~marginalrevolution | Bookmarks (551)

Here is one new method to lower teen-age driving deaths: We show that a targeted law can modify teens’ risky behavior. We examine the effects of an Australian intervention banning first-year drivers from driving late at night with multiple peers, which had accounted for one-fifth of their traffic fatalities. Using data on individual drivers linked […] The post Shaping the Habits of Teen Drivers...

1. The marshmallow test is not holding up. 2. What do they serve in an Arctic restaurant? 3. High rise construction in Canada. 4. FEE seeks editorial director. 5. Who’s weird? 6. AI and the humanities. 7. Voice GPT doing some British accents. The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Nicholas 𝖓𝖎𝖌𝖌𝖊𝖗ponte. Like, ... by it's the...

A fascinating new paper The Political Economic Determinants of Nuclear Power: Evidence from Chernobyl by Makarin, Qian, and Wang was recently presented at the NBER Pol. Economy conference. The paper is nominally about how fossil fuel companies and coal miners in the US and UK used the Chernobyl disaster to successfully lobby against building more […] The post The Unseen Fallout: Chernobyl’s Deadly Air...

This is all from an anonymous reader, not by me, but I will not indent: “Hi Tyler, I enjoyed your post – I’m kind of tired of this – and wanted to respond to it as I think what you wrote gets at two important trends happening in politics today. 1 – High and Low Decoupling […] The post High and low decoupling, and other...

Why do so many economic historians ignore the benefits of the largest free-trade zone in history:  inside the US!  Thanks to the “dormant” commerce clause of the US Constitution, the US has achieved rapid growth, despite the tariffs.  I write about it here:  This Little-Known Section of the Constitution Made America the World’s #1 SuperPower – […] The post Mark Skousen on free trade (from...

Introducing: Arena Magazine. It’s a print & digital magazine about tech, capitalism, and the USA – that’s actually on the side of tech, capitalism, and the USA! Subscribe: http://arenamag.com/join Here is a link and a thread. The post Arena magazine appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to OutHere. Underrated comment. Using next ... by OneMoreTimeIn reply to Marc Cohen. Walking in Memphis...

1. Why has ornament in architecture declined? 2. Patrick McKenzie on the Crowdstripe failure. 3. David Brooks on AI (NYT). 4. I’ve already linked to this podcast with Julia La Roche, recorded before Biden left office.  In it I predicted Kamala Harris will be the next POTUS. 5. The physics of the emergence of life […] The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on...

The UK Health Security Agency has raised their pandemic threat level for H5N1 bird flu from a 3 to a 4 on a 6 point scale.  My takeaway is that we have completely failed to stem the outbreak in cattle, there has been animal to human transmission which we are surely undercounting, but so far […] The post Operation Warp Speed for Cows appeared...

We provide credible estimates of the effect of duration and uncertainty in local regulatory approval times on the rate of housing production. The analysis derives from a novel dataset of development timelines for all multifamily housing projects permitted in the City of Los Angeles between 2010 and 2022. As a lower bound, simply by pulling […] The post Approval timelines really matter for housing...

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt: Now enter Bitcoin. Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming has introduced a bill to have the Treasury create a $67 billion (at current value) stockpile of the cryptocurrency, and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump supports the idea, saying it would be “a permanent national asset to benefit all […] The post When does a Bitcoin reserve make...

Here is the paper, with co-authors Will Dobbie, Benjamin Goldman, Sonya R. Porter, and Crystal S. Yang.  Here is the abstract: We show that intergenerational mobility changed rapidly by race and class in recent decades and use these trends to study the causal mechanisms underlying changes in economic mobility. For white children in the U.S. […] The post The new Raj Chetty paper on...

1. Wolfgang Rihm, RIP (NYT). 2. Maduro at 82% to “win,” Polymarket puts this “under review,” however. 3. Fairfax County data center NIMBY uh-oh. 4. Higher inflation comes to Japan (NYT), 5. Rorschach test El Salvador prison video, interesting. 6. Thomas Sargent joins Cato as a visiting scholar. 7. Friend.com 8. A Caracas source to […] The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on...

The attack affected online services of all major Russian banks, national payment systems, social networks and messengers, government resources, and dozens of other services…Carpet-Bombing Hack: #Ukraine’s Intelligence (#HUR) has completed one of the largest cyberattacks on Russia’s financial sector and government resources, Kyiv Post HUR sources reported. Here is the link. The post Underreported news of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.        ...

We further show that demographic and productivity factors do not represent convincing drivers of real interest rates over long spans. That is from a new AER piece by Kenneth S. Rogoff, Barbara Rossi, and Paul Schmelzing.  Here are less gated copies of the piece.  Here are some MR posts on Cowen’s Third Law. The post Cowen’s Third Law, illustrated appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION....

In the Austrian-Hungarian Empire during World War I: In order to obtain the required manpower, the armaments manufacturers began to pay their workers higher wages.  This had an almost instant impact on other businesses and firms, which could not compete with the wages of the armaments industry and were thus unable to find any workers.  […] The post Are higher wages in wartime just...

1. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is a very good movie.  Romanian, bizarre, funny. 2. The Dual Beveridge Curve? 3. How price elastic is charitable giving? 4. Claims correlated with dark oxygen claims. 5. The Brain Book (for children).  Supports the Albanian language too. 6. William Calley is gone. […] The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on...

Jeffrey Clemens points us to some bonkers editorializing in the NYTimes coverage of the likely stolen election in Venezuela. The piece starts out reasonably enough: Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, was declared the winner of the country’s tumultuous presidential election early Monday, despite enormous momentum from an opposition movement that had been convinced this was […] The post Venezuela under “Brutal Capitalism” appeared first...

But many of the phrases the English grew up with are fading away as younger generations plug into TikTok or other platforms where they learn to call each other “Karen” or “basic” like any other rando, instead of sticking with tried and tested indigenous slurs. Nearly 60% of the Gen Z cohort haven’t heard the insult “lummox,” […] The post Britain fact of the day appeared...

There is a very interesting new paper on this topic byIshan B. Nath, Valerie A. Ramey, and Peter J. Klenow.  Here is the abstract: Does a permanent rise in temperature decrease the level or growth rate of GDP in affected countries? Differing answers to this question lead prominent estimates of climate damages to diverge by […] The post Global warming, and rate effects vs....

My previously scheduled Conversation with him was postponed, now it is on the schedule again.  So what should I ask him?  (Wikipedia page here, if you don’t know what a lummox is). The post What should I ask Tom Tugendhat? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsAfter Brexit, shouldn't the UK just apply to be states 51-54 in ... by Quantitative SneezingIn reply to...

We find that markups increased by about 30 percent on average over the sample period. The change is primarily attributable to decreases in marginal costs, as real prices only increased slightly from 2006 to 2019. Our estimates indicate that consumers have become less price sensitive over time. That is from a new NBER working paper […] The post Not the worst news… appeared first...

1. Bukele and the future of El Salvador.  A good piece, though I don’t agree with everything in there. 2. The Ohio Supreme Court vs. Aristotle? 3. History of early American tariffs. 4. Some new estimates of what people really enjoy. 5. Duet, with elephant. 6. Latvia rain fact of the day, literally. 7. He […] The post Monday assorted links appeared first on...

Via Cremieux, and here is the related Wikipedia page. The post What do different countries pay for Olympic gold medals? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Fearless Fosdick. I am also baffled. If a post ... by DaveIn reply to German Catholic. 'Invested smartly' means mostly ... by Prof. EmeritusIn reply to Lord Byron. I'm setting the blades on my combine...

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt: It is true that 19th century tariffs often were high, but they were not the main reason the US became rich (they were an important means of funding the government, given the absence of an income tax). The best economic research shows that what […] The post What are Republican analysts getting wrong...