Marginal Revolution

Thursday assorted links

Tyler Cowen — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:58:50 +0000

1. Cato’s Vision for Liberty award for 50k.

2. Gross output signals an economic surge (WSJ).

3. Echo, a new AI site to mimic the styles of particular writers or writing styles. Thread on it here.

4. “Open USD (OUSD), the new stablecoin from Coinbase, Mastercard, Stripe, Visa and others launches…”

5. Are men or women more tolerant of differing views?

6. On AI desires.

The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Comments

2. Gross output signals an economic surge (WSJ).† Spending ... by RAD
#2. Gross Output and its discontents. Net output [or GDP] is ... by Dismalist
5. I don't think men would get married and sometimes stay ... by Darth Maul
[BONUS] AI Competitive Landscape 7. Gemini 4 Argon—Google's ... by RAD
#5/#6. Are men or women more tolerant of differing views on AI ... by MikeP

What should I ask Moxie Marlinspike?

Tyler Cowen — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 14:30:41 +0000

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him, live at the Roots of Progress event next week. From Wikipedia:

Moxie Marlinspike is an American entrepreneur, cryptographer, and computer security researcher. Marlinspike is the creator of Signal, co-founder of the Signal Technology Foundation, and served as the first CEO of Signal Messenger LLC. He is also a co-author of the Signal Protocol encryption used by Signal, WhatsApp, Google Messages, Facebook Messenger and Skype.

There is much more at the link, for instance he is also an anarchist of some kind or another. So what should I ask him?

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Ask him if they enthusiastically engineer their security ... by patrick
In reply to Evanston BT. How about a land where laws don't ... by rsm
In “The Ecosystem is Moving” you argued that federated ... by Ethan
RSS and podcasting are open protocols that have worked for ... by Ethan
Does he have any comments on the French detention of Pavel ... by Gilligan
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The top private sector employers of economics graduates

Tyler Cowen — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 06:23:03 +0000

Here is the link.

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In reply to Bill Allen. The Economist just did this to me… ... by James
In reply to mkt42. It's a good thing an entity with with the ... by Anti-Gnostic
In reply to Sh. Retail is a natural fit for economists–many ... by Dave
In reply to Engineer. There are still plenty of econ PhDs who ... by Colin C
I’ve worked in both tech and litigation consulting during my ... by Jamie D
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Merging LLMs and economics research

Tyler Cowen — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 04:31:10 +0000

We introduce an open-source workflow that enables an LLM to reproduce, improve, and extend an economics article using the article’s published replication package. First, the workflow attempts to reproduce the original calculations, checks for discrepancies with published findings, and performs automated sensitivity analysis. Across 4,452 published replication packages for five economics journals, the workflow flags discrepancies in 3,460 articles or their appendices. Second, the workflow improves the original calculations by using a different implementation or algorithm. In 496 articles, the workflow is able to reduce a calculation’s computation time, at similar or greater accuracy, by more than a factor of 10. Third, the workflow extends the original analysis. In 923 articles, the workflow develops an extension that does not appear in the original article and that is aligned with the original article’s goals and assumptions.

That is from a new paper by Matthew Schwartz, Isaiah Andrews & Jesse M. Shapiro. At some point, in some cases, the paper will just fade into the backround…

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Comments

In reply to Small discrepancies aren’t a problem. “When ... by Wayfaring Stranger
In reply to rayward. Small discrepancies are easy to end up ... by Small discrepancies aren’t a problem
I think this is just saying that LLMs should make good editors. ... by steve
In reply to patrick. Statistical text is basically a ... by Bob
In reply to patrick. Apparently, Tyler and/or the MR ... by RAD
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The polity that is Singapore

Tyler Cowen — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 18:37:04 +0000

Police in Singapore have charged a man who is accused of posting an AI-generated image of a saltwater crocodile in a popular reservoir.

Ye Lin was charged with communicating a false message and obstructing the course of justice for allegedly deleting the picture and the application he used.

The fake image caused public concern, authorities allege. The national water agency suspended its work at the city-state’s largest reservoir for two days last month after receiving information that a crocodile had been spotted.

Here is the full story, via Kyle.

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Hidden AI watermarking seems the best solution for images and ... by Rahul
In reply to Benjamin Cole. Back in the day regulating ... by bazza
In reply to JWatts. per the article, he sent it to “a ... by Gilligan
In reply to RAD. It'll probably cause more problems that it ... by Gilligan
Singapore is a successful city-state but also a dirigiste ... by Benjamin Cole
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Wednesday assorted links

Tyler Cowen — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 15:49:34 +0000

1. It seems there is no evidence for the concept of a fertility rebound.

2. We will tell children nasty stories, but mostly only show them positive images.

3. Deregulation in Idaho.

4. Weather risk is reflected in Florida home prices.

5. Have we discovered where Aristotle taught Alexander the Great?

6. How to keep an agent swarm on track?

7. What the mathematicians want.

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In reply to Kaleberg. That’s very enlightening—thank you, ... by Kaz Stanczak
In reply to Sure. The idea that we need to create more young ... by diz
In reply to Hazel Meade. While price and it's transparency ... by NotRover
In reply to Dismalist. Correct. No knock on the Amish, they ... by Sure
In reply to Dismalist. Marginal cost or average total cost? ... by Gilligan
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Trump Administration Limits Predatory Lending in Education

Alex Tabarrok — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 11:17:27 +0000

The New Republic writes “President Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans.” Yes, but do note that no student is banned from any major and the lending rule is mild. Undergraduate programs must show:

that their graduates earn more than the typical high school diploma holder…[and] graduate programs will be required to demonstrate that their graduates earn more than the typical bachelor’s degree holder. (emphasis added).

Think about how low that bar is. The comparison group for an undergraduate program is working adults aged 25-34 with nothing more than a high school diploma. A college program that can’t beat that has almost certainly made its students worse off. For graduate programs the bar is the lowest of several bachelor’s benchmarks, including bachelor’s holders in the same field. A master’s in social work need only beat people with a bachelor’s in social work. A program must also fail in two out of three years before it loses loan eligibility. The Department estimates that about 5% of programs will fail in the first year.

I mocked the term “predatory lending” when it first became common in the financial crisis but in this case predatory lending fits the bill because the real borrower isn’t the individual student. Under income-driven repayment, the taxpayer is a forced co-signer, and it’s the taxpayer who gets predated.

Most expansions of the student loan program have been motivated by the picture of an enterprising student who works hard and wants to major in mechanical engineering or nursing but because of their poor circumstances they can’t afford college. “Credit constraints, asymmetric information, you can’t collateralize human capital,” said the economists. Nice theory, what’s the practice?

The economists wanted loans for good investments and insurance against bad luck but the economists can’t swing the vote and once the government is lending, colleges want more tuition money and students want more forgiveness. The result is a subsidy for programs whose graduates are never likely to repay. As Looney and Yannelis document:

Starting in the late 1990s, policymakers weakened regulations that had constrained institutions from enrolling aid-dependent students. This led to rising enrollment of relatively disadvantaged students, but primarily at poor-performing, low-value institutions whose students systematically failed to complete a degree, struggled to repay their loans, defaulted at high rates, and foundered in the job market. As these new borrowers experienced similarly poor outcomes, their loans piled up, loan performance deteriorated, and with it the finances of the federal program.

Indeed, the program worked in reverse of what was promised. The biggest subsidies went to programs whose graduates were least able to repay, rather than programs with the strongest case for public support. As I wrote earlier:

Looney does a back of the envelope calculation and estimates that typical graduates in Mechanical Engineering will on average get a 0% subsidy but graduates in Music will get a 96% subsidy, in Drama a 99% subsidy and Masseuses a 100% subsidy on average. This of course is exactly the wrong approach. If we are going to subsidize, we should subsidize degrees with plausible positive spillovers not masseuses.

The courts later blocked Biden’s Save plan but the problem is built into income-driven repayment. If music, drama and masseuses are promised a 95%+ subsidy who is paying? The taxpayers. Moreover, it’s even worse than this because the very existence of these loans incentivizes the creation of expensive, useless programs. It’s not just the drama colleges, however. Not surprisingly, the law schools have proven adept at using Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) to rip off the taxpayer. The school raises tuition, then covers the student’s small income-driven payments for ten years, and the taxpayer forgives the rest. In short, protecting students from the cost of failure rewards colleges for producing it.

Fortunately, the same bill limiting loans ended Grad PLUS loans and capped graduate borrowing. You can see the logic: if taxpayers are going to insure the loans, they need some say over which programs qualify and how much is borrowed. I don’t like giving government that power, but this is the Mises–Higgs intervention ratchet in action: subsidize the loans, absorb the losses, then regulate the programs to limit the losses.

My ideal program would get the government out of the student loan business altogether but until then this is a good first step at limiting one of the most expensive and wasteful programs of the federal government.

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In reply to j mct. Price discrimination happens a lot, mostly ... by Dick King
Alex Tabarrok: just another boring Republican talking head. ... by Buster Keaton
In reply to superdestroyer. If you go back to the year 2000, ... by diz
Reminder that Trump paid $25M in fines for conning Trump U ... by Abby P
In reply to sam. 2 in 5 borrowers don't enjoy the premium. A ... by Sure
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Shade

Tyler Cowen — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 06:26:22 +0000

The author is Sam Bloch, and the subtitle is The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource. An interesting book on a neglected topic, here is one excerpt:

Shade is not part of L.A.’s modern identity. In the 1930s, the city was rezoned to Federal Housing Administration design standards and banned high-density developments like row houses. Although apartments were once common, city leaders bowed to a prevailing wisdom that L.A. should not resemble a dark and cramped East Coast city. Freestanding single family-homes that were touched by sun on every side became mandatory. In came the cars. L.A.’s curbside trees were removed to accommodate shrinking sidewalks and expanding roads, and new rules that require parking minimums dealt another below to the urban forest. Mediterranean-style courtyards became endangered species as the shaded commons were converted to outdoor car storage. For decades, no building could be taller than the twenty-seven-story city hall…

Since the 1970s, an individual right to sunshine has been practically enshrined in state law.

The book also serves as an alternative history of Los Angeles (though it covers much more than that) through this alternative lens.

The post *Shade* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

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Tashkent is much more pleasant than you’d expect, even in the ... by The Scary Black Hundreder
In reply to Wayfaring Stranger. In Australia, we produced ... by Crikey
In reply to john. The trouble with mandating rooftop solar ... by Crikey
In reply to Vivian Darkbloom. I presume the amount of roof ... by Crikey
In Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason novels set in the 1930s, ... by Kaleberg
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Don’t let AI make you dumber

Tyler Cowen — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:17:47 +0000

That is the topic of my latest Free Press column, here is one excerpt:

I do not think the skeptics would put it this way, but as I read Conti, I find he has a pretty bleak fundamental view of humanity. Are we all really just looking to veg out and abandon curiosity and inquiry, at least once the machines have taken care of both the basic functions of life and certain higher aims such as scientific research? I think some people are like that—indeed you might say many people—but it does not reflect what I take to be the general human condition.

If I look at most people who might fit into the “middle class” when it comes to intellectual pursuits or educational status, I observe they have a lot of strong interests. This might play with their pets, improve their performance at sports, or learn how to cook better. You do not have to identify those preferences with “the new Athens” or “the next Mozart” to think they are perfectly good and noble ways for people to spend their time.

Most of us want to do something interesting and stimulating with our leisure time, and if we do not, it is often because our jobs are so busy and stressful that we just wish to decompress. Of course, in this radical vision of our AI future, fewer jobs will be so all-consuming and so more of us will use vacations and leisure time to explore and learn rather than to just sit on the beach scrolling our phones. And to the extent some jobs do remain hectic, or become even more so (such as cybersecurity), they will continue to be challenging and intellectually stimulating.

A related worry is that humans may feel they simply cannot compete with the AIs, and thus they might turn away from creative pursuits. It is true that I, more than ever, have given up all hope of proving new theorems in mathematical economics. But many of my intellectual and creative pursuits do not involve competition at all. For instance, I use AI to understand classical music better, asking the models questions before I sit down to listen to a piece. (Such as “which are the best recordings?” and “what should I listen for in the second movement?”) As the models get better and smarter, I am not going to be discouraged in this endeavor, as I was not “competing” with the models to see which of us knew more. Rather, I will gratefully end up much better informed about classical music—my increasing knowledge has already induced me to see more live concerts.

Recommended, and AI saved me time on the proofreading and fact-checking (not the writing!), so I could return to reading China Mieville…

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Comments

In reply to Jimmy. Why is that odd? Tyler's income comes from ... by Buster Keaton
In reply to Panderer. I find this kind of thinking, ... by M
In reply to Bill. It is entirely possible that Tyler really ... by Bill
In reply to Jimmy. It's odd that TC underestimates the brain ... by Joseph Ferguson
In reply to Bill. Yes and it’s why he is seemingly blind to ... by Jimmy
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Shipping to America

Tyler Cowen — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 17:53:09 +0000

The vulnerability of our shipping routes remains underdiscussed, perhaps that is in some ways a good thing:

We study the macroeconomic and trade-policy implications of disruptions to U.S.-bound shipping routes. Standard models treat them as iceberg-cost shocks, conflating the shock with the response to it. Using satellite vessel-tracking data, we construct route-level measures of potential and effective capacity for all U.S.-bound container ships from 2016 to 2025. Utilization losses in recent disruptions ran 20 to 40 percentage points, and began months before port congestion became visible. We embed these measures in a general equilibrium model in which firms reallocate a common fleet without internalizing the congestion they create and price above marginal cost, while importers’ sourcing responds to route profitability. The reallocation triggered by a disruption then has first-order welfare effects, and the route’s Domar weight is not a sufficient statistic for its welfare cost. The 2021 West Coast crisis and the 2023-2024 Red Sea attacks cost 0.69% and 0.35% of output. Naval protection of Red Sea shipping generated benefits of 0.04-0.08% of output at a fiscal cost of 0.02%. Tariffs decongest the routes they tax, offsetting or even reversing their conventional welfare cost.

That is from a new paper by Xiwen Bai, Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, Yiliang Li, Ricardo Marto & Francesco Zanetti.

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Tuesday assorted links

Tyler Cowen — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 15:47:30 +0000

1. Comment section arbitrage. This is what the AIs do too, right?

2. Claims about New Zealand.

3. Good Bryan Caplan post on Effective Altruism.

4. Reported female bisexuality is in retreat?

5. Sadly, now a fringey view, yes. But not with me.

6. Fewer and fewer are defecting from North Korea.

The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

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4. “People respond to political repression by going ... by Buster Keaton
I had a good demonstration recently of darkening movies – we ... by Michael Tinkler
In reply to Michael. In the comparison between contemporary ... by OldTrader
In reply to bazza. That wasn't Dad's experience. Rather the ... by dearieme
“1. Comment section arbitrage.” Imagine if teenagers ... by mkt42
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Accounting for Cross-Country Income Differences Revisited

Tyler Cowen — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 06:53:35 +0000

Also known as Why I Do Not Believe in the Housing Theory of Everything:

Development accounting is the search for proximate sources of cross-country income differences. This article describes how knowledge in this field has evolved over the two decades since the influential work of Caselli (2005). There have been large advances in the measurement of production inputs (labor, physical capital, and human capital). These advances have raised the estimated contribution of inputs, mostly human capital, in development accounting. Our preferred estimate is that inputs account for 55–70 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) per worker differences, versus 30 percent using the classic specification. The literature has also made progress in moving away from Cobb-Douglas production functions and measuring factors such as management quality that were previously bundled into total factor productivity (TFP). Our review highlights the new implications of these advances, areas where future research would be beneficial, and the limitations of development accounting.

That is from a new NBER working paper by David Lagakos & Todd Schoellman.

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Even so, people in Sapporo Japan have higher living standards ... by Benjamin Cole
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The Macroeconomic Effect of AI through software engineering

Tyler Cowen — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:50:01 +0000

We measure how artificial intelligence (AI) affects the economy through its impact on software engineering productivity. We use information from financial markets to develop a forward-looking measure that is available in real time. We estimate the sensitivity of each firm’s stock return to an AI stock market index, and how this sensitivity depends on the share of firm payroll in software engineering. We use a model to map this cross-sectional relationship into software engineering productivity gains. From November 2022 to December 2025, AI increased the market’s expected present value of software engineering productivity by the equivalent of a permanent 32.6% productivity increase. The corresponding effect on the level of GDP is 3.6% in the baseline and 6.5% when higher software engineering productivity also raises R&D productivity. By mid-2026, amid rapid progress in coding agents, the effect of AI on productivity and GDP had more than doubled relative to the end of 2025.

That is a new NBER working paper by Alex Blumenfeld, Jonathon Hazell, Chen Lian & Andreas Schaab. This is also a simple way of showing that markets do indeed price in the effects of AI.

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In reply to Roger Zimmerman. LLMs can be used not only for ... by The Scary Black Hundreder
In reply to Ted. “More software engineers, not less.” ... by Roger Zimmerman
In reply to MikeP. As an independent, displaced software ... by Nathan Braun
In reply to Newton Robinson. Programming languages have ... by Tom Meadowcroft
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Man’s best friend?

Tyler Cowen — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 17:53:27 +0000

When it comes to bear encounters in or near the wild, dogs are the aggressors in 54 percent of incidents, according to a recent study conducted by bear experts at Brigham Young University and other institutions, and published in the Journal of Wildlife Management. In approximately 36 percent of the encounters, dogs did not come to their owners’ defense. And they only successfully alerted their owners to the presence of a bear in about 9 percent of cases.

Here is more from the NYT.

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