~marginalrevolution | Bookmarks (552)

1. Tiger vs. small bear (NYT). 2. Is granting AIs legal freedoms one way to approach alignment issues? 3. More on aphantasia. 4. D.C.’s first Jane Austen ball. 5. Data on childless cat ladies. 6. Janan Ganesh on how and what to read (FT, noting I think he underrates our ability to pick out the […] The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on...

Recently I have been writing about how the federal government should not go further in bargaining or forcing down the prices of pharmaceutical drugs.  Supply is elastic and the benefits from new pharma drugs are enormous. But it is not as simple as being “for higher prices.”  There is also a price trajectory over time.  […] The post Prices vs. price paths appeared first...

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one key segment: Game theory can help explain how ranked choice voting changes the behavior of candidates, as well as the elites who support them. Consider a ranked choice election that has five or six candidates. To win the election, you can’t just appeal […] The post What to think about ranked choice...

This one is for religious music, taken from various religions around the world, including yes Sikhs too.  Here are Rick Rubin playlists from other people, including Carlos Santana. The post Tyler Cowen playlist for Rick Rubin appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsI enjoy these playlists – if you could pass on a message to ... by ThomasIn reply to Go beyond surprise towards...

1. Links from Sam Enright. 2. When you put animals on the banknotes. 3. How Nicholas Carlini uses AI. 4. Jon Hartley podcast with Acemoglu. 5. Scott Sumner on Bitcoin in the government portfolio. Or try the link here: https://www.themoneyillusion.com/provoked-by-a-provocative-piece/ 6. New paper on the economics of extinction. The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Some Guy....

It is extremely versatile, very responsive to feedback, and has response lags comparable to that of a human, or better yet.  Just keep on telling it what to do, if you need to.  If you ask it to be better, guess what?  It gets better.  Her really is here.  Now. Some complain that the foreign […] The post ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode appeared first...

Here are a few observations from the trip: 1. El Salvador does truly seem safe, arguably “Canada safe” or maybe safer yet. 2. Hardly ever have I had quicker and more convenient airport and entry procedures. 3. Hardly any tourists are there, unless you count returning El Salvadorans from the United States. 4. For a […] The post El Salvador notes appeared first on...

Here is one new method to lower teen-age driving deaths: We show that a targeted law can modify teens’ risky behavior. We examine the effects of an Australian intervention banning first-year drivers from driving late at night with multiple peers, which had accounted for one-fifth of their traffic fatalities. Using data on individual drivers linked […] The post Shaping the Habits of Teen Drivers...

1. The marshmallow test is not holding up. 2. What do they serve in an Arctic restaurant? 3. High rise construction in Canada. 4. FEE seeks editorial director. 5. Who’s weird? 6. AI and the humanities. 7. Voice GPT doing some British accents. The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Nicholas 𝖓𝖎𝖌𝖌𝖊𝖗ponte. Like, ... by it's the...

A fascinating new paper The Political Economic Determinants of Nuclear Power: Evidence from Chernobyl by Makarin, Qian, and Wang was recently presented at the NBER Pol. Economy conference. The paper is nominally about how fossil fuel companies and coal miners in the US and UK used the Chernobyl disaster to successfully lobby against building more […] The post The Unseen Fallout: Chernobyl’s Deadly Air...

This is all from an anonymous reader, not by me, but I will not indent: “Hi Tyler, I enjoyed your post – I’m kind of tired of this – and wanted to respond to it as I think what you wrote gets at two important trends happening in politics today. 1 – High and Low Decoupling […] The post High and low decoupling, and other...

Why do so many economic historians ignore the benefits of the largest free-trade zone in history:  inside the US!  Thanks to the “dormant” commerce clause of the US Constitution, the US has achieved rapid growth, despite the tariffs.  I write about it here:  This Little-Known Section of the Constitution Made America the World’s #1 SuperPower – […] The post Mark Skousen on free trade (from...

Introducing: Arena Magazine. It’s a print & digital magazine about tech, capitalism, and the USA – that’s actually on the side of tech, capitalism, and the USA! Subscribe: http://arenamag.com/join Here is a link and a thread. The post Arena magazine appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to OutHere. Underrated comment. Using next ... by OneMoreTimeIn reply to Marc Cohen. Walking in Memphis...

1. Why has ornament in architecture declined? 2. Patrick McKenzie on the Crowdstripe failure. 3. David Brooks on AI (NYT). 4. I’ve already linked to this podcast with Julia La Roche, recorded before Biden left office.  In it I predicted Kamala Harris will be the next POTUS. 5. The physics of the emergence of life […] The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on...

The UK Health Security Agency has raised their pandemic threat level for H5N1 bird flu from a 3 to a 4 on a 6 point scale.  My takeaway is that we have completely failed to stem the outbreak in cattle, there has been animal to human transmission which we are surely undercounting, but so far […] The post Operation Warp Speed for Cows appeared...

We provide credible estimates of the effect of duration and uncertainty in local regulatory approval times on the rate of housing production. The analysis derives from a novel dataset of development timelines for all multifamily housing projects permitted in the City of Los Angeles between 2010 and 2022. As a lower bound, simply by pulling […] The post Approval timelines really matter for housing...

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt: Now enter Bitcoin. Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming has introduced a bill to have the Treasury create a $67 billion (at current value) stockpile of the cryptocurrency, and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump supports the idea, saying it would be “a permanent national asset to benefit all […] The post When does a Bitcoin reserve make...

Here is the paper, with co-authors Will Dobbie, Benjamin Goldman, Sonya R. Porter, and Crystal S. Yang.  Here is the abstract: We show that intergenerational mobility changed rapidly by race and class in recent decades and use these trends to study the causal mechanisms underlying changes in economic mobility. For white children in the U.S. […] The post The new Raj Chetty paper on...

1. Wolfgang Rihm, RIP (NYT). 2. Maduro at 82% to “win,” Polymarket puts this “under review,” however. 3. Fairfax County data center NIMBY uh-oh. 4. Higher inflation comes to Japan (NYT), 5. Rorschach test El Salvador prison video, interesting. 6. Thomas Sargent joins Cato as a visiting scholar. 7. Friend.com 8. A Caracas source to […] The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on...

The attack affected online services of all major Russian banks, national payment systems, social networks and messengers, government resources, and dozens of other services…Carpet-Bombing Hack: #Ukraine’s Intelligence (#HUR) has completed one of the largest cyberattacks on Russia’s financial sector and government resources, Kyiv Post HUR sources reported. Here is the link. The post Underreported news of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.        ...

We further show that demographic and productivity factors do not represent convincing drivers of real interest rates over long spans. That is from a new AER piece by Kenneth S. Rogoff, Barbara Rossi, and Paul Schmelzing.  Here are less gated copies of the piece.  Here are some MR posts on Cowen’s Third Law. The post Cowen’s Third Law, illustrated appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION....

In the Austrian-Hungarian Empire during World War I: In order to obtain the required manpower, the armaments manufacturers began to pay their workers higher wages.  This had an almost instant impact on other businesses and firms, which could not compete with the wages of the armaments industry and were thus unable to find any workers.  […] The post Are higher wages in wartime just...

1. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is a very good movie.  Romanian, bizarre, funny. 2. The Dual Beveridge Curve? 3. How price elastic is charitable giving? 4. Claims correlated with dark oxygen claims. 5. The Brain Book (for children).  Supports the Albanian language too. 6. William Calley is gone. […] The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on...

Jeffrey Clemens points us to some bonkers editorializing in the NYTimes coverage of the likely stolen election in Venezuela. The piece starts out reasonably enough: Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, was declared the winner of the country’s tumultuous presidential election early Monday, despite enormous momentum from an opposition movement that had been convinced this was […] The post Venezuela under “Brutal Capitalism” appeared first...