Marginal Revolution

Here is the source. The post USA fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

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 an attempt to redefine and revitalize liberalism for our times. Where Daron’s first visit was about how states and societies contend for the narrow corridor in which liberty survives, this one asks what liberals themselves got wrong, and the answer implicates the educated elite—that is to say, you. Tyle

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 that it kills everyone. So shorting things would be pointless. That is from Tom Chivers.  It is easy enough to say buy seriously out of the money puts, and be long with the rest of your portfolio.  But few (if any) of the worriers are doing that.  I should note also that many (most? almost all?) of the

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 the US consumer spending budget. By contrast, imported Chinese goods make up about 3% of US domestic expenditures.” 4. Noah is right. 5. “For decades, men have been increasing their share of housework and child care. But the number of babies just keeps falling.”

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

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 propose a complementary approach: using responses to questions that are not themselves politically sensitive to provide indirect evidence about politically sensitive attitudes. Using subjective well-being (SWB), we ask whether within-person changes in life satisfaction, after accounting for changes in ma

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 their first year of residence in the United States and in each year thereafter, allowing us to identify immigrants who eventually leave the United States (referred to here as return migrants). We use those data to produce the first examination of trends in earnings assimilation over a 41-year period an

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 Angst I am seeing?  Not quite “a Gilda Radner thing,” but if nothing else shows the usefulness of trying to be concrete.  Here is an estimate of $100 billion extra for the world annually.  That is estimated as a twenty percent increase in cyber costs.  Brad Carson uses AI agents (hurrah!) to

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 Bloomberg Intelligence, companies in the S&P 500 are expected to post an average +29% jump in quarterly earnings for Q2 compared to the previous year.” 4. Conor Sen Substack on viewing the economy through a housing lens. 5. Southwood on Samuel Hughes on architecture. The post Tuesday

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 costs £430million, is intended to link power between the UK’s National Grid and Ireland, running between County Wexford and Freshwater West in Pembrokeshire. However, the latter site is known to Potter fans as the site of house elf Dobby’s grave in the film Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, and contain

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 100 errors, while the worst caught 30. Pooling every system’s output caught 93 of 100. Models are only partly correlated in the errors they find, making ensembling a big lever for finding issues in papers. Check your papers against multiple models! Seven errors could not be caught by any system. Al

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 economic outliers. By 1940, close to 60 percent of MCs aged 18–40 held a college degree, against under 5 percent of comparable young men outside Congress. In the 19th-century censuses, MCs as adults held roughly three times the wealth of demographically matched controls. They also come from economi

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 also describes the five stories. The post Brian Chau at work appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

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 a rhetorical commitment to equality that eschews its most redistributive instrument(s).” 3. Francesco Cabella conversation with (an older) Victor Niederhoffer. 4. New homes in Tatu City, Kenya. 5. Bill Goichberg, RIP (NYT).  America’s greatest chess organizer, he was always very nice

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 humanities and social sciences. We then use student transcripts from one flagship to estimate causal effects. Students become more liberal during college regardless of major and sort toward ideologically similar instructors. Exploiting plausibly random variation in when instructors teach courses, we

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 have a simple request.  If you are worried, and wish to persuade the doubters, try the methods of science.  I would like to see the following: 1. Your outline of how, say two or three years from now, we might estimate the additional cybersecurity costs from the AI break-ins.  I am convinced that number i

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 in Vietnam. 4. Questions from Seb Krier. 5. Time magazine has a special version that only the AIs can read. 6. Tymofiy Mylovanov has a good summary of my greatest fear. The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

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.” “United, there is little we cannot do… Divided, there is little we can do.” “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. and from the 1962 moon speech at Rice University; We choose to do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard. and from Ly

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. Hews very close to the truth. The two camps really did divide on theory versus past prediction and the weather was as portrayed. After the war, John F. Kennedy asked Eisenhower what gave the Allies the decisive advantage during the D-Day invasion, Eisenhower replied, “We had better meteorologi

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