Mark Fabian

Friends, foes, family: I have a popular booking coming out on April 10 - Beyond Happy: How to rethink happiness and find fulfilment. It's the book I wish existed when I was 18. I couldn't find it in 20 years of searching, so I went and wrote it. A video brief: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XPZ...

Spotify just slid Robot Rock into my headphones after a very different playlist finished and damn this shit was PHAT. From 2005! I feel old, but also confident that human craftsmanship will always hit different than AI generated. The boys hadn't even peaked yet. www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFZj...

I'm a Meta-Effective Altruist™️ I believe that Effective Altruism needs to be redistributed from where it is least effective (Silicon Valley sex cultists) to where it would be most effective (British pensioners who leave their life savings to the Donkey Sanctuary).

Academics, students, anyone. Let authors know that you enjoyed reading their work. It matters.

Also up there? California quail. Look at that little head feather. Look at that tiny baby. The bobbing. The peeping. Excellent.

This stuff is just so sad. You can’t even say 3 things that make your own daughter special. And then you brag about this in the press to other shriveled, failing people. bsky.app/profile/davi...

But guess what? Farmers could be bringing BACK nature and thriving if paid to rewild Foresters could be producing timber AND natural wildlife habitat Fishermen would benefit HUGELY from no-take MPAs Our NPs could be spectacularly rich, if rangers were properly supported. There are no excuses.

I've published a review of The Economy as Evolving Complex System at Economic Record (see link in first reply). You can read it ungated on my website here: profmarkfabian.com/pdf/review-o... TL;DR: all economists should read this book, especially those doing impact evaluation and microemet.

Good, simple, practical article for my workplace wellbeing peeps wellbeingexplained.substack.com/p/awareness-...

Another sunrise from the kayak, this time with a loquacious red squirrel and a bald eagle calling from the shore.

it's not the only problem in the world but it seems very clear to me that better ADHD support leads to better real-world outcomes, and that the delta between outcomes for the well-supported and unsupported is frequently enormous

If AI had not been trained to use the first person would people still think it was conscious?

Most of what I hear out of Jensen Huang is pretty dumb, though obviously the media amplifies his weirder statements. It doesn't fill me with confidence that the CEO of a graphics card company has turned it into an overleveraged bank on which the global economy now rides.

Now *this* is fun methodsmatter.substack.com/p/why-are-yo...

Fall into the glorious cadence of @storyclare.bsky.social as she helps us recover, re-imagine and re-weave the myths of Britain and Ireland, fit for the 21st Century. accidentalgods.life/we-all-came-... #Accidentalgods #ThrutopianPodcast #Podcast #Mythweaving #Mythology #MythsForANewWorld

a 5% success rate for ERC Starting Grants. It seems hardly worth the effort (and increasingly the case across the ERC portfolio...)

I'm puzzled why the APS Conference only accepts papers in: Empirical Research Systematic Review Meta-Analysis & -Synthesis Methods & Applications Perspectives, an APS journal, had its theory crisis issue in 2021. How can this be solved without an audience? journals.sagepub.com/toc/ppsa/16/4

I just teared up a little showing my wife some places we could road trip to in Australia. I miss the raw nature so bad. Flying over Europe and seeing endless farms always gets me depressed. "Green Spaces" are not the same as national parks that can make you feel small, where animals teem.

yall ever just watch a wombat eating grass

This is excellent! ‘The restaurant will continue to trade, while becoming a commercial tenant of the charity. Under the deal, the rent payments will go towards conserving the building.’ What a far sighted move www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

1/n We've just put a new (long) paper online: osf.io/preprints/so... It's a new history of macroeconomics, and it's been one very, very important for me to write It summarizes what historians of macro have been up to in the 10 years, but more importantly...

This is the problem Burnham and his ministers must face up to: stabilising the criminal justice system requires spending both money & political capital, whether on aligning police force boundaries to mayoral strategic authorities, increasing legal aid fees or investing in perpetrator programmes.

Lots of striking results in here, e.g. * Reform voters think London is 50% Muslim * Only 6% of respondent think London ranks well when it came 1st in the 2025 World's Best Cities index. www.kcl.ac.uk/news/london-...

New post by me on @bewellco.bsky.social's wellbeing explained substack about why happiness hacks are overrated. Come for the swings at Huberman, stay for the structural determinants of wellbeing. Top it off with applications to your workplace. wellbeingexplained.substack.com/p/why-you-do...

New working paper: the Norwegian wealth tax was a huge success. The "exodus" of wealthy people never happened (less than 100 individuals left). Tax revenue increased by 71.5%. No changes in business activity or investment. www.nber.org/papers/w35854

Copyright became necessary when replication got cheap (while first expression remained expensive). It needs to change now AI makes the first expression cheap, argues Shruti Rajagopalan: buff.ly/lF2BxWF

Oracle is sending 30 TRUCKS OF GAS A DAY to one of its data centres due to delayed gas pipeline 🩻 still waiting for AI to solve climate change🩻 www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/...

The Publisher's Weekly review of Beyond Happy is out and it's delightful 😁 💌 "Takeaway: Smart guide, free of bromides, for readers seeking fulfilling lives." booklife.com/project/beyo...

Wrote a little piece for The Economic Times on the dangers of conflating self-actualisation with self-optimisation: hrme.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/workpla...

Don't we all need some good news from time to time :) Though, I would like to point out that that did not happen magically. "The report credits its recent recovery to a concerted international effort that included reducing catch quotas, size limits and protection of spawning grounds ..."

These things are pro-life: Universal Healthcare Universal Education Universal Child Care Paid Sick Leave Paid Maternity Leave Paid Family Leave Paid Vacation Time A Living Wage Clean Air Pure Water Fertile Soil Healthy Food Green Energy Environmental Protection Biodiversity Gun Control Peace Love

Reminds me of my favourite lines from Simone Weil: "Hope is the knowledge that the evil we carry within us is finite, and every turning towards the good destroys a little of it".

"Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions we make are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of." — C. S. Lewis 📷🌱

I did an interview with Authority magazine on how to find more satisfaction in life. It's free to read: medium.com/authority-ma...

Sky now using a fictional gangster to advertise their online casino offerings. Is the world OK? Half the ads on the tube are either gambling, crypto (gambling), investing (gambling), questionable health cures (e.g. testosterone), or thin bestsellers. The rest is musicals.

New NBER Book released: The Economics of Place-Based Policies www.nber.org/books-and-ch...

Every AI/HCI paper I review now just sounds like this.

2.5km underwater! 😲

It does feel this way from the outside.

Perhaps of interest to @kevinzollman.com @cailinmeister.bsky.social @nescio13.bsky.social @carlbergstrom.com

@eastasiaforum.bsky.social remains the best place for short form commentary on anything that's going on in Asian policymaking. This editorial for example is streets ahead of anything you will get in The Economist or FT: eastasiaforum.org/2026/10/05/c...

I visited the Amazon rainforest a year ago ahead of the cop conference in Belem. Historically the only thing that has stopped deforestation has been electing Lula da Silva has Brazilian president. www.economist.com/the-americas...