Double issue this week.

  1. DISIA Working Paper (2025) - “Income and Parenthood in Europe”
  • New cross-country evidence shows higher-income Europeans are now more likely to become parents - a reversal of the late-20th-century pattern.
  • Gradients are positive for both men and women across most countries, suggesting constraints (housing, childcare, earnings volatility) weigh heaviest on lower incomes.

A grid of line charts divided into two sections for men and women, each containing 12 sub-charts labeled AT BE CH CY EL ES FI FR IE IT LU MT PT SE UK, plotting projected fertility probabilities over income levels from low to high, with blue lines indicating trends across European countries.

  • The shift hints that family policy is acting as a means test in practice: those with stable jobs and assets clear the hurdles; others postpone or opt out.
  • Methodologically, predicted probabilities rise steadily from income quintile 1→5, with tight CIs in large samples - robust across many national contexts.
  • Income and Parenthood in Europe (Working Paper) – University of Florence, DISIA
  1. Daniel Král - “A surprising reshuffle in Eurozone debt ratios”
  • Draft budgets imply Greece’s debt/GDP will match (and then drop below) Italy’s; Portugal will fall below the Eurozone average; Cyprus to parity with Netherlands.

Line chart titled Eurozone General govt gross consolidated debt as percent of GDP with y-axis from 25 to 200 and x-axis years 2010 2015 2020 2025 showing lines for Germany in black Netherlands in blue Portugal in yellow Italy in brown Cyprus in purple and Greece in red with diamonds marking 2026 projections based on draft budgets sourced from Oxford Economics Haver Analytics

  • Ten years ago this trajectory looked implausible - underscoring how growth, inflation composition, and primary surpluses can bend debt dynamics.
  • The message: fiscal positions are not destiny; composition of adjustment (reforms vs. austerity vs. windfalls) matters for credibility and rates.
  • Watch the dispersion: improvements at the periphery contrast with slower consolidation in some core economies, shifting the bloc’s risk map.
  • Eurozone debt ratios: Greece, Portugal, Cyprus surge ahead – X (Twitter)
  1. Arctotherium42 - “How LLMs trade off different lives”
  • Building on the Center for AI Safety’s “Utility Engineering” study, a new investigation probes how newer LLMs weight lives across nationalities and categories.

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  • The approach elicits implicit value systems via structured moral trade-offs, revealing large and model-specific disparities.
  • Takeaway: alignment is about constraining emergent preferences that could systematically bias decisions at scale.
  • Calls for transparent benchmarking, dataset audits, and governance that treats moral generalisation as a testable property, not a by-product.
  • LLM life-valuation tests & findings – X (Twitter)