Noah Smith
· Noahpinion
· May 21, 2026 at 06:51
· ⏱ 24 min read
| Read on Substack ↗
Summary
Noah Smith's newsletter roundup covers a wide range of policy and technology topics—falling crime, ineffective immigration raids for wages, rising AI backlash, an AI solving a major math problem, and the rise of solopreneurship—but offers no explicit trade ideas or company-specific actionable calls. The article is thematic and analytical, not a source of direct investment signals.
•Homicides dropped 17.7% across largest U.S. cities in early 2026; robberies fell 20.4%, rapes 7.2%, aggravated assaults 4.8%.
•Cox and East's 2026 paper finds Trump's immigration arrests had no positive effect on native-born workers' wages, with a small negative effect on male workers.
•An OpenAI general-purpose reasoning model autonomously solved the planar unit distance problem (Erdős problem), a prominent open math problem.
•Americans' negativity toward AI is rising, with protests and political salience increasing; AI is now nearly as unpopular as Donald Trump or ICE.
•China's AI policy community shifted from ranking AI's job impact 6th out of 7 concerns in 2024 to 2nd in 2026.
•Peter Enns' new paper shows that Gilens & Page (2014) suffer from Simpson's Paradox; when including cases where rich and poor agree, policy responsiveness to the rich disappears.
•The invention lag between technical feasibility and actual invention collapsed after the Second Industrial Revolution, per Brian Potter's AI-assisted analysis.
•New business formation (solopreneurship) remains elevated post-pandemic, partly driven by AI tools.