Bookmarks (564)

Schools in Beijing will introduce AI courses and teaching methods into the primary and secondary school curriculum starting September, to nurture young talent and boost growth in the advancing sector. In a statement shared on its official website on Friday (Mar 7), Chinese education authorities said schools would “explore and build” AI courses while incorporating […] The post China AI mandate of the day...

1. Australia fact of the day: “In 2023-24, for the first time, Australia spent more on in-kind benefits (e.g. the NDIS) than on transfers.” 2. Fine-tuned chatbots seem to work as well as humans for mental health treatments in this RCT. 3. The decline in publicly listed companies is microcaps. 4. The pro-natalist movement in […] The post Monday assorted links appeared first on...

I’ve been shouting Sell! for many years. Perhaps now is the chance to do it. Here’s a recap: The Federal Government owns more than half of Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Alaska and it owns nearly half of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming. See the map (PDF) for more [N.B. the vast majority of this land is […] The post Sell Floyd Bennett Field! appeared first...

The New York Times has described her recent Onyx Storm as the bestselling adult book of the last twenty years, as the work sold 2.7 million copies in the first week of publication.  Out of curiosity I started the book, but it is not for me.  It feels like reading a computer game?  Grok 3 […] The post Rebecca Yarros and the vibe shift...

This is all from Andrew Mitrak, I will not double indent: “Back in January, I listened to your interview on the Frames of Space podcast. You shared some advice that I haven’t seen you share elsewhere, so I’m pasting a transcript below here (transcribed with Gemini 2.5 Pro) Host: Do you see podcasts in general, especially podcasts […] The post Start your podcast (from my email)...

Peter Navarro is arguing that the pending tariffs will raise $600 billion a year, which might make them the biggest tax increase in U.S: history.  I am completely against this!  And for reasons I (and Alex) have explained over the years in dozens of MR posts. I would like to point out one thing, however, […] The post Consistency on taxes and tariffs appeared...

1. “Our results suggest that the recent stagnation of the college wage premium primarily reflects demand factors, specifically a slowdown in the pace of skill biased technological change.” 2. The Zvi on Gemini 2.5.  I agree it is very strong. 3. Very old interview with Hrishikesh Mukherjee. 4. Does Boulez still matter? A good talk, […] The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on...

For a brief moment in the mid-1950s, it seemed as if Liverpool’s transportation system was about to be revolutionised, not by cars, trams, buses or ferries, but instead by helicopters.  As strange as it may seem, Liverpool was at the forefront of a flurry of interest from planners and politicians who imagined that an age […] The post That was then, this is now...

Here is a new set of results, by Laura Lemahieu, et.al.: Abstaining from social media has become a popular digital disconnection strategy of individuals to enhance their well-being. To date, it is unclear whether social media abstinences are truly effective in improving well-being, however, as studies produce inconsistent outcomes. This preregistered systematic review and meta-analysis […] The post Social media and well-being appeared first...

1. Richard Ngo on AI safety. 2. Owen Hatherley interview on Central European emigres to Britain. 3. AGI and the future of warfare. 4. 42 new words added to the OED (NYT). 5. Okie-dokie. 6. Argentina nearing new $20 billion loan from the IMF (FT).  “He said the central bank’s gross reserves, which include a […] The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on...

Peter Marks was key to President Trump’s greatest first-term achievement: Operation Warp Speed. In an emergency, he pushed the FDA to move faster—against every cultural and institutional incentive to go slow. He fought the system and won. I had some hope that FDA commissioner Mary Makary would team with Marks at CBER. Makary understands that […] The post Peter Marks Forced Out at FDA...

Mexico’s economy is slowing sharply and will soon fall into recession, several economists predict, as Donald Trump’s changing tariff plans cast uncertainty over the relationship with its largest trading partner. Mexico is one of the countries most vulnerable to the US president’s drive to reshore investment and close trade deficits. The country’s economy was already […] The post Is Mexico falling into recession? appeared...

David Sheff, Yoko: A Biography.  An excellent work, I view Yoko as a quite good visual and conceptual artist, a sometimes quite interesting but hard to listen to in any volume musical creator, and overall a pretty stunning woman.  Sheff has known Yoko well for decades, so you get a real sense of her from […] The post What I’ve been reading appeared first...

Here is the YouTube link.  Here is part of the episode summary: I had a wonderful conversation with Professor Tyler Cowen. We discussed his view of economic growth, the chase for GDP growth, the most underrated risks to global economic stability, and whether capitalism will survive the next century. Other topics included universal basic income, behavioral […] The post Science podcast with Hrvoje Kukina appeared...

1. Guess why Utah has so few restaurants. 2. Invisible College, August, for 18-22 year olds, Cambridge UK. 3. How did Kerala become relatively wealthy? 4. Sharks make clicking sounds? (NYT) 5. Digital Delacroix (NYT). 6. Bari Weiss interviews Leonard Leo. 7. Speculative. 8. Anthropic on how the AIs think.  Blog post here. 9. Trump […] The post Friday assorted links appeared first on...

The economics of AI remains surprisingly understudied, even as technical progress in artificial intelligence continues rapidly. The Stripe Economics of AI Fellowship aims to help fill that gap by supporting foundational academic research in the area. We invite graduate students and early-career researchers who are interested in studying the economics of AI to apply, regardless […] The post Stripe economics of AI fellowship appeared...

Here is a good post by Brian Albrecht, he works through the logic.  A VAT, properly understood, does not favor say European producers over American producers.  Work through his example if you don’t see this right away.  In this sense the pro-tariff “fairness” arguments are quite wrong.  Yet I am not entirely convinced by the […] The post Is a VAT an export subsidy?...

Here is a new and sure to be controversial piece from the JPE: Why does the stock market rise and fall? From 1989 to 2017, the real per capita value of corporate equity increased at a 7.2% annual rate. We estimate that 40% of this increase was attributable to a reallocation of rewards to shareholders […] The post Where do stock market returns come...

Your daily life will feel more controllable and legible than it does now. Nearly everything will feel more personalized to you, ready for you whenever you need it, in just the way you like it. This won’t be because of one big thing, but because of unfathomable numbers of intelligent actions taken by computers that […] The post Dean Ball on “how it will...

This year is likely to be remembered for the Covid-19 pandemic and for a significant presidential election, but there is a new contender for the most spectacularly newsworthy happening of 2020: the unveiling of GPT-3. As a very rough description, think of GPT-3 as giving computers a facility with words that they have had with numbers […] The post That was then, this is now...

1. The people who still use typewriters. 2. “Vaccine skeptic hired to head federal study of immunizations and autism.” 3. David Perell on AI and writing. 4. Paralysed man stands again after receiving ‘reprogrammed’ stem cells. 5. Modeling how the military and the media interact.  An underdiscussed topic. 6. How baseball analytics are keeping pitchers from […] The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on...

In Collaborating with AI Agents: Field Experiments on Teamwork, Productivity, and Performance Harang Ju and Sinan Aral (both at MIT) paired humans and AIs in a set of marketing tasks to generate some 11,138 ads for a large think tank. The basic story is that working with the AIs increased productivity substantially. Important, but not […] The post The Madmen and the AIs appeared...

Here is the link, via Alex T. The post Men watch women’s sports more than women do appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsTo me, the illogical thing is that men like to watch men's ... by FloccinaWomen have to do more of the housework, so that leaves less ... by KalebergIn reply to Sashoir. A friend of mine preferred women's ... by KalebergIn...

A few thoughts on the new ChatGPT image release. (1) This changes filters. Instagram filters required custom code; now all you need are a few keywords like “Studio Ghibli” or Dr. Seuss or South Park. (2) This changes online ads. Much of the workflow of ad unit generation can now be automated, as per QT […] The post Balaji on the new image release...

I can think of a few reasons: At least for the time being, even very good LLMs cannot be counted on for originality.  And at least for the time being, good economic reasoning does not require originality, quite the contrary. Good chains of reasoning in economics are not too long and complicated.  If they run […] The post Why LLMs are so good at...

1. Inaccurate beliefs about skill decay.  George Loewenstein papers have been quite good historically… 2. New Dwarkesh book with Stripe Press, an oral history of AI. 3. New Alice Evans paper on the global Islamic revival. 4. Waymo is coming to WDC. 5. 2025 color stats. 6. Bhattacharya now confirmed at NIH. The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn...

On November 4, 1979, a mob of radical university students and supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini, surged over the wall and occupied the US Embassy in Tehran. Fifty two Americans were taken hostage but six evaded capture. Hiding out for days, the escapees managed to contact Canadian diplomat John Sheardown and Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor and […] The post Canada and America in Better Times...

Regulatory fragmentation occurs when multiple federal agencies oversee a single issue. Using the full text of the Federal Register, the government’s official daily publication, we provide the first systematic evidence on the extent and costs of regulatory fragmentation. Fragmentation increases the firm’s costs while lowering its productivity, profitability, and growth. Moreover, it deters entry into […] The post Rethinking regulatory fragmentation appeared first on...

1. 23 Australians sent to the hospital by red ant stings. 2. Maurice Obstfeld on the trade deficit. 3. William Vollmann update, good piece. 4. The State Capacity crisis, and a popular version here. 5. On the underground economy. 6. Iguanas rafted from North America to Fiji. The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         Comments#2 can’t be any more clear...

You recently mentioned the Alpha School and their claims about AI tutoring. I share the skepticism expressed in your comments section regarding selection bias and the lack of validated academic benchmarks. I wanted to highlight a more rigorously evaluated project called Tutor CoPilot, conducted jointly by Stanford’s NSSA and the online tutoring firm FEVTutor (sadly […] The post Jonathan Bechtel on AI tutoring (from...

Cato has a good summary of Deregulation in Argentina: The end of Argentina’s extensive rent controls has resulted in a tripling of the supply of rental apartments in Buenos Aires and a 30 percent drop in price. The new open-skies policy and the permission for small airplane owners to provide transportation services within Argentina has […] The post Argentina’s DOGE appeared first on Marginal...

This Valentine’s Day was a memorable one as MRU finally hit its nationwide goal of having MRU products adopted by 25% of U.S. high schools by the year 2025. (See our final MRU Adoption & Market Share map for 2-14-25.) Great work, bravo! The post Congratulations to the Marginal Revolution University team! appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Dean. “Context, please. What does...

Buried in China’s latest government budget were some numbers that add up to an alarming trend. Tax revenue is dropping. The decline means that China’s national government has less money to address the country’s serious economic challenges, including a housing market crash and the near bankruptcy of hundreds of local governments… Tax revenue fell further […] The post China fact of the day appeared...

1. Is YouTube why Herbie Hancock has not made an album in so long? 2. Often you need only one person with the AI.  And the demand for translators is falling. 3. Willingness to be paid. 4. Speculative claims about AI tutoring. 5. The peso in Argentina is now quite overvalued, and this is a […] The post Monday assorted links appeared first on...

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him.  He has a new book coming out, namely Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead. Ken is tenured at Harvard, here is his Wikipedia page, here is Ken on scholar.google.com, here is o1 pro on Rogoff, […] The post What should I ask Ken Rogoff?...

Does it matter whether SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab in Wuhan or had natural zoonotic origins? I think on the margin it does matter. First, and most importantly, the higher the probability that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab the higher the probability we should expect another pandemic.* Research at Wuhan was not especially unusual or […] The post What Follows from Lab Leak? appeared...

If you peer into the souls of the major LLMs, they are (broadly) positive, friendly, universalistic, and cosmopolitan.  They are more objective than media as a source of information.  They are too politically correct, but nastiness would be much worse.  They are open, and you can be inquisitive with them.  They are (again broadly) socially […] The post We are lucky good LLMs were...

While the psychological dispositions that underlie conspiracy thinking are well researched, there has been remarkably little research on the political preferences of conspiracy believers that go beyond self-reported ideology or single political issue dimensions. Using data from the European Voter Election Study (EVES), the relationship between conspiracy thinking and attitudes on three deeper-lying and salient […] The post Who believes in conspiracy theories? appeared...

Carney said removing barriers to the free movement of workers, goods and services across the country would increase the size of Canada’s economy by $250 billion… Carney said his government would table legislation by July 1 to allow goods to travel across the country barrier-free. He said his government would also remove labour mobility restrictions […] The post Carney seeks internal free trade for...

1. O’Shaughnessy Ventures launches Infinite Books, Jimmy Soni in charge. 2. Matt Kahn on natural disaster economics. 3. Namibia will soon be the richest country in Africa. 4. Bhutan holds lots of Bitcoin. 5. “How I read poems, with aphantasia.” 6. Welcome to the world’s biggest rodeo. 7. US border officials have caught more people […] The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on...

City Journal: A year and a half since fires devastated the historic town of Lahaina on the island of Maui, Hawaii, only six houses have been rebuilt—six out of more than 2,000. Why is the recovery effort taking so long? Initially, the biggest hurdles were the pace of debris removal and damage litigation. Both were […] The post Maui is Not Abundant appeared first...

The Federal Communications Commission is prepared to block mergers and acquisitions involving companies that continue promoting diversity, equity and inclusion policies, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said Friday. President Donald Trump has ordered federal agencies such as the Justice Department to draw up lists of companies, nonprofits and other organizations to target over “illegal DEI efforts,” which the […] The post Not the precedent I have been...

It’s easy enough to trace the decline of young white men in American letters—just browse The New York Times’s “Notable Fiction” list. In 2012 the Times included seven white American men under the age of 43 (the cut-off for a millennial today); in 2013 there were six, in 2014 there were six. And then the doors shut. By 2021, there […] The post The vanishing male writer appeared first...

US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has intercepted an increasing number of eggs from Mexico, where a carton of a dozen costs about $2. For comparison, the cost in many parts of California is just under $10 per dozen, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Nationally, there has been a 48% increase in eggs […] The post Thwarted arbitrage? appeared first on Marginal...

1. How Rickover built the US Navy. 2. My interview with Reason magazine. 3. The importance of stablecoins to the US Treasury market. 4. Another measure of how automatable your job is.  And tweet thread. 5. New AI and economics model from Epoch: Twitter thread: https://x.com/EpochAIResearch/status/1902802037752111569 Interactive playground: https://epoch.ai/gate Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04941 6. More on Liu Jiakun, Pritzker winner.  […] The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on...

We analyze the impact of wind turbines on house prices, distinguishing between effects of proximity and shadow flicker from rotor blades covering the sun. By utilizing data from 2.4 million house transactions and 6,878 wind turbines in Denmark, we can control for house fixed effects in our estimation. Our results suggest strong negative impacts on […] The post Wind turbines lower Danish real estate...

To Dr. Damrosch, who has studied academic culture at colleges, the current turmoil was vaguely reminiscent of a 1940s episode at the school now known as Iowa State University. The school’s economics department — in a paper on economic policy for wartime food production — had proposed replacing butter with margarine, said Dr. Damrosch. The […] The post Some history of higher education appeared...

A tour guide is raking in the cash by carrying fatigued females up a mountain. Xiao Chen, 26, who works at Mount Tai in Shandong Province, China, accompanies tourists on their trek to the peak – but many of his female clients often want to be carried up the last 1,000 steps. He starts by […] The post Those new service sector jobs, China...

1. One report on car-free Tempe, AZ. 2. Speculative new claims about human evolution. 3. Is dark energy evolving? And from WaPo — the universe might stop expanding, big if true. 4. Indian painting sets new auction record at $13.7 million. 5. Update on Ukrainian defenses and drones. 6. Understanding solar energy. 7. Claude can […] The post Friday assorted links appeared first on...

The Economist reports that China is now the second largest producer of new pharmaceuticals, after the United States. China has long been known for churning out generic drugs, supplying raw ingredients and managing clinical trials for the pharmaceutical world. But its drugmakers are now also at the cutting edge, producing innovative medicines that are cheaper […] The post China’s Medicines are Saving American Lives...