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Lower Artificial Intelligence Literacy Predicts Greater AI Receptivity - Marginal REVOLUTION
As artificial intelligence (AI) transforms society, understanding factors that influence AI receptivity is increasingly important. The current research investigates which types of consumers have greater AI receptivity. Contrary to expectations revealed in four surveys, cross country data and six additional studies find that people with lower AI literacy are typically more receptive to AI. This lower […]
Tuesday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Trump repeals the Biden Executive Order on AI. 2. Artificial Intelligence Asset Pricing Models. 3. No concrete news on tariffs is good news. 4. Less post-training on DeepSeek? And other claims about DeepSeek. And yet further claims — ask o1 pro to explain it to you! 5. Are there national security risks to a […]
What should AI policy learn from DeepSeek? - Marginal REVOLUTION
That is a Bloomberg column of mine from about two weeks ago. I thought it would make more sense to people if I did not blog it right away. Here is one bit: Now the world knows that a very high-quality AI system can be trained for a relatively small sum of money. That could […]
The Stargate Project - Marginal REVOLUTION
The Stargate Project is a new company which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States. We will begin deploying $100 billion immediately. This infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit […]
Keep an Eye on Crypto Regulation - Marginal REVOLUTION
Crypto regulation is likely to change very rapidly. I expect that SAB 121 will be overturned, perhaps even today. Overturning SAB 121 wouldn’t even be controversial because, as I wrote earlier, Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate both voted to overturn SAB 121 which was saved only by Biden’s veto. Essentially, SAB 121 made […]
DeepThink from DeepSeek - Marginal REVOLUTION
DeepSeek-R1 is here. Try it — it is amazing, free and open source. Go to the main site and press “DeepThink” for superior performance. Marginal cost remains difficult to measure, but almost certainly far cheaper than the main models. A big day, most of all for Africa. Some commentary. Here is the research paper. Here […]
Monday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Is Vietnam following some aspects of Milei? 2. Piketty and Sandel on what went wrong for the Left (NYT). 3. The wisdom of Ross Douthat: “A key paragraph in an @arisroussinos piece on Keir Starmer’s fading worldview, with applications to Canada among other nations; the attempted de-nationalization of 2nd-tier powers by their own elites actually leaves […]
Atlas Shrugged as Novel - Marginal REVOLUTION
The conversation between Henry Oliver and Hollis Robbins about Atlas Shrugged as a novel is excellent. I enjoyed especially the discussion of some of the minor characters and the meaning of their story arcs. Hollis: There are some really wonderful minor characters. One of them is Cherryl Taggart, this shop girl that evil Jim Taggart meets one […]
The case for democracy (from the comments) - Marginal REVOLUTION
I was democracy-pilled by reading biographies of Franco and Salazar. The Iberian countries in the 1930’s were what every right-wing authoritarian fantasizes about: vigorous young conservative dictators firmly in charge of a country, liberals totally defeated and out of power. Both were able to stay in power for decades. The result? For a while they […]
Travis Fisher on electricity privatization (from my email) - Marginal REVOLUTION
I’m a long-time reader and first-time emailer. I just read your blog post from earlier this month about privatizing public services like water and electric utilities. My colleague Glen Lyons and I are developing a way to introduce more competition into the electricity sector, which some believe to be hopelessly uncompetitive. The idea is to allow new, […]
"Be careful what you wish for, you might get it!" - Marginal REVOLUTION
I said that to Ezra Klein about the current rightward vibes shift. What are some of the scenarios I had in mind?: 1. If the Republicans regulate social media companies to discriminate less against “the Right,” hose regulations may someday be used against them. 2. Personal presidential issuance of crypto assets is not always (ever?) […]
Ezra Klein on the vibe shift - Marginal REVOLUTION
In July of 2024, Tyler Cowen, the economist and cultural commentator, wrote a blog post that proved to be among the election’s most prescient. It was titled “The change in vibes — why did they happen?” Cowen’s argument was that mass culture was moving in a Trumpian direction. Among the tributaries flowing into the general shift: the […]
Sunday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. “AIs exceed humans on every major creativity test we give them, like the Torrence Test, but it isn’t clear what exactly that means.” And in Turing tests, GPT-4 is judged more human than the humans. 2. Inference Magazine, a new magazine about AI progress. 3. Determinism continues to look more plausible. 4. NYT interviews […]
More on the AI virtual tutor - Marginal REVOLUTION
The results of the randomized evaluation, soon to be published, reveal overwhelmingly positive effects on learning outcomes. After the six-week intervention between June and July 2024, students took a pen-and-paper test to assess their performance in three key areas: English language—the primary focus of the pilot—AI knowledge, and digital skills. Students who were randomly assigned […]
A Galt’s Gulch for Talent - Marginal REVOLUTION
A new paper in the QJE, The Global Race for Talent: Brain Drain, Knowledge Transfer, and Growth, by Marta Prato uses extensive data on inventors and their migration to make the following points. (i) gross migration is asymmetric, with brain drain (net emigration) from the EU to the United States; (ii) migrants increase their patenting […]
Ross Marchand on postal service privatization (from my email) - Marginal REVOLUTION
I really enjoyed your piece on USPS privatization. I recently wrote about the subject too. Even in the absence of privatization, relaxing the mail monopoly and allowing competition would make for better, more reliable mail services. This is true even in countries with a “national champion”-style carrier subject to a universal service obligation. It appears that, over […]
Should you be writing for the AIs? - Marginal REVOLUTION
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt: Another reason to write for the LLMs is to convince them that you are important. Admittedly this is conjecture, but it might make them more likely to convey your ideas in the future. Think of how this works with humans. If you […]
Saturday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Is it bureaucratically hard to give away the Chagos Islands? 2. New Bloomberg results on NYC congestion. 3. George Eliot and tech. 4. Samuel Butler’s Erewhon: “The writer went on to say that he anticipated a time when it would be possible, by examining a single hair with a powerful microscope, to know whether […]
Friday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. The sad beige aesthetic. 2. More on AI boyfriends and girlfriends (NYT). 3. “…free dog-sitting services now offered at major cultural landmarks, including Rome’s MAXXI Museum and Florence’s Uffizi, art lovers no longer have to choose between culture and their canine companions.” TNSSJ. 4. “New randomized, controlled trial of students using GPT-4 as a tutor […]
The AEA is making social media recommendations - Marginal REVOLUTION
Timur Kuran is right, they have no business doing this. Furthermore the quality of the work is not befitting an AEA journal. Demonstrated preference is not stressed, for instance that even survey respondents are about 10x more likely to be reading Twitter than BlueSky. Maybe it is all a network effect and they would prefer […]
Corin Wagen defends Leviticus (from my email) - Marginal REVOLUTION
In your recent conversation with Misha Saul, you and Misha discussed your joint dislike for Leviticus. I can’t say that I find Leviticus a page-turner, but the book that’s done the most to help me understand why it’s important and what role it plays in the movement of the narrative is L Michael Morales’s book Who […]
Gordon Tullock was right - Marginal REVOLUTION
Do minimum wage changes affect workplace health and safety? Using the universe of workers’ compensation claims in California over 2000-2019, we estimate whether minimum wage shocks affect the rate of workplace injuries. Our identification exploits both geographic variation in state-and city-level minimum wages and local occupation-level variation in exposure to minimum wage changes. We find […]
Net neutrality, we hardly knew ye - Marginal REVOLUTION
That is the topic of a recent Bloomberg column. Here is the opening bit: One of the longest, most technical and, as it turns out, most inconsequential public-policy debates of the 21st century was about net neutrality. Now that a federal appeals court has effectively ended the debate by striking down the FCC’s net neutrality rules, it’s worth asking what […]
An Economic Approach to Homer's Odyssey: Part I - Marginal REVOLUTION
I wrote this paper several years ago when preparing for my CWT with Emily Wilson. It is now being published by Liberty Fund, in parts. Here is part I. Here is an excerpt from the introduction: In this series, I will use an economic approach to better understand the implicit politics and economics in The Odyssey. […]
Thursday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. “We show that same-sex couples experience lower gains from live-in relationships, a “same-sex penalty”. Absent this penalty, the share of same-sex couples in the U.S. would increase by about 50% (from 1.36% to 2.05% of all couples).” Link here. 2. Vatsal reviews Stubborn Attachments. 3. Share repurchases do not hurt labor’s share of income. […]
Tax incidence theory and congestion tolls - Marginal REVOLUTION
One More Hospitality Restaurants The New York company will refund $9 to diners driving into the city for meals at four of its Greenwich Village restaurants. That includes Italian restaurant Osteria 57, Italian seafood restaurant Alice, Italian cafe Travelers Poets & Friends, and also-Italian seafood restaurant Alaluna. Osteria: 57 West 10th Street near Sixth Avenue; Alice: 126 West 13th Street […]
The Remarkable Life of Ibelin - Marginal REVOLUTION
The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (Netflix) is one of the best and best-crafted documentaries that I have ever seen. It tells the story of Mats Steen, a Norwegian boy living with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. As the disease relentlessly robs him of mobility, Mats turns to the online world, spending much of his time immersed in […]
What should I ask Theodore H. Schwartz? - Marginal REVOLUTION
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. He is a famous brain surgeon and author of the recent and excellent book Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery. Here is his Wikipedia page, and an opening excerpt: Theodore H. Schwartz (born May 13, 1965) is an American medical scientist, academic physician and neurosurgeon. Schwartz specializes in surgery for brain tumors, pituitary […]
*Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life* - Marginal REVOLUTION
That is the new Agnes Callard book, very good, self-recommending. I would say my views on some of these issues are different. In my vision, Socrates is a weak interlocutor and Plato is the real genius. Plato also does not identify with Socrates per se, but rather is teaching us how to deal with a […]
Anonymous Attention and Abuse - Marginal REVOLUTION
There is a new paper by Florian Ederer, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, and Kyle Jensen. It concerns what happens on EJMR, and abusive rhetoric in on line economic discourse. I have not yet read it, but very likely it is of interest. Here is the direct paper link.
Thinking about Greenland critically (from the comments) - Marginal REVOLUTION
Well one thing that comes up is the Diego Garcia problem. It appears that Downing Street opted to relinquish sovereignty of an isolated territory remote from major population centers for reasons of domestic politics and perhaps international popularity. As long as we might (continue to) see a major gulf between American and European norms regarding […]
Wednesday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Scenario for an independent Greenland. 2. Gender gaps in the Federal Reserve System. 3. Zvi on congestion pricing in NYC. 4. A short (pronunciation) saga from Kearny, NJ, the place of my birth. 5. Milei is artificially slowing the devaluation of the peso (FT). 6. Henry Farrell on America’s plan to control global AI […]
Canada's Comparative Advantages - Marginal REVOLUTION
Jay Martin writes a provocative post, Has Canada Become a Jamaican Bobsled Team? if Canada were to become a state, it would be the third poorest in the country, right behind Alabama. Everybody talks about the American debt issue, but Canadian households bear more debt relative to their income than any other G7 country. The average Canadian now spends 15% of their […]
The circulation of elites, sort of - Marginal REVOLUTION
Is the top tail of wealth a set of fixed individuals or is there substantial turnover? We estimate upper-tail wealth dynamics during the Gilded Age and beyond, a time of rapid wealth accumulation and concentration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Using various wealth proxies and data tracking tens of millions of individuals, […]
Principles, from Nabeel - Marginal REVOLUTION
14. You don’t do anyone any favors by lurking, put yourself out there! 15. If you don’t “get” a classic book or movie, 90% of the time it’s your fault. (It might just not be the right time for you to appreciate that thing.) 16. If you find yourself dreading Mondays, quit… 23. Doing things […]
Tuesday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Stephen Miran makes the case for twenty percent tariffs (WSJ). You can run this one through o1 pro yourself. 2. The history of export controls on IP. 3. Jacob Trefethen, on reforming science funding. 4. In ex-Soviet States, the mental health of the young seems fine. 5. New Ashlee Vance sci-tech media venture. Site […]
Should the U.S. recognize Somaliland? - Marginal REVOLUTION
I do not myself have a position on this issue, but I found this analysis by Ken Opalo interesting: The main argument below is that while the people of Somaliland deserve and have a strong case for international recognition, such a development at this time would very likely take away the very incentives that have set them […]
Some game theory of Greenland - Marginal REVOLUTION
It is commonly assumed that the U.S. “acquiring” Greenland, whatever that might mean, will result in greater U.S. control of the territory. Along some dimensions that is likely. But it is worth pondering the equilibrium here more seriously. I observe, in many locations around the world, that indigenous groups end up with far more bargaining […]