~marginalrevolution | 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...