Economist at @EestiPank | international macro/ monetary economics, applied econometrics | Bayesian | Opinions are my own | RT != endorsement
Joined June 2015
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Nicolas Reigl retweeted
Today, Foreign Affairs publishes a long essay I wrote summarizing some of my work on the global fertility collapse:
foreignaffairs.com/united-st…
It was a fantastic experience (with great editorial support) because the essay pushed me beyond pure economics to discuss issues such as geopolitics and polarization. Unlike some commentators, I don’t think the first-round economic consequences of fertility decline matter most; the second-round political and social ones do.
Yes, social security systems worldwide are in danger, but reality will impose itself sooner or later. The same politicians who swear over their ancestors’ tombs that retirement benefits will remain untouched will cut them (even if they are French). It will not be pretty, and most likely the cuts will come only after a major crisis and after politicians have tried everything else and failed.
Similarly, businesses will adapt to shrinking markets and valuations. Those who claim that capitalism somehow needs constantly expanding markets will be proven wrong. After all, this is the same misguided understanding of markets that has been proven wrong again and again since September 14, 1867, and that nobody really believes unless they have had the misfortune of earning a Ph.D. in a humanities department at an Ivy League school.
The real consequences will come when collapsing populations poison political systems. Look at the recent elections in eastern Germany. That is the future for all of us.
Also, the relative standing of great powers will shift drastically. Given current demographic trends, the U.S. will have a larger population than China by around 2100. The exact date depends on assumptions about net immigration into the U.S., but even with zero net immigration, the U.S. will overtake China by 2128. And Russia’s demographic future is only slightly more optimistic than China’s.
Those who dismiss these changes forget how antiquity ended in Western Europe. The western part of the Roman Empire entered acute demographic decline around 200 CE. By 476 CE, the western empire no longer existed. Despite some revisionist views that have cast a more positive light on late antiquity (and rightly corrected what was sometimes an overly negative assessment of the period), the fact is that England or France in 600 CE had lost most of their classical heritage, and material life had lost at least an order of magnitude in sophistication. The eastern part of the empire, however, weathered its demographic collapse much better and lasted another millennium.
No, I don’t believe we will go extinct (the Amish and Haredi will be enough for the survival of humankind), but the world will be very different in 2200 regardless of how you feel about it. The rational is the real and the real is the rational.
Nicolas Reigl retweeted
We have already seen a defection from the traditional WASP elite idea that it was an elite duty to hold the population to high educational standards, for the betterment of the entirety of society. This has led to stupidity. AI will make it worse.
I predict that High IQ well off functional people will form communities to protect themselves from sloppification, while everyone degenerates into this numb, sterile mass of jellyfishness. A Snow Crash-like scenario.
And the "well intentioned" will clap like seals, supporting the lowering of standards, much like what we've seen for the last decades, which will affect the masses and not already privileged the most.
Nicolas Reigl retweeted
Ok, finished going through the OAI math list. It is bonkers and should be front page news around the world if folks understood what this meant. But if I am running strategy at a lab, #1 priority is "do this for medicine, oncology, battery efficiency, etc as fast as possible".
Nicolas Reigl retweeted
You cannot expect people to reason objectively when they stand to profit enormously from one conclusion.
Many people at Anthropic and OpenAI are well-intentioned, but their work on recursive self-improvement urgently needs external oversight.
I found this long post from OpenAIs chief scientist a bit bonkers. Outstanding, but bonkers.
Outstanding because you see someone smart and honest reason carefully through a very, very hard problem. Bonkers because of what follows from that reasoning.
1. We do not understand alignment ("I believe that no lab has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer. I expect and hope for voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established.") You want to teach machines how to love? Anyone has any idea of how to teach anyone how to love?
2. We are proceeding by making it up as we go ("The study of deep learning-based AI is largely an experimental science. We put a lot of effort into building principled algorithms and making testable predictions, but fundamentally, our large-scale training runs are experiments, and we are sometimes surprised by their results. Moreover, as the systems become more capable, the results become harder to interpret.")
3. It is getting harder to figure out what the machines are doing and thinking ("The AI is becoming better at reasoning about and manipulating its own reasoning process.
With improved pretraining performance, we also see the models become much smarter even without using verbalized reasoning at all.")
4. Hence lets go forward fast into the unknown ("The strongest argument I see for continuing to train much smarter models quickly is the need to build defensive systems against the dangers posed by other AI.")
Nicolas Reigl retweeted
1. if transacting with superintelligent models outside of the boundaries of a lab becomes difficult due to national security / ai safety concerns and so on, it will mean the Coasean boundaries of the labs will grow to encompass all interesting industry, creating a truly cyberpunk chaebol-capitalism type of future, where the goverment sort of runs them but they also sort of run the government
2. as if there weren't already enough reasons to break up your family, leave your home, the Zone of Thought will increase the attractiveness of migrating to try and have your child on american soil, so they can have 1000x the effective brain power of people born elsewhere
3. every country should probably try and either work towards a new ai security pact with the americans immediately or pool every ounce of national resources to try and create their own ASI labs lest you become complete intellectual, economic, and moral vassals to the united states of america and the output byproducts its ASIs (you wont even get to talk to them). if they succeeded (big if) this will imply a more global race and more risk factors than was previously implied by the formerly only "beating china" narrative -- but many will prefer it to the superintelligent monopolar value lock-in
4. the other alternative is to keep the tension between safety and concentration of power at the top of mind and for the government/labs to push for solving it, rather than instrumentalizing all other values to be subservient to minimizing ai harms. insofar as safety means defending properties of the fragile world we like, the diffuse nature of power is one of those properties
5. historically the americans have been really quite Benign about their global public goods hegemony despite the ability to extract significantly more rents than they do, and it makes it easy for people of all stripes to fight for america rather than under it. we probably don't have to, but i hope america overall works towards export promotion of american models rather than export control
Nicolas Reigl retweeted
📢📢Call for Papers: Conference on Machine Learning in Economics
📍Beijing | July 11–12, 2026
Topics: AI+macro, finance, metrics, theory, applied, etc.
Confirmed speakers (so far): F Kübler, @comp_simon, S Maliar, @zhigangfeng, Gopalakrishna, Payne
🗓️Submit by May 1: smlecon.com/2026_summer_conf…
Nicolas Reigl retweeted
If the regime falls, rival intelligence agencies will be parachuting into Tehran in a cutthroat race to capture their social media guy—the Wernher von Braun of wartime posting.
Nicolas Reigl retweeted
Apple spent a decade gluing batteries into $2,499 MacBook Pros. Then it shipped a $599 laptop you can take apart in six minutes.
The MacBook Neo teardown numbers are wild. Eight screws to open. Eighteen screws hold the battery, zero glue, zero tape. The USB-C ports, speakers, and headphone jack are all modular, meaning each one swaps individually. The speakers come out with four screws. An Australian repair channel disassembled most of the machine in under six minutes using standard Torx bits you can buy at any hardware store.
For context, the 2019 MacBook Pro scored 2 out of 10 on iFixit’s repairability scale. The 16-inch Pro got a 1 out of 10. Soldered RAM, soldered storage, glued battery, proprietary pentalobe screws, keyboard riveted to the top case. Apple’s own Self Service Repair program required you to rent a 79-pound repair kit shipped in two Pelican cases just to swap a battery.
The timing explains everything. The EU Right to Repair Directive takes effect July 31, 2026. Member states are transposing it into national law right now. Manufacturers must offer repair beyond warranty, provide spare parts within 5 to 10 working days for seven years, and publish repair manuals. In the US, over a quarter of Americans already live in states with enforceable Right to Repair laws. Oregon banned parts pairing. California’s act is in effect.
Apple read the regulatory calendar and realized the cheapest laptop in the lineup would face the most scrutiny. Millions of students and first-time buyers will own it. The volume will be enormous. And regulators love consumer-protection cases involving the most affordable products in a company’s portfolio.
So they built the Neo as the compliance flagship. Standard screws, modular ports, no adhesive, a battery that lifts out. Meanwhile the $1,099 MacBook Air still has soldered storage and a riveted keyboard. The $2,499 Pro still scores poorly on independent repairability scales.
The $599 laptop is the most repairable MacBook in over a decade. Apple always knew how to build a repairable laptop. They just needed a reason that showed up on a regulatory deadline.
Nicolas Reigl retweeted
Academic journals can adapt to the AI era in the way that the horse transport industry adapted to the internal combustion engine.
Nicolas Reigl retweeted
As I explain here, the status symbol isn’t merely having kids, it’s raising kids with all the expensive inputs that indirectly priced most people out of parenting. Each family member needs a smartphone. Kids should have their own bedrooms. They need to travel. Sports teams. Music and ballet lessons. SAT prep. A family vacation means flying somewhere. Preferably internationally. College tuition. And so on: robkhenderson.com/p/girlboss…
What is the ultimate luxury status symbol? Once upon a time it may have been a sports car or a flashy watch.
But with soaring costs of living, perhaps the most serious flex of wealth is something once considered a natural part of life: having kids on.ft.com/4q0lDzD
Nicolas Reigl retweeted
If you're an expert on wealth inequality, you have to start by acknowledging the basic asset valuation dynamics that drive financial wealth inequality. real rate r ↘️ implies top 10% wealth share ↗️, and vice-versa. Picture for US below.
The red solid line displays the top-10% financial wealth share for the United States from the World Inequality
Database. The black dash-dot line displays the 10-year real bond price approximating the real yield using the 10-year nominal yield and contemporaneous inflation.
dlgreenwald.com/uploads/4/5/…
Nicolas Reigl retweeted
I think this critical point is totally lost on both the NIMBY left and the fascist right.
Countries with shrinking populations see a *massive* relocation from smaller to largest cities -- Tokyo, Madrid, Lisbon, Athens, Milan -- because, again:
Agglomeration effects are real.
Here's why mass deportations or declining birth rates cannot solve the housing crisis: housing is all about location.
Right now, America has a ton of cheap houses in rural nowhere or mid-size midwestern cities. but people don’t want housing in the abstract; they want housing *somewhere desirable.*
If America’s population shrinks, the impact won't be evenly distributed. NYC, DC, and Seattle won't suddenly have affordable rents and empty towers. Instead, economic and social gravity will pull people more tightly into the existing hubs.
Shrinkage actually intensifies geographic inequality. More and more will concentrate in the clusters that still have jobs, young people, culture, thriving economies. It'll be Cairo, IL and Toledo, OH that die. Not NYC.
Furthermore, fewer workers will likely raise rents by shrinking the construction workforce amid a shortage - forcing higher labour costs on new housing in those desirable areas.
Nicolas Reigl retweeted
OECD food inflation fell to 4.5% from 4.8% in March, while core inflation (inflation excluding food and energy) remained broadly stable at 4.6% from 4.5% in March.
🔗 brnw.ch/21wTgD6 | #OECDstats | @OECD_Stat
Nicolas Reigl retweeted
A "Ph.D. economist ... returns to his university for his class's 50th reunion. He asks if he can see the most recent Ph.D. generals exam. After a while it is brought to him. He reads it carefully, looking perplexed, and then says, "But this is exactly the same as the exam I wrote over 50 years ago." "Ah yes," says the professor. "It is the same, but all the answers are different."'
All the macroeconomics you'll ever need at a cocktail party is in this Stan Fischer speech federalreserve.gov/newsevent…
Nicolas Reigl retweeted
Birth rates are plummeting,
The UN and other forecasters keep missing the mark
Fertility in Latin America has dropped off a cliff.
Do we need to update our models?
Asks @jburnmurdoch
