Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok on economics, culture, and ideas.
1. Rob Wiblin interviews Rohin Shah, who leads AGI alignment/safety at DeepMind. 2. Books Arnold Kling has reread. 3. Wemby and Star Wars. 4. Even (especially?) for ontologists, supply is elastic. 5. SSRN is getting worse. 6. Major layoffs at The New School. 7…
We were honored to speak to OpenAI about the economics of AI. Lots of good material here. Self-recommending. The post Tyler and Alex Speak to OpenAI appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Overall, the Western Hemisphere now produces more oil than the Middle East did before the crisis. Canada is the world’s fourth-largest oil producer. Brazil produces four times as much oil as Venezuela; and in Guyana, where production began only seven years ago…
When during the meetings the Americans offered that at most they could convert 15 percent of U.S. auto plants to military production, Beaverbrook replies that 100 percent of British automobile factories had been converted, and encouraged Roosevelt to aim highe…
The post My twenty-minute AI talk for the Swedish company Sana appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
1. Does banking consolidation harm households? 2. Some comments on the new federal framework for AI regulation. 3. This guy is skeptical about doing things in space. 4. Is Chairman Mao underrated, and why did India not get rich too? 5. “Between 1985–2023, MIT’…
In California a 17 year-old can drive a car but can’t ride alone in an Uber or a Waymo. I long for the days when you could put a kid in the post. We have weakened as a civilization. The post CA Logic appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column. Here is one excerpt: The present and also future of mankind is a world where reasonably high levels of self-discipline are needed to do well. The journalist Daniel Akst pointed this out in his 2011 book Temptat…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly promoted as educational tutors, yet most evaluations focus on domains with a single ground truth. Many disciplines, however, hinge on judgment: reasoning, weighing ambiguity, and reaching defensible conclusions. La…
1. One hundred greatest bird names of all time. 2. The method for counting 52,019 puffins. 3. Luggage-tag switching scheme involves flights from Canada to countries where drug smuggling can carry death penalty. Yet a third link from Jodi Ettenberg. 4. Pet Soun…
According to Feynman’s approach, in this context, people should try a different restaurant each night until they find one that exceeds a particular threshold that reflects a desired quality. In Feynman’s equations this threshold is not fixed. Instead it declin…
In 2019, there were about 150,000 people working in autism therapy. Six years later, there were 654,000—more than the number of people who work in mining and logging, or telecommunications, or at the US Postal Service. That is from Derek Thompson. And here is…
This paper examines how expanding the legal definition of sexual assault affects fertility and sexual behavior, using a panel of European countries. I find that switching to tacit consent-based legislation reduces fertility by about 4% relative to the mean. Th…
Several important questions — such as the possibility of debt-rollover without primary surpluses — turn on whether the present value of the aggregate endowment is finite, i.e., whether the economic growth rate under the “risk-neutral” measure, lies below the r…
1. Chaucerian John Fleming has passed away. 2. Can we agree to disagree? 3. The viral Wemby video. 4. New dark output from AI? 5. Should Florida eliminate property taxes for most residents? 6. Observations on quantum computing and its progress. The post Tuesda…
Most Americans work in the service sector so it’s not surprising that most export-related jobs are in the service sector (The U.S. exports about $2.2 trillion of goods and $1.2 trillion of services, but services are more labor intensive than manufacturing so t…
The author is Martha C. Nussbaum, and the subtitle is Opera & Political Freedom. Martha decided she did not wish to do a podcast after all, so since I put some real prep time in I thought I would offer some thoughts on the book directly, in part because it is…
Our findings suggest that policies intended to subsidize health insurance of higher income groups, for example, the enhanced premium subsidies, are far less efficient than policies intended to further expand public insurance to low-income groups, for example,…
1. Progress Ireland. 2. Some new results on tatonnement? 3. The new Paul McCartney album is his best since the 2004 Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. Here is a song by song analysis. For an 83-year-old, it is an astonishing and I think unparalleled achieveme…
In the US, someone with wealth is free to give it away more or less as they see fit (spousal claims excepted, which partly reflect marital co-ownership). In much of Europe, however, there is forced heirship–a large fraction of wealth must be handed down to chi…
At the peak, the year to March 2023, almost 1.5m immigrants came. The Office for National Statistics thinks that far fewer people left, so net migration amounted to 944,000. …Net migration to Britain last year amounted to 171,000—the lowest level since 2012, i…
A leftist senator and a rightwing populist outsider who calls himself “The Tiger” will go to a run-off presidential election in Colombia this month after no candidate won outright in the first round of voting on Sunday. Iván Cepeda, a close ally of outgoing le…
When we want A.I. to solve real problems for real people, we need to make sure the data exists. That means cleaning up government data sets that are currently in a shambles (a project that the province of Alberta’s government found A.I. could make much faster…
From Paul Krugman: Let me be clear: I am not arguing that European productivity is mismeasured, and never said that. I am, instead, arguing that standard measures of productivity do not have the implications for cross-country comparisons of living standards an…
1. A new theory of galaxy formation? 2. Using AI to sell your house (NYT). 3. Ryan Graves. 4. Henry Oliver on reading Proust and also The Golden Bowl, an excellent essay. 5. On Spotify and Apple Music, are now about half of new song releases done by AI? 6. Is…
Since the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. hasn’t collected comprehensive statistics on the number of citizens leaving. Yet data on residence permits, foreign home purchases, student enrollments and other metrics from more than 50 countries show that Americ…
1. Which foreign food chains have made it in NYC? 2. Testing products on AI-generated buyers. 3. Are Vatican pronouncements rising in status? 4. A saner Argentina take. I notice that PTDS is spreading. 5. Yupsy-dupsy. 6. Japan lost three million people over th…
Forty hours a week, fifty weeks a year, forty years: a career is about 80,000 hours. Yet it’s striking how little serious thought goes into career decisions relative to, say, choosing a mortgage. Indeed, you are almost supposed to tell a story about how a rand…
Until two years ago, West London’s Greenford Tube station used to flood whenever it rained heavily. The train tracks are aboveground, but the ticket office would often get inundated. Sandbags still line the corridor. But in October 2023, a new family moved in…
With deadly precision, the Trump administration has launched dozens of attacks on small boats in the waters off South America, killing nearly 200 people in a campaign U.S. officials say is meant to curb the flow of illicit drugs to the United States. But almos…