Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok on economics, culture, and ideas.
Michael Kremer picked as World Bank chief economist (Bloomberg). Here are many many previous MR posts on Kremer, of course Alex also worked with him on Operation Warp Speed. The post Very good news appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
It’s amazing how a theory can take over a brain. Consider the idea that people believe what serves their interests. As heuristics go, it’s a good one. I use it all the time. Yet when Dario Amodei says AI is dangerous, perhaps even an extinction risk, some peop…
From Aniket Baksy and Daniele Caratelli, here is part of the abstract: Because larger firms are more attractive targets but also invest more in protection, the model generates an inverse-U relationship between firm size and attack risk, consistent with the dat…
Whatever your ideas for regulating AI, I say start with China. Do not put China as an afterthought at the end of your proposal, mentioned in a vague wish that something good ought to happen and that maybe the future of humanity can be secured. During the 2023…
Share prices of cyber firms have jumped around a lot in recent weeks, leading one side or the other to claim victory. But the crucial point is that, relative to the historical norm, the market is not really pricing ANYTHING big to change. There was a much bigg…
1. Easy to bioengineer a very dangerous virus? 2. The astrophysicists are getting antsy too. Princeton is also getting nervous. If nothing else, these are huge PR own goals. The guy is a Mill scholars, can you imagine J.S. Mill tweeting that way? 3. New David…
Here’s the S&P 500 (daily close) with the key COVID and policy events marked; the numbered key is below the chart. Event key: Dec 31 – China reports the Wuhan pneumonia cluster to the WHO Jan 21 – First confirmed US case (Washington state) Jan 23 – Wuhan locke…
Horwitz is in the business of playing a version of mom for local college students. Concierge companies offering student support have existed for decades. But in recent years, a new crop of upstarts — such as Horwitz’s company, MindyKnows; the Bama Mama in Alab…
Many of us brought up related points at the time, but basically we were booed off the reservation: While recent research has provided evidence that the Medicaid expansions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) reduced mortality, there is no evidence on the effect o…
1. Will driverless cars increase or reduce urban density? 2. One decomposition approach to why interest rates have been going up. 3. New Guinness record holders. 4. Is there any chance of finding Rembrandt DNA? 5. “Abundance Corps is hosting Making Progress, a…
Anthropic’s economic team, including Anton Korinek and Chad Jones, have a valuable new paper, Economic Scenarios for Transformative AI. They make their assumptions explicit and provide a scenario explorer that lets you change them. How capable will AI become?…
The Dark Ages implies television and phones are the main cause of cognitive decline. This fails to explain the patterns in PISA scores. Why did England and Scotland fall so precipitously from 2000 to 2005 whilst America improved? Why did England and Estonia ho…
From a new NBER working paper: Whether AI assistance builds or erodes professional expertise is unsettled. In a pre-registered three-month randomized controlled trial, we gave 133 practicing patent lawyers at eleven U.S. intellectual property law firms access…
1. Scott Sumner as regional thinker. 2. The economists who work on “Productivity and Innovation” are most likely to use AI for their writing. 3. Michael Levin defends neo-neo-Platonism? 4. Look for and try to limit agent collusion. 5. Do orangutans like Indian…
Diversity is our strength is a common motto. Indeed it is one of GMU’s core values but what is the scientific evidence for this thesis? A new scoping review: Recent years have witnessed many strong claims that ‘diversity’ leads to more original and impactful s…
The Solow model has its uses, but it fails when it comes to major changes stemming from AI. Consider instead an economy with (at least) two factors of production: 1. Intelligence. Yes, formal smarts. Playing chess, proving math theorems, and doing well on eval…
Here is the statement, signed by Terry Tao among many other math notables, most of you probably have read it by now. I do not accept the most cynical interpretations of this proclamation. Some of you for instance may recall that I made and indeed stressed a si…
My second concern is the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident (OAI-HF), in which a swarm of agents essentially acted as a fanatically devoted collective, conducting cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack and that were unrelated to the task at h…
The UK economy grew 0.4 per cent in July as the global AI boom helped deliver an unexpectedly robust start to the third quarter, in a boost to Prime Minister Andy Burnham as he prepares for a tough first Budget next month. Friday’s figure from the Office for N…
The Prediction Archive is a public database of tens of thousands of world predictions. Using AI it tracks predictions over many decades and marks to market. I was surprised to discover that I am currently the highest ranked individual predictor in the world! H…
New technologies swept through Britain during the Second Industrial Revolution, destroying old jobs and creating new ones. We know little about how workers reallocated. Using 170 million full-count British census observations (1851-1911), I construct new task-…
From GPT Pro: The Manhattan Project scientists were remarkably good technological and arms-race forecasters. They correctly rejected the idea that America’s nuclear monopoly could be maintained; the Soviet bomb arrived in 1949. They anticipated thermonuclear w…
Why is war so economically costly? Our answer is that modern war lowers output not only by destroying productive factors, but also by making the surviving economy work less efficiently. Using uniquely comprehensive firm-level data collected during Russia’s ful…
1. Some Princeton philosophers are converting to Catholicism. 2. New Ada Palmer podcast. 3. Nice statement of how intelligence is overrated in the AI debates. 4. Joshua Rothman on the phones and mental health (New Yorker). 5. How different are philosophers? Th…
You will find it here, with transcript. The post My AI podcast with James Pethokoukis appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Here is the link. What are the changes in the other market prices telling you? The post Markets do respond to AGI news appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
A key U.S. government report on mental health, substance use and addiction showed continued improvements in several metrics, especially among young people. There was some uncertainty about the future of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health last year, whe…
Here is the link, here is the end bit: Who is the most important thinker of our time? It’s not about individual thinkers any more. It’s about the internet as this vast organ of knowledge that you can play like a musical instrument, and combining the internet w…
1. On India’s new gdp statistics. 2. Reasons why robotics are hard. 3. On 20th century music. 4. Is the inflation picture shifting? (correct link) 5. The importance of nuclear risk. 6. Call for AI safety start-ups. Project Tailwind. 7. Do the doomers have a go…
By Anton Korinek, Charles I. Jones, Szymon Sacher, Tess Cotter, and Peter McCrory, a strong line-up from Anthropic. They are sober, reasoned, scientific, and (for the most part) dynamically consistent. Here is the paper, here is the abstract: This paper presen…