TheNote
Marginal REVOLUTION Note
GooglePlay AppStore

Marginal REVOLUTION

Marginal Revolution is an online magazine or collection of blogs that primarily deals with economics. It covers a wide variety of economic topics, with a mix of theoretical underpinnings, real-world applications, and current events. The blog is run by scholars and is affiliated with George Mason University.
RSS feeds.feedburner.com
Marginal REVOLUTION marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Aug 19, 2024

Thread Of Notes

Saturday assorted links

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, […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/saturday-assorted-links-571.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Yesterday

A natural experiment in economics

To study whether and how academics respond to political pressure, we exploit a natural experiment: the publication in early 2025 of a “blacklist” of words flagged by the U.S. government. We find that the release of this list led to a sharp reduction in the use of these flagged words among economists at universities that […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/a-natural-experiment-in-economics.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Yesterday

Crypto markets in everything? (moo)

Farmers in Parana, Brazil, struggling to get banks to loan them cash, became the first to tokenize livestock and place 10 dairy milk cows’ tokens for trade on the country’s B3 national stock exchange. They generated nearly $20,000 in credit backed by their cattle, signaling the potential of tokenizing RWAs as a financing tool. The […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/crypto-markets-in-everything.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Yesterday

Talk Therapy is Speech

IJ: On Wednesday, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia struck down a D.C. law that barred therapists from other jurisdictions from doing online teletherapy visits with clients in D.C. The decision comes nearly six years after Virginia-based counselor Elizabeth Brokamp teamed up with the Institute for Justice (IJ) to file a lawsuit arguing the law violated the First Amendment. “This decision is […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/talk-therapy-is-speech.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 24

The optimal Bayesian update?

I see at least three updates one might make from the recent OAI/Hugging Face hacking incident: 1. “This happened sooner than I expected, and the story is more dramatic than I expected,” therefore I am more worried than before. 2. “This happened, and the inferior Chinese cyber-defense seems to have performed just fine,” therefore I […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-optimal-bayesian-update.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 24

What should I ask Gita Gopinath?

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her.  From Wikipedia: Gita Gopinath…is an Indian-American economist who is currently serving as the Gregory and Ania Coffey professor of Economics at Harvard University and previously served as the first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), from 21 January 2022 to 31 August 2025. Before that she also served […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/what-should-i-ask-gita-gopinath.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 23

My excellent Conversation with Andrew Graham-Dixon

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  From the episode summary: Tyler and Andrew discuss whether it was inevitable we’d rediscover Vermeer, how that vanishingly rare sect left its fingerprints all over his life, why the Met has misread its own Allegory of the Catholic Faith, whether Vermeer painted for money or pointedly refused to, where […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/my-excellent-conversation-with-andrew-graham-dixon.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 23

Solve for the equilibrium

Something that the Ukraine and Iran wars have taught me is that for a lot of countries, including very big countries, there are a small number of buildings and infrastructure components that are required for their economy to function. And in countries that aren’t protected by oceans, like the US, drones completely change everything. You […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/solve-for-the-equilibrium-19.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 22

Brazil fact of the day

Last year, the US exported $171bn of agricultural goods according to the Department of Agriculture, just $2bn more than the export total claimed by Brazil, which many analysts say has benefited from trade disruption set in train by President Donald Trump’s tariffs. With US exports falling and Brazil’s rising — they increased 6 per cent […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/brazil-fact-of-the-day-12.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 22

Wednesday assorted links

1. Balaji and Network State moving to Kazakhstan. 2. Why evolvable AI is not yet a Darwinian threat. 3. “This paper argues that societies with greater historical exposure to natural disasters are more likely to develop long-term-oriented norms that emphasize preparation, saving, and future well-being.” 4. And from Agustin: Questions that Are Rarely Asked. 5. MacroMusings […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/wednesday-assorted-links-563.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 22

An OpenAI Model Escaped Its Sandbox and Hacked Hugging Face

AI has just had what I considered to be the first truly concerning security breach. The facts, as we know them so far, are wild. On July 16, Hugging Face, a vast repository housing over a million open-source AI models and data, announced in a blog post: Earlier this week, we detected and responded to […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/an-openai-model-escaped-its-sandbox-and-hacked-hugging-face.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 22

Alec Stapp on the new Science report from Michael Kratsios

Major new report from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Five things in the report I really liked: 1. Proposes metascience units as a way to advance experimentation in science agencies. IFP recommended OSTP take this forward in our response to a 2025 RFI. 2. Advocates for a portfolio approach to federal […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/alec-stapp-on-the-new-science-report-from-michael-kratsios.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 22

Tuesday assorted links

1. White on Hutt’s macro. 2. Are LLMs obsessed with Japan? 3. Princeton University art museum gets landmark gift of Haitian paintings. 4. “Sight unseen” — the revenge of asymmetric information.  But was it a good buy? 5. “Democratic types would give up about $210,000 and Republican types about $100,000 in annual partner income to […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/tuesday-assorted-links-578.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 21

The economic effects of GLP-1s

We estimate the causal impacts of GLP-1 treatment on labor market outcomes using linked Danish administrative data and a matched stacked difference-in-differences design. We compare patients who initiate GLP-1 treatment during the first two years of Semaglutide availability to observably similar patients who initiate four years later. We find that GLP-1 treatment reduces long-term sickness […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-economic-effects-of-glp-1s.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 21

Is America ruled by an oligarchy?

Any time you hear claims about American government, a sanity-inducing response is to ask whether they also are true of state and local governments.  Here is an excerpt from my latest piece at The Free Press: First, in people’s daily lives, they typically interact with their state and local governments more than with the feds. […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/is-america-ruled-by-an-oligarchy.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 21

Words of wisdom on Chinese AI and our responses

The strategy for China is obvious: commoditize your complements. Note that Xi explicitly ties openness to AI “moving from the digital world into the physical world”; the physical world is the world dominated by China, and the country’s lead in areas like robotics is going to massively benefit from widely available AI models. Along the […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/words-of-wisdom-on-chinese-ai-and-our-responses.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 20

Monday assorted links

1. “In all three countries, declining places displayed higher animosity prior to salient populist campaigns.”  In their tweets. 2. Sunstein on Hayek and conservatism. 3. Jacobian conjecture proved false.  Fable found a counterexample that fits inside a tweet.  From the strawberry guy: “in the areas that the labs are targeting, we’ve achieved artificial super intelligence. […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/monday-assorted-links-569.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 20

Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan (that was then, this is now)

It is fun to watch/rewatch this 1990 movie circa 2026.  It is about New York City debutantes (CT and the Hamptons too), and how they interact with each other.  The movie is set a bit earlier in time, perhaps in the mid-1980s, though some scenes hearken back to the 1970s.  Of course there is no […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/whit-stillmans-metropolitan-that-was-then-this-is-now.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 20

Democrats are more politically segregated than are Republicans

We estimate the extent of workplace political segregation in the United States by merging data covering over 45 million workers. We present four main findings. First, partisans are segregated by workplace. The average Democrat’s coworkers are 11.7 percentage points (pp; 95% confidence interval (CI) [10.6, 12.8]) more Democratic than the average Republican’s. After controlling for […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/democrats-are-more-politically-segregated-than-are-republicans.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 20

Emergent Ventures winners, 56th cohort

Audrey London, Los Angeles, to write a book on water in California. Seyi Oluwasanmi, London, to bring Brits to SF to learn tech. Thomas Haferlach, Berlin, payments and compute layer for the long tail of AI apps. Juan Ramón Egea Fernández, Andalusia, tech. Teo Spiro, Israel, AI and biology. Amitav Krishna, suburban Ontario, 14, quantum. […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/emergent-ventures-winners-56th-cohort.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 20

Markets in everything?

Peter Brook‘s five-hour-plus film adaptation of “The Mahabharata” is set for a BFI Blu-ray release on Aug. 10, presented in high definition from a new 4K restoration of the 1989 production. The release centres on the triptych version of the film, running 332 minutes, which sits between Brook’s three-hour cinema cut and the six-hour television version he shot […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/markets-in-everything-78.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 19

Sunday assorted links

1. Female promotions and the academic pipeline. 2. NEW MONKEYS. 3. Those new service sector jobs — “One nanny isn’t cutting it anymore. Some parents are spending upward of $250,000 on teams for their children. Luxury services offer potty-training, baby chefs and bike-riding lessons.”  (WSJ). 4. There some English people with the name “Ralph” who […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/sunday-assorted-links-576.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 19

Building luxury homes is good for the poor

Tej Parikh writing in the FT: …high-end developments unlock long housing chains. As higher-income households move into newly built units, they free up older properties, raising supply and slashing prices for middle- and lower-end housing through a process known as filtering. Numerous international studies underscore this positive ripple effect. One published last year tracked households […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/building-luxury-homes-is-good-for-the-poor.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 19

How does social media change people?

I would not trust the results of this (or any) paper on this topic very much, but it is good to see some inquiry along different dimensions than the usual: Past research explored the beneficial and harmful effects of social media (SM), but no study has investigated how SM might change people’s identities. Authors suggest […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/how-does-social-media-change-people.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 19

Trial Lawyers Lobby Against Autonomous Vehicles

Roughly 37,000–40,000 Americans die in auto accidents every year. We now have large‑scale, real‑world evidence—from Waymo and a joint analysis with Swiss Re—that driverless operations can be substantially safer than matched human driving within their current operating domains. The latest data show that over 220 million miles driven, Waymo vehicles–in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/trial-lawyers-lobby-against-autonomous-vehicles.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 18

What should I ask Luis Garicano?

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him.  From Wikipedia: Luis Garicano Gabilondo (pronounced [ˈlwis ɣaɾiˈkano]; born 1967) is a Spanish economist and politician who was a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 2019 to 2022. He was also vice president of Renew Europe and vice president of the European political party Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/what-should-i-ask-luis-garicano.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 18

The small business boom

Across the country, founders like Ms. Winkler are powering an entrepreneurial renaissance. Jump-started by the pandemic, when a confluence of factors including mass layoffs and remote work led to a flood of business creation, and supercharged by the rise of artificial intelligence, start-up activity is booming after a decades-long slump. Americans filed 5.7 million applications last […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-small-business-boom.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 18

The Odyssey, the movie (no real spoilers)

I can’t say I loved it.  The Circe scene was excellent, Cyclops was good, and the battles in Troy were well done.  But most of the roles were miscast.  I like Matt Damon, but he is too “Good Will Hunting” to play Odysseus.  The character did not cohere.  (Compare to Ralph Fiennes in the superior […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-odyssey-the-movie-no-real-spoilers.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 18

Cataloging Growth: A Re-Evaluation of 1900–1990

From Verónica Bäcker-Peral and Benjamin Wittenbrink of MIT: Measuring real GDP growth requires distinguishing changes in prices from changes in product quality and composition, yet systematic quality adjustment of price indexes is unavailable for much of the twentieth century. We construct a new quality-adjusted price index for U.S. consumer goods using 5.1 million product listings […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/cataloging-growth-a-re-evaluation-of-1900-1990.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 17

Why crime will decline in (most of) Brazil

The system, introduced in 2024, uses facial recognition to spot people wanted by police on São Paulo’s streets. It issues alerts and officers are dispatched to pick them up. The system can also locate people who have been reported missing, identify stolen vehicles and provide footage to police investigations. Streamed to its control room in […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/why-crime-will-decline-in-most-of-brazil.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 17

Governing agentic AI

From a new paper by Shruti Rajagopalan: AI agents now transact, publish, and act on external systems without contemporaneous human approval, creating new regulatory challenges. A growing literature has responded with proposals for legal personhood. This Article argues that personhood is neither necessary nor sufficient, shifting the question from status to enforcement. The Article first […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/governing-agentic-ai.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 16

The Equal Pay Madness Just Got Madder

In my post Equality Act 2010 I discussed the UK’s absolutely insane wage policy: In short, supply and demand have been replaced by judges and labor boards with the authority to deem which jobs are “equal” and therefore should be paid equally….No one is alleging that male and female warehouse workers were paid unequally or […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-equal-pay-madness-just-got-madder.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 16

My excellent Conversation with Chase Koch

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary: Chase and Tyler discuss if any of his father’s lessons never stuck, the guilt-trip letter his grandfather wrote three months after Charles was born, why Chase started throwing tennis matches, what Rafa’s grit taught him about stoicism, who he admired most […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/my-excellent-conversation-with-chase-koch.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 16

Those new service sector jobs

It’s 85 years since Brian O’Nolan, better known as Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen, proposed a Book Handling Agency in The Irish Times. On Sunday evening, Flann’s idea became reality. In a Berlin bar’s back room, Cabinet Magazine, a literary quarterly, assembled a crack team of white-coated literary experts to make your unread books look well-read – at […]
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/those-new-service-sector-jobs-16.html marginalrevolution.com
RSS Hunter RSS Hunter • Jul 15