~marginalrevolution | Bookmarks (573)

1. In defense of Gemini. 2. Schelling applied to AI dominance? 3. One account of the Zizian story. 4. Can you induce anxiety in your LLM? 5. Chris Blattman on Deep Research. 6. ESPR summer camp, for 16- to 21-year olds. 7. AI art auction exceeds expectations. The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to The Original D....

An excellent EconTalk episode with Pete Boettke on the socialist calculation debate. I like Boettke on the three Ps. The three Ps–property, prices, and profits and loss. Property incentivizes us. Prices guide us. Profits lure us to new changes and losses discipline us. Today, “incentives matter” is often considered the first lesson of economics. But […] The post Boettke on the Socialist Calculation Debate...

Here is my 68 minutes with David Perell, who is excellent in such settings: Here is David’s Twitter take, here is a short bit on how to use different AI tools.  Here is the transcript.  Self-recommending. The post How AI is changing and will change the world of writing appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         Commentsno comments engaging with the substance of the post,...

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary: He joins Tyler to discuss why it took scientists so long to accept airborne disease transmission and more, including why 19th-century doctors thought hay fever was a neurosis, why it took so long for the WHO and CDC to acknowledge COVID-19 […] The post My Conversation with Carl Zimmer appeared...

German borrowing costs surged by the most in 17 years on Wednesday, as investors bet on a big boost to the country’s ailing economy from a historic deal to fund investment in the military and infrastructure. The yield on the 10-year Bund surged 0.21 percentage points to 2.69 per cent, its biggest one-day move since […] The post Germany fact of the day appeared...

1. Some new survey results on work from home. 2. Digital doppelgangers. 3. Liu Jiakun wins the Pritzker Prize, photos at the link. 4. The ideology of AI governance.  Can AI rule be interpretable to humans?  Weird stuff, don’t worry I don’t understand it either. 5. Three Wikipedia pages for great economists. 6. Robert Mundell […] The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on...

Elon recently re-opened the perennial debate about whether Social Security is a ponzi scheme. Here’s my, lightly edited post from 2011. Elon is in good company calling social security a ponzi scheme. First up is Nobel prize winner Paul Samuelson who wrote: The beauty of social insurance is that it is actuarially unsound. Everyone who reaches […] The post Is Social Security a Ponzi Scheme?...

Of relevance to some recent debates: We have four main findings: First, measuring “economic income” as currently-taxed income plus new unrealized gains, the income tax base captures 60% of economic income of the top 1% of wealth-holders (and 71% adjusting for inflation) and the vast majority of income for lower wealth groups. Second, adjusting for […] The post The Role of Unrealized Gains and...

IMO this is one of the more compelling “disaster” scenarios — not that AI goes haywire because it hates humanity, but that it acquires power by being effective and winning trust — and then, that there is a cohort of humans that fear this expansion of trust and control, and those humans find themselves at odds with the nebulously part-human-part-AI […] The post Should OneQuadrillionOwls be worried? appeared first...

1. Perplexity, Deutsche Telekom, and an AI smartphone. 2. GPT 4.5 and Bishop Berkeley! 3. Stocks vs. flows, blah blah blah you still can compare two numbers. 4. “That men once stood before the Rokeby Venus and gawped means nothing to us.” 5. GDP forecasts getting worse. 6. Australian who blood saved the lives of 2.4 […] The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on...

Robert Higgs coined the term regime uncertainty to illustrate the challenge faced by business under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, when a flurry of unpredictable legislation such as the expansive and often unclear mandates of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), attempts at court packing, abrupt tax increases, and shifting labor policies, meant businesses couldn’t reliably […] The post Regime Uncertainty appeared first on Marginal...

From a new piece by Daniel Schwarcz, et.al., here is part of the abstract: This article examines two emerging AI innovations that may mitigate these lingering issues: Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), which grounds AI-powered analysis in legal sources, and AI reasoning models, which structure complex reasoning before generating output. We conducted the first randomized controlled […] The post New results on AI and lawyer...

Here is a new paper from Doron Shiffer-Sebba, I found this most amusing but yes tragic too: How do wealthy families preserve their fortunes across generations? A historic peak in wealth inequality in the United States has inspired research on how economic elites benefit from markets, tax rates, and legal entities. However, the ongoing practices […] The post How Bureaucratic Practices Preserve Elite Multigenerational...

Thanks to a very generous donor, we now will be starting a Taiwan cohort in Emergent Ventures.  If you are in Taiwan, or know anyone in Taiwan who might be a good choice, of course consider applying or recommending as such.  Thank you! The post Emergent Ventures, Taiwan cohort appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to ×. Jiminy Crickett, Loess-stuffed diet! I've...

Highlights from the article: The coach’s gender has a sizable and significant effect on the team’s risk-taking, a finding that is robust to an instrumental variable approach. Women’s teams with a male head coach make risky attempts 6 percentage points more often than women’s teams with a female head coach. The difference is persistent within […] The post Male coaches increase the risk-taking of...

1. Increased (Platform) Competition Reduces (Seller) Competition. 2. GPT 4.5 on Bernard Williams.  It is quite funny on the AI skeptics, I might add. 3. AI bookmarks.  And AI-generated sheet music for classical music.  And the Luddites they ain’t. 4. 2005 redux, my idea of how to clean up the house. 5. I never knew […] The post Monday assorted links appeared first on...

Stripe’s Annual Letter is eminently quotable and insightful. As a payments company, Stripe has a unique data on the entire business landscape. But who else about the Collison brothers would cite the O-ring model in their annual report? Businesses on Stripe generated $1.4 trillion in total payment volume in 2024, up 38% from the prior […] The post Stripe’s Annual Letter appeared first on...

1. Eric Topol, Super Agers: An Evidence-Based Approach to Longevity.  Longevity research goes mainstream!  Very clearly written, well argued, and focused on the science.  I cannot pretend to evaluate the details of the material, but this seems a step ahead of the other, typically less serious books on the same topic. 2. Daniel Dain, A […] The post What I’ve been reading appeared first...

1. A guy who doesn’t understand Paul Verhoeven. 2. Context is that which is scarce, AI edition.  And the most rapid change in human communication ever.  And the power of DeepSeek? Big if true. 3. “…male students are averse to majors with more female faculty but prefer those with more female students…” 4. Partial liberation […] The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on...

A reader requests that in the comments, but it is exactly the kind of topic I can tire of.  Nonetheless I will jot down a few quick pointers on how I think about it: 1. Downweight almost every opinion you read on Twitter, instead check the Ukrainian bond market.  If need be, query with Grok […] The post “What do I think of the...

This paper reports results from a survey experiment comparing the effect of (the same) opinions expressed by visibly senior, female versus male experts. Members of the public were asked for their opinion on topical issues and shown the opinion of either a named male or a named female economist, all professors at leading US universities. […] The post Do female experts face an authority...

1. I feel that writing about the topic will make me stupider. 2. I believe that you reading more about the topic will make you stupider. 3. I believe that performative outrage usually brings low or negative returns.  Matt Yglesias has had some good writing on this lately. 4. I don’t have anything to add […] The post Some reasons why I do not...

This paper examines the effects of the Big Five personality traits on labor market outcomes and gender wage gaps using a job search and bargaining model with parameters that vary at the individual level. The analysis, based on German panel data, reveals that both cognitive and noncognitive traits significantly influence wages and employment outcomes. Higher […] The post Personality traits and gender gaps appeared...

1. The $19 strawberry. 2. Writing for the AI is paying off. 3. You’ve quoted Gerhard Richter as saying that a good picture “takes away our certainty,” and suggested (Philip Guston) that doing so enables us to “begin to see the push and pull of impulse, recanting, and reconfiguration that constitute painting and, by extension, life itself.” From […] The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on...