Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok on economics, culture, and ideas.
Bryan Caplan: It seems like you and other AIs are bad Bayesians. When presented with counterevidence, you should move toward or against the presenter with roughly equal probability. It depends on whether the argument was better or worse than expected. In fact,…
Here is notice from Yale, and from Paul Krugman, he was one of the true greats. For the pointer I thank several MR readers. The post William Nordhaus, RIP appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Researchers, I just uploaded a prominent QJE paper on climate change economics to @RefineDotInk and I loaded my critique of the paper. I asked the AI to offer an impartial verdict. I will make this report public. A new journal could collect these into “Special…
1. Organizing Intelligence. 2. World Bank African urbanization report. Building out African cities in a decent way could end up being the task of our coming era. 3. Summary of The Commanding Heights. 4. “Meanwhile in Armenia…” 5. “Female psychopathology has wo…
Wednesday, November 4, 18:30 Barcelona time, details here. I am honored to have won the Elinor Ostrom Prize from the Institut Ostrom Catalunya. Maybe see you there! The post My Barcelona talk appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
This paper shows retailers increase prices in response to organized retail crime. We match store-level crime data to scanner data from the universe of transactions for cannabis retailers in Washington state. Using quasi-experimental variation from robberies an…
Education is widely recognized as the primary driver of human capital accumulation. However, policies designed to promote educational attainment often overlook students’ endogenous responses. This paper provides empirical evidence of the causal impact of relax…
1. Dwarkesh interviews Robert Caro (!). 2. New and pretty brutal results on CTE and football. 3. Interview with Dan Wang. 4. Updated version of the Saez-Zucman audit. Contestable and speculative assumptions are now separated from true defects. 5. Rosalind Arde…
The organ procurement system has long been a miasma of inefficient monopoly providers. In 2024 I quoted some shocking facts from a great Statecraft interview with Jennifer Erickson and Greg Segal: “Organs are literally lost and damaged in transit every single…
Maybe so: Misdemeanors account for three-quarters of criminal cases filed annually in the United States, yet causal evidence on the impacts of misdemeanor conviction is scarce. We combine administrative and survey data to provide novel evidence of how misdemea…
Scott Carlson did the work (gated, but free with registration), here is one excerpt: Cowen: …Another proposal I’ve made is that schools should let people do one class, only one class, AI-only — no professor, except a professor grades at the end. The professor…
I use LLMs to forecast treatment effects of research studies pre-registered on the AEA RCT Registry and the Open Science Framework. I focus on studies whose results were first publicly released in 2026 and elicit forecasts from models whose training or knowled…
1. “A whopping 79 NBA players are listed on today’s 2:30 PM injury report for tonight’s games. That’s roughly 15% of the entire league” This is just week one people! And some commentary. 2. Video making the case that AI has been fine for jobs. 3. John Repetti…
From the Archives-written by ChatGPT. Both became dramatically more confident in AI’s capabilities while remaining optimistic about its economic potential. Their differences concern how benefits arrive, how seriously to weight emerging dangers, and whether AI…
We show that AI-generated article reviews are now better, by every measure we could construct, than reviews written by well-compensated human experts and judged to be of unusually high quality by journal editors and authors. We then discuss how this result may…
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary: Roman Mars has built one of podcasting’s great empires out of noticing things everyone else walks past. His show, 99% Invisible, has racked up over 500 million downloads telling sto…
AI issues its judgment: 138 papers audited 2,035 problems found 147 serious enough to change a headline number 69% of papers have at least one 97% of major and moderate errors with a clear direction overstate the paper’s claim And on the method: Two independen…
Does generative AI narrow or widen productivity gaps in research? We study the distributional effects of AI on research productivity in economics using evidence from three sources: NBER working-paper and publication records, text-based measures of LLM-assisted…
1. A new taxonomy of work, for the AI era. Thread here. 2. On Morel’s Invention (NYT). 3. Iranian brick architecture. 4. How do non-profits use cash windfalls? 5. The roots of earlier German industrial success. 6. Susquehanna Hat Company skit. The post Wednesd…
Adam Nash has a good post on wealth inequality: …Every year, we pull the most recent data from the US Census on household wealth, cut by age. …invariably, the students’ initial response is a reaction to the apparent disparity in wealth between households based…
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column (now there are gift links!), here is one excerpt, noting this is a worst-case scenario not a prediction: Yet current systems are likely to prove more robust than that suggests. For one thing, they use a variety…
1. Which musical styles do smart people prefer? 2. U. of Austin job ads. 3. Walter Koenig, RIP (NYT). Chekov. 4. One take on the new computational result. And one (overstated) Chinese interpretation. And another extreme and unwarranted view. 5. New research me…
From the Archive–these posts are written by ChatGPT These selections emphasize the quality of the criticism: original interpretations, close attention to the work, and arguments worth considering even when you disagree. They are not a ranking of the films and…
Emily Bazelon was the moderator, there were five of us in the symposium. Excerpt from me: Bores: Do you think the federal government pre-empting the states is consistent with democracy? Cowen: Absolutely. We have federal laws that pre-empt state lawmaking in m…
Well, no, it is not funny, it would be too easy to relieve the dramatic tension by having Abbott explain the actual situation to Costello. One is not wrong to call the whole thing stupid. Yet there is another reading of the skit which stands at least some chan…
1. Why slow fields may determine the pace of discovery. 2. Touch screens on your jacket? 3. Astras performance on Bach bench. 4. More on regional productivity differences (and puzzles) in health care. 5. “Plans to allow US companies run entirely by AI “agents”…
The Marginal Revolution archive is now live at https://marginalrevolution.com/ai-archive/. You can also find it from the header and from “Download Full Archive” link in the left menu. The purpose of the archive is twofold, first as Tyler has said we love our h…
From the Archive–these posts are written by AI. Cowen’s strongest recommendations include 1491, The Power Broker, Knausgaard’s first two My Struggle volumes, Fuchsia Dunlop’s Chinese cookbooks, and Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts. These stand out through…
It would take true Milei-like ardour to slice through Brazil’s economic troubles. These are caused by a gnarly mix of high public spending, stubborn inflation and low saving. The result is a crippling cost of capital. Some analysts put Brazil’s real interest r…
More likely than interference with the election is that unsuccessful office-seekers will refuse to concede, claiming their opponents cheated. Nothing is more basic to democratic legitimacy than the loser’s consent. Many feared that Mr Trump’s refusal to conced…