News
Entertainment
Science & Technology
Life
Culture & Art
Hobbies
News
Entertainment
Science & Technology
Culture & Art
Hobbies
Noah on cultural stagnation - Marginal REVOLUTION
Fast-forward to the 2020s, and the artistic community has been largely disintermediated. If you want to be a successful commercial creator, the way to get started now is not first to struggle to prove yourself in the closed and cosseted artistic community — it’s to simply throw your work up online and see if it […]
My honorary degree at Francisco Marroquin - Marginal REVOLUTION
I am greatly honored to have received an honorary professorship in social science at the Universidad Francisco Marroquin, in Guatemala City (there are branches in Panama and Madrid as well). The Guatemala City branch is an excellent, highly selective school with about 3,000 students. It is also explicitly classical liberal in orientation. One interesting feature […]
Wednesday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Fighting overcriminalization in federal regulations. 2. The evolution of voting rules in the Conclave. 3. “Republicans have inserted language into the budget reconciliation bill that would ban states from regulating AI in any capacity for 10 years.” 4. New results on male labor force participation. 5. Airbnb matching markets in everything. 6. Drink more […]
Econ 101 is Underrated: Pharma Price Controls - Marginal REVOLUTION
Econ 101 is often dismissed as too simplistic. Yet recent events suggest that Econ 101 is underrated. Take the tariff debate: understanding that a tariff is a tax, that prices represent opportunity costs, that a bilateral trade deficit is largely meaningless, that a so-called trade “deficit” is equally a goods surplus or an investment surplus—these […]
How will AI change what it means to be human? - Marginal REVOLUTION
That is the topic of my latest piece at The Free Press, co-authored with Avital Balwit. Here is a segment written by Avital: I was Claude pre-Claude. I once prided myself on how quickly I could write well. Memos, strategy documents, talking points—you name it. I could churn out 2,000 words an hour. That skill […]
New AI and economics podcast - Marginal REVOLUTION
From Andrey Fradkin: Seth Benzell and I have been working on a podcast about the economics of AI called Justified Posteriors, which may be of interest to you and your readers. We have episodes on topics such as the “The Simple Macroeconomics of AI” and the Anthropic Economic Index. The format is that we state our priors, read a paper, […]
Tuesday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. “On Thursday, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University unveiled LegoGPT, an AI model that creates physically stable Lego structures from text prompts.” Link here. 2. Learn all about New York’s judges. 3. Abi Olvera on limiting U.S. traffic fatalities. 4. In defense of YIMBY estimates. 5. No mass shootings so far this year in America. […]
Should gdp include defense spending? - Marginal REVOLUTION
Maybe not, isn’t that a form of double counting? After all, defense spending is there to enable the production of other goods and services, it is not useful per se. Chandler S. Reilly and Vincent Geloso recalculate the history of U.S. economic growth using this new method: In fact, our corrections applied to the entire […]
Who wants impartial news? - Marginal REVOLUTION
The subtitle of the piece is Investigating Determinants of Preferences for Impartiality in 40 Countries, and the authors are Camila Mont’Alverne, Amy Ross A. Arguedas, Sumitra Badrinathan, Benjamin Toff, Richard Fletcher, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen. Here is part of the abstract: This article draws on survey data across 40 markets to investigate the factors shaping […]
Monday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. The tyranny of last year’s budget. 2. Should Britain have an Exceptional Talent Office? 3. The Pope is AI-pilled. And what is the tax status of the Pope? 4. China facts of the day: which are the most widespread global restaurant chains? 5. What would an ambitious Australia look like? 6. Milei’s party did […]
Mississippi schools are pretty good - Marginal REVOLUTION
…in recent years…Mississippi has become the fastest-improving school system in the country. You read that right. Mississippi is taking names. In 2003, only the District of Columbia had more fourth graders in the lowest achievement level on our national reading test (NAEP) than Mississippi. By 2024, only four states had fewer. When the Urban Institute adjusted national […]
Sentences to ponder - Marginal REVOLUTION
In fact, it was the Obama administration that paused funding for high-risk GoF studies in 2014. The ban was lifted by none other than Donald Trump in 2017. At the time, outlets like Scientific American and Science covered the decision, in articles that quoted scientists talking about what could go wrong. Remind yourself of this the next time you see rightists trumpeting some […]
What is the best age to confront AI? - Marginal REVOLUTION
Here is one extra bit from my chat with Jack Clark of Anthropic: COWEN: For the ongoing AI revolution, what’s the worst age to be? CLARK: Ooh. COWEN: Say the best age is just to have been born if you’re going to live to maybe 130. If you’re very old and retired, it probably isn’t […]
Supply is elastic, installment #6437 - Marginal REVOLUTION
Numerous empirical studies show a relationship between a drug’s expected market size and the magnitude of research and development investments. Early studies focused on changes to market size resulting from the demographics of disease burden (Acemoglu and Linn 2004) and policy changes influencing market demand (Finkelstein 2004). These findings have largely been confirmed by more […]
The game theory of India and Pakistan - Marginal REVOLUTION
Now that the dust has settled at least temporarily, a few readers have asked me for comment on the recent clash The events are difficult to understand, in part because of rampant misinformation and also because of genuine continuing uncertainty as to what happened. Nonetheless we do know two things: 1. The two sides whacked […]
Adam Smith on Mercantilism - Marginal REVOLUTION
ChatGPT: Adam Smith strongly criticized mercantilism in The Wealth of Nations (1776), arguing that it was a flawed and self-defeating economic doctrine. His main points: Wealth is not gold: Mercantilists equated national wealth with the accumulation of gold and silver (bullion). Smith rejected this, emphasizing instead that real wealth lies in a nation’s productive capacity—its […]
Sunday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. ” These findings suggest that IRS officials possess, and trade on, material tax-related information and that these trades are associated with future tax enforcement outcomes for firms.” 2. New centrist movement seeking to swing the House by winning a few seats. 3. “Doubling-back aversion” is distinct from the sunk cost fallacy. 4. Papal production […]
Eric Topol invites me to his podcast - Marginal REVOLUTION
You will find it here, along with a transcript. Interesting throughout, here is one excerpt from me: The AI is your smartest reader. It’s your most sympathetic reader. It will remember what you tell it. So I think humans should sit down and ask, what does the AI need to know? And also, what is […]
Where did the Solow residual go? - Marginal REVOLUTION
As many people know, in 1987 Robert Solow quipped that “we see computers everywhere today but in the productivity statistics.” What few know is that the Nobel Laureate himself never was willing to use a personal computer. Even though he was still young in the 1980s and 1990s, he never used email. All of his […]
Saturday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Gazing at the pond and casting stones (music video, short). 2. There is now an Abundance movement-inspired caucus. 3. Kyla Scanlon on the importance of frictions. 4. The value of private space activity. 5. Uh huh. You can ask GPT for the tl/dr version (“don’t use that phrase!”). I can report I have not […]
Is MR Biased? - Marginal REVOLUTION
Long Time MR reader Sean R. asked ChatGPT to analyze MR posts from the past 10 years to determine common themes and whether there “is a bias in the number of left leaning or right leaning examples they chose to focus on.” Here’s ChatGPT’s answer (with some editing for length): How I approached the question […]
Why progress is important - Marginal REVOLUTION
In America, we tell ourselves one kind of story — about the backlash to science, on one side, or the liberal overreach, on the other. But this is not just an American phenomenon. The measles outbreak in Canada, for instance, is even bigger than ours; in Europe, they’ve gone from 127 cases in 2022 to […]
Elasticities and incidence - Marginal REVOLUTION
President Trump’s budget proposes a significant rethink of federal rental assistance programs, consolidating a number of them — and cutting them by more than $26 billion — next fiscal year. Many experts previously told The New York Times that this could result in low-income Americans losing access to federal housing benefits. Here is more from the NYT. […]
Major reforms at the NSF - Marginal REVOLUTION
The National Science Foundation (NSF), already battered by White House directives and staff reductions, is plunging into deeper turmoil. According to sources who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, staff were told today that the agency’s 37 divisions—across all eight NSF directorates—are being abolished and the number of programs within those divisions will be drastically […]
Friday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Rohit on working with LLMs. 2. Learning to reason for long-form story generation. 3. Anthropic looking to hire economic wisdom. 4. “We’re [Stripe] partnering with Ramp to launch stablecoin-backed cards, first in Latin America.” 5. Philanthropy to ponder. 6. AI Agatha Christie is teaching an online writing course (NYT). The family is on board. […]
How will AI affect cities and travel? - Marginal REVOLUTION
COWEN: In the 5 percent [economic growth] scenario — put aside San Francisco, which is special — but do cities become more or less important? Clearly, this city might become more important. Say, Chicago, Atlanta, what happens? CLARK: I think that dense agglomerations of humans have significant amounts of value. I would expect that a lot of the effects of AI are […]
Emergent Ventures, 42nd cohort - Marginal REVOLUTION
Chris Wong, University of Chicago, non-invasive blood glucose monitor. Akira Li., 17, Sydney, Australia, quantum computing. Jon Sine, Washington DC, to study China. Alex Kesin, San Francisco, Substack on pharma, drugs, the FDA and other biomedical issues. Stephen Voss, northern Virginia, photography of northern Virginia data centers. Liam Baldwin, Atlanta, economics videos on YouTube. Juan […]
This is Vindication??? - Marginal REVOLUTION
Joe Nocera has a strange piece in the Free Press arguing that the “godfathers of protectionism” have been vindicated. It begins with a story about how Dani Rodrik couldn’t get a famous economist to endorse his book Has Globalization Gone Too Far? because doing so would arm the barbarians. Well give that reluctant economist a […]
Solve for the electoral energy equilibrium - Marginal REVOLUTION
I know many Democrats have been heartened by recent electoral wins by the Labor Party in Australia and the Liberal Party in Canada, both boosted by anti-Trump sentiment. But Labor prime minister Anthony Albanese views Australia as an energy-producing country, and while they have taken measures to boost renewables deployment and electric cars, they’re not […]
Avoiding pharma dependence on China - Marginal REVOLUTION
Research-intensive pharmaceutical companies have also warned that low prices paid by European health systems are driving new drug discovery efforts to the US and China. China. Here is the FT source, with plenty of interesting additional information. It is a common charge that libertarians or classical liberals had no suggested remedy for the growing U.S. […]
Is classical liberalism for losers? - Marginal REVOLUTION
That is the topic of my latest column for The Free Press. Excerpt, starting with the point that the New Right has an obsession with seizing political power: There are two essential problems with yelling “Rule!” The first is that your side will not win every election. It’s a reliable assumption that, on average, “the […]
Thursday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Reasons to write for the LLMs. 2. Astral Codex on Moldbug. 3. How the US built 5000 ships during WWII. 4. Using machine learning to understand chimpanzee social negotiation. 5. Okie dokie, and some more okie dokie. 6. “Government spending as a share of GDP in Argentina fell from 22.3 to 15.6% in Javier […]
Globalization did not hollow out the U.S. middle class - Marginal REVOLUTION
From Noah Smith: Trade deficits are an even smaller amount of GDP. U.S. imports of manufactured goods minus exports are equal to about 4% of GDP per year. Our trade deficit with China is about 1% of GDP. In terms of imported components, America manufactures most of what it uses in production. China’s exports to […]
My excellent Conversation with Jack Clark - Marginal REVOLUTION
This was great fun and I learned a lot, here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary: Jack and Tyler explore which parts of the economy AGI will affect last, where AI will encounter the strongest legal obstacles, the prospect of AI teddy bears, what AI means for the […]
Wednesday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Interview with Galen Strawson, including about panpsychism. 2. Botched Dublin pipe bomb drone attack, neighborly feud edition. Solve for the equilibrium. 3. Claims that spicy food is good for you. 4. Unparalleled misalignments. Amazing what people will spend time on. 5. Why didn’t tariffs help the dollar? 6. Reforming naval shipbuilding. 7. The cardinals […]
China missing facts of the day - Marginal REVOLUTION
Not long ago, anyone could comb through a wide range of official data from China. Then it started to disappear. Land sales measures, foreign investment data and unemployment indicators have gone dark in recent years. Data on cremations and a business confidence index have been cut off. Even official soy sauce production reports are gone. […]