~marginalrevolution | Bookmarks (552)

As most of you already know, the Trump administration through Executive Orders has taken major steps against affirmative action and also DEI.  We will see how the details play out, but each of these developments seems highly significant and not just “expressive.” Those two individuals played a decisive role in what happened, in both cases […] The post Congratulations to Christopher Rufo and Richard...

I am pleased to have been given an early look at this new project, I think in less than a year’s time many of us will be using an updated version for many ordinary tasks: “Operator is one of our first agents, which are AIs capable of doing work for you independently—you give it a […] The post OpenAI Operator research preview is now...

1. Do growth rates have to decline for aging societies? 2. Conversations with Tyler Boston meet-up. 3. ChinaTalk is expanding into Chinese AI issues. 4. Nate Silver on the zigzag of American politics. 5. Dwarkesh podcast with Adam Brown: “Bubble Universes, Black Holes, & AdS/CFT.” 6. UFO okie-dokie. 7. The politics of LLM content?  Tweet […] The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on...

Reason: In a sweeping move to overhaul Argentina’s food trade policies, Javier Milei’s administration officially deregulated food imports and exports on Monday. The reform, outlined in Decree 35/2025, seeks to boost foreign trade, cut bureaucratic red tape, and lower consumer prices. Federico Sturzenegger, head of the Ministry of Deregulation and State Transformation, explained in a post on […] The post Milei Implements Peer Approval for Food...

The NIH’s own research indicates that Pioneer Award recipients seem to produce influential, highly cited research.  But despite efforts to help younger scientists, the share of basic NIH funding going to scientists under thirty-five continues to decline.  In the 2004 fiscal year, the High-Risk, High-Reward Research program allocated about $200 million to scientists, a moderate […] The post *Abundance*, by Ezra Klein and Derek...

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary: Joe Boyd was there when Dylan went electric, when Pink Floyd was born, and when Paul Simon brought Graceland to the world. But far from being just another music industry insider, Boyd has spent decades exploring how the world’s musical traditions connect and […] The post My Conversation with the excellent Joe...

By Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato.  As you might expect, I am in synch with the basic message of this book. I received a review copy which on the front says “Tyler Cowen edition.”  There is a forward, made out to me personally and highly intelligent, relating the book to my own work.  There is […] The post *Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right...

1. Why is everyone suddenly reading Middlemarch? 2. Good thread on a great book: Revel’s Without Marx or Jesus. 3. Richard Hanania on the day one Executive Orders.  And Doug Irwin on tariffs (FT). 4. Ashley Mehra on Executive AI orders and the defense production act. 5. How many exceptional people are there? 6. The […] The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on...

The Yarvin interview in the NYTimes magazine illustrates the change in vibes, but frankly, I was bored. It’s amusing when Yarvin tweaks liberals by pointing out that FDR was an authoritarian, but Liberal Fascism did it better. More generally, much of Yarvin’s thinking is superficial. He thinks, for example, that capitalism works because firms are […] The post Democracy, Capitalism and Monarchy (Yarvin) appeared...

The 1920s immigration restrictions in the US did not affect manufacturing wages. The US immigration restrictions of the 1920s lowered the occupational standings of whites and incumbent immigrants. US counties with more immigrants excluded by the quotas of the 1920s saw increased in-migration. During the Great Black Migration of the US, black southerners moved to […] The post The 1920s immigration restrictions appeared first...

The Stargate Project is a new company which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States. We will begin deploying $100 billion immediately. This infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit […] The post The Stargate Project appeared first on...

As artificial intelligence (AI) transforms society, understanding factors that influence AI receptivity is increasingly important. The current research investigates which types of consumers have greater AI receptivity. Contrary to expectations revealed in four surveys, cross country data and six additional studies find that people with lower AI literacy are typically more receptive to AI. This lower […] The post Lower Artificial Intelligence Literacy Predicts Greater...

1. Trump repeals the Biden Executive Order on AI. 2. Artificial Intelligence Asset Pricing Models. 3. No concrete news on tariffs is good news. 4. Less post-training on DeepSeek? And other claims about DeepSeek.  And yet further claims — ask o1 pro to explain it to you! 5. Are there national security risks to a […] The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on...

Crypto regulation is likely to change very rapidly. I expect that SAB 121 will be overturned, perhaps even today. Overturning SAB 121 wouldn’t even be controversial because, as I wrote earlier, Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate both voted to overturn SAB 121 which was saved only by Biden’s veto. Essentially, SAB 121 made […] The post Keep an Eye on Crypto Regulation...

That is a Bloomberg column of mine from about two weeks ago.  I thought it would make more sense to people if I did not blog it right away.  Here is one bit: Now the world knows that a very high-quality AI system can be trained for a relatively small sum of money. That could […] The post What should AI policy learn from...

I’m a long-time reader and first-time emailer. I just read your blog post from earlier this month about privatizing public services like water and electric utilities. My colleague Glen Lyons and I are developing a way to introduce more competition into the electricity sector, which some believe to be hopelessly uncompetitive. The idea is to allow new, […] The post Travis Fisher on electricity privatization (from...

I was democracy-pilled by reading biographies of Franco and Salazar. The Iberian countries in the 1930’s were what every right-wing authoritarian fantasizes about: vigorous young conservative dictators firmly in charge of a country, liberals totally defeated and out of power. Both were able to stay in power for decades. The result? For a while they […] The post The case for democracy (from the...

1. Is Vietnam following some aspects of Milei? 2. Piketty and Sandel on what went wrong for the Left (NYT). 3. The wisdom of Ross Douthat: “A key paragraph in an @arisroussinos piece on Keir Starmer’s fading worldview, with applications to Canada among other nations; the attempted de-nationalization of 2nd-tier powers by their own elites actually leaves […] The post Monday assorted links appeared first on...

DeepSeek-R1 is here.  Try it — it is amazing, free and open source.  Go to the main site and press “DeepThink” for superior performance.  Marginal cost remains difficult to measure, but almost certainly far cheaper than the main models.  A big day, most of all for Africa.  Some commentary.  Here is the research paper.  Here […] The post DeepThink from DeepSeek appeared first on...

The conversation between Henry Oliver and Hollis Robbins about Atlas Shrugged as a novel is excellent. I enjoyed especially the discussion of some of the minor characters and the meaning of their story arcs. Hollis: There are some really wonderful minor characters. One of them is Cherryl Taggart, this shop girl that evil Jim Taggart meets one […] The post Atlas Shrugged as Novel appeared first...

I said that to Ezra Klein about the current rightward vibes shift.  What are some of the scenarios I had in mind?: 1. If the Republicans regulate social media companies to discriminate less against “the Right,” those regulations may someday be used against them. 2. Personal presidential issuance of crypto assets is not always (ever?) […] The post “Be careful what you wish for,...

1. “AIs exceed humans on every major creativity test we give them, like the Torrence Test, but it isn’t clear what exactly that means.”  And in Turing tests, GPT-4 is judged more human than the humans. 2. Inference Magazine, a new magazine about AI progress. 3. Determinism continues to look more plausible. 4. NYT interviews […] The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on...

In July of 2024, Tyler Cowen, the economist and cultural commentator, wrote a blog post that proved to be among the election’s most prescient. It was titled “The change in vibes — why did they happen?” Cowen’s argument was that mass culture was moving in a Trumpian direction. Among the tributaries flowing into the general shift: the […] The post Ezra Klein on the vibe shift...

The results of the randomized evaluation, soon to be published, reveal overwhelmingly positive effects on learning outcomes. After the six-week intervention between June and July 2024, students took a pen-and-paper test to assess their performance in three key areas: English language—the primary focus of the pilot—AI knowledge, and digital skills. Students who were randomly assigned […] The post More on the AI virtual tutor...