Donald Trump wants to create Freedom Cities. It’s a good idea. As I wrote in 2008, the Federal Government owns more than half of Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Alaska and it owns nearly half of California, Arizona, New Mexico and…

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New paper in Science, A single mutation in bovine influenza H5N1 hemagglutinin switches specificity to human receptors. If that isn’t clear enough, here is the editor’s summary: In 2021, a highly pathogenic influenza H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b virus was detected in North…

Info finance is Vitalik Buterin’s term for combining things like prediction markets and news. Indeed, a prediction market like Polymarket is “a betting site for the participants and a news site for everyone else.” Here’s an incredible instantiation of the idea…

Today on the MR Podcast Tyler and I discuss the “New Monetary Economics”. Here’s the opening TABARROK: Today we’re going to be talking about the new monetary economics. Now, perhaps the first thing to say is that it’s not new anymore. The…

The case is straightforward: Google pays firms like Apple billions of dollars to make its search engine the default. (N.B. I would rephrase this as Apple charges Google billions of dollars to make its search engine the default–a phrasing which matters…

Zeynep Tufekci writing in the NYTimes hits the nail on the head: The H5N1 avian flu, having mutated its way across species, is raging out of control among the nation’s cattle, infecting roughly a third of the dairy herds in California…

Max T. at Maximum Progress shows that between 1992 and 2003 US literacy rates fell dramatically within every single educational category but the aggregate literacy rate didn’t budge.  A great example of Simpson’s Paradox! The easiest way to see how this is…