~marginalrevolution | Bookmarks (570)

A long video chat, with Geoffrey Cain, who is more hawkish than I am.  Bari Weiss moderates.  One argument I make is that America may prefer if China does well with AI, because the non-status quo effects of AI may disrupt their system more than ours.  I also argue that for all the AI rival […] The post “Can America Win the AI War...

1. Is DOGE leading an AGI revolution in government? 2. And on the legislative front…? (does that still exist?) 3. Claims about what Deep Research is good for. 4. The genetic origin of the Indo-Europeans. 5. Deep Research reviews Deep Research. 6. Can a working Chinese car be that cheap? The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsThe very small...

Are we in a trade war today? Who knows? Doesn’t really matter. It’s always a good time to review important principles. A good source is Doug Irwin’s Three Simple Principles of Trade Policy published in 1996. Below I have updated occasionally with more recent data. Principle 1: A Tax on Imports is a Tax on […] The post Three Simple Principles of Trade Policy...

She is a Canadian economic historian at Oxford, here is from her home page: I am an economic historian. I explore the lives of ordinary people in the past and try to explain how poor economies get richer and improve human well-being. I’m interested in how social institutions – the formal and informal constraints on […] The post What should I ask Sheilagh Ogilvie?...

You can read it here, summary sentence: Based on the analysis above, the net assessment leans toward the conclusion that USAID’s benefits outweigh its costs on the whole, though with important qualifiers by sector and context. Here is a useful Michael Kremer (with co-authors) paper.  Here are some CRS links.  Here is a Samo analysis.  […] The post Deep Research considers the costs and...

Now he is in it: A former senior adviser to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors was arrested Friday and accused of leaking inside information from the Fed to the Chinese government over a period of several years, at one point receiving a $450,000 payment, and then lying about it to Fed investigators. Economist John […] The post I wonder if he enjoyed our...

1. Douglas Irwin on dismantling the Indian license raj.  And Indians praying for visas under Trump.  And podcast on Indian biotech potential. 2. New data on LLMs refereeing economics papers. 3. Do LLMs use trigonometry to do addition? 4. Is Occam’s Razor obsolete? 5. Oliver Kim on exchange rates. 6. New asteroid risk. 7. Heat […] The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on...

The Trump administration has issued a blizzard of Executive Orders, and set many other potential changes in the works.  They might rename Dulles Airport (can you guess to what?).  A bill has been introduced to add you-know-who to Mount Rushmore.  There is DOGE, and the ongoing attempt to reshape federal employment. At the same time, […] The post Trumpian policy as cultural policy appeared...

What are the best sources to read on US AID, and its costs and benefits?  I am not interested in your anecdotes and adjectives, please offer serious research sources only.  Thank you. The post US AID bleg appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Naveen_K. Naveen – I think you’re failing to ... by John SmithIn reply to ShatGPT. Tyler is like...

I have had it write a number of ten-page papers for me, each of them outstanding.  I think of the quality as comparable to having a good PhD-level research assistant, and sending that person away with a task for a week or two, or maybe more. Except Deep Research does the work in five or […] The post Deep Research appeared first on Marginal...

1. Congestion Pricing Tracker update, sigh…Economists like to think they are useful, but if the initial policy is not right you can expect the results to be disappointing, as these are so far.  It is true congestion prices that work, not “cordon prices.” 2. How is GPT-4o as a judge? 3. North Koreans at McDonald’s. […] The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on...

My take is that there is an evolving new consensus on the minimum wage. Namely, the effects of the minimum wage are heterogeneous and take place on more margins than employment. Read Jeffrey Clemens’s brilliant and accessible paper in the JEP for the theory. A good example of the heterogeneous impact is this new paper […] The post The New Consensus on the Minimum...

The subtitle is “Systemic Existential Risks from Incremental AI Development,” and the authors are Jan Kulveit, et.al.  Several of you have asked me for comments on this paper.  Here is the abstract: This paper examines the systemic risks posed by incremental advancements in artificial intelligence, developing the concept of `gradual disempowerment’, in contrast to the […] The post Gradual Empowerment? appeared first on Marginal...

Maya Chouikrat, Algeria, to support training for an international olympiad of informatics team. Mercy Muwanguzi and Kwesiga Pather, Uganda, for sanitation robotics to be used in medical centers. Johan Fourie, South Africa,  Professor of Economics at Stellenbosch University, to write a graphics novel on classical liberalism in a South African context. Ken Opalo, Associate Professor, […] The post Emergent Ventures Africa and Caribbean winners,...

One explanation of the gender wage gap is taste discrimination, as in Becker (1957). We test for taste discrimination by constructing a novel measure of misogyny using Google Trends data on searches that include derogatory terms for women. We find—surprisingly, in our view—that misogyny is an economically meaningful and statistically significant predictor of the wage […] The post Does the Gender Wage Gap Actually...

1. The world’s most elite sober coach? (FT…his fees seem low to me?) 2. El Salvador planning on releasing many from prison? 3. An early version of portfolio theory, from the late 19th century.  French, of course. 4. Deep Research okie-dokie.  It is amazing.  And a wee bit of data.  And another relevant comment. 5. […] The post Monday assorted links appeared first on...

He has passed, here is one obituary. The post Robert Paul Wolff, RIP appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsHugely indebted to his video lecture series on the Critique, ... by Lawrence RowlandI was going to let this go but the comments by uneducated and ... by Donald PretariIn reply to HisBN. Actually, its a terrible book review , ... by HisBNIn reply to...

In 1994 I published Genetic Testing: An Economic and Contractarian Analysis which discussed how genetic testing could undermine insurance markets. I also proposed a solution, genetic insurance, which would in essence insure people for changes in their health and life insurance premiums due to the revelation of genetic data. Later John Cochrane would independently create […] The post Genetic Prediction and Adverse Selection appeared...

Often I don’t write particular posts because I feel it is obvious to everybody.  Yet it rarely is. So here is my post on o1 pro, soon to be followed by o3 pro, and Deep Research is being distributed, which uses elements of o3.  (So far it is amazing, btw.) o1 pro is the smartest […] The post o1 pro appeared first on Marginal...

Brad Setser estimates the costs at 0.8 percent of U.S: gdp.  I am not sure if he is considering exchange rate adjustments in that figure. Kevin Bryan writes: The problem with escalating, again, is that Canada is more reliant on US energy than vice versa, US ports than vice versa, US intermediate goods than vice […] The post Sundry observations on the Trump tariffs...

Oh the howls that claim elicited.  Basically Dallas did not want to give him a Supermax extension for $345 million (no, Luka did not ask to be traded).  So Luka is now gone, here are some notes from ESPN: The Mavericks were motivated to move Doncic because of his constant conditioning concerns, sources told MacMahon. […] The post Remember when I said Luka was...

In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu famously argued that: …Peace is the natural effect of trade. Two nations who traffic with each other become reciprocally dependent; for if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling; and thus their union is founded on their mutual necessities. Similar arguments were […] The post Peace and Free Trade appeared first...

Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism.  A very good short book, defending “left wing modernism,” a much maligned target on the right these days.  Hatherley himself is a much underrated figure, a commie who came along at the wrong time but a very good writer and thinker about aesthetics. Stuart A. Reid, The Lumumba Plot: The Secret […] The post What I’ve been reading appeared first...

1. Opportunity cost?? 2. Is Tether the most profitable company in the world per employee? 3. Flow (trailer), the animated Latvian silent movie about a cat, dog, bird, capybara, and coatimundi, is excellent and unique. 4. Patrick Collison interviews Noah Smith. 5. Does more law lead to more economic growth, due to contingent clauses? 6. […] The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on...