Marginal Revolution

What Drives Censorship on College Campuses?

Tyler Cowen — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 19:58:38 +0000

There has been widespread concern about self-censorship on university campuses, and especially that conservative voices are being stifled. Using survey data from a private elite college, we show that self-censorship is not simply about being conservative: it is students with the most moderate views who self-censor the most. This pattern is associated with confidence and salience — students who are more confident in their views or who see an issue as especially important tend to hold more extreme views and to self-censor less. At the same time, conservatives self-censor at higher rates than liberals, and the same individual is more likely to self-censor on the views where they are relatively more conservative than on those where they are relatively more liberal; conservatives are also far more likely than liberals to cite concerns about social exclusion as a reason for self-censoring, and report self-censoring less outside the university community. Groups perceived as marginalized self-censor less than majority groups, and especially so on issues salient to them (e.g., Black students on BLM).

That is from a new NBER working paper by Peter Arcidiacono, Cory Dowd & Matthew Lilley.

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Wednesday assorted links

Tyler Cowen — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 16:48:24 +0000

1. Important people in the AI world.

2. Ted Nordhaus on Bill Nordhaus.

3. “That universities facilitate broader political mobilization can explain why governments often seek to restrict student activism.”

4. NYT obituary for William Nordhaus.

5. A new (job market) paper on how much does economic geography matter?

6. “Recent-graduate unemployment fell to 5.2%, its lowest level this year.”

7. Martian dust is a problem.

8. Stock market moves.

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The election

Tyler Cowen — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 07:41:25 +0000

Procedurally it seems to have gone just fine, and the people predicting “the end of democracy in America” now look foolish. They have been suffering under fundamental misunderstandings of how this country works. During this election cycle, democracy never was under threat and the United States has not been under risk of fascism.

Rising in status:

Matt Yglesias (socially moderate Democrats did very well)

Normie social science results on campaign finance

Nate Silver predictions

Falling in status:

Tariffs

Corruption

War with Iran

Wealth taxes (losing in CA)

Gerrymandering (came back to hurt Republicans, given the Blue wave)

And there you go.

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Trade and the end of antiquity, or did Islam serve to deglobalize the world?

Tyler Cowen — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 05:54:16 +0000

How did trade and economic activity evolve at the End of Antiquity, when political power shifts away from the Mediterranean towards the Middle East and northern Europe? No records of ancient production, consumption, and trade exist. Yet the composition of coin finds reveals information about monetized transactions, as coins gradually diffused along trade routes. To recover trade and consumption time series, we assemble a database of half a million ancient coins from the fourth to the tenth century and estimate a dynamic model of trade and money. Our estimates suggest that: Mediterranean trade was disrupted by the newly formed border between Islam and Christianity; economic activity shifts away from the Mediterranean starting in the sixth century; real consumption peaks in the Middle East in the eighth century; and by the end of the ninth century, Islamic Spain and Frankish northwestern Europe are the wealthiest regions of the ancient western world.

Recently published in Econometrica, by Johannes Boehm.

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Ireland fact of the day

Tyler Cowen — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 19:26:51 +0000

Almost half of Ireland’s corporation tax haul comes from just three companies: Apple, Eli Lilly and Microsoft.

Here is much more from Jude Webber at the FT, on why Ireland does not always feel or operate like a wealthy country.

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Tuesday assorted links

Tyler Cowen — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 17:01:23 +0000

1. Jason Furman on AI and the CEA.

2. Matt Kahn uses Refine and gets results.

3. Cyril Hilsum, RIP (flat screen TV, NYT).

4. How much of the return to education is in fact a return to genes?

5. Essay contest on how AI will affect developing economies.

6. AI sanity from Nicholas Decker. And Samir Varma on AI constitutions.

7. What happens when AI audits the work of Chad Jones?

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Thoughts on Owning a Self-Driving Tesla

Alex Tabarrok — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 12:18:06 +0000

My Subaru was showing its years so I recently bought a Tesla. My thinking was I can buy a car or I can buy a car+driver for the same price. Simple choice. I’ve driven about 2000 miles including one long trip (6 hours) to North Carolina and back.

FSD is incredible. I don’t mind driving but about 95% of the miles on my Tesla have been FSD. You might wonder why bother with FSD when you still have to supervise but supervising is easier and more pleasant than driving. I was in Washington, DC one evening and I needed to go to an address I was not familiar with. I could have gotten there but it would have required going back and forth between the road and the map, and DC can be confusing–do I drive straight under the mini-underpass or is this the one where I drive over the pass (DC drivers will understand). Instead, FSD drove me at night, flawlessly.

FSD uses 8 cameras to build a 3D, bird’s eye view of the car and everything around it, so it sees in all directions at once. It picks out every car, pedestrian and cyclist and predicts where each is going, much as an LLM predicts the next word. Then it predicts the best move a good driver would make, and makes it. All of this runs on one big neural network, trained on data from billions of miles of Tesla fleet driving. The ride is smooth. Since ChatGPT launched, FSD has improved about as much as LLMs have, and for the same reasons.

Supervision is needed, in my experience, mostly due to navigation. It gets a bit confused on the HOV and normal lanes on I-66 (as does Google Maps). It stopped perfectly, however, for a school bus and even for a police officer who stopped traffic by standing in the middle of the street.

Another example of how supervising is much less taxing than driving. I was listening to Tyler talk with Gita Gopinath on my way home from North Carolina. It’s a great conversation but full-on PhD mode and I became a little lost trying to remember my international econ. No problem, just ask Grok. I had a whole conversation with Grok, reviewed Mundell-Fleming, reminded myself of the great Alan Stockman model (the only international econ model that makes sense) and then returned to the podcast. I could not have done that while driving.

Grok is a significant benefit. Essentially, Grok runs the car’s controls the way it might run your computer, and you just talk to Grok. It’s a more seamless interaction than talking with the car directly. I can even review (verbally) email and send emails as I drive. If you also use Grok Bot you have the bot book an appointment at a dentist or start working on your PowerPoint slides. FSD is $99 a month and the premium connectivity needed for Grok is $10 a month (Grok Bot a bit extra). FSD plus Grok is about what I am saving on gas, so it’s roughly a wash.

My colleague, who long held that self-driving would be worthwhile only if he could sleep, was amazed at the experience of driving my Tesla and immediately ordered two.

It was also pretty cool when I “summoned” the Tesla from the nearby parking lot and we watched it drive itself to us. You might wonder, by the way, how all this innovation is possible. Maxwell Tabarrok, writes about a key part of the answer:

The Department of Transportation (DOT) sets strict safety requirements for cars, but manufacturers are allowed to release new designs without first getting the DOT to sign off that all the requirements have been satisfied. The law is enforced ex post, and the government will impose recalls and fines when manufacturers fail to follow the law.

The FAA, by contrast, enforces all of its safety rules ex ante. Before aircraft manufacturers can do anything with a design, they have to get the FAA’s signoff, which can take more than a decade.

(By the way, it’s amusing to re-read Max’s post in light of Tesla’s flying car.)

If you do enjoy driving, the Tesla is fun, with sports-car acceleration and great responsiveness.

What about range anxiety? If you run out of electrons, the car is dead and no one is going to bring you a portable battery to get you to the nearest charging station. You must be carried–carried on a flatbed, not towed! (Moreover, if you leave the car unplugged for weeks the low-voltage battery can die, in which case you can’t even open the frunk without a special jump start.) You don’t want to run out.

It works fine, however, if you adjust behavior. In a gas car you drive until you are low on fuel and then assume you will find a gas station. If you try this with an electric car, you will be anxious. Tesla chargers are quite common but they are often in odd places like behind a restaurant. There is no big T sign out front. So what do you do? The Tesla knows where the chargers are so put your final destination into navigation, switch on self-driving, and then, if needed, the Tesla will find the nearest charger along your route and drive you there and even back you in nicely. Thus, you trust the Tesla system–car plus network–not just the car. This works much better than with any other electric car.

Normal range for the Model Y is about 250 highway miles on an 80% charge. This is less restrictive than it appears because in many cases you don’t need to charge to full. Returning from North Carolina, for example, I was projected to arrive home with 2% charge–a bit too close for comfort. So the Tesla stopped and charged for 5 minutes (no slower than a gas stop) and I arrived home with 18% charge. I then charged to full overnight. Being able to charge at home is a big advantage (~$1500 to add a charger). Overall, driving the Tesla long distances you will have more frequent stops but unless you are driving cross-country, you will rarely need to stop for longer than a bathroom break and a cup of coffee.

Aside from FSD the rest of the car is nicely designed. I like the flush exterior door handles. The headlights are pixel-based, so when you drive with high beams on and come up behind another car, the pixels aimed at that car turn off while keeping the rest on, so you don’t blind the driver in front. Neat.

A few negatives. Tesla reliability is good but not great; Consumer Reports ranks Tesla 9th among brands. Despite the safety benefits of FSD, Teslas aren’t cheaper to insure than other similarly priced cars, largely I think because repair costs are not low. (Tesla’s own insurance gives lower rates for FSD miles and might be cheaper for me. I had my other car and an umbrella policy with another insurer so I didn’t switch, but I might.) I do find the pure electronic approach a bit much at times–must I really open the glove compartment verbally? Do those nice door handles only work when the battery is working?

Bottom line: FSD is revolutionary–a step change in what it means to drive. I don’t think any other car at a similar price comes close. It’s the best car I have ever owned.

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The economics of tips

Tyler Cowen — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 07:58:10 +0000

Tipping is large and growing, but we know little about its consequences for workers and firms. We link point-of-sale and payroll records at 20,000 U.S. firms, which lets us observe tips from customer payment to worker earnings. We find that tips are a nearly constant share of revenue, which means hourly pay moves with revenue. Firms that begin collecting tips claw back between 23 and 33 cents of each dollar of tips through lower base wages. Tips reward effort: workers at tipping firms earn more by serving more customers. We show this with demand shocks constructed from customer spending at other businesses. A demand shock raises revenue nearly twice as much at tipping firms as at non-tipping firms, while base wages and prices do not respond. Output per hour rises more despite a larger increase in hours. Effort drives the gap because each worker is more productive, so the firm expands and recovers about a third of the tips. Yet not every firm adopts tipping: the gain is smaller where customers tip less. A model calibrated to the demand-shock estimates implies that tipping benefits workers and firms, raising job value by about half and firm profit by about 30 percent in firms where customers are prone to tip. These gains may explain why tipping has recently grown in many industries.

That is by Dylan Balla-Elliott and Isaac Norwich, Isaac being on the job market this year from University of Chicago.

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Are economists declining in status?

Tyler Cowen — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 05:22:51 +0000

That is the theme of my latest Free Press article. Excerpt, which offers the beginning of the story:

If we look at the 1960s, the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson administrations brought James Tobin, Robert Solow, Kenneth Arrow (all three later Nobel laureates), Arthur Okun, Walter Heller, Gardner Ackley, Otto Eckstein, and Walt Rostow into government. Those were all names with significant academic heft who could count among the world’s leading macroeconomists. Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson served as a consultant to the government. Heller and some of the others helped to shape the Kennedy-Johnson tax cut of 1964.

That cluster of talent and its influence should come as no surprise. This was an age of elites, of love for science, of the moon landing project, and of network news shows with an establishment bent. Americans were used to deferring to elites, who had won World War II for them, and who were not out there making fools of themselves on the internet. With the Cold War raging, Americans felt their government had to get it right…

Most of this respect was still in place by the 1980s. President Ronald Reagan appointed Martin Feldstein to chair his Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), Feldstein being a Harvard professor and one of the leading market-oriented economists of his time. Two of the junior economists working for Feldstein were Paul Krugman and Lawrence Summers—before they became famous, but the intellectual firepower was already there. Michael Mussa and William Niskanen were other notables in the administration, and Milton Friedman and Friedrich A. Hayek were standing sources of inspiration.

And this:

On top of those political trends, there are further mechanisms at work pushing down the social status of economists. The Trump administration is proposing to eliminate social sciences funding at the National Science Foundation, and there are declining enrollments on the horizon for American colleges and universities. Academia is now seen as more politicized and left-leaning than used to be the case. Our best AI models are often better economists than the humans, just as they are proving theorems that human mathematicians cannot. All of those trends, even if you might consider some of them good news overall, are reinforcing a declining status for economists.

Worth a ponder.

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Fjord and Fatherland

Tyler Cowen — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 19:44:38 +0000

Both of these movies I found worth watching. Fjord won the Golden Prize at Cannes, and it concerns the rights of the family vs. the rights of the state, when it comes to raising children. As I interpreted the story, it was so right-wing and so based I am shocked it won. It is by the Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, who is best known for 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, also referred to as “the Romanian abortion movie.” His new outing is a quality film but I found theh messaging a bit heavy-handed at times (and am I one to defend European bureaucracy?), noting that some critics are still debating which side the director took so “maybe it is just me.”

Fatherland is a Polish take on postwar Germany and some travels of Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika. A German director might have been afraid to portray the communism of East Germany as this movie does, in any case I found that convincing. It captures what I imagine the immediate postwar era to have been like, and the moral dilemmas people faced as they had to decide their future relationships with Germany (and indeed Germanies), past, present, and future. At one hour, twenty-two minutes it worked very well, though it requires the viewer to know a good deal about German history, literature, and culture.

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Monday assorted links

Tyler Cowen — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 17:13:35 +0000

1. Why is it now so common to be asked about your food allergies? (GPT Pro answer)

2. Training for alignment, applies principal-agent theory.

3. Do people offload empathy when they think AI can give it instead?

4. The Wallace line.

5. AI can draw blueprints now.

6. Ed Glaeser review of the new book Property Values (WSJ).

7. Nicholas Decker on Bill Nordhaus.

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Expensive Pharmaceuticals for Targeted Diseases

Alex Tabarrok — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 12:16:34 +0000

My latest paper, The Price of a Cure: Luxturna and the Economic Dilemmas of Precision Medicine, is in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics. I discuss the economics of the pharmaceutical industry and the special issues that arise with targeted drugs that cure. We are going to get many more of these drugs in the future–more value but smaller patient group–so this paper is timely.

The $850,000 price for the gene therapy Luxturna is often framed as a story of private profiteering from publicly funded science. This paper challenges that narrative. Pharmaceuticals are a hit-driven industry: most projects fail, so the few successes must earn revenues well in excess of their own direct costs if the portfolio as a whole is to attract investment. Precision medicine intensifies this logic through two core economic challenges: (1) the “sticker shock” of one-time cures, which compress decades of value into a single payment, creating a financing problem more than a value problem; and (2) the “targeting dilemma,” in which precisely targeting drugs to smaller patient groups shrinks the market, requiring higher rewards per treated patient to maintain incentives to innovate. Rather than simply controlling prices, the paper proposes a policy toolkit that includes amortizing payments over time, bundling diagnostics with drugs and insurance, and streamlining regulation to lower development costs. The aim is to preserve innovation while expanding patient access.

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Should you feel grief for the dead who go to heaven?

Tyler Cowen — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 05:24:47 +0000

I am not myself religious, but let us consider the possible gulf between behavior and doctrine amongst those who are.

It has long struck me as a kind of mini-puzzle why people feel so much grief for the departed, at least for the departed who are supposed to be headed for heaven (and yes there are supposed to be at least a few).

It is fine to miss those people after they are gone, but it seems that, in addition, their death is considered a tragic event to be mourned, and also if possible to be postponed. We are crying for them, not just for ourselves.

I do not doubt the sincerity of the religious belief that these people are headed to heaven. And I do not doubt the sincerity of the grief and mourning for their departure from this world.

So what is going on here? Why can’t you just be happy for them?

I believe that people often construct a portfolio of moods when faced with stressful situations. Sometimes they will mix a positive and a negative mood, other times they will mix two different kinds of negative mood (worried about a recession? Buy a book that heralds a financial crash and hold the talisman close to your chest as pre-emptive mood management exercise.)

So if the death of a loved one is a terrible event, there is a partial assuagement if you also think they are going to heaven. It makes their death modestly less terrible. But if you simply celebrated their passing, you would feel disloyal and like a rotten person who cannot recognize true loss. The point is not that you can make this bundle of feelings consistent, rather it is useful psychologically precisely because it is a portfolio and is not entirely consistent, and also not consistent over time. As your moods change, and you need an extra dose of either modest cheer or true mourning, you can adjust your blend accordingly.

Others kinds of portfolios end up being constructed. For instance sometimes you may focus on some other terrible thing, to distract yourself from the first pain that came along, a bit like how you might pinch yourself during a dental session. You might prefer to have a portfolio with more pain in a way, but some of it being pain you can control.

You can multiply additional examples in these directions.

When people hold views for reasons of mood management (however sincerely), typically they are unable to respond intelligently to questions challenging their beliefs. Even very smart people will pull b.s. out of the hat and stick with it, moving on rapidly, mentally, to some other topic. Their response is not really thought through, it is a placeholder for “now I can move on to something else.” After all, consistency was never the goal in the first place, you might even argue that anti-consistency was what was needed, and what proved to be psychologically stable.

I once asked someone religious about mourning death and the answer I received was something like “Well, the people in New Orleans celebrate death with funerals like parties.” Now, I am not sure how true that is, but assume it holds. It still resolutely refuses to address why the queried person might mourn and grieve the death of loved ones, rather than celebrate their ascent to heaven. Nonetheless it fills in the box “I did say something back to the initial query.” The person then wanted to simply move on to another topic.

If you challenge smart people on this issue, namely the discrepancy between beliefs and actions, they often will respond with extremely weak counters and dismissals, rather than thinking the issue through.

Once you see this kind of psychological portfolio construction in action, and learn how to identify it, you cannot unsee it.

These days, you see it especially frequently in response to AI and its advances. People have an odd love-hate relationship with the models, and they adjust their emotional balance as their stress needs may require. They do not want to give up either the very positive or the very negative side of their visions, because then they would have a non-diversified emotional portfolio, and they would be very vulnerable to disappointment.

You can understand some of the current AI debates by pondering how religious people react to the deaths of their loved ones. It was never about consistency in the first place.

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As predicted, the ACA exchanges seem not to be stable

Tyler Cowen — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 19:53:38 +0000

The average price of health insurance in the Obamacare marketplaces will rise by 13 percent next year, according to an analysis on Friday by KFF, the health research group.

The Trump administration on Friday published new prices for 2027 in 30 states with markets managed by the federal government. Using that data and state figures, KFF calculated the increase nationwide.

…The average cost for the cheapest bronze plan with a high deductible will be about $700 a month for a 50-year-old single person, according to Ms. Cox.

Here is more from the NYT. Of course that makes the people who can expect to be healthy all the less likely to sign up, given that the enforcement of the mandate, for political reasons, was forced to evolve into something quite weak. For purposes of context, when the original mandate was more tightly enforced, with actual penalties, the ACA was very unpopular and led to significant political protests. In essence the benefits to a broad, scattered majority were imposed on a well-identified minority, namely those who signed up because of the mandate. Trump in his first term relaxed mandate enforcement, thereby politically saving Obamacare at least for a while, but also creating this longer-term problem.

It is striking to me how infrequently I hear Democrats boasting about Obamacare. They instead prefer to talk as if little or nothing has been done for America’s uninsured.

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