Nonrival

Expert analysis from think tanks and academia, on public policy, economics, and technology.
Human experts. AI summaries.

A visa lottery experiment shows low-skill immigrants don't take American jobs — they create them

aea

• Using a federal visa lottery as a natural experiment, economists found that firms denied H-2B temporary worker visas didn't replace foreign workers with Americans — they just shrank, cutting overall employment.
• Foreign and American low-skill workers turned out to be poor substitutes for each other, meaning more immigrant workers actually correlates with more American jobs, not fewer.
• The findings suggest the H-2B visa cap — set arbitrarily in 1990 and never updated — is costing American firms revenue, investment, and jobs.

AI's Energy Costs Are Real, But the Bigger Climate Threat Is the Economic Growth It Enables

mit_sloan

• AI and data centers currently account for about 0.5% of global CO₂ emissions, and their direct climate impact is real but modest — projected to add roughly a tenth of a degree of warming by 2100.
• The bigger danger is indirect: if AI meaningfully boosts economic growth, the resulting surge in energy demand could raise global temperatures by an additional 0.3°C, dramatically worsening sea level rise, wildfires, and crop failures.
• The authors argue AI alone won't solve the climate crisis — only strong policies like carbon pricing, mandatory disclosure of AI's environmental costs, and broad decarbonization incentives can prevent AI's economic benefits from becoming a climate liability.

Australia Banned Teens from Social Media — But Researchers Still Can't Say Whether It Will Help

knowable

• Australia's under-16 social media ban took effect in December 2024, but three months in, surveys show no measurable change in teen sleep or mental health — and more than 85% of teens are still using the banned platforms anyway.
• After two decades of research, scientists still can't prove that social media harms the mental health of most adolescents, not just vulnerable individuals, because existing studies can't establish causation and miss key variables like the social cost of being the only teen offline.
• A growing number of researchers argue that outright bans are the wrong tool, and that the real priority should be forcing transparency into the opaque algorithms that shape what teenagers actually see — a black box that even regulators have barely cracked open.

In the News

The Supreme Court Just Made It Much Harder for Police to Access Your Digital Location Data

scotusblog

• In Chatrie v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that police need a warrant to access Google location history data, extending and strengthening its 2018 Carpenter ruling on digital privacy under the Fourth Amendment.
• The court's most consequential move was treating digital location data as belonging to the user — not the tech company storing it — which punches a major hole in the longstanding legal doctrine that sharing data with a third party means surrendering privacy rights.
• The ruling opens the door to warrant requirements for AI chat logs, fitness data, and license plate reader databases, but leaves many key questions unanswered, including whether the police tactic of "geofence" searches can continue at all.

Analysis

M&A Lawyers Get Their Legal Signals From Cocktail Parties, Not Court Opinions

harvard_corpgov

• When Delaware's Supreme Court created ambiguity in 2018 about a key M&A contract clause (sandbagging), legal experts predicted lawyers would respond by writing more explicit contract language — but the opposite happened: silence on the issue rose from 49% to 72%.
• The reason, uncovered through 50+ interviews with senior M&A lawyers, is an informal back-channel between Delaware judges and elite deal lawyers operating through ABA panels, conference dinners, and hotel lobbies — where judges signaled the ambiguity was a non-issue.
• The finding upends a core assumption of contract theory: in tight-knit legal communities, what judges say off the record at conferences can matter more than what they write in opinions.

Also Worth a Look

• When an AI Agent Buys Something You Told It Not To, Who's Responsible? (the_conversation)
• The Danube Is So Low That It's Threatening to Knock Out Nuclear Plants Across Central Europe (atlantic_council)
• Indians and Pakistanis Agree on One Thing: The Other Country Is Their Biggest Threat (pew)
• Rising Bond Yields and Record Leverage Are Quietly Making the Financial System More Fragile (atlantic_council)
• Health Insurers Deny 12–18% of Prior Authorization Requests, but Two-Thirds of Medicare Denials Are Overturned on Appeal (kff)
• Lawmakers Are Targeting the Wrong Thing in the Workplace Surveillance Debate (itif)
• Wildfire-scorched historic buildings are often salvageable — but only if rescuers act within weeks (the_conversation)