![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
marginal_revolution_feedTrump’s tariff policy is an agenda for pushing American output down the value chain, away from advanced manufacturing and toward making cheaper simpler goods and supplying raw materials to China.
That is from Matt Yglesias.
The post Tariff sentences to ponder appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
marginal_revolution_feed1. An alternate model for training economists?
2. RIP Luis Fernando Verissimo. Borges and the Eternal Orangutans is a very fun book for me.
3. Chinese guy builds Cat World, Department of Why Not?
4. “Walking Tall?” (NYT). The husband did it.
5. AI progressed more quickly than superforecasters had expected. Green energy did not.
6. Price discrimination for campus housing?
7. Garett Jones podcast with John Cochrane on stablecoins.
The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
marginal_revolution_feedWe examine how financial pressure influences rule enforcement by leveraging a novel setting: NFL officiating. Unlike traditional regulatory environments, NFL officiating decisions are immediate, transparent, and publicly scrutinized, providing a unique empirical lens to test whether a worsening financial climate shapes enforcement behavior. Analyzing 13,136 defensive penalties from 2015 to 2023, we find that postseason officiating disproportionately favors the Mahomes-era Kansas City Chiefs, coinciding with the team’s emergence as a key driver of TV viewership/ratings and, thereby, revenue. Our study suggests that financial reliance on dominant entities can alter enforcement dynamics, a concern with implications far beyond sports governance.
That is from a new piece by Spencer Barnes, Ted Dischman, and Brandon Mendez. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The post They solved for the Kansas City Chiefs enforcement equilibrium appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
marginal_revolution_feedBy ordering the U.S. military to summarily kill a group of people aboard what he said was a drug-smuggling boat, President Trump used the military in a way that had no clear legal precedent or basis, according to specialists in the laws of war and executive power.
Mr. Trump is claiming the power to shift maritime counterdrug efforts from law enforcement rules to wartime rules. The police arrest criminal suspects for prosecution and cannot instead simply gun suspects down, except in rare circumstances where they pose an imminent threat to someone.
Here is more from the NYT.
The post Sentences to ponder appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
marginal_revolution_feedFrom philosopher Michael Huemer:
Do persons continue to exist after the destruction of their bodies? Many believe so. This might occur either because we have immaterial souls that persist in another, non-physical realm; or because our bodies will be somehow reanimated after we die; or because we will live on in new bodies in the physical realm.1 I shall suggest herein that the third alternative, “reincarnation,” is surprisingly plausible. More specifically, I shall argue (i) that your present existence constitutes significant evidence that you will be reincarnated, and (ii) that if the history of the universe is infinite, then you will be reincarnated.
My argument is entirely secular and philosophical. The basic line of thought is something like this. The universe has an infinite future. Given unlimited time, every qualitative state that has ever occurred will occur again, infinitely many times. This includes the qualitative states that in fact brought about your current life. A sufficiently precise repetition of the right conditions will qualify as literally creating another incarnation of you. Some theories about the nature of persons rule this out; however, these theories also imply that, given an infinite past, your present existence is a probability-zero event. Hence, your present existence is evidence against such theories of persons. Given an infinite past, it is conclusive evidence.
Here is the rest of the paper. Via Nabeel. So you do not need to read this paper just right now?
The post “Existence is evidence of immortality” appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
marginal_revolution_feed1. Milei having some problems right now (FT).
2. Caplan and Hendren back and forth on the value of Medicaid.
3. How to influence chatbots. Cialdini still applies.
4. Seeing Wizard of Oz at The Sphere (NYT).
5. Patrick Collison on George Berkeley as development economist.
6. Ross Douthat interviews Dan Wang, who by the way is now on the bestseller lists (NYT).
7. Some comments on the Google decision.
The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
marginal_revolution_feedNonetheless these are interesting results, worthy of further examination:
The measurement of intelligence should identify and measure an individual’s subjective confidence that a response to a test question is correct. Existing measures do not do that, nor do they use extrinsic financial incentive for truthful responses. We rectify both issues, and show that each matters for the measurement of intelligence, particularly for women. Our results on gender and confidence in the face of risk have wider applications in terms of the measurement of “competitiveness” and financial literacy. Contrary to received literature, women are more intelligent than men, compete when they should in risky settings, and are more literate.
That is from the September JPE, by Glenn W. Harrison, Don Ross, and J. Todd Swarthout. Here are ungated versions of the paper. Here is Bryan Caplan on the limitations of any single paper.
The post It would take more than one paper to establish these claims appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
marginal_revolution_feedYou can register at this link. Or here.
The post Oct.9th I am speaking for the Pioneer Institute in Boston, on federalism appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
marginal_revolution_feedHere is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Seamus Murphy is an Irish photographer and filmmaker who has spent decades documenting life in some of the world’s most challenging places—from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to Nigeria’s Boko Haram territories. Having left recession-era Ireland in the 1980s to teach himself photography in American darkrooms, Murphy has become that rare artist who moves seamlessly between conflict zones and recording studios, creating books of Afghan women’s poetry while directing music videos that anticipated Brexit.
Tyler and Seamus discuss the optimistic case for Afghanistan, his biggest fear when visiting any conflict zone, how photography has shaped perceptions of Afghanistan, why Russia reminded him of pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland, how the Catholic Church’s influence collapsed so suddenly in Ireland, why he left Ireland in the 1980s, what shapes Americans impression of Ireland, living part-time in Kolkata and what the future holds for that “slightly dying” but culturally vibrant city, his near-death encounters with Boko Haram in Nigeria, the visual similarities between Michigan and Russia, working with PJ Harvey on Let England Shake and their travels to Kosovo and Afghanistan together, his upcoming film about an Afghan family he’s documented for thirty years, and more.
And an excerpt:
COWEN: Now you’re living in Kolkata mainly?
MURPHY: No. I’m living in London, some of the year in Kolkata.
COWEN: Why Kolkata?
MURPHY: My wife is Indian. She grew up in Delhi, Bombay, and Kolkata, but Kolkata was her favorite. They were the years that were her most fond of years. She’s got lots of friends from Kolkata. I love the city. She was saying that if I didn’t like the city, then we wouldn’t be spending as much time in Kolkata as we do, but I do love the city.
It’s got, in many ways, everything I would look for in a city. Kabul, in a way, was a bit like Kolkata when times were better. This is maybe a replacement for Kabul for me. Kolkata is extraordinary. It’s got that history. It’s got the buildings. Bengalis are fascinating. It’s got culture, fantastic food.
COWEN: The best streets in India, right?
MURPHY: Absolutely.
COWEN: It’s my daughter’s favorite city in India.
MURPHY: Really?
COWEN: Yes.
MURPHY: What does she like about it?
COWEN: There’s a kind of noir feel to it all.
MURPHY: Absolutely.
COWEN: It’s so compelling and so strong and just grabs you, and you feel it on every street, every block. It’s probably still the most intellectual Indian city with the best bookshops, a certain public intellectual life.
MURPHY: It’s widespread. It’s not just elite. It’s everyone. We went to a huge book fair. It’s like going to . . . I don’t know what it’s like going to, Kumbh Mela or something. It’s extraordinary.
There’s a huge tent right in the middle, and it’s for what they call little magazines. Little magazines are these very small publications run by one or two people. They’ll publish poetry. They’ll publish interesting stories. Sadly, I don’t speak Bengali because I’d love to be reading this stuff. There are hundreds of these things. They survive, and people buy them. It’s not just the elite. It’s extraordinary in that way.
COWEN: Is there any significant hardship associated with living there, say a few months of the year?
MURPHY: For us, no. There’s a lot of hardship —
COWEN: No pollution?
MURPHY: Yes. The biggest pollution for me is the noise, the noise pollution.
Interesting throughout.
The post My very interesting Conversation with Seamus Murphy appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
marginal_revolution_feedBy Benjamin Manning and John Horton:
Useful social science theories predict behavior across settings. However, applying a theory to make predictions in new settings is challenging: rarely can it be done without ad hoc modifications to account for setting-specific factors. We argue that AI agents put in simulations of those novel settings offer an alternative for applying theory, requiring minimal or no modifications. We present an approach for building such “general” agents that use theory-grounded natural language instructions, existing empirical data, and knowledge acquired by the underlying AI during training. To demonstrate the approach in settings where no data from that data-generating process exists—as is often the case in applied prediction problems—we design a highly heterogeneous population of 883,320 novel games. AI agents are constructed using human data from a small set of conceptually related, but structurally distinct “seed” games. In preregistered experiments, on average, agents predict human play better than (i) game-theoretic equilibria and (ii) out-of-the-box agents in a random sample of 1,500 games from the population. For a small set of separate novel games, these simulations predict responses from a new sample of human subjects better even than the most plausibly relevant published human data.
Here is a good Twitter thread. A broader AI lesson here is that you often have to put in a lot of work to get the best from your LLMs. And these results ought to have implications for the methods of psychology and some of the other social sciences as well.
The post Pathbreaking paper on AI simulations of human behavior appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
marginal_revolution_feedYes I will be doing a Conversation with him. From Wikipedia:
Steinberg was born and raised in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, South Africa. He was educated at Wits University in Johannesburg, and at the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and earned a doctorate in political theory. He taught for nine years at Oxford, where he was Professor of African Studies. He currently teaches at Yale University‘s Council on African Studies.
Three of Steinberg’s books – Midlands (2002), about the murder of a white South African farmer, The Number (2004), a biography of a prison gangster, and Winnie & Nelson (2023) – won South Africa’s premier non-fiction prize, the Sunday Times CNA Literary Awards making him the first writer to win it three times.
I am a special fan of Winnie & Nelson, which I consider to be one of the best books of the last ten years. He is currently working on a biography of Cecil Rhodes. So what should I ask him?
The post What should I ask Jonny Steinberg? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
marginal_revolution_feed1. Where are all the trillion dollar biotech companies?
2. Ne Zha 2 is bombing in America.
3. More John Cochrane on the Fed.
4. Some new problems with the minimum wage.
5. “Complaining about feminization does not a man make”.
6. Did the rise of OpenAI stop Google from being broken up?
7. Geoffrey Hinton moves away from the Doomer position.
8. Car sketch with labels, noting GPT is probably not the best model for this task, at least not the sketch part of it.
The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
marginal_revolution_feedThe NYTimes has a good data-driven piece on How China Went From Clean Energy Copycat to Global Innovator, the upshot of which is that the old view of China as simply copying (“stealing” in some eyes) no longer describes reality. In some fields, including solar, batteries and hydrogen, China is now the leading innovator as measured by high-quality patents and scientific citations.
None of this should surprise anyone. China employs roughly 2.6 million full-time equivalent (FTE) researchers versus about 1.7 million in the United States. On a per-capita basis the U.S. is ahead—about 4,500 researchers per million people versus China’s 1,700—but population scale tips the balance. China simply has more researchers in absolute terms. If you frame it in terms of rare cognitive talent, as in my post on The Extreme Shortage of High IQ Workers—the arithmetic is even more striking: 1-in-1,000 workers (≈IQ 145) ~170,000 in the U.S. labor force and ~770,000 in China. Scale matters.
In the 20th century the world’s most populous countries were poor but that was neither the case historically nor will it be true in the 21st century. The standard of living in China remains well below that in the United States and China may never catch U.S. GDP per capita, but quantity is a quality of its own. More people means more ideas.
To be clear, the rise of China and India as scientific superpowers is not per se a threat. Whiners complain about US pharmaceutical R&D “subsidizing” the world. Well, Chinese pharmaceutical innovation is now saving American lives. Terrific. Ideas don’t stop at borders, and their spread raises living standards everywhere. It would be wonderful if an American cured cancer. It would be 99% as wonderful if a Chinese scientist did. What matters is that when more scientists attack the problem, the odds of a cure rise so we should look favorably on a world with more scientists. That is progress.
The danger is not China’s rise but America’s mindset. Treat science as zero-sum and every Chinese patent looks like a loss. But ideas are nonrival: a Chinese breakthrough doesn’t make Americans poorer, it makes the world richer. A multi-polar scientific world means faster growth, greater wealth, and accelerating technology—even if America wins a smaller share of the Nobels.
The post The Simple Mathematics of Chinese Innovation appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
marginal_revolution_feedA global bond sell-off deepened on Wednesday, driving the yield on the 30-year US Treasury to 5 per cent for the first time since July, as investors’ fears over rising debt piles and stubbornly high inflation dominated trading.
Longer-dated bonds bore the brunt of the selling, with the yield on the 30-year Treasury up 0.03 percentage points at 5 per cent and Japan’s 30-year bond yield hitting a record high of 3.29 per cent.
In the UK, long-term borrowing costs climbed further after reaching their highest level since 1998 on Tuesday. The 30-year gilt yield rose 0.06 percentage points to 5.75 per cent.
Here is more from the FT.
The post Read it and weep appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
marginal_revolution_feedIn today’s market, even companies with multiple approved drugs can trade below their cash balances. Given this, it is truly perplexing to see AI-biotechs raise mega-rounds at the preclinical stage – Xaira with a billion-dollar seed, Isomorphic with $600M, EvolutionaryScale with $142M, and InceptiveBio with $100M, to name a few. The scale and stage of these rounds reflect some investors’ belief that AI-biology pairing can bend the drug discovery economics I described before.
To me, the question of whether AI will be helpful in drug discovery is not as interesting as the question of whether AI can turn a 2-billion-dollar drug development into a 200-million-dollar drug development, or whether 10 years to approve a drug can become 5 years to approve a drug. AI will be used to assist drug discovery in the same way software has been used for decades, and, given enough time, we know it will change everything [4]. But is “enough time” 3 years or half a century?
One number that is worth appreciating is that 80% of all costs associated with bringing a drug to market come from clinical-stage work. That is, if we ever get to molecules designed and preclinically validated in under 1 year, we’ll be impacting only a small fraction of what makes drug discovery hard. This productivity gain cap is especially striking given that the majority of the data we can use to train models today is still preclinical, and, in most cases, even pre-animal. A perfect model predictive of in vitro tox saves you time on running in vitro tox (which is less than a few weeks anyway!), doesn’t bridge the in vitro to animal translation gap, and especially does not affect the dreaded animal-to-human jump. As such, perfecting predictive validity for preclinical work is the current best-case scenario for the industry. Though we don’t have a sufficient amount and types of data to solve even that.
Here is the full and very interesting essay, from the excellent Lada Nuzhna.
The post Where are the trillion dollar biotech companies? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
marginal_revolution_feedWilliam Wu, NoVa, piano, Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff.
Olga Niekrasova, Kyiv, animated film.
Anhelina Leshak, Ukraine/GWU, general career support.
Myles Fritts, Florida, fish and genetics.
Luzia Bruckamp, LSE, education and fertility.
Maximilian Jager, Frankfurt, LLMs to outline the German regulatory code.
Reyansh Sharma, London/Cambridge, open source math for the AIs.
Donnacha Fitzgerald, improve genome editing, London, from Ireland.
Sam Glover and Stella Tsantekidou, free speech in the UK.
Lyubov Guk, London/Ukraine, immigrant entrepreneurs.
Lily Geidelberg, London, AI and your calendar.
Ben Johnson, London, new policy and research developments for R&D.
Aden Nurie and Ian Cheshire, Tampa and Wallingford, “We’d like a grant to help us turn ChatARV into the best AI algorithm for finding comparable properties on the market.”
Jessie Chen, Singapore/Cambridge, privacy-preserving machine learning models that can work on encrypted data without exposing sensitive information.
Anton Leicht, Berlin, AI policy research.
Here is Nabeel’s semantic search for previous EV winners.
The post Emergent Ventures winners, 46th cohort appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
marginal_revolution_feedAnother concern is that stablecoins could displace bank deposits and undermine commercial banks. Many banks are taking steps to “tokenise” their deposits, allowing them to be used easily for blockchain-based transactions. And they are reducing their fat fees on cross-border payments. In other words, faced with new competition, they are cutting costs and increasing efficiency. This is as it should be.
Here is more from Eswar Prasad at the FT. Or can the banks simply not compete and will lose lots of deposits?
The post Stablecoins competing with banks? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
marginal_revolution_feed1. What do extremists have in common?
2. Australia now has its own convict islands.
3. Henry Oliver on Tanenhaus on Buckley. Recommended.
4. UK immigration and public services.
5. Metaculus has a new competition for forecasters vs. AIs, with prizes.
The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
marginal_revolution_feedThe Taiping Rebellion is arguably the most important event in modern history that even educated Westerners know very little about. It’s also known as the Taiping Civil War and it was one of the largest conflicts in human history (1850–1864), with death toll estimates ranging from 20 to 30 million, far exceeding deaths in the US civil war (~750,000) with which it overlapped. The civil war destabilized Qing China, weakening it against foreign powers and shaped the trajectory of 19th- and 20th-century Chinese politics. In China the Taiping Civil War is considered the defining event of the 19th-century.
The most surprising aspect of the civil war is that the rebels were Christian. The rebellion has its genesis in 1837 with the dramatic visions of Hong Xiuquan. In his visions, Hong and his elder brother traveled the world slaying demons, guided onwards by an old man who berated Confucius for failing to teach proper doctrines to the Chinese people. (I draw here on Steven Platt’s excellent Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom). It is perhaps not coincidental that Hong began experiencing his visions after failing the infamously stressful Chinese civil service exams for the third time. It wasn’t until 1843, however, after he failed the exams for the fourth time, that he had an epiphany. A Christian tract that he had never read before suddenly unlocked the meaning of his visions–the elder brother was Jesus Christ, making Hong the second son of the old man, God.
With his visions unlocked, Hong threw himself into learning and then teaching the Gospels. He quickly converted his cousin and a neighbor and they baptized themselves and began taking down icons of Confucianism at their local school. Confucianism, of course, underpinned the exam system that Hong had grown to hate (Recall, that a similar pattern is visible in India today, where mass exams generate large numbers of educated but frustrated youth).
The wild visions of a lowly scholar wouldn’t seem to have the makings of a revolutionary movement but this was the beginning of the century of humiliation when China was forced to confront the idea that far from being the center of civilization it was in fact a backward and weak power on the world stage. Moreover, China was governed by foreigners, the Manchus, who despite ruling for 200 years had never really integrated with the Chinese population. Hence, Hong’s calls to kill the demons merged with a nationalist fervor to massacre the Manchus. Hong proclaimed himself the Heavenly King and his movement quickly grew to more than a million zealous warriors who captured significant territory including establishing the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom with its capital at Nanjing.
The regime banned foot‑binding, prostitution and slavery, promoted the equality of men and women, distributed bibles, and instituted a 7-day week with strict observance of the sabbath. To be sure, this was a Sinicized, millenarian Christianity, more Old Testament than new but the Christianity was serious and real and the rebels appealed to British and Americans as their Christian brothers. One Taiping commander wrote to a British counterpart:
You and I are both sons of the Heavenly Father, God, and are both younger brothers of the Heavenly Elder Brother, Jesus. Our feelings towards each other are like those of brothers, and our friendship is as intimate as that of two brothers of the same parentage. (quoted in Platt p.40)
Now, as it happened, the Heavenly Kingdom fell to the Qing, but it was a close thing and could easily have gone the other way. Western powers—above all Britain, but also the United States—hedged their bets and at times fought both sides, yet for short-sighted reasons ultimately tilted toward the Qing, an intervention Ito Hirobumi later called “the most significant mistake the British ever made in China.” Internal purges fractured the movement, alliances went unmade, and crucial opportunities slipped away. Yet the moment was pregnant with possibility. Hong Rengan, Hong Xiuquan’s cousin and prime minister from 1859, pushed sweeping modernization: railroads, steamships, postal services, banks, and even democratic reforms. These initiatives would likely have brought what one might call Christianity with Chinese Characteristics into closer alignment with Western Christianity.
Indeed, it is entirely plausible that with only a few turns of history, China might now be the world’s most populous Christian nation. And if that seems hard to believe, consider what did happen. Sixty three years after the fall of Nanjing in 1864, China again erupted into civil war under Mao Zedong. This time the rebels triumphed, and instead of a Christian Heavenly Kingdom the world got a Communist People’s Republic. The parallels are striking: both Hong and Mao led vast zealous movements that promised equality, smashed tradition, and enthroned a single man as the embodiment of truth. Both drew on foreign creeds—Hong from Protestant Christianity, Mao from Marxism-Leninism. Both movement had excesses but of the counter-factual and the factual I have little doubt which promised more ruin. The Heavenly Kingdom pointed toward a biblical moral order aligned with the West, the People’s Republic toward a creed that delivered famine, purges, and economic stagnation. Such are the contingencies of history—an ill-timed purge in Nanjing, a foreign gunboat at Shanghai, a missed alliance with the Nian. Small events cascaded into vast consequences. For the want of a nail, the Heavenly Kingdom was lost, and with it perhaps an entirely different modern world.
The post Could China Have Gone Christian? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
marginal_revolution_feed - Tariff sentences to pondermarginal_revolution_feed - Friday assorted linksmarginal_revolution_feed - They solved for the Kansas City Chiefs enforcement equilibriummarginal_revolution_feed - Sentences to pondermarginal_revolution_feed - “Existence is evidence of immortality”marginal_revolution_feed - Thursday assorted linksmarginal_revolution_feed - It would take more than one paper to establish these claimsmarginal_revolution_feed - Oct.9th I am speaking for the Pioneer Institute in Boston, on federalismmarginal_revolution_feed - My very interesting Conversation with Seamus Murphyxkcd_feed - Cursed Numbermarginal_revolution_feed - Pathbreaking paper on AI simulations of human behaviormarginal_revolution_feed - What should I ask Jonny Steinberg?marginal_revolution_feed - Wednesday assorted linksmarginal_revolution_feed - The Simple Mathematics of Chinese Innovationmarginal_revolution_feed - Read it and weepmarginal_revolution_feed - Where are the trillion dollar biotech companies?marginal_revolution_feed - Emergent Ventures winners, 46th cohortmarginal_revolution_feed - Stablecoins competing with banks?marginal_revolution_feed - Tuesday assorted linksmarginal_revolution_feed - Could China Have Gone Christian?![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
branchandroot
