~marginalrevolution | Bookmarks (560)

The chronometer, one of the greatest inventions of the modern era, allowed for the first time for the precise measurement of longitude at sea. We examine the impact of this innovation on navigation and urbanization. Our identification strategy leverages the fact that the navigational benefits provided by the chronometer varied across different sea regions depending […] The post The importance of the chronometer appeared...

1. James Damore update (Free Press). 2. AIs rationalize too. 3. Survey of new developments in regional and urban economics. 4. Survey on the macroeconomic costs of climate change. 5. A technical look at bottlenecks to AI adoption. 6. Drones will carry loads for sherpas up Mount Everest (NYT). The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Hazel...

We use matched employer-employee data to study where Americans live in relation to employer worksites. Mean distance from employee home to employer worksite rose from 15 miles in 2019 to 26 miles in 2023. Twelve percent of employees hired after March 2020 live at least fifty miles from their employers in 2023, triple the pre-pandemic […] The post The New Geography of Labor Markets...

From DeepSeek: **Marginal Revolution** – the *Wirtschaftswunder* (economic miracle) of blogs, where Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok dissect the *Zeitgeist* (spirit of the age) through the lens of economics, culture, and *Hintergedanken* (ulterior motives). Founded in 2003, it’s a *Schnellimbiss* (fast-food joint) for ideas: bite-sized posts on everything from pandemic policy to why cilantro tastes […] The post “Explain to me the blog Marginal...

You know, the one from yesterday suggesting that tighter building restrictions have not led to higher real estate prices, at least not in the cross-sectional data?  My sense is that it could be true, but we should not overestimate its import.  In most circumstances, economists should focus on output, not prices per se.  Let’s say […] The post What do I think of the...

1. New David Beckworth newsletter on macroeconomics. 2. Early prediction markets on papal succession. 3. Clifford Winston on DOGE as a wake-up call. 4. Project to preserve on-line text in stone? 5. Incomplete markets in everything, “Mason: the Musical”? 6. Institute for Progress action plan for AI. 7. Did business metrics break the university? The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION....

The annual Public Choice Outreach Conference is a crash course in public choice. The conference is designed for undergraduates and graduates in a wide variety of fields. It’s entirely free. Indeed scholarships are available! The conference will be held Friday May 30-Sunday June 1, 2025, near Washington, DC in Arlington, VA. Lots of great speakers. […] The post Public Choice Outreach Conference! appeared first...

How can I not link to a new Sam Peltzman piece on such a topic?  Here goes: Since 1972, the General Social Survey has periodically asked whether people are happy with Yes, Maybe or No type answers. Here I use a net “happiness” measure, which is percentage Yes less percentage No with Maybe treated as […] The post The Anatomy of Marital Happiness appeared...

Last year the agency provided $266.7m in grants to libraries, museums and related institutions across the country and its territories. Those grants ranged widely in value and purpose, such as $343,521 to support an internship and fellowship programme at the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico or $10,350 for the Art Museum of Eastern Idaho […] The post The Institute for Museum and Library...

The standard view of housing markets holds that the flexibility of local housing supply–shaped by factors like geography and regulation–strongly affects the response of house prices, house quantities and population to rising housing demand. However, from 2000 to 2020, we find that higher income growth predicts the same growth in house prices, housing quantity, and […] The post NIMBY contrarianism appeared first on Marginal...

1. Does generative AI support the MAGA aesthetic style? (NYT) 2. Would you rather have married young? 3. Possible improvements in teen mental health? 4. LLMs produce funnier memes than the average human, though not as funny as the top humans. 5. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is another good Zambian movie, here is the […] The post Monday assorted links appeared first on...

As late as the 1980s it was widely believed that babies do not feel pain. You might think that this was an absurd thing to believe given that babies cry and exhibit all the features of pain and pain avoidance. Yet, for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the straightforward sensory evidence was dismissed […] The post What Did We Learn From Torturing...

I could not get the emojis to reproduce in legible form, you can see them on the original tweet. Here goes: The Less Wrong/Singularity/AI Risk movement started in the 2000s by Yudkowsky and others, which I was an early adherent to, is wrong about all of its core claims around AI risk. It’s important to […] The post Roko on AI risk appeared first...

Dogs can’t talk, but their body language speaks volumes. Many dogs will bow when they want to play, for instance, or lick their lips and avert their gaze when nervous or afraid. But people aren’t always good at interpreting such cues — or even noticing them, a new study suggests. In the study, the researchers presented […] The post How well do humans understand dogs?...

1. A hyper-curiosity theory of ADHD. 2. The religious are more skeptical about the moral character of scientists. 3. “Magpies and Crows Are Using “Anti-Bird Spikes” to Make Their Nests.” 4. Clampdown on DeepSeek? 5. Most externalitlies problems are solved by technology, not coordination. 6. “Their new report also highlights the increasing use of drones […] The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on...

Highly speculative, but I found this of interest: This article explores the hypothesis that modern East Asian populations inherited and maintained extensive psychosocial adaptations to arctic environments from ancestral Ancient Northern East Asian populations, which inhabited arctic and subarctic Northeast Eurasia around the Last Glacial Maximum period of the Late Pleistocene, prior to back migrating southwards into East Asia in […] The post Arctic Instincts? The Late Pleistocene Arctic...

Without a doubt, since its launch, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revolutionized our view of the early universe, but its new findings could put astronomers in a spin. In fact, it could tell us something profound about the birth of the universe by possibly hinting that everything we see around us is sealed […] The post Was our universe born inside a...

In one particularly eye-opening statistic, the share of adults who are unable to “use mathematical reasoning when reviewing and evaluating the validity of statements” has climbed to 25 per cent on average in high-income countries, and 35 per cent in the US. Here is more from John Burn-Murdoch at the FT. The post Have humans passed peak brain power? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION....

1. System override. 2. The pop music kill rate. 3. Politicians have to learn how to use AI advisors. 4. Estimating local gdp everywhere. 5. What the Trump administration demands from Columbia University.  And more from the NYT. 6. Daniel Kahmeman’s assisted suicide (WSJ). 7. Police officer steps in when alligator stops pizza delivery in […] The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on...

It sometimes happens that a patient needs a non-commercially-available form of a drug, a different dosage or a specific ingredient added or removed depending on the patient’s needs. Compounding pharmacies are allowed to produce these drugs without FDA approval. Moreover, since the production is small-scale and bespoke the compounded drugs are basically immune from any […] The post The Shortage that Increased Ozempic Supply...

In the last decade, large financial institutions in the United States have purchased hundreds of thousands of homes and converted them to rentals. This paper studies the welfare consequences of institutional ownership of single-family housing. We build an equilibrium model of the housing market with two sectors: rental and homeownership. The model captures two key […] The post Institutional ownership of single-family housing appeared...

From the NYT: The part of this research that really blows me away is the realization that our environment is, in part, made up of the genes of the people around us. Our friends’, our partners’, even our peers’ genes all influence us. Preliminary research that I was involved in suggests that your spouse’s genes […] The post Dalton Conley in genes-environment interaction appeared...

The welfare contributions of new goods and free goods are not well-measured in our current national accounts. We derive explicit terms for the contributions of these goods and introduce a new framework and metric, GDP-B which quantifies their benefits. We apply this framework to several empirical examples including Facebook and smartphone cameras and estimate their […] The post A new measurement for the value...

1. What explains the global Islamic revival? 2. Sofia Gubaidalina, RIP (NYT). 3. Europe’s oldest universities that are still open. 4. Civic Future Talent Programmes. 5. Do we need a more assertive Congress? 6. Ruxandra on fertility. The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to H. No they weren't. I've had plenty of Syrians ... by Anti-GnosticIn reply...