Marginal Revolution

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Posts

Friday assorted links

Gans and Doctorow on AI Copyright

GDPR is worse than you had thought

Agentic interactions

Thursday assorted links

Mass Incarceration and Mass Crime

Sentences to ponder

My Conversation with the excellent Gaurav Kapadia

Claims about Russian women (and men)

Wednesday assorted links

Did market power go up so much?

Australia should not ban under-16s from internet sites

Tuesday assorted links

Three Nobel lectures in economic science

Crime and the Welfare State

Quantifying human-AI synergy

Ford Madox Ford on Joseph Conrad

Does studying economics and business make students more conservative?

Monday assorted links

Political Organization in Pre-Colonial Africa

What has gone wrong with tourism to Las Vegas?

Colors of growth

The chess culture that is India

Sunday assorted links

My 2011 Review of Contagion

Planning sentences to ponder

The EU production function

A Ukrainian mathematician requests mathematical assistance

Saturday assorted links

What Tom Whitwell learned in 2025

Two things that really matter

Classical music of 2025

Friday assorted links

Welcome to the Crazy CAFE

Political pressure on the Fed

Emergent Ventures winners, 50th cohort

Abu Dhabi fact of the day

Thursday assorted links

Innovations in Health Care

South Korea fact of the day

My Conversation with the excellent Dan Wang

The importance of the internet

Wednesday assorted links

The MR Podcast: Debt!

Congressional leadership is corrupt

Pharma supply is elastic

The Dell’s add to Trump Accounts

Tuesday assorted links

The People’s Republic of Santa Monica

The myth of the $140,000 poverty line

Séb Krier

*Liberal Worlds: James Bryce and the Democratic Intellect*

Monday assorted links

Make Africa Healthy Again

Meta-analytical effect of economic inequality on well-being or mental health

Popular music of 2025

Sunday assorted links

What should I ask Harvey Mansfield?

Europe’s first elephant sanctuary

*FDR: A New Political Life*

Emergent Ventures Africa and the Caribbean, 7th cohort

Does drug interdiction work?

Saturday assorted links

Education Signaling and Employer Learning Heterogeneity

Best movies of 2025

I hope this is stupid and bad enough to change some things

*Policing on Drugs*

Friday assorted links

Against We

What I’ve been reading

What we’re grateful for

Thursday assorted links

Thanksgiving and the Lessons of Political Economy

My excellent Conversation with Cass Sunstein

Race and economic well-being in the United States

Wednesday assorted links

“Why ‘Humane’ Immigration Policy Ends in Cruelty”

Emergent Ventures India, 13th cohort

Tuesday assorted links

Why are Mormons so Libertarian?

*God’s Grandeur*

LLMs Position Themselves as More Rational Than Humans

Prediction markets in everything

Monday assorted links

I talk talent networks and mentoring and Christianity with Luke Burgis

Side-Walking Problems

What should I ask Arthur C. Brooks?

Will the most important pop stars of the future be religious pop stars?

*The Age of Disclosure*

Sunday assorted links

Enlightenment ideas and the belief in progress leading up to the Industrial Revolution

Emergent Ventures winners, 49th cohort

What is opera?

Saturday assorted links

Big, Fat, Rich Insurance Companies

I appear on the Odd Lots podcast

Best non-fiction books of 2025

Eric Hanushek on the import of schooling quality declines

Friday assorted links

Some second-order effects of unaffordable housing

Nano Banana Pro does Marginal Revolution

My very fun Conversation with Blake Scholl

Thursday assorted links

Confidently Wrong

Mexico facts of the day

American democracy is very much alive, though not in all regards well

Google Scholar Labs

Matt Yglesias on aphantasia

Wednesday assorted links

Cyprus and multiple state sovereignties

Is the AI sector currently a bubble?

Tuesday assorted links

The MR Podcast: Tariffs!

Comparing health outcomes across countries (from the comments)

Do (human) readers prefer AI writers?

John Cochrane understands the elasticity of supply

Monday assorted links

Illegal Immigrants Didn’t Break the Housing Market; Bad Policy Did

There is no great stagnation (not any more — really!)

“May I meet you?”

Sunday assorted links

Why are US Clinical Trials so Expensive?

Best fiction of 2025

Emergent Ventures winners 48th cohort

The Effect of Video Watching on Children’s Skills

Saturday assorted links

The spatial construction of Incan monies?

Was Brexit worse than we had thought?

*The Science of Second Chances*

Friday assorted links

“Some Economics of Artificial Super Intelligence”

My first trip to Tokyo

Markets in everything?

Thursday assorted links

Waymo

My Conversation with the excellent Donald S. Lopez Jr.

Prediction markets in everything? Tariff refund edition

Lô Borges, RIP

Wednesday assorted links

UCSD Faculty Sound Alarm on Declining Student Skills

Solve for the NIMBY equilibrium?

Mexico estimates of the day

Tuesday assorted links

One-Third of US Families Earn Over $150,000

European Stagnation

Old school workplace feminization

*Marked by Time*

Monday assorted links

More From Less: Optimizing Vaccine Doses

How has Japan managed its debt ratio?

In defense of Schumpeter

*Violent Saviors*

Sunday assorted links

Educational for-profit charter schools do worse in Sweden

Housing costs and fertility

Should USG support a 50-year mortgage?

The first human arrivals in the New World may have sailed from northeast Asia

Saturday assorted links

My podcast with Deutsche Bank

Emergent Ventures India, 12th cohort

Affordability sentences to ponder

Two books I hope you do not mood affiliate against

Friday assorted links

Very good sentences

What I’ve been reading

Thursday assorted links

Creative Stagnation

Here Comes the Sun—If We Let It: Cutting Tariffs and Red Tape for Rooftop Solar

The geopolitical determinants of economic growth, 1960-2019

I worry about “affordability politics”

UATX Is Ending Tuition Forever

My excellent Conversation with Sam Altman

Wednesday assorted links

Incentives matter, and supply is elastic

Track the 2025-2026 Economics Job Market

Tuesday assorted links

The MR Podcast: Our Favorite Models, Session 3: Compensating Differentials and Selective Incentives

Andrej and Dwarkesh as philosophy

Notes on Maputo (Mozambique)

The American economy is showing its flexibility

Supply is elastic, in a new and different setting

Monday assorted links

How Cultural Diversity Drives Innovation

Public housing and economic opportunity

The influence of Malthus in India?

Sunday assorted links

The business of the culture war

The cosmopolitan conservative

Observations on browsing economics job market candidates

Sentences to ponder

Saturday assorted links

David Brooks on the New Right

“Gender without Children”

Does economics make you more sexist?

Friday assorted links

Time to Privatize U.S. Air Traffic Control—Copy Canada’s Model

Why did we think wages are rigid for all those years?

*The Master of Contradictions*

Technological Change and the Market for Books, 1450-1550

Thursday assorted links

The microfoundations of the baby boom?

My Conversation with the excellent Jonny Steinberg

Noah Smith has economic ideas for Japan

Wednesday assorted links

The Game Theory of House of Dynamite

Informative jury disagreement

On a possible China deal

Tuesday assorted links

What to Watch

A new critique of RCTs

Trump and the Americas

Agustín Etchebarne on Milei and the election

Monday assorted links

Privatizing Law Enforcement: The Economics of Whistleblowing

Why did the colonists hate taxes so much?

The evolution of Albanian AI governance

What should I ask Dan Wang?

Sunday assorted links

*The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny*, now finished

Are new data centers boosting electricity prices?

What should I ask Andrew Ross Sorkin?

Saturday assorted links

Are the ACA exchanges unraveling?

Should we worry about AI’s circular deals?

Emergent Ventures India, 11th cohort

Who Pays for Tariffs Along the Supply Chain?

Friday assorted links

Prediction Markets Are Very Accurate

Some further new negative results on minimum wage hikes

The Peter Principle and exploiting overconfident workers

When will quantum computing work?

Thursday assorted links

Red Rooms, a 2023 Quebecois movie

What I’ve been reading

*Why Live: How Suicide Becomes an Epidemic*

Wednesday assorted links

Ads as cues

Podcast with Filippo Gaddo

Will there be a Coasean singularity?

Tuesday assorted links

Harvard graduate admissions

The MR Podcast: Our Favorite Models, Session 2: The Baumol Effect

Words of wisdom

How the pandemic has changed the world

Monday assorted links

The median voter model, or the Becker pressure group model?

Creative Destruction in a Nutshell

What should I ask Diarmaid MacCulloch

*Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent*

Sunday assorted links

*The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny*, by Kiran Desai

My choral music podcast with Rick Rubin

Understanding and Addressing Temperature Impacts on Mortality

Saturday assorted links

Rare Earths Aren’t Rare

Some simple economics of AI and macro cycles

The Economic Geography of American Slavery

Friday assorted links

Predicting Job Loss?

Those new service sector jobs

My excellent Conversation with George Selgin

Thursday assorted links

Rick Rubin podcasts with me

John Nye on Joel Mokyr (from my email)

AI and the First Amendment

Interview with Robinson Erhardt of Stanford

What matters for central banks?

Wednesday assorted links

Democracy and Capitalism are Mutually Reinforcing

Tanmay Khale on the decline in iconic songs over time (from my email)

D’Angelo, RIP

Tuesday assorted links

We Turned the Light On—and the AI Looked Back

China fact of the day

French facts of the day

Monday assorted links

What should I ask Blake Scholl?

Sunday assorted links

How Immigration is Changing the Black-White Earnings Gap

New archaeology tranche for Emergent Ventures

What matters for central banks?

What should I ask Brendan Foody?

China understands negative emotional contagion

Ian Smith’s memoir *Bitter Harvest: The Great Betrayal*

Friday assorted links

Lookism sentences to ponder

Claims about education and convergence