What we’re reading (1/17)
“Claude Is Taking The AI World By Storm, And Even Non-Nerds Are Blown Away” (Wall Street Journal). “They call it getting ‘Claude-pilled.’ It’s the moment software engineers, executives and investors turn their work over to Anthropic’s Claude AI—and then witness a thinking machine of shocking capability, even in an age awash in powerful artificial-intelligence tools. Many coders spent their holiday breaks on a “Claude bender,” testing out the capabilities of the latest Anthropic model, Claude Opus 4.5, which they used within a desktop coding tool called Claude Code…Some described a feeling of awe followed by sadness at the realization that the program could easily replicate expertise they had built up over an entire career.”
“Move Over, ChatGPT” (The Atlantic). “Part of what works so well about Claude Code is that it makes it easy to connect all sorts of apps. Sara Du, the founder of the AI start-up Ando, told me that she is using it to help with a variety of life tasks, like managing her texts with real-estate agents. Because the bot is hooked up to her iMessages, she can ask it to find all of the Zillow links she’s sent over the past month and compile a table of listings. ‘It gives me a lot of dopamine,’ Du said. Andrew Hall, a Stanford political scientist, had Claude Code analyze the raw data of an old paper of his studying mail-in voting. In roughly an hour, the bot replicated his findings and wrote a full research paper complete with charts and a lit review.”
“Is This Billionaire A Financial Genius Or A Fraudster?” (New York Times). “Bitcoin has attracted plenty of prophets, braggarts and flat-out baddies. Of late, though, no one in the industry is attracting more attention and scorn than Mr. Saylor, a would-be magnate and accused tax scofflaw who in six short years has transformed his also-ran technology company, Strategy, into a Bitcoin betting machine.”
“Stocks, Bubbles & Market Myths” (Barry Ritholtz). “Perhaps the Mag 7 dominance is fading; if five of these seven companies underperformed the S&P 500, that means the other 493 companies are catching up in both price appreciation and (eventually) earnings growth.”
“Growth Experiences And Trust In Government” (Timothy Besley, Christopher Dann, Sacha Dray, QJE). “Exploiting cohort-level variation, we find that individuals who experience higher GDP growth are more prone to trust their governments, with larger effects found in democracies. Higher growth experiences are also associated with improved perceptions of government performance and living standards. We find no similar channel between growth experience and interpersonal trust. Second, more recent growth experiences appear to matter most for trust in government, with no detectable effect of growth experienced during one’s formative years, closer to birth or before birth. Third, we find evidence of a “trust paradox” whereby average trust in government is lower in democracies than in autocracies.”
