Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok on economics, culture, and ideas.
1. Deirdre economics reading list. 2. The 1878 entrance exam for the British India civil service. 3. How good is Opus 5 on biology? 4. “A linguistic “golden age” flourished between 1,000 to 3,000 years ago when tens of thousands of languages were spoken throug…
I have an amateur interest in Oriental rugs but my eye is untrained. Thus, for fun and learning I created with Fable a Rug Atlas and quiz. The Rug Belt Atlas Check it out. Constructive comments welcome. P.S. The site is in fact safe! Working on getting it reco…
When a new technology promises large private benefits but may impose social costs that markets do not price, demand need not reveal how citizens want it governed. We examine this using a nationally representative U.S. survey experiment (N=5,556) on human enhan…
This is one of the best Op-Eds you will read this year, though it deliberately deemphasizes the personal (no one is attacked) in a manner that will result in less attention. Better to write the truth! Excerpt: Why has this [voter discontent} happened? Some of…
The subsection of the Georgi Gospodinov novel runs like this: The Shortest Novel About Odysseus After His Return Home One night, now old and flabby and starting to forget, he leaves his home secretly. He’s sick of everything, so he heads back one last time to…
1. The 1991 Project’s oral history collection (led by Shreyas Narla and Shruti) with ~50 hours of interviews with policy reformers and witnesses to India’s market liberalization, is now available. 2. Mini Cities. 3. The new Claude, on Mondrian. 4. More on cybe…
To study whether and how academics respond to political pressure, we exploit a natural experiment: the publication in early 2025 of a “blacklist” of words flagged by the U.S. government. We find that the release of this list led to a sharp reduction in the use…
Farmers in Parana, Brazil, struggling to get banks to loan them cash, became the first to tokenize livestock and place 10 dairy milk cows’ tokens for trade on the country’s B3 national stock exchange. They generated nearly $20,000 in credit backed by their cat…
Imagine your career were coming to a close, how would you want it to end? By earning an especially large sum of money? Publishing a final wonderful paper? With an amazing act of mentorship? When it comes to Lebron, had he wanted to finish his career with the g…
1. How global was “antiquity”? 2. Why the Clarity Act is mired in muck (NYT). 3. Jim Olds on the new science plan. 4. Cyber capabilities of Kimi 3? 5. “Following a standard workplace safety check, I have just received an email from a university administrator i…
IJ: On Wednesday, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia struck down a D.C. law that barred therapists from other jurisdictions from doing online teletherapy visits with clients in D.C. The decision comes nearly six years after Virginia-…
This year, like last year, “the European Union will again make more money from fining US tech companies Than from the total tax income from Europe’s own public tech companies!” The post European Fact of the Day, Again appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
I see at least three updates one might make from the recent OAI/Hugging Face hacking incident: 1. “This happened sooner than I expected, and the story is more dramatic than I expected,” therefore I am more worried than before. 2. “This happened, and the inferi…
1. Christopher Priest and Nina Allan, The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J.G. Ballard. Priest died before he finished this book, and his widow added material, including on Priest himself. This is in any case a good overview and introduction to…
1. Puffin spotted on the Dorset coast. 2. Anthropic chief economist on AI and unemployment. 3. Whales use different vowels when ships are around. 4. Oliver Kim on McNamara. 5. Large language models can predict the results of social science experiments. 6. Alex…
I tell my Gary Becker story, why I like police more than prisons, how criminals are like children and more. The post Alex Tabarrok on the Economic Analysis of Crime appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her. From Wikipedia: Gita Gopinath…is an Indian-American economist who is currently serving as the Gregory and Ania Coffey professor of Economics at Harvard University and previously served as the first deputy managing d…
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. From the episode summary: Tyler and Andrew discuss whether it was inevitable we’d rediscover Vermeer, how that vanishingly rare sect left its fingerprints all over his life, why the Met has misread its own Allegory of…
Something that the Ukraine and Iran wars have taught me is that for a lot of countries, including very big countries, there are a small number of buildings and infrastructure components that are required for their economy to function. And in countries that are…
Last year, the US exported $171bn of agricultural goods according to the Department of Agriculture, just $2bn more than the export total claimed by Brazil, which many analysts say has benefited from trade disruption set in train by President Donald Trump’s tar…
1. Balaji and Network State moving to Kazakhstan. 2. Why evolvable AI is not yet a Darwinian threat. 3. “This paper argues that societies with greater historical exposure to natural disasters are more likely to develop long-term-oriented norms that emphasize p…
AI has just had what I considered to be the first truly concerning security breach. The facts, as we know them so far, are wild. On July 16, Hugging Face, a vast repository housing over a million open-source AI models and data, announced in a blog post: Earlie…
Major new report from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Five things in the report I really liked: 1. Proposes metascience units as a way to advance experimentation in science agencies. IFP recommended OSTP take this forward in our respon…
Alan and Karen Miller’s first dance was a win-or-lose moment for many of their wedding guests. As the couple glided across the floor during their reception in New Rochelle, N.Y., last year, attendees kept track of the chosen artist and the length of the dance.…
1. White on Hutt’s macro. 2. Are LLMs obsessed with Japan? 3. Princeton University art museum gets landmark gift of Haitian paintings. 4. “Sight unseen” — the revenge of asymmetric information. But was it a good buy? 5. “Democratic types would give up about $2…
Worth seeing, and I enjoyed it — but a few observations I haven’t seen elsewhere. For all the praise of IMAX and 70mm’s supposed clarity, several scenes are out of focus on the actor. Pulling focus is harder with a large-format negative. The problem is compoun…
We estimate the causal impacts of GLP-1 treatment on labor market outcomes using linked Danish administrative data and a matched stacked difference-in-differences design. We compare patients who initiate GLP-1 treatment during the first two years of Semaglutid…
Any time you hear claims about American government, a sanity-inducing response is to ask whether they also are true of state and local governments. Here is an excerpt from my latest piece at The Free Press: First, in people’s daily lives, they typically intera…
The strategy for China is obvious: commoditize your complements. Note that Xi explicitly ties openness to AI “moving from the digital world into the physical world”; the physical world is the world dominated by China, and the country’s lead in areas like robot…
1. “In all three countries, declining places displayed higher animosity prior to salient populist campaigns.” In their tweets. 2. Sunstein on Hayek and conservatism. 3. Jacobian conjecture proved false. Fable found a counterexample that fits inside a tweet. Fr…