~marginalrevolution | Bookmarks (363)

1. Lyman Stone criticizes the Pope paper on church attendance.  Good criticisms, see also the points by Sure and others in the comment section.  This paper doesn’t seem to hold up?  I’ll gladly publish a response by the author, otherwise a withdrawal might be in order? 2. Good critique of the AGI concept.  And AI […] The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on...

…residents of La Salut neighbourhood in Barcelona are celebrating a move to wipe themselves off the map. For years, residents had complained that they could not get home because the number 116 bus was always crammed with tourists visiting Antoni Gaudí’s Park Güell. The park is the city’s second most popular attraction after the Sagrada Familia basilica. […] The post Barcelona escalates its role in the...

That is the subject of my latest Bloomberg column.  Here is one excerpt: The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises is having a moment, especially in Latin America. Argentine President Javier Milei admires Mises, and he has adopted some Misesian ideas, such as the notion that “the middle of the road leads to socialism.” Milei used to be an academic […] The post The Ludwig von Mises comeback appeared...

“I have one partner now with three kids. He is transmasc, and he’s radical about the way he raises them. They’re radically home-schooled. They’re 17 and nonbinary, 6 and 5. They know everything in age-appropriate ways. They’ve seen their mommy undergo the transmasc experience, seen their mom become who they really are.” 5 and 6!  […] The post Does the NYT not recognize child...

From a recent paper: We bring novel data to bear on these questions, presenting the largest empirical study of private security to date. We introduce an administrative dataset covering nearly 300,000 licensed private security officers in the State of Florida. By linking this dataset to similarly comprehensive information about public law enforcement, we have, for […] The post Data on private security forces appeared...

1. Paul Christiano appointed to USG Head of AI Safety. 2. Further worries about the anti-cavity thing.  I don’t pretend to know the answers here, but this has not been thought through well enough.  And SSC update. 3. Fritz Peterson, RIP, MIE.  Very 1970s. 4. The economic research policymakers actually need. 5. Doris Day: A […] The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on...

Thus, approximately 1 out of 7 people who I classify as a Latter-day Saint attends [religious service] weekly. And: However, only 5% of Americans attend services “weekly”, far fewer than the ~22% who report to do so in surveys. Oh, and this: The religions with the longest average visit duration are Orthodox Christians (116 minutes), […] The post LDS and indeed USA fact of...

Here is a very good article by Ronald Bailey of Reason magazine.  Excerpt: The contours of the new progress movement stretch from the Human Progress project at the libertarian Cato Institute to the “eco-modernist” initiatives at the Breakthrough Institute and the Pritzker Innovation Fund. Four relatively new groups at the forefront of the pro-progress forces […] The post The progress in Progress Studies appeared...

…at least half of a population of ten million depend on the state in some way—35% are retirees, 10% government workers, and another 5% receive either unemployment benefits or integration benefits. They would see a country with less youth than they once saw; they would see what is in fact, after Italy, the second-oldest country in […] The post A portrait of Portugal appeared first...

1. Should we change species to save them? (NYT) 2. Mechanical watch. 3. Why is it called Martingale? And “With French under fire, Mali uses AI to bring local language to students.” 4. McDonald’s new marketing: Billboards that smell like its French fries. 5. Erwin Dekker on the history of economic thought. 6. Strawberries and the […] The post Monday assorted links appeared first on...

Our primary concern in this chapter will be Iran, though toward the end we will shift the focus to Central Asia.  We can best begin with a first-order approximation of the pattern of Iranian history across the whole period.  It has four major features.  The first is the survival of something called Iran, as both […] The post Michael Cook on Iran appeared first...

“Name three famous people who all share the exact same birth date and year.” Usually it fails, the most common failure being it names someone with the correct date but the incorrect year.  Telling it to “reason step by step” is no panacea either.  And if you want to make it harder, ask for more […] The post GPT-4-Turbo still doesn’t answer this question...

1. Austrian economist Walter Block is now a columnist for Israel Hayom. 2. Progress against dengue. 3. Faith Ringgold, RIP (NYT). 4. The world of competitive quizzing (NYT).  Good piece. 5. Post-fight interview, with profanity, and Mises. 6. U.S. homicide rates are plummeting (WSJ). The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         Comments1. Is Walter still defending the undefendable here? by...

The author is Alex Fernandes, and the subtitle is The Day Portugal’s Dictatorship Fell.  A very good and well-written book, here is one short excerpt: The First Republic is sixteen years of unrelenting chaos, one that sets the scene for the fascist state that follows it. Between 1910 and 1926 Portugal goes through eight presidents […] The post *The Carnation Revolution* appeared first on...

At Sansan Chicken in Long Island City, Queens, the cashier beamed a wide smile and recommended the fried chicken sandwich. Or maybe she suggested the tonkatsu — it was hard to tell, because the internet connection from her home in the Philippines was spotty. Romy, who declined to give her last name, is one of […] The post Samuelson-Stolper, writ anew appeared first on...

1. Sorry people, but I’m not convinced by the whole anti-cavities thing.  Stuart Richie also comments. 2. Thirty minute talk by the great Gašper Beguš. You need to remove timing between the clicks! 3. A recent paper on AI and labor markets.  I don’t quite follow the central intuitions, but possibly important? 4. Ukraine report. […] The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on...

We examine the relation between earnings information content and the use of trust words, such as “character,” “ethics,” and “honest,” in the MD&A section of 10-K. We find that earnings announcements of firms using trust words have lower information content than earnings announcements of firms that do not use trust words. We also find that […] The post Should I trust this paper? appeared...

1. “The largest office building in St. Louis has sold for $3.5 million, per WSJ. In 2006, it sold for $205 million.” 2. Robin Hanson on the world’s monoculture mistake. 3. An AI system to match silver medalists in geometry? 4. Generative AI can turn your most precious memories into photos that never existed. 5. […] The post Friday assorted links appeared first on...

This movie was more cinematically serious than I was expecting, and with some odd (but mostly good) 1970s vibes.  It is also an interesting case study in anhedonia. Video and grenades seem scarcer than they ought to be, even given the constraints.  Good characters. The movie works very hard not to reveal its politics to […] The post *Civil War* appeared first on Marginal...

1. Some progress on the Moderna cancer vaccine. 2. The culture that is New Zealand (excruciating, not recommended). 3. My podcast with Sean Speer and The Hub on GOAT. 4. Edward S.F. suggests: K. Omodo reviews G O A T: “It was amazing.  I took it in all at once!” Here is the short video. […] The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on...

For the first time in 75 years, Mattel is making a major change to the iconic board game Scrabble — and touting a “No More Scoring” gameplay option. The new launch is a double-sided version of the famous board game — one side with the original game for those who want to stick to the […] The post Scrabble markets in everything, okie-dokie edition...

An excellent piece, here is one excerpt I enjoyed in particular: Cowen reads the John Maynard Keynes of The General Theory “as writing about an economy where uncertainty was much higher than usual, investment was highly unstable, fiscal policy was unable to fill in the gap, there was a risk or even reality of a downward spiral […] The post Robert Whaples reviews *GOAT* appeared first...

1. Terminator metal. 2. An RCT on the economic benefits of vision correction. 3. “Claude 3 Opus is roughly as persuasive as humans.“ 4. Jon Haidt responds to the Nature review.  And Greg Lukianoff with his First Amendment concerns. 5. Interview with Nicholas Tabarrok, who works in the movies. 6. Samo Burja skeptical on nuclear. […] The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on...

1. Skepticism about the beauty premium? 2. “On a cellular level, younger generations seem to be aging faster than their forebears.” (speculative) 3. Interview with Merve Emre. 4. William Stanley Jevons and eclipses (NYT).  And an Amtrak train ride across the country is less carbon-efficient than flying (NYT). 5. The ascent of high school wrestlers. […] The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on...