Short economic arguments, observations and explorations.
Housing · Markets
Since 2015 Spain has made room for its newcomers by squeezing rather than building, and rents rose where they arrived. Rents are paid by renters, and renters are poor and young: the same inflow costs the poorest tenth about seven times as much of its income as the richest, while the price gain goes to older owners.
ReadLabor · Technology
The advice for the age of AI is to work with your hands and with people. It is right about jobs and wrong about pay. In care, retail and hospitality, wages will follow who else can do the job, and AI is sending more people their way. Data from the US, the UK, Spain and the EU.
ReadHousing · Markets
Spain's population has grown twice in two decades. The first time, it built homes for the newcomers. The second time, it fitted them into the homes it already had, and around Barcelona the squeeze began to push residents out. Provincial maps and an international comparison.
ReadTechnology · Firms
AI software is moving from seats to usage, and from usage to tasks and outcomes. This is not a fashion in pricing. It follows from one question: who decides how much compute the product burns? Copilots, agents and the old choice between cost-plus and fixed-price contracts.
ReadLabor · Technology
Juniors have always learned by doing the easy work. AI now does the easy work, and once it is standard, knowledge below its frontier stops being paid. Learning becomes all or nothing, each model release raises the bar, and employers have little reason to pay for the missing rungs.
ReadTechnology · Firms
Solo founders now start a third of new companies, and some write almost no code by hand. But whatever makes your product cheaper to build makes your rival's cheaper too. With free entry, the typical software firm ends up worth what it cost to build, so cheaper building means cheaper firms. What survives is what code cannot copy.
ReadLabor · Technology
Some experiments find that AI helps the least skilled most; others that it helps the best. Both are right. An AI tool lifts those below its frontier and multiplies those above it, so the gain is V-shaped in ability, and which side shows up depends on how much the model knows.
ReadLabor · Technology · Firms
The price of AI is collapsing, yet postings for forward-deployed engineers rose eightfold in 2025. Agents can be copied at the price of compute; plugging them into a firm cannot. Cheaper AI raises demand for the people who implement it, and whether that boom lasts depends on whether AI learns to implement itself.
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