Marginal Revolution https://marginalrevolution.com/ Small Steps Toward A Much Better World Fri, 17 Jul 2026 14:44:18 +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/2026/07/a-phone-is-a-cow.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-phone-is-a-cow A Phone is a Cow https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/960719771/0/marginalrevolution~A-Phone-is-a-Cow.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/a-phone-is-a-cow.html#comments Fri, 17 Jul 2026 11:20:42 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93295 Philip Auerswald’s A Phone is a Cow is three books in one, it’s a history of the mobile phone, it’s a business biography of Iqbal Quadir, who brought the cell phone to Bangladesh at at time when that seemed quixotic and doomed to fail, and it’s a theory of economic growth. It succeeds on all […]

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]]> Philip Auerswald’s A Phone is a Cow is three books in one, it’s a history of the mobile phone, it’s a business biography of Iqbal Quadir, who brought the cell phone to Bangladesh at at time when that seemed quixotic and doomed to fail, and it’s a theory of economic growth. It succeeds on all three levels.

…relatively few technologies have managed to reach the majority of the world’s people. Fire. Writing. The cookpot. The portable radio. These all succeeded. Yet most people in the world have never flown in an airplane. Most do not own a car or a bicycle. And, until recently, most still did not have access to a safe, sanitary toilet in their home. The list goes on.

The mobile phone reached the global majority more rapidly than any technology that had come before. How did this happen?

The title, by the way, comes from Quadir’s insight that just as Grameen Bank lent to villagers so they could purchase productive assets like a cow, Grameenphone could lend villagers the money to buy a phone—which then became a revenue-generating asset in its own right.

Addendum: Auerswald on Econ Talk with Russ Roberts.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/a-phone-is-a-cow.html/feed 8 93295 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/why-crime-will-decline-in-most-of-brazil.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=why-crime-will-decline-in-most-of-brazil Why crime will decline in (most of) Brazil https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/960683525/0/marginalrevolution~Why-crime-will-decline-in-most-of-Brazil.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/why-crime-will-decline-in-most-of-brazil.html#comments Fri, 17 Jul 2026 07:03:48 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93407 The system, introduced in 2024, uses facial recognition to spot people wanted by police on São Paulo’s streets. It issues alerts and officers are dispatched to pick them up. The system can also locate people who have been reported missing, identify stolen vehicles and provide footage to police investigations. Streamed to its control room in […]

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The system, introduced in 2024, uses facial recognition to spot people wanted by police on São Paulo’s streets. It issues alerts and officers are dispatched to pick them up. The system can also locate people who have been reported missing, identify stolen vehicles and provide footage to police investigations. Streamed to its control room in the city centre, information flows not just from lenses on street corners but in health centres, on buses and mounted on police motorbikes. By 2028 the number of cameras in the network is supposed to double, to 100,000.

São Paulo is one of many Brazilian cities spending big on crime-fighting technology. As in other countries, police are investing in body-worn cameras and networks of microphones that detect the sound of gunshots. What sets Brazil apart from many democracies is its enthusiasm for face-spotting tech. Researchers for O Panóptico, a watchdog, count 560 active facial-recognition projects in more than 20 Brazilian states. These include police-run initiatives but also experiments in schools, for example, where cameras are increasingly being used to take attendance. They gaze upon some 99m people, more than 47% of Brazil’s population.

Here is more from The Economist.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/why-crime-will-decline-in-most-of-brazil.html/feed 34 93407 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-future-belongs-to-ai-maniacs.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-future-belongs-to-ai-maniacs The future belongs to AI maniacs https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/960659657/0/marginalrevolution~The-future-belongs-to-AI-maniacs.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-future-belongs-to-ai-maniacs.html#comments Fri, 17 Jul 2026 04:11:30 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93408 That is the theme of my latest Free Press column, excerpt: An AI maniac is someone who is obsessed with working with the latest AI models. They try out new models as soon as they can, they spend hours and hours trying to master them, and they use them to regulate both their workflows and […]

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]]> That is the theme of my latest Free Press column, excerpt:

An AI maniac is someone who is obsessed with working with the latest AI models. They try out new models as soon as they can, they spend hours and hours trying to master them, and they use them to regulate both their workflows and their personal lives. I know one person who has his AI agent text him if he is not drinking enough water, for which he’s placed cameras around his house. One online anecdote tells of a man who canceled a date to spend more time playing around with Claude Fable 5 after Anthropic (where I am a member of the economic advisory board) extended the model’s availability for a few days.

Many AI maniacs are using AI tools to start companies of smaller size, and thus of smaller expense, than ever before. For those companies, the humans must set in motion and then monitor a large number of AI tools and agents. Those individuals then stand to reap outsize profits as their companies grow and succeed. Stripe, the payments company, recently issued customer data showing that the number of single-person companies earning $10 million or more has doubled in the past two years. There is no firm estimate how much of that improvement is due to AI, but it stands to reason that AI is a main driver of the trend…

Anecdotally, I observe that AI maniacs tend to be young, as with participants in so many other cultural trends. They tend to lack standard manners and graces, as they just want to “get right to it.” They are able to imagine a future that is very different from our present. Many of them also are kind, as they see the potential for new AI services, in areas such as biomedicine, to help other people. Their obsessiveness is a small price to pay for all of those virtues, and it is usually part of their charm and vibe.

The AI maniacs also are skeptical of credentials, as they should be. If you wish to learn how to manipulate AI tools, Harvard and Yale are not the places to go. You need to teach yourself, with assistance from other AI maniacs and also with help from the AI tools themselves. There are some AI maniacs in the Ivy League, but too often those individuals have invested their energies into other, more established ways to succeed.

I also believe that immigrants are especially likely to be AI maniacs. Immigrants have fewer channels to rise through credentials, family connections, and establishment modes of thinking and doing. They are more willing to try something new, they tend to be younger than average, and, because they were willing to switch countries, they tend to have higher levels of energy, courage, and ambition.

Worth a ponder.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-future-belongs-to-ai-maniacs.html/feed 41 93408 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/governing-agentic-ai.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=governing-agentic-ai Governing agentic AI https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/960609425/0/marginalrevolution~Governing-agentic-AI.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/governing-agentic-ai.html#comments Thu, 16 Jul 2026 20:23:55 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93411 From a new paper by Shruti Rajagopalan: AI agents now transact, publish, and act on external systems without contemporaneous human approval, creating new regulatory challenges. A growing literature has responded with proposals for legal personhood. This Article argues that personhood is neither necessary nor sufficient, shifting the question from status to enforcement. The Article first […]

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]]> From a new paper by Shruti Rajagopalan:

AI agents now transact, publish, and act on external systems without contemporaneous human approval, creating new regulatory challenges. A growing literature has responded with proposals for legal personhood. This Article argues that personhood is neither necessary nor sufficient, shifting the question from status to enforcement. The Article first shows that for two millennia, nonhuman legal personality, from the Roman universitas to the corporation, the Hindu idol, the waqf, and the river, has operated through human officeholders the law can locate, question, prosecute, and replace. Agentic AI inverts that design, exercising practical agency without legal status, sometimes with no identifiable human in the responsibility-bearing role. The Article then sorts deployments into three categories: first, where one firm builds and deploys the agent; second, where the developer and deployer are separate but known; and third, where there is no identifiable developer or deployer. The Article stress tests each agent deployment category against five liability doctrines: agency law, products liability, enterprise liability, negligence, and strict liability. It demonstrates that each fails at different points in the third category for the same reason: the absent responsibility-bearer. Bare personhood would supply a caption without a representative, assets, or a mechanism for cessation. Finally, the Article assembles an alternative from regimes governing aircraft, ships, drones, driverless cars, and motor carriers. It develops a six-layer stack—registration, identification, verification, financial responsibility, lifecycle traceability, and suspension—so a responsibility-bearer can be identified, liability imposed, and the activity suspended. These layers place the human back at the end of the chain.

I would say that social science now has new frontiers, let us hope it blossoms in response.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/governing-agentic-ai.html/feed 18 93411 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/thursday-assorted-links-561.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=thursday-assorted-links-561 Thursday assorted links https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/960586637/0/marginalrevolution~Thursday-assorted-links.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/thursday-assorted-links-561.html#comments Thu, 16 Jul 2026 16:59:20 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93406 1. On the decline of sumptuousness in cinema, part II. 2. Funding canonical visions. 3. Thiel and Wolfe on the Pope and the Antichrist. 4. Claims about blue eyes. 5. Are the world’s best counterfeit artists in Colombia? (NYT) 6. Britain nationalizes its last major steel mill (NYT). 7. “Expected working life is 11 years […]

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]]> 1. On the decline of sumptuousness in cinema, part II.

2. Funding canonical visions.

3. Thiel and Wolfe on the Pope and the Antichrist.

4. Claims about blue eyes.

5. Are the world’s best counterfeit artists in Colombia? (NYT)

6. Britain nationalizes its last major steel mill (NYT).

7. “Expected working life is 11 years shorter (3/4 as long) in Italy than in the Netherlands, in spite of Italians living longer.”

8. The public choice of AI regulation.

9. Why is it so expensive to fly within Africa?

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/thursday-assorted-links-561.html/feed 58 93406 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-equal-pay-madness-just-got-madder.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-equal-pay-madness-just-got-madder The Equal Pay Madness Just Got Madder https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/960547346/0/marginalrevolution~The-Equal-Pay-Madness-Just-Got-Madder.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-equal-pay-madness-just-got-madder.html#comments Thu, 16 Jul 2026 11:12:11 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93405 In my post Equality Act 2010 I discussed the UK’s absolutely insane wage policy: In short, supply and demand have been replaced by judges and labor boards with the authority to deem which jobs are “equal” and therefore should be paid equally….No one is alleging that male and female warehouse workers were paid unequally or […]

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]]> In my post Equality Act 2010 I discussed the UK’s absolutely insane wage policy:

In short, supply and demand have been replaced by judges and labor boards with the authority to deem which jobs are “equal” and therefore should be paid equally….No one is alleging that male and female warehouse workers were paid unequally or that male and female retail workers were paid unequally or that there was any direct or indirect discrimination. The only claim is that warehouse workers, who are less likely to be female than retail workers, earn more than retail workers. And since these jobs have been judged “equal,” the company has violated Equality Act 2010.

…The warehouse workers were almost 50% female (47.25%). So females were not barred from the higher paying jobs. The fact that 77.5% of the retail workers were female suggests that retail work has special appeal to females relative to males and thus that there are compensating differentials. Any of the three female plaintiffs could have taken jobs in the warehouse. If the jobs are equal and the warehouse jobs pay more this is, on the plaintiffs’ theory, “puzzling”. [Or, as Ayn Rand would say, blank out.]

In fact, the court case reveals that Next was struggling to fill the warehouse positions and offered any retail employee—including the plaintiffs—the opportunity to switch to warehouse work. On cross-examination, one of the plaintiffs admitted that, given the unpleasant conditions in the warehouse—described by the court as “the drone of machinery,…vibration, alarm sirens and the screeching of machinery, wheels and rollers, continuously present in all areas”—the warehouse job “did not seem particularly attractive” compared to the greater autonomy and more appealing environment of the retail job. The plaintiff added that she would only have considered the warehouse job if it paid “a lot more money.”

Well, here is the update. The outgoing Keir Starmer government is trying to massively expand these laws. The “equal value” framework previously applied only to sex discrimination; under the proposed law, employees could also bring equal-value claims based on race and disability. Remember, these laws have nothing to do with discrimination—they are about demanding, at the point of a gun, that apples and oranges sell for the same price because they’re both fruit.

The new law would also establish an Equal Pay Regulation and Enforcement Unit. As I said, Orwellian.

See also my post, How Britain Become as Poor as Mississippi.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-equal-pay-madness-just-got-madder.html/feed 114 93405 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/spreading-ai-to-the-rest-of-the-world.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=spreading-ai-to-the-rest-of-the-world Spreading AI to the rest of the world https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/960545648/0/marginalrevolution~Spreading-AI-to-the-rest-of-the-world.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/spreading-ai-to-the-rest-of-the-world.html#comments Thu, 16 Jul 2026 10:49:56 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93388 Another job we’ll have, I call this imperialism, but I mean that in a value neutral way. But AI comes to different parts of the world at different speeds. I think the countries where AI changes a lot of things first, there’ll be a very high demand for people from those places, which I’ll think […]

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Another job we’ll have, I call this imperialism, but I mean that in a value neutral way. But AI comes to different parts of the world at different speeds. I think the countries where AI changes a lot of things first, there’ll be a very high demand for people from those places, which I’ll think to be the US, possibly UK, to go around the rest of the world and teach people in other places how to integrate AI into what we have. And a lot of those demands won’t be fully rational. They won’t be, oh, give us the best possible AI. They’ll be like, oh, we’re Peruvians. We want to keep things a certain way. You may or may not agree, but we want you to give us a version of AI that helps keep it that way. And that will be the job. And I think Americans in particular, probably Brits as well, huge growth sector will be living in other parts of the world spreading AI. And again, the fact that AI can do it better may or may not be true, but I don’t think it’s what will matter. I think the Peruvians or some analogue will want humans to come and listen to their concerns and assure and persuade them as humans, that’s what they’re going to get. I’m not saying it’s always going to go well, but that will always be, I think, a big job for humans to do.

It’s already a growth sector for Americans to want to live abroad. Like we have all this accumulated wealth. Life in America can be a bit dull. Life in Europe in particular is amazing. Personally, I love life in most parts of Latin America. So it’s already a trend for Americans to live overseas. For another reason, it’s nothing to do with AI. So if there are all these future job opportunities, like full of meaning, like come to Kenya, help Kenya, you can save 73 lives or maybe like 73,000 lives, help them build out their AI in a way that’s acceptable to them. That’ll just be this phenomenally rich inner and outer life. And I think it’ll be a great source of job creation.

I have already linked to the transcript of the talk.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/spreading-ai-to-the-rest-of-the-world.html/feed 44 93388 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/my-excellent-conversation-with-chase-koch.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=my-excellent-conversation-with-chase-koch My excellent Conversation with Chase Koch https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/960519812/0/marginalrevolution~My-excellent-Conversation-with-Chase-Koch.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/my-excellent-conversation-with-chase-koch.html#comments Thu, 16 Jul 2026 04:36:13 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93402 Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary: Chase and Tyler discuss if any of his father’s lessons never stuck, the guilt-trip letter his grandfather wrote three months after Charles was born, why Chase started throwing tennis matches, what Rafa’s grit taught him about stoicism, who he admired most […]

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

Chase and Tyler discuss if any of his father’s lessons never stuck, the guilt-trip letter his grandfather wrote three months after Charles was born, why Chase started throwing tennis matches, what Rafa’s grit taught him about stoicism, who he admired most from the 1992 Dream Team, whether the Spurs should jettison De’Aaron Fox, the David Gilmour solo that hooked him at eleven, what drew him to jam bands, how he built a boom-box business out of his parents’ garage, why his father interviewed Snoop on a Zoom call during Covid, why his band is named for the second law of thermodynamics, what it’s like working with MrBeast, how Koch Industries has evolved, what he learned from Marc Andreessen, the philosophy behind hiring the “farm team,” why he is teaching himself to code with Claude at his fourteen-year-old’s urging, where he’s traveling next, and much more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: N.W.A., are they good? I like them.

KOCH: I had my phases. My first business, Tyler, was when I was 15 years old and one of my best friends to this day, Askia Ahmad, he was wiring up car stereos and building custom boom boxes and all that. We basically built a business out of my parents’ garage because they had all the tools and materials and everything. Like, “Let’s build a business out of here. My parents hopefully will pay for the machinery, and then we can sell these boom boxes to our friends at high prices and capture a big margin.” Through that, I learned about the whole gangster rap. Your listeners may be surprised, but it started with me, Public Enemy, N.W.A., Eazy-E, of course—

COWEN: It’s so good.

KOCH: Dre.

COWEN: Snoop.

KOCH: Snoop.

COWEN: You know Snoop, right?

KOCH: It’s so good, so good. Yes.

COWEN: What’s Snoop like?

KOCH: Snoop? Okay. This goes back to what I was mentioning on the power of music to unify people. So I’ve been with Stand Together. For the listeners that don’t know, it’ll give context to your question. Stand Together is an organization that has really a community of like-minded leaders that all believe in one thing, in the power of human potential, and that every human has a gift.

We all know that there’s so many barriers in society that are holding people back, whether it’s barriers in education, barriers in regulation, so you can’t start a business, barriers in our criminal justice system, you name it. What Stand Together does is we have basically a comprehensive strategy that addresses everything from education to policy to bottom-up empowerment in communities to drive real social change. I’ve been a part of this for as long as I can remember.

My father’s been working on social change for 60 years. My passion for music, as you can see from your last line of questioning, with Stand Together and that whole community, we never tapped into culture. When I say culture and what the next generation pays attention to—sports, music, YouTube, entertainment, creators, media. During COVID, I had this idea that we’ve never tapped into music to drive social change.

And on one specific point:

Back to your question on energy, 4 percent of the overall capital consumed at Koch is in refining, which is basically where my grandfather started the company. I think that surprises a lot of people because I think a lot of people are still stuck in this, “Well, you’re this energy company.” No, we’re not. We touch the majority of the economy now, and we’re in everything from forest products, consumer products, software, as I described, glass manufacturing, to energy and fertilizers as well.

Interesting throughout.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/my-excellent-conversation-with-chase-koch.html/feed 33 93402 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/those-new-service-sector-jobs-16.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=those-new-service-sector-jobs-16 Those new service sector jobs https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/960309843/0/marginalrevolution~Those-new-service-sector-jobs.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/those-new-service-sector-jobs-16.html#comments Wed, 15 Jul 2026 18:31:09 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93400 It’s 85 years since Brian O’Nolan, better known as Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen, proposed a Book Handling Agency in The Irish Times. On Sunday evening, Flann’s idea became reality. In a Berlin bar’s back room, Cabinet Magazine, a literary quarterly, assembled a crack team of white-coated literary experts to make your unread books look well-read – at […]

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It’s 85 years since Brian O’Nolan, better known as Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen, proposed a Book Handling Agency in The Irish Times.

On Sunday evening, Flann’s idea became reality. In a Berlin bar’s back room, Cabinet Magazine, a literary quarterly, assembled a crack team of white-coated literary experts to make your unread books look well-read – at moderate prices.

For €5 you could get an “essential” handling package including a “professional” spine-break for your book, “two commonplace page markers, 2 scholastic dog-ears; 4 underlined passages; 1 arbitrary yet discerning piece of marginalia; and 1 contextually appropriate piece of marginalia”.

The premier package added “mauling the edges” of the book with a drill and sand paper, thanks to the “vice-chiefs of abrasion (light, heavy)” as well as “one stain using cheap wine, coffee etc”, hand-applied by a “fluid dynamics specialist”.

There is a learning dimension as well:

“We learned that, to look authentic, coffee needs to be dropped at a different height than wine,” said Sina Najafi, editor-in-chief of Cabinet magazine, who organised the evening and took on the professional spine-breaking.

Here is the full story, via Benen Harrington.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/those-new-service-sector-jobs-16.html/feed 36 93400 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/wednesday-assorted-links-562.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=wednesday-assorted-links-562 Wednesday assorted links https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/960501683/0/marginalrevolution~Wednesday-assorted-links.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/wednesday-assorted-links-562.html#comments Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:34:23 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93398 1. New Stephen Dubner talk show. 2. “Spain accelerates and already contributes 65% of the population growth in Europe” 3. Scott Alexander defends AI chip regulation.  If AI can be that powerful (which Scott believes), there will be a significant way to make lots of money building a very strong open model.  I do not […]

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]]> 1. New Stephen Dubner talk show.

2. “Spain accelerates and already contributes 65% of the population growth in Europe”

3. Scott Alexander defends AI chip regulation.  If AI can be that powerful (which Scott believes), there will be a significant way to make lots of money building a very strong open model.  I do not see how the regulators stop this on a global basis, and his recipe may well accelerate the trend.

4. Should we train AIs to be risk-averse?

5. The Invite is a good movie.

6. So when was a space rocket possible?

7. The unmeasured boom in UK entrepreneurship.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/wednesday-assorted-links-562.html/feed 70 93398 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/sub-saharan-africa-facts-of-the-day.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=sub-saharan-africa-facts-of-the-day Sub-Saharan Africa facts of the day https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/960458972/0/marginalrevolution~SubSaharan-Africa-facts-of-the-day.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/sub-saharan-africa-facts-of-the-day.html#comments Wed, 15 Jul 2026 06:30:06 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93399 In aggregate its farmers are growing more cereals, such as maize (corn) and rice, than ever: nearly five times as much as in the 1960s, when many countries achieved independence. But most of those gains came from cultivating more land, which cannot go on for ever (see chart 1). Africa, once sparsely populated, is getting […]

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In aggregate its farmers are growing more cereals, such as maize (corn) and rice, than ever: nearly five times as much as in the 1960s, when many countries achieved independence. But most of those gains came from cultivating more land, which cannot go on for ever (see chart 1). Africa, once sparsely populated, is getting crowded. The amount of arable land per person has been falling for decades, and now sits at roughly the global average.

That might not matter if farmers were also growing more crops per hectare. But recently gentle growth in agricultural productivity has given way to stagnation, perhaps even decline. Consider figures drawn from national statistics in Africa by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), a UN  body. Cereal yields did not grow between 2020 and 2024, the latest data point (see chart 2). Nor did total factor productivity (TFP), a measure of how efficiently inputs of all kinds (such as labour and machinery) are turned into produce. Most African countries had lower agricultural TFP in 2023 than a decade before.

This seems to be more than a pandemic blip. In a paper published in 2024, Douglas Gollin of Tufts University in Massachusetts and his co-authors analysed data from surveys of 55,000 household farms in six African countries between 2008 and 2019. They estimated that, for smallholdings, yields and TFP were already falling by 3-4% a year then. They found steeper declines than the FAO did, perhaps because their sample did not include large farms, or because official statistics are sketchy.

Here is more from The Economist.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/sub-saharan-africa-facts-of-the-day.html/feed 51 93399 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/toward-a-theory-of-uni-context.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=toward-a-theory-of-uni-context Toward a theory of uni-context https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/960454253/0/marginalrevolution~Toward-a-theory-of-unicontext.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/toward-a-theory-of-uni-context.html#comments Wed, 15 Jul 2026 05:05:14 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93397 Here is a good dialogue between Derek Thompson and Agnes Callard, excerpt: Callard: In general, goodness is more context-dependent than badness. There isn’t really anything that’s good all the time for everyone independent of context. Happiness depends on your context and who you are. There isn’t anything that will always make a person happy. But there […]

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]]> Here is a good dialogue between Derek Thompson and Agnes Callard, excerpt:

Callard: In general, goodness is more context-dependent than badness. There isn’t really anything that’s good all the time for everyone independent of context. Happiness depends on your context and who you are. There isn’t anything that will always make a person happy. But there are reliable ways to make people unhappy. There’s a set of evils that are close to universal: death, pain, illness, violence. Even if someone’s in very different circumstances from yours, if you see they’re being subjected to one of those, you can interpret it as suffering and understand it.

So we should predict that what we see on the internet, insofar as people are trying to be legible to large groups, is that they focus their attention on things that show up to everyone. Take two strangers on the internet trying to talk to each other. What are they going to coordinate on as a topic they can both care about? It’s likely going to be something bad.

And here is from Derek:

Here are some questions that I consider self-evidently compelling about the modern world:

  • Why is the news media so interested in telling you how much the world sucks all the time?
  • Why are so many of us obsessed with distraction and managing our attention?
  • Why is it so hard to stop comparing ourselves to others?
  • And why does everything in art and design seem the same these days?

And more from Agnes:

With identity categories like woman, disabled, gay, Jewish, or American, the striking thing is that you are a member of those categories in every circumstance. There is no circumstance in which I stop being a woman. Identity is a hat you never take off. So identity is well suited to a uni-contextual world.

Worth pondering, interesting throughout.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/toward-a-theory-of-uni-context.html/feed 40 93397 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/my-goat-book-now-has-updated-software-ai.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=my-goat-book-now-has-updated-software-ai My GOAT book now has updated software/AI https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/960420611/0/marginalrevolution~My-GOAT-book-now-has-updated-softwareAI.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/my-goat-book-now-has-updated-software-ai.html#comments Tue, 14 Jul 2026 20:09:02 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93365 Generative Book – GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time, and Why Does it Matter?

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Generative Book – GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time, and Why Does it Matter?

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/my-goat-book-now-has-updated-software-ai.html/feed 14 93365 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/tuesday-assorted-links-577.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=tuesday-assorted-links-577 Tuesday assorted links https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/960401552/0/marginalrevolution~Tuesday-assorted-links.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/tuesday-assorted-links-577.html#comments Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:09:08 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93392 1. Were the 1980s so great for kids? 2. Elasticity Institute, new for the economics of AI. 3. Can you get a job at Bending Spoons? (WSJ) 4. How are AI agents changing basketball analytics? 5. Terminal lucidity for dementia patients? (NYT) 6. Why are Australian real wages collapsing?

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]]> 1. Were the 1980s so great for kids?

2. Elasticity Institute, new for the economics of AI.

3. Can you get a job at Bending Spoons? (WSJ)

4. How are AI agents changing basketball analytics?

5. Terminal lucidity for dementia patients? (NYT)

6. Why are Australian real wages collapsing?

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/tuesday-assorted-links-577.html/feed 98 93392 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/occupational-licensing-around-the-world.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=occupational-licensing-around-the-world Occupational Licensing Around the World https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/960363791/0/marginalrevolution~Occupational-Licensing-Around-the-World.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/occupational-licensing-around-the-world.html#comments Tue, 14 Jul 2026 11:17:07 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93394 Hartley and Kleiner have a new Fed Minneapolis working paper surveying workers around the world to measure occupational licensing by country. In the United States, occupational licensing has increased substantially over time, so one might expect licensing to rise with income. Their headline result is the opposite: occupational licensing is negatively correlated with GDP per […]

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]]> Hartley and Kleiner have a new Fed Minneapolis working paper surveying workers around the world to measure occupational licensing by country. In the United States, occupational licensing has increased substantially over time, so one might expect licensing to rise with income. Their headline result is the opposite: occupational licensing is negatively correlated with GDP per capita. Many developing countries such as India, South Africa, and the Philippines have a lot of occupational licensing while Denmark, Sweden and France have relatively little. Similarly, countries which rate poorly in measures of government quality, such as regulatory quality, political stability, the rule of law, and corruption have more occupational licensing.

I do have some concerns, however. The figure for India of 42% of workers requiring a government license seems too high. Admittedly this is the home of the License Raj but I worry about the survey results. In order to mark a surveyed worker as requiring an occupational license HK require that the worker say that a) they have a license and b) a license is required to work in their profession. But in India there are many workers who do not have a license and a license is required to work in their profession–HK, however, consider these workers confused and drop them from the analysis. That is appropriate for a developed country where there aren’t many illegal unlicensed workers but, as the authors later discuss, informality is very high in India so working illegally is not uncommon.

Including these workers would make the true India figure even higher than HK report but I think with such a high degree of informality we also have to wonder whether survey responders in India really are responding the same way as in Germany. Perhaps they are reporting a license isn’t really required since very few workers have one. In India, for example, some 60% of “licensed” drivers have an fake or invalid license and many have no license at all so maybe workers are just reporting the facts on the ground.

Within the United States, professions are regulated in some states but not others—Louisiana, for instance, requires florists to be licensed. (Do license-holding Louisiana florists produce better, safer arrangements? I don’t think so.) Given this variation even within a single country, we’d expect considerable variation across countries too. Multiple independent surveys—not just HK—confirm that Denmark, Sweden, and even France have less occupational licensing than the United States. Since these countries have high state capacity, we can rule out the hypothesis that licensing exists for safety or quality. The implication is clear: occupational licensing is often about rent-seeking, not quality assurance.

Addendum: See also my review of  Allensworth’s The Licensing Racket which finds that licensing board spend most of their time and effort on regulating entry rather than quality and my paper on the surprise delicensing of occupational licensing in the funeral industry in Colorado.

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