Aug 1
2026

_QUICK BITES_

1. EUROPEAN ECONOMIC REVIEW: Japan’s growth looks stronger

   Japan’s GDP grew just 0.83% annually from 1991 to 2019, versus 2.58% in the U.S but growth per working-age adult was much closer: 1.39% versus 1.65%. From 1998 to 2019, Japan actually led on that measure, gaining 31.9% versus 29.5% in the U.S.

2. FEDERAL RESERVE: 30-Year Real Yields Hit 2008 High

   The real yield on 30-year inflation-protected Treasuries reached 2.98%, its highest level since 2008, meaning investors can earn nearly three percentage points above inflation on long-dated U.S. debt.

3. INSTITUTE FOR FISCAL STUDIES: Indian women increasingly homebound

   An Institute for Fiscal Studies paper found that the median married woman in India leaves home for just 30 minutes a day, while 45% do not leave at all on a given day. Women’s seclusion has increased over the past two decades—especially among poorer and less-educated women—and home-based jobs available to them tend to pay less.

4. DIGITAL DIGGING: Google Earth AI Rolled Back

   Google rolled back its worldwide AI image generator one day after launching it in Google Earth when users created photorealistic fabrications at real locations, including a nuclear plant in Iran and a bomb crater beside a Gaza hospital—scenes the feature’s safeguards were designed to block. Generated images were separate from the public map and watermarked, but Google said screenshots were being shared in apparent violation of its policies and paused the feature while it develops stronger guardrails.

5. WORKING PAPER: Pay transparency linked to women’s departures

   A draft study of Britain’s 2017 gender-pay-gap reporting mandate found an implied departure rate near 15.4% for women versus 14% for men—a 1.4-percentage-point gap the paper describes as about 10%. Departures concentrated among lower-paid, lower-skilled women in non-managerial jobs; the researchers found no increase in women’s hiring or promotions, and women who left tended to enter lower-paying occupations.

6. PROPUBLICA: MAGA Charity Paid Its Founder

   Trump appointee Nick Adams’ civics charity paid him and his mother $587,279 in compensation and benefits in 2024—53% of its revenue—while federal filings showed almost no spending on schools, teachers or educational distributors. FLAG raised $7.7 million over a decade and did not respond to ProPublica’s questions.

7. BEHAVIOR GENETICS: Study estimates selection against education-associated polygenic scores

   A study of three generations of Americans found natural selection favoring polygenic scores associated with less education while selecting against scores associated with greater educational attainment. The researchers estimate selection is reducing genetically associated cognitive performance by roughly 0.6 IQ points per generation, although environmental gains can outweigh that small shift.

8. AP: GOP Senate PAC has not yet reserved Texas airtime

   The Senate Leadership Fund has reserved a combined $115 million for North Carolina and Georgia but nothing yet in Texas, where Trump-backed Ken Paxton is the Republican nominee. AP reports Republican leaders want Trump’s MAGA Inc., which has reported $382 million, to help fund the race; airtime reservations are not final spending.

9. UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS: LLM study traces a long shift toward autonomy in Western literature

   An LLM analysis of 23,064 public-domain books estimates that its constructed “innovation wedge”—hierarchy and fear of new ideas relative to autonomy and patience—fell 51% from its year-1000 level by 1920. The authors report that a separate 5,000-book archive reproduced the decline and that a rival model family produced a similar path. The measure covers Western elite literary culture, not mass belief; the paper’s causal growth claims remain model-dependent.

10. AEI: Comparable measures narrow—but do not erase—the productivity-pay gap

    AEI argues that the familiar chasm mixes measures: from 1929 to 2022, net productivity rose 656% while hourly compensation rose 637%. BLS likewise finds that using the same inflation gauge narrows the difference, but productivity still outpaced compensation in 83% of 183 industries studied from 1987 to 2015. Median pay has lagged since the early 1970s, so the aggregate comparison does not mean gains were evenly distributed.

11. PEW RESEARCH CENTER: China tops U.S. favorability in most countries surveyed

    Pew surveyed 42,151 adults across 36 countries and found China is now viewed more favorably than the U.S. in most of them; the U.S. leads in just six. In Canada, U.S. favorability fell from 57% in 2023 to 33%, while China’s rose from 14% to 44%.

12. PLOS BIOLOGY: Just 5% of animal-tested therapies ultimately win human regulatory approval

    A meta-analysis published in PLOS Biology found that just 5% of therapeutic interventions tested in animals ultimately received regulatory approval for human use.