Sunday assorted links
1. His office.
2. The South African bi-oceanic railway.
3. Ethnic politics and class politics.
4. AI-generated preview is going viral, what is the chance they make the movie now? I will pay to see it. Is this a new method of movie evaluation and greenlighting?
5. Ezra Klein on the permitting bill (NYT).
6. Cindy Wu on RSI.
7. Canada’s most famous grizzly bear (NYT).
Tyler Cowen’s strongest musical recommendations, 2003–2026
From the Archive, written by ChatGPT:
The clearest standouts are Loveless, Brazil Classics 1, Solo Monk, and the Louvin Brothers’ Tragic Songs of Life. Bach receives the strongest sustained endorsement across the years. Some of these recommendations were buried in country profiles and assorted links rather than music posts.
This selection draws on the Marginal Revolution archive from 2003 through October 2026, giving greatest weight to explicit all-time praise, repeated endorsements, and evidence of continued listening. It assesses the strength of Cowen’s recommendations; it is not a ranking he himself published. Dates below refer to his posts.
Amazon links are affiliate links. Editions and availability may vary.
1. My Bloody Valentine — Loveless
“Certainly my favorite album post-1970s, and possibly my favorite of all time.”
That is about as strong an album endorsement as the archive yields. It puts his enthusiasm for experimental popular music alongside his devotion to classical music. His praise for the band’s later mbv reinforces that this was a continuing attachment.
Source: March 11, 2017 — “My favorite things Ireland”. His praise for mbv appears in “Favorite popular music 2013,” December 15, 2013.
Amazon: Loveless — vinyl reissue; mbv.
2. Various artists, selected by David Byrne — Brazil Classics 1
“sometimes I feel it is my favorite CD period.”
He also places it among his ten desert-island discs. Especially revealing: Cowen thinks Brazilian popular music often works better as selected songs than as individual artists’ albums, so this compilation is his preferred introduction to an exceptionally rich musical tradition.
Source: December 28, 2006 — “My favorite things Brazil, music edition”.
Amazon: Brazil Classics 1: Beleza Tropical.
3. Thelonious Monk — Solo Monk
“My number one pick is Thelonious Monk’s Solo Monk”
This is his explicit first choice in an early discussion of the greatest jazz albums. Five years later, he again calls it “my favorite jazz album?” That repetition makes it a particularly solid recommendation. The original post also singles out Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor’s Silent Tongues.
Sources: October 5, 2003; May 14, 2008.
Amazon: Solo Monk; Cecil Taylor — Silent Tongues.
4. The Louvin Brothers — Tragic Songs of Life
“one of my favorite recordings of all time, any genre.”
This is an unusually unequivocal endorsement. He had already recommended it in 2008 and 2009; in the latter post, he emphasizes its unsettling, tragic character and argues that listeners can love it even if they ordinarily dislike country and bluegrass.
Sources: January 26, 2011; July 17, 2009 — “My favorite things Alabama”.
Amazon: Tragic Songs of Life.
5. Bach — The Art of the Fugue, played by Grigory Sokolov
“Best of all is the Art of the Fugue, for piano, by Grigory Sokolov.”
This comes within a detailed selection of essential Bach recordings, making “best of all” particularly significant. Cowen had also endorsed the recording in 2005 while discussing Thomas Schelling’s affection for it. For a single classical recommendation with both emphatic language and longevity, this is one of the strongest.
Sources: March 25, 2007 — “My favorite things German: J.S. Bach”; October 10, 2005.
Amazon: Sokolov — Bach: The Art of the Fugue.
6. Bach — Benjamin Alard’s keyboard recordings and Masaaki Suzuki’s cantatas
On Alard:
“These are some of the best recordings of the best music I have heard, ever.”
He calls Alard his biggest discovery of 2022. Suzuki receives similarly exceptional praise: in 2020 Cowen describes his complete cantata cycle as definitive, and the cycle remains prominent in his 2024 listening. These recommendations show that his Bach enthusiasm keeps generating new discoveries.
Sources: November 27, 2022; November 15, 2020; November 29, 2024.
Amazon: Alard — The Complete Works for Keyboard, Volume 1 (an entry point to the series, not the complete collection); Suzuki and Bach Collegium Japan — Complete Sacred Cantatas, 55-disc Japanese edition.
7. Bola Sete — Samba in Seattle: Live at the Penthouse 1966–1968; Doc Watson — Life’s Work: A Retrospective
He describes these two sets as:
“some of the best guitar recordings of all time.”
Sete receives the greater individual emphasis: Cowen judges the release’s contribution and historical importance across all musical genres. His admiration for Sete was already explicit in 2006, fifteen years earlier. Watson’s set is also judged substantially better than other Watson collections.
Sources: December 10, 2021; December 28, 2006.
Amazon: Bola Sete — Samba in Seattle; Doc Watson — Life’s Work: A Retrospective.
8. Beethoven — piano sonatas played by Yves Nat; complete piano music played by Martino Tirimo
On Nat:
“it stands as one of my desert island discs.”
Cowen values Nat’s directness and depth. Fifteen years later, Tirimo’s complete Beethoven piano recordings enter his two or three favorite sets ever. These are especially useful recommendations because he identifies particular performers after comparing interpretations, rather than merely recommending Beethoven.
Sources: February 6, 2005; November 15, 2020.
Amazon: Yves Nat — Beethoven piano sonatas; Martino Tirimo — Beethoven: Complete Piano Works.
9. Cécile McLorin Salvant — Dreams and Daggers, Ghost Song, and Mélusine
“Her track record (and consistency) at this point is simply staggering”
This is one of the strongest sustained recommendations of a contemporary performer. He recommends her work in 2013, calls her the new Ella Fitzgerald in 2017, includes Ghost Song in 2022, and places her alongside the greatest female jazz vocalists in 2023. Start with Dreams and Daggers or Mélusine.
Sources: August 15, 2013; December 24, 2017; December 18, 2022; November 27, 2023.
Amazon: Dreams and Daggers; Ghost Song; Mélusine.
10. Mozart — the operas, particularly Don Giovanni conducted by Teodor Currentzis
“If I had to choose the operas, or all the rest of Mozart put together, I would go for the operas.”
That establishes the strength of his preference within Mozart. Currentzis’s Don Giovanni wins his top classical-recording prize for 2016, and he returns to it approvingly in 2021.
Sources: August 7, 2017; January 10, 2017; December 27, 2021.
Amazon: Currentzis — Mozart: Don Giovanni.
11. Andrés Segovia — Bach recordings
“some of the best musical interpretations of Bach by anyone playing any instrument.”
The breadth of that comparison makes this much stronger than a recommendation for guitar enthusiasts. Cowen treats these recordings as permanent additions to a collection.
Source: February 20, 2008.
Amazon: The Segovia Collection, Volume 1: The Legendary Andrés Segovia in an All-Bach Program.
12. Bruckner — the symphony cycle conducted by Marek Janowski
“the best Bruckner overall.”
This is a particularly strong recent recommendation, backed by his explicit comparison with numerous competing recordings. It also demonstrates that his preferred classical performances continue to change.
Source: March 9, 2026.
Amazon: Janowski and Orchestre de la Suisse Romande — Bruckner: Complete Symphonies.
Strong endorsements from the annual listening posts
His annual listening posts add several emphatic recommendations worth distinguishing from those all-time judgments.
| Music and Amazon link | Strength of endorsement | Dated source |
|---|---|---|
| Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu — Gurrumul | Calls it deeply moving and says the unusually expensive purchase was worthwhile. | December 21, 2008 |
| Kanye West — Yeezus | “His best album by quite a bit.” | December 15, 2013 |
| Beyoncé — Lemonade | “a clear first choice” among his albums of the year. | December 12, 2016 |
| Brian Eno — Another Green World; Van Morrison — Astral Weeks | The two CDs he most enjoyed that year, despite both being older recordings. | December 9, 2018 |
| Billie Eilish — When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?; Janelle Monáe — Dirty Computer | His two clear favorites; Monáe’s album continued improving with repeated listening. | November 23, 2019 |
What the recommendations reveal
The most revealing pattern is the combination of repeat listening and highly specific performances. His strongest recommendations often concern a particular interpretation, compilation, or recovered concert recording. And his clearest statement about actual listening habits is simple: “Bach gets the most listening time.” February 26, 2024 — “How I listen to music”.
AI and complements
In a “weak links” model of production, where tasks are complements, the gains from automation tend to arrive slowly because output is constrained by the least productive tasks. But the same complementarity makes attacks more harmful and easier to execute. For example, with an elasticity of substitution across tasks of 0.2, automating tasks worth 1 percent of GDP with a tenfold increase in productivity raises output by less than one percent, while cutting their productivity tenfold lowers output by 68 percent on impact. Whena larger AI sector simultaneously makes AI models more capable and attacks more likely, the positive productivity spillover is negligible compared with the potential damage, so the market overinvests in AI. In a weak-link economy, the costs and benefits from AI can be extremely asymmetric.
That is from a recent “in progress” manuscript by Charles I. Jones and Christopher Tonetti. Via Lukas Freund.
Best films of 2026
I thought this was a splendid and highly innovative year. Here is my list, in the order I saw them, noting that a link typically brings you to my review:
Testament of Ann Lee
28 Years Later
Project Hail Mary
A Man on the Run
The Blue Trail
Blue Heron
The Invite
Queen at Sea
What else? La Bola Negra has good reviews but I have not seen it yet. Confession is receiving raves. Of those listed, Sirat would be my definite favorite, big screen required of course.
I will give you an update for the rest of the year later in December, noting that anything appearing on Dec.31 in LA and NYC counts as 2027 for me.
Saturday assorted links
2. Stephen Kovacevich, RIP (NYT). Brahms and the Diabellis stand among his towering pianistic achievements. He was one of my favorite pianists.
3. Queen at Sea is an excellent movie, though hard to watch due to the dementia theme. Impossible to review without spoilers.
4. Claude revises the notebooks of Gödel.
Privatize Air Traffic Control, Redux
Yesterday the FAA grounded every domestic departure in the United States for more than four hours. Such groundings appear to be happening more often. The last nationwide grounding was in 2023, and regional ones have hit Newark, Dallas, and the entire Northeast in the past two years.
My post from October of 2025 (below) was prompted by regional groundings and delays caused by labor problems. Air traffic control was then (and still is today) far understaffed, and then, absurdly, the government shutdown hit the controllers we had, thus further stressing the system. According to Transportation Secretary Duffy the cause of yesterday’s grounding wasn’t labor but capital: aging TDM telecom circuits overloaded with data.
The deeper cause is the same in both cases: poor incentives. Airlines bear the costs when the system fails and have almost no say in how it is run. By the way, some will crow that yesterday’s failure may have been due to a private contractor. That may well be true–Pro tip: Do not update system software on a Friday at 3pm–but it is beside the point. Contracting out may have some advantages, especially if there is competition, but it is not the same as privatization. The argument for privatization of air traffic control services is to give responsibility for the system to the people who pay when it fails. Align incentives.
My 2025 post. No indent.
Yesterday, the FAA grounded flights at Reagan (DCA) because there weren’t enough air traffic controllers. By mid‑afternoon, thousands of flights were delayed nationwide. The same thing is happening at major airports across the country.
The proximate cause is that the FAA is short about ~3,500 controllers, forcing the rest to work mandatory overtime, six days a week, and now, during the shutdown, sometimes without pay! The more fundamental problem is that we have a poorly incentivized system. It’s absurd that a mission‑critical service is financed by annual appropriations subject to political failure. We need to remove the politics.
Canada fixed this in 1996 by spinning off air navigation services to NAV CANADA, a private, non‑profit utility funded by user fees, not taxes. Safety regulation stayed with the government; operations moved to a professionally governed, bond‑financed utility with multi‑year budgets. NAV Canada has been instrumental in moving Canada to more accurate and safer satellite-based navigation, rather than relying on ground-based radar as in the US.
NAV CANADA – in conjunction with the United Kingdom’s NATS – was the first in the world to deploy space-based ADS-B, by implementing it in 2019 over the North Atlantic, the world’s busiest oceanic airspace.
NAV CANADA was also the first air navigation service provider worldwide to implement space-based ADS-B in its domestic airspace.
Meanwhile, America’s NextGen has delivered a fraction of promised benefits, years late and over budget. As the Office of Inspector General reports:
Lengthy delays and cost growth have been a recurring feature of FAA’s modernization efforts through the course of NextGen’s over 20-year lifespan. FAA faced significant challenges throughout NextGen’s development and implementation phases that resulted in delaying or reducing benefits and delivering fewer capabilities than expected. While NextGen programs and capabilities have delivered some benefits in the form of more efficient air traffic management and reduced flight delays and airline operating costs, as of December 2024, FAA had achieved only about 16 percent of NextGen’s total expected benefits.
Airlines bleed money when planes idle, gates clog, and crews time out. The airlines have every reason to demand reliability, capacity, and modernization—Congress does not. Thus, fund air traffic control with user fees paid by those who depend on performance. Put the airline executives on the board of the non-profit, as in Canada. Give them the power to tax themselves to benefit themselves.
Align power with incentives and performance will follow.
People like their jobs, even British people
This paper investigates the role of work in providing meaning, purpose, community, and other non-monetary benefits. Using an original cross-national survey of 8,234 working-age adults across the UK, US, Denmark, and India, I study the factors that motivate people in their work, with an eye toward the future AI economic transformation. I find that 81% of respondents report being satisfied with their job, and a majority across all four countries are strongly motivated by the non-monetary components of their employment. Using an original “Work Values” Index, I show that one third of working respondents are motivated intrinsically by their job—valuing their role for its own sake. Nearly one quarter are driven by social and community-related aspects of their employment, 17% by social status, and just over one quarter by the transactional financial benefits of their job. Although a majority of people would leave their role if offered their current salary as a guaranteed income, one fifth of workers would stay even if offered up to 120% of their salary. Intrinsically motivated workers were disproportionately likely to refuse a basic income at any substitution level. Groups attached to their job for non-monetary reasons were also more likely to pursue volunteering or work-like activities if they received guaranteed income substitution but could no longer perform their role. Crucially, these non-monetary work motivations are evenly distributed across the income distribution and between white- and blue-collar workers. I argue that these findings have implications for managing the AI transition, understanding attitudes to AI, and making sense of policy preferences. Guaranteeing a basic income may indeed be necessary for managing any future AI labor shock, yet it could ultimately fail to compensate workers for any loss of the non-monetary benefits they derive from work.
That is from a new paper by Julian Jacobs, via Kevin Bryan. And here is a thread on the paper.
The Power and Roots of Aspirations
Aspirations have become a common theme in empirical economics studies but there is no unified understanding of the range of outcomes they influence, the factors that shape them, and how to measure them. We survey this growing literature. We argue that there is compelling evidence to consider aspirations as a useful lens to analyze human behavior and development outcomes, at the individual and aggregate levels, in poorer and richer countries. The empirical evidence aligns with the theory that high aspirations can lead individuals to achieve better educational, labor market, and other outcomes and can contribute to making countries more equal and prosperous. The empirical evidence also confirms that the mix of social and circumstantial factors shaping aspirations tends to hinder the aspirations of the disadvantaged—such as the poor, immigrants, and women—and can contribute to vicious circles of poverty, high inequality, low social mobility, and low growth. However, high aspirations should not be considered an end in themselves as they can backfire, with deleterious effects, if unmatched with opportunities. Further, we argue that definitional and measurement issues can affect the understanding of the topic and that studies should more explicitly describe their measures of aspirations to ensure that divergent underlying concepts are not mistaken.
That is from a 2025 paper by Anna Fruttero, Noël Muller, and Óscar Calvo-González. And here is a 2026 paper on similar topics.
Are we witnessing an intelligence explosion?
From Luis Garicano and Alex Imas:
Hence AI capabilities improved 1.91 times faster after October 2025, but R&D spending grew 6.19 times and the technical workforce 3.10 times. So measured capability gains per dollar fell by approximately 69%, and measured gains per technical employee-year decreased by 38%. These figures are accounting; nothing causal can be inferred…
The accounting exercise we just did cannot tell us which. It shows that returns per dollar decreased: spending multiplied by 6.2 and the pace of progress by 1.9. But two different causes for this are possible. One is congestion: the effort is getting less productive as it increases, because it is hard organizationally to increase the budget by more than five times in a year. The other possibility is that each advance is harder than the last. With enough congestion, these same two numbers are even consistent with each advance making the next one easier, which is what an explosion requires. To know whether a break is needed, we must know what an unchanged relationship would have delivered…
In sum our finding is consistent with that of Bloom and his coauthors: ideas are getting harder to find in AI too, and maintaining the rate of improvement requires ever larger increases in inputs.
Overall the idea of an intelligence explosion still remains to be demonstrated.
Friday assorted links
The Economics of Rent Controls
I appear on Ryan Bourne’s excellent new podcast, The Economics of It. We discuss The Economics of Rent Controls drawing on my essay, Rent Control: The Ceiling Trap. It’s a very good discussion. Here’s one bit (edited slightly to remove some ums for reading and to fix a date I got wrong from memory):
RB: And in your essay you talk about some like truly insane ways that people are trying to signal to landlords that they’ll be good tenants in Oslo. I know you talk about that example.
Tabarrok: Yeah, so in Oslo they had rent controls for many years, but then they got rid of them in 1982 (fixed, AT), And there’s a great paper by Are Oust who looks at what happened. When the rent controls were in place, amazingly he found just like Friedman and Stigler found in San Francisco in 1906 that in Oslo the renters advertised I need an apartment, okay? Won’t you rent me an apartment? And as part of their advertisement they would say I’m willing to look after your cat, I’m willing to, you know, shovel the snow.
And on the other side the landlords would say, well, I’m looking for a good Christian. Uh you know, I’m looking for a uh a heterosexual, you know, single-family couple, whatever—these kinds of things. Sometimes literally advertised, sometimes this would happen, under the table. Um there would be things like you would have to pay uh months–sometimes years–you have to pay your rent years in advance. You know, all kinds of ways in which because of the shortage of apartments, it was the renters who had to advertise…
Even companies would say I’ve got a great employee. Please won’t you get them an apartment for me? Okay. 1982 the rent controls were lifted and suddenly the advertisements switch 100%. So suddenly it’s no longer the renters who are advertising. It’s now the landlords I’ve got a great apartment. And uh all of this stuff, are you willing to shovel the driveway, take care of my cat? It all goes away.
Outlook email is still down
And GMU is on the Outlook system. If you need to reach me, you can extrapolate my gmu address to my gmail address, or try Twitter, or use your imagination in other ways. Sorry for the inconvenience!
(Although it seems my Outlook system just opened up, albeit with an incomplete email delivery so far!?)
The U.S. Federal AI Observatory
Federal AI at a glance
41 agencies · 3,611 reported use cases · OMB 2025 Inventory. Portfolio size reflects reporting, not performance.
From Irakli Petriashvili of Tblisi, here is the site.
Do not overrate zero-sum status-seeking
If people really preferred relatively higher income in a poorer society, then those born in Western Europe and the US would be saving up their money so they could live like kings in Africa. Very few people of middle- or upper-class status in poor countries would try to get to the West. Obviously, what we observe is precisely the opposite. Doctors from Africa will come to America in order to drive a cab if their license to practice medicine isn’t recognized. Research on Middle Eastern and African migrants to Europe shows that they aren’t the poorest of the poor, but are relatively well off for where they come from. There are a lot of stories about how terribly South Asian migrant workers are treated in the Arab Gulf, but this causes no problem in recruiting laborers who want to earn a higher income.
Here is more from Richard Hanania.