Public goods theory tells us that the National Science Foundation should support activities that are especially hard to support through traditional university, philanthropic, and private-sector sources. This insight suggests a simple test: to the extent that the NSF allocates funds to genuine public goods as opposed to subsidies on the margin, we ought to see a large difference in the kinds of projects the NSF supports compared to what the “market” sector supports. But what stands out from lists of prominent NSF grants (like the one provided by Moffitt in this symposium) is how similar they look to lists of “good” research produced by today’s status quo. If we take public goods theory seriously, what areas of economics should be supported?

We suggest replication studies and support for producing public datasets. Which brings me to Scholar Data, a neat new project that won NIH’s competition to create a data-sharing index. Scholar data creates an S-Index, like an H-Index for papers, but instead the S-Index measures a dataset’s ease of access, citations and other mentions. The point is to create a metric to reward the creation of a public good:

Researchers invest years collecting and sharing datasets that underpin reproducibility, transparency, and discovery across every field. Without shared data, findings can’t be verified, built upon, or trusted. And yet, the metrics that define academic careers, such as citations, h-index, and impact factor, only count publications. Data sharing goes unrecognized and unrewarded.

This creates a broken incentive: researchers are expected to share data, but get no credit for doing so. The result is that data sharing is treated as a chore rather than a contribution.

Scholar Data and the S-index are aimed at fixing this. By measuring how impactful your datasets are, the S-index gives data sharing the same visibility and recognition as publishing, turning it from an obligation into a career asset.

Bravo! Your dataset may already be catalogued. You can get credit at ScholarData.

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Comments

• In reply to Steven. The problem is that a significant ... by Wayfaring Stranger
• In reply to Steven. Datasets are practical. The S-Index is a ... by RAD
• I know it is pedantic but that first sentence is rough. by JP
• Correction: “Scholar data creates an S-Index D-Index (dataset ... by RAD
• In reply to Steven. Spend the public's money for research ... by rayward
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Costco sold 157.4mn rotisserie chickens worldwide last year, almost double the number of a decade ago.  “It’s $4.99 and for Costco members, that’s one fantastic deal. I don’t think you can produce it for that,” said Walt Shafer, who oversaw the construction and management of the Nebraska site before he retired from Costco this year.

Roasted in ovens in the rear of the retail giant’s hundreds of cavernous stores, the birds have cost only $4.99 since 2009 even as the US retail price of chicken almost doubled. The product has become a textbook “loss leader”, buttressing the loyalty of Costco customers who pay membership fees for the right to shop there…

Rotisserie accounts for only a portion of the chicken processed in Nebraska. The plant also cuts breasts, thighs and other cuts delivered in six-pouch “saddle packs” to stores. Raw breast meat, for example, sells for $2.99 a pound, helping make up for losses on rotisserie.

Here is more from Gregory Meyer at the FT.  Via Mike Rosenwald.

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European and American capitalism were different.  The violence of human clashes in America took place on the surface, in the open.  The violence in Europe became formalized, coalesced with class divions hallowed by centuries; it was interiorized, ingrained, or baked in, if one may use such an expression.  American capitalism was founded on daring, resourcefulness, largesse, waste; European capitalism was founded on one powerful passion — miserliness.  These patterns, which still endure, explain why America succeeded in creating a vast, new sector of the economy adapted to needs that become increasingly evident the closer we come to the twenty-first century: the sector of the universities, research institutes, laboratories, with billions of dollars invested in them.  Western Europe, where education always has been the preserve of a narrow elite, failed to produce anything like it.  The prodigality of private capital in America made the beginnings possible; money from taxes joined in at the next stage.  Miserliness with capital in Europe effectively prevented the laying of foundations for this new sector, and it is doubtful whether the government treasuries will ever be able to over come ever-widening gap.

That is from Czeslaw Milosz’s Visions from San Francisco Bay.

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• *Visions from San Francisco Bay* Publication dateJuly 1, 1983 ... by sumadartson
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The centerpiece is Tysons Corner Center, today the eighth largest mall in the country, and one of the largest sub-city-sized markets for office space. It is half-owned by the Alaska Permanent Fund, which is the state-owned corporation that invests oil revenue on behalf of Alaska’s citizens, and half-owned by Macerich, a giant REIT, which is in turn owned by hundreds of large institutional investors and many individuals.

This very interesting essay by Joseph Lawler argues that liquid real estate markets, and distanced ownership, militate against beauty.

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• The piece seems to argue that various regulations are the real ... by Bobster, The
• In reply to Wayfaring Stranger. ok, Boomers! by ShatGPT
• An excess of dwellings and edifices are dominated by the rigid ... by Jumfrey Tuckins, President of Texas
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2. The Monterrey spirit.

3. Is Aaron Renn the biggest superinfluencer on the New Right?

4. Two Dan Sullivans on the Alaska Senate ballot, let us see how the voters do (NYT).

5. Virginia Postrel on our Anthropic visit and discussions.  Good post.

The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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A bet on near-term explosive AI-driven growth: whether U.S. real GDP per capita will grow by at least 15% within a single year (measured relative to prior peak) by the end of 2033. Agreed on X, 15–16 August 2026. This document summarizes the agreed terms.
1. Parties and stakes
Fast-growth side (wins if the growth condition in Section 2 is met):
● William MacAskill https://www.williammacaskill.com/ — $10,000
● Samuel Albanie https://samuelalbanie.com/ — $25,000
● Tom Cohen https://x.com/tomcohen — $25,000
● Total: $60,000
No-fast-growth side (wins otherwise):
● Benjamin Moll http://benjaminmoll.com/ — $40,000
● Andrew Ho https://andrewho.xyz/ — $200,000
● Total: $240,000

Odds: 4:1 — every $1 staked by the fast-growth side is matched by $4 from the no-fast-growth
side. Implied probability of the fast-growth scenario: 20%.

I’m known for quipping that a bet is a tax on bullshit but I don’t think either side is BSing. We have a genuine and important disagreement. I’d side with Moll, for what it is worth.

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• In reply to bb. I don't see anything even close to 15 percent ... by Mark Bahner
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We talked about:

—The origin story of the New Aesthetics grants — and why he and Tyler Cowen disagree on almost everything aesthetic (1:00)

—Why culture is “stuck”: a 1926 Bauhaus building could pass for last year’s (2:30)

—Modernism’s explicit, stated mission to tear down beauty — “they weren’t hiding it” (3:30) —Solzhenitsyn: you can fake goodness and truth, but beauty “bears within it its own verification” (6:30)

—Is beauty objective? Why everyone visits Toledo, Spain and no one visits Toledo, Ohio (7:30)

—Detroit was rich for ~25 years and built the DIA. Silicon Valley’s been rich for 50. “We could do the Silicon Valley art tour in a coffee break” (14:30)

—Was Y Combinator secretly modeled on the art atelier? (18:30)

—The highest-leverage point for aesthetic renewal used to be churches. What is it now? (27:00)

—The sacred as an “endangered species”

— and Patrick’s alternative theory of WTF happened in 1971: we lost the sacred, so we can’t have nice things (28:30)

—I asked him about Vatican II and technological stagnation. He (wisely?) passed. I didn’t. (34:30)

—”Can anyone name a work of art made with AI?” Silence. (37:30)

—Why Germany is preeminent in music, literature, and philosophy — and its food is so bad. (A demand-side problem.) (41:30)

—”Biology is so ugly, man.” Physics is beautiful; biology is a tower of hacks (43:30)

—The “anti-beauty conspiracy” of the last century — and the massive latent demand waiting to be uncorked (52:30)

—Patrick reacts live to beeswax art (56:30)

Here is the link.  And on YouTube, Brian Eno intro.

The post Luke Burgis interviews Patrick Collison on aesthetics appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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• In reply to Bob. “So many clear mistakes…” But not ... by Wayfaring Stranger
• In reply to Patrick. You'd think a railroad engineer would ... by Wayfaring Stranger
• In reply to Dave. Toledo did have things to preserve. Just ... by Agorabum
• In reply to Patrick. Could not agree more. A perfect response. by Tu
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The results suggest that the public is feeling down about capitalism but is still wary of full-blown socialism. And many are deciding whether a few socialist candidates might help shake up the system. We found that:

—Just a third of Americans privately say they have a positive view of capitalism.

—Less than half of Republicans privately express a positive view of capitalism, though two-thirds support it in public.

—Almost half of women privately say they would consider voting for a socialist.

—Nearly a third of Gen Z publicly say that America would be better off as a socialist country, but only 14 percent say so in private.

—The majority of blacks publicly say capitalism is the cause of America’s social ills, but only 37 percent say so privately.

—Of people earning more than $150,000 a year, 58 percent privately say they are open to voting for a socialist, though only 42 percent say so publicly.

That is from Mene Ukueberuwa at The Free Press.

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• In reply to Gilligan. Gilligan, if we know—or ... by Kaz Stanczak
• In reply to Student. One more random thought in this. If ... by Student
• In reply to Gilligan. There was another political movement ... by Komori
• In reply to Naveen_K. I agree this kind of polling is suss… ... by Student
• In reply to Naveen_K. What cascade? What socialism? The 2016 ... by Lee A. Arnold
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Yiyang Zhuge is a political theorist, political columnist, and a translator of German and Greek philosophical texts. She is an instructor at Brandeis University, and a PhD Candidate at Boston College. 

Yiyang is a major translator of Hannah Arendt into Chinese. She has translated The Human Condition, Life of the Mind, Men in Dark Times, collected poetry, Die verborgene Tradition, and Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess. She has given numerous lectures and published numerous public-facing articles on Arendt. 

Yiyang published the first Greek-to-Chinese translation of Plutarch’s Moralia, a best-selling philosophy book in 2025. 

She runs Princeton University Press’s Political Philosophy Book Club, where she interviews important Western academics for the Chinese audience. 

Yiyang is a public intellectual in China. She reports on American higher ed monthly at print magazine Caixin Weekly. She is a political commenter on Hong Kong’s Phoenix TV (here and here). She hosts great books programs on vistopia and has contributed essays on Machiavelli, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Arendt at vistopia. She hosts the most popular Mandarin political philosophy podcast “Monologues of a Committed Observer” with 1m+ subscribers.

So what should I ask her?

The post What should I ask Yiyang Zhuge (诸葛一杨), also known as Zhong Shu (仲树)? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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• In reply to Citi.zen. One candidate surely has to be _Journey ... by mkt42
• 1) Using the Peloponnesian war as an analog for the Warring ... by Alopen
• In reply to Ted. Relatedly, as Arendt's Chinese translator, ... by James Broughel
• In reply to Alamo. In China now she is mainly associated with ... by Abraham
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2. More whales and Dr. Doolittle stuff.

3. Rohit on the AI hacks.  And Peter Wilderford.

4. Is Australia the most resilient country to global catastrophic risk?

5. Dolly Parton’s philanthropy (NYT).

6. Why has New Zealand education so declined? (and other questions about the country)

7. Yayoi Kusama, RIP.

The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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• In reply to Logan. Doesn't look like that to me by Anonymous
• In reply to Dick King. A GPU can wight about 1-4 kg. Let's ... by Hazel Meade
• In reply to Sometorontoguy. There's always Lago del Norte de ... by M
• In reply to Floccina. One change in schooling occurred in ... by LesHapablap
• In reply to Wayfaring Stranger. Lake of South Canada. by Sometorontoguy
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We use more than 900 million linked employer–employee records covering the entire formal workforce of Brazil to examine when cities provide upward mobility for the initially poor. We find that upward mobility for low-wage workers is strongest in workplaces that combine low-wage individuals with high-wage workers. This association is particularly pronounced in Brazil’s southern cities, where more complex industries include workers with a wider range of skills. The association is weaker in northern cities, where formal employment is dominated by the public sector.

Here is the paper by Radu Barza, Edward Glaeser, César A. Hidalgo, and Martina Viarengo.   And here is a useful thread on the paper.  This is one of the best and most important economics papers I have seen in the last few years.

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The key is to create some basic safeguards, but without stifling broader AI progress. To do so, we must defy the conventional wisdom about public oversight and instead trust the AI labs to be their own primary regulators.

My version of the proposal starts with defining a private not-for-profit body for AI regulation. An ideal body would draw some features from FINRA (the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority): a consortium of financial firms that examines the trade practices of each and makes recommendations, helping the federal Securities and Exchange Commission with oversight and regulation. The AI version would include the major labs and would be authorized and overseen by Washington, perhaps through the now-fledgling Center for AI Standards and Innovation.

This body would periodically audit major AI companies and their models, judging their conduct and safety. In the short run at least, much of this would be focused on issues of cybersecurity, and whether the new models created more cyber risk than they help to solve. If a company passed the audit, it would be exempted from standard liability law, at least provided that it had shown basic, reasonable care, as opposed to extreme or deliberate negligence. That would free the AI labs from the fear that courts might derail their business by granting huge awards to plaintiffs for ill-defined harms that could not reasonably have been prevented. And it would give the labs a strong incentive to meet the safety standards of this body.

It is reasonable to wonder whether such a body, composed of industry players, would issue fair and equitable judgments of safety. Maybe not. Yet there are many upsides and no better alternative.

For one thing, each company knows that a dangerous model from another company could cause a harmful incident and damage the prospects for the entire industry. Consider the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979, which contributed significantly to the mothballing of the entire U.S. nuclear industry. Few people can name the company (Metropolitan Edison) behind the malfunctioning plant; the reputational penalty attached to the industry as a whole.

Another incentive for safety is that the top companies do not want too much competition from lower-price, lower-quality upstarts. That too will induce those companies to support fairly tough standards, perhaps excessively tough in some cases. Still, we are choosing from imperfect alternatives. The concrete truth, whether we like it or not, is that there is far more expertise within the companies for judging AI safety than we can expect to find in the federal government anytime soon.

I am indebted to some ideas from Dean Ball, noting that his proposal is somewhat different.  And here are some comments from Brendan McCord.

The post The least bad way to regulate AI? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Using Danish registry data, we study how managers’ gender attitudes shape gender inequality in the workplace by exploiting the birth of a daughter – as opposed to a son – as a plausibly exogenous shock to male managers’ gender attitudes. Comparing within-firm changes in women’s labor outcomes depending on the gender of the manager’s newborn child, we find that women’s relative earnings and employment increase by 4.4% and 2.9% respectively following the birth of the manager’s first daughter. These effects are driven by an increase in managers’ propensity to substitute male hires with female hires that have comparable education, hours worked, and earnings. Consistent with this substitution channel, we do not detect any significant effect on firm performance. Because these effects emerge rapidly and persist over time, we can rule out the need for prolonged exposure to gender issues or for personal incentives tied to improving conditions for their own daughters as prerequisites for managers to promote gender equality within their firms.

That is by Maddalena Ronchi and Nina Smith, forthcoming in Review of Economic Studies.

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2. On the LLM flooding of governmental services.

3. Joe Walker podcast with Andrew Charlton on the future of AI in Australia.

4. The bread culture that is the German regulatory state.

5. Data on the placement of economics PhDs.

6. The Nvidia thing is now under dispute.  And here is a defense of the original.

The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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