Okay this is sick pic.twitter.com/IUv29cLIeA — Daniel (@growing_daniel) September 28, 2023

The paper, by David J. Winter and Manuela Kiehl, is titled “Long-term Macroeconomic Effects of Shifting Temperature Anomaly Distributions.”  I’ve posted a few papers showing results like “5 to 10 percent of global gdp by 2100” (try here and here), and…

Greater price transparency doesn’t have to cost much money upfront, as most of what is required is attention. A critical majority of Americans — including doctors, patients, politicians, media and hospital board members — needs to insist on this outcome. And…

Have you ever visited a bookshop and noticed that a cover caught your attention in just the right way?  But then you say “Nah, I don’t want to read a book right now on that topic.”  But then you crack open…

“Today, a column of tanks or a column of advancing troops can be discovered in three to five minutes and hit in another three minutes. The survivability on the move is no more than 10 minutes,” said Maj. Gen. Vadym Skibitsky,…

1. On the need for German supply-side reforms. 2. BAP on Argentina. 3. LLMs are a new kind of operating system (duh). 4. A chain of comments on Amazon. 5. “Sweden is considering using its military to help police in the…

Here are the paper highlights: Women in same-sex couples commute longer to their workplace and work more hours than women in different-sex couples. Men in same-sex couples instead exhibit shorter commutes and work fewer hours than men in different-sex couples. These disparities are larger among married couples with children.…

That is the first sentence of their abstract, here is the rest: To explain this puzzling phenomenon, we develop a theory linking internal migration, localized social institutions (e.g., family and friend networks), and voters’ preferences for social insurance. We start with…

Canada is pushing the United States and other major economies to follow through on pledges to phase out “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies, which have soared despite the growing threat of climate change. Such subsidies hit records last year, according to several…

1. Presale link for the new Coleman Hughes book. 2. The Fish and Wildlife Service constraint on SpaceX. 3. “Proprietor Israel Mizrahi is quite familiar with the shocked look on your face.” 4. Branko here is speaking more truth than he…

This paper describes the response of the economy to large shocks in a nonlinear production network. A sector’s tail centrality, measures how a large negative shock transmits to GDP – i.e. the systemic risk of the sector. Tail centrality is theoretically…

From a new NBER working paper: Infrastructure costs in the United States are high and rising. The procurement process is one potential cost driver. In this paper we conduct a survey of procurement practices across the 50 states. We survey both…

I won’t double indent, here is the email: ““Whatever It Is, I’m Against It,” Resistance to Change in Higher Education (Harvard Education Press; September 26, 2023; Price: $38.00), is a relentlessly frank look at higher education from the perspective of a long-time…

This is absolutely insane. TAMU was probably one of the most conservative flagship state universities in the nation https://t.co/z3yVLvoe7I — constans (@constans) September 25, 2023

1. Burkey Belser, RIP. 2. Why is multilateralism in the tax sphere surviving when multilateralism is collapsing elsewhere? 3. The U.S. effects of banning cousin marriage. 4. I am not convinced, but here is an argument that AI will lead to…

In the mid-1980s manufacturing accounted for a third of Brazil’s gdp; now it represents just 10%. The country’s surplus in manufacturing trade, $6bn in 2005, became a deficit of $108bn by 2019. Productivity in manufacturing and services has stagnated or shrunk.…

Dan Rivera, South Carolina, FavorPiedmont, addiction recovery and treatment. Lukas Bogacz, Utrecht/South Africa, to start a company based on fine-tuning LLMs. Brian Wang, MIT, Panoplia Laboratories, for DNA-based pan-virus vaccine research. Gabriel Abrams, Washington, D.C., Sidwell (high school), LLMs and economic…

1. The Reversal Curse (LLMs). 2. Crows use statistical logic. 3. The AI skeptics are starting to go a little quiet. 4. The crisis in UK universities (WSJ). 5. The wisdom of Larry Summers, recommended.  YouTube here. 6. US capital is…

I will be doing a Conversation with him.  Patrick is a phenomenon of the modern age.  He writes the excellent Bits About Money, which focuses on money, banking, payments, and more. His blog is Kalzumeus.  He has lived most of his…

I take it this is good news?  Or will it arrive too slowly? The interest rate has been falling for centuries.  a process of natural selection that leads to increasing societal patience is key to explaining this decline.  Three observations support…

I won’t do double indentation, but this is all from Rick from Baltimore: “In your post today, you cite to an interview you gave in which you describe the negative effects of children growing up with one parent and state that…

1. “Decline in Independent Activity as a Cause of Decline in Children’s Mental Well-being.” 2. “We find that annual suicide attempts increased by 16%, or 5 attempts per 100k capita, after the enactment of [Polish] anti-LGBT statutes.” 3. Time preferences and…

Lower-income people are more lonely Jiska Cohen-Mansfield did a literature review with Haim Hazan, Yaffa Lerman, and Vera Shalom of the statistical correlates of loneliness in older adults and found that being low-income is a strong correlate of loneliness. You see the same…

Percentage of 12th graders who have a driver’s license, who’ve ever tried alcohol, who ever go on dates, and who worked for pay at any point during the last school year. https://t.co/wBtK4YTIkX pic.twitter.com/LeGIA7wWMB — Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) September 23, 2023

Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Eujin Jung report on what has worked and what has not: Industrial policy is making a comeback in the United States. It is more urgent than ever to understand how and whether industrial policy has worked to…

By Rohit Krishnan, due out on Kindle October 25, very likely a good book for policymakers, I have just pre-ordered.

“Robots can’t replace senior clerics, but they can be a trusted assistant that can help them issue a fatwa in five hours instead of 50 days,” said Mohammad Ghotbi, who heads a state-linked organisation in Qom that encourages the growth of…

That is the new book by Costin Alamariu, who also has self-identified as the very famous BAP.  It is a published version of his Yale doctoral dissertation on political theory.  It has been selling very well. It still comes across as…

Yes, in short: Is GPT psychologically WEIRD? Using the World Values Survey and other psych measures, we seat GPT within a global perspective. The culturally more distant a place is from the US, the lower the correlation with GPT @MohammadAtari90 @blasi_lang…

1. The Dean Karlan plan for fixing USAID. 2. David Salle tutors an AI in how to make art (NYT). 3. Jellyfish evidence that “thinking/learning” goes on at the cellular level (NYT). 4. If the federal government shuts down, members of…

Cara Fitzgerald, The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America, is quite a good and also objective book. Florian Illies, Love in a Time of Hate: Art and Passion in the Shadow of War.  Take…

For youth below the age of eighteen: High: District of Columbia Alaska Arkansas Idaho Maine Montana New Hampshire (the highest) Low: Florida (least) Alabama Mississippi South Carolina New Jersey That is from Liu, Zhou, Cheng, and Vengeepuram, discussed earlier here.  Extra…

North Carolina’s budget for the new biennium would expand school choice across the state to an unprecedented level. The budget, slated for votes Thursday morning, would enlarge the piggybank for the Opportunity Scholarship Program — the state’s voucher that enables families…

Einstein believed that mentors are especially influential in a protégé’s intellectual development, yet the link between mentorship and protégé success remains a mystery. We marshaled genealogical data on nearly 40,000 scientists who published 1,167,518 papers in biomedicine, chemistry, math, or physics…

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt: Economists have once again entered the fray, this time with a study that tries to determine how patience is correlated with better educational outcomes. The results are impressive, albeit unsettling.…

1. Claims about weddings.  And a romance (NYT).

While some assert that social identities have become more salient in American media coverage, existing evidence is largely anecdotal. An increased emphasis on social identities has important political implications, including for polarization and representation. We first document the rising salience of…

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary: Lazarus Lake is a renowned ultramarathon runner and designer. His most famous creation (along with his friend Raw Dog) is the Barkley Marathons, an absurdly difficult 100-mile race through…

The Heritage Foundation announced today that Harvard University professors Robert Barro, Ph.D., and Rachel McCleary, Ph.D., will join the organization in September. Barro will serve as a distinguished fellow in economic thought and McCleary will be a senior visiting fellow in…

Sweden looks set to miss its legislated climate targets, the latest sign of how combating global warming is slipping down the policy agenda. The nation — the first globally to set a milestone target for net zero emissions — won’t reach…

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt: The decision offers some important lessons about regulation. First, sometimes an outright ban is better than charging owners or users a fee, or what economists call Pigou taxes. Under…