From my email: I will be in Singapore soon. Do you have any up-to-date recommendations? I notice there is this old post: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/12/how-to-visit-singapore.html Comments are open…

1. Who maintains the scaffolding of freedom? 2. The Trenton bridge is older than I had thought — 1806 — but the famous sign dates from 1935. 3. How a collector stole thousands of butterflies from Australian museums. 4. Does AI favor more senior hires? 5. More on the Faroe Islands. 6. How much does […]

From David Perell and Cultural Tutor, a preview of a longer film to come:

Theory tells us that, and the empirics tell us that too: Our study examines the claim that share repurchases lead to reductions in real investments. Repurchase opponents argue that managers forego valuable investments to conduct opportunistic repurchases, while proponents argue that repurchases return excess cash to shareholders. We compare repurchasing firms’ real investments in capital […]

Nearly 400,000 Black men were drafted into the National Army during World War I, where they toiled primarily as menial laborers in segregated units. Leveraging novel variation from the WWI draft lottery and millions of digitized military and NAACP records, we document the pioneering role these men played in the early civil rights movement. Relative […]

1. For different states, where the main immigrant group comes from. 2. NBA rookies do worse when they end up on very good teams. 3. Yale Budget Lab study claims AI is not having much of an effect on labor markets. 4. Twenty-five questions university presidents, provosts, and deans need to be asking themselves. 5. […]

For every Singaporean who has left Christianity, about three others have become Christians. About 3.2 in fact, if you look at the exact numbers.  Buddhism in Japan and South Korea is being depopulated, also.  Here is the Pew piece on defections from religions.

The Marginal Revolution Podcast is back and this time Tyler and I discuss some of our favorite models or ways of thinking about the world. We begin with Spence on Monopolies, Harberger on Incidence and Solow on Growth. Here’s one bit: TABARROK: You have an increase in the corporate tax. What happens? COWEN: One lesson of the […]

In an adversarial collaboration, two preregistered U.S.-based studies (total N = 6181) tested three hypotheses regarding the relationship between political ideology and belief rigidity (operationalized as less evidence-based belief updating): rigidity-of-the-right, symmetry, and rigidity-of-extremes. Across both studies, general and social conservatism were weakly associated with rigidity (|b| ~ .05), and conservatives were more rigid than liberals (Cohen’s d ~ .05). Rigidity generally had […]

Vivek Kommi, 16, London, Extend healthy human lifespan by hacking the neuroimmune axis. Adam Essemaali, northern Italy, 16, a new platform. Rushil Kukreja and co-workers, northern Virginia, high school, devices to see through walls. Sheehan Quirke, also known as The Cultural Tutor, London, work with David Perell, on why beauty has disappeared in the modern […]

1. Costco to sell GLP-1s at a significant discount. 2. What Frederick Douglass learned in Ireland. 3. How the early Standard Oil business model worked. 4. In praise of the Faroe Islands. 5. More Scott Sumner movie reviews.  When I describe Scott as the best movie reviewer in the world today, what I mean is […]

Announcement here, congratulations!

To provide some sense of scale, that means the equivalent of about $1,800 per person in America will be invested this year on A.I. Here is more from Natasha Sarin at the NYT.

Paul Krugman has a recent post defending the exchange subsidies and tax credits that the Republicans wish to cut, talking with Jonathan Cohn about the “premium apocalypse” (and here).  Whether or not one agrees with Krugman normatively, the arguments if anything convince me that Obamacare probably is not financially or politically stable. To recap some […]

1.  “Accurately accounting for that misreporting may reduce rather than increase top shares of income.” 2. Marc Rowan and the universities (NYT). 3. “Book people are going to be incensed by this, but I often listen while I am playing speed chess. I also often listen somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5x.” 4. Insights about Singapore […]

Virginia saw one of the smallest increases in electricity costs in the nation this past year, per new federal data, but it could get even higher as data centers proliferate statewide… By the numbers: Between May 2024 and May 2025, the average cost of electricity for residential customers in Virginia rose about 3%, from 14.95 cents to […]

The tiny country of Anguilla (pop 15,000) has an official country top-level domain code for the internet of .ai. Domain name registrations have surged from 48,000 in 2018 to 870,000 in the year to date and that source of revenue alone now accounts for nearly 50% of state revenues. Hat tip: Cremieux

Jonathan Swift tried to exorcise ­Baconian Antichrist-worship from England. Gulliver’s Travels agreed with New Atlantis on one point: The ancient hunger for knowledge of God had competition from the modern thirst for knowledge of science. In this quarrel between ancients and moderns, Swift sided with the former. Gulliver’s Travels takes us on four voyages to fictional countries bearing scandalous […]

1. Jonathan Ross podcast.  While Jonathan is doing very, very well, he remains underrated. 2. Colombia vs. “Brayan” (NYT). 3. Do the Abundance types favor cutting the capital gains tax on homes, to improve housing reallocation? 4. Can a Waymo get a ticket? 5. Estate sale with beautiful Philly town home and 100,000 books. 6. […]

Today, we introduce Periodic Labs. Our goal is to create an AI scientist. Science works by conjecturing how the world might be, running experiments, and learning from the results. Intelligence is necessary, but not sufficient. New knowledge is created when ideas are found to be consistent with reality. And so, at Periodic, we are building […]

It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline, according to an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries carried out for the FT by the digital audience insights company GWI. And this is not just the […]

Türkiye’s response to post-pandemic inflation is a cautionary tale of how political pressure for low interest rates can create macroeconomic instabilities. While central banks worldwide raised interest rates to combat inflation in 2021-2023, Turkish authorities pursued the opposite strategy: cutting real rates to deeply negative levels while implementing financial engineering tools, FX interventions, and financial […]

Here is part of the abstract, I will not ask who or what wrote this: We focus on the hiring context, where job applicants often rely on LLMs to refine resumes, while employers deploy them to screen those same resumes. Using a large-scale controlled resume correspondence experiment, we find that LLMs consistently prefer resumes generated […]

1. How many legal moves can a reachable chess position have? 2. French guy with opinions visits the UC salaries website. 3. Sam H. on LDS. 4. The job market for economists is weakening. 5. Climate advocacy should focus more on the hard problems. 6. Noah Smith, libertarian. 7. The AI productivity index, with Sunstein, […]