Automation as colonization wave

“Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy”, Timothy O’Reilly2002

The Luck Factor, Wiseman2004

“OKCupid: The Mathematics Of Beauty”, Rudder2011

War/Disaster/Collapse:

• “The great wars, the great crash, and steady state growth: Some new evidence about an old stylized fact”, Ben-David & Papell1995; “Do natural disasters promote long-run growth?”, Skidmore & Toya2002

• “The Economic Impact of Hurricane Katrina on Its Victims: Evidence from Individual Tax Returns”, Deryugina et al 2014

• “Are Resettled Oustees from the Sardar Sarovar Dam Project Better off Today than their Former Neighbors who were not Ousted?”, Aiyar & Kaushal2018

• “The Benefits of Forced Experimentation: Striking Evidence from the London Underground Subway Network”, Larcom et al 2017

• “Resetting the Urban Network: 117–2012 AD”, Michaels & Rauch2016; “Monks, Gents and Industrialists: The Long-Run Impact of the Dissolution of the English Monasteries”, Heldring et al 2021 (see the criticisms of perpetuities/waqfs as locking in mistakes)

• “Lehman’s Lemons: Do Career Disruptions Matter for the Top 5%?”, Fedyk & Hodson2021

• “Displacement, Diversity, and Mobility: Career Impacts of Japanese American Internment”, Arellano-Bover2021

• “Natural disasters and financial technology adoption”, Barros et al 2024

• Fire (background):

  • “Razing San Francisco: The 1906_119ya Disaster as a Natural Experiment in Urban Redevelopment”, Siodla2012; “Does Building New Housing Cause Displacement?: The Supply and Demand Effects of Construction in San Francisco”, Pennington2021

  • “Creative Destruction: Barriers to Urban Growth and the Great Boston Fire of 1872”, Hornbeck & Keniston2017 (cf. The Limits of Power: Great Fires and the Process of City Growth in America, Rosen1986)

  • “The Billion Pound Drop: The Blitz and Agglomeration Economics in London”, Dericks & Koster2018 (contrast with Lin2020)

  • “The Fiscal Impacts of Wildfires on California Municipalities”, Liao & Kousky2022

Decisions:

• “Making Big Decisions: The Impact of Moves on Marriage among U.S. Army Personnel”, Carter & Wozniak2018

• “Timing is Everything: Evidence from College Major Decisions”, Patterson et al 2019

• “Heads Or Tails: The Impact Of A Coin Toss On Major Life Decisions And Subsequent Happiness”, Levitt2020

• “Science Is Shaped by Wikipedia: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial”, Thompson et al 2017; “Wikipedia Matters”, Hinnosaar et al 2019

• “The Gift of Moving: Intergenerational Consequences of a Mobility Shock”, Nakamura et al 2022

creative destruction; the “Porter hypothesis”; the equity premium puzzle

“Property Is Another Name for Monopoly: Facilitating Efficient Bargaining with Partial Common Ownership of Spectrum, Corporations, and Land”, Posner & Weyl2016

“Exploration in the wild”, Schulz et al 2018 (an interesting paper, although not clearly establishing suboptimal exploration, which uses an extremely large dataset of restaurant orders by individuals from Deliveroo)

“Evidence for a Conserved Quantity in Human Mobility”, Alessandretti et al 2016 (people visit few physical locations, and while they do continuously explore new locations & shift, there appears to be an equivalent of a Dunbar’s number, suggesting limits to human abilities to easily plan/remember activities covering more than ~25 locations regularly)

An amusing fictional example might be the My Little Pony episode “Applejack’s ‘Day’ Off”.

“Eager To Burst His Own Bubble, A Techie Made Apps To Randomize His Life”

“Neural autopilot and context-sensitivity of habits”, Camerer & Li2021

See Also: Evolution as Backstop for Reinforcement Learning, Sunk costs, On Having Enough Socks