Economist at EIU covering Asia. Previously Oxford Economics, Captial Econ, ICAP, Barclays, Government Economics Service. Also cook food. Views not my employers.
Singapore
Joined September 2015
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Alex Holmes retweeted
Since the launch of ChatGPT, the Philippines offshore industry (8% of country’s GDP) has actually grown much bigger.
Employment in IT and business outsourcing is up by +20% to 1.9m workers and industry revenue is up +30% to $42B.
“AI is helping offshore workers in the Philippines do new, more complex jobs. They are picking up work training AI models or supervising AI agents. Hospitals in America are increasingly outsourcing the checking of insurance eligibility and filing of medical records to Filipinos packing AI tools. Mr Gallimore says more “high-value” work, such as accountancy or engineering, is going offshore in part because “AI is a leveller. You can now teach someone complex stuff quickly” and still get it done more cheaply than in America or Europe.”
***
More here: economist.com/asia/2026/08/0…
Alex Holmes retweeted
What a great story. There is so much latent demand out there for very specific products/services. This demand hasn’t been met because the market is usually relatively small and the overhead cost of providing it through traditional firms is too high to meet it.
AI changes this, @aidenjohnsonn_ is a perfect example of how: small team providing useful products to a market that would have otherwise been underserved.
My prediction is that we’ll see a ton of this going forward. Markets/people who were underserved/ignored because overhead costs were too high will have their demand met. Small teams/firms, but also teams within larger organizations targeting unmet demand with bespoke products. This is what a welfare improvement looks like.
AN ACTUAL GOOD THING TO COME FROM AI
In today’s newsletter, I wrote about our new chat with @aidenjohnsonn_ and how stories like his are far more white-pilling than the typical “one day this might cure cancer” form of AI boosterism.
Alex Holmes retweeted
As is always the case when travelling to Deep England I am struck by how much space there is for new housing. Here we are just 16 minutes away from Paddington. Build here!
Alex Holmes retweeted
‘The study shows that the restrictiveness of the UK’s planning system, more than any physical shortage of land, drives the long-run rise in house prices’
Since 1970, productivity across most of the American economy has roughly doubled. In construction, it has fallen by around 40%. A new VoxEU column by Dongkeun Choi and Munseob Lee unpacks why.
The fall in the price of equipment — computers, machines, instruments — has been one of the great engines of the post-war economy, adding around 1.3 percentage points a year to growth in output per person. But structures have moved the other way. The relative price of buildings in the US is now 80% higher than in 1970, and that rise claws back almost two-fifths of the gain from cheaper machines. The net contribution of falling capital-goods prices is therefore closer to 0.8 points than 1.3.
“About three-quarters of the drag runs through standard capital deepening. When structures are expensive, firms accumulate less of them, and production slows accordingly. The remainder operates through innovation. Laboratories, offices, and pilot plants are themselves structures. Stagnant productivity in construction raises the cost of doing science.”
This is not an American curiosity. Choi and Lee examine thirteen advanced economies, and all but Belgium sit in the same troubling quadrant: construction prices up, construction productivity down. Across the entire sample, the UK records both the largest fall in construction productivity and the steepest rise in the relative price of building.
Why has construction forgotten how to build? The leading suspect is regulation. Hilber and Vermeulen show that the restrictiveness of the UK’s planning system, more than any physical shortage of land, drives the long-run rise in house prices; D’Amico and co-authors tie America’s construction-productivity stagnation directly to land-use rules. A planning regime that makes every project bespoke, contested and slow has meant construction is one of the few industries that never industrialised — it never achieved the scale economies and standardisation that lifted output almost everywhere else.
This resembles Baumol’s cost disease. When productivity stalls in one sector but the rest of the economy still needs its output, the relative price rises and everyone else pays for it. What makes construction unusual is that there is no way to route around it: the economy cannot make do with fewer hospitals, fewer fabs or — increasingly — fewer data centres. The cost of standing still in construction shows up everywhere.
As is often argued, restrictive planning acts as a tax on housebuilding. But it has also held back innovation in the construction industry. Alongside planning reform, we need to look deeper at what’s made us less efficient at building.
Alex Holmes retweeted
Singapore’s Foreign Minister, Dr Balakrishnan casually explaining how he built his own AI agent (a 2nd brain for diplomacy) using Claude & WhatsApp integration etc. on a Raspberry Pi
“You cannot govern a technology you have only been briefed on.” 🇸🇬
Alex Holmes retweeted
UK government strategy
1. Announce contentious position
2. Spend political capital defending
3. Take largest possible popularity hit
3. Stop mentioning contentious position
4. Drop policy entirely
5. RETURN TO START
🔺 BREAKING: Sir Keir Starmer has abandoned plans for mandatory digital ID for workers amid concerns that it will undermine public trust in the scheme ⬇️ thetimes.com/uk/politics/art…
Alex Holmes retweeted
In my day, critics denounced U.S. wars of choice as imperialist schemes to seize foreign oil - while the president insisted they were really attempts to spread democracy
Now, critics denounce such wars as attempts to spread democracy - while the president insists they are really imperialist schemes to seize foreign oil
Alex Holmes retweeted
> be demis hassabis
> spawn in london
> age 4, become child chess prodigy
> win chess tournaments
> reach ~2300 elo
> face danish chess champion
> game lasts hours
> position is a forced draw
> too exhausted to see it
> resign
> danish guy laughs and shows the draw
> feel sick to my stomach
> realise something is wrong
> chess is too narrow a problem
> brilliant minds wasting decades on it
> decide not to become a chess pro
> buy a computer with chess winnings
> teach self to program from books
> start hacking on games with friends
> decide to finish school early
> apply to cambridge age 16
> cambridge says you're too young
> forced to take a gap year
> enter a video game coding competition
> win
> get invited to join bullfrog game studio
> too young to be legally employed
> work there anyway
> build ai system inside theme park game
> game becomes a global hit
> turn 17
> offered £1,000,000 to stay and build games
> turn it down
> go to cambridge anyway
> decide games aren't enough
> study computer science
> interested in agi since 2007
> most people laugh at this idea
> realise brain is only form of agi we have
> want to learn more about human brain
> go back to school
> study neuroscience
> realise academia moves too slow
> decide to build a company instead
> start deepmind
> pitch “solve intelligence”
> investors don’t know what that means
> get to meet peter thiel for one minute
> wonder how to convince him
> spend one minute playing chess with him
> pitch "solve intelligence" again
> he invests
> go into total stealth mode for two years
> no website
> secret office
> candidates think it’s a scam
> start to train ai in simulated environments
> train ai with reinforcement learning
> train ai on pong first
> it sucks
> can't win a single point
> keep trying
> wait it won a a point
> wait it's winning every single point
> it actually works
> expand to train on any two-player game
> chess first, then move on to go
> beats world champion at go
> beats pros at starcraft
> games is not enough
> want to push into science
> realise compute is the bottleneck
> know this will take decades
> google offers ~$400m
> not the highest price
> but they offer unlimited compute
> accept
> refuse to become a product team
> stay in research mode
> determined to use ai for good
> need to figure out what's next
> land on protein folding
> 50-year-old unsolved science problem
> many great minds have tried and failed
> "good luck"
> start up alphafold
> try to solve protein folding
> humans take years to find 1 protein structure
> alphafold can find ~5 per day
> submit results, win competition
> not good enough
> hire more scientists
> rebuild it
> go from solving one per day to millions per day
> create invaluable system
> pharma would pay anything
> have to decide what to do with this
> could sell access for usage
> maybe make it a paid service
> remember childhood chess tournament
> remember why we built this
> decide to give it away all away for free
> publish all known protein structures publicly
> win nobel peace prize
> just the beginning towards agi
Alex Holmes retweeted
On Dec 2nd @TheEIU will be hosting a FREE webinar on our outlook for Asia in 2026, discussing topics incl 🇨🇳property market, 🇯🇵 fiscal plans and 🇮🇳 water politics.
We'll have two sessions, one at 4.30pm Hong Kong, and another at 9.00am US EST.
Sign up: tinyurl.com/37zxkxjj
Alex Holmes retweeted
Alex Holmes (@TheEIU): Trade policy isn’t everything. Fundamentals, macro trends and tech cycles matter too. #GTDCSummitAPJ
Alex Holmes retweeted
Spoke to @NewsHour about the demonstrations in Indonesia.
Lawmakers giving themselves a raise and the killing of Affan Kurniawan were the spark that started the protests. But the dry kindling is a bad economy and President Prabowo’s attempt to eliminate legislative opposition.
In recent weeks, Indonesia has been rocked by massive anti-government demonstrations. The protests are led by students, workers and women’s rights groups angered by the yawning gap between Indonesia’s elites and shrinking middle class, and turned violent after a delivery driver was killed amid a police crackdown.
@johnyangtv sat down with The Economist’s @ConnellyAL about the ongoing situation.
to.pbs.org/45SWCiD
Alex Holmes retweeted
Despite the dismal first-quarter growth mostly weighed down by world trade uncertainties, @TheEIU sees the Philippine economy outperforming the region by growing 6.1% in 2025–also due to its relatively smaller exposure to global trade👇 @AlexCapEcon
mb.com.ph/2025/05/12/philipp…
Alex Holmes retweeted
.@TheEIU’s @AlexCapEcon (who had correctly forecast @BangkoSentral’s February pause and April monetary policy easing resumption) expects 100 bps of interest rate cuts for the rest of 2025, in preparation for a possible recession in the United States (US)👇
mb.com.ph/2025/4/21/jumbo-bs…
Alex Holmes retweeted
Farmers scramble to find new export markets beyond China
agri-pulse.com/articles/2205…
Alex Holmes retweeted
The repercussions of Donald Trump’s sweeping victory in America’s election will affect everything from immigration and defence to economics and trade. Discover more themes to watch for the coming year in The World Ahead 2025 econ.st/4fWUIju 🌐
Alex Holmes retweeted
It's published.
We ran 80,000 simulations tonight.
Harris won in 40,012.
natesilver.net/p/nate-silver…
