~marginalrevolution | Bookmarks (547)

It’s bizarre to me that there are still people claiming that LLMs are not reasoning or are not creative when by any objective measure they are obviously creative reasoners! By objective measure I mean a test that evaluates creativity and reasoning by evaluating outputs not by idle philosophical speculation that rules AIs out by definition. […] The post LLMs are Creative Reasoners appeared first...

1. Bécquer Seguín, The Op-Ed Novel: A Literary History of Post-Franco Spain.  I liked this book very much, as it gave me extremely useful background on the Spanish fiction I enjoy.  It may make less sense to read if you don’t already know the relevant fiction, but in any case a fine work.  Imagine, by […] The post What I’ve been reading appeared first...

Surveying the literature on the impact of labor regulation, we find that India’s firm-level labor regulations punish businesses in two ways. First, the regulations are too onerous, preventing firms from remaining competitive. While some sectors and large-scale industries might be able to comply with this regulatory overload, most regulations are imposed on firms with as […] The post Why Indian firms don’t scale appeared...

From Dan Hendrycks: We’ve created a demo of an AI that can predict the future at a superhuman level (on par with groups of human forecasters working together). Consequently I think AI forecasters will soon automate most prediction markets. Here are the links. The post AI prediction markets appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsI could see this being used for good or for...

1. Converts research papers into audio discussions. 2. Interest in reading, by gender, across various countries. 3. Max Richter on the music that made him. 4. A simple recipe for robot dexterity.  And short video of robots picking strawberries.  They even judge which ones are ripe. 5. Steam-powered vs. gas-powered tractors. 6. What was the […] The post Monday assorted links appeared first on...

From an announcement, slightly edited by me: Kalshi has defeated the CFTC, legalizing election markets in the US for the first time in 100 years.  After years of battling with the US government, we won in court: the District Court of Columbia just ruled in our favor, legalizing trading on U.S. elections and overthrowing a […] The post Kalshi wins appeared first on Marginal...

From my Bloomberg column of last week: Just as more capital assets would go to foreigners, they would also go to domestic nonprofit and other non-taxpaying institutions. Rather than donating money to their favorite charity, people would be more likely to give them stock or other assets. But it would be harder for those institutions […] The post A bit more on wealth taxes...

More importantly, Honduras is not just locked in a dispute with Silicon Valley billionaires, as the authors would lead you to believe. Other claimants against Honduras at the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) include the Paiz family, one of the wealthiest in Guatemala, the U.S. bank JPMorgan Chase, and others from Honduras, Panama, Mexico, […] The post Honduras and its disputes appeared first...

In France, frozen products accounted for 24 per cent of all pastries and other sweet baked goods in 2021. In the UK 21 per cent of pastries were frozen, compared with 13 per cent in Spain and 17 per cent in the US, according to research groups Gira and Global Market Insights. Industry researchers have […] The post France frozen croissant fact of the...

1. Mr. Greedy produced 230 descendants in an era of population collapse, RIP.  And there are two Shakers left (NYT). 2. The Beatles’ deepest song. 3. Joe Reid once made a point like this, though not in the context of AI: “advanced artificial intelligence makes the return of secret guild society likely, because the only […] The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on...

Reuters: Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drug Company said…that it is working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to import and distribute penicillin in the country temporarily….Cuban’s Cost Plus will import Lentocilin brand penicillin powder marketed by Portugal-based Laboratórios Atral S.A. There are two remarkable items in the above passage. First, there is a shortage […] The post Peer Approval to Address Drug Shortages...

Here is a very good response to readers’ questions essay by Richard Hanania, excerpt: Although EHC [elite human capital] types can make a lot of mistakes, it’s inevitable that they will rule and it’s mostly a good thing that they do. I think a society where most elites could stomach someone like Trump would have […] The post Elite Human Capital Is Not Just...

Yes, there is a human capital crisis of sorts: We show the incidence of mental ill-health has been rising especially among the young in the years and especially so in Scotland. The incidence of mental ill-health among young men in particular, started rising in 2008 with the onset of the Great Recession and for young […] The post Mental health trajectories in the UK...

1. Podcast with Andrej Karpathy.  Recommended.  And Meta AI is popular. 2. AI music arbitrage fraud. 3. It seems many Swiss referenda are based on phony signatures? 4. realtimecrimeindex.com. 5. The French air conditioning law. 6. “These results imply further frontier model scaling — which is currently estimated at 4x increase per year — may […] The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on...

The subtitle is The Origins of Modern Economics, and the author is Benjamin M. Friedman.  Here is the book’s home page, you can order here.  I very much look forward to reading this one.  Here is my earlier CWT with Ben Friedman. The post *Religious Influences on Economic Thinking* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to CJ. There was specialization and trade...

Bloomberg: Moraal is among the growing number of Dutch people struggling to find a rental property after a new law designed to make homes more affordable ended up aggravating a housing shortage. Aiming to protect low-income tenants, the government in July imposed rent controls on thousands of homes, introducing a system of rating properties based on […] The post The Affordable Rent Act appeared first...

As Ed Banfield observed, the flight to the suburbs pre-dated the car because people prefer cheaper housing and more space: “The first elevated steam railroads were in New York in the 1870s, and twenty years later every sizable city had an electric trolley system. Railroads and trolleys enabled more people to commute and to commute […] The post From the comments, on moving to...

Nicholas Kruus, 17, Highlands Ranch, CO, poverty alleviation, general career support. Tobi Shevlane, Oxford, AI and prediction of real world events. John Gross-Whitaker, Stanford, writing and thinking and career development. Benjamin Manning, MIT, AI as a tool for doing economic research. Arden Berg, Western Massachusetts, incoming student at the University of Chicago, philosophy and economics. […] The post Emergent Ventures, 37th cohort appeared first...

Popular New Keynesian macroeconomic models predict that cuts in various types of distortionary taxes are contractionary when monetary policy is constrained at the zero lower bound. We turn to a long span of history in the United Kingdom to test this hypothesis. Using a new long-run dataset of narrative-identified tax changes from 1918to 2020, we […] The post Another zero lower bound prediction bites...

Russ tweets: In about two months I will be discussing Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman with @tylercowen  on our respective podcasts. Read along with us if you’d like. 872 pages so start soon. It starts slowly. Just gets better and better. So what should Russ and I talk about, and here I am asking for […] The post With Russ Roberts, on Vassily Grossman...

1. Why is India so bad at sport? (FT) 2. Review of Olivier Roy on culture. 3. Strong ratings for Reflection 70B, a new open source model. 4. Technology of the future? 5. I heard this song on satellite radio yesterday — does anyone still think about these guys? 6. When South Africa banned alcohol […] The post Friday assorted links appeared first on...

In the 1970s the general aviation aircraft industry was selling 15,000 or more aircraft a year but that number fell by a factor of about 10 in the early 1980s. What happened? One factor was a massive increase in tort liability as discussed in my paper with Eric Helland, Product Liability and Moral Hazard: Evidence […] The post Why Don’t We Have Flying Cars?...

NYC is now a more expensive destination for visitors: The average hotel prices in New York City rose 7.4 percent over the past year (July 2023 to July 2024), compared with an only 2.1 percent increase nationally, according to data from CoStar. Despite the law’s promise, rent hits an all-time high and vacancy rates stay […] The post Banning Airbnb in NYC appeared first...

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column.  Here is one excerpt: To the extent there is a lot of slack [with cost and energy], AIs themselves will create wild products of the imagination, especially as they improve in computing power and skill. AIs will sing to each other, write for each other, talk […] The post How weird will AI culture get?...