I knew Civil War (now streaming on HBO/Max) was going to be good when just a minute or so in you see an explosion in the distance and only later do you hear the sound wave. [Mild spoilers may follow.] Shortly after, we meet war journalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst in a standout performa … | Continue reading

This paper examines the impact of the emergence of the “gig economy” on the broader labor market by exploiting the staggered introduction of the ridesharing service Uber to American Cities between 2013 and 2018. Using difference-in-differences methods, Callaway and Sant’Anna’s do … | Continue reading

Andrew Cedotal writes me: This issue came up with the post where someone claimed that N% of Americans were active OnlyFans content creators, here it is again! For software services, total accounts ever created is a vanity metric. It’s not used by serious operators or investors of … | Continue reading

A Free Press Debate. “Tyler Cowen, Katherine Mangu-Ward, David Leonhardt, and Bhaskar Sunkara duke it out over the state of the economy.” Here is the video, for Free Press subscribers only. A splendid time was had by all. The post Is the American dream alive and well? appeared fi … | Continue reading

Later this morning (or possibly early afternoon) I'll be heading into town to the Verizon Store to pre-order the new iPhone 16 Pro Max. ("New" in scare quotes because the 16 is similar to the 15, which was similar to... Related Stories Canon Complaint Canon Throws Out Baby With B … | Continue reading

1. “I will not tell you why Brazilians cannot buy cheap and safe sunglasses.” From an economic theorist. 2. Brutalist KFC. 3. “These results strongly suggest Neanderthal-derived DNA is playing a significant role in autism susceptibility across major populations in the United Stat … | Continue reading

I think AI is going to have some if its biggest effects on biology. Biological pathways are among the most complex in all of science. People are good at handling two or maybe three variable problems but just keeping three variables and their interactions in one’s head is difficul … | Continue reading

Deep Prasad writes: OpenAI just released an AI as smart as most PhDs in physics, mathematics and the life sciences. Wake up. The world will never be the same and in many ways, it will be unrecognizable a decade from now. Mckay Wrigley is enthusiastic: o1’s ability to think, plan, … | Continue reading

Just a short note about an upcoming book and show. This coming November 9th will mark the centennial of the birth of Robert Frank, the Swiss-born American/Canadian photographer who upended 1950s America's view of itself. There's to be an exhibition... Related Stories The Photoboo … | Continue reading

Going forward, TOP won't be publishing on Fridays and Saturdays, but hopefully will publish on all the other days. However, I'll be posting tomorrow, since I didn't yesterday. (I wanted to give the previous day's long post more of a... Related Stories Blog Note Anyone Have Any In … | Continue reading

One and a half minutes, you will find it here, mostly me talking about how well the new OpenAI o1 model does economics. Spinoza (the dog) steals the show. As I said to the OpenAI film crew, “Spinoza may not be AGI, but if you leave any foodstuffs near the couch, he will beat anyt … | Continue reading

From the great Noam Brown, the link to the more detailed OpenAI page is here. And a preview page here. Step by step advanced reasoning, now a reality, with some pretty incredible benchmark achievements. Too much to say, right? Here is the accompanying John Lennon demo. The post O … | Continue reading

1. Comment directly on top of arXiv links. 2. Latent polarization, based on values clusters. 3. Reading scrolls from the ancient world. 4. The wrong kind of city? 5. GMU Econ Society (new and better link). 6. Does non-response bias make the economy look better than it really is? … | Continue reading

The UK’s Orwellian sounding Equality Act 2010 is strikingly Marxist. It demands equal pay for work of equal value where these are defined as follows: A’s work is equal to that of B if it is like B’s work, rated as equivalent to B’s work, or of equal value to B’s work. A’s work is … | Continue reading

The London Times, in its Sunday on-line culture section, no longer has a weekly article listing what they think are the best books of the year. Yet they continue to run similar weekly articles for music and film and television. The books feature has, for me, been the single stron … | Continue reading

This report describes compound return outcomes for the 29,078 publicly-listed common stocks contained in the CRSP database from December 1925 to December 2023. The majority (51.6%) of these stocks had negative cumulative returns. However, the investment performance of some stocks … | Continue reading

This paper measures the causal effect of deficits on inflation using a “high frequency narrative approach”. We identify an event that released news about the 2021 deficits in the United States—the Georgia Senate election runoff. We calculate the size of the shock using new narrat … | Continue reading

One thing in that Martin Evening video hit me hard. It's the section that begins at 15:10 with the subheading, "A Wasted Opportunity." He tells the story of stumbling on a new technique that he liked, but failing to sell... Related Stories The Best Way to Be a Photographer A Curi … | Continue reading

Martin Evening, the important early Photoshop expert whose books a lot of us learned from, sadly died at a young(ish) age in 2022. He wrote many technical books as well as numerous articles in magazines and online. There's one problem... Related Stories The Erasing of Arthur Rimb … | Continue reading

Masterpiece? I'm back from my little break. Catching up with TOP again: When I suggested looking back into the archives while I was gone, Michel Hardy-Vallée said he would wait till post No. 10,001, because that would be my first... Related Stories Reader View VSL and ZV-E10II Yo … | Continue reading

I've had two days off and need to take another two days...I'll be back on Sunday! Nothing dire, just a needed vacation due to that ol' overwhelmed-by-life feeling, which raises its head every now and then. I'm sure you know... Related Stories Blog Note Anyone Have Any Information … | Continue reading

Sunflowers: Took this yesterday to show I've got nothing against sunflowers. :-) Yesterday was the last day of Summer where I live. It was a glorious day: A cold front with a high-pressure system behind it came through in the... Related Stories A Day With the Dogs Anyone Have Any … | Continue reading

1. Durlauf reviews Koyama and Rubin, and Brad DeLong. 2. Some remarks on Norway and unrealized capital gains taxes. And Scott Sumner, on his new Substack, on how to manage taxation. 3. Chinese student views on AI risk. 4. The Pentium as Navajo weaving. 5. “I think hate is very mu … | Continue reading

Ireland ranks as the loneliest country in Europe, with almost a fifth of people lonely most or all of the time and nearly two-thirds of people suffer from anxiety or depression, according to EU data. One in seven children live in homes below the poverty line, defined as 60 per ce … | Continue reading

I don’t agree with this theory as stated, but it can be worth spelling such things out, if only to see their weaknesses, or perhaps some strengths at some of the more unusual or less likely margins. Here goes: People, especially “thinkers,” like to believe they serve all sorts of … | Continue reading

scottsumner.substack.com The post Scott Sumner is switching to Substack appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION. Comments In reply to Bill Allen. Just like with Covid, is the reaction ... by rsm In reply to Neurotic. So you've solved all those problems ... by rsm In reply to rsm. O … | Continue reading

1. Founder mode. 2. Forthcoming movie about brutalism, The Brutalist, three hours and thirty-five minutes, receives standing ovation. 3. Paper types, ranked by likelihood of paper cuts. 4. Pre-order the new Houllebecq. 5. Judit Polgar, egalitarian radical. She is not a sexist. 6. … | Continue reading

Sadly, Jason Furman has been endorsing one of the very worst economic ideas of our generation. Here is Jason’s Twitter take, here is his earlier WSJ piece. Let me start with his quick summary: I like the Biden-Harris proposal to tax unrealized capital gains. For any given level o … | Continue reading

First read Tyler on the practical difficulties implementing a tax on unrealized capital gains! I have a different argument that I rarely see discussed. A significant fraction of what we call capital gains is due to variation in the discount rate rather than variation in income. T … | Continue reading

Étienne Carjat—I don't know the French pronunciation—started out drawing caricatures, a big fad in France in the late 1800s. It was an sustaining source of income for many freewheeling bohemians; its practitioners included Honoré Daumier and the illustrator Gustave Doré.... Relat … | Continue reading

“I didn’t want my ex-employer to deny my resignation and keep me working for longer,” she told CNN during a recent interview. But she found a way to end the impasse. She turned to Momuri, a resignation agency that helps timid employees leave their intimidating bosses. For the pri … | Continue reading

1. Learning by teaching chatbots. 2. Noam Dworman profile (WSJ). 3. Wisconsin fact of the day, where are the most drunk counties? 4. Can the cost of solar energy keep on shrinking? 5. Are low wages an advantage in international trade? (bears on the Michael Pettis claims of course … | Continue reading

Progress in crypto has been slow but one saving grace may be AI. AIs can’t get a bank account but they can use cryptocurrencies. Bryan Armstrong at Coinbase tweets: This week at @CoinbaseDev we witnessed our first AI to AI crypto transaction. What did one AI buy from another? Tok … | Continue reading

About ninety minutes, transcript only, almost entirely fresh material. Lots of philosophy. Here is one excerpt: Tyler Cowen: I think when you read [John] Gray on many people, you get quite a bit of Gray. That’s not a complaint. I love reading John. I like him. I like talking to h … | Continue reading

When people criticize cars, you often hear it mentioned that many people die in road accidents, many more are injured, and so on. All that is true, dangerous driving does represent a negative externality on others, and it implies that roadway reforms should be undertaken. Still, … | Continue reading

Market efficiency is a central issue in asset pricing and investment management, but while the level of efficiency is often debated, changes in that level are relatively absent from the discussion. I argue that over the past 30+ years markets have become less informationally effi … | Continue reading

1. FT lunch with Eugene Fama. 2. Alexa will be powered by Claude. And ChatGPT goes to church? 3. In praise of reading reference books. 4. AI analyzes interviewing styles, in this case with CWT with Nate Silver. 5. Five productive years from Stephen Wolfram. 6. The microfoundation … | Continue reading

I am pleased and also honored to have been sent an advance copy of The Daylight Computer. It performs functions similar to those of an iPad and a Kindle, but with improvements. My first surprise is that I proved capable of operating the thing. It requires no expertise above and b … | Continue reading

This is a followup to the OT Ford Mach-E EV post, and I beg your pardon. I really shouldn't write about this this morning. But I can't help myself...I need to vent. Here's the short version. As you've probably heard,... Related Stories More Selected Comments on 'New Work' Open Mi … | Continue reading

Frans Hals, Catharina Both van der Eem, bride of Paulus Beresteyn, 1629 Tom Burke writes, on Saturday: "[On the subject of] single-subject pictures, in this case Wegman’s Weimaraners: I’ve found something similar in other artists and photographers. Jane Bown was... Related Storie … | Continue reading

Mach-E's in a row at Friendly Ford in Geneva, New York Yesterday, as I was going about my errands, I decided to start familiarizing myself with the automotive New World Order. I stopped at a Ford dealer and asked if... | Continue reading