~marginalrevolution | Bookmarks (547)

1. Do people exposed to generative AI become more pessimistic about inequality? 2. The economics of WordPress?  I don’t understand this well at all. 3. But who is Andrea Sikora? 4. James Broughel and I debate sovereign wealth funds on NPR. 5. A revisionist defense of recent Knausgaard. 6. California is banning “sell by” food […] The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on...

One disgruntled veteran at a FF annual meeting in 2016 was heard to complain, ‘They’re all fucking schoolteachers now.’ He was partly right. In the thirtieth Dáil in 2007 there were 3 university lecturers, 14 primary school teachers and 14 secondary school teachers; there were also 16 lawyers, 5 doctors, 3 nurses and 14 farmers; […] The post A country run by schoolteachers? appeared...

Russia’s parliament, the State Duma, is working on a law that aims to ban so-called child-free ideology which it sees as harmful to traditional values. Vyacheslav Volodin, the chairman of the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, announced recently that fines for “propaganda of childlessness” will amount to up to 400,000 rubles ($4,300; €3,879) for individuals and up […] The post The polity that is Russia appeared...

Monthly inflation went from 25% to about 4%. This is obviously great, but there are two small notes of concern. First, the 25% number was just one really bad month. Inflation had been at a baseline of about 4% for most of the last five years. The immediately-pre-Milei government really cranked up the money printer […] The post Scott Alexander on Milei appeared first...

1. Another meta-study on smart phone use and mental illness. 2. Ross Douthat has a serialized fantasy novel. 3. Movie Gen, on Meta. 4. “Home to only around four percent of the world’s automobiles, Africa accounted for 19 percent of road deaths last year.” 5. Why is “the Silent Generation” so well-cited in philosophy? 6. […] The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on...

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt: Economists from Princeton, Vanderbilt and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis have estimated just how much hard work contributes to inequality in lifetime earnings. While the answer depends on context, they arrived at an average for the US workforce: About 20% of […] The post How much does hard work matter?...

Donald J. Trump’s presidency broke the mold in many ways, including how to think about judicial appointments. Unlike other recent presidents, Trump was open about how “his” judges could be depended on to rule in particular ways on key issues important to voters he was courting (e.g., on issues such as guns, religion, and abortion). […] The post How different are Trump judges? appeared...

From the excellent Katherine Dee, here is just one excerpt: TikTok sketch comedy is in the same lineage of theater. It invites a suspension of disbelief from the audience, creators often play multiple characters, rapidly switching between roles with nothing more than a change in voice, facial expression, or camera angle. And importantly, it’s funny. When […] The post The case why culture is not...

1. Bitcoin documentary on HBO.  Claims they will unmask Satoshi. 2. GPT Canvas, for writing and research writing, interactive.  And more here. 3. Inaugural World Bank Business Ready report (successor to the Doing Business which ended in 2021 over political rigging) is now out.  Hungary, Estonia, and Singapore take the top spots. 4. More Scott […] The post Friday assorted links appeared first on...

Kotkin’s most prominent book project is his three-volume biography of Joseph Stalin: The first two volumes have been published as Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (2014) and Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 (2017), and the third volume remains to be published. Here is more from Wikipedia, of course he is an expert on the Soviet Union and also Russia more […] The post What should I ask Stephen Kotkin?...

Question: An economist once said that the fiscal theory of the price level was true, or became more true, as governments approached insolvency. But otherwise it is not true. Can you reconstruct analytically why the economist might have held this view? The economist’s view hinges on the relationship between a government’s fiscal position and the […] The post Ask ChatGPT o1-preview, fiscal theory of...

1. How does low fertility affect economic growth?  Podcast with Alice Evans and Jesús Fernández-Villaverde. 2. Kalshi’s court victory (bravo!). 3. Do oncologists understand Adam Smith? 4. Why is the speed of light so fast? 5. Films recommended in CWT. 6. Paul Milgrom update. 7. The Great Forgetting, dockworker strike edition. The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         Comments)))) Hot...

In Disentangling the Effects of the 2018-2019 Tariffs on a Globally Connected U.S. Manufacturing Sector (forthcoming) Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce of the Federal Reserve Board write: The unprecedented increase in tariffs imposed by the United States against its major trading partners in 2018-2019 has brought renewed attention to the economic effects of tariffs. While […] The post Tariffs Hurt Manufacturing appeared first on...

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary: Kyla Scanlon has made it her personal mission to bring economics education to a larger audience through social media. She publishes daily content across TikTok, YouTube, Substack, LinkedIn and more, explaining what is happening in the economy and why it is happening. Tyler […] The post My Conversation with the excellent Kyla...

Since 2000, pharmaceuticals for common psychiatric conditions aged out of patent protection. After generic entry, supply increases as more sellers enter the market, leading to lower prices – about 80-85% less! Cheaper prescriptions and more treatment are the stated goal of policies to improve affordability. …Drug prices definitely fell during this period. For the SSRI sertraline, consumer cost per month dropped from ~35 dollars in […] The post Incentives matter, the demand curve slopes...

Doctors were given cases to diagnose, with half getting GPT-4 access to help. The control group got 73% right & the GPT-4 group 77%. No big difference. But GPT-4 alone got 92%. The doctors didn’t want to listen to the AI. Here is more from Ethan Mollick.  And now the tweet is reposted with (minor) […] The post Model this appeared first on Marginal...

1. Listen to it order 400 strawberries. 2. Does studying philosophy make you a more rigorous thinker? 3. What the populists do not know about tariffs.  From two experts who understand trade theory. 4. Claims. 5. “Zoos around the world have occasionally used a little dye, or just brazenness, to pass off one animal as […] The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on...

Here’s the latest video from Marginal Revolution University. It covers negative externalities–drawing, of course, from the most innovative and interesting principles of economics textbook, Modern Principles of Economics. MRU videos are free for anyone’s use anytime, anywhere and don’t forget there are also two new econ-practice games on negative externalities and positive externalities and a fun choose […] The post New MRU Video! Negative Externalities appeared...

It is titled ARPAS, FROs, and Fast Grants, Oh My!  The host is the excellent Tammy Winter, and the other guests are Patrick Hsu and Adam Marblestone, plus yours truly. Here is the link, with transcript.  Excerpt: Tyler Cowen: In virtually all institutions, we should be taking more chances on quite young people, giving them […] The post Podcast on science policy appeared first...

Volume 21, Number 2, September 2024 In this issue: Academic Productivity after the CEA: Gordon Tullock wrote that government economists found capable of “firefighting” are assigned to do more of it, “with the result that the higher ranks of government economists aren’t able to read.” Here, Richard Burkhauser, Kevin Corinth, and Casey Mulligan offer themselves as […] The post Econ Journal Watch, new issue appeared...

1. “Montana Man Sentenced for Federal Wildlife Trafficking Charges as Part of Yearslong Effort to Create Giant Hybrid Sheep for Captive Hunting.“ 2. Dikembe Mutombo, RIP (NYT). 3. Rick Rubin asked me to make for him a Spotify playlist of some of my favorite classical performances.  Quite subjective and arbitrary. 4. How are “Top Five” […] The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on...

Migrants incarcerated for homicide are considered “non-detained” by ICE when they are in state or federal prisons. When ICE uses the term “non-detained,” they mean not currently detained by ICE. In other words, the migrant murderers included in the letter are overwhelmingly in prison serving their sentences. After they serve their sentences, the government transfers them […] The post There are not 13,099 Illegal Immigrant...

From the results: Facial traits are the primary driver of subject perceptions of leadership ability, and those perceptions successfully predict promotional success later in the cadets’ careers. When selecting for leadership potential based on police cadet photographs, respondents predict correct promotional choices at levels well above chance as measured by an AUC score of .70. […] The post Predicting future promotions from police cadets’...

This is less news to the private sector traders on the frontier, but the idea now has reached academia and the NBER working paper series: We introduce artificial intelligence pricing theory (AIPT). In contrast with the APT’s foundational assumption of a low dimensional factor structure in returns, the AIPT conjectures that returns are driven by […] The post The dominance of large factor models...