2. Apply to Coase workshop on institutional analysis in Mexico City.

3. How does a mechanical watch work?

4. New immigration debate video from Caplan-Garett Jones.

5. Do stolen French fries taste better?

6. New minimum wage results.

7. Supply is elastic, even in the shuttered Straits of Hormuz.

8. “We registered the AI agent with the SEC as an investment advisor.”

9. Carlo Ginzburg, RIP.

The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

Much of what looks like changing marriage preferences over the twentieth century is actually demographics. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in sex ratios across U.S. birth cohorts (1870, 1930, 1950), we jointly identify preferences, match quality dynamics, and the costs of marriage and divorce. Demographics alone explain two-thirds of cross-cohort differences. Women’s premium for older husbands collapsed across cohorts; men’s preferences barely changed. Love that survives its early years becomes permanent, but the odds of surviving fell from 97% to 44%. Divorce costs fell six-fold and depend on life stage. A horse race across behavioral channels shows that the match quality process—not mate-age preferences—is the primary dimension of generational change. Declining divorce costs and fragile match quality are substitutes: either alone fits the data, but together they reveal two independent dimensions of social change. The model validates out of sample on the 1910 and 1970 cohorts.

That is from a recent paper by Jose-Victor Rıos-Rull, Shannon Seitz, and Satoshi Tanaka.  Via the excellent Samir Varma.

The post Facts about American men and women appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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A new study by Irish researcher Eoin Whelan attempts to answer this. Dr. Whelan told me he was specifically inspired by Haidt’s 2024 claims and sought to examine them rigorously and in the context of other regrets. This is a great use of science…testing dramatic public claims. So…do they hold up?

In Dr. Whelan’s study, 389 young adult participants (20-24) who were social media users as teens were asked about their regrets regarding their teenage years. A list of 20 possible teenage regrets was asked of all participants, with degree of regret marked on a 7-point Likert scale. This is an interesting design…testing social media regrets against other possible regrets, putting them in better context than the crude survey Haidt relied on.

So how did social media regrets hold up? Out of 20 possible regrets, too much time on social media ranked 13^th. The top regrets were 1.) not sticking up for oneself, 2.) being too self-conscious, 3.) not documenting memories, 4.) not learning practical life skills and 5.) not getting help with mental health. Girls were slightly more likely to regret time on social media than boys (ranking 11^th vs 13^th) though this effect was very small (I estimated it at about r = .11) so hardly the big “vulnerable girls” narrative some have peddled.

Further, regrets over time spent on social media as a teen did not predict current young adult life satisfaction for either boys or girls. Thus such regrets may be more a symptom of current panics over social media than anything of actual life importance2. Of the regrets, only not working harder in school and not exercising negatively predicted young adult life satisfaction. Interestingly, having regrets over socializing with friends positively predicted life satisfaction.

As Dr. Whelan noted in his study, “The objective of this study was to critically examine the commonly held belief that social media use during teenage years is a significant source of regret and a predictor of diminished well-being in early adulthood…Contrary to dominant narratives in the public domain, our results suggest that regrets over time spent on social media are not among the most potent regrets reported by young adults…As such, these results align with prior research indicating that the harmful effects of social media may be overstated.”

Here is the full Chris Ferguson Substack.

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• In reply to KevinK. This was also true for me being a teen in ... by Bill Allen
• Um….lets read point 4 again. It seems like there might be a ... by Anthony Cohen
• In reply to Alan. More so, recency bias disappears over time. ... by Hudson Valley
• In reply to JFA. ” Given how much time kids spend on their ... by Wayfaring Stranger
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The consequences of online regulations depend on the extent to which users can circumvent restrictions or substitute toward noncompliant platforms. Since 2023, 25 U.S. states have implemented age verification laws that caused prominent adult websites (including Pornhub) to restrict local access for all users. We study how these restrictions affected browsing activity using individual-level panel data. Access restrictions reduced overall time spent on adult sites by roughly 10%. Specifically, for every 100 hours spent on top adult sites before restrictions, about 50 hours remained accessible at noncompliant sites that never restricted access, 30 hours persisted through VPN-based circumvention, 10 hours were substituted from compliant sites to noncompliant sites, and 10 hours were no longer spent on adult sites.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Matthew Brown, Emily J. Davis, and Devin G. Pope.

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2. A treasury of book dedications.

3. Abdullah Ibrahim, RIP (NYT).

4. One part of the Iran equilibrium.

5. Economists report on Fable 5.

6. Another estimate of the productivity gains from AI.

7. Until the 1970s, Algeria was the world’s largest wine exporter.

8. Mosquito drone for surveillance?

The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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• In reply to M. Iran would only need a handful of medium-range ... by B.B.
• In reply to Hazel Meade. Supposed to be sub-thread reply to ... by Hazel Meade
• In reply to Guy. Reading these chilling status reports, you ... by Action Figure
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What’s remarkable is how China is winning: deregulation and capitalism. It’s faster and easier to set up a clinical trial in China than in the United States. China is even experimenting with the peer approval model I’ve long advocated. The Medical Tourism Pilot Zone on Hainan island lets medical institutions import and use any pharmaceutical or device approved in the EU, US, or Japan — no separate Chinese approval needed. China is using our own regulatory judgments to get treatments to its patients faster than we do.

The core problem is that our clinical trial and drug approval system is slow and expensive. Getting a new drug to market in the US takes billions of dollars and a decade or more of clinical trials — and all of that before a company earns a single dollar. The consequence is drug lag and drug loss and also learning loss. Innovation is a dynamic process. You must build to build better.

It’s not over for the United States, however. Montana’s SB535, signed into law in May 2025, is the most important regulatory innovation in drug approval in my lifetime. The law authorizes investigational drugs and therapies that have cleared Phase I trials to be prescribed and sold — bypassing the traditional FDA approval pathway. It makes Montana the first state to license experimental treatment centers, “one stop shops” for otherwise hard-to-access care.

This is a very big deal.

SB535 makes Montana the only state in the nation where firms can move more quickly from a successful Phase I trial into limited commercialization. This positions Montana as a highly attractive location for biopharma, biotherapeutics, and other life sciences companies that want to accelerate time-to-market while continuing the federal FDA approval process.

Montana’s regulatory system creates the possibility of a self-funding clinical pipeline: companies using early commercial revenues to finance the path to full FDA approval. You get treatments to patients faster, and you keep companies alive long enough to prove their treatments work. Experimental treatments are not for everyone–these treatments are cash based–no Medicaid or Medicare and probably no private insurance either–but after conventional treatments have failed experimental treatments should be available for some patients, both for their benefit and for ours.

Montana is not alone. Florida now allows non-FDA approved stem cell therapies:

A new law in Florida, CS/CS/SB 1768, allows physicians to market and administer stem cell therapies that have not been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for orthopedic conditions, wound care and pain management.

These experiments in regulatory federalism are vital and not just for patients but also for geopolitical competition. I am thrilled China is pursuing medical innovation (I predicted and applauded this in my TED talk) but I also don’t want to see America falling behind.

The Trump administration has been supportive. I would like to see HHS and the FDA working with companies operating under state right-to-try frameworks — sharing data, clarifying federal-state boundaries favorably, and treating these experiments as the biotech competitiveness infrastructure they are.

The FDA approval process has long been treated as the only legitimate path to market. The cost of that orthodoxy is measured in companies that never reached viability, innovations that never got off the ground, and patients who died when they didn’t have to. I have spent thirty years trying to get people to see the invisible graveyard. That’s hard. Most remain blind. But China’s bursting pipeline of new drugs is visible — could this be a Sputnik moment for biotech?

An American biotech renaissance — driven by AI, federalism, and regulatory innovation — is possible. The path forward is to double down on what makes America great: the laboratories of democracy are working, and in Montana and Florida, so are the labs.

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• In reply to Brian Villanueva. What about making sick people ... by qetzal
• In reply to Can't Have Any Pudding. If the patients have not ... by superdestroyer
• Federalism. It gets things done. by Brian Villanueva
• In reply to Dan. Efficacy should be a stamp of approval by ... by Brian Villanueva
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Justin Helman didn’t get his dream acceptance from the University of Florida. But that isn’t stopping him from pursuing the classic college experience there.

The recent high-school graduate from Park Ridge, N.J., is set to move into a private apartment right by campus. He is enrolling in a UF online program for the first few semesters and paying an extra fee package to access services like the campus gym and student-section football-game tickets. He plans to study at the library, join clubs and might rush a fraternity.

The post Educational arbitrage? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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There is yet another huge problem behind all these first-order problems. Let us say, for instance, that France’s Mistral AI develops very nicely and serves as an EU counterpart of Anthropic and OpenAI. Well, then the other European countries will become highly dependent on the French. That may seem okay today, but it will be much less fun for the Germans if the French really do have all that extra power and leverage.

As for the French themselves, they would be highly dependent on a private company. France may end up with one such company, but it is unlikely to have three of them. So Mistral will in turn have high leverage over France, French politics, and French foreign policy. Let us hope they are up to that. The simple point is that being influenced by someone in your home country, even if it sounds more appealing rhetorically, is not always better than being pushed around by foreigners. Sometimes the foreigners are less oppressive and intrusive, if only because they care less about you.

Worth a ponder.  I am hearing good things about the new Mistral model, so these questions may become relevant sooner than I had thought when writing this.

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Peter Thiel, Ross Douthat, telephone!

And yet I have plenty of quibbles.  It was a little too long.  The acting is entirely serviceable, but none of the characters are excellent or memorable.  The portraits of America are below the level of charm and insight we have come to expect from Spielberg.  And any time a character makes “a speech” it is pretty mediocre.

Cinematic influences are numerous, starting with E.T. and Close Encounters of course.  Not to mention Sugarland Express.  I was surprised to see the references to The Magic Flute, including the Bergman cinematic version.  Perhaps Spielberg had Jacob’s Ladder in mind as well?

The Freudian interpretation of the film I will not articulate, but it surfaces near the end and never quite goes away.

But who here was the Antichrist anyway?  That is up for grabs.

I had no problem sitting through the movie and enjoying it, but the problem of excess hodgepodge worsens as the exposition continues.  So I will grade this one as misunderstood, but nonetheless no better than an interesting failure.

The post *Disclosure Day* (doubt if there are net spoilers in this post) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Champions of a European AI model should ask themselves if a European effort would be more effective than Meta, which this year will spend more on chips ($125 billion) than Germany spends on defense ($114 billion) and offer salaries of over $100 million to attract the best researchers, and is still failing to catch up.

Here is more from Pieter Garicano and Simon Grimm.  Via Jesper.

The post Germany fact of the day sentence to ponder appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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• In reply to Old Programmer. IBM had this problem in the 1960s ... by Kaleberg
• In reply to Okay. Gee, and I thought that terrorists ... by Kaleberg
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2. Jason Furman on Social Security (NYT).

3. Markets in everything, customized water edition.

4. AI progress in Rio de Janeiro.

5. Satya Nadella does Oliver Williamson.

6. A shared feed of my guest appearances.

7. Results on the Great Recession and U.S. fertility.

8. Nice words about me.

The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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In the most recent census (2022), 1,017,437 people in Ireland were born abroad. Even if you classify people from Taiwan as “foreigners”, there are 845,697 + 157,886 = 1,003,583 immigrants to China. There are now more foreigners in Ireland than in China in absolute terms, despite having a population that is 260 times smaller.

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This paper studies the causal effect of being the oldest within a school cohort on social capital. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design and data from Facebook, we find that boys who are older than their classmates make 11% more friends in high school. This social advantage is associated with leadership roles, with relatively older boys 42% more likely to become class president than their relatively younger peers. Men who were relatively older during childhood have larger social networks in adulthood, and disproportionately sort into management and entrepreneurship. Our findings suggest that small age differences in peer composition can have persistent effects on social and economic outcomes.

That is from Matthew Jacob of Harvard and Michael Bailey of Facebook.  Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

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• In reply to Matt. Correct. In the USA system it appears the ... by bazza
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Frontier LLMs outperformed clinical AI tools in all three evaluations. Clinical AI tools performed comparably to auto-enabled Google Search AI Overview on the RCQ. These findings highlight the need for independent, real-world evaluation of AI tools before they enter clinical settings.

From Krithik Viswanath, et.al.  As a side note, this (and the more general version of the point) is one big reason why some fairly large number of Emergent Ventures proposals are rejected rather quickly.

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• In reply to Rob Baranowski. This blog is not a serious source ... by James
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• In reply to Patrick. My guess is the system will become less ... by Gilligan
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