What should I ask Andrew Ross Sorkin?

Oct. 25th, 2025 05:39 pm
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Posted by Tyler Cowen

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Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him.  From Wikipedia:

Andrew Ross Sorkin (born February 19, 1977) is an American journalist and author. He is a financial columnist for The New York Times and a co-anchor of CNBC’s Squawk Box. He is also the founder and editor of DealBook, a financial news service published by The New York Times. He wrote the bestselling book Too Big to Fail and co-produced a movie adaptation of the book for HBO Films. He is also a co-creator of the Showtime series Billions.

In October 2025, Sorkin published 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History–and How It Shattered a Nation, a new history of the Crash based on hundreds of documents, many unpublished.

Most of all I am interested in his new book, but not only.  So what should I ask him?

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Saturday assorted links

Oct. 25th, 2025 04:10 pm
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Posted by Tyler Cowen

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1. Return of California Forever?

2. Asterisk magazine is hiring a Managing Editor.

3. The tragedy of bear nationalism.

4. Are data-driven VCs less innovative?

5. What happened to late night television?

6. Ai Weiwei is too harsh on Germany.  And ChatGPT denkt wie die deutschen.

7. John Collison on Ireland.

8. Did mRNA vaccines prolong the lives of cancer patients?

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Are the ACA exchanges unraveling?

Oct. 25th, 2025 02:02 pm
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Posted by Tyler Cowen

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After all, that is what economists predicted if the mandate was not tightly enforced.  Here is the latest reprt:

Premiums for the most popular types of plans sold on the federal health insurance marketplace Healthcare.gov will spike on average by 30 percent next year, according to final rates approved by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and shown in documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

The higher prices — affecting up to 17 million Americans who buy coverage on the federal marketplace — reflect the largest annual premium increases by far in recent years.

Here is the full article.

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Should we worry about AI’s circular deals?

Oct. 25th, 2025 05:01 am
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Posted by Tyler Cowen

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The yet once again on target Noah Smith reports:

As far as I can tell, there are two main fears about this sort of deal. The first is that the deals will artificially inflate companies’ revenue, tricking investors into overvaluing their stock or lending them too much money. The second is that the deals increase systemic risk by tying all of the AI companies’ fortunes to each other.

Let’s start with the first of these risks. The question here is whether AI’s circular deals are an example of round-tripping or vendor financing.

Suppose two startups — let’s call them Aegnor and Beleg2 — secretly agree to inflate each other’s revenue. Aegnor buys ad space on Beleg’s website, and Beleg buys ad space on Aegnor’s website. Both companies’ revenues go up. They’re not making any profits, and they’re not generating any cash flows, because the money is just changing hands back and forth. But if investors are looking for companies with “traction”, they might see Aegnor and Beleg’s topline revenue numbers go up. If they fail to dig any deeper, they might give both companies a bunch of investment money that they didn’t earn. This is called “round-tripping”, and it happened occasionally during the dotcom boom.

Now what I just described is completely illegal, because the companies colluded in secret. But you can also have something a little similar happen by accident, in a perfectly legal way. If there are a bunch of startups whose business model is selling to other startups, you can get some of the “round-tripping” effect without any collusion.

On the other hand, it’s perfectly normal and healthy for, say, General Motors to lend its customers the money they use to buy GM cars. In fact, GM has a financing arm specifically to do this. This is called vendor finance. It’s perfectly legal and commonplace, and most people think there’s nothing wrong with it. The transaction being financed — a customer buying a car — is something we know has value. People really do want cars; GM Financial helps them get those cars.

So the question is: Are the AI industry’s circular deals more like round-tripping, or are they more like vendor finance? I’m inclined to say it’s the latter.

Noah stresses that the specifics of these deals are widely reported, and no serious investors are being fooled.  I would note a parallel with horizontal or vertical integration, which also can have a financing element.  Except that here corporate control is not being exchanged as part of the deal.  “I give him some of my company, he gives me some of his — my goodness that is circular must be some kind of problem there!”…just does not make any sense.

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Emergent Ventures India, 11th cohort

Oct. 25th, 2025 04:04 am
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Saket Sinha is an accomplished bansuri virtuoso with more than seventy students worldwide. His grant enables a move to Mumbai.

Riddhi Jain, 17, received her grant to build an AI-powered mental health system addressing unaffordable and stigmatized therapy.

Advik Kapoor, 16, received his grant for Exerton, to help builders get started with their dream projects.

Vibhuti Bafna, Aliya Mamadfozilova, Julian Drotkiewicz and Enya Dumitru are high-schoolers in four different countries. They received their grant for Waste2o, turning agricultural waste into potable water.

Ishan Khire, 18, received his grant for Rural Analytics, to make rural development data more accessible for researchers.

Nikitaa Sivaakumar received her grant to develop interactive visual aids for high school science teachers.

Jhillika Trisal (with Falguni Shrivastava and Souvik Ghosh) received her grant for building Cognitii, an AI‑plus‑human learning platform for children with special needs; the grant scales pilots and the personalization engine.

Piyush Jha, 18, founder of Vasudeva Innovations, received his grant to turn wastewater into clean energy while earning carbon credits.

Ambreen Deol is an aspiring surgeon who has rotated at Cleveland Clinic, Stanford, Mount Sinai and UAB, received her grant for travel and general career support.

Anjali Jayaraman, 14, received her grant for Repay Smart, to help young adults make smarter financial decisions using gamification.

Arjun Khemani received his grant for the Arjun Khemani Podcast, and work on his writing. His latest book Lords of the Cosmos (With Logal Chipkin) is out now.

Adwait Dandwate received his grant for Vardhishnu, to create learning spaces for children from vulnerable backgrounds.

Amruth Ravindranath is a neuroscience researcher, and received his grant to develop cognitive assessments and AI models that personalize mental health chatbots to each person’s unique cognitive fingerprint.

Shaunak Agarkhedkar is a novelist, and received his grant to write novels challenging myths about stray animals.

Kaustubh Bankapure received his grant to create an online learning model of applied theatre education for Indian educators.

Kavish Garg, 18, a sophomore studying math and philosophy at Stanford, received his grant for conference and travel support.

Ria Khurana and Tanmaya Gulati, both 22 and studying medicine, and founders of RNT Health Insights, received their grant to develop medical devices detecting early-stage gastrointestinal cancers.

Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV India announcement is here. More about the winners of EV India second cohort, third cohort, fourth cohort, fifth cohort, sixth cohort, seventh cohort, eighth cohort, ninth cohort, and tenth cohort. To apply for EV India, use the EV application, click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.

And here is Nabeel’s AI engine for other EV winners. Here are the other EV cohorts.

If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at srajagopalan@mercatus.gmu.edu.

TC again: I thank Shruti for writing this post for me.

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Who Pays for Tariffs Along the Supply Chain?

Oct. 24th, 2025 06:02 pm
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This paper examines the effects of tariffs along the supply chain using product-level data from a large U.S. wine importer in the context of the 2019-2021 U.S. tariffs on European wines. By combining confidential transaction prices with foreign suppliers and U.S. distributors as well as retail prices, we trace price impacts along the supply chain, from foreign producers to U.S. consumers. Although pass-through at the border was incomplete, our estimates indicate that U.S. consumers paid more than the government received in tariff revenue, because domestic markups amplified downstream price effects. The dollar margins per bottle for the importer contracted, but expanded for distributors/retailers. Price effects emerge gradually along the chain, taking roughly one year to materialize at the retail level. Additionally, we find evidence of tariff engineering by the wine industry to avoid duties, leading to composition-driven biases in unit values in standard trade statistics.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Aaron B. Flaaen, Ali Hortaçsu, Felix Tintelnot, Nicolás Urdaneta & Daniel Xu.

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Friday assorted links

Oct. 24th, 2025 04:16 pm
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Posted by Tyler Cowen

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1. Should AI surrogates of you make your life and death decisions?

2. “According to Federal Railroad Administration data, the Brightline has been involved in at least 185 fatalities, 148 of which were believed not to be suicides, since it began operating, in December 2017. Last year, the train hit and killed 41 people—none of whom, as best as authorities could determine, was attempting to harm themselves.”  Link here.

3. The Recoding America Fund, from Jennifer Pahlka.

4. Dean Ball on the call for a superintelligence ban, Dean is right once again.  Mainly (once again) a lot of irresponsibilitiy on the other side of that ledger, you will not see them seriously address the points that Dean raises.  If you want to go this route, do the hard work and write an 80-page paper on how the political economy of such a ban would work.

5. A new way of trying UAP measurements?

6. Klenow on Aghion and Howitt.

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Continents

Oct. 24th, 2025 04:00 am
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Prediction Markets Are Very Accurate

Oct. 24th, 2025 11:19 am
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Posted by Alex Tabarrok

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alexmccullough at Dune has a very good post on the accuracy of Polymarket prediction markets. First, how do we measure accuracy? Suppose a prediction market predicts an event will happen with p=.7, i.e. a 70% probability. The event happens. How do we score this prediction? A common method is the Brier Score which is the mean squared difference from the actual outcome. In this case the Brier Score is (0.70−1)2 = 0.09. Notice that if the prediction market had predicted the event would have happened with 90% probability, a better prediction, then the Brier Score would have been (0.90−1)2 = 0.01 a lower number. If the event had not happened then the Brier Score for a 70% prediction would have been (0.70−0)2 = 0.49, a higher number. Thus, a lower Brier Score is better.

Across some 90,000 predictions the Polymarket Brier Score for a 12 hour ahead prediction is .0581. As Alex notes:

A brier score below 0.125 is good, and below 0.1 is great. Polymarket’s total score is excellent, and puts it on par with the best prediction model’s in existence… Sports betting lines tend to average a brier score of between .18-.22.

Brier Scores have been widely used to measure weather forecasts. A state of the art 12 hour ahead forecast of rain, for example, might have a Brier Score of .0.05 – 0.12 so if Polymarket suggest a metaphorical umbrella you would be wise to listen.

Moreover, highly liquid markets are even more accurate.

Even markets with low liquidity have good brier scores below 0.1, but markets with more than $1m in total trading volume have scores of 0.0256 12 hours prior to resolution and 0.0159 a day prior. It’s hard to overstate how impressive that is.

There are,  however, some small but systematic errors. The following bar chart splits events into 20 buckets of 5% each so the first bucket covers events that were predicted to happen 0-5% of the time and the last bucket covers events that were predicted to happen 95-100% of the time. The black bar gives the predicted probability, the orange bar the actual frequencies. As expected, events which are predicted to happen more often do happen more often with a very nice progression. Note, however, that the predicted probability is almost always slightly higher than the actual frequency. This means that people are paying a bit too much. It’s unclear whether this is due to market design issues such as the greater difficult of shorting or something about the Automated Market Makers or due to psychological factors such as favorite bias. Thus, some room for improvement but very impressive overall.

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Some further new negative results on minimum wage hikes

Oct. 24th, 2025 06:30 am
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We study how exposure to scientific research in university laboratories influences students’ pursuit of careers in science. Using administrative data from thousands of research labs linked to student career outcomes and a difference-in-differences design, we show that state minimum wage increases reduce employment of undergraduate research assistants in labs by 7.4%. Undergraduates exposed to these minimum wage increases graduate with 18.1% fewer quarters of lab experience. Using minimum wage changes as an instrumental variable, we estimate that one fewer quarter working in a lab, particularly early in college, reduces the probability of working in the life sciences industry by 2 percentage points and of pursuing doctoral education by 7 percentage points. These effects are attenuated for students supported by the Federal Work-Study program. Our findings highlight how labor market policies can shape the career paths of future scientists and the importance of budget flexibility for principal investigators providing undergraduates with research experience.

That is from a new working paper by Ina Ganguli and Raviv Murciano-Goroff.

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The Peter Principle and exploiting overconfident workers

Oct. 24th, 2025 04:46 am
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This paper studies a long-term employment relationship with an overconfident worker who updates his beliefs using Bayes’ rule. Once the worker has proven to be a good match, exploitation opportunities disappear. Then, it may be optimal to either end the relationship or promote/transfer the worker to a different role, especially if the new position offers fresh opportunities to exploit his overconfidence. In doing so, we offer a novel microfoundation for the “Peter Principle,” rooted in this dynamic of overconfidence exploitation. Our analysis addresses key limitations in previous explanations, particularly those related to the findings of Benson et al. (2019), where the Peter Principle was observed among highly confident workers.

Look at it this way: you can always promise the worker, at each new switch, a career trajectory that probably he or she will not be able to attain.  So you boost them in the hierarchy, with such promises, they are incompetent for the new roles they receive, but you pay them in promised trajectory rather than cold hard cash.  That is from Matthias Fahn and Nicholas Klein, now out in the Journal of Labor Economics.  Offer them a deanship now, or at least chair of the department.  Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

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When will quantum computing work?

Oct. 24th, 2025 12:41 am
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Huge investments are flowing into QC companies today. IonQ has a $19B market cap, Rigetti has a $10B cap, and PsiQuantum recently raised $1B.3D-Wave is not relevant, despite high qubit counts. Their machines are annealers, rather than gate based, and have less computational power than the QCs that IonQ, Rigetti, PsiQuantum, etc. are working on. This is a lot of money for an industry generating no real revenue, and without an apparent path to revenue over the next 5 years. Qubit counts have not been doubling each year, but even if they did, we’d have 32 kq machines in 2030.4If qubits double each year, 1,000 qubits today grows to 32 kq in 5 years’ time. There are few – if any – commercial applications for machines of that size. Will these companies keep raising larger rounds until they achieve 100 kq? Or have they got some secret sauce we don’t know about that investors are betting on? If there has been a true breakthrough, we should see much faster growth in qubit count, as well as larger and larger quantum processors, running increasingly massive programs. Note that the QC ecosystem is reasonably public and both private companies and university labs are competitive players. Advances tend to get published rather than stowed away.

Here is more from Tom McCarthy.

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Thursday assorted links

Oct. 23rd, 2025 03:54 pm
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Posted by Tyler Cowen

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1. Is the rebellion against cognitive elites?

2. Zvi on Dwarkesh and Andrej.

3. The China tech canon?

4. Knausgaard on Dostoyevsky (New Yorker).

5. David French on feminization (NYT).

6. Chauncey, say it ain’t so! Wemby as recompense.  Here is my 2021 Bloomberg column on the NBA and gambling.

7. What NSF grant reviewers look for.

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Red Rooms, a 2023 Quebecois movie

Oct. 23rd, 2025 08:57 am
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Highly disturbing, so I do not recommend it to most of you.  It concerns a murder trial, and while violence is never shown on screen it is harrowing to watch.  Much of the movie is about the spectators at the trial, and you can think of it as one vision for how online life will evolve for a particular class of people.  Even in 2023, the movie had “LLM psychosis” as a subtheme.  Grossly underrated, so I am passing this information along, which originally comes from Eugene.  Here is the Wikipedia page, here is the trailer.

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What I’ve been reading

Oct. 23rd, 2025 04:39 am
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Terry Eagleton, Modernism: A Literature in Crisis.  The book is short, its quality unevenly distributed, and the subtitle misleading (plenty of it is not about literature).  It remains the case that Eagleton is one of the people who knows enough that he is almost always worth reading.

Jonathan Healey, The Blood in Winter: England on the Brink of Civil War, 1642.  What I found so compelling about this book was the step-by-step narrative of how the whole thing collapsed into very direct conflict and then an execution.  Recommended.

Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity.  I’m not the sort of person to recommend these sorts of anti-tech books (they are a dime a dozen), but if you have to read one of them…this is maybe the most coherent, non-ridiculous, and philosophically oriented, in the good sense of course?

David Nasaw, The Wounded Generaton: Coming Home After World War II.  A good book showing just how much post-traumatic stress disorder there was during and after WWII.

Marc S. Ryan, The Healthcare Labyrinth: A Guide to Navigating Health Plans and Fixing American Health Insurance is a very good and balanced book on the economics of health care.

Benjamin Schneider, The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City-Building Revolution.  How do we make urban transformation succeed in America’s largest and most important cities?  What are the main obstacles to such success?  Schneider calls for resurrecting the “lost art of city-building” to achieve abundant housing, good public transit, and streets for people instead of cars.

Helen Vendler, Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays.  She wrote these for Leon Wieseltier’s magazine, and they are now collected after her passing.  Self-recommending.

And there is Cynthia Paces, Prague: The Heart of Europe.

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Shielding Chart

Oct. 22nd, 2025 04:00 am
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*Why Live: How Suicide Becomes an Epidemic*

Oct. 22nd, 2025 05:58 pm
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That is the new Helen C. Epstein book, which I found very instructive and useful.  My main wish is that it would be longer, in any case here is one very interesting excerpt of many:

If Nunavut, the semi-autonomous Canadian territory that is home to roughly 28,000 indigenous Inuit people, were an independent country, it would have the highest suicide rate in the world.  The suicide rate in Greenland, whose population is mostly Inuit, is 85 per 100,000; next highest is Lithuania, at 33 per 100,000.  Nunavut’s rate is 100 per 100,000, ten times higher than the rest of Canada and seven times higher than the US.  When I visited Nunavut’s capital, Iqaluit, in July, virtually every Inuit I met had lost at least some relative to suicide, and some recounted as many as five or six family suicides, plus those of friends, co workers ,and other acquaintances.  Three people in my small circle of contacts lost someone close to them to suicide during my nine-day visit.  Acquaintances would direct my attention to passersby on the street: “his older brother too,” “his son.”  Almost one-third of Nunavut Inuit have attmpted suicide, and most Inuit I met confided, without my asking that had done so at least once.

This book also is important for understanding the key phenomenon of negative emotional contagion.

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Wednesday assorted links

Oct. 22nd, 2025 03:58 pm
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Posted by Tyler Cowen

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1. “…town leaders successfully convinced a court to force ICE to remove a fence around the immigration processing facility because it was erected without a permit.” (NYT)

2. Knausgaard on Dostoyevsky (New Yorker).

3. Chat with AI Ray Dalio in your spare time.

4. Rebuilding American corporate research.

5. Country rankings for AI freedom of speech.

6. 21st century civilization curriculum.  A look at where one part of “the intellectual new right” is these days.

7. New IQ results, commercial and not confirmed.

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Ads as cues

Oct. 22nd, 2025 01:20 pm
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https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=91712

Why do we see both advertising and powerful consumer habits for well-known and intrinsically similar brands? We offer an explanation based on the idea that, as in Bordalo et al. (2020), a consumer is more likely to demand a good if she recalls the pleasure it gave her in the past. In turn, the consumer is more likely to recall goods that are consumed more frequently and more similar to cues, subject to interference from other goods. Our model yields context-dependent brand habits where ads work as memory cues. It predicts that ads: i) are more effective for more habitual consumers and ii) exhibit spillovers, within and across products, that are stronger for more habitual consumers and for goods with more similar ads. Using data from NielsenIQ and Nielsen we find support for these predictions in 20 undifferentiated and highly advertised product categories. Memory offers new insights on how advertising affects market competition and consumer welfare.

That is from a new paper by Pedro Bordalo, Giovanni Burro, Nicola Gennaioli, Gad Nacamulli and Andrei Shleifer.

The post Ads as cues appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

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https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=91712

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Podcast with Filippo Gaddo

Oct. 22nd, 2025 06:48 am
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Posted by Tyler Cowen

https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/926602838/_/marginalrevolution~Podcast-with-Filippo-Gaddo.html

https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=91707

Here is the link, it runs about forty minutes, with links to Spotify and Apple versions as well.  Lots of economics and tech talk in this one, UK productivity, the School of Salamanca, and a discussion of GOAT and the history of economic thought as well, more too.  Here is a Twitter thread on the chat.

The post Podcast with Filippo Gaddo appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/926602838/_/marginalrevolution~Podcast-with-Filippo-Gaddo.html

https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=91707

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