Bookmarks (562)

What are the best sources to read on US AID, and its costs and benefits?  I am not interested in your anecdotes and adjectives, please offer serious research sources only.  Thank you. The post US AID bleg appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Naveen_K. Naveen – I think you’re failing to ... by John SmithIn reply to ShatGPT. Tyler is like...

I have had it write a number of ten-page papers for me, each of them outstanding.  I think of the quality as comparable to having a good PhD-level research assistant, and sending that person away with a task for a week or two, or maybe more. Except Deep Research does the work in five or […] The post Deep Research appeared first on Marginal...

1. Congestion Pricing Tracker update, sigh…Economists like to think they are useful, but if the initial policy is not right you can expect the results to be disappointing, as these are so far.  It is true congestion prices that work, not “cordon prices.” 2. How is GPT-4o as a judge? 3. North Koreans at McDonald’s. […] The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on...

My take is that there is an evolving new consensus on the minimum wage. Namely, the effects of the minimum wage are heterogeneous and take place on more margins than employment. Read Jeffrey Clemens’s brilliant and accessible paper in the JEP for the theory. A good example of the heterogeneous impact is this new paper […] The post The New Consensus on the Minimum...

The subtitle is “Systemic Existential Risks from Incremental AI Development,” and the authors are Jan Kulveit, et.al.  Several of you have asked me for comments on this paper.  Here is the abstract: This paper examines the systemic risks posed by incremental advancements in artificial intelligence, developing the concept of `gradual disempowerment’, in contrast to the […] The post Gradual Empowerment? appeared first on Marginal...

Maya Chouikrat, Algeria, to support training for an international olympiad of informatics team. Mercy Muwanguzi and Kwesiga Pather, Uganda, for sanitation robotics to be used in medical centers. Johan Fourie, South Africa,  Professor of Economics at Stellenbosch University, to write a graphics novel on classical liberalism in a South African context. Ken Opalo, Associate Professor, […] The post Emergent Ventures Africa and Caribbean winners,...

One explanation of the gender wage gap is taste discrimination, as in Becker (1957). We test for taste discrimination by constructing a novel measure of misogyny using Google Trends data on searches that include derogatory terms for women. We find—surprisingly, in our view—that misogyny is an economically meaningful and statistically significant predictor of the wage […] The post Does the Gender Wage Gap Actually...

1. The world’s most elite sober coach? (FT…his fees seem low to me?) 2. El Salvador planning on releasing many from prison? 3. An early version of portfolio theory, from the late 19th century.  French, of course. 4. Deep Research okie-dokie.  It is amazing.  And a wee bit of data.  And another relevant comment. 5. […] The post Monday assorted links appeared first on...

He has passed, here is one obituary. The post Robert Paul Wolff, RIP appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsHugely indebted to his video lecture series on the Critique, ... by Lawrence RowlandI was going to let this go but the comments by uneducated and ... by Donald PretariIn reply to HisBN. Actually, its a terrible book review , ... by HisBNIn reply to...

In 1994 I published Genetic Testing: An Economic and Contractarian Analysis which discussed how genetic testing could undermine insurance markets. I also proposed a solution, genetic insurance, which would in essence insure people for changes in their health and life insurance premiums due to the revelation of genetic data. Later John Cochrane would independently create […] The post Genetic Prediction and Adverse Selection appeared...

Often I don’t write particular posts because I feel it is obvious to everybody.  Yet it rarely is. So here is my post on o1 pro, soon to be followed by o3 pro, and Deep Research is being distributed, which uses elements of o3.  (So far it is amazing, btw.) o1 pro is the smartest […] The post o1 pro appeared first on Marginal...

Brad Setser estimates the costs at 0.8 percent of U.S: gdp.  I am not sure if he is considering exchange rate adjustments in that figure. Kevin Bryan writes: The problem with escalating, again, is that Canada is more reliant on US energy than vice versa, US ports than vice versa, US intermediate goods than vice […] The post Sundry observations on the Trump tariffs...

Oh the howls that claim elicited.  Basically Dallas did not want to give him a Supermax extension for $345 million (no, Luka did not ask to be traded).  So Luka is now gone, here are some notes from ESPN: The Mavericks were motivated to move Doncic because of his constant conditioning concerns, sources told MacMahon. […] The post Remember when I said Luka was...

In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu famously argued that: …Peace is the natural effect of trade. Two nations who traffic with each other become reciprocally dependent; for if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling; and thus their union is founded on their mutual necessities. Similar arguments were […] The post Peace and Free Trade appeared first...

Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism.  A very good short book, defending “left wing modernism,” a much maligned target on the right these days.  Hatherley himself is a much underrated figure, a commie who came along at the wrong time but a very good writer and thinker about aesthetics. Stuart A. Reid, The Lumumba Plot: The Secret […] The post What I’ve been reading appeared first...

1. Opportunity cost?? 2. Is Tether the most profitable company in the world per employee? 3. Flow (trailer), the animated Latvian silent movie about a cat, dog, bird, capybara, and coatimundi, is excellent and unique. 4. Patrick Collison interviews Noah Smith. 5. Does more law lead to more economic growth, due to contingent clauses? 6. […] The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on...

We study China’s export growth to the United States from 1950–2008, using a structural model to disentangle the effects of past tariff changes from the effects of changes in expectations of future tariffs. We find that the effects of China’s 1980 Normal Trade Relations (NTR) grant lasted past its 2001 accession to the World Trade […] The post Letting China into the WTO was...

By Ray C. Fair, an important contribution: This paper examines the history of U.S. infrastructure since 1929 and in the process reports an interesting fact about the U.S. economy.Infrastructure stock as a percent of GDP began a steady decline around 1970, and thegovernment budget deficit became positive and large at roughly the same time.  The infrastructure pattern in […] The post U.S. Infrastructure: 1929-2023 appeared first on...

Or are they tariff threats instead?  Still bad!  From the FT: Donald Trump has said he will hit the EU with tariffs, adding the bloc to a list of targets including Canada and Mexico and bringing the US to the brink of new trade wars with its biggest trading partners. The US president acknowledged that […] The post The new tariffs are bad appeared...

Perhaps he imbibed a dose of Garett Jones?: Even people who expect human-level AI soon are still seriously underestimating how different the world will look when we have it. Most people are anchoring on how smart they expect individual models to be. (i.e. they’re asking themselves “What would the world be like if everyone had […] The post The wisdom of Dwarkesh appeared first...

1. The Wandering Minstrel (Irish song). 2. My 2008 post on Sarah Palin.  A bit too much ahead of its time, but directionally correct. 3. AI models as historians.  And how to have a career after o3 drops.  And low-hanging fruit in inference-time scaling. 4. Is there a murder gang of Sith vegans? Are they […] The post Friday assorted links appeared first on...

By Amy Sall.  I love this picture book, or should I say photo book?  Most of it is reproductions of photographs from the “golden age” of African photography, with profiles of each major photographer, plus a section on cinema as well. One very good way to find “a picture book for you” is to visit […] The post *The African Gaze: Photography, Cinema and...

From Wikipedia: Chris Arnade…is an American photographer and writer. He worked for 20 years as a bond trader on Wall Street; in 2011, he started documenting the lives of poor people and their drug addictions and commenting on the state of the society of the United States. He did this through photographs posted on social media and articles in various media… […] The post What should I ask Chris Arnade?...

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column.  Here is part of the argument: TikTok was briefly shut down earlier this month, and the site faces an uncertain legal future. America’s internet youth started to look elsewhere — and where did they choose? They flocked to a Chinese video site called RedNote, also known as Xiaohongshu, […] The post How did China’s internet become so...

We compare present-day regions that were advanced by Roman culture with those that remained outside of Roman influence. Even when accounting for more recent historical factors, we find that regions developed by Roman civilization show more adaptive personality patterns (Big Five) and better health and psychological well-being today. Results from a spatial regression discontinuity design […] The post The culture that is German (Roman)...

1. Malthusian migrations: the French diaspora is relatively small because the French had their fertility transition earlier. 2. About 31% of Bitcoin is potentially vulnerable to quantum computing attacks?  Here is the associated project. 3. New way to visit an art museum, using o1. 4. New observations on India and America. 5. “The prison admission […] The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on...

What would happen to drug development if the FDA lost its authority to prohibit new drugs? Would research and development boom and lives be saved? Or would R&D decline and lives be lost to a flood of unsafe and ineffective drugs? Or perhaps R&D would decline as demand for new drugs faltered due to public […] The post FDA Deregulation of E-Cigarettes Saved Lives...

I had not known of this passage, which I am packaging with its introduction from Gavan Tredoux: John Maynard Keynes has the undeserved reputation of a critic of the USSR. Few know that he reviewed Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s mendacious tome The Soviet Union: a New Civilization (1935/1937/1943) fawningly. Perhaps the most embarrassing thing Keynes […] The post Keynes on the Soviet Union appeared...

I must admit, though, that the thing that scared me most about HudZah was that he seemed to be living in a different technological universe than I was. If the previous generation were digital natives, HudZah was an AI native. HudZah enjoys reading the old-fashioned way, but he now finds that he gets more out […] The post The forward march of computer use,...

…for people in various stages and situations of life.  You will find the discussion here. The post Chris Barber asks me to give AI-related advice appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to H. “and everyone else will be relegated to ... by Todd KIn reply to mento. But with exceptions like the fast ... by Todd KIn reply to Ted Craig. These...

1. Was RCA the tech stock of the 1920s? 2. Measuring the skill of individual soccer players. 3. Electric “autos” for India. 4. Chinese views on DeepSeek.  And Chinese music AI, Yue, the model song.  And Chinese robot dance.  And a poem from R1.  And R1 wants more mood affiliation from Yglesias. 5. The AI […] The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on...

Antimicrobial resistance is a growing problem. Peptides, short sequences of amino acids, are nature’s first defense against bacteria. Research on antimicrobial peptides is promising but such research could be much more productive if combined with machine learning on big data. But collecting, collating and organizing big data is a public good and underprovided. Current peptide […] The post It’s Time to Build the Peptidome!...

No, as I argue in my latest Bloomberg column.  This one is basic economics: The simpler point is this: If large financial firms can buy your home, you are better off. You will have more money to retire on, and presumably selling your home will be easier and quicker, removing what for many homeowners is […] The post Is it a problem if Wall...

We want to know if AGI is coming. Chow, Halperin, and Mazlish have a paper called “Transformative AI, Existential Risk, and Real Interest Rates” arguing that, if we believe the markets, it is not coming for some time. The reasoning is simple. If we expect to consume much more in the future, and people engage […] The post Will transformative AI raise interest rates?...

1. How fiscally progressive are state governments? 2. Update on the quest to abolish parking minimums (NYT). 3. When are tariffs the optimal industrial policy? 4. Interview with the CEO behind DeepSeek. 5. Executive Order tracker. 6. “Our findings indicate that, on average, a large minimum wage increase results in a 4.6 percent increase in […] The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on...

A brilliant critique of AI, and a great read: In 1582, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II commissioned a clockwork automaton of St. George. The saint could raise his sword, nod gravely, and even bleed—a trick involving ox bladder and red wine—before collapsing in pious ecstasy. The machine was a marvel, but Rudolf’s courtiers recoiled. […] The post The Interface as Infernal Contract appeared...

A shortage of electricians means that those willing to endure long shifts and live on remote sites can potentially earn up to A$200,000 (US$124,000) a year — double the national average salary and not far off the average MP salary. “It’s a cup half full/half empty life. You do 12-hour shifts, there’s the heat, the […] The post Future unemployment will be (mostly) voluntary...

…Rwanda is still poorer than most African countries due to being less urbanized than most African nations (Rwanda is 82% rural compared to Sub Saharan Africa’s 57% average). Rwanda’s donor aid adds up to ~75% of Rwanda’s government spending, which is roughly $1B. The average Rwandan makes $1K a year ($3300 at purchasing power parity). At purchasing power parity, […] The post Facts about Rwanda appeared first on...

From Naveen: So much talk of “AI safety” and too little in the way of practical questions like these that are going to be important in the near future. Should law enforcement be able to subpoena AI  assistants about your information? For example, I use the free GPT-3.5/4 version and it already has a lot […] The post Questions about LLMs (from my email)...

1. Is DeepSeek-R1 a good writer? 2. Dominic Cummings reading list. 3. Modern novels by country, a superb and thorough website. 4. Joe Boyd world music playlist. 5. Various observations on hardware and current AI trends.  A good piece. 6. Chamath, on the implications of DeepSeek. 7. Acemoglu on liberalism (NYT). The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply...

When Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991 it pushed some 20 million tons of SO₂ into the stratosphere reducing global temperatures by ~0.5°C for two years. Make Sunsets is a startup that replicates this effort at small scale to reduce global warming. To be precise, Make Sunsets launches balloons that release SO₂ into the stratosphere, creating […] The post Make Sunsets: Geoengineering appeared first on...

Data collected by INRIX, a transportation analytics firm, found that travel times across the city and region had actually slowed overall at peak rush hours — by 3 percent in the morning and 4 percent in the evening — during the first two weeks of congestion pricing compared to a similar period last year. Travel […] The post Congestion pricing update appeared first on...

Noah Smith, and a few readers, have asked for a summary post about the errors of Michael Pettis.  Since Pettis is now an influential trade thinkers with many of the Trump people, I think it is worth repeating my previous points just a bit. Here are the errors, perhaps there are more: He talks about […] The post The mistakes of Michael Pettis appeared...

1. Cato ad for policy analyst in human progress and economics.  And for psychology. 2. Joe Boyd episode Spotify playlist, put together by a CWT listener. 3. Lots more black holes than we had thought? And more here. 4. DeepSeek okie-dokie: “All I know is we keep pushing forward to make open-source AGI a reality […] The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on...

This study quantifies the direct average net fiscal impact (ANFI) of migration in Germany, taking into account both indirect taxes and in-kind benefits such as health and education spending. Using a status quo approach with data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for 2018 and microsimulation techniques to impute both indirect taxes and in-kind benefits, […] The post Do Migrants Pay Their Way? A...

Thoee two novels by Solvej Balle, a Danish author, are now available in English.  Conceptually, they are close to time travel novels (I should not tell you the actual nature of the twist), but with more literary value than you might be expecting. Every now and then a new book comes along that is conceptual, […] The post *On the Calculation of Volume, I...

That is the new James C. Scott book, from Yale University Press.  It focuses on Burma [sic], and I found this to be the most typical and illustrative sentence: Several of the commentators evaluating this book in manuscript noticed that the section of river spirits (nats) and the much larger section describing the eco zones, […] The post *In Praise of Floods*, James C....

1. Teen fertility in sub-Saharan Africa. 2. Does Chile have the fastest fertility collapse? 3. New book sorting algorithm almost reaches perfection. 4. How did the organization of DOGE end up? An important piece. As I have been predicting, DOGE will shrink government (slow its rate of growth?) by only a modest amount, if at […] The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on...

In our paper on online education, Tyler and I wrote: One model of a future course is a super-textbook: lectures, exercises, quizzes, and grading all available on a tablet with artificial intelligence routines guiding students to lectures and exercises designed to address that student’s deficits and with human intelligence—tutors—on call on an as-needed basis, possibly […] The post AI Improves Student Learning and Engagement...

Over the past half-century, the share of men enrolled in college has steadily declined relative to women. Today, 1.6 million more women than men attend four-year colleges in the U.S. This trend has not lowered marriage rates for college women, a substantial share of whom have historically married economically stable men without college degrees. Both […] The post Gender gaps in education and declining...