Gavin Jackson
@gavinjackson
Mumbai correspondent at the Economist
Is it okay to be a Luddite? Thomas Pynchon asked in 1984. archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes....
They don't like Burnham in the Thames Estuary www.economist.com/britain/2026...
New paper argues that the "climate refugee" assumption is wrong and climate change is likely to reduce migration rather than increasing it. (Moving home is expensive, climate change makes people poorer). cepr.org/voxeu/column...
Case study in unintended consequences: whack up employer NI and the minimum wage and you help spread American-style tipping culture.
In terms of total time spent using Claude and GPT, India is far and away the world's largest user of AI.
If there is an AI race, has America simply lost? www.ft.com/content/9c8f...
Yesterday's results for TCS were therefore a bit of a surprise. Earnings were a beat and headcount is rising at the fastest rate in three years. www.breakingviews.com/columns/brea...
The world is making heady progress in the fight against dementia www.economist.com/briefing/202...
Here you go, you can see that tech actually has one of the smaller gaps since 2010 and US outperformance is much more about lawyers and bankers than coders. (Which is much more of a problem for Krugman's argument than his opponents).
You can see that the Swedish TFR is quite cyclical, likely reflecting a baby boom moving through society. The completed fertility rate is stable at around 2. So it likely just reflects a combination of delaying fertility and changes to the age structure.
This is what it says about declines in US fertility since 2007 which she suggests is due to the spread of the iPhone.
We know that more educated men tend to do more housework and have more children. This is Danish data.
It also looks as though there is still a significant motherhood penalty in Denmark, so if you think the value of women's wages are going up over time then the costs of patriarchal gender norms would rise over time even if the norms did not change.
I'm not sure. It looks like the decline is entirely post-pandemic in Denmark and the country saw a similar drop in the 1980s due to delayed fertility that reversed. I don't think we have evidence to say that it is a secular trend.
New Acemoglu and Autor paper finds that lower birth rates are associated with higher GDP per capita growth and falling fertility doesn't reduce economic wellbeing.
Women who took GLP-1 drugs were 30 ppts more likely to be cohabiting or married than women who expressed an interest but did not start the drugs after a year and half. www.nber.org/papers/w3538... I think this paper has an omitted variable bias but still a striking finding.
Productivity gains from AI usage in coding are getting bigger in each generation of models but dwindle as you get closer to final output. And there's been no obvious increase in demand. cepr.org/voxeu/column...
When I tell Claude Code to write some code and it then writes the code for me.
Smartphones and AI are making rural India www.economist.com/asia/2026/06...
This is crazy. European deaths from high temperatures are almost as common per head as American gun deaths. hannahritchie.substack.com/p/heat-guns-...
My favourite Brexit counterfactual: France. Before the referendum the two countries were about as rich as each other but now France is slightly richer. Though most of that gap has opened up since 2022 so maybe it's not got much to do with Brexit and is more about Britain's dependence on natural gas.