~marginalrevolution | Bookmarks (560)

The post The Nobel Prize lectures in economics appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Moral Panic. Did you just say might makes right ... by rsmI made the trip to see it live 🙂 My TLDRs: Acemoglu: ... by Data ScientistIn reply to Sean. Maybe you should elaborate. After all, ... by Bill AllenDoes Simon Johnson wish that Britain and other...

Donald Trump wants to create Freedom Cities. It’s a good idea. As I wrote in 2008, the Federal Government owns more than half of Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Alaska and it owns nearly half of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming. See the map (PDF) for more [N.B. the vast majority of this land […] The post Trump City appeared first on Marginal...

When does it make sense to organize most of your urban activity on a (more or less) straight line? If land transport is very costly, as in much earlier times, and a river is available, you might build much of the town right on the river bank.  You can see remnants of this if you […] The post La ciudad lineal appeared first on...

1. Nick Bostrom on The Cosmic Host. 2. Alexander Berger on the risks and benefits of kidney donation. 3. Who owns the drones flying over New Jersey (NYT)? 4. Some astronomy photos of the year. 5. al-Julani comment, on institutions. 6. Be a full-time annotator for the Vesuvius scrolls.  $40 an hour. 7. NIMBY and […] The post Monday assorted links appeared first on...

Recommendations? The post Buenos Aires appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         Commentssteakhouses e.g. Fogón Asado; bring cash in USD, quality meat ... by w8In reply to Chris. I assume you mean Colonia not Colombia? ... by andrew97Order a suprema napolitana con papas fritas in a good ... by GuillermoBA is the best boulevardier city in the world. Paris, even ... by SpencerIn reply to...

Here is one of them: In the 2020s, over 16% of movies have colons in the title (Like Superman: Man of Steel), up almost 300% since the 1990s. And: The Telugu-language action film Devara: Part 1 made more money ($5.5m) in US cinemas than Francis Ford Coppola’s $120m Megalopolis in its first week ($5m). And: In 2024, around 10% of […] The post 52 things Tom Whitwell learned in...

The offensive vs. defensive framing seems wrong, at least temporarily. It should be motivated vs. unmotivated, with drones favoring the motivated. A competent drone capability requires building a supply chain, setting up a small manufacturing/assembly operation, and training skilled operators. They need to manage frequencies and adjust to jamming. Tight integration of these functions is a […] The post Austin Vernon on drones (from my...

The author is Bartle Bull, and the subtitle is A 5,000-Year History of Iraq.  Excerpt: Another is the extraordinary length of what might be called an East-West conflict in Iraq.  The Roman-Persian wars lasted from 54 BC until 628 AD.  Nine centuries later a version of the conflict resumed, when the Ottoman Turks made Constantinople […] The post *Land Between the Rivers* appeared first...

1. The Knausgaard library. 2. A new paper on the diminishing returns to research. 3. Those new service sector jobs: “How to Make $100 an Hour Scratching Someone’s Back.” (WSJ) 4. Shruti podcast with Pravin Krishna on trade. 5. Jennifer Doleac on what we get wrong about crime (NYT). 6. “Eyeballing the results, something like […] The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on...

You don’t have to upload any book into the system.  The Great Cosmic Mind is smarter than most of the books you could jam into the context window.  Just start asking questions.  The core intuition is simply that you should be asking more questions.  And now you have someone/something to ask! I was reading a […] The post How to read a book using...

The prediction of inflation dynamics—how prices change over time—has increasingly confounded modern macroeconomists. Throughout much of the twentieth century, there seemed to be clear relationships linking the money supply, economic slack, and price levels. Monetarism, the school of thought that posits a stable connection between the growth rate of a money aggregate and the subsequent […] The post o1 explains why you should not...

But a new paper by Ryan Oprea challenges the idea that we even need something like Prospect Theory at all. Oprea hypothesizes that a lot of the seemingly “irrational” experimental behaviors are really just due to the excessive complexity of the task they’re being asked to do. He does an experiment where he takes away all the […] The post Noah Smith presents Ryan Oprea appeared...

1. Brazilian economists are seeking a kind of occupational licensing (Portuguese). 2. Sovereign AI project for Thailand? 3. Is there a law for AI “capacity density”? 4. More on AI and board games. 5. Royal Mint honors Macca with his own coin. 6. Tim Wu.  Or here. 7. o1 for a cancer therapy project. 8. […] The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on...

The latest sought-after home amenity? Personal fire hydrants. The logic is that when there’s a major disaster there may not be enough fire engines to protect every house in an area. If homeowners have their own hydrant ready to go—along with hoses, nozzles and adapters—and are trained to use it all, that could help reduce […] The post Markets in everything, personal fire hydrant...

Here is a gloomy account from Vladimir Mirov: Ruble depreciation will contribute to inflation even further, as Russia is continued to be heavily reliant on imports – this is a kind of self-sustaining spiral. I also strongly disagree with those who say that cheaper ruble is “good” for exporters and the budget. Exporters have yet […] The post How is the Russian war economy...

There is a new translation by Joseph Luzzi, and I find it an order of magnitude better than the older treatments.  It somehow communicates the strangeness of this work in a new and unprecedented way.  You can order it here. I also very much enjoyed my read through the letters of Paul Celan and Ingeborg […] The post *Vita Nuova*, und *Herzzeit* appeared first...

Here is the NYT announcement. I hope they consider Noah Smith as the obvious replacement… The post Paul Krugman retires as Times columnist appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to ABC. Noah's driveby style is perfect for Twitter, ... by StendellI'm laughing at all the Trump Poodles and Reactionary ... by Donald PretariNoah would not be a replacement; he would be a...

1. AI video for training embodied agents? 2. “She uses the hashtags “hemmaflickvän” and “hemmafru” (Swedish for stay-at-home girlfriend and housewife) and describes herself as a “soft girl” – an identity that embraces a softer, more feminine way of living rather than focussing on a career.”  Link here. 3. The firm as tax shelter. 4. […] The post Friday assorted links appeared first on...

New paper in Science, A single mutation in bovine influenza H5N1 hemagglutinin switches specificity to human receptors. If that isn’t clear enough, here is the editor’s summary: In 2021, a highly pathogenic influenza H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b virus was detected in North America that is capable of infecting a diversity of avian species, marine mammals, and […] The post You Have Been Warned appeared first...

It was so much fun we ran over and did about ninety minutes instead of the usual hour.  Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary: Tyler sat down with Stephen to discuss the state of Russian Buddhism today, how shamanism persists in modern Siberia, whether Siberia might ever […] The post My excellent Conversation with Stephen Kotkin...

That is the theme of a new Substack by Pieter Garicano, here is one excerpt: These answers, according to a recent paper by Olivier Coste and Yann Coatanlem, two French investors, miss the point: the reason more capital doesn’t flow towards high-leverage ideas in Europe is because the price of failure is too high. Coste estimates that, […] The post Why are no trillion dollar companies...

1. A corporate comms joke. 2. These South Korean Catholic priests should be bloggers. 3. Zero-based regulation by James Broughel.  And from Alex Adams. 4. RLHF propaganda posters, funny stuff. 5. Scientific breakthroughs of 2024. 6. Weather forecasting breakthroughs with AI. 7. Scott Sumner on Cowen and Tabarrok on money.  The key I think is […] The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on...

Bahala says each of his calls at Concentrix is monitored by an artificial intelligence (AI) program that checks his performance. He says his volume of calls has increased under the AI’s watch. At his previous call center job, without an AI program, he answered at most 30 calls per eight-hour shift. Now, he gets through […] The post Before AI replaces you, it will...

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit: Fortunately, there is new research. We have entered the age where innovative methods of measurement, such as computer vision and deep learning, can reveal how American life has changed. Researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research compiled footage of four urban public […] The post Using AI to analyze changes in...