Marginal REVOLUTION

14 Aug 2026

“I should note also that many (most? almost all?) of the bad scenarios have intermediate points of great worry and catastrophe” Not on my model. By the time any humans start worrying about a

14 Aug 2026

Gowrisankaran, Langer and Reguant have an excellent paper, Energy Transitions in Regulated Markets (WP), in the latest AER. The basic idea is that regulation designed to prevent utilities from

14 Aug 2026

From Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde and Patrick Norrick: As of 2026, humanity is likely below replacement fertility. That has never happened before, not in wars or pandemics. But the real surprise is

14 Aug 2026

We estimate intergenerational mobility of children of immigrants in fifteen receiving countries. Children of immigrants have somewhat lower income than children of local-born parents. Around half of

13 Aug 2026

An ability to mimic the shrieks of langur monkeys may not seem like a bankable skill, but for some Indians it has become a job, if not a calling. These vocal professionals specialise in pest control

13 Aug 2026

1. Write a paper in six days with only AIs, then record all of that and write a second paper about writing the first. 2. Saloni on the future of medicine.  “Every disease is a policy failure.”

13 Aug 2026

Here is the source. The post USA fact of the day (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/08/usa-fact-of-the-day-17.html) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION

13 Aug 2026

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary: Daron Acemoglu returns for his second appearance with a new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, which Tyler reads as

12 Aug 2026

I feel like this is almost deliberately missing the point. My median expectation is that AI boosts the economy enormously, so shorting things would be a terrible idea. But non-trivial tail risk is

12 Aug 2026

1. The cheese collateral in Italian banks is melting. 2. Denmark fact of the day: “…half of Denmark’s growth has been due to essentially one company” 3. “Foreign travel now makes up 1.4% of

12 Aug 2026

A good piece, it is good to see the artists themselves front and center of the story. The post Fast Company covers New Aesthetics

12 Aug 2026

Measuring politically sensitive attitudes in authoritarian settings is difficult because expressions of political support may reflect repression and social pressure as much as genuine belief. We

12 Aug 2026

In this paper, we characterize trends in the earnings assimilation of immigrant workers from 1981 to 2021. We use administrative longitudinal data that contain the earnings of workers beginning in

11 Aug 2026

Here is one (partial) estimate of the higher cyber costs.  I am not sure how many incidents they have in mind, but this seems to me realistic as an estimate but also rather modest relative to the

11 Aug 2026

1. “The fraction of women who undergo this procedure who go on to bear a child with the frozen eggs is around 2%.” 2. Long Mark Zuckerberg/Meta piece on the future of AI. 3. “According to

11 Aug 2026

NME: Harry Potter fans have succeeded in moving a construction project that would have originally gone through the “grave” of the character Dobby. The 125-mile Greenlink power connector, which

11 Aug 2026

Claude and I planted 100 known errors into 10 open-access psychology papers and then ran them through frontier models and two commercial AI review tools. In brief: The best single system caught 71 of

11 Aug 2026

We trace the family origins of Members of Congress (MC) born between 1830 and 1950, linking each MC, their parents, and their brothers to the complete-count censuses. Future MCs have always been

10 Aug 2026

I am automating investigative journalism at http://Effort.News We’re breaking five stories today based on verifiable financial data which everyone missed for years. Here is the entire thread, which

10 Aug 2026

1. Tax land more heavily than structures. 2. “Our findings suggest that equality-oriented governments adopt an approach that insures the middle, buffers the poor, but spares the rich. The result is

10 Aug 2026

We study whether Democratic college professors make their students more liberal. We link voter data to salary records from 33 state flagships and show that faculty skew Democratic, especially in the

10 Aug 2026

I am seeing so many doom prognostications, or least severe worries, due to the OAI/HuggingFace incident and related stories.  But virtually all of these I find underargued to say the least. So I

9 Aug 2026

1. African use of Chinese AI (NYT).  And what happened to Talenti gelato? (NYT)  And the NIMBY brutalists who live in the Barbican (NYT). 2. Modernist Gothic in Copenhagen. 3. AI-generated Odyssey

9 Aug 2026

From Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”

9 Aug 2026

Who would have thought that someone could make a gripping movie about predicting the weather? Nevertheless, Pressure delivers. To be sure, it’s predicting the weather for D-Day. Excellent cast.

9 Aug 2026

The post One of the better pro-natalist Lieder (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/08/one-of-the-better-pro-natalist-lieder.html) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION

9 Aug 2026

The Balkans may be the only region other than central Asia where fertility has increased from 2015 to 2026.* All of the highest fertility rates in Europe are in the Balkans. As of 2024: Montenegro

8 Aug 2026

As weapon systems increase in effectiveness, they will generally target one another rather than humans. Lower loss of life will ease conflict entry and hinder exit. Warfare will veer further from

8 Aug 2026

1. Possibly AI-written pieces that have won literary awards. 2. HuggingFace co-founder on what happened, very good post. 3. What do private insurers want from a Hormuz agreement? 4. GPT Pro on

8 Aug 2026

That is the new book by Peter Gray, and it is very much a whole philosophy of child-rearing and also antidote to the current panic over social media. Excerpt: In preparation for this chapter, I spent

8 Aug 2026

1. Mike Jay, Wireheads: An Unnatural History of Technology in the Brain.  Much of this story is told through the lens of the accompanying science fiction and non-neuro trends in other parts of

7 Aug 2026

I only recently learned what it is really about, namely very rapid travel into space and time dilation mattering for the return voyage. I had never before listened carefully to the lyrics.  I heard

7 Aug 2026

1. Denmark fact of the day. 2. “Books that Tyler Cowen probably would like.” 3. The tenure dismissal of Sanjay Reddy (NYT). 4. Dell and Rambachan NBER video on the economics of AI.  I have yet

7 Aug 2026

An interesting paper from French economists, including recent Nobelist Philippe Aghion, looks at the savings from a predictive machine-learning model applied to wastewater treatment: This paper

7 Aug 2026

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is from the episode summary: Julia joined Tyler to discuss why so many of Russia’s great constructivist painters were women, why the tsarist

6 Aug 2026

We’re proud to announce that Refine has signed partnerships with two leading publishers in economics. Both the American Economic Association and the Econometric Society now use Refine’s

6 Aug 2026

1. “Next to rising oxygen levels and other contributing factors, the importance of feces in ancient ecosystems is often overlooked…” 2. New publication on AI and institutions.  Good people

6 Aug 2026

I was on the British CapX Podcast talking about the Equality Act, riffing off my two posts Equality Act 2010 and The Apples and Oranges Tribunal. One thing I discussed in the podcast which I

6 Aug 2026

Federal money flows to cities in three flavors: direct transfers, indirect transfers, and what we call fiscal dark matter. Direct transfers are exactly what they sound like — money sent directly

6 Aug 2026

If unions raise worker wages, who pays? We provide a comprehensive assessment of firm responses to increased unionization, using changes in the tax deductibility of union dues in Norway as a

5 Aug 2026

1. A catalog of past AI predictions. 2. Jasmine Sun on why people do not want data centers.  And Jasmine Sun on Ezra Klein, on data centers (NYT). 3. A bot running an SF retail boutique? (NYT) 4.

5 Aug 2026

I created the dominant assurance contract aka the refund bonus mechanism in 1998–it’s a mechanism capable of producing some types of public goods privately–in recent years working with Tim

5 Aug 2026

This paper investigates why China’s recurrent credit expansions have coincided with persistently weak inflation. We argue that this pattern reflects the country’s production-oriented monetary

5 Aug 2026

In addition to his well-known public roles, he worked very hard to help and befriend me when I was younger.  Here are the Google searches for Victor.  Less well known about Victor is that he had

5 Aug 2026

Behavioral interventions have become central to modern public policy, but their empirical promise remains contested because estimated treatment effects often appear small. We argue that a policy

4 Aug 2026

We estimate the economic value of zoning reform in São Paulo, which altered maximum permitted construction along transportation corridors. Developers increased filings for multifamily construction