Marginal Revolution https://marginalrevolution.com/ Small Steps Toward A Much Better World Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:06:14 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://marginalrevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/cropped-MR-logo-thumbnail-32x32.png Marginal REVOLUTION https://marginalrevolution.com/ 32 32 42693868 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/my-excellent-conversation-with-katja-hoyer.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=my-excellent-conversation-with-katja-hoyer My excellent Conversation with Katja Hoyer https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/957941972/0/marginalrevolution~My-excellent-Conversation-with-Katja-Hoyer.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/my-excellent-conversation-with-katja-hoyer.html#respond Thu, 11 Jun 2026 05:15:39 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93186 Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary: Tyler and Katja discuss why communism made East Germans more loyal to the system while it bred dissidents in Poland and Hungary, how happy or unhappy life in the GDR actually was, Tyler’s own bleak day-trip to East Berlin in 1984, […]

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]]> Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Tyler and Katja discuss why communism made East Germans more loyal to the system while it bred dissidents in Poland and Hungary, how happy or unhappy life in the GDR actually was, Tyler’s own bleak day-trip to East Berlin in 1984, the underrated literature of the GDR (Christa Wolf, Brigitte Reimann), whether Good Bye, Lenin! got the era right, why it’s no coincidence that Richter and Polke came from the East, the strange coexistence of communist prudishness and Germany’s nudist culture, what Merkel’s East German background did and didn’t give her as a chancellor, why East Germans remain dramatically underrepresented in leadership positions today, what makes Weimar the cultural and spiritual heart of Germany, why relatively few Jews ever settled there, how much the citizens of Weimar knew about Buchenwald, what actually killed the Weimar Constitution, how she’d rewrite the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler’s citizenship problem, underrated German thinkers, the complacency behind Germany’s current economic decline, which side of the Weißwurstäquator she’d choose to live on, and much more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: Why did the Weimar Constitution fail?

HOYER: How much time have I got?

COWEN: Americans typically think it’s that the proportional representation system allowed too many small parties to enter into government. That’s one factor, but what else is there?

HOYER: There are plenty of factors, I think. Some of these are inbuilt flaws, like the proportional representation that you just mentioned. Another one that’s often referred to as Article 48, which was a kind of emergency article that was in the constitution that allowed the president to bypass parliament and the other democratic structures in time of emergency.

If you just follow down this route, then the fall of the Weimar Republic becomes inevitable. If you’re just assuming that there were all these flaws in the constitution already, so therefore it was bound to fail, I don’t think that is the case because when you study this closely, you do see all these kinds of forks in the road as to where things could have gone differently. I don’t think the system was set up to fail. I think these things contributed to the brittle nature of this. I think there was perhaps a degree of naivety there in 1919 to think that you could have this ultra-democratic system without any guardrails.

When you think how long it took the American Founding Fathers to sit there and really work out every angle, and “What if we got a mad president, what do we put in there to try and protect against that?” Those sorts of things. That process is so rushed in 1919 that they just put an ultra-liberal democracy in place, which allows extremists to hijack it. That is part of the reason. I think the other group of reasons is the circumstances under which the system is born. It’s basically born into crisis. It comes on the back of the First World War and then runs into economic trouble very quickly. That never really goes away despite the so-called gilded years in the middle. All of that’s propped up by American money, even the stability years of the middle 1920s. The moment that falls because of the Wall Street crash, you basically get the very economic foundation taken away again.

The subtitle I chose for the book, Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, I’m trying to hint at the fact that that’s how a lot of people felt. They were literally balancing constantly for this entire time, really, after 1919, on the edge of their own personal catastrophes. It was always unemployment, hyperinflation, trying to get enough food. People were dying of diseases. There’s the Spanish flu. There’s tuberculosis. It’s always something or other. People don’t feel that the system is giving them stability. I don’t think there ever really is a feeling that this can really work long term.

People do, at the slightest whim, think, “Oh, maybe we just need to go back to a system where someone makes the decisions.” The Weimar Republic actually dies in 1933, years before Hitler comes into power, as a democracy. He takes over a system, I think, that’s already given up on being a democracy, even at that point. As I say, I could talk about this for two days and still be lining up factors. It is complex.

COWEN: The army is interfering in politics quite early and pretty frequently.

HOYER: Yes. They still think that because of the nature of the Prussian system previously, it’s often been said that “Prussia wasn’t a state with an army, but it was an army with a state.” That intrinsic self-confidence, if you want to call it that, of the army, that they are really calling the shots, that doesn’t really go away.

People also often forget that in the First World War, you have the so-called silent dictatorship, which is basically the army running absolutely everything under Hindenburg’s system, from the economy and culture to newspaper output and everything else. Again, that they don’t just suddenly turn that off in 1919. They do try and make their influence heard ongoingly.

Then the young Weimar Republic has to make a pact with the military because they defend them effectively against communists and also right-wing Putschers. They depend on the military in that way as well for security. They do try and build up a new military, but they never go Stalin-style and purge everybody who was there previously. They keep the existing elites largely in place, so they inherit an army that isn’t loyal to them, that’s still loyal to the old system.

I very much enjoyed Katja’s recent book Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/my-excellent-conversation-with-katja-hoyer.html/feed 0 93186 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/what-do-the-ais-think-of-us.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=what-do-the-ais-think-of-us What do the AIs think of us? https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/957938549/0/marginalrevolution~What-do-the-AIs-think-of-us.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/what-do-the-ais-think-of-us.html#comments Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:06:14 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93191 Asked to answer as a typical human, every cutting-edge model rated us markedly more neurotic, less open, less agreeable and less conscientious than they rated themselves. The gap on Neuroticism alone is 1.69 points on a 5-point scale. Here is more material of interest.  And this: Across 31 models from those seven labs they answer […]

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]]>

Asked to answer as a typical human, every cutting-edge model rated us markedly more neurotic, less open, less agreeable and less conscientious than they rated themselves. The gap on Neuroticism alone is 1.69 points on a 5-point scale.

Here is more material of interest.  And this:

Across 31 models from those seven labs they answer the personality tests in unison: high openness, low Dark Triad, Universalism on top, Power dead last in every single model.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/what-do-the-ais-think-of-us.html/feed 12 93191 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/are-the-ais-conscious.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=are-the-ais-conscious Are the AIs conscious? https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/957930569/0/marginalrevolution~Are-the-AIs-conscious.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/are-the-ais-conscious.html#comments Wed, 10 Jun 2026 17:44:35 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93170 That is the topic of my latest Free Press column.  I will spare you the discussion of the AIs, but here is what I have to say about the humans: I am here to tell you that there is no ghost in the machine. But perhaps more importantly, there is barely a “ghost” in your […]

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]]> That is the topic of my latest Free Press column.  I will spare you the discussion of the AIs, but here is what I have to say about the humans:

I am here to tell you that there is no ghost in the machine. But perhaps more importantly, there is barely a “ghost” in your own human machine. “Are people conscious?” is a better and more scientifically plausible question than whether AIs are conscious.

If there is one near-universal tendency of humans, it is to attribute intent where none is present. Prehistoric humans anthropomorphized nature and attributed natural events to good and bad deities. These kinds of beliefs persist today, not only in the folk religions of the world, but in human obsessions with fortune tellers, tarot cards, and the supernatural…

If there is one systematic flaw that humans have, it is an excessive willingness to ascribe conscious intent and to anthropomorphize purely natural and material entities. It seems we are strongly disposed toward this bias.

Yet few of us are willing to examine what is perhaps the biggest and most significant way we make this mistake. When it comes to understanding ourselves, so many of us assume that “we are in charge.” We identify our phenomenological stream of consciousness with our actual selves, and treat that consciousness stream as the true decision maker.

The reality is that you—whatever we take that concept to mean—make most or maybe all of your actual decisions in parts of your brain that precede what you take to be the conscious choice. Among experts in neuroscience, this is not a controversial proposition. As brain surgeon Theodore Schwartz explained to me: “I do not think we have free will in the way that most people do. I think that our brains make decisions for us. We carry out those behaviors, and then we write a story that makes it into a logical timeline that makes us feel as if we were the ones, that there was a self that made that decision, whereas, in fact, that self didn’t really exist.”

…Sometimes I like to say that “I am only conscious at the margin.” Tongue in cheek, I will suggest that I am only conscious enough to avoid the self-contradiction of asserting that I am not conscious at all. I feel I am honest enough to just not be very impressed by my own flow of conscious awareness or its ability to perform complex calculations. Still, I recognize that it is all I have got, so I need to treasure it, however paltry it may be.

And by the way I do not think the AIs are conscious, no more than I believe in the Thunder God of Thor.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/are-the-ais-conscious.html/feed 80 93170 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/wednesday-assorted-links-557.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=wednesday-assorted-links-557 Wednesday assorted links https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/957928523/0/marginalrevolution~Wednesday-assorted-links.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/wednesday-assorted-links-557.html#comments Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:15:54 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93173 1. New edition of Copernicus on money. 2. Denazification of the United States?  Denazification actually consisted of: “…dissolution of Nazi organizations, licensing/control of new political organizations, individual classification by denazification tribunals, and temporary or permanent disabilities on voting, standing for office, party membership, officeholding, public speech professions, and public/private employment.” 3. Faster replies increase your […]

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]]> 1. New edition of Copernicus on money.

2. Denazification of the United States?  Denazification actually consisted of: “…dissolution of Nazi organizations, licensing/control of new political organizations, individual classification by denazification tribunals, and temporary or permanent disabilities on voting, standing for office, party membership, officeholding, public speech professions, and public/private employment.”

3. Faster replies increase your chance of being hired.

4. OpenAI Economic Research Exchange.

5. Some new growth estimates from the AI boom.

6- Behavioral economics guide 2026.

7. Damian Clarke has a new microeconometrics textbook out from MIT Press.

8. “So I gave Fable 5 the watchmaker benchmark…”  And Taelin.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/wednesday-assorted-links-557.html/feed 50 93173 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/the-labor-share-fell-so-what.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-labor-share-fell-so-what The Labor Share Fell. So What? https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/957920345/0/marginalrevolution~The-Labor-Share-Fell-So-What.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/the-labor-share-fell-so-what.html#comments Wed, 10 Jun 2026 11:16:41 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93177 The share of Gross Domestic Income accruing to labor has been declining in recent decades while the share accruing to capital has been rising. In the graph below, I show labor compensation as a share of GDI (left axis). Labor share has indeed been trending down–some of this could be an artifact of the data, […]

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]]> The share of Gross Domestic Income accruing to labor has been declining in recent decades while the share accruing to capital has been rising. In the graph below, I show labor compensation as a share of GDI (left axis). Labor share has indeed been trending down–some of this could be an artifact of the data, e.g. an increase in proprietor’s income (labor) mislabeled as capital income, more pass throughs and so forth—but for the purposes of this post I will accept that the labor share has declined. What does this mean?

The natural response is to think that because the share going to labor has fallen and the share going to capital has risen that there has been a transfer of income from labor to capital. That is possible but it is not the only interpretation and it does not follow mechanically from the share data.

I have also plotted total compensation to labor (in real terms) in the graph above and far from shrinking it is higher than ever and growing. Moreover the right axis is logged so you can also see that outside of recessions the growth rate of labor compensation looks quite steady (similar slope over time). (Labor compensation per member of the labor force is noisier but looks similar).

The recessions in 2008 and 2020 are worth noting because these are periods when the labor share was high and locally at a maximum! The reason, of course, is that GDI was shrinking in these periods more than labor compensation. In other words, capital takes a bigger hit than labor in a recession. This is a good reminder that a high share of GDI is not what workers most care about–a high absolute level of GDI is more important for the bottom line.

In short, the data are consistent—not proof of, but consistent with—a story in which capital has become more productive, raising output. More productive capital also raises the demand for labor, so while more of the new output goes to capital in the first instance, the pie is growing and labor’s absolute compensation has grown with it. Yes, if the shares had stayed constant and output had grown just as much, labor compensation would have been higher still. And if my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bicycle.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/the-labor-share-fell-so-what.html/feed 74 93177 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/therapy-to-make-cells-young-again-trialled-in-a-person.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=therapy-to-make-cells-young-again-trialled-in-a-person Therapy to make cells young again trialled in a person https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/957918125/0/marginalrevolution~Therapy-to-make-cells-young-again-trialled-in-a-person.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/therapy-to-make-cells-young-again-trialled-in-a-person.html#comments Wed, 10 Jun 2026 09:40:15 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93183 Here is the Nature article.

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]]> Here is the Nature article.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/therapy-to-make-cells-young-again-trialled-in-a-person.html/feed 6 93183 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/stanislaw-lem-foresaw-drones.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=stanislaw-lem-foresaw-drones Stanislaw Lem foresaw drones https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/957912941/0/marginalrevolution~Stanislaw-Lem-foresaw-drones.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/stanislaw-lem-foresaw-drones.html#comments Wed, 10 Jun 2026 04:21:33 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93161 This was published in English (and Polish) in 1986 under the title One Human Minute: So it was not humanoid automata that former the new armies but synthetic insects (synsects) — ceramic microcrustacea, titanium annelids, and flying pseudo-hymenoptera with nerve centers made of arsenic compounds and with stingers of heavy, fissionable elements…The flying synsect combined […]

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]]> This was published in English (and Polish) in 1986 under the title One Human Minute:

So it was not humanoid automata that former the new armies but synthetic insects (synsects) — ceramic microcrustacea, titanium annelids, and flying pseudo-hymenoptera with nerve centers made of arsenic compounds and with stingers of heavy, fissionable elements…The flying synsect combined plane, pilot, and missile in one miniature whole.  but the operating unit was the microarmy, which possessed superior combat effectiveness only as a whole (just as a colony of bees was an independent, surviving unit while a single bee was nothing).

…The nonliving, synthetic “locust” was incomparably more lethal, since it was made that way by its designers.  It possessed a preprogrammed autonomy, so that communication with a command center was unnecessary.

…the microarmy was one giant flowing or flying aggregate of self-assembling elements.  It started out dispersed, approaching its objective from many different directions, as strategy or tactics demanded, in order to concentrate into a preprogrammed whole on the battlefield.  For this fighting material did not leave the factory in final shape, read for use, like tanks or guns loaded on a railroad flatcar; the mechanisms were microproductive blocks designed to fuse together into a war machine at the designated place.  For this reason, such armies were called “self-bonding.”

…Amid a swarm of self-guided, programmed microarms, a man in uniform was as helpless as a Roman legionary with sword and shield against a hail of bullets.  In the face of special types of biotropic microarms capable of destroying everything that lived, human beings had no choice but to abandone the battlefield, for they would be killed in seconds…

A microarmy could easily penetrate all systems of defense and go deep into enemy territory.  It had no more trouble accomplishing this than did rain or snow.  Meanwhile, high-powered nuclear weapons were proving more and more useless on the battlefield.

Lem is always worth reading.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/stanislaw-lem-foresaw-drones.html/feed 29 93161 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/the-new-mythos-release.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-new-mythos-release The new Mythos release https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/957905291/0/marginalrevolution~The-new-Mythos-release.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/the-new-mythos-release.html#comments Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:40:29 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93179 My prompt: Write your own exam question and answer it, for microeconomics. Not a math question, but a high level PhD level question. You will be graded on the quality, interest, and creativity of the question as much as by your answer. The answer.  Here is Ethan Mollick on Mythos.

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]]> My prompt:

Write your own exam question and answer it, for microeconomics. Not a math question, but a high level PhD level question. You will be graded on the quality, interest, and creativity of the question as much as by your answer.

The answer.  Here is Ethan Mollick on Mythos.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/the-new-mythos-release.html/feed 39 93179 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/how-well-does-current-ai-find-errors-in-economics-papers.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-well-does-current-ai-find-errors-in-economics-papers How well does current AI find errors in economics papers? https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/957903869/0/marginalrevolution~How-well-does-current-AI-find-errors-in-economics-papers.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/how-well-does-current-ai-find-errors-in-economics-papers.html#comments Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:20:40 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93164 Can artificial intelligence (AI) refute economic theory? I document experiments in which I asked several AI models (Gemini, Refine, Claude, and ChatGPT) to check the correctness of four published papers in economic theory, each containing an error that I helped identify or correct. ChatGPT Pro performed best, occasionally constructing counterexamples and corrected proofs, while other […]

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Can artificial intelligence (AI) refute economic theory? I document experiments in which I asked several AI models (Gemini, Refine, Claude, and ChatGPT) to check the correctness of four published papers in economic theory, each containing an error that I helped identify or correct. ChatGPT Pro performed best, occasionally constructing counterexamples and corrected proofs, while other models fared worse. However, no model located a true error without substantial human guidance, and data contamination complicates interpretation. I argue that a competent human paired with a frontier model can outperform current peer review, but AI cannot yet refute economic theory on its own.

That is from a new piece by Alexis Akira Toda.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/how-well-does-current-ai-find-errors-in-economics-papers.html/feed 11 93164 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/tuesday-assorted-links-572.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=tuesday-assorted-links-572 Tuesday assorted links https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/957900695/0/marginalrevolution~Tuesday-assorted-links.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/tuesday-assorted-links-572.html#comments Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:57:55 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93166 1. Birthing a child in South Korea. 2. Those new service sector jobs (NYT). 3. Britain launches AI Economics Institute. 4. House Committee makes effort to speed up clinical trials. 5. Those new manufacturing sector jobs. 6. More comments on phones and fertility. 7. Gordon Wood, RIP (NYT), his books are great.

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]]> 1. Birthing a child in South Korea.

2. Those new service sector jobs (NYT).

3. Britain launches AI Economics Institute.

4. House Committee makes effort to speed up clinical trials.

5. Those new manufacturing sector jobs.

6. More comments on phones and fertility.

7. Gordon Wood, RIP (NYT), his books are great.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/tuesday-assorted-links-572.html/feed 98 93166 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/seb-krier-3.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=seb-krier-3 Séb Krier https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/957883985/0/marginalrevolution~S%c3%a9b-Krier.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/seb-krier-3.html#comments Tue, 09 Jun 2026 07:17:08 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93172 I really loved this article. A one-time increase in per capita growth from 2% to 2.1% for a single year, then dropping back to 2%, would permanently raises the level of GDP per capita – and because that small gain recurs and compounds every year afterward across the population, it would add up to roughly […]

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]]>

I really loved this article. A one-time increase in per capita growth from 2% to 2.1% for a single year, then dropping back to 2%, would permanently raises the level of GDP per capita – and because that small gain recurs and compounds every year afterward across the population, it would add up to roughly a trillion dollars in cumulative value. abundanceandgrowth.org/p/a-little-pro

When people talk about pausing AI development, I can’t help but think about the enormous cumulative value that would get lost over time, the higher rates of absolute poverty that would persist across the world, and the needless deaths from delayed medical advances. There may be worlds where some version of this is something to consider, but the evidentiary bar for delaying technological development should obviously be pretty high.

Here is the link.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/seb-krier-3.html/feed 57 93172 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/sao-paulo-notes.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=sao-paulo-notes Sao Paulo notes https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/957881693/0/marginalrevolution~Sao-Paulo-notes.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/sao-paulo-notes.html#comments Tue, 09 Jun 2026 05:10:49 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93165 The old saw “Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be” now seems so wrong.  The place feels increasingly conservative, and it is aging rapidly.  In the domestic airport you see couples with only a single kid, not two or three kids, never mind four. Country and Western music, in their Brazilian […]

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]]> The old saw “Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be” now seems so wrong.  The place feels increasingly conservative, and it is aging rapidly.  In the domestic airport you see couples with only a single kid, not two or three kids, never mind four.

Country and Western music, in their Brazilian incarnations, are very popular.

It does not feel like the next Pelé will be coming from Brazil.

Sao Paulo as a city is much improved.  The murder rate has plummeted, and the nice neighborhoods are very nice and are growing in size.  The business community is strong, interesting architecture abounds, and there is a real arts scene.  It is arguably Latin America’s number one city, with only Mexico City as a rival.  It has, along with Mexico City, evolved into a “must know” global city, though it is rarely treated that way by outsiders.  In the three days I spent there, going around to many places, I did not see a single person who was evidently a foreign tourist.  That is crazy, but also a sign there is good value here.

Sao Paulo has food to die for.  It is top tier for Brazilian (of course), meat/steak, Japanese, and Italian, and pretty good in many other offerings as well.  I had a wonderful fifteen-course omikase for $110 at a Michelin star restaurant.  The establishment, Kan Suke, has only eight seats, but I could get a table by inquiring only an hour in advance.

For Italian food it is probably the second best country in the world?  For meats it might be number one, at least if you are willing to put aside the small country of Uruguay.  For beans it is top two, and the fruits are excellent as well.  Chocolate ice cream and gelato abound.  All constraints considered, I would rather spend a week dining out here than in London or Paris or Rome, or for that matter New York City.

People are very friendly, surprising few speak decent English, and Brazilian warmth still abounds.

I was very pleased with my stay at Hotel Unique, due to its architecture and also a perfect location.

Observers should be more optimistic about the Brazilian economy.  Yes it is overregulated and the government is locked into far too much spending.  But hyperinflation is now a distant memory, a reasonable fiscal consolidation occurred in the 1990s, and the country has plenty of its own energy.  Keep in mind that for emerging economies, years of negative growth are a major problem.  Brazil now has sidestepped most (not all!) of those risks.  Slow, steady growth should be able to get them somewhere, albeit at a langorous pace.

My biggest worry about Brazil is demographics and shrinking population.  In recent times TFR has been in the 1.3 to 1.4 range, hardly satisfactory.  A shrinking population is bad per se, and also it will hurt many regions of the country due to imperfect market integration, both nationally and globally.  More importantly, the country does not have an obvious and easy option for pulling in a higher number of desirable immigrants, at least not relative to its size.  There is Venezuela and Bolivia, but the former of those may go away as a major source of people.

Will Brazilian fertility tick back up?  Will Brazil re-attain its status as a highly influential culture on the world scene, as it was in the 1960s through early 1990s?  Unclear.  But if the question is “should you go visit?”, the answer is a definite yes.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/sao-paulo-notes.html/feed 66 93165 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/monday-assorted-links-563.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=monday-assorted-links-563 Monday assorted links https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/957869591/0/marginalrevolution~Monday-assorted-links.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/monday-assorted-links-563.html#comments Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:43:05 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93157 1. It seems Piketty has become a degrowther.  And other views.  Maybe it is rude to say this, but some of our best-known economists basically have a negative-valued understanding of how the world works.  And a bit more. 2. Claims about soil (speculative).  Here is GPT Pro analysis. 3. Stepping up. 4. An interactive feature […]

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]]> 1. It seems Piketty has become a degrowther.  And other views.  Maybe it is rude to say this, but some of our best-known economists basically have a negative-valued understanding of how the world works.  And a bit more.

2. Claims about soil (speculative).  Here is GPT Pro analysis.

3. Stepping up.

4. An interactive feature for AI and economic growth.

5. The strange allure of the single-sentence novel.  From Totei.

6. Where is the Indian diaspora population?

7. The Pope in Spain cites Salamanca and liberty.

8. “We’re hiring two Research Fellows to study the future of scientific discovery.“

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/monday-assorted-links-563.html/feed 112 93157 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/virginia-postrel-and-charles-c-mann-have-a-new-podcast.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=virginia-postrel-and-charles-c-mann-have-a-new-podcast Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann have a new podcast https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/957863255/0/marginalrevolution~Virginia-Postrel-and-Charles-C-Mann-have-a-new-podcast.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/virginia-postrel-and-charles-c-mann-have-a-new-podcast.html#comments Mon, 08 Jun 2026 13:19:37 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93174 Everyday Abundance it is called, self-recommending…sponsored by the Abundance Institute.

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]]> Everyday Abundance it is called, self-recommending…sponsored by the Abundance Institute.

The post Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann have a new podcast appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/virginia-postrel-and-charles-c-mann-have-a-new-podcast.html/feed 9 93174 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/hayekian-literary-criticism.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=hayekian-literary-criticism Hayekian Literary Criticism https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/957860741/0/marginalrevolution~Hayekian-Literary-Criticism.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/hayekian-literary-criticism.html#comments Mon, 08 Jun 2026 11:16:50 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93153 In economics, Marx is relegated to the history of thought as his ideas were an economic dead end and a political disaster. Yet Marx-influenced literary criticism is a dominant mode of analysis in nearly every English department in the country. It’s not that the English professors are all Marxists, it’s that even the non-Marxists reach […]

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]]> In economics, Marx is relegated to the history of thought as his ideas were an economic dead end and a political disaster. Yet Marx-influenced literary criticism is a dominant mode of analysis in nearly every English department in the country. It’s not that the English professors are all Marxists, it’s that even the non-Marxists reach for Marxian concepts–class, ideology, alienation, material conditions, commodification–when analyzing texts. These concepts may be useful for analyzing a Victorian novel of the landed classes but they have become a default economics for all of literature. That default is odd. Class analysis predates Marx and society can be divided into more than one set of classes; material conditions do not supersede all artistic agency; and capitalism contains figures—entrepreneurs, speculators, intermediaries, innovators, discoverers—who are great subjects for art yet fit poorly into the Marxist moral geometry. Not surprisingly, Marxism handles capitalism’s protagonists badly.

Is Marxian economics the only economic lens one can apply to literature? What would a Hayekian literary criticism look like? The place to start is the great Paul Cantor’s pioneering essay on Thomas Mann’s “Disorder and Early Sorrow,” a slight-seeming story set in Weimar Germany during the hyperinflation. Cantor shows that when one reads the novella through Hayek and Mises rather than Marx, the story opens up.

Start with inflationary psychology and its ramifications. Inflation shortens time horizons. When money loses value by the hour, saving is foolish and the rational move is to spend as fast as you earn—Mises’s “flight into real goods.” Prudence, discipline, and respect for the past become maladaptive. Speed, improvisation, risk-taking, and a certain youthful irresponsibility become survival traits.

Thus, Cantor/Mann tell us that inflation changes psychology and inverts the authority of age over youth. The old are set in their ways and often living on fixed incomes that inflation has wiped out; they cannot adapt. The young have known nothing but instability and go with the inflationary flow effortlessly. So the conservative virtues that once commanded respect are in decline while youthful recklessness starts to look like competence. Thus, Mann’s world has “gone mad in the worship of youth”: the children call their father by his first name, the teenagers are “the big folk,” and Professor Cornelius literally crouches down to his children’s height as the hierarchy collapses around him.

Money is a society’s primary measure of value, so Cantor/Mann argue that when you shake a people’s faith in their money, you shake their other faiths. Thus Cantor ties the conviction-less skepticism of Cornelius—and the broader Weimar nihilism and disequilibrium that helped feed the rise of Nazism—to monetary disequilibrium.

In short, inflation converts economic disorder into moral, social, psychological, and finally ontological disorder. Prices become unstable, then values, then identities, then reality. The modern feeling of absurdity and inauthenticity that critics reflexively pin on capitalism, Cantor/Mann argue is due to government-created inflation and paper money.

A Marxist could read the same story and find the inevitable contradictions of capitalism. Cantor reads it and finds the consequences of the state debasing the currency. Both are economic readings of literature. Only one of them has the economics correct.

Cantor is the place to begin but a Hayekian literary criticism could go much further. Atavism, the impossibility of social justice, products of human action but not of human design, spontaneous order, the fatal conceit, subjectivism, the sensory order–there is a lot of Hayekian ideas that literary interpretation could draw upon.

A Hayekian criticism would ask questions like how do characters acquire and process knowledge? Which institutions transmit information successfully, and which corrupt it? How do money, law, language, and custom function as social coordination mechanisms? Why do some attempts at rational redesign end in disaster? Read War and Peace as a critique of the great-man theory of history, Brazil and The Lives of Others as the fatal conceit degenerating into ignorance, fear, and absurdity. The Wire as a Hayekian epic of spontaneous order that demonstrates the illusion of social justice. Cantor’s essay on Mann shows the method, the broader project remains underdeveloped.

Hat tip: Hollis Robbins for discussion.

Addendum: Don’t forget my earlier WSJ piece, Capitalism: Hollywood’s Miscast Villain which gives an economic, one might even say Marxist, explanation for why film directors in particular disdain capitalists.

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