~marginalrevolution | Bookmarks (545)

1. Criminals are targeting luxury cheeses. 2. twodw: “Harris lost all seven swing states, but in five of them – Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Wisconsin – she’s ending up with more raw votes than Biden got in 2020. If you still think all those swing state mail votes in 2020 were fake, idk what […] The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on...

The total payroll of the federal government is about $110 billion a year https://buff.ly/3CnrMCx Federal government spending was $6.1 trillion https://buff.ly/3YLb0Vf You cannot meaningfully shrink the federal government by firing “unelected bureaucrats” That is from Jason Abaluck. The post USA fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Lord Action. >trying to get blood from a stone ... by...

The author is Patchen Barss, and the title is The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius.  I liked this book very much, and feel there should be more works like this.  It was made with the full cooperation of Penrose himself, though he had no veto over the final work.  Here is […] The post The new Roger Penrose biography appeared...

1. Michael Magoon has “progress” recommendations for the second Trump administration. 2. Update on LLMs and chess.  And a further update on that. 3. Podcast on speaking to whales. 4. Bitcoin for the sovereign, by Matt Huang. 5. Yes Woke has peaked. 6. Berlin techno clubs are closing in large numbers (Times of London). 7. […] The post Friday assorted links appeared first on...

A German newspaper asked for my take on the nomination of RFK Jr. to head HHS. Here’s what I said: Operation Warp Speed stands as the crowning achievement of the first Trump administration, exemplifying the impact of a bold public-private partnership. OWS accelerated vaccine development, production, and distribution beyond what most experts thought possible, saving […] The post Will Trump Appoint a Great FDA...

By Wolfgang Münchau, this book is the best and most detailed account of the German economic decline to date.  Excerpt: In 2018, the federal government promised that Germany would become a world leader in artificial intelligence. As if they don’t understand that such efforts are more than just a play toy.  The overall lesson I […] The post *Kaput: The End of the German...

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column.  We should tax on the basis of residency, not citizenship.  Only Eritrea shares with us the practice of doing the latter.  Here is one excerpt: There is another possible gain, one which may have more appeal to the incoming administration than to economists like me. Trump […] The post Let’s reform taxation for expats appeared...

By Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber, a new Stripe Press book. The post *Bubbles and the End of Stagnation* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Pillow Lasers. Alex Jones isn't merely a kook. ... by Mark BahnerIn reply to So Much For Subtlety. “Pfizer refused to test ... by Mark BahnerIn reply to Todd K. Cool, but the dollars, adjusted for...

1. Dwarkesh podcast with Gwern, self-recommending. 2. Gila monster venom (NYT). 3. ChatGPT says “okie-dokie.” 4. Magnus on chess. 5. Ukraine bonds surging. 6. The Dean Ball pro-active regulatory agenda for AI. 7. Two sea creatures fused into a single animal (WSJ). The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsMr Branwen was more eloquent and less autistic than I thought...

As many of you know, I grew up reading (on knowledge) Hayek, Michael Polanyi, Ludwig Lachmann, Mario Rizzo, and others in that tradition.  For these Austrian and Austrian-related thinkers, knowledge is about how different parts of a system fit together, rather than being a homegeneous metric easily expressed on a linear scale.  There is no […] The post Austrian economics and AI scaling appeared...

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary: In Neal’s second appearance, Tyler asks him why he sometimes shifts from envisioning the future to illustrating the past, the rise of history autodidacts, the implications of leaked secrets from the atomic age to today’s AI, the logistics of faking one’s […] The post My Conversation with the excellent Neal...

1. The Indonesian energy trajectory.  A new Substack. 2. Emily Oster on fluoride, vaccines, and raw milk (NYT). 3. Why didn’t people smile in old photos? 4. Fukuyama on how to make government more efficient. 5. Did a New Zealand start-up in a Wellington apartment just make major progress on nuclear fusion? (FT) 6. Christina Kirchner […] The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on...

Using a descriptive decomposition and data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we show that, in gross terms, fertility decline can explain almost one-quarter of gender pay convergence from 1980 to 2018. Even net of a host of controls for human capital and job characteristics, fertility decline explains 8 percent of the attenuation of […] The post Does declining fertility lower the gender...

My latest paper, Signaling Quality: How Refund Bonuses Can Overcome Information Asymmetries in Crowdfunding (with the excellent Tim Cason and Robertas Zubrickas) is just published in Management Science. Many promising crowdfunding projects fail due to a fundamental issue: trust. Potential backers often hesitate because they lack confidence in the credibility or viability of the projects. […] The post Signaling Quality in Crowdfunding Projects with...

An excellent post, one of the best things written this year in economics.  Here is part of the bottom line: Inflation did make the median voter poorer during Biden’s term. In no part of the income distribution did wages grow faster while Biden was President than they did 2012-2020. This is true in the raw […] The post J. Zachary Mazlish on median wages...

We characterize optimal product market policy in an unequal economy in which firm ownership is concentrated and markups increase with firm market shares. We study the problem of a utilitarian regulator who designs revenue-neutral interventions in the product market. We show that optimal policy increases product market concentration. This is because policies that encourage larger […] The post Big business is better than you...

This is the Steve McQueen movie about the Nazi blitz against London.  I found it visually superb, countering clichés (mostly), showing a different and more varied side of civilian life in wartime, and perhaps the best screen treatment (ever?) of what life was like in the earlier “world of atoms”.  I objected to the overuse […] The post *Blitz* (no spoilers) appeared first on...

1. LDS on AI.  And likely AI policy under Trump. 2. The Zvi on sports gambling. 3. Thoughts on limiting the administrative state. 4. “Today, Astera is opening a call for its first major science residency program, a one-year, fully funded program centered on the creation of public goods.” 5. George Packer on Thomas Mann’s […] The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on...

Tyler and I wrap up our series of podcasts on the 1970s with The 1970s Crime Wave. Here’s one bit: TABARROK: …people think that mass incarceration is a peculiarly American phenomena, or that it came out of nowhere, or was due solely to racism. Michelle Alexander’s, The New Jim Crow, takes his view. In fact, the […] The post The 1970s Crime Wave appeared first...

Eh: How well does bar exam performance predict lawyering effectiveness? Is performance on some components of the bar exam more predictive? The current study, the first of its kind to measure the relationship between bar exam scores and a new lawyer’s effectiveness, evaluates these questions by combining three unique datasets—bar results from the State Bar […] The post How well does bar exam performance...

We combine societal-level institutional measures from 51 countries between 1996 and 2017 with individual decision-making outcome data from 1,126 laboratory experiments in six meta-analyses to evaluate the effects of within-country institutional change on pro-social and Nash behavior. We find that government effectiveness and regulatory freedom positively correlate with pro-social behavior. We find that freedom from […] The post A new meta-meta analysis says things...

From my email, here is your Switzerland fact of the day: The media is awash with stories about western countries incumbent parties losing elections in the last two years: https://www.semafor.com/article/11/08/2024/the-democrats-join-a-long-list-of-global-parties-wrecked-by-post-pandemic-backlash https://www.ft.com/content/e8ac09ea-c300-4249-af7d-109003afb893 The exception no one seems to remember: Switzerland. In the october 2023 election, 3 out of the 4 governing parties increased their vote share. And it […] The post Where are incumbents still popular? appeared...

1. Those new Chinese service sector jobs. 2. New Robin Hanson project: first futarchy on Ethereum. 3. Claims about how the two parties have evolved (speculative). 4. Can Singapore regulate its cats? (NYT) 5. Test-time training is working. The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Dino Sauro. Honestly sitting here wondering ... by WC VaronesIn reply to...

Does reducing the number of firms in public equity markets harm investors? How much has the value firms can get from going public changed in the past few decades? I develop a dynamic supply and demand model of the firm entry to and exit from public markets to relate firm benefits from being public to […] The post Who Wins and Who Loses when...