~marginalrevolution | Bookmarks (545)

More importantly, Honduras is not just locked in a dispute with Silicon Valley billionaires, as the authors would lead you to believe. Other claimants against Honduras at the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) include the Paiz family, one of the wealthiest in Guatemala, the U.S. bank JPMorgan Chase, and others from Honduras, Panama, Mexico, […] The post Honduras and its disputes appeared first...

In France, frozen products accounted for 24 per cent of all pastries and other sweet baked goods in 2021. In the UK 21 per cent of pastries were frozen, compared with 13 per cent in Spain and 17 per cent in the US, according to research groups Gira and Global Market Insights. Industry researchers have […] The post France frozen croissant fact of the...

1. Mr. Greedy produced 230 descendants in an era of population collapse, RIP.  And there are two Shakers left (NYT). 2. The Beatles’ deepest song. 3. Joe Reid once made a point like this, though not in the context of AI: “advanced artificial intelligence makes the return of secret guild society likely, because the only […] The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on...

Reuters: Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drug Company said…that it is working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to import and distribute penicillin in the country temporarily….Cuban’s Cost Plus will import Lentocilin brand penicillin powder marketed by Portugal-based Laboratórios Atral S.A. There are two remarkable items in the above passage. First, there is a shortage […] The post Peer Approval to Address Drug Shortages...

Here is a very good response to readers’ questions essay by Richard Hanania, excerpt: Although EHC [elite human capital] types can make a lot of mistakes, it’s inevitable that they will rule and it’s mostly a good thing that they do. I think a society where most elites could stomach someone like Trump would have […] The post Elite Human Capital Is Not Just...

Yes, there is a human capital crisis of sorts: We show the incidence of mental ill-health has been rising especially among the young in the years and especially so in Scotland. The incidence of mental ill-health among young men in particular, started rising in 2008 with the onset of the Great Recession and for young […] The post Mental health trajectories in the UK...

1. Podcast with Andrej Karpathy.  Recommended.  And Meta AI is popular. 2. AI music arbitrage fraud. 3. It seems many Swiss referenda are based on phony signatures? 4. realtimecrimeindex.com. 5. The French air conditioning law. 6. “These results imply further frontier model scaling — which is currently estimated at 4x increase per year — may […] The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on...

The subtitle is The Origins of Modern Economics, and the author is Benjamin M. Friedman.  Here is the book’s home page, you can order here.  I very much look forward to reading this one.  Here is my earlier CWT with Ben Friedman. The post *Religious Influences on Economic Thinking* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to CJ. There was specialization and trade...

Bloomberg: Moraal is among the growing number of Dutch people struggling to find a rental property after a new law designed to make homes more affordable ended up aggravating a housing shortage. Aiming to protect low-income tenants, the government in July imposed rent controls on thousands of homes, introducing a system of rating properties based on […] The post The Affordable Rent Act appeared first...

As Ed Banfield observed, the flight to the suburbs pre-dated the car because people prefer cheaper housing and more space: “The first elevated steam railroads were in New York in the 1870s, and twenty years later every sizable city had an electric trolley system. Railroads and trolleys enabled more people to commute and to commute […] The post From the comments, on moving to...

Nicholas Kruus, 17, Highlands Ranch, CO, poverty alleviation, general career support. Tobi Shevlane, Oxford, AI and prediction of real world events. John Gross-Whitaker, Stanford, writing and thinking and career development. Benjamin Manning, MIT, AI as a tool for doing economic research. Arden Berg, Western Massachusetts, incoming student at the University of Chicago, philosophy and economics. […] The post Emergent Ventures, 37th cohort appeared first...

Popular New Keynesian macroeconomic models predict that cuts in various types of distortionary taxes are contractionary when monetary policy is constrained at the zero lower bound. We turn to a long span of history in the United Kingdom to test this hypothesis. Using a new long-run dataset of narrative-identified tax changes from 1918to 2020, we […] The post Another zero lower bound prediction bites...

Russ tweets: In about two months I will be discussing Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman with @tylercowen  on our respective podcasts. Read along with us if you’d like. 872 pages so start soon. It starts slowly. Just gets better and better. So what should Russ and I talk about, and here I am asking for […] The post With Russ Roberts, on Vassily Grossman...

1. Why is India so bad at sport? (FT) 2. Review of Olivier Roy on culture. 3. Strong ratings for Reflection 70B, a new open source model. 4. Technology of the future? 5. I heard this song on satellite radio yesterday — does anyone still think about these guys? 6. When South Africa banned alcohol […] The post Friday assorted links appeared first on...

In the 1970s the general aviation aircraft industry was selling 15,000 or more aircraft a year but that number fell by a factor of about 10 in the early 1980s. What happened? One factor was a massive increase in tort liability as discussed in my paper with Eric Helland, Product Liability and Moral Hazard: Evidence […] The post Why Don’t We Have Flying Cars?...

NYC is now a more expensive destination for visitors: The average hotel prices in New York City rose 7.4 percent over the past year (July 2023 to July 2024), compared with an only 2.1 percent increase nationally, according to data from CoStar. Despite the law’s promise, rent hits an all-time high and vacancy rates stay […] The post Banning Airbnb in NYC appeared first...

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column.  Here is one excerpt: To the extent there is a lot of slack [with cost and energy], AIs themselves will create wild products of the imagination, especially as they improve in computing power and skill. AIs will sing to each other, write for each other, talk […] The post How weird will AI culture get?...

Here is the link, hope to see you there!  October 16, and you do need to pre-register. The post Los Angeles area meet-up for CWT fans appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Michael Stack. Good, want to avoid rayward by DeCologeroIn reply to Math. ... by Robert SmithIn reply to krugfan. Anyone else awaiting the mystery reveal ... by Tyler's turning...

1. “I’d like to see an AI future that focuses on what makes a great teaching interface, what makes users pay attention, and will make more people better learners.  Until then, UATX is the only startup I see putting the human interface first.”  Link here. 2. Indian student builds the world’s smallest vacuum cleaner, using […] The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on...

This is one of the best and most correct self-help books.  Bryan describes it as follows: I’ve been writing economically-inspired self-help essays for almost two decades, Self-Help Is Like a Vaccine compiles the most helpful 5-7% of my advice. Of Bryan’s recent string of books, this is the one I agree with the most.  Bryan offers some […] The post *Self-Help is Like a Vaccine*, by...

In this post, we show that under the median estimated elasticity the socially optimal fertility rate is 2.4 in the US, well above today’s 1.7, given that the US should place a value of 14.28x GDP per additional birth ($1.17mn per birth). Furthermore, to achieve this, the US should be willing to spend the equivalent […] The post Solving for optimum U.S. fertility appeared...

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary: Tyler and Philip discuss how well scientists have stood up to power historically, the problematic pressures scientists feel within academia today, artificial wombs and the fertility crisis, the price of invisibility, the terrifying nature of outer space and Gothic cathedrals, the […] The post My excellent Conversation with Philip Ball...

Announced today, here is the website: “A network of thinkers and builders advancing human flourishing in the AI era.” Here is a tweet storm from Brendan McCord.  Here is the video and Substack post. The post Cosmos Institute appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Mike. I see AI mowing through white-collar ... by Anti-GnosticIn reply to mkt42. Meta: Cosmo Kramer's coffee...

1. Nabeel Qureshi on adapting to the AI revolution. 2. Patrick Wolff on San Francisco YIMBY. 3. Jeff Sachs Daily Mail. 4. Rothko Chapel in Houston to close indefinitely, and the Pergamon Museum in Berlin may not reopen until 2043.  We are a bit asleep on some of these heritage issues.  Low-quality institutions are not […] The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on...