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- Marginal Revolution Read
What should I ask Fuchsia Dunlop?
Yes I will be doing a fourth (!) Conversation with her, based in part on her forthcoming book Five Tastes: Delicious Recipes for Chinese Flavors. I am sure it is excellent, and will read it very soon. Her works are not just great cookbooks, they are among the best books period. Here are my previous
- Marginal Revolution Read
The economics of agents
From Patrick Collison: Assorted things I’ve been mulling over regarding agents in the economy: • Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It’s often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive,
- Marginal Revolution Read
Saturday assorted links
1. Chris Blattman’s practical AI for academics. 2. Platypus Economics on red diesel. 3. Those new service sector jobs, Indian cricket edition. 4. Will AI make us more technocratic? 5. What should a scientific paper look like? 6. Screening for twins? 7. Chris Wickham, RIP. The pos
- Marginal Revolution Read
Earth facts of the day
Global call center headcount is 5.3% below its December 2023 peak, ending more than a decade of growth. It has fallen year over year for eight straight quarters, a decline that started in high-income countries and coincided with the rise of AI chatbots. Call center support is falling behind other white-collar work in the same
- Marginal Revolution Read
California in-migration and out-migration
Long-run U.S. population movements have been driven more by natural amenities than by jobs, and California, rich in both uniform and complementary climates, should be a persistent net gainer of domestic migrants. It has instead lost residents to other states every year since about 1990. This paper argues that its amenities are unchanged and that
- Marginal Revolution Read
The origin of risk
From the QJE, by Alexandr Kopytov, Mathieu Taschereau-Dumouchel, and Zebang Xu: We propose a tractable model in which risk, at both the micro and macro levels, is endogenous and driven by incentives. In the model, each firm chooses the mean and the variance of its productivity process, as well as how it covaries with the productivity of other firms. Aggregate risk arises when firms select productivity processes that are correlated with one another.
- Marginal Revolution Read
Ethiopia update
Ethiopia is the center of the world right now as it has returned to war. Ethiopian forces retook Mekelle from rebel forces, but the fighting has extended beyond Tigray. Eritrean forces allegedly entered Tigray, and Ethiopia responded with drone attacks. The war could go a number of ways. The war extends beyond Ethiopia. Sara Al-Saeed
- Marginal Revolution Read
Friday assorted links
1. Charles Kenny on foreign aid. 2. Rise and fall of the plasma screen. 3. France also has very high private debt. 4. Ross Douthat will do a weekly column for The Free Press. And from Ross himself. 5. Encryption risk? 6. “The Altruists premieres November 19.” 7. Emily Wilson on various Canadian writers.
- Marginal Revolution Read
A Sentiment Analysis of Cowen, Hanson, Caplan, and Krugman
Supplied by Bryan Caplan, performed by ChatGPT, excerpt: So Cowen isn’t well described as either “positive” or “negative.” A much better description is: High appreciation + high concern + very low emotional agitation. He seems to think there is an astonishing amount of wonderful stuff in the world and an astonishing number of things worth
- Marginal Revolution Read
On *Stubborn Attachments* and religion (from my email)
Hey Tyler I consider Stubborn Attachments your most dogmatic and religious book. Pondering on it, here are my Abrahamic readings of it: Jewish: Ten Commandments, obviously. While the bigger canon of Jewish laws tend to be overly conservative because people will fail following them anyway, the Ten Commandments are the laws the Jews should be
- Marginal Revolution Read
Predictions for economics, given AI
From Ingar Haaland: With math essentially being delegated to OpenAI, here’s what I predict for economics and the social sciences more generally: The top tier of research will just become better and it will be normal human-led research where AI is used for scale (e.g. conducting qualitative interviews with relevant populations, running behavioral interventions in
- Marginal Revolution Read
Thursday assorted links
1. War in space? 2. How the math breakthroughs might matter. 3. Short proof of quasi-Riemann. 4. App for finding art exhibitions. 5. Podcast on African economic growth. 6. New and very good book: The Madrid Model: How Freedom and Openness Created an Economic Powerhouse, by Diego Sánchez de la Cruz. 7. This is only the
- Marginal Revolution Read
How and why did the Victorians succeed?
From Samuel Hughes, in Works in Progress: The elites of Victorian Britain operated differently. Their schools and universities were not terribly academic and had very little STEM. As adults, they got up late, drank a lot, and spent a remarkable share of their waking hours partying. They loved feasting, sports, holidays, dancing, and dressing up.
- Marginal Revolution Read
What I’ve been reading
1. Begoña Gómez Urzaiz, The Abandoners: On Mothers and Monsters. A wonderful book about mothers who abandon their children, and properly unsentimental. You will never think about Muriel Spark the same way again. Vashti Bunyan gets a section too. Recommended. 2. Evan Gershkovich, This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian-American Story. Yes he is the WSJ
- Marginal Revolution Read
Wednesday assorted links
1. Palo Alto Networks (cybersecurity firm, check out YTD). 2. OAI doing math again. Quasi-Riemann! And just one metric of import. 3. The AI agents pitching literary magazines. 4. Redux of my 2022 post on the effective altruists. 5. Rude AI video about Europe. 6. Power constraints and the productivity slowdown.
- Marginal Revolution Read
Against Laissez-Faire Democracy
In a new paper, Brennan and Freiman argue persuasively that: the arguments against laissez-faire capitalism apply in a rather straight way against laissez-faire democracy. This should be a rather startling result, considering that laissez-faire capitalism is widely rejected, yet laissez-faire democracy is widely accepted. All the typical market failure arguments–externalities, asymmetric information, principal-agent problems, behavioral
- Marginal Revolution Read
Texas-Canada Fact of the Day
Texas produces more than Canada with three quarters of the population. Rough numbers for 2025: Texas Canada Texas / Canada Population 31.7 million 41.7 million 0.76 GDP, nominal (US$) $2.9 trillion $2.3 trillion 1.27 GDP per capita, nominal $91,500 $55,700 1.64 GDP per capita, PPP $94,000 $66,700 1.41 GDP, PPP (int’l $) $3.0 trillion $2.75
- Marginal Revolution Read
Why most stereotypes are negative
Stereotypes are a foundational construct in psychological science, often defined as beliefs concerning characteristic group attributes. We present a cognitive-ecological theory of social perception that predicts and explains why such characteristic attributes are likely negative, that is, why most stereotypes are negative. The theory assumes that, cognitively, people characterize groups by attributes that distinguish them
- Marginal Revolution Read
Effective altruism is useful at the margin
That is the theme of my latest Free Press essay, here is one excerpt: I feel I am well aware of the limitations of effective altruism, and I have outlined many others in an hour-long dialogue I had with MacAskill, arguably the father of the movement, in 2022. Nonetheless, at the margin I think more
- Marginal Revolution Read
Brazil election notes (from my email)
From Diego Costa: “Hi Tyler, If you’re still interested in the fallout from Brazil’s elections, here are some observations that add texture to the usual narratives: Nine of the 10 candidates who received the most votes for the Lower Chamber are under 40. The exception is 41. Their average age is 31.6. They’re all very
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