~marginalrevolution | Bookmarks (547)

Surprised to learn that the US is below the OECD average for out of pocket health care spending as a fraction of per capita consumption, with virtually the same % as Canada. That is Jason Abaluck, via the wisdom of Garett Jones. The post USA fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Pshrnk. What number would you consider...

As late as the 1990s, food in Haiti probably was the best in the Caribbean, and it certainly was regarded as such.  There were fancy French-Caribbean fusion restaurants in Petitionville with amazing seafood, and there was high quality street and diner-level food in Port-au-Prince.  Lambi (conch) was consistently the best I ever have had, and […] The post What is Haitian food like in...

1. Is there a rationale for natural monopoly regulation in AI services? 2. Three mistakes in the moral mathematics of existential risk.  I don’t agree with everything in there, but quite an interesting piece, forthcoming in Ethics by David Thorstad. 3. Claims about o1. 4. Good article about Haitians settling in Alabama. 5. The Zvi […] The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on...

I knew Civil War (now streaming on HBO/Max) was going to be good when just a minute or so in you see an explosion in the distance and only later do you hear the sound wave. [Mild spoilers may follow.] Shortly after, we meet war journalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst in a standout performance). I thought, […] The post Civil War appeared first on Marginal...

This paper examines the impact of the emergence of the “gig economy” on the broader labor market by exploiting the staggered introduction of the ridesharing service Uber to American Cities between 2013 and 2018. Using difference-in-differences methods, Callaway and Sant’Anna’s doubly robust difference-in-differences estimator, Chaisemartin and D’Haultoeuille’s time-corrected Wald estimator, and Abadie et al’s synthetic control method, I […] The post The economics of ride-sharing appeared first...

Andrew Cedotal writes me: This issue came up with the post where someone claimed that N% of Americans were active OnlyFans content creators, here it is again! For software services, total accounts ever created is a vanity metric. It’s not used by serious operators or investors of consumer-tech companies (the fact that it shows up in public […] The post “four percent of humanity subscribes to...

A Free Press Debate. “Tyler Cowen, Katherine Mangu-Ward, David Leonhardt, and Bhaskar Sunkara duke it out over the state of the economy.”  Here is the video, for Free Press subscribers only.  A splendid time was had by all. The post Is the American dream alive and well? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to joan. The Fed says Real Median Personal Income...

1. “I will not tell you why Brazilians cannot buy cheap and safe sunglasses.”  From an economic theorist. 2. Brutalist KFC. 3. “These results strongly suggest Neanderthal-derived DNA is playing a significant role in autism susceptibility across major populations in the United States.” 4. The story of Easter Island resilience. 5. “There are no AI-shaped […] The post Friday assorted links appeared first on...

I think AI is going to have some if its biggest effects on biology. Biological pathways are among the most complex in all of science. People are good at handling two or maybe three variable problems but just keeping three variables and their interactions in one’s head is difficult. AIs with access to vast databases […] The post AI and Biology appeared first on...

Deep Prasad writes: OpenAI just released an AI as smart as most PhDs in physics, mathematics and the life sciences. Wake up. The world will never be the same and in many ways, it will be unrecognizable a decade from now. Mckay Wrigley is enthusiastic: o1’s ability to think, plan, and execute is off the […] The post Strawberry Alarm Clock! appeared first on...

One and a half minutes, you will find it here, mostly me talking about how well the new OpenAI o1 model does economics.  Spinoza (the dog) steals the show. As I said to the OpenAI film crew, “Spinoza may not be AGI, but if you leave any foodstuffs near the couch, he will beat anything […] The post My video contribution to the new...

From the great Noam Brown, the link to the more detailed OpenAI page is here.  And a preview page here.  Step by step advanced reasoning, now a reality, with some pretty incredible benchmark achievements.  Too much to say, right? Here is the accompanying John Lennon demo. The post OpenAI announces “Strawberry” appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to YY. Wouldn’t it be...

1. Comment directly on top of arXiv links. 2. Latent polarization, based on values clusters. 3. Reading scrolls from the ancient world. 4. The wrong kind of city? 5. GMU Econ Society (new and better link). 6. Does non-response bias make the economy look better than it really is? 7. “The existence of manual mode […] The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on...

The UK’s Orwellian sounding Equality Act 2010 is strikingly Marxist. It demands equal pay for work of equal value where these are defined as follows: A’s work is equal to that of B if it is like B’s work, rated as equivalent to B’s work, or of equal value to B’s work. A’s work is […] The post Equality Act 2010 appeared first on...

The London Times, in its Sunday on-line culture section, no longer has a weekly article listing what they think are the best books of the year.  Yet they continue to run similar weekly articles for music and film and television. The books feature has, for me, been the single strongest reason to subscribe to the […] The post Two missing markets appeared first on...

This report describes compound return outcomes for the 29,078 publicly-listed common stocks contained in the CRSP database from December 1925 to December 2023. The majority (51.6%) of these stocks had negative cumulative returns. However, the investment performance of some stocks was remarkable. Seventeen stocks delivered cumulative returns greater than five million percent (or $50,000 per […] The post Which U.S. Stocks Generated the Highest...

This paper measures the causal effect of deficits on inflation using a “high frequency narrative approach”. We identify an event that released news about the 2021 deficits in the United States—the Georgia Senate election runoff. We calculate the size of the shock using new narrative data from investment banks. We then study the high frequency […] The post How much of the recent inflation...

Introducing PaperQA2, the first AI agent that conducts entire scientific literature reviews on its own. PaperQA2 is also the first agent to beat PhD and Postdoc-level biology researchers on multiple literature research tasks, as measured both by accuracy on objective benchmarks and assessments by human experts. We are publishing a paper and open-sourcing the code. […] The post AI and scientific literature reviews appeared...

1. Innovation networks in the Industrial Revolution. 2. Self-treatment of many diseases and maladies is going to accelerate a good deal.  Can you guess why? 3. Four percent of humanity subscribes to OnlyFans?  Who says Britain is in decline? 4. Those new service sector jobs, Argentina Milei edition. 5. A summary of some John Cochrane.  […] The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on...

Inflation-adjusted median household income was $80,610 in 2023, up 4% from the 2022 estimate of $77,540, the bureau said in its annual report card on households’ financial well-being. This move returned incomes to about where they were in 2019, the peak that was hit just before the pandemic. Here is more from the WSJ.  The […] The post Median income facts appeared first on...

Byrne Hobart writes to me: One of the purposes of inheritance taxes is to avoid compounding intergenerational wealth. But The Missing Billionaires points out that if all of America’s millionaires had put their money in broad market indices in 1900, their heirs would number 16,000 billionaires, even accounting for taxes, splitting estates among multiple children, etc. So […] The post Should we keep the wealthy non-diversified?...

The men’s national soccer team is hoping that hosting World Cup qualifiers at an altitude higher than ever will help it improve in the South American standings. The Bolivians usually play in the capital La Paz at 3,640 meters (11,940 feet) above sea level, but the South American soccer body CONMEBOL has allowed them to […] The post Bolivian soccer competition appeared first on...

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt: It is true that the expected rate of return of the US stock market is higher than the US government’s borrowing rate. But what matters is the net social increase in investment value, not the nominal returns on the government’s portfolio. If the government buys some […] The post Against an American sovereign wealth fund...

1. Find the most and least expensive Taco Bell meal in America.  The price dispersion is larger than I would have expected. 2. What will Apple Intelligence do for you?  I was impressed by this demo.  These whines sound like problems that will be fixed within a year? 3. https://hasanyone.com/ 4. Scott Sumner on Boston […] The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on...