How Much Will Gold Fall in a Hot War?
A ten percent jump in oil prices - if it happens - maps into a four percent drop in gold
Department
Economics.
Policy, markets, and the science of choices.
Lately on the shelf
30 of 2365Are LLMs good or bad Bayesians?
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,…
The Visual Æsthetics of Cheesecake Factories: (LATE) FRIDAY FOG & FLATLANDS
Looking at life, work, & the world here in & from the vantage point of Berkeley, California; today’s burning question: should the People’s House look like a restaurant franchise?
RIP Bill Nordhaus
A giant of economics and my first great mentor
William Nordhaus, RIP
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.
And so it begins…
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…
Saturday assorted links
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…
Markets on the Eve of War
A recording from Robin J Brooks's live video
CROSSPOST: NOAH SMITH: Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: TNG: Farewell, My Captain
Noah’s subheadline: “ A TV character gave us a glimpse of what humanity might become”;
My Barcelona talk
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.
Reading List 10/31/26
Space fiber optic cable manufacturing, nuclear district heating, Spain’s high-speed rail crash, China’s spaceplane, and more.
Anthropic Isn't Just a Company, It's a Payoff
The trillion dollar Anthropic IPO will enrich Google and Amazon, who are ostensibly competitors. How does that make sense? It doesn’t, unless Anthropic is four flailing monopolies in a trench coat.
Azeem Azhar on the Explosion of Hacking and Other AI Issues
The threats just keep coming
Dan Williams on Why AI (Probably) Won’t Kill Us
Yascha Mounk and Dan Williams discuss the impact of AI on society, education, and politics.
The pass-through of retail crime
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…
Markets on the Eve of War
Markets have this week moved to fully price in a return to a “hot” war with Iran
The unintended consequences of academic leniency
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…
Farewell, my Captain
A TV character gave us a glimpse of what humanity might become.
Price discrimination by needless complexity
(This is another script for a forthcoming weekly rant. Recycling disclaimer.)
How a 1906 Book Predicted the DSA
Socialism was never popular in the U.S. Now it is.
Friday assorted links
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…
Let’s Stop Telling Insomniacs to Get More Sleep
Useful policy advice must address How, not just What.
Trump & Co. Do Not Claim to Be Angry at Comparison to Saddam Hussein: LAUGH OF THE DAY
In which “Wall Street Journal” pretends that a Great Republic really ought to make its public spaces look like the kitsch-glitz of a successful carbmaxxxing chain restaurant...
Better Incentives, More Kidneys, More Lives
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…
Trumpflation and Travel
One chart to end your week
Are there too many misdemeanor convictions?
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…
Temperature, tools and tobacco
Our monthly newsletter covering the latest work, new platform features and key updates from Data For India.
Is Kevin Warsh a Dove or a Hawk?
If you were to consult Yoda from Star Wars on this, he’d say: “wrong question that is.”
Chronicle of Higher Education interviews me on AI and education
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…
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, & Co.: They Are Not Brains, They Are Kernel-Smoother Functions: HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES
If your large language model reminds you of a brain, it’s because you’re projecting—not because it’s thinking. It’s not reasoning, it’s interpolation And anthropomorphizing the algorithm doesn’t...