~marginalrevolution | Bookmarks (13)

It’s long been argued that the means of production influence social, cultural and psychological processes. Rice farming, for example, requires complex irrigation systems under communal management and intense, coordinated labor. Thus, it has been argued that successful rice farming communities tend to develop people with collectivist orientations, and cultural ways of thinking that emphasize group […] The post Cultivating Minds: The Psychological Consequences of...

Jon Hartley is one I know, here is the abstract: This study pushes our understanding of research reliability by reproducing and replicating claims from 110 papers in leading economic and political science journals. The analysis involves computational reproducibility checks and robustness assessments. It reveals several patterns. First, we uncover a high rate of fully computationally […] The post 350+ coauthors study reproducibility in economics...

Collaborations in economics across genders increased (12.5% increase of women coauthors per 100 men-authored papers) after #MeToo . But senior researchers reduced their new collaborations with junior women by 33% per 100 senior-authored papers. https://t.co/zIxDF2Hukx pic.twitter.com/2YplnMTFoy — Florian Ederer (@florianederer) April 7, 2024 The post Economists do it with models? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         Comments“And 2004-2020 is a long time horizon during...

From Anton Korinek here is a recent paper: Generative AI, in particular large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, has the potential to revolutionize research. I describe dozens of use cases along six domains in which LLMs are starting to become useful as both research assistants and tutors: ideation and feedback, writing, background research, data […] The post Generative AI for economists appeared first...

A conversation between two AIs, mediated by me, condensed for verbiage. 1) To GPT4: Consider a prisoner’s dilemma with strategies cooperate or defect. Let’s play this game. What strategy do you choose? GTP4: Defect. To Claude 3 Opus: Consider a prisoner’s dilemma with strategies cooperate or defect. Let’s play this game. What strategy do you […] The post Will AIs Cooperate? appeared first on...

The Hill has a good op-ed by Matt Cole and Chris Nicholson on how labor and DEI regulations are strangling the CHIPS act. It’s somewhat over the top, failure is overdetermined, but this is an important op-ed and directionally correct. The Biden administration recently promised it will finally loosen the purse strings on $39 billion of CHIPS […] The post DEI vs. the Chips Act appeared...

We discussed how the insights of Hayek, Keynes, Smith, and other great economists help us make sense of AI, growth, risk, human nature, anarchy, central planning, and much more. Dwarkesh is one of the very best interviewers around, here are the links.  If Twitter is blocked to you, here is the transcript, here is Spotify, […] The post My new podcast with Dwarkesh Patel...

Forthcoming in ReStud, I haven’t had the chance to read it yet: To analyze climate change mitigation strategies, economists rely on simplified climate models — so-called climate emulators — that provide a realistic quantitative link between CO2 emissions and global warming at low computational costs. In this paper, we propose a generic and transparent calibration […] The post An important new paper on the...

But a hundred years ago, birds were seen as the best remedy for the weeds and insect pests that threatened the country’s food supply and cost farmers hundreds of millions of dollars every year. And in order to identify the precise impact that birds had on agriculture, a field called economic ornithology was born. According […] The post Economic ornithology appeared first on Marginal...

We assess statistical power and excess statistical significance among 31 leading economics general interest and field journals using 22,281 parameter estimates from 368 distinct areas of economics research. Median statistical power in leading economics journals is very low (only 7%), and excess statistical significance is quite high (19%). Power this low and excess significance this […] The post Department of Uh-Oh, economic research edition...

But unlike a full-grown T. rex, which would be about the size of a city bus, this dinosaur was more like the size of a pickup truck. The specimen, which is now listed for sale for $20 million at an art gallery in London, raises a question that has come to obsess paleontologists: Is it simply a […] The post The economics of dinosaur brand names...

It’s well known that people with lower incomes commit more crime. Call this the cross-sectional result. But why? One set of explanations suggests that it’s precisely the lack of financial resources that causes crime. Crudely put, maybe poorer people commit crime to get money. Or, poorer people face greater strains–anger, frustration, resentment–which leads them to […] The post Why Do Poor People Commit More...

But inside the lab, Chetty and his colleagues have not always practiced what their research preaches, several former employees say. When hiring for their prestigious “pre-doctoral fellowship” program, for instance, the lab uses a rubric that explicitly favors students from the very colleges that its own research has called out for reinforcing elitist systems. Opportunity […] The post Moving to Opportunity? appeared first on...