Category: Uncategorized
Tuesday assorted links
1. Desmond Morris, RIP (NYT).
2. A long NYT feature on how to be cultured.
5. People laid off from USAID (NYT).
6. Ariel Rubinstein tells his story. And his home page more generally.
Monday assorted links
1. Sindarov profile. And: “I know this GM who made 2600 at 19 without reading a chess book in his life.” And Magnus on Sindarov vs. Gukesh.
2. Inflation-adjusted book prices over time.
3. On the Amanat Iran book and its excellence.
4. More on the wet market hypothesis. We should all be uncertain, but it is mood affiliation (with conspiracy theorizing, for one thing) to be convinced of Lab Leak. It is contributing to negative emotional contagion.
5. Review of the new Knausgaard series. By Max Norman: “(I’d rather read Knausgaard on defecation than predestination, let alone whether machines can think or trees can feel.)”‘
6. AI and the arts, a short Instagram video.
7. AI and the pancreatic vaccine. More testing is needed, but there is a reasonable chance that we have a good treatment for pancreatic cancer, and AI was instrumental in that. It is mRNA as well, so a double burn on the haters.
Sunday assorted links
1. Religion and business economics Substack.
2. WDC crime is way down. Alex T. was right, POTMR.
3. Movie theaters are making an economic comeback?
5. Has the fight against inflation stalled in Argentina? (FT)
6. The case against off-shore processing.
7. Harry Law on alignment. And do AI-written plays have too little conflict?
Saturday assorted links
1. Cato Handbook on affordability.
2. Are first-generation college students overrated?
3. No Detectable Economic Effect of Extreme Heat After Correcting for Dependence. Here is analysis from Claude 4.7, link now fixed.
5. AI and the early history of electricity. Good claims.
6. Betting on how well various pundits predict the future.
7. On Jensen.
Friday assorted links
1. Conversations about boring topics are more interesting than we think.
2. What will be scarce. And Andy Hall on using AI to boost economics research.
3. Virginia passes reasonable AI legislation.
4. AI-generated movie trailer. And the short movie.
6. Objection.ai.
7. A neglected cost of restricting data centers. And on not waking up a loser.
My excellent Conversation with Kim Bowes
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Kim Bowes is an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania whose book, Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent, Tyler calls perhaps his favorite economics book of 2025. By sifting through the material remains of Roman life — shoes, bricks, ceramics, and the like — she uncovers a picture of ordinary Romans who could evidently afford to buy multiple sets of colorful clothes, use gold coins for daily transactions, and eat peppercorns sourced from thousands of miles away. This vast web of commerce, she argues, both bound the empire together and provided the tax base that kept it running — and when it unraveled, Rome unraveled with it.
Tyler and Kim discuss what would surprise a modern visitor to a Roman elite home, what early Roman Christianity actually looked like on the ground, why Romans never developed formal economic reasoning, what decentralized money-lending reveals about the Roman state, whether there were anything like forward markets, why Romans continued to use coins even as the empire debased them, the economics of Roman slavery, whether Roman recipes taste any good, the Romans as hyper-scalers rather than inventors, what Rome made of China and Egypt, why Kim’s not a fan of the Vesuvius challenge, the practicalities of landscape archaeology, how a vast belt of factories along the Tiber Valley went undiscovered until twenty years ago, where to go on a three-week tour of the Roman Empire, what she thinks is ultimately behind Rome’s unraveling, and much more.
Here is an excerpt with some economics:
COWEN: Say, when the government is clipping the silver coins and lowering their silver content, as we now know in economic theory, this will imply at least some inflationary pressure. Are there Roman writers who understood that and laid it out, or they’re just vague public complaints about government clipping the coins?
BOWES: They’re not so much clipping them as they are minting them with less silver, which amounts to the same thing. It’s just a little bit classier and harder to detect. Absolutely, people know that they’re doing this. What I think is most interesting and what we’re all still wrestling with is, from even before Nero onwards, Roman emperors recognized the advantage to the fisc to basically producing coins with less silver.
Then they start to have silver problems, and they start really pulling the silver out of their coins, and nobody cares. That is to say, people care, and they notice, but the convenience of the Roman coin of the realm, the denarius, which is made with silver, outweighs—that’s a little bit of a pun—the actual silver content of that coin, and so people are willing to just suck it up and deal, and they keep using it.
There is inflation, and inflation, we can now tell, thanks to some great papyri from Egypt, trends upwards very slowly over the first century, the second century, the third century, but it’s not proportional to the amount of silver that’s being pulled out of the coins. People basically still have trust in their coinage, which really shows the degree to which the state has convinced people, simply by supporting ordinary people’s coin use, that the coins work and that they’re going to back their coins, even though they’re slightly pulling the silver out.
COWEN: Why was there so much decentralized money lending? You would think that banks would have economies of scale, offer better terms, just like I wouldn’t borrow money from my friends, I would go to the bank. Why doesn’t the Roman Empire evolve that way?
BOWES: The Roman Empire confuses us, I think, because on the one hand, it looks like a really big state that ought to do things that big states do. The Roman big state is really a mask for an empire of friends and family. You borrow money from friends and family. Banks, such as they exist, are really nothing more than friends and family, so even when you have actual banks, they tend to be largely constituted by a single family.
The difference that you’re making between borrowing from a bank and borrowing from your family is much less clear-cut in a world in which the bank is your family, or the bank is a family that is friends of yours. It’s not that Romans don’t use banks, they do use banks. We can see the most often wealthier Romans using banks. It’s a lot harder to see the 90 percent using banks, and they seem to more often default to the immediate circle of people that they know, which again, it’s not such a huge distinction. In a world in which there’s no FDIC, in which the bank isn’t guaranteed and protected by the state in the way in which our banks are, the distinction between bank and family, bank and friends, is much less clear.
Interesting and engaging throughout, definitely recommended. You can buy Kim’s excellent book here.
Thursday assorted links
1. Kasparov analyzes the rise of Sindarov.
2. Podcast on Houellebecq’s Submission. With transcript.
3. “A majority of Australian children under age 16 still use social media apps despite a ban implemented in December, according to new research.
Sixty-one percent of Australian children between the ages of 12 and 15 told researchers from a prominent UK foundation and an Australian youth research agency that they can still access accounts on major platforms just as they did before the ban was put in place.” Link here.
4. “If anything, nationalists are fighting to reassure pro-EU voters. Marine Le Pen has softened her line on Brussels over the years to remain electorally competitive in France. Giorgia Meloni has mostly co-operated with the EU during her three-and-a-half surprising years as a hard-right Italian prime minister. Both will have watched events in Hungary over the weekend and felt themselves vindicated. Of all the varied reasons for Viktor Orbán’s landslide defeat, the public’s desire to mend relations with the EU was prominent. The election winner Péter Magyar, no kind of liberal, and in fact a former Orbán man, favours a “return to Europe”.” (Ganesh in the FT)
5. Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia. And a useful thread.
The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, 1969-2025
The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics has been awarded annually since 1969. Who wins the prize is a topic of much interest and tracks the whole course of the academic discipline over the last 57 years. Explaining who wins the prize in any given year is a complex process, which involves the subtle endogeneity of the choice of the field and the individual(s) who should be honoured. Citations, track records, networks of past winners, institutional factors along with field rotation and Economic Prize Committee composition may all play a role. A dynamic sample involving a changing stock of would-be candidates along with a moving flow—both into and out of the sample—add complexities to the modelling. We find robust evidence that the Nobel Prize rotates in a semi-regular way between the fields of economics. Earlier awards were for a single paper, later ones for a body of work. Networks do not matter, but having a Nobel student or co-author does. There is some evidence that the personal preferences of Committee members had an effect on either field or individual winner. The Committee’s decisions changed after Lindbeck retired.
That is from a new paper by Peter J. Dolton and Richard S.J. Tol. Via Niclas Berggren.
Wake up people assorted links
Wednesday assorted links
1. An observation on left-wing universities.
2. Arnold Kling on marginalism.
3. “You should be holding more babies.”
5. Why Hungary will prove hard to change (FT).
6. Miami-Dade is losing residents?
7. Brazilian real on the rise.
8. Peter Thiel and Emmanuel Todd discussion. Imperfect sound however.
Are we underestimating youth well-being?
Although there is growing evidence that the subjective wellbeing among the young declined in recent years, the evidence is not consistent across surveys. We examine the relationship between age and various measures of wellbeing and illbeing across three major surveys – the Gallup World Poll (GWP, Global Minds (GM) and the Global Flourishing Survey (GFS). The GWP is conducted via face-to-face and telephone surveys; GM surveys are web-based; and GFS uses both telephone and web-based surveys. We focus on 23 countries appearing in all three surveys. The clearest evidence that wellbeing rises with age and illbeing declines with age comes from the web-based surveys in both GM and GFS. The age profiles look very different when surveys are conducted by telephone: the higher rates of illbeing among the young are far less apparent in these surveys. Because survey mode is not randomly assigned, we cannot be sure differences in age profiles of wellbeing and illbeing are causally affected by survey mode. Selection into survey mode, both across and within country, plus differential non-response by survey across the age range, may be playing a role. However, the evidence indicates very different age patterns in wellbeing and illbeing emerge across different survey modes.
That is from a new NBER working paper by David G. Blanchflower and Alex Bryson.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Where is it dangerous to be a pedestrian in NYC? And city-owned grocery stores for NYC? (NYT)
2. Is Mississippi running out of liquor?
3. Four classic Chinese texts and their relevance.
5. Seb Krier.
6. The penguin-tracking culture that is Kyoto, Japan.
7. The Economist will be using bylines and putting people in front of the camera (NYT).
That was then, that was then
Fred Anderson has demonstrated how a futuristic novel written in 1763 can help to shed light on British thinking about the long-term consequences of the peace [from the Seven Years’ War]. The anonymously published The Reign of George VI, 1900-1925 presents a scenario far in the future, in the early twentieth century. The book’s counterhistorical narrative suggests that Britain, by granting far too generous a peace in 1763, unintentionally helped France and Russia become leading nineteenth-century world powers. In the early twentieth century, the reign of George VI is thus dominated by Britain’s worldwide struggle to reestablish its position as a global power. The conflict ends with Britain imposing peace in Paris in 1920, after British troops have “liberated” France, with George, the “philosopher king,” hailed as the bringer of freedom. At the time the book was written in 1763, its primary target was clearly the British negotiators in Paris…
That is from the new and interesting book The World in Flames: A Global History of the Seven Years’ War by Marian Füssel.