Benjamin Yeoh

Writer, investor. Angel | Sustainability | Healthcare | Theatre | Top 10% Podcast: | £1k grants

[Daron Acemoglu @DAcemogluMIT]

Dear followers, please see this new paper on the labor market and macroeconomic effects of low birth rates. Although almost all analysts and policymakers are very worried about the prospect of stagnant and aging populations, the evidence from cross-country and within the United States points to the opposite: lower birth rates predict faster growth of GDP per worker and wages. The reason: labor scarcity encourages more technology adoption.

[Samir Varma @samirvarma]

Opinion | One City Might Have Just Cracked the Housing Crisis https://t.co/I4b1N00nzB

[Philip Hensher @PhilipHensher]

This was a great conversation, very thoroughly reported here.

[Joe Weisenthal @TheStalwart]

Amazing chart from today's episode:

It's not just that US household exposure to equities is at a record high, but that the stock market is a SIGNIFICANTLY greater component of total household net worth than real estate now, which blows my mind.

The stock market is the economy.

[Henry Shevlin @dioscuri]

After years of bumping against Twitter's character limit, I've finally started a blog, called Polytropolis (a Homeric pun). As my first post, I'm sharing my Berggruen-shortlisted essay on why the public will decide AI is conscious before scientists do.
https://t.co/wJvncLNiKE

[Benjamin Yeoh @benyeohben]

Listened to @HenryEOliver and @PhilipHensher on the novel at @civic_future conference 2026. Was an excellent conversation. Here are some notes: https://t.co/ni8lKI7gqs

[Louis Elton @LouisElton96]

Exciting stuff!

[🌈⃤ ⃝lga🌞Yakimenko🌈⃤ @AnalogWhole]

The post I wrote about the decline of sumptuousness in cinema is a byproduct of my obsession with film and technology. I never stop thinking about the film to which I've dedicated the last 3 years of my life. It is how I talk to God.
We're shooting the sizzle reel for in 3 weeks, then pitching it together with the feature script to production companies.

It's going to be strange and wonderful, and if you join us as Associate or Executive Producer, we will get there faster. 👁️

(Substack post here: https://t.co/ipHfdRzamJ)

[Caleb Watney @calebwatney]

Some bittersweet news to announce today:

I recently left @IFP to join @coeff_giving as Managing Director of Public Policy, where I'm building a new US AI policy team, overseeing the Abundance and Growth Fund alongside @mattsclancy, and managing CG's government affairs work.

Building IFP has been the defining professional project of my life, and this was one of the hardest decisions I've ever made. In just four and a half years, our team became, pound-for-pound, the most effective think tank in DC. I feel insanely proud of the work we’ve done and the incredible team we’ve assembled.

I sometimes joke that when @alecstapp and I launched IFP, we felt like two kids in a trench coat pretending to be a think tank. And now we're a proper institution!

But it feels possible to step back now because they've hit escape velocity. The talent density at IFP is bonkers. And I have complete confidence they'll keep racking up counterfactual policy wins with Alec at the helm and our superstar directors.

I'm staying on the IFP board and staying in DC. In some sense the new role is a continuation of the old one. All of IFP's policy issues are reflected in CG's portfolio, but now I'm working at a new layer of the stack.

So why leave? Because AI is hitting Washington like a tsunami, and DC is still radically underprepared. I hold a lot of uncertainty about timelines, but it seems very plausible that the next 2–10 years will bring the fastest technological upheaval we've ever had to navigate.

The new team I’m leading is a bet on how to prepare: proactively scanning the horizon, identifying gaps in the policy ecosystem, headhunting founders, and launching new organizations, while strengthening the democratic institutions that will have to steer through the transition to powerful AI systems.

I've written an essay laying out the larger vision here: https://t.co/D3DeC5rQ8x

There is no master plan or silver bullet here. I suspect getting AI "right" is going to feel more like a chaotic, iterative process of institutions trying to make better decisions over time as the facts change underneath them.

As John von Neumann wrote in 1955 about mastering an earlier technological revolution: “What safeguard remains? Apparently only day-to-day — or perhaps year-to-year — opportunistic measures, a long sequence of small, correct decisions.”

Each of the small, correct decisions ahead will look small only in the sweep of the full historical picture. Up close, every one of them will require heroic levels of effort and coordination.

Coefficient Giving is scaling rapidly to meet the moment, part of what Nan Ransohoff has called the “third wave of American philanthropy”, potentially large enough to fund thousands of new projects and organizations.

The binding constraint is unlikely to be money. It will be people: grantmakers and policy entrepreneurs and others with the judgment to make a long sequence of small, correct decisions, and the ambition to build the institutions we wish we had.

I'm hiring a team of exactly those people, starting with generalist grant makers and a chief of staff. If you share this vision, please apply! And if you are building something that we’ll need in the years ahead, reach out.
https://t.co/jASDyYVbRj

[Isaak @isaakfreeman]

We built the lab that's able to go from AI-led drug design to data in 24h.

GPT-8 won't be bottlenecked by intelligence. It needs a biological compute layer.

This is Capable. We're turning AI capabilities into human capabilities--starting with short-sleeper peptides.

[Matt Marx @marxmatt]

help me find a data scientist!!

you'll work directly with me, down the hall in the office of the vice provost for entrepreneurship, innovation, & external engagement. we are building tools to

▶️locate all known Cornell alumni, faculty, & startups
▶️read every scientific paper published on campus and triage those with highest commercial potential
▶️matchmake co-founders, companies, and projects

I need someone comfortable with wrangling terabyte-scale datasets, who uses LLM coding tools but who is also able to debug code manually. lastly, there will be no small bit of manually inspecting data.

it's a great gig for a fresh graduate or even college dropout; industry experience not necessarily required. you just need to show me your skills.

oh, and you need to be here in Ithaca (I meant down-the-hall literally).

(link in the reply because twitterX hates links)

[Simon Baron-Cohen @sbaroncohen]

Delighted to receive this exceptionally generous gift from philanthropist K. Lisa Yang who also funds centers for autism research at Harvard and MIT. We are honoured to join her "collective" to partner between Cambridge US and Cambridge UK, to conduct autism research that serves autistic people and their families https://t.co/Ug5a1C4e60

[Sam Bowman @s8mb]

I think Andy Burnham should champion the idea of 'municipal socialism': having utilities owned by local governments, primarily combined authorities, rather than the national monopoly that nationalisation usually entails. This may already be what he is planning, but he hasn't really said so yet.

Nationalised monopoly fails for many reasons:

- It creates entities that are too big to fail, so they can waste large amounts of money while being subsidised from public funds.

- It gives people no comparison point to see if a certain industry is being well-run, so bad outcomes end up being treated like bad weather.

- It prevents the public companies themselves from learning from other companies, because they only have other countries to learn from where circumstances might be very different.

- It creates very weak political feedback mechanisms, because your vote on whether the trains are being run well is bundled with your vote on, eg, tax policy and foreign policy.

- It engenders short-termism, because voters are less forward looking than private investors, so there is more scope to take long-term degradation of service for short-term benefits. (This is happening with TfL's fare freeze right now.)

Municipal ownership does not solve all these problems, but it can maintain more accountability and some of the elements of competition that national monopoly does not have.

There is more room for experimentation and learning because different municipalities try different policies, and can copy the successes from each other. The Oyster Card and contactless card payments were a good example of this by TfL. Manchester's bus privatisation scheme was scrapped in part by looking at the success of London's approach to buses, where delivery is outsourced to multiple private companies but services are designed by a single authority and provided under one brand.

The 'too big to fail' problem is smaller, because municipal governments can face a harder budget constraint than national government, though bailouts undermine this. Those that want to subsidise services have to draw on a narrower tax base. In fact, well-run services can raise revenues for local governments, as many locally-owned tramways did in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Local authorities are more accountable for failures and get more credit for successes than national governments would be.

Internationally, successful examples of public ownership of utilities are often owned by municipalities. This is true in much of the United States, where water is mostly municipally owned rather than private, and in France, where most public services are owned by local governments, who then offer contracts to companies to handle the actual delivery. The Bee network and London buses operate on the same basis.

Historically in Britain, trams, electricity and gas were all mostly run by small local companies and local governments before the 1940s–70s. Municipally-owned gas networks were highly profitable for Birmingham under Joseph Chamberlain. There were still nearly 200 different water boards across England by 1970!

We use 'nationalisation' as a byword for 'public ownership', but there is little reason for most of these things to be nationalised monopolies. Much of the drive towards nationalised monopoly in the 20th Century was inspired by a mistaken belief that economies of scale would drive the biggest improvements in productivity, inspired by the apparent success of the USSR and large conglomerates in Germany and the USA. It is clear today that experimentation via trial and error is extremely valuable, and losing it is one of the big costs of monopoly.

'Municipalisation' would, for example, mean overhauling the Great British Railways policy which by default puts commuter lines in Surrey into the same administration that runs the West Midlands Cross-City Line, the East Coast Main Line, and commuter networks in Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool. There are some provisions for lines going into municipal control, but the default is to stop the next Mayor of Greater Manchester from running the region's commuter trains and London from absorbing more lines into the Overground.

Public ownership has many flaws, but some of them are avoidable by looking beyond the 1940s and 1970s for how to do it. 'Municipal socialism' allows for much greater learning and feedback loops, and would hugely strengthen devolution by making local government responsible for things that directly matter to their electorates rather than having them run by a single inert national monopoly.

[Samir Varma @samirvarma]

Urban pollution in wealthy world still adding to heart damage, study finds https://t.co/0aBSxSNeM5

[Samir Varma @samirvarma]

World First: Patient Receives High-Risk Therapy to Make Cells Young Again https://t.co/mQ6lpAqakM

[Joe Weisenthal @TheStalwart]

NEW ODD LOTS:

What @danwwang saw on his last trip to China.

Dan stopped by to chat with me and @tracyalloway about his recent visit to Shanghai, the ongoing boom, phone culture, the contradictions of domestic life, and the ongoing consumer softness. https://t.co/EYStNKPtgI

[🌈⃤ ⃝lga🌞Yakimenko🌈⃤ @AnalogWhole]

We're shooting a sizzle reel for The User Illusion in 4 weeks: an ambitious team in Vienna with an Alexa, using tungsten lights, designing striking shots with in-camera FX.
I'm raising the final €15k of the budget and opening a small run of producer credits to close it!

[Paul Graham @paulg]

What's interesting about these questions is the ratio of how important they are to how often you think about them.

Every company probably could and should do its own version of this. In fact it would be a useful exercise just to decide what the questions are.

[Louis Elton @LouisElton96]

Have you got a clever idea to fuse craft and technology to build something beautiful, useful, and scalable?

61 days left to submit to the Cræft Prize!

£60k prize pot. 6x £5k rapid grants. £30k for the winner + the glory of being the most tasteful technologist-aristisan.

[Julia Willemyns @jujulemons]

✨ Announcing fast grants for British progress ✨

Have an idea for how to drive growth and progress in Britain? We’re making small grants for research, policy and other projects, with funding decisions in just two weeks. No academic affiliation required.

Need some prompting to start cooking? We’ve got a list of questions we’d love people to tackle - on topics like devolution, AI diffusion, financial regulation and more…

Apply here: https://t.co/VT8SXWF39A

More on why we’re doing this: https://t.co/AXasxE5mMY