Roundup #84: Bears on bikes

GLP-1 weight-loss drugs seem to boost some women's marriage and employment rates because losing weight reduces physical and social barriers that affect attractiveness and hireability, though part of the effect could come from early adopters being more motivated.

Russia's gains from higher oil prices are limited because a stronger ruble, domestic fuel subsidies, and falling crude production mean price spikes convert into fewer dollar revenues and undermine future output capacity.

Deindustrialization is not one thing but three: falling domestic demand for manufactured goods, offshoring of final goods, and offshoring of intermediate inputs, and in the U.S. most decline since 1995 came from Americans simply spending a smaller share on manufactured goods.

Millennials appear richer at similar ages largely because taxes and government transfers have become more redistributive, so post-tax-and-transfer income measures shift the cohort upward compared with earlier generations.

Treating human extinction as zero utility breaks log-utility models because ln(0) is negative infinity, so unless modelers artificially cap terminal utility any nonzero extinction risk becomes infinitely costly and distorts choices.

The University of Michigan consumer sentiment drop likely overstates Americans' economic pessimism because moving from telephone to online polling and an overrepresentation of Democrats make recent responses systematically more negative and thus not comparable to past readings.

AI advice can reduce political polarization because, even when the model flatters users, the substantive factual information it supplies shifts people away from their initial leanings and improves decision accuracy.