Bookmarks (545)

With international reserves at about a tenth of their $15 billion peak in 2014, the government of President Luis Arce is safekeeping every dollar bill and gram of gold, depressing activity, sparking fuel shortages and stoking social unrest — all in the name of avoiding a devaluation of an untenable 6.9 boliviano-per-dollar peg… Arce has […] The post Bolivia update, uh-oh appeared first on...

1. How good are American roads? 2. Civil War death toll higher than had been thought (NYT). 3. The reason a minimum wage struggles to deliver efficiency gains is that with realistic firm productivity dispersion, a minimum wage that eliminates monopsony power at one firm causes severe rationing at another.” 4. The size of the […] The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on...

Nature: Keller Scholl got out of quarantine 13 days ago, and he’s still not feeling 100%. The itchiness — far and away the worst symptom, he says — is mostly gone, and now the graduate student just feels exhausted. “I’m trying to get enough sleep,” he says. Scholl’s symptoms might be uncomfortable, but they are […] The post Human Challenge Trials Aren’t Riskier than...

In the last few days, Vivek has issued a series of tweets showing he understands how the regulatory process works.  That is good, but in turn it means DOGE ambitions end up scaled down.  Now there is a WSJ piece by Vivek and Elon.  Here is what I take to be the critical passage: DOGE […] The post How DOGE is really going to...

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 […] The post Bike lanes are not about bikes...

President-elect Barack Obama is strongly considering Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Environmental Protection Agency, a Cabinet post, Democratic officials told Politico. Here is the Politico story from 2008.  Via Glenn. The post That was then, this is now appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Mark Bahner. Yeah. Just worked as an ... by Robert MIn reply to Oops. Is...

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 post New Zealand’s Regulatory Standards Act appeared...

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 […] The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on...

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 […] The post The economic powers of the HHS...

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 […] The post Do Minimum Wages Reduce Job Opportunities...

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 […] The post The Impact of Divorce Laws on...

1. Was America supposed to be Art Deco? 2. Claims about placebos. 3. Robot dogs are patrolling Mar-A-Lago. 4. Economic surveillance using corporate text. 5. GPT simulating interviews. 6. Is Arlington now the safest suburb in the country? (Bloomberg) The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to David B. Another thing about modern buildings: ... by FazeIn reply...

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 post MR Podcast: Insurance! appeared first on...

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 […] The post Peter Coy on DOGE appeared first...

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 […] The post “The Misery of Diversity” appeared first...

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 post *Is Inequality the Problem?* appeared first...

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 […] The post Monday assorted links appeared first on...

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 […] The post Broad tariffs can be worse than...

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 […] The post How badly do humans misjudge AIs?...

By Alexander Kraus, economist at LSE, the Oxford University Press book is now open access on-line.  Here is the chapter on the economics of science. The post *Science of Science* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Gabriellarsm Dinward Raywar. Did Feyerabend's ... by Edward BurkeIn reply to Dismalist. “science progresses funeral by ... by deariemeIn reply to Gabriellarsm Dinward Raywar. The...

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 […] The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on...

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 […] The post AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written...

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 post How to make DOGE work appeared...

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 […] The post Further Saturday assorted links appeared first...

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 […] The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on...

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. The post USA fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Lord Action. >trying to get blood from a stone ... by...

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 […] The post The new Roger Penrose biography appeared...

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. […] The post Friday assorted links appeared first on...

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 […] The post Will Trump Appoint a Great FDA...

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 […] The post *Kaput: The End of the German...

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 […] The post Let’s reform taxation for expats appeared...

By Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber, a new Stripe Press book. The post *Bubbles and the End of Stagnation* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Pillow Lasers. Alex Jones isn't merely a kook. ... by Mark BahnerIn reply to So Much For Subtlety. “Pfizer refused to test ... by Mark BahnerIn reply to Todd K. Cool, but the dollars, adjusted for...

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). The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsMr Branwen was more eloquent and less autistic than I thought...

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 […] The post Austrian economics and AI scaling appeared...

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 […] The post My Conversation with the excellent Neal...

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 […] The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on...

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 […] The post Does declining fertility lower the gender...

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. […] The post Signaling Quality in Crowdfunding Projects with...

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 post J. Zachary Mazlish on median wages...

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 […] The post Big business is better than you...

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 […] The post *Blitz* (no spoilers) appeared first on...

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 […] The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on...

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 […] The post The 1970s Crime Wave appeared first...

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 […] The post How well does bar exam performance...

We combine societal-level institutional measures from 51 countries between 1996 and 2017 with individual decision-making outcome data from 1,126 laboratory experiments in six meta-analyses to evaluate the effects of within-country institutional change on pro-social and Nash behavior. We find that government effectiveness and regulatory freedom positively correlate with pro-social behavior. We find that freedom from […] The post A new meta-meta analysis says things...

From my email, here is your Switzerland fact of the day: The media is awash with stories about western countries incumbent parties losing elections in the last two years: https://www.semafor.com/article/11/08/2024/the-democrats-join-a-long-list-of-global-parties-wrecked-by-post-pandemic-backlash https://www.ft.com/content/e8ac09ea-c300-4249-af7d-109003afb893 The exception no one seems to remember: Switzerland. In the october 2023 election, 3 out of the 4 governing parties increased their vote share. And it […] The post Where are incumbents still popular? appeared...

1. Those new Chinese service sector jobs. 2. New Robin Hanson project: first futarchy on Ethereum. 3. Claims about how the two parties have evolved (speculative). 4. Can Singapore regulate its cats? (NYT) 5. Test-time training is working. The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Dino Sauro. Honestly sitting here wondering ... by WC VaronesIn reply to...

Does reducing the number of firms in public equity markets harm investors? How much has the value firms can get from going public changed in the past few decades? I develop a dynamic supply and demand model of the firm entry to and exit from public markets to relate firm benefits from being public to […] The post Who Wins and Who Loses when...

I cover these in my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt: A new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that tariffs probably did more harm than good. Using meticulously collected industry-level and state-level data, the paper traces the impact of specific tariff rates more clearly than before. The results are not pretty. One […] The post New results on tariff history do...

1. AI binoculars for birdwatching. 2. Fifty global guitar greats. 3. Creative destruction (WSJ). 4. The internet, time, and oral culture. 5. Profile of Larry Katz. 6. Imaginary podcast okie-dokie. 7. Why is Spain growing so fast? The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Phil S.. “GDP/capita lower than 2008.” PPP ... by Todd KIn reply to...