Between 2012 and 2022, the number of obese adults in Scotland rose 46 percent, to comprise about one-third of the population.

In 1950, 76 percent of Scots age 16 or older were married, now it is about 45 percent.

All those details are from the new and fun book by Alistair Moffat, To See Ourselves: A Personal History of Scotland Since 1950.  From these tidbits I conclude that “Scotland as we knew it” is not just evolving, but also disappearing.

The post Scotland facts of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

2. Dialogues of Confucius, translated and edited by Brian Buya and Wenwen Li.  It seems these works, once considered doubtful in provenance, are likely by Confucius after all?  So this is an epic volume of real import.  But does it raise my opinion of Confucius as a thinker?  No.

3. I liked all of Thomas F. Madden’s The Fall of Republics: A History from Ancient Carthage to the American Constitution, but most of all the section on Venice.

4. Frank Callanan, James Joyce: A Political Life.  An excellent book, and it truly induces us to revalue Joyce and understand him in a new light.  Joyce was in fact highly politically conscious, heavily influenced by Parnellism, and in part writing a critique of Irish nationalism from an internal perspective.

4. Alastair Reynolds, “Zima Blue,” one of the better short stories about AI, and also aesthetics.  Via R.

5. Justin Gest, Democratic Drain: Global Migration and the Struggle for Democracy is a political economy argument that widespread immigration can drain home countries of their democracy supporters to some extent.

Daniel Susskind, What Should My Children Do?: How to Flourish in the Age of AI is a book that needed to be written.

Melissa S. Kearney and Luke Pardue, editors.  Demographic Headwinds: The Economic Consequences of Lower Birth Rates and Longer Lives.  A short volume, to the point, worry is in order.

And there is Jeremy A. Simmons, Sea of Treasures: A Cultural History of Ancient Indian Ocean Trade.

The post What I’ve been reading appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Here is the article, via Air Genius Gary Leff.

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2. Short TV clip of me on the Brazilian economy.

3. Patrick Collison on Paris.

4. “Thrilled to announce the inaugural cohort of the 1991 Fellowship @mercatus. Meet some of the most talented and creative minds working on challenging policy problems at the state level in India.”  Link here.

5. AI has won another literary prize.

6. Roon on worship.  Roon is one of our best thinkers.

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The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 represents the most significant reform of the U.S. income tax code since the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Previous analyses of the TCJA’s economic impact often rely on estimates based on data prior to the enactment of the legislation. This paper leverages plausibly exogenous variations in state-level tax changes brought about by the TCJA and employs local projections with two-way fixed effects to examine its effects on the labor market. Measures of TCJA tax shocks are constructed with the NBER-TAXSIM model using state-level tabulations of individual income tax returns from the Statistics of Income (SOI). Our findings suggest that tax cuts amounting to 1 percent of Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) under the TCJA are associated with a 0.7–1 percentage point increase in the labor force participation rate (LFPR) and a 0.8–1.5 percent increase in payroll employment over the two years following the TCJA’s implementation. These results appear broadly robust to assumptions about heterogeneous state responses and the inclusion of interactive fixed effects.

That is from a newly published article by Anil Kumar.  Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

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It might seem surprising, in a world of global stars, that the 6m Danes, many of whom are fluent in English, listen mainly to homegrown music. And until fairly recently they did not. In 2019 only five songs in Denmark’s top 20 were in Danish. By last year the figure was 18.

A similar trend is under way in other countries—and in other forms of entertainment. From Asia to the Americas, music charts are increasingly dominated by local sounds. Hollywood television-streaming companies are commissioning more local productions in foreign markets, causing consumption of American shows to fall. Social networks are connecting the whole world, but so far people are mainly using them to consume local content. And as video gaming expands, it too is becoming increasingly tailored to local cultures…

In 2023 Will Page and Chris Dalla Riva noted in a London School of Economics paper that a number of European countries including France, Germany, Italy and Poland had seen rising domestic shares of their top tens in the preceding decade. Since then the phenomenon seems to have spread. Mr Page, formerly chief economist at Spotify, finds that 55% of streams of songs in Sweden’s top 20 last year were in Swedish, up from 29% in 2019. Norway’s figure rose from 13% to 38% in the same period.

That is from The Economist, and of course it echoes themes from my earlier Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures.  And Brazil most of all?

Latin America has gone the same way (see chart 1), Brazil astonishingly so: in the first week of June 96 of the top 100 artists on YouTube Music in the country were Brazilian (foreigners included Justin Bieber and Michael Jackson). Last year Thailand had a solidly local top ten, while Indonesia and the Philippines each had eight local tracks in their respective charts; Nigeria’s top ten were all local, as were nine of South Africa’s, according to the IFPI, which represents the recorded-music industry.

The same trends are happening for television as well, albeit less radically.

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Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0HBFWS1avb6tYY1IoLefYb

Web: https://athenaeumreview.org/podcast/aesthetics-a-conversation-with-tyler-cowen/

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/aesthetics-a-conversation-with-tyler-cowen/id1509089416?i=1000773451248

Here is basic information about art scholar Benjamin Lima, it was great fun for me to do this one.

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Some of the most impactful measures announced by Cuba’s Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Thursday include allowing:

• Private and foreign capital to purchase and sell fuel
• The creation of private corporate banking
• Private business owners to own more than one company and hire more than 100 workers
• Private businesses in agriculture and tourism
• Tourism property sales, evaluated case-by-case, for Cubans resident in the country and abroad
• Foreign investors to hire workers directly
• Foreign investment in Old Havana and other tourist spots, in state telecom ETECSA data centers, mobile networks, and other digital infrastructure
• The extension of surface rights up to 99 years and leases up to 50 years for foreign investments
• Real estate development in tourism
• Farmland lease rights for an “indefinite period”
• Wholesale and retail trade without limits by foreign entities
• The sale of state assets and state companies’ shares to the private sector and foreign companies.

Taken together, the reforms proposed significantly expand the private sector six decades after Cuba’s communist leaders forbade all private business—even frita stands— and adopted a centrally planned economy model that ended up ruining the country and dragging Cubans into a severe humanitarian crisis. Currently, the government is in such dire straits that it is even seeking to transfer the management of the country’s zoos and aquariums to private hands, another announced change.

The post Cuba appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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2. Are elite economists overpaid?  Elite economists conclude no.

3. Dialog.

4. Are you in the weights?

5. Inside the world’s first AI art museum (Los Angeles).

6. Redux of my 2023 post on AI and existential risk.

The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Free Press columnist Tyler Cowen picks a biography of one of the finest poets of the 20th century, Paul Celan: A Life, by Anna Arno.

Could Celan be the very best poet of all time? When read in the German language, I think he might be. When read in English, he is still very good. No one has a poetic topic of more importance than the Holocaust. Contrary to Theodor Adorno, he decided it was possible to write poetry after it, and he took that mission very seriously.

Now we finally have a first-rate biography. Celan’s mother was killed in the Holocaust, and he took his own life in 1970, drowning himself in the Seine. How did he get to that point? How did he have the strength and wherewithal to write such powerful poetry in the first place?

I found this book gripping from start to finish. Given the topic I cannot call it a “fun” read, but it is absorbing and the translation is very accessible.

Is it possible that Anna Arno is one of our best intellectuals today? She has written on the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker and the Polish writer and activist Konstanty Jeleński, and has done important work as a translator, including of Henry James—though those works are in Polish, and thus inaccessible to me. Can we get translations as soon as possible? In the meantime, you can start with this one.

The article has many other quality selections as well.

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Sweden is continuing to reap the rewards of this mixture of fiscal rectitude and pro-market reforms. GDP is projected to grow by 1.8% to 1.9% this year; headline inflation stands at 1.5%; debt-to-GDP ratio is one of the lowest in the world, at just above 35%.

There are some flies in this ointment, of course: The economy has recently endured a bout of stagnation, unemployment is at an uncomfortably high 9.4% and Sweden has one of Europe’s highest rates of household debt. But the business environment is healthy, particularly when it comes to business to business. Sweden has a diversified business scene — the highest number of unicorns per capita in Europe, with notable successes such as Spotify, but also a healthy manufacturing and engineering sector. Many of these established companies are thriving because of a surge in demand for both server farms and military equipment…

Sweden has recently experienced its first net emigration in 50 years, thanks to higher minimum wages for labor visas, tougher citizenship tests and, most controversially, financial payouts of up to $37,000 for refugees who volunteer to leave. It has also made progress against violent crime in the immigrant-heavy suburbs, increasing police numbers and toughening the penal code, including a boost to stop-and-search powers and a lowering in the age of criminal responsibility to 14. The number of shootings fell by 63%, from 390 in 2022 to 147 by the end of 2025.

Here is the full Bloomberg column.  And here is Adrian’s new book on liberalism, self-recommending.

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Missing book: Glorious Committees of History, on great committees that accomplished great things as committees.

GPT Pro has an impressive response, here is the start:

1. The King James Bible translation companies. This is maybe the purest literary example: 47 scholars organized into six companies at Westminster, Oxford, and Cambridge, with review procedures, producing one of the monuments of English prose. The committee form mattered because it blended scholarship, doctrinal acceptability, and a shared ear for cadence.

And Henry Oliver suggests The Great Exhibition?

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2. Is the AI shock like the China shock?

3. Can AI agents be individuated?

4. Who is liked by GPT 5.5? (from a partial list, if I understand this correctly)

5. “A policy-induced rural broadband expansion lowered adolescent fertility, and the response appears to operate through the information and opportunity set rather than through new clinical capacity.”

6. Noah Smith is fearing that he and many others are having less influence.

7. Right-wing arguments against Great Books.  And two more.

8. “It is my great pleasure to confirm that the brilliant Professor Robin Hanson joined the UAP Science Advisory Council.“

The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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What we found was that delicensing reduced wages, reduced prices, and caused a shift towards cremation rather than the more expensive mortuary services preferred by funeral directors. Here’s a key figure.

But that is not the end of the story. In 2023 a series of gruesome abuses came to light involving the sale of body parts, rotting bodies, and worse. Newspapers repeatedly noted that Colorado was the only state not to license funeral service workers. As a result, Colorado is relicensing funeral service workers as of 2027.

The problem is that there is no evidence that abuses were worse in Colorado. It’s easy to find similar abuses—including sexual abuse of corpses—in states with heavy licensing. Pizzola and I didn’t examine the rate of necrophilia among funeral workers in our paper (silly us), but we did cite the following:

A recent US government review of occupational licensing concluded that “the empirical research does not find large improvements in quality or health and safety from more stringent licensing” (CEA, 2015). Similarly, Colorado revisited their decision in a 1990 sunrise review that considered reinstating occupational licensing. The Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies found that since the 1983 occupational delicensing: (1) “there had been incidents of malpractice within the profession but no widespread pattern of abuse,” (2) “[a]llegations of significant threats to the public health, safety and welfare perpetrated by the death care industry in Colorado regarding the improper disposal of human or infectious wastes had not been supported by verifiable evidence,” and (3) “claims that the public in Colorado had suffered or might suffer significant detriment due to a lack of trained mortuary science practitioners caused by the abolition of the Board were unsupported” (Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies, 2007).

Moreover, the licensing requirements—mandating various hours of training and so forth—have very little to do with the types of abuses that generated public support for relicensing. How many hours of “don’t have sex with corpses” training is required? And the funeral director in the worst Colorado case was in fact sentenced to 40 years in jail. Isn’t that incentive enough?

People want what cannot be guaranteed: good behavior in all circumstances. And they will reach for a licensing regime if it promises that, even when such promises are empty.

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