Category: Uncategorized
Thursday assorted links
2. New publication on AI and institutions. Good people involved.
4. What kind of machine can a book make?
5. Longevity firms push for medical deregulation in Montana (WSJ).
6. OpenAI Economic Research Exchange.
7. Victor Niederhoffer obituary. Do not forget Victor also was a world class checkers player, art collector, and a very good jazz bassist as well (yes I have heard him play) in addition to his other achievements.
Wednesday assorted links
1. A catalog of past AI predictions.
2. Jasmine Sun on why people do not want data centers. And Jasmine Sun on Ezra Klein, on data centers (NYT).
3. A bot running an SF retail boutique? (NYT)
5. On the NYC grocery store plan.
6. New credit card gives you tokens instead of miles.
7. Does AI mean the end of math heroes? Some other heroes too?
Dominant Assurance Contract aka Refund Bonus Explainer
I created the dominant assurance contract aka the refund bonus mechanism in 1998–it’s a mechanism capable of producing some types of public goods privately–in recent years working with Tim Cason and Robertas Zubrickas I’ve put refund bonuses to the test in lab experiments and they work! I’ve written an accessible Refund Bonus Explainer that covers this body of work. Here’s one bit:
The dike is a public good. Once it stands, it protects everyone nearby, and a neighbor who contributed nothing cannot easily be excluded. That property is what makes it hard to finance.
Paul Samuelson defined public goods in 1954, and he was pessimistic about them. Each person does better by understating what the good is worth to him, so it is, in Samuelson’s words, “in the selfish interest of each person to give false signals, to pretend to have less interest in a given collective consumption activity than he really has.” From this he concluded that “no decentralized pricing system can serve to determine optimally these levels of collective consumption.” Public goods, on this view, are what governments are for. Refund bonuses challenge that conclusion.
Read the whole thing and here is my Rent Control Explainer.
Victor Niederhoffer, RIP
In addition to his well-known public roles, he worked very hard to help and befriend me when I was younger. Here are the Google searches for Victor. Less well known about Victor is that he had one of the world’s best collections of private letters. He also once gave me a very nice small painting by Jack Savitzky, for which I remain grateful.
The Value of Behavioral Policies
Behavioral interventions have become central to modern public policy, but their empirical promise remains contested because estimated treatment effects often appear small. We argue that a policy response is economically meaningful only relative to the response generated by alternative policies. We assemble more than 1,200 estimates from over 600 studies comparing “nudges” and traditional price interventions in the markets for cigarettes, alcohol, influenza vaccination, electricity, and residential water. Translating nudge effects into equivalent price changes, we find that behavioral interventions often correspond to enormous fiscal interventions, from an 11% tax on electricity to a 100% subsidy on influenza vaccinations. Nudges are also more cost-effective than price instruments in all markets, but cost-effectiveness does not predict the welfare ranking of policies. Using a behavioral extension of the Marginal Value of Public Funds, we show that nudges have high welfare returns at the margin, while price instruments often generate larger total surplus at scale.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
Estimating the Economic Value of Zoning Reform
We estimate the economic value of zoning reform in São Paulo, which altered maximum permitted construction along transportation corridors. Developers increased filings for multifamily construction in blocks affected by the reform, leading to more housing supply and lower housing prices in neighborhoods that allow more densification. Our equilibrium model of housing markets estimates an aggregate 1.6 percent increase in housing stock and a 0.4 percent reduction in prices, resulting in large housing wealth transfers from current to future homeowners. The reform produced welfare gains of 0.65 percent of city GDP, mostly due to developer profits and consumer gains from the newly built environment.
That is from the AEA policy journal, by Santosh Anagol, Fernando Ferreira, and Jonah Rexer.
Tuesday assorted links
Emergent Ventures winners, 57th cohort
Oisin O’Gorman, 15, Dublin, misinformation and fakes.
Karsen Lee Wahal, Stanford, is AI killing the web?, and measuring media slant.
Davy Deng, with Claire Wang (previous winner), whole brain emulation, MIT.
Enerj Grmek, 16, Ljubljana, privacy.
Vladimir Shmelev, Ukraine, Ukrainian children for relief trips to Montenegro.
Nik Verma, Chicago, a legal framework for AI agents.
Emirhan Demir and Çınar Yıldırım, Istanbul area, 19, protection against AI agents.
Midhat Doruk, 14, Ankara, longevity, biology, and skin cosmetics.
Burak Yilmaz, 17, Diyarbarkir, Turkey, browser-native authentication.
Lloyd Strickland, London, to publish the remaining Leibniz papers, including on computation.
Abdul Quyum, 15, Perth, organizing information and data.
Catharine Young, podcast on women in science, science communication tranche, Cambridge/DC.
How does the market regard stablecoins?
We study the demand for safety and liquidity in the crypto ecosystem. We do so under a framework in which a representative investor allocates liquidity across stablecoin deposits in lending pools and traditional safe assets (e.g., MMF shares). Our model delivers three main predictions: (i) the stablecoin deposit premium co-moves with the Treasury premium when investors value the safety and liquidity services of stablecoins; (ii) increases in Treasury supply reduce the stablecoin deposit premium; and (iii) drops in the perceived safety and liquidity of stablecoin deposits (e.g., due to de-pegs or hacker attacks) reduce their premium. Using granular data from hundreds of DeFi pools spanning multiple protocols, tokens, and blockchains, we find evidence supporting these predictions. Investors treat stablecoin deposits as money-like instruments that are borderless and permissionless, yet as fragile as other forms of privately produced safe assets.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
Monday assorted links
On infinite ethics
Infinite numbers have long troubled utilitarian ethicists: if the universe is boundless, then there is infinite positive utility and infinite negative utility, and we can’t even define our current state, let alone affect it. Oxford philosopher Toby Ord proposes a solution: use hyperreal numbers, a mathematical construct in which infinite sums behave more like finite ones (for example, the sum of infinitely many twos is twice as big as the sum of infinitely many ones). As with so many philosophical ideas, this solves some existing problems while creating some new ones (pinpointing some hyperreals requires choosing something called an “ultrafilter”, but this choice is underdetermined). Still, Elias Schmied calls this a real philosophical advance, of the sort which comes along only rarely and makes genuine headway into a previously-hopeless-seeming problem. I’m just surprised there’s a way of thinking about infinities under which they behave logically. Why didn’t we start with this one, instead of being told that infinity + infinity = infinity and we should just accept it? Claude tries to answer my questions.
That is from Scott Alexander (many more links at the link, many on AI safety).
*Rome’s Age of Revolution*
The author is Tim Whitmarsh and the subtitle is Augustus, Empire and the Making of Christianity. This is the most important book on the history of Christianity I have read in a long time, and it is also an important work in Roman history. Yet also fun and extremely readable. Excerpt:
The story I have told so far has emphasised the fit between Christianity and the Greek world of the early Roman Empire; I have given relatively little space to conflict. That has been quite deliberate. One of the commonest misconceptions about the early Roman Empire is that it was a time of ceaseless and inevitable suppression of virtuous Christians by a brutal governmental machine. This is a myth that has roots in antiquity itself, and has been pumped systematically into western popular culture since the nineteenth centuury. It is a remarkably durable myth, because it is both emotionally seductive and ideologically powerful. The idea that virtuous Christians were engaged in endless conflict with the Roman state makes for great narrative. But the reality is more banal: most Christians were fully integrated into Roman society, and no more or less harassed than anyone else…
My argument has been, rather, that Christianity could not have come into being in anything like the form we know it without the revolutionary impact of Augustus’ political reforms. It was this seismic change that fundamentally transformed Mediterranean thought…The most dramatic effect of the Augustan swirl was Christianity itself: a breakaway Judaean sect led by brilliant entrepreneurs who understood the opportunities offered by the new political dispensation, and rapidly reshaped their ideas to suit new audiences.
Definitely recommended, and not only to Christians and Romans.
Sunday assorted links
1. The inverseminar, someone else presents your paper.
2. The rise of million-dollar companies with just one employee (WSJ).
3. The political party itself is a big driver of polarization.
4. Gita Gopinath is making sense.
5. GPT Pro (not Astra) on what “Astra” means.
On the Acemoglu-Autor et.al. fertility result
Here is criticism from Revana Sharfuddin. Here is criticism from JFV.
Saturday assorted links
1. What do consultants get paid for?
2. Ugly architecture creates coalitions against development.
3. London is (modestly) degentrifying.
4. Is the “no forward guidance” approach failing? (FT)
5. Chinese interview with Christopher Nolan.
6. “social media use and school grades are unrelated for adolescents…meta-analytic evidence is not in support of dramatic claims relating social media use to mischief.” Link here.