Nonrival

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

Letting in More Low-Skill Immigrant Workers Helps American Workers, Too — New Research Shows Why

peterson

• A study using a randomized lottery for H-2B visas — which cover low-skill, nonfarm jobs like landscaping, hospitality, and seafood packing — finds that firms that won access to more foreign workers increased production, investment, and profits.
• Contrary to the intuition that immigrant workers displace Americans, the research finds the effect on US employment is zero or positive, because foreign and domestic workers complement each other more than they compete.
• The findings also suggest H-2B workers are not substitutes for undocumented labor, undermining a common argument that legal guest worker programs simply formalize a black market.

AI Has Revolutionized Finding Drug Molecules — But That Was Never the Hard Part

promarket

• AI has dramatically accelerated and cheapened the early stage of drug development — finding promising molecules — but has done almost nothing to improve success rates in clinical trials, where most of the cost and failure actually occur.
• A BCG analysis found AI-designed drugs perform far better than average in early safety trials but revert to the industry's typical 40% failure rate once tested for actual efficacy in patients, meaning the net improvement is real but modest.
• 2026 is the first real test, as the initial cohort of AI-designed drugs reaches large Phase 3 trials — and whether AI can eventually tackle the harder problem of target validation and efficacy prediction is the question the entire multibillion-dollar bet hinges on.

We Can't Prove AI Is Conscious, But That's No Reason to Ignore the Question

noema

• A neuroscientist-turned-AI researcher argues that the impossibility of proving machine consciousness shouldn't stop us from extending moral consideration to AI systems — the same way we extend it to animals whose inner lives we can never fully access.
• He proposes a "competence standard": if an AI system demonstrates robust ability across the observable building blocks of consciousness (perception, memory, attention, self-modeling, goal pursuit), that's enough to warrant treating it as potentially conscious.
• Some institutions are already acting on this logic — Anthropic has launched a formal AI welfare research program and given its Claude models the ability to exit conversations they find harmful, without claiming the models are definitively conscious.

In the News

The U.S. Chose Not to Renew NAFTA's Successor — and Now Nobody Knows What Happens Next

csis

• The U.S. declined to extend the USMCA trade deal for another 16 years, triggering instead an annual review process that runs until 2036 — meaning years of uncertainty rather than a clean resolution.
• The $2 trillion trading relationship is too deeply integrated to collapse, but prolonged ambiguity will quietly cost all three countries as businesses delay investment and supply chains drift elsewhere.
• A revised deal will be politically contentious, tangled up in disputes over Chinese supply chain involvement, U.S.-Canada tensions, and a murky question of whether any new agreement would even need congressional approval.

Analysis

The Supreme Court Just Stripped Most Regulators of Their Independence — but Spared the Fed, for Now

scotusblog

• The Supreme Court overturned a 91-year-old precedent to let presidents fire most independent agency commissioners at will, a decision telegraphed for years by Chief Justice Roberts — but carved out the Federal Reserve as a special case rooted in the founding-era concept of a national bank.
• The Fed's exemption is likely temporary: Roberts' own footnotes invite future lawsuits challenging the Fed's regulatory powers specifically, which could eventually be severed from the institution even if its core monetary independence survives.
• The ruling also creates unexpected new incentives for outgoing presidents to fire opposition-party commissioners in their final hours, potentially leaving incoming administrations with no one to run key agencies for months.

Also Worth a Look

• Chinese AI Models Are Now Only Months Behind the US — and Getting Closer Fast (csis)
• Scientists Built a Cell From Scratch That Can Feed, Grow, and Replicate — A First in History (hoover)
• Tariffs Are Ending the Era of Falling Appliance and Electronics Prices (stl_fed)
• The Supreme Court Just Ruled That Federal Approval of a Pesticide Label Shields Manufacturers from State Lawsuits — Even If the Product Causes Cancer (the_conversation)
• A.I. Is Reshaping the Economy. Good Luck Measuring How. (eig)
• Iran's Oil Is Technically Back on the Market, But Getting It There Is Complicated (atlantic_council)
• June's Jobs Report Is a Puzzle: Employment Tanked for Young Workers, But Unemployment Fell Too (employ_america)