But I like doing this

What Adam Smith and two new NBER papers say about work that is too enjoyable to stop

For the last eight or so weeks, I have worked sixteen-hour days. I have enjoyed almost every one of them. My shoulders have been in spasm for almost the entire time.

It has taken me most of those weeks to see that those three things fit together.

Over the last six months, my workflow has undergone a radical transformation. I can now ask questions that would once have needed a research assistant, a year of their time and a grant I did not have. Alex Imas, the behavioural economist at Chicago Booth who became Google DeepMind’s Director of AGI Economics this year, knows the feeling: ‘I am not writing more papers, I’m writing very different papers, ones I would not have been able to write before. This is incredibly exciting (for me, maybe not “the world”).’

The gain is largest for those of us from the centre. Colleagues in Chicago or Cambridge have always had graduate students and a library that owns everything. At the southern tip of Africa the binding constraint was never a shortage of questions – it was capacity. A huge chunk of that constraint has now dissolved. The effect is intoxicating.

Intoxicating is the word to worry about…