Adrián Lucardi writes to me, addressing yesterday’s question of why more currencies are not nominally stronger than the USD: Short answer: costly to implement; few direct (political or macroeconomic) benefits if things go well; but politically costly if things turn sour. Long…
Rob asks: I would love to see you write on how AI changes the value of language learning, at the margin. Two thoughts: The value of learning languages in order to “get” a culture more deeply probably doesn’t change much. On…
The currencies from Kuwait and Bahrain and Grand Cayman are more valuable than the U.S. dollar, the British pound, and the euro usually if not always as of late. Why aren’t more currencies greater in nominal value? True, nominal variables should…
1. Does quantum entanglement enable mechanisms that guarantee PD cooperation? 2. Building the Empire State Building. 3. Enter Inspector Gadget, and Wilkie Collins. 4. FT dialogue with Brad DeLong. 5. The other AEA — Actors’ Equity Association — lifted mask mandates…
Happy Thanksgiving! The painter’s name is…George Mason, further explanation here.
Lord Triesman: I will tell the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, that at Cambridge University, after the faculty of economics was redecorated, I was inveigled into taking part in a debate as to the order in which the portraits of its Nobel…
Behind the links are sometimes but not always my longer reviews. The list is (mostly) in the order I read them. Here goes: Markus Friedrich, The Jesuits: A History. Barbara Bloemink, Florine Stettheimer: A Biography. Anna Keay, The Restless Republic: Britain…
We introduce a model of the admissions process based upon standard agency theory and explore its implications with economics PhD admissions data from 2013-2019. We show that a subjective score that aggregates subjective ratings and recommendation letter features plays a more…
Except that the claim generates virtually no controversy. I argue that moral comparisons are possible only within the “cone” of an episode of (potentially) sustainable economic growth. So you can compare a growth-maximizing policy to a non-growth-maximizing policy, and judge the…
An MR reader request: You are appointed to the 24 DeSantis cabinet with the task of “fixing the administrative state”. Republicans have a very large Congressional majority. What do you try to do? I will outsource this one to James Broughel,…
Here is one answer (to a slightly different question) from Reddit: Asia Minor/Anatolia might be the region which have seen most empires. For example: Akkadians, Hittites, Persians, Alexander’s Empire, Seleucids, Roman Empire, Parthians, Byzantine Empire, Sassanids, Arabians, Seljuks, Mongols and Ottomans.…
With translations from foreign fiction and also differing publication dates in the UK, it is hard to classify some of these. But they are of recent vintage, I did read them in 2022, and I found them rewarding: Olga Tokarczuk, The…
I will be doing a Conversation with the author, not the actor: Thomas Holland FRSL (born 5 January 1968) is an English author who has published best-selling books on topics including classical and medieval history and the origins of Islam. He…
Extreme numbers are getting some new names (there is no great stagnation): By the 2030s, the world will generate around a yottabyte of data per year — that’s 1024 bytes, or the amount that would fit on DVDs stacked all the way…
European regions where the % of religious people is much higher than the rest of the country. pic.twitter.com/eHd14D2hAl — Xavi Ruiz (@xruiztru) November 18, 2022 Via Fergus.
1. The future AI stack? 2. A defense of TikTok. 3. Qatar bans beer at the World Cup (NYT). 4. Paris is banning e-scooters? Would the FDA approve them? 5. Future Fund and clawback issues with grants, noting that I see…
The digital alerts that debuted on Garden State highway signs last month may have displayed a bit too much Jersey attitude. As of Wednesday afternoon, messages such as “Get your head out of your apps” and “mash potatoes — not your…
That is the topic of my Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt: To the extent crypto clearinghouses and exchanges have a future, they too will be regulated, and this is all the more certain after the FTX fiasco. Then the question…
It is striking to me that some of the biggest critics of FTX — “They stole people’s crypto!” — are exactly the same people who want to see crypto disappear, regulate it out of existence, or otherwise stunt it, in all…
That is the title of the paper at least, here is the abstract: It is widely assumed that thinking is independent of language modality because an argument is either logically valid or invalid regardless of whether we read or hear it.…
Have you ever visited Zagreb, Ljubljana, or Bratislava, and noticed how boring they are? They still feel like backwaters, not the national capitals they are. That is no accident, because they “grew up” under the Habsburg monarchy and in the Austro-Hungarian…
The Center for Strategic Translation translates and annotates material of strategic and historical value that currently exists only in the Chinese language. Of great import.
Here is the transcript, audio, and video. Here is part of the episode summary: Ken joined Tyler to discuss how facial expressions in photos have changed over time, where in the American past he’d like to visit most, the courage of…
The required recapitalization of the NHS is a major pending expenditure, and it is not playing a sufficiently large role in budget discussions. The system was never as cheap as it looked, and now the bill is coming due. If you…
Here they are, so many figures well-known to MR readers. The Peter Thiel talk was quite interesting, you can think of it as his concessions to Greta, with a new twist on the great stagnation and its causes. My ten-minute talk…
The author is John Higgs, and the subtitle is Bond, the Beatles and the British Psyche. I loved this book, and reading it induced me to order the author’s other books, the ultimate compliment. It is not for everyone, nor is…
The authors are Iain S. Thomas and Jasmine Wang, here is one excerpt: What is the proper response to suffering? If this life is all there is, then the proper response to suffering is to embrace it and be transformed by…
A second problem with the Keynesian recommendations is that governments did not do enough to build up surpluses in good times. Many governments therefore are running out of fiscal space, or at least markets perceive that to be the case. Even…
More than one MR reader has requested this post, so here goes: Rises Common-sense morality Common-sense investing rules American corporate governance Boards, and nervousness about related-party transactions Coinbase Seen as stodgy and bloated for much of the past year. But run…
I am interested in Danil Dmitriev’s job market paper from UCSD: How should one incentivize creativity when being creative is costly? We analyze a model of delegated bandit experimentation where the principal desires the agent to constantly switch to new arms…
The author is Ha-Joon Chang, and the subtitle is A Hungry Economist Explains the World. This is an economics of food book with a Korean emphasis, and arguing in favor of protectionism and industrial policy, in line with the author’s earlier…
Here is one MR comment that illustrates my point: How noble—stealing people’s life savings to increase African birth rates, navel-gaze about AI risk, make cows happier, and all the other nonsense. Mostly a bunch of lost, hideous people with terrible moral…
Hardly anyone associated with Future Fund saw the existential risk to…Future Fund, even though they were as close to it as one could possibly be. I am thus skeptical about their ability to predict existential risk more generally, and for systems…
No. To be clear, I am not “an EA person,” though I do have sympathies with considerable parts of the movement. Most of all it has struck me, as I have remarked in the past, just how much young talent the…
I’ve been asking people that question for years, here is the best answer I have found so far: We argue that cross-national variability in homicide rates is strongly influenced by state history. Populations living within a state are habituated, over time,…
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt: The upshot is that there is a tendency for members of a clearinghouse to either a) fail to meet standards and go bust, or b) join or least…
We discuss talent and also the NBA.
I won’t indent: COWEN: I have some crypto questions for you. Is there, in fact, any way to coherently regulate stablecoins? I see what the proposals say: It’s all about capital requirements, deposit insurance, treat it as a bank account, like a new…
Performative populism has begun to ebb. Twitter doesn’t have the hold on the media class it had two years ago. Peak wokeness has passed. There seem to be fewer cancellations recently, and less intellectual intimidation. I was a skeptic of the…
They do about an hour with me…I recall telling Niall he is being a bit too pessimistic…
One of the best biographies of any economist, covers anything you might wish to know, and with conceptual understanding. This is a fantastic book and I am eagerly awaiting volume II. Mini-excerpt: Hayek [at LSE] never really liked Mannheim, whom he…
This paper studies the long-run effects of slavery and Jim Crow on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. We trace each Black family’s linked census and administrative records between 1850 and 2000 to measure how long they were enslaved and where they lived…
Read their letter here. Via Matt Y.
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. Here is the basic idea: Say the price of oil is $100 per barrel, and extraction costs Russia $50 per barrel. The profit on that oil is $50 per barrel. Now assume…
I think I forgot to mention this when they won the Nobel Prize. In their model of bank runs, there are multiple equilibria and people can run on the bank simply if they expect other depositors will run on the bank…
Teenage mental health has been a source of growing concern over the past decade, with recent whistleblower testimony pointing to the mental health risks of spending time on social media platforms, especially for girls. This paper investigates the extent to which…