Recent articles
May 11, 2026
Trust the Markets, Not the Headlines
Despite the Iran war, economic fundamentals justify a rising market, writes Tyler Cowen.
www.thefp.com
May 10, 2026
USA sectoral shift fact of the day
Healthcare and Social Assistance have added nearly 1.8 million private-sector jobs in the US since the end of 2023 while all of other industries combined have lost 127,800 jobs. Here is the source ...
marginalrevolution.com
May 10, 2026
Sunday assorted links
1. What should be our Bayesian priors on von Neumann probes? 2. AI book mirrors. 3. Why power in Spain is so cheap. 4. The comments on Mick West here are pretty tough. We still do not know what it...
marginalrevolution.com
May 10, 2026
Will AI kill the research paper?
Imagine taking a macroeconomics paper and adding a little button at the end “Press this button to update this paper with the latest macro data.” All of a sudden you have multiple papers rather than...
marginalrevolution.com
May 10, 2026
Which are the most common everyday phenomena that we don’t properly understand?
Off the top of my head: • Lightning (how does it happen?) • Sleep; dreams (why do they exist?) • Glass (thermodynamics of formation) • Turbulence (when does it start?) • Morphogenesis (how does a c...
marginalrevolution.com
May 10, 2026
Saturday assorted links
1. Do chatbots ever follow the interests of advertisers? 2. Approaching the Star Trek universal translator. 3. Jon Haidt response to the new cell phone study. 4. U.S. electricity prices have been f...
marginalrevolution.com
May 9, 2026
The UAP report so far
I will stick with my earlier Free Press predictions: The fact remains that, if you talk with insiders, they will confirm that the federal government faces some big mysteries. It seems that we have ...
marginalrevolution.com
May 9, 2026
Self-fulfilling misalignment?
From Anthropic: We started by investigating why Claude chose to blackmail. We believe the original source of the behavior was internet text that portrays AI as evil and interested in self-preservat...
marginalrevolution.com
May 9, 2026
The social media ban in Australia, how is it going?
In December 2025, Australia became the first country to ban youth under 16 years old from holding accounts on major social media platforms, a policy now under consideration in more than a dozen cou...
marginalrevolution.com
May 8, 2026
Friday assorted links
1. Eigenism. 2. Steven Nadler, Spinoza, Atheist. A good and very readable introduction to the Dutch philosopher. 3. Neal Katyal talk on what really won the SCOTUS tariff case. 4. “What America lac...
marginalrevolution.com
May 8, 2026
The UFO files
Here is the web site, with some of the files released, I have not yet had a chance to look or to read any reliable summaries. More releases are expected, and as of this moment the Kalshi market is...
marginalrevolution.com
May 8, 2026
A simple point about diversification
In recent times a significant percentage of the S&P 500 run-up has been driven by a small number of tech and AI stocks. Plus the effects of AI can be expected to be further reaching yet for so...
marginalrevolution.com
May 8, 2026
Sentences to ponder
Exposure increases interclass (high- and low-parent-income) marriage but has no detectable effect on interracial (White and Black) marriage. A spatial marriage market model predicts that residentia...
marginalrevolution.com
May 8, 2026
How Poverty Fell
The share of the global population living in extreme poverty fell dramatically from an estimated 36% in 1990 to 9% in 2015. We describe how this decline happened: the extent to which changes within...
marginalrevolution.com
May 7, 2026
Thursday assorted links
1. School shootings are declining quite a bit. 2. Dean Ball on the real reasons to regulate AI. 3. Noah on development economics. 4. Peter Frampton update (NYT). 5. What have we learned about human...
marginalrevolution.com
May 7, 2026
Do Americans really hate AI?
We might be heading towards a populist backlash towards AI, but we’re not there yet. Outside the tech bubble, Americans really don’t care about AI yet. AI is Americans’ 29th most important issue, a...
marginalrevolution.com
May 7, 2026
AGI Could Lower Interest Rates
Standard models predict that expectations of artificial general intelligence (AGI) should elevate long-term interest rates. I show that this prediction need not hold. I develop a heterogeneous-agen...
marginalrevolution.com
May 7, 2026
William Stanley Jevons as polymath
In the 1860s Jevons built a Logical Abacus, sometimes called a logical piano, a kind of early computer that could perform (some kinds of) logical operations faster than humans could. It is held in ...
marginalrevolution.com
May 6, 2026
Justin Wolfers update
Wolfers’s moment of clarity ultimately sent him down a road less traveled by academic economists: creating his own media company. On Wednesday, Wolfers, 53, announced that he had founded Platypus E...
marginalrevolution.com
May 6, 2026
ICE has not improved U.S. labor markets
We provide the first causal, national empirical analysis of the labor market impacts of heightened immigration enforcement during the second Trump administration. Enforcement increased everywhere, ...
marginalrevolution.com
May 6, 2026
Wednesday assorted links
1. “We find evidence of LLMs enabling people to file lawsuits without lawyers (filing “pro se”) at historically unprecedented rates in federal courts.” 2. The persistent apartheid infrastructure of...
marginalrevolution.com
May 6, 2026
Korean banana markets in everything
Did you know Korea sells “one-a-day” banana packs? Instead of every banana ripening at once, each one is at a different stage. One is ready today. The next one is ready tomorrow. The last one is st...
marginalrevolution.com
May 6, 2026
What I’ve been reading
1. David Narrett, The Cherokees in War & at Peace 1670-1840. An excellent book, one of the two best books on a single Native American tribe I have read. The book actually aims at explaining t...
marginalrevolution.com
May 5, 2026
Tuesday assorted links
1. How many buildings are “trapped buildings”? 2. Rachel Glennerster defends RCTs in development economics. 3. Why do airlines go bankrupt so often? 4. Why is southern Italy poorer than northern It...
marginalrevolution.com
May 5, 2026
The best study to date on school phone bans
Schools across the U.S. have sharply restricted student use of phones during the school day. We evaluate one type of restriction—lockable phone pouches—using nationwide data combining large-scale s...
marginalrevolution.com
May 5, 2026
Is psychotherapy underdiscussed these days? (from my email)
I listened to your recent conversation with Arthur C. Brooks and found myself struggling with his core premise. His framing of happiness seems to reduce it to something like a biological or behavio...
marginalrevolution.com
May 4, 2026
What should I ask Martha Nussbaum?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. Most of all focusing on her recent book The Republic of Love: Opera and Political Freedom. So what should I ask her?
The post What should I ask Martha...
marginalrevolution.com
May 4, 2026
Trade and the End of Antiquity
What was the role of trade, and how did economic activity evolve at the End of Antiquity, when political power shifts away from the Mediterranean towards northern Europe and the Middle East? To ans...
marginalrevolution.com
May 4, 2026
Monday assorted links
1. Ezra Klein on whether AI is likely to lead to mass unemployment (NYT). 2. There is a great Kentucky Derby stagnation. 3. Is open source AI overrated? 4. The deadweight loss of the human capital ...
marginalrevolution.com
May 4, 2026
What makes art great?
That is the title of the new and very stimulating essay by Nabeel Qureshi. It is difficult to summarize, but here is one excerpt: 2. Great art contains multiple overlapping layers of echoes. This ...
marginalrevolution.com