Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study (začet 1972 v Novi Zelandiji), objavljen v Moffitt et al. (2011) “A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety”, v prestižni reviji Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

A team of researchers in New Zealand followed 1,037 babies from the day they were born for the next 45 years to find out what actually determines a successful adult life, and the strongest predictor they found had almost nothing to do with intelligence or family wealth.

The findings have been published in the most prestigious scientific journals in the world.

Almost no parent has heard of them.

His name is Avshalom Caspi. Her name is Terrie Moffitt.

They are a husband and wife research team based at Duke University and King’s College London, and the study they have spent their careers running is called the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study. It started in 1972 in a single hospital in Dunedin, New Zealand. Every baby born there in a 12-month window was enrolled. 1,037 of them. The study is still running today.

The retention rate is the part that should astonish anyone familiar with how research usually works. After more than 45 years, over 90 percent of the original participants are still being tracked. Most longitudinal studies lose half their sample inside ten years. The Dunedin team has lost almost nobody.

They measured everything. Blood. DNA. Brain scans. Income. Criminal records. Romantic relationships. Drug use. Dental health. Sleep. Mental health. Lung function. They flew participants who had moved abroad back to Dunedin every few years for a full day of assessments. Some of those people now live in seven different countries. They still show up.

For the first decade of life, the team did something nobody else was doing systematically. They measured each child’s self-control. Not IQ. Not family income. Not parenting style. Self-control. They watched 3-year-olds in a research lab and rated their ability to wait, regulate frustration, follow instructions, and resist impulsive reactions. They added teacher ratings. They added parent ratings. They added the children’s own self-reports as they grew older. They combined all of it into a single highly reliable score.

Then they did the thing nobody else had the patience to do. They waited.

When the data came in at age 32, the result was so consistent it should be illegal to teach a child without it.

The children who scored lowest on self-control at age 3 grew into adults with worse physical health, more substance dependence, lower incomes, more credit card debt, higher rates of single parenthood, more criminal convictions, and worse mental health than the children who scored highest. The pattern was not subtle. It was a clean gradient. Every step up in childhood self-control produced a measurable step up in adult outcomes across every domain the team could measure.

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Rast BDP, in s tem blaginje, določata rast produktivnosti in rast prebivalstva. Če imamo pri demografiji težave, imamo še večje glede pešajoče produktivnosti. Dobra novica pa je, da je trend produktivnosti precej lažje obrniti kot trend rodnosti.

EU je med letoma 1945 in 1995 skoraj dohitela ZDA po produktivnosti, nato pa po začetku digitalne revolucije vstopila v obdobje dolgoročne stagnacije in ponovnega zaostajanja. Po letu 1995 je Evropa zamudila ključni tehnološki in investicijski val, kar je privedlo do »treh izgubljenih desetletij« počasnejše rasti produktivnosti glede na ZDA. Zelo povedno je, da je produktivnost Japonske, ki je od finančne krize leta 1991 v »izgubljenem desetletju«, v zadnjih treh desetletjih rasla hitreje od evropske. V treh desetletjih, v obdobju 1995-2024, je evrsko območje povečalo produktivnost za pičlih 16%, ZDA za več kot 50 %, Kitajska pa za več kot 700 %. Evropa je polž na invalidskem vozičku.

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Hamsa Bastani (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania) je s soavtorji objavila študijo z rezultati kontroliranega eksperimenta, kako uporaba UI za učenje vpliva na dejansko znanje. Rezultati so pričakovani – uporaba UI daje študentom iluzijo, da znajo reševati naloge, ne da pa jim znanja. Študenti, ki so morali naloge reševati na »hard way« prek uporabe učbenikov in brez UI, so na testih, kjer UI ni bil dovoljen, dosegali bistveno višje rezultate kot tisti, ki so se “učili” s pomočjo UI. Študija je bila objavljena v ugledni reviji PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) junija 2025 (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2422633122).

A Wharton economist ran a randomized controlled trial on almost a thousand high school students in Turkey.

The result was so brutal for the AI-in-education narrative that it had to be peer-reviewed by PNAS before people would believe it.

Her name is Hamsa Bastani. She teaches operations and information at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and the study she published in 2025 alongside her co-authors is one of the cleanest experiments anyone has run on what AI actually does to learning when you remove it from the equation and check what is left.

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Chris Williamson hosted a nearly four-hour deep dive into the problem of collapsing fertility with leading experts @lymanstoneky, @SimoneHCollins and @StephenJShaw.

The wide-ranging discussion covered tremendous ground. Here are some key highlights!

The severity of the crisis

Few really grasp how bad the birthrate crisis is going to be. Shaw emphasized the dramatic effect of compounding and how countries with below replacement fertility will be orders of magnitude smaller in the future. That means the collapse of whole economies and countries, especially those with fertility rates continuously well-below replacement, which is 2/3 of countries today.

Loss of innovation

Innovation is a numbers game, and it takes large populations to give rise to brilliant innovators and entrepreneurs. More than that, Stone explained that a large and highly educated population and an advanced economy are preconditions for innovation to flourish, and that benefits the whole world. But populations that are high in innovation are in sharp decline, and aging societies are much less innovative and slower to adopt new technology. Thinkers like Robin Hanson say that innovation itself will grind to a halt.

Decline of small towns and rural areas

Collins mentioned the “urban population shredder” because birthrates are far lower in cities. But Shaw described a great irony: small towns and rural areas will be ravaged the most by population decline, as people migrate to a few marquee cities. That means in a declining country like Japan, a city like Tokyo can remain healthy long after rural areas and smaller towns face abandonment and collapse.

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Seminarska naloga mojih študentov pri makroekonomiji (2. letnik ekonomije), ki poskuša odgovoriti na 2 vprašanji:

• Ali spremembe zakonske stopnje davka na dobiček pravnih oseb statistično značilno vplivajo na stopnjo gospodarske rasti v vzorcu 38 držav OECD v obdobju 1981–2023?
• Ali se učinek davčnih sprememb na gospodarsko rast v Sloveniji statistično značilno razlikuje od povprečja preostalih držav OECD?

Glavna ugotovitev je, da – podobno kot v ostalih študijah – ni empiričnih dokazov za supply-side tezo, da znižanje davka na dobiček pospeši gospodarsko rast. Niti v OECD državah, niti v Sloveniji.

Celotna predstavitev: Davek na dobiček in rast_Prezentacija. Tekst pošljem na zahtevo.

Seminarska naloga mojih študentov pri makroekonomiji (2. letnik ekonomije), ki preučuje vpliv zniževanja stopnje dohodnine v najvišjem dohodninskem razredu na gospodarsko rast za OECD države in Slovenijo v obdobju 2000-2024. Podobno kot ostale študije tudi ta ne najde statistično značilnega pozitivnega vpliva zmanjšanja obdavčitve tistih z najvišjimi dohodki na rast BDP. Niti v državah OECD niti v Sloveniji. Trickle down učinek ne deluje.

Celotna predstavitev: Makroekonomija ppt – dohodnina. Tekst pa pošljem na zahtevo.

Če slučajno koga zanima. Včeraj je moja doktorska študentka Danijela Lazović Vuković imela zagovor doktorske disertacije s tremi ključnimi raziskovalnimi vprašanji:

• kaj so vzroki za poraslo neenakost v razvitih državah (globalizacija, tehnološki napredek ali neustrezne politike)?
• ali povečana neenakost vodi v povečano povpraševanje po redistribucijskih politikah?
• kaj zo vzroki za porast levega in desnega populizma v razvitih državah (neenakost in ekonomska stiska ali globalizacija in migracije)?

Na tej povezavi je celotna prezentacija. Posamezni članki oziroma disertacija pa se dobijo na zahtevo.

Zadmjič mi je Ali (Žerdin) povedal, da snemajo nov album. No, zdaj so ga končali. In po 10 letih se vračajo na odre.

Kart se ne da razgrabiti, ker povezava na spletno trgovino ne dela. Upam, da popravijo, da lahko pridem do kart.

Spodnji graf kaže na korelacijo med začetkom množične uporabe pametnih telefonov in strmim padcem rodnosti v večini držav (t.i. “negativna revolucija v rodnosti”)

Vendar je pri teh sklepih treba biti previden. Kajti, kot kaže spodnji zapis, tega grafa, podobnega objavljenemu v Financial Timesu, (še) ni mogoče replicirati. Počakajmo na avtorja Johna Burn-Murdocha, da pojasni, kako je prišel do njega.

Na družbenih omrežjih se odvija zanimiva diskusija o razlogih za zmanjšanje rodnosti, ki je univerzalno tako za razvite države kot države v razvoju. Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, profesor na univerzi Pennsylvania in eden največjih strokovnjakaov za demografske spremembe, polemizira s tezo, ki jo propagirajo nekateri, med njimi John Burn-Murdoch v Financial Timesu, da je razširitev uporabe pametnih telefonov najbrž kjlučni dejavnik v pojasnitvi strnega upada rodnosti v zadnjem desetletju in pol. Njegova teza je, da so vzroki za to “revolucijo v rodnosti” bolj široki in povezani s širšimi družbenimi spremembami. Med njimi je ena ključnih tudi razmah družbenih omrežij, ki so spremenila ne samo način izražanja in komunikacije med ljudmi, pač pa tudi način socializacije. Ljudje se družijo manj fizično in bolj virtualno, kar zmanjšuje ne samo druženje, ampak tudi potrebo pa “parjenju” (življenju v parih v smislu partnerstev). Ta recesija zmenkov in partnerstev posledično vpliva na zmanjšanje rodnosti. No, pametni telefoni so del tega procesa, ker omogočajo in pospešujejo digitalno komunikacijo prek družbenih omrežij. Brez pametnih telefonov se ta negativna revolucija v rodnosti ne bi mogla zgoditi v takšnem obsegu.

Smartphones are not the explanation for the recent decline in fertility. Instead, they are an accelerator of deeper forces already at work.

Let’s start with the facts. Fertility is falling almost everywhere: in rich, middle-income, and poor countries; in secular and religious countries; and in countries with high and low levels of gender equality.

The decline accelerated around 2014. So, no country-specific explanation will work unless you are willing to believe that 200 distinct country-specific explanations arrived at roughly the same time.

Smartphones look like the obvious candidate: the first iPhone was released in 2007, and global adoption has been astonishingly fast.

Economists understand the first major decline in fertility in advanced economies, from 6 or 7 children per woman throughout most of human history to about 1.8, that occurred between the early 1800s and roughly 1970, well before smartphones. The main drivers were a sharp fall in child mortality (effective fertility was rarely above 3 and often close to 2) and the shift from a low-skill, rural agrarian economy to a high-skill, urban industrial one. We have quantitative models that fit these facts well.

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