on the paper things.  Smugly, I imagined that I’d saved the dolphins in the tuna nets and helped some other mom feel like she was doing okay.

Who do you imagine is upset? Not the other moms. My kids. The older one especially feels in his body that failing this test in February of 2026 will result in expulsion from the tribe and death in the outer darkness beyond the reach of the campfire.

Guess what I care about more than dolphins? We will do more this year.

Preschool kids do not care and should not be asked to care. I still believe that parents and daycare directors should do less for preschool. Truly, I see no reason, at all, for a preschool dress up day or Valentine’s Day party. Can someone think of the dolphins before it’s too late and the kid grows up and starts caring about the status wars?

Casual Sourdough Baking

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I have sourdough starter in my fridge and have tried making two rounds of bread. I write this as a civilian, for others who will never elevate baking above a hobby.

I will begin with a picture of my first bread:

That’s not very fluffy but not terrible. It was real bread to go with butter or soup. My neighbor’s starter was in great condition when she gave it to me, and I followed the standard recipe. I use 80% bread flour and 20% whole wheat flour to make it healthier.

Below I will speculate on whether sourdough projects are a good use of time or not. Call it home economics.

Continue reading →

Thousands killed in Iran Protests

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How Many People Were Killed in Iran’s Crackdown? (WSJ)

Efforts to establish the death toll in the Iranian protests are confounded by the regime’s internet blockade, but even the most conservative estimates take the tally way beyond some of the most brutal political crackdowns in modern history.

Even the lowest estimates—between 2,000 and 3,000—have surged past the death tolls in unrest during protests in 2019 and 2022.

I have sadly seen much higher estimates circulating which may be confirmed eventually.

Further complicated by the fact that Iran authorities demanding large sums for return of protesters’ bodies, BBC told

The value of reading great literature

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I am pleased to have guest posted for Henry Oliver:

“An economist asks: What is the value of reading great literature like Eliot and Tolstoy?”

In 2025, after mostly feeling too busy for great literature for a few years, I picked up two books that come highly recommended by people with good taste: Middlemarch and Anna Karenina. They are excellent, and they are long. I propose two reasons why they need to be long.

My second reason for long novels:

The second powerful thing about a long novel, if they are written by geniuses like Eliot or Tolstoy, is that you have enough time to see how choices play out over years. You have space to even see the consequences of the consequences. You will experience moral formation from these novels in a way that you just cannot from a 2-hour movie or social media post. 

Quick bio of Henry: Henry Oliver writes the popular literary Substack The Common Reader, which has been quoted in the Atlantic and elsewhere. His book Second Act, a study of late-blooming talent, was released in 2024.

Lastly, I must thank my sister for engaging me in literature discussion over the Christmas break. She is reading Proust.