Marginal Revolution

Things you cannot buy in America?

Tyler Cowen — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 18:51:39 +0000

3. Exterior roller shutters (Rollladen)
In much of Europe, homes feature heavy shutters integrated into the exterior of the window, enabling total blackout and better insulation. Sleeping in true, complete darkness—not “blackout curtain” darkness, but can’t-see-your-hand darkness—is an experience most Americans will never have. These shutters are nearly impossible to get in the USA because these shutters are built directly into the home during its construction. They are fundamentally incompatible with standard American wood-frame, siding, and drywall construction, meaning there is no domestic supply chain to support them, even if you built a house to fit them.

From Daniel Frank, here is the full piece, noting I am not convinced you cannot get a “grass roof,” among other items mentioned. In any case an interesting list, file under “possibly thwarted markets in everything.” Via Anecdotal.

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Comments

In reply to Hoosier. Power of suggestion. by Tom T.
In reply to Joss Delage. At my latitude abolishing daylight ... by Dismalist
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Sunday assorted links

Tyler Cowen — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 15:41:17 +0000

1. Ken Opalo on the evolution of post-post-apartheid South Africa.

2. Reasonable recommendations for AI policy over at Noah’s.

3. JFV recommends some economics articles.

4. William Vollmann update.

5. More writing for the AIs.

6. When Europeans from Warsaw live role-play an Ohio trailer park.

7. Is EJMR gone for good?

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In reply to RAD. Excuse me, waiter. What kind of dressing ... by Keith
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Another rationale for sticky prices?

Tyler Cowen — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 04:44:29 +0000

…what can be predicted, Dabis said, is that a recent policy change by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority requiring drivers to verbally quote the $2.25 fare to passengers may make their job even riskier.

Eight current Metro employees and two former employees who work at the union representing Metro workers told The Washington Post that they are concerned that announcing the fare is ineffective and may increase the risk that bus operators will be harassed or assaulted. As a result, several drivers said they are disregarding the policy to keep themselves safe.

“It’s very disheartening to think that a company would put their operators in harm’s way by allowing this type of change,” said Dabis, who is among those refusing to quote the fare. “I just want to go home the same way that I came to work: healthy, unharmed. I love this company. I love the customers. But quoting the fare is just too much.”

Fare evasion has plagued Metro for years. In 2024, Metro said about 70 percent of bus riders didn’t pay.

Here is the full story. And for the pointer I thank Rich.

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In reply to Kyle. Almost thirty years left on that clock. But ... by Etalon d'Silomar
Fairfax County schools are about to institute a completely ... by Tom T.
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Adolfo Bioy Cesares delay

Tyler Cowen — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 18:33:45 +0000

My Amazon shipment is postponed from this fall until April 11, 2028 (!).

Will it ever come?

Of course this is the fantastic, and long, Bioy Cesares book Borges, his memoir of their friendship.

How can the reoptimization both be so distant and so exact in timing?

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In reply to Jack Funchion. Yes, me too. My delivery is ... by It Ain't Necessarily So
Hum… it's CASARES Adolfo Bioy CASARES…. by Michel Persitz
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In reply to Paco. Plus with his pace of reading, he could ... by M
In reply to dmcharette. Time to re-read **The Unending Gift** by HB
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Saturday assorted links

Tyler Cowen — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 15:42:49 +0000

1. Speculative Chinese claims about Alzheimer’s.

2. Very interesting Anthropic piece on why multi-agentic systems seem to show more herd behavior and collusion than human systems. And a comment from Rune Kvist.

3. Cross-cultural data on masculinity.

4. The Griers on the performance of Modi relative to synthetic controls.

5. Which federal datasets have been terminated?

6. The economics of NY state potato procurement.

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A Conservative Case for Liberal Immigration

Tyler Cowen — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 06:44:46 +0000

That is the title of my latest Free Press piece, here is one excerpt:

Or look at the AI revolution, another area where America is leading the world and also using its AI models to exert soft power. Dario Amodei of Anthropic has an Italian father, neural-network pioneer Geoffrey Hinton is originally from the U.K., and Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who helped initially fund and found OpenAI, are from South Africa and Germany, respectively. OpenAI co-founder Wojciech Zaremba is from Poland. Musk and Thiel, of course, have other achievements to their credit as well. A significant portion of the employees at the major labs are Chinese. In one survey of published AI researchers, 38 percent received their undergraduate education in China, and 72 percent of those are working in the U.S.

Recommended, do read the whole thing.

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That was then, this is now

Tyler Cowen — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 05:00:09 +0000

I very much like the new Michael Khodarkovsky book The Steppe and its Empires: The Russian Empire & its Eurasian Counterparts. Excerpt:

Russia presented the most remarkable contrast to both Eurasian and Western empires. The oower of Moscovite tsars and Russian emperors seemed to be completely unconstrained by moral or ethical boundaries. Whereas religious authorities in Europe, the Islamic world, and Cjhina kept some distance from the state and had a degree of independence from the rulers, in Russia the Orthodox Church was fully behind the autocratic powers of the tsars. Ivan III was the first to adopt the title samoderzhets (a calque of a title of Byzantine emperors, literally “autocrat” in Greek), which he used in the sense of a “sovereign” ruler. It took another half century before his grandson, Ivan IV, began to use the title to signal his exceptional, universal, and unrestrained power.

And:

To begin with, each Eurasian ruler conceived of himself as the sovereign of a universal, not natinoal, empire. Such a ruler was non plus ultra; confident in his superiority over other religious or political bodies, he was destined to rule the world, if not politically, at least rhetorically, an autocrat whose subjects’ servile condition was a natural state.

Seen through the prism of a universal monarchy, the Eurasian imperial vision blurred the separation between metropolis and periphery, between the peoples within and outside the empire’s boundaries, between servitude and slavery. Whether they were elites or commoners, all were considered to be in personal servitude to an emperor and often referred to by a term interchangeable with slave.

Consequently, Eurasian societies did not develop either the notions or the institutions that could enshrine the idea of freedom…

The concept of universal monarchy allowed for little differentiation between internal and external territories.

Recommended.

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Since neither Khodarkovsky's supplied excerpts nor Tyler's ... by Edward Burke
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In reply to Al. Do you mind expanding on what you mean? by This comment seems highly innaccurate.
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Friday assorted links

Tyler Cowen — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 17:44:02 +0000

1. What sort of maths are LLMs good at?

2. “People think the superrich are unhappy,” she said. “They’re not.” (NYT)

3. Trailer for a Celibadache biopic.

4. Good Joshua Saxe post on the need for a better cybersecurity policy.

5. Refine goes to work on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. At some point we will be reexamining everything, good luck people.

6. A semi-consistent EA view that nuclear energy is bad (not my view though).

7. Updated AI and labor market results, and a summary here.

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Adding to the barrel of finance fallacies

Tyler Cowen — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:40:53 +0000

“I should note also that many (most? almost all?) of the bad scenarios have intermediate points of great worry and catastrophe” Not on my model. By the time any humans start worrying about a takeover or dying, AIs already control all infrastructure

That is from Twitter, and I hear or read that argument often. It is yet another example of a bad “AI safety point” that does not stand up.

He is already a human worried about a takeover or dying! It is weird to think that “I see these problems coming” and also think “…as these problems multiply and become more public, say through cyberincidents, other people and also the markets will not get clued in.” It is assigning a remarkable oracle-like epistemic status to oneself, and then hardly to anyone else. If the pending data will not persuade anyone else of your view, why do you hold your view so strongly? Or if you think the ultimate denouement will be so sudden and furtive, how are you so clued in to the future now? To me this is all obviously absurd, albeit not logically self-contradictory in the narrow sense.

As a side point, if the world does end suddenly, and you bought the puts out of your savings, but cannot cash them in, you still end up dying without having lowered your real level of consumption.

Rob Wiblin trots out a bunch of objections from the MR comments section that can be refuted readily. You are really not sure which stocks to short and that is a big problem? — the risk is not that systemic then. And if you think the world will see some significant calamitous events in the next ten years, and the evidence for that is piling up, yes you should be buying some puts, even if you are unsure on the timing. Simple stuff. (And no you do not need options contracts that last for ten years.) The AI safety advocates with relatively extreme views should be trying to spread these points to their followers, not to retire them.

In general I am not a fan of psychoanalysis as a method of dissecting views, but the number and scope of obvious direct errors on this topic (and from very smart people) is so high that one has to wonder. How about: “$100 billion in added cyber costs is not a significant enough worry, it is too mundane, too small a percentage of gdp, too normal and technocratic a problem…you can’t take my bigger and more dramatic fear away from me! I won’t let you do that! And besides, that view is the social glue that bonds my in-group together.”

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Regulated Markets Are Slow to Handle Change

Alex Tabarrok — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 11:20:34 +0000

Gowrisankaran, Langer and Reguant have an excellent paper, Energy Transitions in Regulated Markets (WP), in the latest AER.

The basic idea is that regulation designed to prevent utilities from building useless power plants can induce them to keep obsolete power plants. Some background. We regulated electric utilities under the theory that they were natural monopolies and therefore we would do better by pushing their prices down. What’s a reasonable price? Hard to say, so regulated utilities were allowed to recoup their operating costs plus a fair return on their “rate base”—their capital stock. Makes sense, but once profits depended on the size of the capital stock, utilities had an incentive to build too much—the classic Averch–Johnson effect. Regulators responded with “prudence” requirements and the rule that capital must be “used and useful.” In a stable world, that rule is a check, albeit an imperfect check, on so-called gold-plating.

But now consider what happens in a time of technological change, such as a rapid decrease in the cost of generating electricity with natural gas (driven by fracking and improvements in combined-cycle natural-gas (CCNG) technology). In a free market, large decreases in costs would cause firms to abandon coal and move to natural gas—some would do this to make profits, others to avoid losses. In short, the market forces sunk investments to be abandoned when not profitable.

But there is another possibility under regulation. Tell the regulator that your plants are still viable. Well, telling is cheap talk so you keep burning coal to prove that the plant remains useful. If you can keep your base operating that’s better than abandoning it and to signal how valuable your coal plant still is, it may even be worth while to burn coal when the cost exceeds the price of electricity! The authors have some nice data on exactly this point.

Figure 3 takes a little work to understand, but the pattern is clear. Each point represents a state. In panel A, the vertical axis shows how much less likely a coal plant is to run when the cost of coal exceeds the price of electricity. Obviously, a strongly negative coefficient is the economically sensible response: when burning coal is more expensive than buying electricity, the plant should burn less.

The red points represent restructured states and the green points regulated states. In restructured states coal burning falls when prices fall, just as expected. Coal burning in regulated states responds much less. (I.e., the red points generally lie below the green points.) Indeed, the six states with the largest reductions in coal operation are all restructured states.

One objection to this analysis might be that utilities in general are just slow to respond to prices, so on the horizontal axis the authors plot how well utilities respond to a higher price of gas. Note that these coefficients are all negative and there is no obvious difference between regulated and restructured states. In both types of states, utilities respond well to the price of gas, but only in restructured states do utilities respond strongly to the price of coal. (Why coal and not gas? Because the used-and-useful standard binds on capital whose usefulness is in doubt—which, once gas got cheap, meant coal. In other words, the utilities have to defend coal to the regulators, not gas.)

Panel B on the right shows a slightly different way of presenting the same data. The vertical axis is again how much less likely a coal plant is to run when its cost exceeds the electricity price. The horizontal axis is the fraction of generation owned by electric utilities. Regulated states tend to be vertically integrated, while restructured states opened electricity generation to competition, so utility ownership and regulatory status are closely correlated. Regulated states generally have utility ownership above 60%, while all the restructured states but one are below 30%. The best-fit line slopes upward: in other words, the more generation a state’s utilities own, the less coal dispatch responds to price. A different perspective on the same story.

That is the direct empirical evidence. The authors then construct a more ambitious structural model. In theory, regulation could produce either too much or too little investment in the new technology; their estimates imply too much. Much, too much. Not only do regulated utilities retain too much coal, they also build too much gas capacity. In short, they accumulate both too much old capital and too much new capital. Averch–Johnson on steroids.

The bottom line is that regulation under dynamic conditions is much more difficult than under static conditions. My view is that it may not even be worth the candle.

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In reply to Simon K. We already have public utility districts ... by Cee-Jay
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The Economics of a Shrinking World

Tyler Cowen — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 06:14:58 +0000

From Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde and Patrick Norrick:

As of 2026, humanity is likely below replacement fertility. That has never happened before, not in wars or pandemics. But the real surprise is that the fall has been concentrated in low- and middle-income countries and among poorer and less educated women. We fit a single-factor model to 236 countries since 1950: the common component peaked in 1978, and what drives fertility down today are country-specific trends, 219 of them negative and not one leveling off. None of the commonly cited mechanisms can account for this pattern, so we offer a conjecture: modernity itself, which makes a third child expensive and childlessness cheap. Children come in integers, so it takes very little to move a cohort’s fertility rate from 1.8 to 1.3. And nothing in an economy pushes fertility back to 2.1. We close with the main economic consequences, in particular slow growth.

When I read “The estimated common factor peaks in 1978 and has been declining since.” I do think of birth control, however, albeit with lags. The actual availability of birth control, all economic and social constraints considered, is a lot more fraught and difficult than some of the more superficial accounts might indicate.

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Intergenerational mobility of immigrants in 15 destination countries

Tyler Cowen — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 05:03:22 +0000

We estimate intergenerational mobility of children of immigrants in fifteen receiving countries. Children of immigrants have somewhat lower income than children of local-born parents. Around half of this gap can be explained by differences in parental income, with the remainder due to differences in mobility parameters. The daughters of immigrants enjoy higher absolute mobility than daughters of locals in most destinations. Absolute mobility of sons of immigrants is higher outside Europe and lower in Europe compared to sons of locals. Cross-country differences in absolute mobility are not driven by parental country-of-origin, but instead by destination labor markets and immigration policy.

Here is the paper, by Leah Boustan, et.al. Via the excellent Samir Varma.

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Those old (new?) service sector jobs

Tyler Cowen — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 18:37:12 +0000

An ability to mimic the shrieks of langur monkeys may not seem like a bankable skill, but for some Indians it has become a job, if not a calling.

These vocal professionals specialise in pest control and are being employed to keep out unwanted primates as Delhi prepares to host the badminton world championships.

The sound of the langur is the only effective deterrent to the smaller rhesus macaques that roam around Delhi in large numbers, stealing food and causing havoc.

Here is more from the Times of London.

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