An ability to mimic the shrieks of langur monkeys may not seem like a bankable skill, but for some Indians it has become a job, if not a calling.

These vocal professionals specialise in pest control and are being employed to keep out unwanted primates as Delhi prepares to host the badminton world championships.

The sound of the langur is the only effective deterrent to the smaller rhesus macaques that roam around Delhi in large numbers, stealing food and causing havoc.

Here is more from the Times of London.

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• In reply to Nick. Relative prices. by Dismalist
• Wildlife management will be one of the great uses of AI and ... by Etalon d’Silomar
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• I still have dreams about the roar of howler monkeys in the ... by RAD
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2. Saloni on the future of medicine.  “Every disease is a policy failure.”

3. John List on generalizability, very important.  And his comments here.

4. China is now regulating AI companions.

5. Fewer phones, more fighting?

The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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• In reply to RRR. It's kind of a meaningless phrase. We can ... by Dan S.
• In reply to TMC. This may be a moment to re-watch (YouTube) ... by RAD
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• are they really classifying 'yelling' as 'fights'? that ... by fred
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Here is the source.

The post USA fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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• In reply to abitoftruth. The median (not average) hourly wage ... by anonprof
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Daron Acemoglu returns for his second appearance with a new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, which Tyler reads as an attempt to redefine and revitalize liberalism for our times. Where Daron’s first visit was about how states and societies contend for the narrow corridor in which liberty survives, this one asks what liberals themselves got wrong, and the answer implicates the educated elite—that is to say, you.

Tyler and Daron discuss what’s wrong with social contract theories and Rousseau’s general will, whether Acemoglu is more objectivist than Rorty, why he blames left liberalism’s own establishment power for its collapse, what standard is left once you refuse to have a book of higher values, nondomination versus noninterference, who counts as working class, why automation alone will not lead to widespread prosperity, how he can call himself a free speech absolutist while wanting to regulate social media, why he worries we’ve given up on educating Americans, whether teachers’ unions need to be reconstituted, what the life expectancy for an educated twenty year old is today, whether open-source models undercut the centralization worry, what pro-worker AI actually means, why the fertility crisis leaves him strangely close to a real business cycle position, whether AI will raise his own already prodigious paper output, why Armenia has disappointed economically, what he wants to learn next, and more.

For an excerpt, let us start from near the beginning:

COWEN: Richard Rorty had a consensus-based defense of liberal democracy. Is your view the same as his, or are there some metrics along which it’s different? Are you more objectivist in some way?

ACEMOGLU: I wouldn’t say it’s more objectivist. I think my commitment in my mind has always been that it’s impossible for us at any point in time not just to know what’s really the absolute truth, but also to have a clear map of what is the right stance. In the same way that I think many people would agree science makes gradual and sometimes uncertain progress toward some better understanding, I think morally, philosophically, we also have to have gradual uncertain evolution toward what we agree on. Objectivism, in some sense, is too strict.

COWEN: Say we’re not evolving toward greater agreement.

ACEMOGLU: No, sometimes we go back.

COWEN: Today, it seems we’re not evolving toward greater agreement, right?

ACEMOGLU: We’re not. Absolutely not. I think you can blame that on reactions to globalization, reactions to technology, better authoritarian challenges. This is the most uncomfortable part because I see myself firmly within the left liberal tradition. I think it’s partly because of the failure of left liberalism. In some sense, if you think of why did Rome fail or collapse, we can tell a story about the barbarians were really too strong. No, really, Rome collapsed because internally it had problems that opened up weaknesses against outside invaders as well as some inside problems.

It’s the same with left liberalism. I think it became quite influential throughout much of the Western world and some of the emerging economies as well over the last 70, 80 years. It did not use that establishment power just in the right way, creating its own weaknesses that made it much more vulnerable to outside attacks. That’s why I think we are now going back because we are at an interregnum period in which ideas are battling again. In some sense, it’s just like the early 19th century where you had all these very different ideas and they were trying to get a toehold in the imagination of people. I think we are going through a period like that, except that there are really many more confusing ideas out there.

COWEN: Say when we’re not evolving toward greater consensus, what’s the external standard you introduce to judge which are the correct ideas and which not? Like Rorty, you need one, though.

ACEMOGLU: I don’t have one.

COWEN: Then why believe in what you believe?

ACEMOGLU: Okay. I think what I believe is, first of all, not as an external standard—I don’t know whether external standard or internal standard is the right word—but that we have to defend some degree of individual freedom because everything starts from that, both in terms of our meaningful lives, but also any kind of improvement in the human condition requires individual initiative, and that individual initiative is impossible without some amount of freedom, a meaningful freedom, not just saying, “Okay, you have the freedom to pray, but you cannot express that idea with others or you cannot turn it into action.” Some meaningful freedom.

That is the only starting point that we need to have. Around that, we need to build things with some sort of consensus within society. That’s what I think liberalism has to recognize, that you have to enshrine those rights, but then give enough elbow room to people to form their own community-level agreements.

COWEN: You present some different values in the book. One is nondomination. Another is noninterference. There’s others. When they clash, what’s the metric you introduce to decide how to resolve that clash?  

ACEMOGLU: I wish I had a perfect answer for that. I don’t.

COWEN: You have an imperfect answer.

ACEMOGLU: I have an imperfect answer. I think noninterference by itself isn’t enough because, at least as read or as interpreted by some philosophers and economists, it is just about being left alone from higher authority or typically state-level authority, although it could be some other authorities as well. We do also need opportunities and some way of actualizing our intentions and our freedom. That’s what the idea of nondomination, which goes back to Roman Republican times, recognizes.

It is not, in my mind, an extremely interventionist philosophy. It doesn’t say the state knows it best or that the state should always have an opportunity to override individual or group-level decisions. It does emphasize that providing people some amount of protection against those who have much greater physical or other power relative to them is something that cannot be done at the individual level. It has to have a community-level component.

COWEN: That’s a good answer, but is it an answer to the question? If we’re Sidgwick, we might say, when values clash, we look to utility, or maybe it’d be cost-benefit analysis to decide which gets priority. You’re not willing to say that, so why not? What’s wrong with that answer?

Very much interesting throughout.

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• In reply to TMC. Trumpism is communism. The far lefty Dems ... by Jake
• In reply to mkt42. Perhaps, but that is not new either. ... by Slocum
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I feel like this is almost deliberately missing the point. My median expectation is that AI boosts the economy enormously, so shorting things would be a terrible idea. But non-trivial tail risk is that it kills everyone. So shorting things would be pointless.

That is from Tom Chivers.  It is easy enough to say buy seriously out of the money puts, and be long with the rest of your portfolio.  But few (if any) of the worriers are doing that.  I should note also that many (most? almost all?) of the bad scenarios have intermediate points of great worry and catastrophe where you can cash in on your puts well before everyone dies.  No leverage required, just spend 5k or 10k a year on this, and if you are wrong consider it a mistaken insurance policy.  If you do not know much about finance, the AGI will guide you in this endeavor.

Or some are saying “Markets are bad at pricing long-term idiosyncratic risk.”  If so, all the more reason to spend on those puts.

You will find many, many mistakes in financial theory when people try to rebut the presumption that, given their views, they should in some way or another be short the market.  And do not just tell me which long positions you hold, those are easy bets, as you can be totally wrong and the long positions still will offer normal, risk-adjusted rates of return.  It is your shorts, whether explicit or implicit, that reveal your true soul.  You may recall that Victor Niederhoffer thought an investor should never go net short on an asset.  I am reluctant to use the word “never,” but my own view is not so different.

Is it really so hard to say (and do): “Thank you, Tyler, I just went out and bought those puts!”?

Apparently so.  And perhaps that is because, deep down, your own intuitions realize that, while some significant costs from AI will appear, it really won’t be that bad after all.

Words to live by.

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• In reply to Tom T.. What does your mood affiliation have to ... by rsm
• In reply to Sure. Can you forgive me for asking if you just ... by rsm
• In reply to Hyperborealis. Do does your opinion count, if ... by rsm
• In reply to J.. You are not wrong in what you say, but I ... by Hyperborealis
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• Act like it is science
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• Immigrant Earnings Assimilation, 1981–2021

 

2. Denmark fact of the day: “…half of Denmark’s growth has been due to essentially one company”

3. “Foreign travel now makes up 1.4% of the US consumer spending budget. By contrast, imported Chinese goods make up about 3% of US domestic expenditures.”

4. Noah is right.

5. “For decades, men have been increasing their share of housework and child care. But the number of babies just keeps falling.”

6. Christopher Phelan confirmed as new CEA chair.

The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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• In reply to JFA. I don't think the difference in time spent ... by JFA
• In reply to Tom Meadowcroft. We're just in a period of ... by Anon
• In reply to JFA. I don't think the difference in household ... by JFA
• In reply to Harun. I believe you meant that in jest, but I ... by Cecil Rokestam-Bourke
• In reply to steve. If you look at husbands and wives, both ... by Crowstep
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• If aesthetics begin with one's personal appearance and attire, ... by rayward
• In reply to Jonathan Doensky. Where does that leave ... by rayward
• “Explicitly allowing aesthetic considerations to carry weight ... by Jonathan Doensky

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Measuring politically sensitive attitudes in authoritarian settings is difficult because expressions of political support may reflect repression and social pressure as much as genuine belief. We propose a complementary approach: using responses to questions that are not themselves politically sensitive to provide indirect evidence about politically sensitive attitudes. Using subjective well-being (SWB), we ask whether within-person changes in life satisfaction, after accounting for changes in material and personal circumstances, can provide evidence of incorporation into a wartime national project. Drawing on more than a decade of panel data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (2013–2024), we find that life satisfaction rises significantly following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Gains are initially larger among ethnic Russians and smaller in Moscow and St. Petersburg, consistently larger in military-industrial regions, and sharply lower among those nearest the front. This theoretically patterned heterogeneity is difficult to reconcile with generalized social-desirability bias and is consistent with differentiated wartime incorporation. By 2024, rising non-response and attenuating subgroup differences suggest that the informational value of SWB may deteriorate over time.

That is from recent research by Sinikka Parviainen and William Pyle.  Via Pippa Norris.

The post What makes people happy? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

Comments

• Grandkids and living close to work. by Dave Smith
• In reply to Kaz Stanczak. You'd be mistaken, though. Most ... by Marian Kechlibar
• “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” – The Beatles (by John Lennon) by Thanatos Savehn
• In reply to rayward. The entire situation looks weird to me. ... by Marian Kechlibar
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In this paper, we characterize trends in the earnings assimilation of immigrant workers from 1981 to 2021. We use administrative longitudinal data that contain the earnings of workers beginning in their first year of residence in the United States and in each year thereafter, allowing us to identify immigrants who eventually leave the United States (referred to here as return migrants). We use those data to produce the first examination of trends in earnings assimilation over a 41-year period and to estimate earnings assimilation separately for return migrants versus those who stay in the United States. We document several new facts about immigrants who arrived between 1981 to 2010. First, roughly one-fifth to one-third of immigrants return migrate from the United States within 10 years after arrival. Second, return migrants have entry earnings similar to those of permanent migrants but experience slower rates of earnings growth. Third, earnings assimilation occurs relatively quickly for cohorts arriving since the mid-1990s: The earnings of permanent immigrants converge, or come close to converging, with those of native-born people within 10 years after arrival. Migrants from earlier arrival cohorts experience significant earnings growth but generally do not converge to that of the native born. We discuss how changes in the labor market quality of immigrant cohorts (measured by their relative earnings upon entry) and selective return migration play an important role in determining whether repeated cross-sectional data over- or underestimate earnings assimilation.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Randall Akee, Jimmy Chin & Daniel L. Crown.  I know full well the common distinction between high-skilled and low-skilled immigrants, and “desirable” vs. “undesirable” immigrants, the latter distinction being somewhat more subjective.  One thing we are learning during this administration is that it is very difficult to just turn off the tap on “the immigrants you do not want.”  An open borders policy untenable, but immigration policy should be fairly liberal more generally.  It is good for us too.

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• In reply to TylerW. > The paper attempts to use science and ... by Alamo
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On this topic, I am seeing so many mistakes in financial economics across social media, but I will not go through them all.  It suffices to note that very smart people have their minds turn to mush when this topic comes up, especially the “sell short” side of the matter.

There is also the “beware isolated demands for rigor” response.  I should not have to demand anything.  If you are pretty worried about AI, you should be dying (yes pun intended) to provide that rigor, whether or not it is provided elsewhere.

How about a new policy?: “All AI safety expressions of despair, grief, panic, anger, or insinuations thereof, with or without gifs, shall be accompanied by an estimated percentage of gdp footnote.”  Would inject some real sanity into the discussion and drain out some of the all too rampant emotions.

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2. Long Mark Zuckerberg/Meta piece on the future of AI.

3. “According to Bloomberg Intelligence, companies in the S&P 500 are expected to post an average +29% jump in quarterly earnings for Q2 compared to the previous year.”

4. Conor Sen Substack on viewing the economy through a housing lens.

5. Southwood on Samuel Hughes on architecture.

The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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• In reply to Ricky. Definitely not fabricated. McKinsey I know ... by Jason
• In reply to Sure. @Sure, I believe I speak for most MR ... by Karl Chungus
• On #1: I think when it comes down to it, a large fraction of ... by JSK
• 1. The statistic is misleading. The link states how only 29% of ... by Sh
• In reply to Sidd. Baby Fever would like a word. by anon
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NME: Harry Potter fans have succeeded in moving a construction project that would have originally gone through the “grave” of the character Dobby.

The 125-mile Greenlink power connector, which costs £430million, is intended to link power between the UK’s National Grid and Ireland, running between County Wexford and Freshwater West in Pembrokeshire.

However, the latter site is known to Potter fans as the site of house elf Dobby’s grave in the film Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, and contains a pile of stones with the words “here lies Dobby” that many flock to…

All I can say is that Voldemort would never have put up with this shit.

The post Impedimenta Developerum! appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Claude and I planted 100 known errors into 10 open-access psychology papers and then ran them through frontier models and two commercial AI review tools. In brief:

• The best single system caught 71 of 100 errors, while the worst caught 30.
• Pooling every system’s output caught 93 of 100. Models are only partly correlated in the errors they find, making ensembling a big lever for finding issues in papers. Check your papers against multiple models!
• Seven errors could not be caught by any system. All were omissions — information deleted from a paper rather than mistakes inserted into it.
• Refine.ink contributes more unique catches than any other single system, though it’s expensive.
• I didn’t measure false positives and I don’t know how this error distribution compares to the distribution of errors in real papers.
• I’ve made the papers, errors, model outputs, and the full experiment log public. I hope people can build on this work to create a comprehensive eval benchmark across disciplines.

That is from Paul Litvak, here is more.  Note that is not even using the very latest generation of models.

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• Not measuring FP's is absurd. If the model knew this, it could ... by Roger Zimmerman
• In reply to Wayfaring Stranger. AI notices a lot of things ... by Kaz Stanczak
• In reply to Student. ” the relevant comparison is…AI peer ... by Wayfaring Stranger
• In reply to Kaz Stanczak. 🙂 True but I'm sure it's doing ... by Wayfaring Stranger
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We trace the family origins of Members of Congress (MC) born between 1830 and 1950, linking each MC, their parents, and their brothers to the complete-count censuses. Future MCs have always been economic outliers. By 1940, close to 60 percent of MCs aged 18–40 held a college degree, against under 5 percent of comparable young men outside Congress. In the 19th-century censuses, MCs as adults held roughly three times the wealth of demographically matched controls. They also come from economically elite families: their fathers earn more, attain more education, and hold more wealth. The brothers of future MCs sit between the population and the MCs themselves. Across the socioeconomic measures we compare, we calculate that roughly half of an MC’s adult premium is shared with his brother and the other half is his own. Even as the American economy and political system have changed, the family background gap has widened over the last century and a half. Wealth, household servants, and four separate occupation-based scores all show the gap holding or growing across cohorts. We study four Progressive-Era reforms in a triple-difference design—women’s suffrage, the secret ballot, direct primaries, and the direct election of senators—and none produce detectable shifts in who reaches Congress. Our results document a Congress drawn from the most fortunate families in American society in every cohort we observe.

That is from a new NBER working paper by James J. Feigenbaum, Andrew B. Hall, Daniel M. Thompson & Jesse Yoder.

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I am automating investigative journalism at http://Effort.News

We’re breaking five stories today based on verifiable financial data which everyone missed for years.

Here is the entire thread, which also describes the five stories.

The post Brian Chau at work appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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• In reply to PatH. Libertarians are just Republicans. What ... by Andao
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• “∙ Catholic/mainline Protestant refugee contractors framed ... by Harun
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