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MR Podcast: Our Favorite Models, Session 1 - Marginal REVOLUTION
The Marginal Revolution Podcast is back and this time Tyler and I discuss some of our favorite models or ways of thinking about the world. We begin with Spence on Monopolies, Harberger on Incidence and Solow on Growth. Here’s one bit: TABARROK: You have an increase in the corporate tax. What happens? COWEN: One lesson of the […]
Black Veterans and Civil Rights After World War I - Marginal REVOLUTION
Nearly 400,000 Black men were drafted into the National Army during World War I, where they toiled primarily as menial laborers in segregated units. Leveraging novel variation from the WWI draft lottery and millions of digitized military and NAACP records, we document the pioneering role these men played in the early civil rights movement. Relative […]
Tuesday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. For different states, where the main immigrant group comes from. 2. NBA rookies do worse when they end up on very good teams. 3. Yale Budget Lab study claims AI is not having much of an effect on labor markets. 4. Twenty-five questions university presidents, provosts, and deans need to be asking themselves. 5. […]
Singapore fact of the day - Marginal REVOLUTION
For every Singaporean who has left Christianity, about three others have become Christians. About 3.2 in fact, if you look at the exact numbers. Buddhism in Japan and South Korea is being depopulated, also. Here is the Pew piece on defections from religions.
Who exactly is rigid again? - Marginal REVOLUTION
In an adversarial collaboration, two preregistered U.S.-based studies (total N = 6181) tested three hypotheses regarding the relationship between political ideology and belief rigidity (operationalized as less evidence-based belief updating): rigidity-of-the-right, symmetry, and rigidity-of-extremes. Across both studies, general and social conservatism were weakly associated with rigidity (|b| ~ .05), and conservatives were more rigid than liberals (Cohen’s d ~ .05). Rigidity generally had […]
Monday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Costco to sell GLP-1s at a significant discount. 2. What Frederick Douglass learned in Ireland. 3. How the early Standard Oil business model worked. 4. In praise of the Faroe Islands. 5. More Scott Sumner movie reviews. When I describe Scott as the best movie reviewer in the world today, what I mean is […]
Emergent Ventures winners, 47th cohort - Marginal REVOLUTION
Vivek Kommi, 16, London, Extend healthy human lifespan by hacking the neuroimmune axis. Adam Essemaali, northern Italy, 16, a new platform. Rushil Kukreja and co-workers, northern Virginia, high school, devices to see through walls. Sheehan Quirke, also known as The Cultural Tutor, London, work with David Perell, on why beauty has disappeared in the modern […]
Virginia fact of the day - Marginal REVOLUTION
Virginia saw one of the smallest increases in electricity costs in the nation this past year, per new federal data, but it could get even higher as data centers proliferate statewide… By the numbers: Between May 2024 and May 2025, the average cost of electricity for residential customers in Virginia rose about 3%, from 14.95 cents to […]
The ai Boom - Marginal REVOLUTION
The tiny country of Anguilla (pop 15,000) has an official country top-level domain code for the internet of .ai. Domain name registrations have surged from 48,000 in 2018 to 870,000 in the year to date and that source of revenue alone now accounts for nearly 50% of state revenues. Hat tip: Cremieux
The unraveling of Obamacare? - Marginal REVOLUTION
Paul Krugman has a recent post defending the exchange subsidies and tax credits that the Republicans wish to cut, talking with Jonathan Cohn about the “premium apocalypse” (and here). Whether or not one agrees with Krugman normatively, the arguments if anything convince me that Obamacare probably is not financially or politically stable. To recap some […]
Sunday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. “Accurately accounting for that misreporting may reduce rather than increase top shares of income.” 2. Marc Rowan and the universities (NYT). 3. “Book people are going to be incensed by this, but I often listen while I am playing speed chess. I also often listen somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5x.” 4. Insights about Singapore […]
Saturday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Jonathan Ross podcast. While Jonathan is doing very, very well, he remains underrated. 2. Colombia vs. “Brayan” (NYT). 3. Do the Abundance types favor cutting the capital gains tax on homes, to improve housing reallocation? 4. Can a Waymo get a ticket? 5. Estate sale with beautiful Philly town home and 100,000 books. 6. […]
AI Scientists in the Lab - Marginal REVOLUTION
Today, we introduce Periodic Labs. Our goal is to create an AI scientist. Science works by conjecturing how the world might be, running experiments, and learning from the results. Intelligence is necessary, but not sufficient. New knowledge is created when ideas are found to be consistent with reality. And so, at Periodic, we are building […]
New data on social media - Marginal REVOLUTION
It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline, according to an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries carried out for the FT by the digital audience insights company GWI. And this is not just the […]
Thiel and Wolfe on the Antichrist in literature - Marginal REVOLUTION
Jonathan Swift tried to exorcise Baconian Antichrist-worship from England. Gulliver’s Travels agreed with New Atlantis on one point: The ancient hunger for knowledge of God had competition from the modern thirst for knowledge of science. In this quarrel between ancients and moderns, Swift sided with the former. Gulliver’s Travels takes us on four voyages to fictional countries bearing scandalous […]
Friday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. How many legal moves can a reachable chess position have? 2. French guy with opinions visits the UC salaries website. 3. Sam H. on LDS. 4. The job market for economists is weakening. 5. Climate advocacy should focus more on the hard problems. 6. Noah Smith, libertarian. 7. The AI productivity index, with Sunstein, […]
Türkiye's Homemade Crises - Marginal REVOLUTION
Türkiye’s response to post-pandemic inflation is a cautionary tale of how political pressure for low interest rates can create macroeconomic instabilities. While central banks worldwide raised interest rates to combat inflation in 2021-2023, Turkish authorities pursued the opposite strategy: cutting real rates to deeply negative levels while implementing financial engineering tools, FX interventions, and financial […]
Do LLMs favor outputs created by themselves? - Marginal REVOLUTION
Here is part of the abstract, I will not ask who or what wrote this: We focus on the hiring context, where job applicants often rely on LLMs to refine resumes, while employers deploy them to screen those same resumes. Using a large-scale controlled resume correspondence experiment, we find that LLMs consistently prefer resumes generated […]
Valuing free goods - Marginal REVOLUTION
There is a new AEJ Macro paper by Brynjolfsson, et.al. on how to value free goods. Here is one of the concrete measures: Using this approach, we estimate the reservation price [for giving up Facebook] to be $2,152 in 2003 US dollars. That is for the 2017 version of Facebook. Note this does not measure […]
What I've been reading - Marginal REVOLUTION
Marcus Willaschek, Kant: A Revolution in Thinking. A very good book, perhaps the best introduction to Kant? Though for me it is mostly interior to my current knowledge set. Matthew Bell, Goethe: A Life in Ideas. A beautiful book, now in English we have Nicholas Boyle’s work and also this. Bell is wise enough to […]
Thursday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Lisa Cook stays in office at least through January. 2. “There are 19,000 private equity funds in the US. There are 14,000 McDonald’s in the US. How are there more private equity funds than McDonald’s? That’s actually crazy, right?” (Bloomberg link) 3. Zvi praises Claude 4.5. 4. Is the stablecoin duopoly breaking down? 5. […]
On politics and gender - Marginal REVOLUTION
I also had other opportunities to meet with conservatives in DC. With a foot in both worlds, I noticed certain social differences that stood out to me. They center mainly around the ways in which individuals perform gender and are worth reflecting on. When I talk about differences between conservatives and liberals here, I’m talking […]
Uri Bram on throwing a good party - Marginal REVOLUTION
Interesting throughout, here is one excerpt: 14) Couples often flake together. This changes the probability distribution of attendees considerably, and so your chance of losing a quorum in a small-group setting. Small-group couple-events (e.g. 3-4 couple dinner parties) are very hard to manage in a high-flake society, as a result. 15) Create as much circulation […]
Wednesday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. More stablecoins news from Stripe. And from Visa Direct. 2. Periodic Labs, to accelerate progress in science (NYT). 3. Kevin Roose reports from the AI and education front. 4. Sora 2. 5. My Free Press column on which immigrants we should take in. 6. Antoni nomination to run BLS is withdrawn.
Incentives matter, installment #1637 - Marginal REVOLUTION
In the first three months of 2025, U.S. companies canceled, downsized or mothballed nearly $8 billion worth of supply chain projects — including more than $2.2 billion tied to battery plants. That single quarter exceeded the combined losses of the previous two years, according to Atlas Public Policy. Via Adam Ozimek.
My excellent Conversation with John Amaechi - Marginal REVOLUTION
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. As I said on Twitter, John has the best “podcast voice” of any CWT guest to date. Here is the episode summary: John Amaechi is a former NBA forward/center who became a chartered scientist, professor of leadership at Exeter Business School, and New York Times bestselling author. His […]
Higher education is not that easy - Marginal REVOLUTION
More than two years into a conservative takeover of New College of Florida, spending has soared and rankings have plummeted, raising questions about the efficacy of the overhaul. While state officials, including Republican governor Ron DeSantis, have celebrated the death of what they have described as “woke indoctrination” at the small liberal arts college, student outcomes are […]
Some simple economics of Sora 2? - Marginal REVOLUTION
I do not have access or any kind of inside information on what it can do, or not. Still, from my distance it seems quite possible that the “slop” side of the equation is a simple way to fund AI “world-modeling” (and other) skills in a manner that is cross-subsidized by the consumers of the […]
Tuesday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Dean Ball on classical music. 2. Profile of Russell Vought (NYT). 3. Research center markets in everything. 4. “Don’t fret about life extension, you’ve already absorbed everything that really matters.” Link to the piece here. 5. Seb Krier on AI as a means of obliterating transactions costs. 6. Did the Chinese exam system benefit imperial […]
What should I ask Gaurav Kapadia? - Marginal REVOLUTION
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. He is a tried and true New Yorker like few others, a very successful investor and head of XN, a long term focused investment firm that invests across public and private markets. He is a “generational investor,” one of the most successful over the last twenty […]
UK fact of the day - Marginal REVOLUTION
London has slipped out of the world’s top 20 initial public offering markets as the third quarter ends, overtaken by Mexico and Singapore in a fresh blow to its standing as a global finance hub. The UK exchange has slipped three places to 23rd in a Bloomberg ranking of the world’s busiest IPO destinations, placing […]
Monday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. The real secret and meaning of The Beatles. 2. Large-brained humans have been around longer than we had thought? 3. Tallest bridge in the world opened, with coffee shop at the top. 4. John Searle, RIP. And a defense of John. 5. Collison on Rockefeller. 6. DeLong on AI and existential risk. 7. Secretary-General […]
I was curious, so I asked - Marginal REVOLUTION
My prompt: I read that ChatGPT will be starting connections with Shopify, Stripe, and perhaps other companies for LLM commerce, as you might call it. That is, you could search for something in the app and then buy it through GPT. OpenAI would receive some sort of commission, as Google does now if you buy […]
Mark Skousen on recession warning signs - Marginal REVOLUTION
The White House and Wall Street were exuberant last week when the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis revised upward its second-quarter estimate of gross domestic product to show 3.8% growth in real terms, compared with a negative number in the first quarter. “US economy notches fastest growth pace in nearly two years in second […]
The costs of traffic noise - Marginal REVOLUTION
Let’s do leaf-blowers next!: More than 42 million Americans are exposed to medium or high levels of traffic noise. Despite its potentially large toll and unequal distribution, the economic costs, incidence, and policy implications of traffic noise have received limited attention in economics. We quantify the aggregate economic burden of this externality and its distribution […]
New issue of Econ Journal Watch - Marginal REVOLUTION
The End of Truth: In 1944, Friedrich Hayek warned that traveling down the anti-liberal road would lead us into serfdom under rogue government. One chapter, “The End of Truth,” explained the kit necessary to sustain the new feudalism, the kit of propaganda and clientelism promoting big lies that must be protected by censorship, intimidation, and […]