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Firewood in the American Economy: 1700 to 2010 - Marginal REVOLUTION
Despite the central role of firewood in the development of the early American economy, prices for this energy fuel are absent from official government statistics and the scholarly literature. This paper presents the most comprehensive dataset of firewood prices in the United States compiled to date, encompassing over 6,000 price quotes from 1700 to 2010. […]
Austin Vernon on taxes on solar (from my email) - Marginal REVOLUTION
I think your question about new taxes on solar and wind is an interesting one, and increasing taxation has been an ongoing process for years. Some of these tax increases are normal, like ending property tax exemptions. These taxes don’t impact project economics too severely, and the breaks create a lot of ill will at the local level. […]
Calgary is resuming with flouride, and Quebec fact of the day - Marginal REVOLUTION
The taste and smell won’t change, but starting on Monday something was different about Calgary’s water supply — fluoride is back in the taps across the city in Western Canada. Fluoride, a mineral found in water, has widely established dental benefits shown to strengthen the tooth surface, or enamel, and help prevent decay. Calgary stopped […]
Monday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Ferris Bueller’s vest sells for 279k. 2. “The strength of Earth’s magnetic field seems to rise and fall in line with the abundance of oxygen in the planet’s atmosphere, a study of geological records spanning the past half a billion years has found.” 3. Fully synthetic, successful AI cultural product. 4. The cost of […]
Privatize Federal Land! - Marginal REVOLUTION
I’ve long advocated selling off some federal land—an idea that reliably causes mass fainting spells among the enlightened. How could we possibly part with our national patrimony, our land, our sacred wilderness? Calm down. Most of this “public land” is never used by the public. Selling some of it would actually make it more accessible and […]
The world's most expensive toll? - Marginal REVOLUTION
A bridge connects Copenhagen and Malmo, and now the price is higher: …the basic price for a one-way car journey across the bridge has been jacked up to 510 Danish kroner, or £58. For the largest vans, it is the equivalent of £218. Research by Sydsvenskan, a regional newspaper in southern Sweden, suggests this is by […]
C'mon British people, you can do better than this... - Marginal REVOLUTION
I’ve seen estimates that thirty people a day are arreested in the UK for things they say on social media. Other anecdotes of varying kinds continue to pile up: Describing a middle-aged white woman as a “Karen” is borderline unlawful, a judge has said amid a bitter row at a mental health charity. The slang […]
Some European countries have mastered a happiness trick? - Marginal REVOLUTION
Using Eurobarometer data for 21 Western European countries since 1973 we show the U-shape in life satisfaction by age, present for so long, has now vanished. In 13 northern European countries – Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and the UK – the U-shape has been replaced by […]
Sunday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. What is so special about Uruguay? 2. Luis Garicano on why economic growth will not go crazy with AI. These arguments remain unanswered. 3. Ten ways to rebuild Britain. 4. How should London tax mega marshmallows? 5. Dead lawmakers have not stopped posting. 6. Progress with biological computers? (FT) 7. JSTOR now has an […]
Balaji on AI - Marginal REVOLUTION
A few miscellaneous thoughts. (1) First, the new bottleneck on AI is prompting and verifying. Since AI does tasks middle-to-middle, not end-to-end. So business spend migrates towards the edges of prompting and verifying, even as AI speeds up the middle. (2) Second, AI really means amplified intelligence, not agentic intelligence. The smarter you are, the […]
Saturday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Claude buying things. And does Claude generate better research ideas? (Maybe!) 2. NYT 100 best movies of the century list. 3. Can a 78-year-old tech magnate conduct Mahler’s 2nd? (NYT) 4. How active is Child Protection Services? (link is now fixed) 5- Mamdani on Adam Smith. 6. Is morally universal language declining over time? […]
Detroit helicopter drop of cash - Marginal REVOLUTION
The money drop was apparently the last wish of the owner of a nearby car wash. Knife said the man recently died due to Alzheimer’s Disease and his funeral was Friday. Despite the mad dash for free cash, the incident remained peaceful, if hectic, Knife said. “There was no fighting, none of that,” she said. […]
The military culture that is German - Marginal REVOLUTION
Pistorius must grapple with a procurement bureaucracy that once took seven years to select a new main assault rifle and more than a decade to procure a helmet for helicopter pilots. He will have to oversee an enormous ramp-up by an arms industry already struggling with capacity. And billions must go towards tasks such as […]
Friday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Yancey Strickler’s Artist Corporations project, and TED talk here. 2. Debates over the degree of heritability. 3. Matching potential partners based on browser history. 4. USG currently runs about 240 grocery stores, through the military, and operating at a loss. 5. “The risk premium on New York City’s debt barely budged following the election […]
What should I ask Seamus Murphy? - Marginal REVOLUTION
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. An associate of his emails me this excellent description of his work: Spent over two decades photographing in Afghanistan (12 trips between 1994–2007). Has been back since the fall of the U.S. side. Collaborated with P.J. Harvey on her album Let England Shake— they travelled together through […]
What I've been reading - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Alex Niven, The North Will Rise Again: In Search of the Future in Northern Heartlands. If you can look past the usual ill-informed chatter about Maggie ruining northern England (the author needs to study growth models!), this is quite an interesting book. I do not mind that it roams into the territory of popular […]
Flying on Frying Oil - Marginal REVOLUTION
The ever-excellent Matt Levine points us to the amusing economic policies that connect the international jet-set to Malaysian street hawkers of fried noodles. The EU and the US have created strong economic incentives to create sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and a good way to do this is to recycle used cooking oil (UCO). What could […]
The objectivity of Community Notes? - Marginal REVOLUTION
We use crowd-sourced assessments from X’s Community Notes program to examine whether there are partisan differences in the sharing of misleading information. Unlike previous studies, misleadingness here is determined by agreement across a diverse community of platform users, rather than by fact-checkers. We find that 2.3 times more posts by Republicans are flagged as misleading […]
Turkey fact of the day - Marginal REVOLUTION
Real interest rates, which subtract inflation from central bank policy rates, have been negative for a remarkable 13 of the 22 years that Erdoğan has been in power, according to FT research. This helped spur growth, boost incomes and sustain a construction boom. It also laid the foundation for an economic crisis. By late 2022, […]
Who in California opposes the abundance agenda? - Marginal REVOLUTION
Labor unions are one of the culprits, environmental groups are another: Hours of explosive state budget hearings on Wednesday revealed deepening rifts within the Legislature’s Democratic supermajority over how to ease California’s prohibitively high cost of living. Labor advocates determined to sink one of Newsom’s proposals over wage standards for construction workers filled a hearing […]
Thursday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Data centres for New Zealand? 2. “In 2009, ten players in the league had fathers who’d played for N.B.A. teams; this past season, there were thirty-five.” (New Yorker) Is it the cost of youth sports? 3. US incarceration rate is due to fall radically. 4. After a respite, are health care expenditures back to […]
Canine supply was elastic, too, South Korea edition - Marginal REVOLUTION
South Korea has now banned the dog meat trade: Chan-woo has 18 months to get rid of 600 dogs. After that, the 33-year-old meat farmer – who we agreed to anonymise for fear of backlash – faces a penalty of up to two years in prison. “Realistically, even just on my farm, I can’t process […]
One possible reason why the skill premium is declining - Marginal REVOLUTION
This is especially true for those jobs that require the rudimentary use of technology. Until relatively recently, many people could get to grips with a computer only by attending a university. Now everyone has a smartphone, meaning non-graduates are adept with tech, too. The consequences are clear. In almost every sector of the economy, educational […]
My excellent Conversation with Austan Goolsbee - Marginal REVOLUTION
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary: A longtime professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School and former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama, Goolsbee now brings that intellectual discipline—and a healthy dose of humor—to his role as president of the Federal Reserve […]
How constrained is the NYC mayor? - Marginal REVOLUTION
I thought to ask o3, here is the opening of its answer: New York City has a “strong-mayor / council” system, but the City Charter, state law and an array of watchdog institutions deliberately fragment power. In practice the mayor can move fastest on implementation—issuing executive orders, running the uniformed services, writing the first draft […]
Wednesday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. John Cochrane on central bank independence. 2. Possible progress on an AI-driven dengue vaccine? 3. Male and female literary genres. 4. “Zohran Mamdani doing extremely well with college-educated voters, while the working-class overwhelmingly rejects him, is further proof that our higher education system is failing.” 5. AI as governance. 6. The new vertigo years?
The Effects of Ranked Choice Voting on Substantive Representation - Marginal REVOLUTION
Ranked choice voting (RCV) is an increasingly popular electoral institution that has been posited by reformers and media outlets to produce transformative effects on electoral outcomes and representation. However, there is little social scientific evidence available that evaluates these claims. I test the effects of RCV on municipal fiscal outcomes and the ideological composition of […]
Are cultural products getting longer? - Marginal REVOLUTION
Ted Gioia argues that cultural products are getting longer: Some video creators have already figured this out. That’s why the number of videos longer than 20 minutes uploaded on YouTube grew from 1.3 million to 8.5 million in just two years… Songs are also getting longer. The top ten hits on Billboard actually increased twenty seconds in duration last […]
Tuesday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Arc Institute releases the first draft of a virtual cell model. 2. The continuing resurgence of Fischer Black in current macro. 3. Robert Nelsen on why the diabetes breakthrough is important. 4. Law Review Puts Out Full Issue Of Articles Written With AI. 5. ChatGPT got this guy out of the woods. 6. The most […]
Does AI make us stupider? - Marginal REVOLUTION
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column, responding to a recent study out of MIT. Here is one excerpt: To see how lopsided their approach is, consider a simple parable. It took me a lot of “cognitive load”—a key measure used in their paper—to memorize all those state capitals in grade school, […]
Monday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. On the new Xi Zhongxun biography. 2. “This month, four Finnish cities are offering six euros per litre for dead Spanish slugs.” 3. “There are new hints that the fabric of space-time may be made of “memory cells” that record the whole history of the universe.” Speculative. 4. The moratorium on state-level AI regulation has […]
Have Appliances Declined in Durability? - Marginal REVOLUTION
Many Americans believe that their appliances have become less durable and reliable over recent decades. Rachel Wharton at Wirecutter has an excellent piece pushing back. Her conclusions mirror what I found when looking at clothing quality: yes, there has been a modest decline in durability, but the main drivers are customer preferences, regulatory shifts, and […]
Germany Italy fact of the day - Marginal REVOLUTION
Germany and Italy hold the world’s second- and third-largest national gold reserves after the US, with reserves of 3,352 tonnes and 2,452 tonnes, respectively, according to World Gold Council data. Both rely heavily on the New York Federal Reserve in Manhattan as a custodian, each storing more than a third of their bullion in the […]
My Paris delta - Marginal REVOLUTION
I have not been here since 2019, so here are the trends I am noticing: 1. Vastly more shops are open on Sundays than before. 2. Central Paris continues to evolve into a nearly bilingual city. It is not quite Amsterdam or Stockholm, but getting there. And the Parisians do not seem to mind speaking […]
How do declining fertility and climate change interact? - Marginal REVOLUTION
There are lots of assumptions behind these results, but still it is good to see someone working through some scenarios: A smaller human population would emit less carbon, other things equal, but how large is the effect? Here we test the widely-shared view that an important benefit of the ongoing, global decline in fertility will […]
Fred Smith, RIP - Marginal REVOLUTION
He founded FedEx, a company that before the internet truly was a big deal. The plan for the company was based on an undergraduate economics paper. At age thirty Fred was in deep trouble. And “In the early days of FedEx, when the company was struggling financially, Smith took the company’s last $5,000 to Las […]
Rasheed Griffith on the economics and aesthetics of Asunción - Marginal REVOLUTION
Yet, on my first visit to Asunción last week none of that was on my mind. What was striking was the total absence of any aesthetic coherence of the city. There are some economic reasons for this: Going back to the middle class consumption point. If only around 300,000 Paraguayans make up the domestic personal […]
Chantilly destination achieved, the Limbourg brothers are amazing - Marginal REVOLUTION
Commissioned by the Duc de Berry, the enormously wealthy brother of King Charles V of France, this exquisite Book of Hours was begun by the Limbourg brothers, a trio of Netherlandish miniature painters, in around 1411. The Duc and the Limbourgs died in 1416. The manuscript was completed by other wealthy patrons and talented artists 70 […]