~marginalrevolution | Bookmarks (566)

1. Harvard Law Review uh oh. 2. “Vegetative electron microscopy.” 3. Computational analysis of US congressional speeches reveals a shift from evidence to intuition. 4. Waymo total rides per week. 5. Cremieux on autism rates. 6. FT on William Kentridge. 7. My life in a Mexican trouble teen camp. The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Donald Pretari....

Yale has approximately one administrator for every undergraduate student (see also here and here). Years of simmering tension about the growth of administration relative to faculty has now been brought forward. President Trump has threatened to cut funding to Yale, the Yale administration has threatened to stop hiring faculty and raises, some faculty are now […] The post Yale Faculty v. Administrators appeared first...

Stripe, a global payments platform, is building a new US dollar stablecoin product for companies based outside the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe in a move that may further expand the footprint of the dollar around the world. Stripe CEO Patrick Collison confirmed the product on X, posting an invitation for companies interested […] The post The new Stripe stablecoin product appeared...

I sometimes wonder how good the AIs will be at predicting our productivity and our future courses of action. Let’s say an advanced AI has your genome, a bunch of your test scores, and has plenty of video of you interviewing.  How well does the AI really understand you? To be clear, I am not […] The post Is it genetics that will give...

The post My 18-minute podcast with Ehsan Adouane appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Karl Pooper. “Word salad 'AGI'”. 🙂 by Chuck KotlarzIn reply to None. Digging a bit deeper, the stats on the ... by Karl PooperIn reply to John the Baptist. It's amazing how small his ... by NoneIn reply to Karl Pooper. To all the Mcdeemers, and the...

1. Fredric Jameson’s favorite films and novels. 2. Why have sentence lengths decreased? 3. Robot dexterity still seems hard. 4. Irish Times on cosmology, and Julian Gough’s long essay here. 5. Mentoring and self-doubt. 6. MIE: ice from Greenland, $100 for six cubes. The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Anon. Malcolm Baldrige, Secretary of Commerce ......

Last year, the state [CA] chancellor’s office estimated 25 percent of community college applicants were bots. Everyone understands that students are using AI; sometimes to help them learn, sometimes to avoid learning. What I didn’t appreciate is that community colleges offering online courses are being flooded with AI bots who are taking the courses: The […] The post AI Goes to College…for the Free...

That is the new and fun book by David Hepworth.  It focuses on the careers of rock stars who simply keep on going and do not retire. Can we admit that Paul McCartney and also the Rolling Stones have made the best of this? Here is one bit: Of the ten most-visited graves in the […] The post *Hope I Get Old Before I...

1. Statement of prayer-question – Xenophon begins by verbally addressing Apollo, asking “to which of the gods should I sacrifice and pray in order best and most successfully to perform the journey I have in mind and return home in safety?” Only once this plea is uttered does Apollo’s priesthood record the god’s reply. 2. […] The post Xenophon’s consultation of the Pythia appeared...

In 1990, less than 1% of the Spanish population were foreign residents. The foreign-born population was even smaller, with immigrants accounting for about 0.5% of residents. In 2023, Spain alone accounted for 23% of all naturalizations in the European Union As of 2025… 14% of residents in Spain are foreign nationals. Nearly 20% of Spain’s […] The post Spain facts of the day appeared...

1. My 2017 post on Moore’s Law and social media. 2. Does Abundance start at home? 3. Listening to classical music for one year. 4. The “liberal elite” favored school reopening. 5. Again, economics-themed comedy show in NYC. 6. The Shrouds was the best Cronenberg movie in a long time, noting that most people still […] The post Friday assorted links appeared first on...

A powerful but grim essay by John McGinnis, Professor of Constitutional Law at Northwestern. For decades, the federal government—driven by the left—expanded its control over universities. The right, most notably Ronald Reagan, tried to resist, shielding civil society from state overreach. They failed. Now, a new right has turned to the left’s playbook and is […] The post The Library Burned Slowly appeared first...

That is a new paper from Denmark, by Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard, here is the abstract: We examine the labor market effects of AI chatbots using two large-scale adoption surveys (late 2023 and 2024) covering 11 exposed occupations (25,000 workers, 7,000 workplaces), linked to matched employer-employee data in Denmark. AI chatbots are now widespread—most […] The post Large Language Models, Small Labor Market...

There is a new paper by Adrien Auclert, Matthew Rognlie, and Ludwig Straub.  It seems timely?: We study the short-run effects of import tariffs on GDP and the trade balance in an open-economy New Keynesian model with intermediate input trade. We find that temporary tariffs cause a recession whenever the import elasticity is below an […] The post The macroeconomics of tariff shocks appeared...

1. Are these the most beautiful colleges in America?  Where is the brutalism?  UC Irvine has some.  I feel like I have been to way, way too many of those campuses. 2. Facts about egg supply chains. 3. Good robot photos in this NYT story about China. 4. “Apply to our 1517 garage science cohort […] The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on...

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, blocked news from its apps in Canada in 2023 after a new law required the social media giant to pay Canadian news publishers a tax for publishing their content. The ban applies to all news outlets irrespective of origin, including The New York Times. Amid the news void, Canada Proud and […] The post Whose disinformation? appeared first on Marginal...

The political problem of disaster preparedness is especially acute for the most useful form, disaster avoidance. The problem with avoiding a disaster is that success often renders itself invisible. The captain of the Titanic is blamed for hitting the iceberg, but how much credit would he have received for avoiding it? Consider a pandemic. When […] The post The Prophet’s Paradox appeared first on...

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary: Chris Dixon believes we’re at a pivotal inflection point in the internet’s evolution. As a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and author of Read Write Own, Chris believes the current internet, dominated by large platforms like YouTube and Spotify, has strayed far from its […] The post My excellent Conversation with Chris Dixon...

When two of the smartest people in a university class meet each other, and become friends or start working together, how is it they typically meet?  In class is one option of course, what else is there? This important question seems oddly underdiscussed.  I thank L. for suggesting it to me. The post How do very smart people meet each other? appeared first on...

1. Jon Hartley podcast with Robert Barro. 2. Dwarkesh questions about AI. 3. Why it is hard for women to date well. 4. “Social media constantly incentivizes disagreement, and therefore also demasculinization.” 5. WEF update. 6. It is hard to type mathematical symbols. 7. Ezra talks with Steven Hahn about Trump and American continuity (NYT).  […] The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on...

Vernon Smith reviews Joe Stiglitz’s book The Road to Freedom: Stiglitz did work in the abstract intellectual theoretical tradition of neoclassical economics showing how the standard results were changed by asymmetric or imperfect information. He is oblivious, however, to the experimental lab and field empirical research showing that agent knowledge of all such information is […] The post Smith Reviews Stiglitz appeared first on...

Aid agencies already try to cover too many countries and sectors, incurring high costs to set up small programs. Aid projects are far too complicated, resembling a Christmas tree weighed down with everyone’s pet cause. With less money (and in the US, very few staff), now is the time to radically simplify. By choosing a […] The post Rachel Glennerster calls for reforming foreign...

Even though the elites themselves are highly imperfect.  That is the theme of my latest FP column.  Excerpt: Very often when people complain about “the elites,” they are not looking in a sufficiently elitist direction. A prime example: It is true during the pandemic that the CDC and other parts of the government gave us […] The post We need more elitism appeared first...

CDPAP’s enrollment, workforce and total costs ballooned after the state relaxed eligibility rules in 2015. The number of people receiving care through the program surged from just under 20,000 in 2016 to almost 248,000 last year. New York state Medicaid spending on CDPAP in the last five years has more than tripled to about $9.1 […] The post Who needs a UBI? appeared first...