~marginalrevolution | Bookmarks (566)

Buried in China’s latest government budget were some numbers that add up to an alarming trend. Tax revenue is dropping. The decline means that China’s national government has less money to address the country’s serious economic challenges, including a housing market crash and the near bankruptcy of hundreds of local governments… Tax revenue fell further […] The post China fact of the day appeared...

1. Is YouTube why Herbie Hancock has not made an album in so long? 2. Often you need only one person with the AI.  And the demand for translators is falling. 3. Willingness to be paid. 4. Speculative claims about AI tutoring. 5. The peso in Argentina is now quite overvalued, and this is a […] The post Monday assorted links appeared first on...

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him.  He has a new book coming out, namely Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead. Ken is tenured at Harvard, here is his Wikipedia page, here is Ken on scholar.google.com, here is o1 pro on Rogoff, […] The post What should I ask Ken Rogoff?...

Does it matter whether SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab in Wuhan or had natural zoonotic origins? I think on the margin it does matter. First, and most importantly, the higher the probability that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab the higher the probability we should expect another pandemic.* Research at Wuhan was not especially unusual or […] The post What Follows from Lab Leak? appeared...

If you peer into the souls of the major LLMs, they are (broadly) positive, friendly, universalistic, and cosmopolitan.  They are more objective than media as a source of information.  They are too politically correct, but nastiness would be much worse.  They are open, and you can be inquisitive with them.  They are (again broadly) socially […] The post We are lucky good LLMs were...

While the psychological dispositions that underlie conspiracy thinking are well researched, there has been remarkably little research on the political preferences of conspiracy believers that go beyond self-reported ideology or single political issue dimensions. Using data from the European Voter Election Study (EVES), the relationship between conspiracy thinking and attitudes on three deeper-lying and salient […] The post Who believes in conspiracy theories? appeared...

Carney said removing barriers to the free movement of workers, goods and services across the country would increase the size of Canada’s economy by $250 billion… Carney said his government would table legislation by July 1 to allow goods to travel across the country barrier-free. He said his government would also remove labour mobility restrictions […] The post Carney seeks internal free trade for...

1. O’Shaughnessy Ventures launches Infinite Books, Jimmy Soni in charge. 2. Matt Kahn on natural disaster economics. 3. Namibia will soon be the richest country in Africa. 4. Bhutan holds lots of Bitcoin. 5. “How I read poems, with aphantasia.” 6. Welcome to the world’s biggest rodeo. 7. US border officials have caught more people […] The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on...

City Journal: A year and a half since fires devastated the historic town of Lahaina on the island of Maui, Hawaii, only six houses have been rebuilt—six out of more than 2,000. Why is the recovery effort taking so long? Initially, the biggest hurdles were the pace of debris removal and damage litigation. Both were […] The post Maui is Not Abundant appeared first...

The Federal Communications Commission is prepared to block mergers and acquisitions involving companies that continue promoting diversity, equity and inclusion policies, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said Friday. President Donald Trump has ordered federal agencies such as the Justice Department to draw up lists of companies, nonprofits and other organizations to target over “illegal DEI efforts,” which the […] The post Not the precedent I have been...

It’s easy enough to trace the decline of young white men in American letters—just browse The New York Times’s “Notable Fiction” list. In 2012 the Times included seven white American men under the age of 43 (the cut-off for a millennial today); in 2013 there were six, in 2014 there were six. And then the doors shut. By 2021, there […] The post The vanishing male writer appeared first...

US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has intercepted an increasing number of eggs from Mexico, where a carton of a dozen costs about $2. For comparison, the cost in many parts of California is just under $10 per dozen, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Nationally, there has been a 48% increase in eggs […] The post Thwarted arbitrage? appeared first on Marginal...

1. How Rickover built the US Navy. 2. My interview with Reason magazine. 3. The importance of stablecoins to the US Treasury market. 4. Another measure of how automatable your job is.  And tweet thread. 5. New AI and economics model from Epoch: Twitter thread: https://x.com/EpochAIResearch/status/1902802037752111569 Interactive playground: https://epoch.ai/gate Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04941 6. More on Liu Jiakun, Pritzker winner.  […] The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on...

We analyze the impact of wind turbines on house prices, distinguishing between effects of proximity and shadow flicker from rotor blades covering the sun. By utilizing data from 2.4 million house transactions and 6,878 wind turbines in Denmark, we can control for house fixed effects in our estimation. Our results suggest strong negative impacts on […] The post Wind turbines lower Danish real estate...

To Dr. Damrosch, who has studied academic culture at colleges, the current turmoil was vaguely reminiscent of a 1940s episode at the school now known as Iowa State University. The school’s economics department — in a paper on economic policy for wartime food production — had proposed replacing butter with margarine, said Dr. Damrosch. The […] The post Some history of higher education appeared...

A tour guide is raking in the cash by carrying fatigued females up a mountain. Xiao Chen, 26, who works at Mount Tai in Shandong Province, China, accompanies tourists on their trek to the peak – but many of his female clients often want to be carried up the last 1,000 steps. He starts by […] The post Those new service sector jobs, China...

1. One report on car-free Tempe, AZ. 2. Speculative new claims about human evolution. 3. Is dark energy evolving? And from WaPo — the universe might stop expanding, big if true. 4. Indian painting sets new auction record at $13.7 million. 5. Update on Ukrainian defenses and drones. 6. Understanding solar energy. 7. Claude can […] The post Friday assorted links appeared first on...

The Economist reports that China is now the second largest producer of new pharmaceuticals, after the United States. China has long been known for churning out generic drugs, supplying raw ingredients and managing clinical trials for the pharmaceutical world. But its drugmakers are now also at the cutting edge, producing innovative medicines that are cheaper […] The post China’s Medicines are Saving American Lives...

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her.  Here is Wikipedia: Helen Ruth Castor FRSL (born 4 August 1968) is a British historian of the medieval and Tudor period and a BBC broadcaster. She taught history at the University of Cambridge and is the author of books including Blood and Roses (2004) and She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (2010). Programmes she […] The post What should I ask Helen Castor?...

This was in 1994, right after the Aristide regime was restored by Clinton.  I had traveled a good deal by that time, mostly in North America, Europe, and southeast Asia.  But I had never been anywhere truly dangerous.  It seemed impossible to visit such places.  It is not that I did any serious risk calculation, […] The post My first trip to Haiti appeared...

New podcast series on Latin American political economy, with Rasheed Griffith and Diego Sánchez de la Cruz, all in English. The post Why Spain’s transition to democracy remains controversial appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Phillip Hinton. Ur saying ur Truman Capote, and ... by EqantukIn reply to Horhe. Where Spain didn't luck out is when ... by BobIt's not a...

1. Nowrasteh and Bourne on DOGE. 2. “The paradox of India: Punjab is over 60% vegetarian, but Tandoori chicken and butter chicken are its most popular dishes outside the state. Tamil Nadu is less than 1% vegetarian, but its “pure veg” idly, dosa, sambhar, pongal, etc are its most popular dishes outside the state.”  Link […] The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on...

Right now, DOGE is treating efficiency as a simple cost-cutting exercise. But science isn’t a procurement process; it’s an investment portfolio. If a venture capital firm measured efficiency purely by how little money it spent, rather than by the returns it generated, it wouldn’t last long. We invest in scientific research because we want returns […] The post Caleb Watney on risk and science...

Ezra is getting plenty of coverage for his very good and very on the mark new book with Derek Thompson, Abundance.  So far it is a huge hit after only a few days.  I figured this conversation would be most interesting, and add the most value, if I tried to push him further from a […] The post My excellent Conversation with Ezra Klein...