~marginalrevolution | 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...