Policy, markets, and the science of choices.
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…
A recording from Robin J Brooks's live video
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…
Going where the money — and the power — is
The rise in global oil prices should have given the Canadian Dollar a big lift, but it didn't
A lot, actually. But it won't look quite like what humans do with our intelligence.
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…
Protests and Education
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…
A recording from Robin J Brooks's live video
China’s EV subsidies, the future of aeroderivative gas turbines, a US-Saudi nuclear deal, defective roadway guardrails, and more.
Oligarchy, wealth taxes, and more
Francis Fukuyama discusses the experiences and individuals that shaped him.
You can use your central bank to cap yields, but you can't make foreigners buy your debt
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…
London pub meet next Friday! Plus, a new episode of The Good Fight Club.
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…
Witches, spells, tarot are taking Gen Z by storm.
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…
Executives and big law lawyers in the Nexstar-TEGNA case are openly showing contempt for a judge. And the ABA Antitrust bar is silent on the corruption of the Paramount-Warner merger.
The subheadline: "The Trump administration is again shifting its stated rationale for placing comprehensive tariffs...". 60-country tariffs in search of a human-rights pretextual costume...
Manufacturing slowbalisation was actually delocalisation (mostly to China).
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.
Why the world economy is still at risk from the Iran debacle
When you're running out of fiscal space, the last thing you need is war
Our one remaining functional institution is going downhill.