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Friday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Is Baghadad now a boomtown? (The Economist) And tourists are returning to Iraq to see ancient Babylon. 2. “Who aligns the aligners?” 3. Claims. 4. Health care arbitrage. 5. Should the Germans stop teaching Goethe? (no) 6. Bob Cooter, RIP. 7. Nepal update.
The polity that is Albania - Marginal REVOLUTION
Albania has become the first country in the world to have an AI minister — not a minister for AI, but a virtual minister made of pixels and code and powered by artificial intelligence. Her name is Diella, meaning sunshine in Albanian, and she will be responsible for all public procurement, Prime Minister Edi Rama […]
AI Agents for Economic Research - Marginal REVOLUTION
The objective of this paper is to demystify AI agents – autonomous LLM-based systems that plan, use tools, and execute multi-step research tasks – and to provide hands-on instructions for economists to build their own, even if they do not have programming expertise. As AI has evolved from simple chatbots to reasoning models and now […]
Are we building an "animal internet"? - Marginal REVOLUTION
Should we? Human owners of parrots in the study reported that the birds seemed happier when they could interact online with other parrots and not just with people… Scientists are using digital technology to revolutionise animal communication and move towards an “animal internet”, using new products such as phones for dogs and touchscreens for parrots. […]
That was then, this is now - Marginal REVOLUTION
My prediction from 2021: If Russia and Belarus became a single political unit, there would be only a thin band of land, called the Suwalki Gap, connecting the Baltics to the rest of the European Union. Unfortunately, that same piece of territory would stand in the way of the new, larger Russia connecting with the now-cut […]
Thursday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Henry Oliver on the Irish Enlightenment. 2. Don’t say “maybe”! 3. Summary results for previous life on Mars. 4. The greatest night in pop? 5. Commerce Secretary wants half of university patent money. 6. AI task length is accelerating pretty fast. 7. Should open carry be legal on Utah college campuses?
The British War on Slavery - Marginal REVOLUTION
In August of 1833 the British passed legislation abolishing slavery within the British Empire and putting more than 800,000 enslaved Africans on the path to freedom. To make this possible, the British government paid a huge sum, £20 million or about 5% of GDP at the time, to compensate/bribe the slaveowners into accepting the deal. […]
My Hope Axis podcast with Anna Gát - Marginal REVOLUTION
Here is the YouTube, here is transcript access, here is their episode summary: The brilliant @tylercowen joins @TheAnnaGat for a lively, wide-ranging conversation exploring hope from the perspective of insiders and outsiders, the obsessed and the competitive, immigrants and hard workers. They talk about talent and luck, what makes America unique, whether the dream of Internet Utopia has ended, […]
A new RCT on banning smartphones in the classroom - Marginal REVOLUTION
Widespread smartphone bans are being implemented in classrooms worldwide, yet their causal effects on student outcomes remain unclear. In a randomized controlled trial involving nearly 17,000 students, we find that mandatory in-class phone collection led to higher grades — particularly among lower-performing, first-year, and non-STEM students — with an average increase of 0.086 standard deviations. […]
How to think about AI progress - Marginal REVOLUTION
The Zvi has a good survey post on what is going on with the actual evidence. I have a more general point to make, which I am drawing from my background in Austrian capital theory. There are easy projects, and there are hard projects. You might also say short-term vs. long-term investments. The easier, shorter-term […]
Wednesday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Flora Yuknovich, painter (NYT). 2. Further comments on Milei and Argentina. 3. My TA Zixuan Ma is starting a blog on China and also recommends these six books. 4. How is New College of Florida doing? 5. Some new Substacks from economics graduate students. 6. Machine learning for economists. And double descent and econometrics. […]
The politics of depression in young adults - Marginal REVOLUTION
From a recent paper by Catherine Gimbrone, et.al.: From 2005 to 2018, 19.8% of students identified as liberal and 18.1% identified as conservative, with little change over time. Depressive affect (DA) scores increased for all adolescents after 2010, but increases were most pronounced for female liberal adolescents (b for interaction = 0.17, 95% CI: 0.01, […]
AI-led job interviews - Marginal REVOLUTION
We study the impact of replacing human recruiters with AI voice agents to conduct job interviews. Partnering with a recruitment firm, we conducted a natural field experiment in which 70,000 applicants were randomly assigned to be interviewed by human recruiters, AI voice agents, or given a choice between the two. In all three conditions, human […]
The evolution of the economics job market - Marginal REVOLUTION
In the halcyon days of 2015-19, openings on the economics job market hovered at around 1900 per year. In 2020, Covid was a major shock, but the market bounced back quickly in 2021 and 2022. Since then, though, the market has clearly been in a funk. 2023, my job market year, saw a sudden dip […]
Housing 101 - Marginal REVOLUTION
John Arnold points us to this table on new apartments and pointedly notes that the population of LA (18.5 m) is more than 7 times that of Austin (2.5m). MR readers will not be surprised to learn that apartment prices are falling in Austin. Meanwhile the WSJ reports another shocker, New York’s Airbnb Crackdown, in […]
Tuesday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. The Islamic argument for competence. 2. Worry claims about Egypt and Israel. 3. PEPFAR will distribute Gilead’s new anti-HIV drug. 4. A quick U.S. geography lesson. 5. Results from Italian experiments with tenure. 6. New results on the fiscal impact of immigration. 7. Observations on redistricting (New Yorker). 8. Desalination on the march. 9. […]
The "Marvel Universe" of faith - Marginal REVOLUTION
In a recent video posted to the AI Bible’s Youtube channel, buildings crumble and terrified-looking people claw their way through the rubble. Horns blare, and an angel appears floating above the chaos. Then come monsters, including a seven-headed dragon that looks like something out of a Dungeons and Dragons rulebook. The visuals in this eight-minute video, which […]
Facts about Norway - Marginal REVOLUTION
But some worry that a “Norwegian disease” is developing through the use of an ever-increasing withdrawal from the fund each year. That amount — which reached NKr542bn ($54bn) this year — amounts to about a quarter of the government budget. This year, it helped Norway boost contributions to Ukraine without having to cut spending elsewhere […]
One look at negative emotional contagion - Marginal REVOLUTION
This paper studies how peers’ genetic predisposition to depression affects own mental health during adolescence and early adulthood using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health). I exploit variation within schools and across grades in same-gender grademates’ average polygenic score—a linear index of genetic variants—for major depressive disorder (the […]
Patrick Collison on the Irish Enlightenment - Marginal REVOLUTION
Most of all, the Irish Enlightenment seems to me an instance of small group theory. I’m fond of the thought that between great man and structuralist theories of history there lies an intermediate position: the small group, a colocated cauldron for iconoclastic thinking, can as a collective pioneer a novel direction. The romantics in Jena, […]
Monday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. How Arnold Kling reads with AI. 2. Criticism of the Singaporean educational system. 3. Patrick Collison on the uses of crypto. And Matt Huang on permissionless. 4. GPT-5 on Huemer and immortality. And more. 5. How about Chinese stablecoins? (NYT) 6. Milei’s party loses in the elections. 7. How much do AIs push back […]
France fact of the day - Marginal REVOLUTION
If nothing is done, interest payments will become the biggest expense in the French budget in four years, Mr. Bayrou has warned. Here is the full NYT article, noting that government spending is 57 percent of the economy and the French have the longest financed retirements ever seen in the history of the world.
Sunday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Social media use has a slightly positive effect on teen suicide rates. 2. Do we need avocado ripeness scanners? 3. Protections against the rising heat. 4. Will China maintain a demographic lead over India? 5. Where are AI agents? 6. Stuart Kirk on central bank independence (FT). And the battle to protect time (FT). […]
What the financial regulators are saying and feeling - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. “Yes, we know stablecoins will have one hundred percent reserves, but we are not sure we can regulate that system into a position of safety.” 2. “Well, the rest of the financial system has nothing like one hundred percent reserves, but don’t worry we have everything there under control.” The hole is large enough […]
Eli Dourado on trains and abundance - Marginal REVOLUTION
One thing I got a bit of crap for in the hallways of the Abundance conference is my not infrequent mockery of trains on Twitter. I’m sorry, trains are not an abundance technology. I think many people in the abundance scene like trains because: 1. America’s inability to build HSR is the leading example of […]
Three accounts of modern liberalism - Marginal REVOLUTION
I have a review essay on that topic in the latest TLS. Excerpt, on Philip Pilkington: Pilkington’s sense of numbers, history and magnitude is sometimes off. He writes that “liberalism is forming broken, atomized people who are unable to pass on their genes to a future generation”, apparently oblivious to the fact that fertility rates […]
The business of birding - Marginal REVOLUTION
You cannot really trust economic impact studies, but still they give a rough sense of orders of magnitude: Birding is a growing hobby nationwide, especially since the pandemic—and as in Ohio, U.S. birders are an impressive economic force, according to the latest federal data. A November 2024 report from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) […]
Moving on Up - Marginal REVOLUTION
James Heckman and Sadegh Eshaghnia have launched a broadside in the WSJ against the Chetty-Hendren paper The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility I: Childhood Exposure Effects. It’s a little odd to see this in the WSJ but since the Chetty-Hendren paper has been widely reported in the media, I suppose this is fair game. […]
Saturday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Hungarian political evolution? 2. John Horton simulates referee reviews. 3. San Francisco pays squatters to move out, but many do not accept the offer. 4. Emily Linge sings Queen. She is only seventeen, quite a marvel. And doing For No One. 5. The current state of arts funding under Trump. 6. The Metropolitan Opera […]
*Take a Girl Like You*, by Kingsley Amis - Marginal REVOLUTION
This excellent and neglected novel deserves a new look in our time. As Christian Lorentzen points out in his useful introduction, if you are interested in (non-Submission) Houellebecq, this is the next place to go. How exactly did we get on the Houellebecq sexual emptiness path to begin with? This novel was published in 1960, […]
Friday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. An alternate model for training economists? 2. RIP Luis Fernando Verissimo. Borges and the Eternal Orangutans is a very fun book for me. 3. Chinese guy builds Cat World, Department of Why Not? 4. “Walking Tall?” (NYT). The husband did it. 5. AI progressed more quickly than superforecasters had expected. Green energy did not. […]
A few remarks on Fed independence - Marginal REVOLUTION
Trump has made various sallies against the idea of an independent Fed, including lots of rhetoric, firing Lisa Cook, aiming to have a CEA chair on the Fed board, and more. Probably the list is longer than I realize. To be clear, I see no upside to these moves and I do not favor them. […]
They solved for the Kansas City Chiefs enforcement equilibrium - Marginal REVOLUTION
We examine how financial pressure influences rule enforcement by leveraging a novel setting: NFL officiating. Unlike traditional regulatory environments, NFL officiating decisions are immediate, transparent, and publicly scrutinized, providing a unique empirical lens to test whether a worsening financial climate shapes enforcement behavior. Analyzing 13,136 defensive penalties from 2015 to 2023, we find that postseason […]
"Existence is evidence of immortality" - Marginal REVOLUTION
From philosopher Michael Huemer: Do persons continue to exist after the destruction of their bodies? Many believe so. This might occur either because we have immaterial souls that persist in another, non-physical realm; or because our bodies will be somehow reanimated after we die; or because we will live on in new bodies in the […]
Sentences to ponder - Marginal REVOLUTION
By ordering the U.S. military to summarily kill a group of people aboard what he said was a drug-smuggling boat, President Trump used the military in a way that had no clear legal precedent or basis, according to specialists in the laws of war and executive power. Mr. Trump is claiming the power to shift […]
Thursday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Milei having some problems right now (FT). 2. Caplan and Hendren back and forth on the value of Medicaid. 3. How to influence chatbots. Cialdini still applies. 4. Seeing Wizard of Oz at The Sphere (NYT). 5. Patrick Collison on George Berkeley as development economist. 6. Ross Douthat interviews Dan Wang, who by the […]