Marginal Revolution https://marginalrevolution.com/ Small Steps Toward A Much Better World Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:46:41 +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/the-apples-and-oranges-tribunal.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-apples-and-oranges-tribunal The Apples and Oranges Tribunal https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/963888317/0/marginalrevolution~The-Apples-and-Oranges-Tribunal.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-apples-and-oranges-tribunal.html#comments Tue, 28 Jul 2026 11:13:43 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93438 Suppose that apples sell for more than oranges and Parliament in it’s wisdom decides that, at last, apples and oranges must be compared. Not by shoppers — shoppers are biased, they merely reveal what they are willing to pay — but by a tribunal, which will determine whether apples and oranges are of truly equal […]

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]]> Suppose that apples sell for more than oranges and Parliament in it’s wisdom decides that, at last, apples and oranges must be compared. Not by shoppers — shoppers are biased, they merely reveal what they are willing to pay — but by a tribunal, which will determine whether apples and oranges are of truly equal value and thus must sell at the same price.

What would the tribunal need to know?

Start with land. Orange groves sit on Florida real estate with one set of alternative uses; apple orchards occupy Washington hillsides with another. The opportunity cost of an orange includes the housing development, the solar farm, the tourist attraction not built on that grove. How is the tribunal to value what was never built? Perhaps you answer: look at land prices. Brilliant suggestion, I reply. Keep going.

Next, capital. Orchards take years to mature, so today’s fruit embodies investments made under yesterday’s expectations about today, financed at interest rates the tribunal must somehow incorporate. Then storage: apples keep, oranges rot, so an apple and an orange in April are different goods than the “same” fruits in October. Add transportation, refrigeration, frost, pests, crop insurance, the option to divert fruit into juice, cider, marmalade, or pie, substitution with every other item in the produce aisle, and the shifting preferences of millions of consumers, each of whom knows things about his own breakfast that he could not articulate to a tribunal. It all matters.

To determine the “just” price of apples and oranges, the tribunal would need the entire general-equilibrium system.

Market prices are necessary to compare alternative uses of resources, as Mises taught us in 1920. In 1945, Hayek added the knowledge problem: the relevant knowledge is dispersed, local, tacit, and fleeting. Free markets are the only institution that aggregates that knowledge, articulates it in prices and gives people a reason to listen and respond. A price is a signal wrapped up in an incentive. Apples and oranges can be compared but only by the incomparably complex operations of the price system. There is a reason we call it the super-market.

Britain is now running this experiment in the labor market–A retail worker equal to a warehouse worker? A canteen worker equal to a coal miner? A dinner lady equal to a gravedigger?

Under the Equality Act’s “equal value” provisions, tribunals compare jobs by scoring their intrinsic properties — effort, skill, responsibility, working conditions — the labor theory of value applied to labor. How is it going? The Tesco litigation began in 2018; the tribunal’s fact-finding hearing ran 36 days, its judgments run to more than 900 pages resting on some 19,000 pages of training manuals, and the independent experts have yet to begin the report that will actually say whether a shelf-stacker’s job equals a warehouse worker’s. Eight years, and the calculation has not started. Apples and oranges, adjudicated but not, as Orwell or Marx or Stafford Beer might have imagined, by a industrial bureaucracy or by an all-knowing artificial intelligence but by lawyers and commissions and tribunals. The worst of all worlds.

And having discovered that the tribunal cannot price two jobs in a decade, the government now proposes to add race and disability comparisons and an enforcement unit to publish official guidance on which reasons for a wage difference are permissible. A bureau of allowable scarcities.

Moreover, let us say that one day the tribunal reaches its conclusion and finds the truly just apple to orange price. At last, nirvana. The next day the public learns that vitamin C really does combat cancer–the demand for orange juice skyrockets. To encourage more orange juice production we need a higher price but wait…nothing about oranges or apples or the labor required to produce them has changed. We need to attract more labor to the orange juice industry but the effort, skill, responsibility and working conditions of orange juice workers has not changed. How can we justly pay them more than their apple juice brethren? Blank out.

The market compares apples and oranges every day. It is the only institution that can. But there is a deeper error here than computation. Suppose the tribunal succeeded. Suppose that after another decade it delivered the true and final score, shelf-stacker versus warehouseman. What would it have found? Not justice. A wage is not a grade on your character or a measure of your worth as a human being. A wage is a price — a report on how scarce your skills are relative to the desires of people you will never meet. Nurses are not morally less worthy than plumbers should they earn less than plumbers or vice-versa, and no one thinks otherwise except the tribunals.

Hayek nailed it in The Mirage of Social Justice: justice is about conduct — how one person treats another. An employer who defrauds his workers, an employee who steals from the till, a product sold under false pretenses — condemn them, take them to court. But the pattern of prices that emerges from millions of voluntary trades is nobody’s conduct. No one chose it, no one designed it, no one can be guilty of it. The constellation of prices is, in Ferguson’s phrase, the result of human action but not of human design. Demanding that prices be just is a category error, like suing the weather. Prices don’t grade our merit; they guide our actions. Ask them to do the first and they can no longer do the second.

Judge Anthony Kennedy said it well in the Ninth Circuit ruling that (mostly) killed comparable worth in the US: “neither law nor logic deems the free market system a suspect enterprise.”

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-apples-and-oranges-tribunal.html/feed 20 93438 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-aea-presidential-election.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-aea-presidential-election The AEA presidential election https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/963822743/0/marginalrevolution~The-AEA-presidential-election.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-aea-presidential-election.html#comments Tue, 28 Jul 2026 06:44:56 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93487 AEA is the American Economics Association, and a new president is needed, here is the candidate and likely winner: PINELOPI (PENNY) KOUJIANOU GOLDBERG, William Nordhaus Professor of Economics and Global Affairs, Yale University. Statement of Purpose: I am honored to stand for President of the American Economic Association. Economics has long contributed powerful tools to understand […]

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]]> AEA is the American Economics Association, and a new president is needed, here is the candidate and likely winner:

PINELOPI (PENNY) KOUJIANOU GOLDBERG, William Nordhaus Professor of Economics and Global Affairs, Yale University.

Statement of Purpose: I am honored to stand for President of the American Economic Association. Economics has long contributed powerful tools to understand human behavior, markets, institutions, and public policy, but the environment in which we conduct research, teach, and engage with society is evolving rapidly. New technologies, especially artificial intelligence, are reshaping research methods, classroom instruction, and the evaluation and dissemination of scholarship. These changes create exciting opportunities, but they also raise difficult questions about the future of peer review in our journals, transparency, incentives, and research and teaching standards more generally. The profession also faces broader challenges: maintaining rigorous, credible, and independent research, supporting young scholars in an increasingly uncertain academic environment, and ensuring that economics remains open to diverse perspectives, methods, and global talent. If elected, I hope to use my research, teaching, policy, and editorial experience to help address these challenges, while promoting the core values of our discipline.

Here is the link.  Hilarious as always that there is only one candidate allowed (which model predicts this as optimal?), but for the first time I have seen a meaningful statement of purpose that I also like.  That said, I would like to see her endorse my core proposal, namely turning over all submissions, referee reports, and revisions (anonymized is fine) to the major AI companies for use as training data.  After all, such an act would further the mission of the AEA, right?

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-aea-presidential-election.html/feed 14 93487 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-confucian-fertility-paradox.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-confucian-fertility-paradox The Confucian fertility paradox https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/963801071/0/marginalrevolution~The-Confucian-fertility-paradox.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-confucian-fertility-paradox.html#comments Tue, 28 Jul 2026 04:56:44 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93488 Total fertility rates in East Asia have fallen to levels without historical precedent, even though the region’s Confucian heritage long placed extraordinary emphasis on family continuity and large families. We argue that this “Confucian Fertility Paradox” dissolves once we separate two strands of the tradition and recognize that modernization affected them very differently. The pro-natal […]

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Total fertility rates in East Asia have fallen to levels without historical precedent, even though the region’s Confucian heritage long placed extraordinary emphasis on family continuity and large families. We argue that this “Confucian Fertility Paradox” dissolves once we separate two strands of the tradition and recognize that modernization affected them very differently. The pro-natal strand, built on lineage continuity, ancestor worship, and reliance on sons for old-age support, was gradually switched off as child mortality fell, incomes rose, women entered the labor force, and state pensions replaced the family as the main source of security in old age. What survived was the second strand: the veneration of education and of status won through examination success, rooted in the imperial examination tradition. Under modern conditions this surviving strand reverses sign with respect to its effect on fertility. Where the historical examination system rewarded having many sons so that one might succeed, the modern single-ranking tournament rewards concentrating resources on one or two intensively educated children, and the quantity/quality tradeoff turns a once pro-natal culture into a powerful engine of low fertility. Drawing on recent empirical evidence from China and Korea, we show how education competition becomes the channel through which traditional values now suppress childbearing. We explain why standard pro-natalist policies, such as removing birth restrictions or offering cash subsidies, accomplish little when the underlying problem is a competitive equilibrium in parental investment, and we argue that policies aimed at the source of the distortion, such as structural reform of educational pathways, hold more promise.

Here is the paper by Hanming Fang and Chang Liu.  Usually I am suspicious of such explanations, as the low birth rates typically apply also to families who do not face such education/career considerations.  Thailand?  Indians in Singapore?  Ethnic minorities in China?  But I pass this along nonetheless, due to the importance of the topic.  Via Glenn Mercer.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-confucian-fertility-paradox.html/feed 29 93488 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/liberal-worlds-james-bryce-and-the-democratic-intellect-2.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=liberal-worlds-james-bryce-and-the-democratic-intellect-2 *Liberal Worlds: James Bryce and the Democratic Intellect* https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/963679469/0/marginalrevolution~Liberal-Worlds-James-Bryce-and-the-Democratic-Intellect.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/liberal-worlds-james-bryce-and-the-democratic-intellect-2.html#comments Mon, 27 Jul 2026 18:53:23 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93480 A very good book, here is one excerpt that bears directly on a conversation I was just having: He [Bryce] regretted the low quality of the Indian Civil Service: they were hard-working and motivated by a desire to promote the welfare of the Indian people, but ‘rather wanting in imagination and sympathy, less inspired by […]

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]]> A very good book, here is one excerpt that bears directly on a conversation I was just having:

He [Bryce] regretted the low quality of the Indian Civil Service: they were hard-working and motivated by a desire to promote the welfare of the Indian people, but ‘rather wanting in imagination and sympathy, less inspired by the extraordinary and unprecedented phenomena of the country than might have been expected.’  He went on: “Since the unhappy so-called Ilbert Bill there has been a marked change in the attitude of Europeans to natives, especially in Bengal; and the natives complain bitterly that the civilians as well as the military & the planters, treat them with arrogance & make them feel their social inferiority as well as political subordination.”  He continued by saying that all he had seen made him certain that he had made the right decision in not pursuing a career in the Indian Civil Service.

The author is H.S. Jones, and I also learned a good deal about Bryce’s work on behalf of Armenia, a topic I had known nothing about.  I am a big fan of Bryce’s The American Commonwealth book as an analysis of democracy, though of course I do not agree with all of the particulars.  Bryce also was an early NIMBY proponent (even then), and played a large role in debates over the humanities, basically defending liberal education.  He served as ambassador to the U.S. as well.  His long (overlong?) Modern Democracies is in my Kindle queue to read.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/liberal-worlds-james-bryce-and-the-democratic-intellect-2.html/feed 4 93480 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/monday-assorted-links-570.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=monday-assorted-links-570 Monday assorted links https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/963644183/0/marginalrevolution~Monday-assorted-links.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/monday-assorted-links-570.html#comments Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:03:12 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93478 1. Cameroonian prison with its own record label. 2. Noah on what will AI do for us exactly. 3. The impact of the sewing machine on women. 4. Will GPTVoice boost labor supply? 5. Smart phones in North Korea. 6. SSI update. 7. “There is still time for interested scholars to apply to our next […]

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]]> 1. Cameroonian prison with its own record label.

2. Noah on what will AI do for us exactly.

3. The impact of the sewing machine on women.

4. Will GPTVoice boost labor supply?

5. Smart phones in North Korea.

6. SSI update.

7. “There is still time for interested scholars to apply to our next Coase Institute Workshop on Institutional Analysis, which will be held in Mexico City, Mexico, from December 6–12, 2026. We would greatly appreciate it if you could remind your students and colleagues to apply before the July 31, 2026 deadline at: https://www.coase.org/workshopapplication.htm.”

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/monday-assorted-links-570.html/feed 62 93478 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/could-our-preoccupation-with-mental-health-be-part-of-the-problem.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=could-our-preoccupation-with-mental-health-be-part-of-the-problem Could our preoccupation with mental health be part of the problem? https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/963528410/0/marginalrevolution~Could-our-preoccupation-with-mental-health-be-part-of-the-problem.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/could-our-preoccupation-with-mental-health-be-part-of-the-problem.html#comments Mon, 27 Jul 2026 07:38:40 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93479 Could our preoccupation with mental health be part of the problem? In some ways, encouraging people to think and talk more about their mental health is a good thing. There is now less stigma around mental illness, and more people who can benefit from professional help are getting it. But there is also reason to […]

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Could our preoccupation with mental health be part of the problem?

In some ways, encouraging people to think and talk more about their mental health is a good thing. There is now less stigma around mental illness, and more people who can benefit from professional help are getting it. But there is also reason to believe that efforts to bring attention to mental health struggles are inadvertently making us more vulnerable to psychological distress.

Start with our expanding conception of mental illness. The more fixated we are on mental health, the more sensitive we become to anything that might qualify as a symptom and the more we use clinical language to describe normal emotional experiences like grief, burnout and loneliness. This broadening of what we think counts as a disorder — known as concept creep — encourages us to pathologize ordinary life and see ourselves as mentally unhealthy.

Here is more from Clay Routledge at the NYT.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/could-our-preoccupation-with-mental-health-be-part-of-the-problem.html/feed 67 93479 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-decline-in-the-transmission-of-scientific-ideas.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-decline-in-the-transmission-of-scientific-ideas The Decline in the Transmission of Scientific Ideas https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/963481163/0/marginalrevolution~The-Decline-in-the-Transmission-of-Scientific-Ideas.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-decline-in-the-transmission-of-scientific-ideas.html#comments Mon, 27 Jul 2026 04:18:41 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93482 We document that the diffusion of new scientific ideas beyond their field of origin has declined substantially over the past four decades. This contraction is closely linked to increasing specialization in scientific language: research that employs more technical terminology tends to be adopted less broadly. We develop a theory of scientific discovery in which the […]

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We document that the diffusion of new scientific ideas beyond their field of origin has declined substantially over the past four decades. This contraction is closely linked to increasing specialization in scientific language: research that employs more technical terminology tends to be adopted less broadly. We develop a theory of scientific discovery in which the diffusion of new ideas depends on the degree to which potential adopters can understand and process them. When introducing their discoveries, scientists face a tradeoff between technical communication targeted at their immediate peers and more accessible language meant to reach broader audiences. As knowledge accumulates and research at the frontier builds on deeper layers of prior work, this tradeoff increasingly favors specialized language, limiting diffusion. Policy interventions that align scientists’ incentives can broaden adoption and increase the social value of scientific research.

That is from a new NBER conference paper by Enrico Berkes and Ruben Gaetani.

Image

Via this excellent thread by Juan Mateos Garcia.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-decline-in-the-transmission-of-scientific-ideas.html/feed 25 93482 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/in-relative-terms-maybe-children-do-not-cost-more-than-before.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=in-relative-terms-maybe-children-do-not-cost-more-than-before In relative terms, maybe children do not cost more than before? https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/963405392/0/marginalrevolution~In-relative-terms-maybe-children-do-not-cost-more-than-before.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/in-relative-terms-maybe-children-do-not-cost-more-than-before.html#comments Sun, 26 Jul 2026 23:16:14 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93484 Despite rapid inflation in childcare and tuition prices, the goods-and-services CCI closely tracks adult prices, as these increases are offset by children’s lower exposure to shelter and by slower price growth elsewhere in the child basket. Households devote substantially more real resources to children than they did in 1990, but this increase parallels the growth […]

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Despite rapid inflation in childcare and tuition prices, the goods-and-services CCI closely tracks adult prices, as these increases are offset by children’s lower exposure to shelter and by slower price growth elsewhere in the child basket. Households devote substantially more real resources to children than they did in 1990, but this increase parallels the growth of real adult consumption rather than reflecting a child-specific rise in prices. A similar offsetting pattern appears for parental time: the rising value of women’s time is largely counterbalanced by declining motherhood penalties in earnings and work hours, so forgone market work adds little to relative cost growth. The main departure from this stability comes from the growing amount of leisure displaced by childcare; valuing that time raises the CCI, although the magnitude depends on the shadow value assigned to leisure.

A surprising and important result, from a new paper by Christina Patterson and Heather Sarsons.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/in-relative-terms-maybe-children-do-not-cost-more-than-before.html/feed 68 93484 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/further-progress-in-south-america.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=further-progress-in-south-america Further progress in South America https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/963339656/0/marginalrevolution~Further-progress-in-South-America.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/further-progress-in-south-america.html#comments Sun, 26 Jul 2026 19:10:05 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93477 The share of people who are hungry has been decreasing faster in South America than anywhere else in the world. It is down by one-third since 2020, according to a report published on July 21st by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Just 3.5% of people in the region consume insufficient calories, the lowest […]

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The share of people who are hungry has been decreasing faster in South America than anywhere else in the world. It is down by one-third since 2020, according to a report published on July 21st by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Just 3.5% of people in the region consume insufficient calories, the lowest level recorded. Eliminating hunger by 2030 is one of the UN’s “sustainable development” goals. “If there is a region in the world that can potentially achieve that, it’s South America,” says Máximo Torero, the FAO’s chief economist.

Lula, as the president is commonly known, made food security a priority when he returned to office in 2023. By 2025 Brazil had made it off the UN’s Hunger Map, which tracks countries where more than 2.5% of the population suffers from chronic hunger. Chile and oil-rich Guyana were also removed. Argentina is almost there at under 3%. Colombia and Paraguay are approaching at 4%, while Peru and crisis-battered Venezuela are making inroads near 5%. Even Ecuador and Bolivia have improved a tad, to 11% and 20% respectively. Only Suriname is moving in the wrong direction.

This decline rests on sturdier foundations. The first is macroeconomic stability. South America’s central banks are far more independent and adept at managing inflation than they were two decades ago.

Here is more from The Economist.  If you are interested in further economic development, South America (plus Mexico and Panama and the DR) is really the place to look.  What is your other choice?  (Vietnam?)  Most of these countries will continue to grow, albeit at a modest pace.  Sooner or later they will get there.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/further-progress-in-south-america.html/feed 9 93477 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/sunday-assorted-links-577.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=sunday-assorted-links-577 Sunday assorted links https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/963286937/0/marginalrevolution~Sunday-assorted-links.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/sunday-assorted-links-577.html#comments Sun, 26 Jul 2026 15:51:08 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93473 1. Deirdre economics reading list. 2. The 1878 entrance exam for the British India civil service. 3. How good is Opus 5 on biology? 4. “A linguistic “golden age” flourished between 1,000 to 3,000 years ago when tens of thousands of languages were spoken throughout the world, according to a new study coauthored by Yale […]

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]]> 1. Deirdre economics reading list.

2. The 1878 entrance exam for the British India civil service.

3. How good is Opus 5 on biology?

4. “A linguistic “golden age” flourished between 1,000 to 3,000 years ago when tens of thousands of languages were spoken throughout the world, according to a new study coauthored by Yale linguist Claire Bowern that traces trajectories in global language diversity over the past 12,000 years.” Link here.

5. Feline decentralized Italian mob fire attacks.

6. First Neuromancer trailer released.

7. Good Maureen Dowd review, the de-eroticized Homer (NYT).  Excellent piece, many of you underrate her.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/sunday-assorted-links-577.html/feed 54 93473 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/oriental-rugs-atlas-and-quiz.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=oriental-rugs-atlas-and-quiz The Rug Belt Atlas and Quiz https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/963210614/0/marginalrevolution~The-Rug-Belt-Atlas-and-Quiz.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/oriental-rugs-atlas-and-quiz.html#comments Sun, 26 Jul 2026 11:18:30 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93475 I have an amateur interest in Oriental rugs but my eye is untrained. Thus, for fun and learning I created with Fable a Rug Atlas and quiz. The Rug Belt Atlas Check it out. Constructive comments welcome. P.S. The site is in fact safe! Working on getting it recognized.

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]]> I have an amateur interest in Oriental rugs but my eye is untrained. Thus, for fun and learning I created with Fable a Rug Atlas and quiz.

The Rug Belt Atlas

Check it out. Constructive comments welcome.

P.S. The site is in fact safe! Working on getting it recognized.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/oriental-rugs-atlas-and-quiz.html/feed 24 93475 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-demand-for-human-enhancement-technologies.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-demand-for-human-enhancement-technologies The demand for human enhancement technologies https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/963192488/0/marginalrevolution~The-demand-for-human-enhancement-technologies.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-demand-for-human-enhancement-technologies.html#comments Sun, 26 Jul 2026 07:12:48 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93474 When a new technology promises large private benefits but may impose social costs that markets do not price, demand need not reveal how citizens want it governed. We examine this using a nationally representative U.S. survey experiment (N=5,556) on human enhancement technologies (HET). The experiment randomizes benefit domain, mechanism, heritability, purpose, and risk across vignettes; […]

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When a new technology promises large private benefits but may impose social costs that markets do not price, demand need not reveal how citizens want it governed. We examine this using a nationally representative U.S. survey experiment (N=5,556) on human enhancement technologies (HET). The experiment randomizes benefit domain, mechanism, heritability, purpose, and risk across vignettes; for each respondent’s assigned vignette, we elicit stated adoption, preferred regulation, and ethical and societal concerns. Overall, about 53% would adopt. Framing the technology as enhancing rather than restorative lowers adoption by about five percentage points, as much as a severe side-effect profile. About 28% would not adopt at any benefit. This refusal is driven overwhelmingly by the enhancing framing rather than by risk, consistent with a non-compensatory constraint for a substantial subgroup. Most who would adopt still favor strict regulation, and most who would never adopt do not wish to forbid others from doing so. Productivity enhancement generates the most ethical concern of any attribute but attracts the least regulation, and respondents favor subsidizing rather than taxing its adoption, consistent with a concern about access rather than safety. Private demand is therefore an unreliable guide to the governance citizens want, and the divergence we document provides a basis for regulators seeking to align the direction of technical change with societal values and priorities.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Giovanni Immordino, Mario Macis, Immacolata Marino & Fabrizio Panebianco.  And I will repeat this segment: “Productivity enhancement generates the most ethical concern of any attribute…”  Do note of course that the last sentence of the authors is completely unwarranted, and is a classic example of underidentified political bias in academic reasoning.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-demand-for-human-enhancement-technologies.html/feed 22 93474 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-common-sense-of-fareed-zakaria.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-common-sense-of-fareed-zakaria The common sense of Fareed Zakaria https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/963183701/0/marginalrevolution~The-common-sense-of-Fareed-Zakaria.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-common-sense-of-fareed-zakaria.html#comments Sun, 26 Jul 2026 04:56:48 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93471 This is one of the best Op-Eds you will read this year, though it deliberately deemphasizes the personal (no one is attacked) in a manner that will result in less attention.  Better to write the truth!  Excerpt: Why has this [voter discontent} happened? Some of it is economic. Expensive housing, stagnant incomes and widening inequality have fueled public […]

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]]> This is one of the best Op-Eds you will read this year, though it deliberately deemphasizes the personal (no one is attacked) in a manner that will result in less attention.  Better to write the truth!  Excerpt:

Why has this [voter discontent} happened? Some of it is economic. Expensive housing, stagnant incomes and widening inequality have fueled public anger. But economics is only part of the story. America has enjoyed stronger growth than most other advanced economies. France under President Emmanuel Macron has lowered unemployment, and it has attracted more foreign investment projects than any country in Europe for seven straight years, according to an Ernst & Young analysis. South Korea is an economic success story. Japan was experiencing a comeback. Yet democratic governments almost everywhere are unpopular.

The larger explanation is that we are living through one of history’s great technological revolutions. And these transformations always produce deep anxiety and fear.

The last technological transformation on this scale came between roughly 1880 and 1920. Electricity, the telephone, railroads, the automobile and movies overturned entire industries and ways of life. Millions left farms for cities. Global trade disrupted local economies. New fortunes appeared overnight, while old occupations disappeared. In this turmoil, frustration and anger found political pathways. The left turned to communism, the right to fascism. What followed were new mass movements, cultural upheavals and world war.

Do read the whole thing.  You can be a victim of these processes, or keep your wits about you.  The choice is yours.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-common-sense-of-fareed-zakaria.html/feed 115 93471 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/odysseus-notes.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=odysseus-notes Odysseus notes https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/963073505/0/marginalrevolution~Odysseus-notes.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/odysseus-notes.html#comments Sat, 25 Jul 2026 18:34:27 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93470 The subsection of the Georgi Gospodinov novel runs like this: The Shortest Novel About Odysseus After His Return Home One night, now old and flabby and starting to forget, he leaves his home secretly. He’s sick of everything, so he heads back one last time to see the places, women, and wonders he had once […]

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]]> The subsection of the Georgi Gospodinov novel runs like this:

The Shortest Novel About Odysseus After His Return Home

One night, now old and flabby and starting to forget, he leaves his home secretly. He’s sick of everything, so he heads back one last time to see the places, women, and wonders he had once encountered. To go back again into his draimed memory to see how it had been and who he had been. Because thanks to the bitter irony of old age, he has begun to transform into the Nobody, the name he had once cleverly used when introducing himself to the Cyclops.

Telemachus finds him in the evening, collapsed by the boat, only a hundred yards from home, with no idea what he is doing there and where he had been heading.

They take him back to a house with some woman he no longer remembers.

The novel is Time Shelter, and the premise is that refuges are built for people with Alzheimer’s, reflecting life from past decades, for instance the 1960s.  But then people from the present start wanting to live in them.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/odysseus-notes.html/feed 13 93470 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/saturday-assorted-links-571.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=saturday-assorted-links-571 Saturday assorted links https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/963043085/0/marginalrevolution~Saturday-assorted-links.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/saturday-assorted-links-571.html#comments Sat, 25 Jul 2026 16:38:10 +0000 https://marginalrevolution.com/?p=93465 1. The 1991 Project’s oral history collection (led by Shreyas Narla and Shruti) with ~50 hours of interviews with policy reformers and witnesses to India’s market  liberalization, is now available. 2. Mini Cities. 3. The new Claude, on Mondrian. 4. More on cybersecurity and cyberdefense.  And Simon Willison on The Incident.  And early AI fears were not about LLMs, […]

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]]> 1. The 1991 Project’s oral history collection (led by Shreyas Narla and Shruti) with ~50 hours of interviews with policy reformers and witnesses to India’s market  liberalization, is now available.

2. Mini Cities.

3. The new Claude, on Mondrian.

4. More on cybersecurity and cyberdefense.  And Simon Willison on The Incident.  And early AI fears were not about LLMs, and that makes a big difference.

5. Critique of the new 76ers.

6. Anthropic economic research futures allocating $200 million to RCTs.

7. Interview with Emily Wilson.  Excellent piece, many of you underrate her.

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]]> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/saturday-assorted-links-571.html/feed 42 93465