Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok on economics, culture, and ideas.
This paper investigates the role of work in providing meaning, purpose, community, and other non-monetary benefits. Using an original cross-national survey of 8,234 working-age adults across the UK, US, Denmark, and India, I study the factors that motivate peo…
Aspirations have become a common theme in empirical economics studies but there is no unified understanding of the range of outcomes they influence, the factors that shape them, and how to measure them. We survey this growing literature. We argue that there is…
From Luis Garicano and Alex Imas: Hence AI capabilities improved 1.91 times faster after October 2025, but R&D spending grew 6.19 times and the technical workforce 3.10 times. So measured capability gains per dollar fell by approximately 69%, and measured gain…
1. Peru cancels the Moche sculptures for obscenity? 2. Claude translates from The Kalevela. 3. David Chalmers on AI speed-ups. 4. Cass Sunstein picks Bob Dylan’s best songs. 5. “Hobby dogging”? 6. Argentina worries and updates. 7. Jon Hartley podcast with Jame…
I appear on Ryan Bourne’s excellent new podcast, The Economics of It. We discuss The Economics of Rent Controls drawing on my essay, Rent Control: The Ceiling Trap. It’s a very good discussion. Here’s one bit (edited slightly to remove some ums for reading and…
And GMU is on the Outlook system. If you need to reach me, you can extrapolate my gmu address to my gmail address, or try Twitter, or use your imagination in other ways. Sorry for the inconvenience! (Although it seems my Outlook system just opened up, albeit w…
Federal AI at a glance 41 agencies · 3,611 reported use cases · OMB 2025 Inventory. Portfolio size reflects reporting, not performance. From Irakli Petriashvili of Tblisi, here is the site. The post The U.S. Federal AI Observatory appeared first on Marginal RE…
If people really preferred relatively higher income in a poorer society, then those born in Western Europe and the US would be saving up their money so they could live like kings in Africa. Very few people of middle- or upper-class status in poor countries wou…
The post My Barcelona talk on AI appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
1. New Texas A&M podcast: Economists Unscripted. 2. A new tool for AI-proof homework assignments. “It’s called https://deb8.tv — students get paired and have live video debates with one another.” 3. “The average French person believes there are 6.4 workers for…
Zidar and Zwick have a good post on the political power of billionaires versus the power of many millionaires, based on their excellent book The Everywhere Millionaire. First, they point out that despite the attention given to (some days) trillionaires and bil…
Federal oil and gas rights are worth about $625 billion on the paper’s own method, down 75% in real terms since 1981. Federal land has gone the other way, to roughly $1.1 trillion to $1.6 trillion. Land, not minerals, is now the larger asset. Here is the full…
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary: Tyler opens by asking Terence what it feels like to contemplate Euler’s identity, quantum mechanics, the Riemann hypothesis, and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, before moving into w…
One of the greats. The post Richard Posner, RIP… appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
There is a new paper by Raj Chetty, Jamie Fogel, Lawrence F. Katz, Kadeem Noray, Sonya Porter, and James Reisinger: Modern program evaluation prioritizes evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) because prior research found that observational estimate…
1. “We were discussing this today in office: future paper is 5 pages (what’s question, where is lit now very briefly, what do we do, what do we find), with all details left to a long appendix, hyperlinked, with rigorous AI review. We would read many more paper…
I will be doing a Conversation with him, most of all about his new and very good book The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East. He has many other excellent books too, including on Russian history and some fiction. Here is his home page, here is his W…
UK panel data, 1991-2019. Couples who support different parties separate more often. The effect is as strong as some other mismatches, like education. Disagreement over Brexit mattered even more than party preference. Here is a longer Nikolaus Haufler thread o…
That is the theme of my latest Free Press article, here is one excerpt: It may look like merely the latest story of a wealthy, powerful man making an irresponsible decision. But below the surface, it is also a harbinger of the erosion of privacy today, as well…
Maybe so: We study the statistical credibility of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in development economics and the optimal allocation of resources to replication. Using 745 principal-hypothesis tests from 190 articles in leading economics journals, we find…
1. AI as a normal technology. 2. Hayek for our time, by Cass Sunstein, free download for two weeks. 3. Works in Progress is looking for business and finance writers. 4. Matthew Lilley on Harvard grad students. I believe they teach the permanent income hypothes…
From SaneCite: We checked the anonymous AI audit of Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman’s research that Marginal Revolution featured on 28 Oct: all 147 problems it calls serious enough to change a headline number, against the papers, their sources and the authors…
This is a morally serious movie (really). And Ghidorah stars! The whole thing is about twenty minutes too long, but mostly very good. And like many in the Godzilla series, it offers extended and instructive commentary on American-Japanese relations, and how th…
That is the new and forthcoming book from Bryan Caplan, University of Chicago Press. Excerpt: Real-world free markets deliver one broad benefit that flies under the radar of economic theory: They shield humanity from its own Social Desirability Bias. Markets d…
1. What WWII looked like, four and a half minute video. 2. Intellectual Deep Web, YouTube channel. 3. Complete works of Schelling, and no I do not mean Thomas. 4. What the French Left is proposing. 5. How much AI could the CEA manage? 6. Douthat! 7. Andrew Max…
It’s one of the peculiarities of American regulatory history that a natural gas pipeline can cross state lines with a single federal permit, but oil and electricity must run a gauntlet of state approvals. When a power line crosses one state to reach another, f…
Of course as an economist I am always wondering what the equilibrium is. And, in this case, what is the scarce factor? It seems that in the case under current consideration, the returns to honeypotting are very high for somebody. Maybe for China, maybe for the…
Here is the initial post. In the comments Michael Wiebe notes: “So progress per R&D dollar fell by 63%, even while progress per year doubled.” File under: David Ricardo, underrated. The post Seb Krier, Ricardian? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Despite its weaknesses, Paraguay’s young democracy was still able to deliver under stress. Its free, boisterous press was the first to sound the alarm about Peña’s shenanigans. The Central Bank’s supervision chief did his job: he examined ueno’s numbers and re…
1. Among the Wagner fanatics. 2. Does AI instead commodify jobs? 3. The digital world is making Islam more diverse (The Economist). 4. “An affair with an economist exposed the calculus of modern dating.” (New Yorker) 5. “How Much Economic Value Do AI Systems P…