The word “weird” didn’t always mean strange. In Old English, descended from a mix of Germanic and Norse concepts, it meant something closer to “destiny” or “becoming” or even “fate.” Once upon a time, human beings in that culture thought that the way someone’s life would turn out was unseverable from the fundamental weirdness of being alive.
William Shakespeare’s MacBeth is known for its three witches, who popularized the “double, double, toil and trouble” line, often misquoted from its appearance in a Disney cartoon as “bubble, bubble.” But what’s often forgotten is that Shakespeare named these characters the “Weird Sisters,” connecting them to another mythological group of three old crones: the Norns from Scandinavian mythology, who together weaved a web of destiny called (what else?) the “wyrd,” containing every human’s life story. (J.K. Rowling later named a popular band in her Harry Potter universe “The Weird Sisters,” but that was an all-male lineup.)
The weirdest thing of all in economics, says Brandeis University Economics Professor Benjamin Shiller, is that weirdness is closely tied to fate in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). The weirder you are, he tells Fortune, the better off you’ll be.
“AI models can learn stuff really well but only with a massive amount of training data as humans are much more efficient learners,” Shiller says. “If you have a niche field where there’s not a lot of data out there to train an AI model, then AI probably won’t displace your job.”
Goldman Sachs predicts that 300 million jobs in the U.S. and Europe could be susceptible to some level of change because of AI, predicting that humans could go the way of the workhorse in the modern economy. However, Shiller’s “weirdness premium” suggests a cheat code to gaming AI’s takeover: find a job that’s so complex, not even trillions of tokens of data can replace it.
AI doesn’t learn as efficiently as humans … yet
Shiller describes what Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently suggested regarding the sheer volume of information required to replace a human skill. The businessman posted in a reply on X (formerly Twitter) “Roughly 10 billion miles of training data is needed to achieve safe unsupervised self-driving.”
“If a typical American drives about 13,500 miles per year, that’s about 750,000 years of a person driving that they need for training data,” Shiller said. In contrast, it takes the average human just a few hundred driving miles and six months of practice to secure their driver’s license.
Of course, self-driving cars already exist, and can easily get people from point A to point B free of harm. Yet if it takes that much data for an AI to learn a task as simple as driving, then it could take a massive amount of data to automate niche professions, such as that of an aviation accident analyst or an industrial ride engineer. In other words, in fields where data is scarce, humans retain a comparative advantage.
Humans are better equipped at handling kangaroos
Shiller illustrates AI’s limitations with “the kangaroo example,” a cautionary tale of when Waymo tested its self-driving cars in Australia. The vehicles failed to navigate a bizarre and foreign obstacle: jumping marsupials. “They just basically kept on crashing into kangaroos because kangaroos weren’t in their training data and their movements were different [from] other animals’ movements.”
AI fails to predict the unknown, and that failure is what differentiates humans from even the most advanced machines. “For a human, we’re able to adapt and deal with these edge cases without being specifically trained to handle them,” Shiller said. We’re naturally apt at handling niche scenarios, from the unpredictability of the road to the chaos of a hospital or an investment bank.
Shiller says that modern workers—and young people contemplating a degree—should avoid being caught in a profession that everyone else is doing. “Just taking the standard classes and becoming well-versed in what you’re directly taught in these large majors is a risky strategy,” Shiller said.
Jamie Dimon poached a senior figure from Warren Buffett’s inner circle, and the legendary investor was surprisingly OK with it.
The longtime JPMorgan Chase CEO hired former Geico CEO Todd Combs away from Berkshire Hathaway in December, hand-picking him to lead a $10 billion investment group as part of JPMorgan’s Security and Resiliency Initiative aimed at helping companies accelerate manufacturing.
During a U.S. Chamber of Commerce event Thursday, Dimon said he had called Buffett personally to tell him the unwelcome news. He claimed Buffett accepted the outcome, preferring that his former executive land at JPMorgan than elsewhere.
“It’s a free country, and people make their own decisions,” Dimon said. “I did call Warren. He probably wouldn’t have preferred it, but he said, ‘if he’s going anywhere, at least he’s going to you.’”
Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett did not immediately respond to Fortune‘s request for comment.
In a market saturated with executive moves, Dimon’s Combs hire matters because Berkshire Hathaway is a decentralized empire that draws its strength from the long tenures of its leaders with minimal churn at the top. Its executives are often seen as stewards of a culture, built over Buffett’s own six-decade tenure, that prizes patience and discipline.
Combs, a former hedge fund manager, had been at Berkshire since 2010 and was brought on by Buffett to serve as one of two investment managers tasked with picking stocks for Berkshire. During the succession race to replace Buffett, Combs was positioned as a key leader to assist Greg Abel, who took over as CEO officially this month. Yet, he has also served for nine years on JPMorgan’s board, according to his hiring announcement.
In announcing the hiring, Dimon specifically called out Combs’s investment prowess and his work with Buffett.
“Todd Combs is one of the greatest investors and leaders I’ve known, having successfully managed investments alongside the most respected and successful long-term investor of our time, Warren Buffett,” Dimon said in a statement.
Combs’ hiring may have been directly influenced by his respect for Buffett, claimed University of Maryland finance professor David Kass, who runs a Warren Buffett blog, in an interview with Business Insider.
“Dimon may very well have viewed Combs as a close proxy for Buffett himself,” Kass told BI. “Although Dimon could not hire Buffett, he could hire one of his protégés.”
Dimon has long admired the 95- year- old legendary investor. In May, as Buffett announced he was stepping down from the CEO role, Dimon praised him as a friend and said he had learned from him.
“Warren Buffett represents everything that is good about American capitalism and America itself — investing in the growth of our nation and its businesses with integrity, optimism, and common sense,” Dimon said at the time, according to Reuters.
Though a couple decades younger than Buffett, Dimon, 69, has also faced questions about when he will step aside.
Dimon, who has served as CEO of JPMorgan since 2006, has been reluctant to put a clean end date on his tenure. He spent years responding to retirement questions with a rolling horizon, and only changed his tone in 2024 saying the timeframe had shortened and succession plans were “well on the way.”
On Thursday, Dimon changed his mind again, reverting to his past refrain that his retirement is still “at least” five years away.
Once the world’s most populous nation, China is now among the many Asian countries struggling with anemic fertility rates. In an attempt to double the country’s rate of 1.0 children per woman, Beijing is reaching for a new tool: taxes on condoms, birth control pills and other contraceptives.
As of Jan. 1, such items were subject to a 13% value-added tax. Meanwhile, services such as child care and matchmaking remain duty-free.
The move comes after China last year allocated 90 billion yuan (US$12.7 billion) for a national child care program giving families a one-off payment of around 3,600 yuan (over $500) for every child age three or under.
I have studied China’s demography for almost 40 years and know that past attempts by the country’s communist government to reverse slumping fertility rates through policies encouraging couples to have more children have not worked. I do not expect these new moves to have much, if any, effect on reversing the fertility rate decline to one of the world’s lowest and far below the 2.1 “replacement rate” needed to maintain a stable population.
In many ways, the 13% tax on contraceptives is symbolic. A packet of condoms costs about 50 yuan (about $7), and a month supply of birth control pills averages around 130 yuan ($19). The new tax is not at all a major expense, adding just a few dollars a month.
Compare that to the average cost of raising a child in China – estimated at around 538,000 yuan (over $77,000) to age 18, with the cost in urban areas much higher. One 36-year-old father told the BBC he is not concerned over the price hike. “A box of condoms might cost an extra five yuan, maybe 10, at most 20. Over a year, that’s just a few hundred yuan, completely affordable,” he said.
Pronatalist failings
China is one of many countries to adopt pronatalist policies to address low fertility. But they are rarely effective.
The Singapore government has been concerned about the country’s very low fertility rate for a couple of decades. It tried to devise ways to boost it through programs such as paid maternity leave, child care subsidies, tax relief and one-time cash gifts. Yet, Singapore’s fertility rate – currently at 1.2 – remains one of the lowest in the world.
The government there even started limiting the construction of small, one-bedroom apartments in a bid to encourage more “family-friendly” homes of two bedrooms or more – anyone with children will appreciate the need for more space, right? Yet even that failed to budge the low fertility rate.
The Singaporean government got a helping hand in 2012 from candymaker Mentos. In a viral ad campaign, the brand called on citizens to celebrate “National Night” with some marital boom-boom as they “let their patriotism explode” – with a hoped-for corresponding burst in births in nine months’ time. Even with the assistance from the private sector, it appears, reversing declining fertility rates is a tricky thing.
South Korea, the country with the world’s lowest fertility rate – 0.7 – has been providing financial incentives to couples for at least 20 years to encourage them to have more children.
It boosted the monthly allowance already in place for married couples to become parents. In fact, since 2006 the South Korean government has spent well over $200 billion on programs to increase the Korean birth rate.
But South Korea’s fertility rate has continued to drop from 1.1 in 2006 to 1.0 in 2017, to 0.9 in 2019, to 0.7 in 2024.
Unfavorable headwinds
The plight of China is partly of its own doing. For a couple of decades the country’s one-child policy pushed to get fertility rates down. It worked, going from over 7.0 in the early 1960s to 1.5 in 2015.
That is when the government again stepped in, abandoning the one-child policy and permitting all couples to have two children. In May 2021, the two-child policy was abandoned in favor of a three-child policy.
The hope was that these changes would lead to a baby boom, resulting in sizable increases in the national fertility rate. However, the fertility rate continued to decline – to 1.2 in 2021 and 1.0 in 2024.
While China’s historic programs to push down fertility rates were successful, they were aided by wider societal changes: The policies were in force while China was modernizing and moving toward becoming an industrial and urbanized society.
It’s policies aimed at increasing the birth rate now find unfavorable societal headwinds. Modernization has led to better educational and work opportunities for women – a factor pushing many to put off having children.
In fact, most of China’s fertility reduction, especially since the 1990s, has been voluntary – more a result of modernization than fertility-control policies. Chinese couples are having fewer children due to higher living costs and educational expenses involved in having more than one child.
Plus, China is one of the world’s most expensive countries in which to raise a child, when compared to average income. School fees at all levels are higher than in many other countries.
The ‘low-fertility’ trap
Another factor to take into consideration is what demographers refer to as the “low-fertility trap.” This hypothesis, advanced by demographers in the 2000s, holds that once a country’s fertility rate drops below 1.5 or 1.4 – far higher than China’s now stands – it is very difficult to increase it by 0.3 or more.
The argument goes that fertility declines to these low levels are largely the result of changes in living standards and increasing opportunities for women.
Accordingly, it is most unlikely that China’s three-child policy will have any influence at all on raising the fertility rate. And all my years of studying China’s demographic trends lead me to believe that making contraceptives marginally more expensive will also have very little effect.
New enrollments at American colleges and universities hit their highest level in a decade last fall, but a closer look at the type of institution high schoolers are opting for says a lot about what students’ priorities are nowadays.
Over 16 million students enrolled in an undergraduate degree, a 1.2% increase from the year before, according to a survey released Thursday by the National Student Clearinghouse, an education data provider.
But that growth came down almost entirely to rising interest in community colleges and undergraduate certificates, where enrollment massively outnumbered that at traditional four-year universities. While the number of new students seeking two-year associate’s degrees rose 2.2%, interest in bachelor’s degrees grew less than 1%.
Overall, community colleges added 173,000 undergraduate students last fall, nearly double the number of new students at public four-year colleges. Private nonprofit universities actually suffered a decline in enrollment, losing nearly 60,000 students.
The report, which covers 97% of post-secondary enrollment across the country, illustrates traditional universities’ ongoing identity crisis while students rethink the validity of a four-year degree. As young Americans grow disillusioned by tales of crushing student debt loads, a tight labor market for entry-level jobs, and the threatening possibility that artificial intelligence might usurp some of those roles in the near future anyway, many are looking into other educational pathways.
One factor behind the divergence is cost. Average in-district tuition at public two-year institutions costs a little over $4,000 this year, while public four-year colleges tend to run in-state students around $12,000, according to the College Board. Universities and colleges tout rising tuition costs as investments into students’ futures, but while most data still suggests bachelor’s degree holders will earn more and face less unemployment over the course of their career, fresh grads are now facing a tough job market to navigate. In September, the unemployment rate for new college grads hit 9.5%, its highest since 2021.
The difficult labor market for entry-level roles has pushed more young people to low-cost alternatives, including community colleges and trade schools, which also surged in popularity last year. High-paying jobs that do not require degrees, such as escalator installation and electrical power-line repair, have gone viral among Gen Z audiences, and associate’s degrees and certificates are often functional pipelines for students interested in exploring skilled trades.
While the National Student Clearinghouse report did not say which areas of study community college-goers tend to opt for, other surveys have found that most students who are not planning on transferring directly to a four-year school favor degrees that will grant them quick entry to the workforce. These include nursing, engineering and information technology.
To be sure, earning a bachelor’s degree is still seen as a prerequisite for most knowledge work sectors. In addition to imparting social and creative problem-solving skills, recruiters still rank GPA and degrees highly in their search for new talent, although recent evidence suggests many companies are doubling down on hiring from top colleges. And alternative hiring pathways to white-collar work might have a harder time gaining traction than advocates claim. A Harvard study last year tracked hiring across hundreds of companies, finding that even when employers tout non-degree requirements in their job postings, only one in 700 new hires without a degree actually benefit from these programs.
For traditional colleges, slowing or declining enrollment adds to a list of financial pressures. Falling birth rates in the U.S. have contributed to a so-called enrollment cliff, a shrinking pool of eligible students that could lead to budget cuts and mergers or closures for less secure institutions. Another headache has been the sudden decline in international enrollment as the Trump administration has enforced strict visa requirements for students coming from abroad.
International students are a significant revenue stream for schools, but the National Student Clearinghouse data suggests the U.S. has already become a less attractive destination. Graduate international student enrollment last fall declined nearly 6%, while the number of undergraduates from abroad grew 3.2%, less than half last year’s rate.
Politics8 years ago