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Zakir Hussain has indeed passed away - Marginal REVOLUTION
I saw him perform maybe…a dozen times? I was set to go again this spring, and would have kept on going for as long as possible. His two concerts with Shakti I attended were among the very best of my life. No video clip can do justice to percussion, unfortunately. He also seemed so young, […]
o1 is still doing well on monetary economics - Marginal REVOLUTION
This is one of these “don’t bother reading through everything unless you already know what I am talking about” posts. Scott Sumner has a long rebuttal to o1 on monetary theory, offering many criticisms. He does not like the quality of the answer given by the AI. But I view the AI more positively here, […]
Sunday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. NoVa Civil War NIMBY buffs vs. new data centers. 2. “We propose a mechanism by which accumulated scientific knowledge determines the capacity of nuclear reactors, and find that some 55 billion tons of CO2 emissions, 2.3 million premature deaths, and 14 trillion USD in health costs could have been avoided, had we displaced fossil […]
Tax arbitrage through your business - Marginal REVOLUTION
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit: This phenomenon is one reason that many office jobs in Nordic countries seem so pleasant. The workers have nice lunches and the use of comfortable and stylish furniture, which they are not taxed on, though of course their take-home pay may be […]
Marriage markets in everything (tax arbitrage!) - Marginal REVOLUTION
Looking to marry someone with $1m+ of short-term capital gains (LA California) for tax savings (I have $1m+ in losses) and split the savings I (unfortunately) lost a bunch of money this year with some risky gambles and have ~$1.2m of context of capital losses. I would like to marry someone with very large ($1m+) […]
Are LLMs running out of data? - Marginal REVOLUTION
Ilya and many other experts say yes. I would not dare to disagree with them about AI per se, but I cannot say I am entirely convinced. Supply is elastic! That is a time-honored economic truth. So perhaps the future for traditional scaling is brighter than many of the experts currently are suggesting. We outsiders […]
Jennifer Pahlka on DOGE - Marginal REVOLUTION
An excellent piece, one of the best I have read all year. Here is the concluding paragraph: We can wish that the government efficiency agenda were in the hands of someone else, but let’s not pretend that change was going to come from Democrats if they’d only had another term, and let’s not delude ourselves […]
Saturday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. On taste. 2. The dangers of mirrored life? Eli Dourado is not so worried. 3. How are things going with Fermat’s Last Theorem? And are we documenting mathematics properly? 4. Claims made by some Syrians about free enterprise (speculative). 5. What is the evidence on the five-second rule? 6. Where will the Trump crowd […]
Very good sentences - Marginal REVOLUTION
…Corbet can be just as critical of indie movies as he is of studio-backed ones. “Art-house cinema and big tentpole releases are equally algorithmic,” he said. “I’ve seen ‘4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days’ remade forty-five times. I know why; it’s an extraordinary film.” Still, he went on, “There’s this kind of faux subtlety, […]
The Effects of Gender Integration on Men - Marginal REVOLUTION
Evidence from the U.S. military: Do men negatively respond when women first enter an occupation? We answer this question by studying the end of one of the final explicit occupational barriers to women in the U.S.: in 2016, the U.S. military opened all positions to women, including historically male-only combat occupations. We exploit the staggered […]
Zakaria on Rent Seeking - Marginal REVOLUTION
Fareed Zakaria on Freakonomics Radio: ZAKARIA: You can see it in what happened a day after the election results became clear. You got a flurry of tweets from every major C.E.O. in America — every major tech C.E.O., every bank C.E.O. — fawning over Trump, congratulating him and telling him how much they wanted to […]
A new paper on the economics of AI alignment - Marginal REVOLUTION
A principal wants to deploy an artificial intelligence (AI) system to perform some task. But the AI may be misaligned and pursue a conflicting objective. The principal cannot restrict its options or deliver punishments. Instead, the principal can (i) simulate the task in a testing environment and (ii) impose imperfect recall on the AI, obscuring whether the […]
Friday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Space flight during the 21st century. 2. Cato-suggested DOGE reforms. 3. AI progress is massive but increasingly non-legible. 4. One of the biggest benefits of travel: “IMO one of the biggest benefits of travel is just acquiring a scaffold to hang future knowledge on. Places that had similar embeddings in my mind before I […]
My Conversation with the excellent Paula Byrne - Marginal REVOLUTION
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary: Tyler and Paula discuss Virginia Woolf’s surprising impressions of Hardy, why Wessex has lost a sense of its past, what Jude the Obscure reveals about Hardy’s ideas about marriage, why so many Hardy tragedies come in doubles, the best least-read Hardy novels, why […]
Tetlock on Testing Grand Theories with AI - Marginal REVOLUTION
Testing grand theories of politics (or economics) is difficult because such theories are always contingent on ceteris paribus assumptions but outside of a lab, all else is rarely the same. The great Philip Tetlock has run multi-decade forecasting experiments but these are time and resource consuming. Tetlock, however, now suggests that LLMs could speed the […]
On the Gukesh match (from my email) - Marginal REVOLUTION
Unusual, relative to other competitions, that the (undisputed?) top 3 players weren’t competing for the title. The quality of play seemed correspondingly lower than other big tournaments. Ding really is quite an anomaly. Some massive holds despite admitting in interviews to not seeing some pretty straightforward lines. Huge props for him to reach game 14 […]
Gender Composition and Group Behavior - Marginal REVOLUTION
Evidence from city councils: How does gender composition influence individual and group behavior? To study this question empirically, we assembled a new, national sample of United States city council elections and digitized information from the minutes of over 40,000 city-council meetings. We find that replacing a male councilor with a female councilor results in a […]
Thursday assorted links and non-links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Slightly salacious betting markets in everything. 2. A tale of status quo bias. 3. From my email: “I’m curious, if you have the time to reply, about your personal Straussianism and if you believe scarce context is what makes the world livable, or if its actually a tragedy.” 4. The music of Sid Meier’s […]
Wednesday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Semantic search for all CWTs. 2. Job postings for Ph.D economists are down. 3. On the new Nvidia book. 4. Krugman’s last NYT column (though he is not retiring more generally he says). 5. Thread on quantum computing. And Scott Aaronson on Google Willow.
Tabarrok on Bail - Marginal REVOLUTION
I appeared on the Bail in the Midwest Podcast (Apple) to talk about crime and bail. Here is one bit: I’ve talked about capturing these people and recapturing them and that of course is what you see on television. That’s the sexy part of it but actually a lot of what is going on, as […]
*A Boy's Own Story* - Marginal REVOLUTION
By Edmund White, I enjoyed this paragraph from the preface: In A Boy’s Own Story I touched on all the themes of my youth: the exaggerated consolations of the imagination; the sexy but crushing teenage culture of the 1950s; the importance of Buddhism, books and psychoanalysis to my development; my first contacts with bohemianism, the […]
The New Jersey drone sightings - Marginal REVOLUTION
Here is one short clip. They are almost certainly from humans, but whose humans? These incidents also have some bearing on UAP debates. When the UAPs are from humans, even from an advanced tech program (whether ours or others), it is in fact pretty obvious that “these are a bunch of somebody’s drones.” Update your […]
Health insurance companies are not the main villain - Marginal REVOLUTION
First of all, insurance companies just don’t make that much profit. UnitedHealth Group, the company of which Brian Thompson’s UnitedHealthcare is a subsidiary, is the most valuable private health insurer in the country in terms of market capitalization, and the one with the largest market share. Its net profit margin is just 6.11%… That’s only about half of […]
Trump City - Marginal REVOLUTION
Donald Trump wants to create Freedom Cities. It’s a good idea. As I wrote in 2008, the Federal Government owns more than half of Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Alaska and it owns nearly half of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming. See the map (PDF) for more [N.B. the vast majority of this land […]
Science and religious dogmatism - Marginal REVOLUTION
Today’s leading historians of science have “debunked” the notion that religious dogmatism and science were largely in conflict in Western history: conflict was rare and inconsequential, the relationship between religion and science was constructive overall. This view stands in sharp contrast to that of a group of economists, who are beginning to report empirical evidence […]
Tuesday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. What is Russia losing in Syria? 2. Saloni on five medical breakthroughs from 2024. 3. The U.S. tax system has become more redistributive. 4. Open access book on the socialist calculation debate. 5. El Salvador to scale back Bitcoin plans due to IMF pressure (FT). 6. The new Google quantum chip. “It lends credence […]
Should crypto receive a tax exemption? - Marginal REVOLUTION
Probably not, or so I argue in my latest Bloomberg column. Excerpt: The most obvious argument against the proposal is simply that uniform taxation is better than selective tax exemptions. If a lower capital gains tax rate is preferable, then the goal should be to make a smaller cut that applies to all assets. Exempting […]
La ciudad lineal - Marginal REVOLUTION
When does it make sense to organize most of your urban activity on a (more or less) straight line? If land transport is very costly, as in much earlier times, and a river is available, you might build much of the town right on the river bank. You can see remnants of this if you […]
Monday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Nick Bostrom on The Cosmic Host. 2. Alexander Berger on the risks and benefits of kidney donation. 3. Who owns the drones flying over New Jersey (NYT)? 4. Some astronomy photos of the year. 5. al-Julani comment, on institutions. 6. Be a full-time annotator for the Vesuvius scrolls. $40 an hour. 7. NIMBY and […]
52 things Tom Whitwell learned in 2024 - Marginal REVOLUTION
Here is one of them: In the 2020s, over 16% of movies have colons in the title (Like Superman: Man of Steel), up almost 300% since the 1990s. And: The Telugu-language action film Devara: Part 1 made more money ($5.5m) in US cinemas than Francis Ford Coppola’s $120m Megalopolis in its first week ($5m). And: In 2024, around 10% of […]
Sunday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. The Knausgaard library. 2. A new paper on the diminishing returns to research. 3. Those new service sector jobs: “How to Make $100 an Hour Scratching Someone’s Back.” (WSJ) 4. Shruti podcast with Pravin Krishna on trade. 5. Jennifer Doleac on what we get wrong about crime (NYT). 6. “Eyeballing the results, something like […]
How to read a book using o1 - Marginal REVOLUTION
You don’t have to upload any book into the system. The Great Cosmic Mind is smarter than most of the books you could jam into the context window. Just start asking questions. The core intuition is simply that you should be asking more questions. And now you have someone/something to ask! I was reading a […]
*Land Between the Rivers* - Marginal REVOLUTION
The author is Bartle Bull, and the subtitle is A 5,000-Year History of Iraq. Excerpt: Another is the extraordinary length of what might be called an East-West conflict in Iraq. The Roman-Persian wars lasted from 54 BC until 628 AD. Nine centuries later a version of the conflict resumed, when the Ottoman Turks made Constantinople […]
Austin Vernon on drones (from my email) - Marginal REVOLUTION
The offensive vs. defensive framing seems wrong, at least temporarily. It should be motivated vs. unmotivated, with drones favoring the motivated. A competent drone capability requires building a supply chain, setting up a small manufacturing/assembly operation, and training skilled operators. They need to manage frequencies and adjust to jamming. Tight integration of these functions is a […]
Markets in everything, personal fire hydrant edition - Marginal REVOLUTION
The latest sought-after home amenity? Personal fire hydrants. The logic is that when there’s a major disaster there may not be enough fire engines to protect every house in an area. If homeowners have their own hydrant ready to go—along with hoses, nozzles and adapters—and are trained to use it all, that could help reduce […]
o1 explains why you should not dismiss Fischer Black on money and prices - Marginal REVOLUTION
The prediction of inflation dynamics—how prices change over time—has increasingly confounded modern macroeconomists. Throughout much of the twentieth century, there seemed to be clear relationships linking the money supply, economic slack, and price levels. Monetarism, the school of thought that posits a stable connection between the growth rate of a money aggregate and the subsequent […]
Noah Smith presents Ryan Oprea - Marginal REVOLUTION
But a new paper by Ryan Oprea challenges the idea that we even need something like Prospect Theory at all. Oprea hypothesizes that a lot of the seemingly “irrational” experimental behaviors are really just due to the excessive complexity of the task they’re being asked to do. He does an experiment where he takes away all the […]