Marginal REVOLUTION

The New Republic writes “President Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans.”

The author is Sam Bloch, and the subtitle is The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource.

That is the topic of my latest Free Press column, here is one excerpt: I do not think the skeptics would put it this way, but as I read Conti, I find he has a pretty bleak fundamental view of humanity.

The vulnerability of our shipping routes remains underdiscussed, perhaps that is in some ways a good thing: We study the macroeconomic and trade-policy implications of disruptions to U.S.

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Also known as Why I Do Not Believe in the Housing Theory of Everything: Development accounting is the search for proximate sources of cross-country income differences.

We measure how artificial intelligence (AI) affects the economy through its impact on software engineering productivity.

When it comes to bear encounters in or near the wild, dogs are the aggressors in 54 percent of incidents, according to a recent study conducted by bear experts at Brigham Young University and other institutions, and published in the Journal of Wildlife Ma…

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Here is the NYT obituary.

An updated version of our Marginal Revolution University (MRU) video on defining the unemployment rate.

At times we forget what an amazing wonder the Bundesrepublik Deutschland was.

Scientific progress is a key driver of economic growth and prosperity.

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The shortages have gone on for so long that they are aggressively driving down how much carbon is being released into the atmosphere, a Washington Post analysis of data from the International Energy Agency shows.

The US federal government owns and administers 472,892,659 acres or 21% of the land area of the lower 48 states, the country’s largest landowner.

Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him.

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Here, in five waves of panel data (N = 1,966 US adults), we examined associations between life satisfaction and self-reported use of ten common social technologies measured every 3 months on a six-point frequency scale from ‘I did not use’ to ‘multiple ti…

That is the title of my latest Free Press column, here is the closing bit: Sick and elderly Americans will go to Chinese companies for their AI-invented and AI-tested medical devices and drugs.

By Egana Djabbarova of Azerbaijan.

I strongly recommend a trip to Armenia, now is a great time to go.

The post Peter Thiel on AI and tech stagnation appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

An average of 72 percent of respondents said they felt curious, happy or excited about A.I., compared with 41 percent who felt worried, sad or angry.’

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Carl Danner writes to me with a political economy mystery.

The author is Omri Ben-Shahar, and the subtitle is How Privacy Panic Led Tech Regulation Astray — and How to Fix It.

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.

Believing that AI will be incorrigible leads us to proposing the wrong solutions, including ones which are likely to increase the danger than decrease it.

How much liability should AI providers bear when their services enable both attack and defence?

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An amazing Epoch AI report from Emberson and Roodman: Over the past three years, the cost of a given level of AI performance has fallen an average of some 47% per quarter.

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We show how fertility delays compound across generations to raise age at first grandmotherhood.

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On Aug. 26, a Semafor investigation using Pangram to determine whether recent guest columns in major newspapers were written using artificial intelligence identified a column by Schnell as “100% AI-written.”

Some people are suggesting this, including Ezra Klein.

This paper documents how artificial intelligence has affected stocks and flows in the U.S. labor market.

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Nikole Hannah-Jones famously sent her child to a predominantly black/lower-income public school in New York City.

Obama recently said: “If we are thinking about AI just in terms of how do we cure cancer or get better energy, you can do that without having agentic AI and having it just roaming free in the internet.”

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It is excellent.

I observed, for example, that when I got an invitation to travel to give a talk in a different time zone, it mattered what time zone I was in when I got the invitation. if well rested, in my home time zone, I would think, No big deal, about making a long…

UK productivity rose at almost twice the pace previously estimated in the decade after the 2008 global financial crisis, according to new official figures that make Britain look much less of an international outlier.

…this month, Singapore launched a scheme promising actual cash to citizens as a reward for logging reading time on a government website.

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Scott Aaranson, theoretical computer scientist writes: My position on AI is merely the conservative, skeptical position of 2006, updated with intellectual honesty for the reality of late 2026.

Using a panel of 81 countries across six World Values Survey waves (1990–2022), we examine whether growth in internet diffusion is associated with religious decline.

Asit Singh, founder of Syngi, received his grant to develop sub-angstrom optical MEMS sensors for next-generation semiconductor lithography.