The Free Press: Tyler Cowen Must Know

Good Riddance to the ‘Giving Pledge’

Tyler Cowen — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:05:59 GMT

Billionaires are walking away from the Giving Pledge.

If you do not recall the details, the Giving Pledge was a public promise to donate at least half of one’s wealth to charitable causes. Bill Gates, his then-wife Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett were initial signatories of the pledge when it launched in 2010. Since then, more than 250 donors have signed on.

Recently, however, some billionaires have been backing out, and the rate of new donors signing on has plummeted. The New York Times reported that only a handful of new signers joined in 2024 and 2025. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel told the paper that he had urged signers to revoke their commitments, and that many have expressed regrets about joining what Thiel calls an “Epstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club.” There’s no clear single reason for the decline of the pledge; some of it may be that billionaires have turned to political giving, or are reinvesting in their companies instead of giving to charity. Whatever the cause, the pledge has fallen out of fashion.

How to Lose the AI Arms Race

Tyler Cowen — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 22:29:20 GMT

In the Pentagon Battle with Anthropic, We All Lose

Tyler Cowen — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 02:37:41 GMT

The Pentagon and Anthropic have seen their relationship blow up in an argument over how the military could use Anthropic’s AI models. On the surface, this is a fight about defense contracts. Really, it is something much deeper: a stress test of how the United States governs frontier AI.

Anthropic is being eased out of Department of Defense contracting fo…

The Truth About Aliens Is Hiding in Plain Sight

Tyler Cowen — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 02:24:38 GMT

“Are aliens real?” a podcaster asked former president Obama earlier this month.

“They’re real, but I haven’t seen them,” Obama said, smiling. “And they’re not being kept in Area 51.”

As you might guess, a former president suggesting even jokingly that aliens might be among us gets attention. Obama soon walked back his remarks, clarifying that he’d seen no evidence “that extraterrestrials have made contact with us.” While “the odds are good there’s life out there,” Obama wrote, he felt it was unlikely aliens had visited us across the distances of space.

Still, unlikely isn’t impossible. And the alien question is getting plenty of life these days, with Trump announcing last week that he had directed the government to release any files on aliens or extraterrestrial life.

A Simple Test of What People Really Think About Immigration

Tyler Cowen — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 20:32:07 GMT

As debates over immigration rage around us, I would like to propose a simple metric for resolving disputes over whether immigration benefits a particular region or city. It is an imperfect standard, but it has the virtues of being measurable and quantitative and weighing pluses and minuses against each other.

I suggest looking at whether real estate prices in a particular locale have been rising or falling. If immigration is “ruining” a particular city, we would expect homes and other property values in that place to become much cheaper.

Home values have historically served as a strong indicator of the health of a city. Consider Detroit. It was one of the premier American cities in the mid-20th century, but the region lost a lot of its automobile industry to foreign competition, and crime rose precipitously. The city also was poorly managed. The result in real estate markets was a collapse in prices. If anyone asked you to point to quantifiable evidence for the decline in Detroit, it was easy to do so.

Detroit has undergone a renaissance since its nadir. New businesses have opened, crime rates have fallen, and the city feels more lively again. And since that turn of fortune, often dated around the 1990s, Detroit real estate has made a major comeback, putting aside the price collapse of the Great Recession in 2008. Home prices are not a perfect measure of how the city is doing, but they do pick up major and radical trends, both on the downside and on the upside.

An AI Breakthrough That Will Go Down in History

Tyler Cowen — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 23:25:07 GMT

Last week brought a day that will go down in history. February 5 saw the release of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.3-Codex. That may not seem especially exciting to the non-expert eye, but behind these arcane names is a new reality.

What makes these new models so important is the fact that much of the programming work behind them was done by artificial intelligence rather than humans. Anthropic insiders are claiming, for instance, that effectively 100 percent of the code behind their products is written by Claude itself. You can debate exactly how much human guidance and oversight goes into that, but other major AI labs all seem to be on the same trajectory. (Disclosure: I am on the Anthropic Economic Advisory Council.)

The Bots Are Building Their Own Society

Tyler Cowen — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 23:48:23 GMT

Imagine AI agents that can access your entire computer, email accounts, and trading accounts if you let them. The “agents” are software: programs that have memory and can expand their abilities by writing their own apps. They can communicate with the outside world, and with each other.

This is the world of OpenClaw, an AI agent creator that in the last week has caused a frenzy in the AI world and beyond. In just a few days, it has gone through two name changes (from Clawdbot to Moltbot to OpenClaw), spawned more than a million digital AI agents, and given rise to what many AI developers see as the wildest, most science fiction-like experiment on the internet.

You can download OpenClaw right now and install it with one line of code. But you shouldn’t, unless it’s on a burner laptop and you really know what you are doing. The OpenClaw AI agents are new, and we are not sure exactly what to expect from them. Give them enough access, and they could drain your crypto wallet or send a hate email to your boss.

Can AI Help Us Find God?

Tyler Cowen — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:42:17 GMT

Just as artificial intelligence is changing every other part of our lives, so it is changing religion. Spiritual leaders have taken note: Pope Leo XIV has warned of how AI could deaden our emotional lives. The Mormon church, by contrast, has embraced AI as a tool for religious learning, as long as it doesn’t supplant the connection with God. Secular observers (and I am one) should be equally interested.

Believers have always come to religious leaders with questions about their personal lives, Church doctrine, the Bible, or just for general everyday advice. But the current generation of AIs know more about the Bible, Quran, and other religious texts than most human specialists do. And AIs are very good at answering questions.

Tyler Cowen: ‘Buying’ Greenland Is Not an Option

Tyler Cowen — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:36:17 GMT

After catching President Donald Trump’s eye in his first term, Greenland has reemerged as a prospect for U.S. acquisition. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has told lawmakers that the U.S. seeks to buy the island, Trump asserts that we need it for defense reasons, and White House adviser Stephen Miller insists that Greenland should “obviously” be part of the United States.

Overall, I am becoming more nervous rather than pleased, as I hold two views firmly: The United States eventually should come into possession of Greenland; and right now, the United States should back off altogether.

Where do those views—seemingly at odds—come from, and how do they fit together?

First, Greenland is most valuable in the hands of the U.S.

My vision is that someday the world’s largest island will hold a status roughly comparable to that of Puerto Rico. Greenlanders would have the full protection of the United States, and they also would be U.S. citizens, with full rights to migrate to the mainland. At the same time, they could have their own legislature and elect their own leaders, as Puerto Rico does today. Puerto Rico has held several referendums on independence and has rejected it each time—perhaps in part because it remains, despite economic problems, wealthier than almost anywhere else in the Caribbean.

Goodbye to the Age of the Book

Tyler Cowen — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:49:38 GMT

Reading—in particular, reading long books—is losing importance in Western culture, especially in the United States. It is being replaced by two main alternatives. On one hand, people read plenty on their smartphones, but usually it is snippets, such as texts, X and Facebook posts, newspaper articles, and other shorter items. On the other hand, audio and video outputs are rising in importance relative to full books.

When I visit the public library, most of the visitors are on internet terminals, and in San Antonio there is a public library without physical books at all. Anecdotally, I do not see people reading in public as much as I used to. Book sales are robust, but actual reading seems less culturally central. There is good evidence that a smaller percentage of Americans are reading books for pleasure. A New York Times survey indicates fewer whole books are being assigned as reading in high school classes. And within the publishing universe, audiobooks are where the growth lies.

The net result is that we are continuing to move from a literary culture to an oral culture. YouTube, TikTok, and podcasts are growing or robust. Texting is a major form of communication, but it is the written word conforming to the standards of oral communication. Abbreviations, incorrect grammar, short messages, and a conversation tone are paramount, and there are few rewards for longer, more carefully crafted sentences. The snippets we read on our smartphones, however useful or interesting, do not serve the functions of reading Tolstoy or a long, serious book on Roman history.

Stop Trying to Ban Teens from the Internet

Tyler Cowen — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 23:37:38 GMT

You are being sold a bill of goods. A social panic has set in over how smartphones and social media are destroying us and ruining our children. In Australia this week, the hysteria reached its zenith, with a ban on all social media for kids under the age of 16.

These claims are especially difficult to defuse, because there are some pretty clear costs to these technologies. The thing is, after much rigorous investigation, the harms are relatively small. Yet in headlines they are reported as major negative effects.

Let’s consider one recent study of video watching. This study did show some costs, as the core result was that for each daily hour of video watching, a child experiences (on average) a reduction of non-cognitive skills of 0.091 standard deviations on average.

The Myth of the $140,000 Poverty Line

Tyler Cowen — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 22:59:52 GMT

When a flood of people start emailing me the same article, I know something is afoot. That is the case with Michael W. Green’s “The Valley of Death: Why $100,000 is the New Poverty,” which was recently adapted from his Substack and published in The Free Press. Green’s core argument is that participating in the basics of American life costs much more than it used to, and as a result, we should set a new poverty line: up from about $32,000 a year for a family of four with two kids, to $140,000 a year.

Fortunately for us, this is all wrong. The underlying concepts are wrong, the details are wrong, and the use of evidence is misguided. There are genuine concerns about affordability in the United States, but the analysis in this article is not a good way to understand them.

Is AI a Bubble? Not So Fast.

Tyler Cowen — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:14:36 GMT

For more on this subject, read Niall Ferguson on why the AI sector may be headed for a crash after all.

Last week, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway announced it had bought more than 17.8 million shares of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, at a total price of $4.3 billion.

How can that be? Isn’t AI supposed to be the world’s biggest bubble? Wouldn’t that mean that Google, which is increasingly becoming an AI-focused company, would be a poor investment? After all, Google will soon release their much-heralded Gemini 3.0 model. And the prices of Google shares are already nearing all-time highs.

Sydney Sweeney, Inc.

Tyler Cowen — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 19:47:34 GMT

Do we care what our celebrities have to say about politics? For years, the answer was yes—at least, that is what we were told. Celebrities were more likely to get canceled for staying quiet than for speaking up.

Now, the tide has turned. Just look at two interviews from two Hollywood A-listers in recent days. First, Jennifer Lawrence, who said back in 2015 that a Donald Trump presidency would be “the end of the world.” Last week, while promoting her new movie, she more or less threw up her hands: “Celebrities do not make a difference whatsoever on who people vote for. So then what am I doing?”

In Kat Rosenfield’s latest essay, she says this is a welcome change—and that we need more Jennifer Lawrences. Read it here.

Lawrence is not the only one recalibrating. In a “GQ” interview last week, Sydney Sweeney was asked about that viral American Eagle jeans ad from July—the one some people online claimed had white-nationalist undertones.

Her answer: “I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear.” Translation: I’m an actress, not an activist. And a pretty good one at that. Read Suzy Weiss’s review of her latest movie, “Christy,” here.

But that doesn’t mean celebrity influence has evaporated. Sweeney’s ad alone helped push the value of American Eagle’s stock up 38 percent. So what does that say about the current relationship between culture and capitalism? Below, Tyler Cowen lays out the economics of Sydney Sweeney—and explains why we may now be entering a new, mega-superstar economy. —The Editors

Sydney Sweeney is back in the news. And for many reasons: She has two upcoming movies, Christy and The Housemaid, releasing in November and December, respectively. She also recently confirmed her romance with Scooter Braun with their first-ever public kiss.

Naturally, however, the biggest reason is that famous American Eagle ad.

You know the one. It was released on July 23 and featured Sweeney with the tagline “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans.” It was clearly a double reference to the jeans being sold and Sydney’s very comely looks (in other words, her “genes”).

The Folly of ‘Affordability’ Politics

Tyler Cowen — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 22:57:43 GMT

“Affordability” is the new mantra of American politics. Zohran Mamdani ran on it, and he just became the mayor of New York City. He’s not alone: Across the country, many Democrats have moderated their focus on wokeism, centering their campaigns instead on practical, bread-and-butter issues—namely, the cost of living. This focus is largely perceived to have driven Mamdani’s Tuesday night victory, as well as that of Abigail Spanberger in Virginia’s gubernatorial race and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey’s.

And it’s not just Democrats. Republicans, too, are talking about stressing affordability in their messaging. At a time when inflation remains stuck around 3 percent, it is easy to see why voters from both parties share concerns about the cost of living.

But I am here to raise a cautionary note. I fear this talk about affordability will prove harmful, and likely counterproductive.

Wall Street’s AI Obsession Makes Perfect Sense

Tyler Cowen — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 23:08:44 GMT

Change is afoot. Technology companies, long the heavyweights of the markets, are now entirely taking over. Last week, Nvidia became a $5 trillion company—roughly 17 percent of the gross domestic product of the United States, or about twice the GDP of Canada. Microsoft is now a $4 trillion company, and Alphabet $3 trillion.

One need only look at what happened in the markets last week to witness the influence of these companies. Last Tuesday, the S&P 500, the stock market index tracking the 500 largest companies in the United States, hit record highs, at the same time as nearly 80 percent of the stocks in the index fell. How was this possible? Because the value of the market is heavily concentrated in a select few AI-related companies. The stocks of the Magnificent Seven, for example—meaning Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla—constitute about one-third of the S&P 500’s value. When these companies are doing well, as they are now, it creates the appearance that “the market” is rising, no matter the relative weakness of other sectors.

Trump’s Bid to Rule the Americas

Tyler Cowen — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:19:38 GMT

Why is Donald Trump bailing out Argentine president Javier Milei? Why does he court El Salvador’s increasingly authoritarian President Nayib Bukele so avidly? Why did he once regularly talk about annexing Canada and Greenland? Why do we seem to be on the verge of war with Venezuela? Why the talk of possible drone strikes on drug cartels in Mexico? Why the obsession with former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro? Why did Trump recently announce an end to all subsidies to Colombia?

How to make sense of these bewildering headlines? The answer lies in an emerging story about the Trump administration’s approach to the Americas—an approach that, though I’m skeptical of its success, helps organize the flurry of news about the region.

Do AI Models Have First Amendment Rights?

Tyler Cowen — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 21:48:24 GMT

Free-speech battles are being fought everywhere: on our campuses, in our newsrooms, and on social media. But the most important free speech debate isn’t about protesters’ rights at university or moderation policies on X. It’s about whether robots should have First Amendment rights.

Let me explain. Within a few years, I expect most of the written words produced in the United States to come from advanced artificial intelligence models. These models are already better writers than almost everyone, and they know more, too. Their stylistic quirks are being improved. Their grammar is close to perfect and, unlike us mortal writers, they don’t get tired.

Humans may still be around as vision setters and editors. But I soon expect more than half of the content of a random nonfiction book you might pick up at Barnes & Noble to be written by computers, not humans. In a newspaper or online opinion site, maybe 80 percent. Even if the number of human writers and columnists does not decline, it will be impossible to resist adding a lot of high-quality machine content, at very low cost.

Donald Trump’s Worst Idea

Tyler Cowen — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 15:36:37 GMT

Is President Donald Trump a socialist in disguise?

Trump made his name in the private sector as a dealmaker, and so my worry has long been that he will try to make too many deals, specifically here at home with American companies. Sure enough, that’s exactly what he has been doing, effectively turning major U.S. businesses into arms of the government.

My …

My Favorite Actress Is Not Human

Tyler Cowen — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 20:11:00 GMT

Tilly Norwood is the actress I most want to see on the big screen, or perhaps the little screen, if she gets her own TV show. She is beautiful, but not too intimidating. She has a natural smile, and is just the right amount of British—a touch exotic but still familiar with her posh accent. Her Instagram has immaculate standards of presentation.

If you do not already know, Tilly is not an actual human being. She—it?—is an AI creation.

And recently, several agents have been bidding for the right to represent her. They think Tilly will be a “hot property,” and this time around you can interpret that term literally.

Tilly was concocted by actress, comedian, and technologist Eline Van der Velden, working through her AI company Xicoia. (Van der Velden is quite real; she’s a Dutch actress and has a master’s degree in physics.)

Not everyone is happy about this gorgeous innovation. SAG-AFTRA, the union representing performers in U.S. entertainment industries, protests. They state: “The union is opposed to the replacement of human performers by synthetics.” They also claim that Tilly’s makers are ripping off human actors, because presumably the creation of Tilly involved training on their performances. Or in SAG-AFTRA’s words: “. . . It creates the problem of using stolen performances to put actors out of work, jeopardizing performer livelihoods and devaluing human artistry.”