~marginalrevolution | Bookmarks (560)

Highly controversial plans to revolutionise Whitehall by introducing performance-related pay, an accelerated exit process for under-performing mandarins and more digitalisation will be announced this week in what ministers say is a programme to “reshape the state” so it can respond to a new “era of insecurity”. The proposed changes, to be announced by Cabinet Office […] The post Will there be a British DOGE?...

1. Ezra Klein essay, adapted from his Abundance book with Derek Thompson (NYT). 2. Ancient transport vehicles, without wheels, in New Mexico. 3. Was Victor Hugo also a great visual artist? (Times of London).  Further links here. 4. It turns out Buffy Sainte-Marie isn’t even Canadian? 5. Is brick making a comeback in urban architecture? […] The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on...

Early reports are pretty consistent, and they indicate that Manus agentic AI is for real, and ahead of its American counterparts.  I also hear it is still glitchy  Still, it is easy to imagine Chinese agentic AI “getting there” before the American product does.  If so, what does that world look like? The cruder way […] The post The political economy of Manus AI...

1. Salim Furth uses Deep Research. 2. Culture wars in New Zealand. 3. Gdp without g (Bloomberg). 4. “Surprisingly common trait in high agency people is they had heroes and figured out how to meet them all before age 25” Nabeel 5. “We find that Gun Sanctity is highly predictive of different forms of magical […] The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on...

1. Manus.  And more.  And Chubby weighs in.  And more Chubby.  Here is Rowan Cheung.  And another report.  Here is background information.  This seems to be some kind of demo?  Here is Manus on Twitter.  Here is their website.  And a new video.  Mind and Hand!  What a day. The post Manus assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsI’m gonna be honest....

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him.  This is Jack Clark the co-founder of Anthropic, rather than Jack Clark the baseball player.  For further background, here is his LinkedIn page.  So what should I ask him? The post What should I ask Jack Clark? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIs Islam right about women? by raywardIn reply to Bob McGrew. More...

Recent evidence indicates that the emergence of stone tool technology occurred before the appearance of the genus Homo1 and may potentially be traced back deep into the primate evolutionary line. Conversely, osseous technologies are apparently exclusive of later hominins from approximately 2 million years ago (Ma), whereas the earliest systematic production of bone tools is currently restricted […] The post Systematic bone tool production at 1.5...

Poland will look at gaining access to nuclear weapons and also ensure that every man undergoes military training as part of an effort to build a 500,000-strong army to face off the threat from Russia, Prime Minister Donald Tusk told the parliament on Friday. Here is the full article. The post Solve for the equilibrium appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to...

1. Brian Potter analyzes Boom and the attempt to build a successful supersonic aircraft. 2. Balaji on tariffs. 3. Max Tabarrok on AI and the economics job market. 4. 50 thoughts on DOGE, an excellent post. 5. Why people don’t like neighborhood density. 6. Starting to get freaky? 7. Rebuilding Addis? (FT) 8. Jean-Claude Saintilus, […] The post Friday assorted links appeared first on...

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit: The most important factors behind trade balances include savings decisions, fiscal policy, economic growth rates, wealth levels and demographic characteristics such as the age of the population. As economist Joseph Gagnon bluntly put it: “None of the studies found any role for trade barriers.” […] The post Tariffs do not in general help...

I always loved games and card games, and they played a big role in family life.  It was one activity that everyone, including my grandmother, could partake in enthusiastically, and on a more or less equal footing. The big card game was euchre, yes euchre.  It is a trick-taking game with trumps, think of it […] The post Games we played appeared first on...

Denmark’s state-run postal service, PostNord, is to end all letter deliveries at the end of 2025, citing a 90% decline in letter volumes since the start of the century. The decision brings to an end 400 years of the company’s letter service. Denmark’s 1,500 postboxes will start to disappear from the start of June. Transport […] The post Denmark fact of the day appeared...

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...