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Wednesday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Can fiction improve you? 2. How people spent their time in the 1930s. 3. The delta in Russian nuclear doctrine ho hum. 4. 63 Chinese cuisines. 5. The world’s first AI street hawker. 6. Robot finishes a marathon in South Korea. 7. Reform coming to the NIH? 8. FT picks for best economics books […]
Bike lanes are not about bikes - Marginal REVOLUTION
The city [WDC] has built about 20 miles of bike lanes in the past five years, but despite that, the portion of D.C. residents who bike to work peaked in 2017 and has decreased each year since, falling from 5 percent to 3 percent. So who are these lanes for? And: Across town, on South […]
New Zealand's Regulatory Standards Act - Marginal REVOLUTION
From the Antipodes: “To lift productivity and wages, ACT’s coalition agreement includes a commitment to pass a Regulatory Standards Act. “The Bill will codify principles of good regulatory practice for existing and future regulations,” says Mr Seymour. “It seeks to bring the same level of discipline to regulation that the Public Finance Act brings to […]
The economic powers of the HHS secretary - Marginal REVOLUTION
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt: One of the problems with an RFK Jr. ascendancy is that his core views, which run strongly against vaccines and pharmaceuticals, make it unlikely that any of these reimbursement revisions will be done in a rational or scientific way. The best evidence indicates that pharmaceuticals are […]
MR Podcast: Insurance! - Marginal REVOLUTION
In our new Marginal Revolution Podcast Tyler and I talk insurance, the history of insurance, the economics of insurance, the prospects for new types of insurance and more. Did you know that life insurance was once considered repugnant and was often illegal? Tyler and I were both surprised how little good work there is on […]
The Impact of Divorce Laws on the Equilibrium in the Marriage Market - Marginal REVOLUTION
Does easier divorce affect who marries whom? I exploit time variation in the adoption of unilateral divorce across the United States and show that it increases assortative matching among newlyweds. To unravel the underlying mechanisms, I estimate a novel life-cycle equilibrium model of marriage, labor supply, consumption, and divorce under the baseline mutual consent divorce […]
Do Minimum Wages Reduce Job Opportunities for Blacks? - Marginal REVOLUTION
We provide a comprehensive analysis of the effects of minimum wages on blacks, and on the relative impacts on blacks vs. whites. We study not only teenagers – the focus of much of the minimum wage-employment literature – but also other low-skill groups. We focus primarily on employment, which has been the prime concern with […]
Peter Coy on DOGE - Marginal REVOLUTION
The federal government doesn’t have the people it needs to adequately monitor and vet its enormous streams of payments to defense contractors, hospitals and individuals. For example, administrative expenses account for only half a percent of the budget of the Social Security Administration. Trying to squeeze down that half percent by cutting personnel could lead to misspending […]
*Is Inequality the Problem?* - Marginal REVOLUTION
Lane Kenworthy has a book coming out next year, I have read it, and it is superb (rooftops) and also very important. Here is a brief excerpt: Rich democratic nations with higher levels of income inequality or larger increases in income inequality haven’t tended to have slower economic growth, lower or slower-growing household income, or […]
"The Misery of Diversity" - Marginal REVOLUTION
I am surprised this paper made it through, but I am pleased to see the intellectual diversity it represents: Evolutionary accounts assert that while diversity may lower subjective well-being (SWB) by creating an evolutionary mismatch between evolved psychological tendencies and the current social environment, human societies can adapt to diversity via intergroup contact under appropriate […]
Monday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Getting AI data centres in the UK. 2. Those new pillowfighting service sector jobs. 3. Exchange rates really matter (Sarah Gertler). 4. Ben Affleck on AI and the movies. 5. New predictions from John Gray. 6. Human in a bear suit used to defraud insurance companies (NYT). 7. The new words coming out of […]
Broad tariffs can be worse than targeted tariffs - Marginal REVOLUTION
From a new and excellent post by the essential Noah Smith: There are actually two reasons that broad tariffs, like the ones Trump is proposing, have difficulty reducing trade deficits. The first reason is exchange rate adjustment. When you trade stuff internationally, you have to swap currencies. As anyone who has traveled overseas knows, to […]
AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably - Marginal REVOLUTION
That is the title of a new paper in Nature, here is part of the abstract: We conducted two experiments with non-expert poetry readers and found that participants performed below chance levels in identifying AI-generated poems (46.6% accuracy, χ2(1, N = 16,340) = 75.13, p < 0.0001). Notably, participants were more likely to judge AI-generated poems as human-authored than actual human-authored […]
How badly do humans misjudge AIs? - Marginal REVOLUTION
We study how humans form expectations about the performance of artificial intelligence (AI) and consequences for AI adoption. Our main hypothesis is that people project human-relevant problem features onto AI. People then over-infer from AI failures on human-easy tasks, and from AI successes on human-difficult tasks. Lab experiments provide strong evidence for projection of human […]
Sunday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Jay Bhattacharya to run the NIH? 2. LDS missionary defeats local Salvadorans in pupusa-eating contest. 3. Arnold Kling ponders DOGE. 4. Hobart and Huber on how to accelerate science. 5. The University of Florida failed to rebel against the rankings system (NYT). 6. Ross Douthat on “stuff” (NYT). 7. Frozen saber tooth tiger kitten […]
USA fact of the day - Marginal REVOLUTION
The total payroll of the federal government is about $110 billion a year https://buff.ly/3CnrMCx Federal government spending was $6.1 trillion https://buff.ly/3YLb0Vf You cannot meaningfully shrink the federal government by firing “unelected bureaucrats” That is from Jason Abaluck.
Further Saturday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. “Using the full text of the Federal Register, the official publication of the US government, we develop a similarity score that compares the regulatory exposure of pairs of companies.” 2. AI and the last mile. 3. The influence of Bell Labs. 4. Mass-produced automated drones on the way, in combat (WSJ). 5. Amazon is developing […]
Saturday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Criminals are targeting luxury cheeses. 2. twodw: “Harris lost all seven swing states, but in five of them – Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Wisconsin – she’s ending up with more raw votes than Biden got in 2020. If you still think all those swing state mail votes in 2020 were fake, idk what […]
How to make DOGE work - Marginal REVOLUTION
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt: Another priority should be to deregulate medical trials. America is now in a golden age of medical discovery, with mRNA vaccines, anti-malaria vaccines, GLP-1 weight loss drugs and new treatments against cancer all showing great promise. AI may bring about still more advances. Unfortunately, the US […]
The new Roger Penrose biography - Marginal REVOLUTION
The author is Patchen Barss, and the title is The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius. I liked this book very much, and feel there should be more works like this. It was made with the full cooperation of Penrose himself, though he had no veto over the final work. Here is […]
*Kaput: The End of the German Miracle* - Marginal REVOLUTION
By Wolfgang Münchau, this book is the best and most detailed account of the German economic decline to date. Excerpt: In 2018, the federal government promised that Germany would become a world leader in artificial intelligence. As if they don’t understand that such efforts are more than just a play toy. The overall lesson I […]
Friday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Michael Magoon has “progress” recommendations for the second Trump administration. 2. Update on LLMs and chess. And a further update on that. 3. Podcast on speaking to whales. 4. Bitcoin for the sovereign, by Matt Huang. 5. Yes Woke has peaked. 6. Berlin techno clubs are closing in large numbers (Times of London). 7. […]
Will Trump Appoint a Great FDA Commissioner? - Marginal REVOLUTION
A German newspaper asked for my take on the nomination of RFK Jr. to head HHS. Here’s what I said: Operation Warp Speed stands as the crowning achievement of the first Trump administration, exemplifying the impact of a bold public-private partnership. OWS accelerated vaccine development, production, and distribution beyond what most experts thought possible, saving […]
Let's reform taxation for expats - Marginal REVOLUTION
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. We should tax on the basis of residency, not citizenship. Only Eritrea shares with us the practice of doing the latter. Here is one excerpt: There is another possible gain, one which may have more appeal to the incoming administration than to economists like me. Trump […]
Austrian economics and AI scaling - Marginal REVOLUTION
As many of you know, I grew up reading (on knowledge) Hayek, Michael Polanyi, Ludwig Lachmann, Mario Rizzo, and others in that tradition. For these Austrian and Austrian-related thinkers, knowledge is about how different parts of a system fit together, rather than being a homegeneous metric easily expressed on a linear scale. There is no […]
Thursday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. Dwarkesh podcast with Gwern, self-recommending. 2. Gila monster venom (NYT). 3. ChatGPT says “okie-dokie.” 4. Magnus on chess. 5. Ukraine bonds surging. 6. The Dean Ball pro-active regulatory agenda for AI. 7. Two sea creatures fused into a single animal (WSJ).
My Conversation with the excellent Neal Stephenson - Marginal REVOLUTION
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary: In Neal’s second appearance, Tyler asks him why he sometimes shifts from envisioning the future to illustrating the past, the rise of history autodidacts, the implications of leaked secrets from the atomic age to today’s AI, the logistics of faking one’s […]
Wednesday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. The Indonesian energy trajectory. A new Substack. 2. Emily Oster on fluoride, vaccines, and raw milk (NYT). 3. Why didn’t people smile in old photos? 4. Fukuyama on how to make government more efficient. 5. Did a New Zealand start-up in a Wellington apartment just make major progress on nuclear fusion? (FT) 6. Christina Kirchner […]
Does declining fertility lower the gender pay gap? - Marginal REVOLUTION
Using a descriptive decomposition and data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we show that, in gross terms, fertility decline can explain almost one-quarter of gender pay convergence from 1980 to 2018. Even net of a host of controls for human capital and job characteristics, fertility decline explains 8 percent of the attenuation of […]
Signaling Quality in Crowdfunding Projects with Refund Bonuses - Marginal REVOLUTION
My latest paper, Signaling Quality: How Refund Bonuses Can Overcome Information Asymmetries in Crowdfunding (with the excellent Tim Cason and Robertas Zubrickas) is just published in Management Science. Many promising crowdfunding projects fail due to a fundamental issue: trust. Potential backers often hesitate because they lack confidence in the credibility or viability of the projects. […]
How well does bar exam performance predict subsequent success as a lawyer? - Marginal REVOLUTION
Eh: How well does bar exam performance predict lawyering effectiveness? Is performance on some components of the bar exam more predictive? The current study, the first of its kind to measure the relationship between bar exam scores and a new lawyer’s effectiveness, evaluates these questions by combining three unique datasets—bar results from the State Bar […]
Tuesday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION
1. LDS on AI. And likely AI policy under Trump. 2. The Zvi on sports gambling. 3. Thoughts on limiting the administrative state. 4. “Today, Astera is opening a call for its first major science residency program, a one-year, fully funded program centered on the creation of public goods.” 5. George Packer on Thomas Mann’s […]
J. Zachary Mazlish on median wages under Biden - Marginal REVOLUTION
An excellent post, one of the best things written this year in economics. Here is part of the bottom line: Inflation did make the median voter poorer during Biden’s term. In no part of the income distribution did wages grow faster while Biden was President than they did 2012-2020. This is true in the raw […]
The 1970s Crime Wave - Marginal REVOLUTION
Tyler and I wrap up our series of podcasts on the 1970s with The 1970s Crime Wave. Here’s one bit: TABARROK: …people think that mass incarceration is a peculiarly American phenomena, or that it came out of nowhere, or was due solely to racism. Michelle Alexander’s, The New Jim Crow, takes his view. In fact, the […]
*Blitz* (no spoilers) - Marginal REVOLUTION
This is the Steve McQueen movie about the Nazi blitz against London. I found it visually superb, countering clichés (mostly), showing a different and more varied side of civilian life in wartime, and perhaps the best screen treatment (ever?) of what life was like in the earlier “world of atoms”. I objected to the overuse […]
Big business is better than you think (rooftops) - Marginal REVOLUTION
We characterize optimal product market policy in an unequal economy in which firm ownership is concentrated and markups increase with firm market shares. We study the problem of a utilitarian regulator who designs revenue-neutral interventions in the product market. We show that optimal policy increases product market concentration. This is because policies that encourage larger […]