Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok on economics, culture, and ideas.
1. The economics of personal holding companies, including in the Nordics. 2. Jongkuch Mach is a good name for a very tall basketball player. 3. Can AI predict who will be the most important philosopher in 2046? For economics, the top pick of GPT Pro is Ludwig…
Suppose that apples sell for more than oranges and Parliament in it’s wisdom decides that, at last, apples and oranges must be compared. Not by shoppers — shoppers are biased, they merely reveal what they are willing to pay — but by a tribunal, which will dete…
AEA is the American Economics Association, and a new president is needed, here is the candidate and likely winner: PINELOPI (PENNY) KOUJIANOU GOLDBERG, William Nordhaus Professor of Economics and Global Affairs, Yale University. Statement of Purpose: I am hono…
Total fertility rates in East Asia have fallen to levels without historical precedent, even though the region’s Confucian heritage long placed extraordinary emphasis on family continuity and large families. We argue that this “Confucian Fertility Paradox” diss…
A very good book, here is one excerpt that bears directly on a conversation I was just having: He [Bryce] regretted the low quality of the Indian Civil Service: they were hard-working and motivated by a desire to promote the welfare of the Indian people, but ‘…
1. Cameroonian prison with its own record label. 2. Noah on what will AI do for us exactly. 3. The impact of the sewing machine on women. 4. Will GPTVoice boost labor supply? 5. Smart phones in North Korea. 6. SSI update. 7. “There is still time for interested…
Could our preoccupation with mental health be part of the problem? In some ways, encouraging people to think and talk more about their mental health is a good thing. There is now less stigma around mental illness, and more people who can benefit from professio…
We document that the diffusion of new scientific ideas beyond their field of origin has declined substantially over the past four decades. This contraction is closely linked to increasing specialization in scientific language: research that employs more techni…
Despite rapid inflation in childcare and tuition prices, the goods-and-services CCI closely tracks adult prices, as these increases are offset by children’s lower exposure to shelter and by slower price growth elsewhere in the child basket. Households devote s…
The share of people who are hungry has been decreasing faster in South America than anywhere else in the world. It is down by one-third since 2020, according to a report published on July 21st by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Just 3.5% of p…
1. Deirdre economics reading list. 2. The 1878 entrance exam for the British India civil service. 3. How good is Opus 5 on biology? 4. “A linguistic “golden age” flourished between 1,000 to 3,000 years ago when tens of thousands of languages were spoken throug…
I have an amateur interest in Oriental rugs but my eye is untrained. Thus, for fun and learning I created with Fable a Rug Atlas and quiz. The Rug Belt Atlas Check it out. Constructive comments welcome. P.S. The site is in fact safe! Working on getting it reco…
When a new technology promises large private benefits but may impose social costs that markets do not price, demand need not reveal how citizens want it governed. We examine this using a nationally representative U.S. survey experiment (N=5,556) on human enhan…
This is one of the best Op-Eds you will read this year, though it deliberately deemphasizes the personal (no one is attacked) in a manner that will result in less attention. Better to write the truth! Excerpt: Why has this [voter discontent} happened? Some of…
The subsection of the Georgi Gospodinov novel runs like this: The Shortest Novel About Odysseus After His Return Home One night, now old and flabby and starting to forget, he leaves his home secretly. He’s sick of everything, so he heads back one last time to…
1. The 1991 Project’s oral history collection (led by Shreyas Narla and Shruti) with ~50 hours of interviews with policy reformers and witnesses to India’s market liberalization, is now available. 2. Mini Cities. 3. The new Claude, on Mondrian. 4. More on cybe…
To study whether and how academics respond to political pressure, we exploit a natural experiment: the publication in early 2025 of a “blacklist” of words flagged by the U.S. government. We find that the release of this list led to a sharp reduction in the use…
Farmers in Parana, Brazil, struggling to get banks to loan them cash, became the first to tokenize livestock and place 10 dairy milk cows’ tokens for trade on the country’s B3 national stock exchange. They generated nearly $20,000 in credit backed by their cat…
Imagine your career were coming to a close, how would you want it to end? By earning an especially large sum of money? Publishing a final wonderful paper? With an amazing act of mentorship? When it comes to Lebron, had he wanted to finish his career with the g…
1. How global was “antiquity”? 2. Why the Clarity Act is mired in muck (NYT). 3. Jim Olds on the new science plan. 4. Cyber capabilities of Kimi 3? 5. “Following a standard workplace safety check, I have just received an email from a university administrator i…
IJ: On Wednesday, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia struck down a D.C. law that barred therapists from other jurisdictions from doing online teletherapy visits with clients in D.C. The decision comes nearly six years after Virginia-…
This year, like last year, “the European Union will again make more money from fining US tech companies Than from the total tax income from Europe’s own public tech companies!” The post European Fact of the Day, Again appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
I see at least three updates one might make from the recent OAI/Hugging Face hacking incident: 1. “This happened sooner than I expected, and the story is more dramatic than I expected,” therefore I am more worried than before. 2. “This happened, and the inferi…
1. Christopher Priest and Nina Allan, The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J.G. Ballard. Priest died before he finished this book, and his widow added material, including on Priest himself. This is in any case a good overview and introduction to…
1. Puffin spotted on the Dorset coast. 2. Anthropic chief economist on AI and unemployment. 3. Whales use different vowels when ships are around. 4. Oliver Kim on McNamara. 5. Large language models can predict the results of social science experiments. 6. Alex…
I tell my Gary Becker story, why I like police more than prisons, how criminals are like children and more. The post Alex Tabarrok on the Economic Analysis of Crime appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her. From Wikipedia: Gita Gopinath…is an Indian-American economist who is currently serving as the Gregory and Ania Coffey professor of Economics at Harvard University and previously served as the first deputy managing d…
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. From the episode summary: Tyler and Andrew discuss whether it was inevitable we’d rediscover Vermeer, how that vanishingly rare sect left its fingerprints all over his life, why the Met has misread its own Allegory of…
Something that the Ukraine and Iran wars have taught me is that for a lot of countries, including very big countries, there are a small number of buildings and infrastructure components that are required for their economy to function. And in countries that are…
Last year, the US exported $171bn of agricultural goods according to the Department of Agriculture, just $2bn more than the export total claimed by Brazil, which many analysts say has benefited from trade disruption set in train by President Donald Trump’s tar…