What should I ask Sam Altman?
I will be having a conversation with him at a Roots of Progress event, though it will not be a formal CWT Conversation per se. So what should I ask him?
To be clear, this is the conversation with Sam I want to have…
Tuesday assorted links
1. Do you want to own a share of a Rembrandt?
2. Is mid-20th century American culture getting erased? To be clear, I do not find all of that work to be so great. It is for “people like me,” and that is fine, but much of it does not deserve to survive more generally.
4. Toward an AI-augmented textbook.
5. Biting each others’ ankles over who will be the greater fool.
6. “First known wild ‘grue jay’ hybrid spotted in Texas.” An evolutionary reunion of sorts…
The Return of the MR Podcast: In Praise of Commercial Culture
The Marginal Revolution Podcast is back with new episodes! We begin with what I think is our best episode to date. We revisit Tyler’s 1998 book In Praise of Commercial Culture. This is the book that put Tyler on the map as a public intellectual. Tyler and I also wrote a paper, An Economic Theory of Avant-Garde and Popular Art, or High and Low Culture, exploring themes from the book. But does In Praise of Commercial Culture stand the test of time? You be the judge!
Here’s one bit:
TABARROK: Here’s a quote from the book, “Art and democratic politics, although both beneficial activities, operate on conflicting principles.”
COWEN: So much of democratic politics is based on consensus. So much of wonderful art, especially new art, is based on overturning consensus, maybe sometimes offending people. All this came to a head in the 1990s, disputes over what the National Endowment for the Arts in America was funding. Some of it, of course, was obscene. Some of it was obscene and pretty good. Some of it was obscene and terrible.
What ended up happening is the whole process got bureaucratized. The NEA ended up afraid to make highly controversial grants. They spend more on overhead. They send more around to the states. Now, it’s much more boring. It seems obvious in retrospect. The NEA did a much better job in the 1960s, right after it was founded, when it was just a bunch of smart people sitting around a table saying, “Let’s send some money to this person,” and then they’d just do it, basically.
TABARROK: Right, so the greatness cannot survive the mediocrity of democratic consensus.
COWEN: There are plenty of good cases where government does good things in the arts, often in the early stages of some process before it’s too politicized. I think some critics overlook that or don’t want to admit it.
TABARROK: One of the interesting things in your book was that the whole history of the NEA, this recreates itself, has recreated itself many times in the past. The salon during the French painting Renaissance, the impressionists hated the salon, right?
COWEN: Right. And had typically turned them away because the works weren’t good enough.
TABARROK: There could be rent-seeking going on, right? The artists get control. Sometimes it’s democratic politics, but sometimes it’s some clique of artists who get control and then funnel the money to their friends.
COWEN: French cinematic subsidies would more fit that latter model. It’s not so much that the French voters want to pay for those movies, but a lot of French government is controlled by elites. The elites like a certain kind of cinema. They view it as a counterweight to Hollywood, preserving French culture. The French still pay for or, indirectly by quota, subsidize a lot of films that just don’t really even get released. They end up somewhere and they just don’t have much impact flat out.
Here’s the episode. Subscribe now to take a small step toward a much better world: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube.
Girls improve student mental health
Using individual-level data from the Add Health surveys, we leverage idiosyncratic variation in gender composition across cohorts within the same school to examine whether being exposed to a higher share of female peers affects mental health and school satisfaction. We find that being exposed to a higher proportion of female peers, despite only improving school satisfaction for boys, improves mental health for both boys and girls. The benefits are greater among boys of low socioeconomic backgrounds, who would otherwise be more likely to be exposed to violent and disruptive peers. We find suggestive evidence that the mechanisms driving our findings are consistent with stronger school friendships for boys and better self-image and grades for girls.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Monica Deza and Maria Zhu.
Claims about interest rates
Based on this analysis, I believe the appropriate fed funds rate is in the mid-2 percent area, almost 2 percentage points lower than current policy. The Federal Reserve has been entrusted with the important goal of promoting price stability for the good of all American households and businesses, and I am committed to bringing inflation sustainably back to 2 percent. However, leaving policy restrictive by such a large degree brings significant risks for the Fed’s employment mandate.
And there is this point:
Given that roughly 100 million Americans rent, net zero immigration going forward would imply 1 point lower rent inflation per year.
That is from Miran’s recent speech about monetary policy. I do believe the speech is a useful guide for how some parts of the Trump administration are thinking about economic policy. From my side, I view this as a highly inflationary monetary policy, pursued on the basis of a bunch of unconfirmed conjectures.
Monday assorted links
1. An argument that Pakes, Berry, and Hausman should win the Nobel Prize in economics.
2. The fleeting lifespan of a major league baseball (NYT).
3. “Bird lovers are more motivated to take action to prevent birds from colliding with their windows by messages that emphasize the effectiveness of those measures, while emotional appeals are more persuasive for the general public, a new Cornell study has found.” Link here.
4. The illusion of diminishing returns in LLM progress. And will the entire economy become a “reinforcement learning machine”?
5. Which names should Starbucks allow on the cup?
6. For the non-famous, co-authorship predicts academic job switches.
What should I ask Alison Gopnik?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. Here is Wikipedia:
Alison Gopnik (born June 16, 1955) is an American professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her work in the areas of cognitive and language development, specializing in the effect of language on thought, the development of a theory of mind, and causal learning. Her writing on psychology and cognitive science has appeared in Science, Scientific American, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, New Scientist, Slate and others. Her body of work also includes four books and over 100 journal articles…
Gopnik has carried out extensive work in applying Bayesian networks to human learning and has published and presented numerous papers on the topic…Gopnik was one of the first psychologists to note that the mathematical models also resemble how children learn.
Gopnik is known for advocating the “theory theory” which postulates that the same mechanisms used by scientists to develop scientific theories are used by children to develop causal models of their environment.
Here is her home page. So what should I ask her?
Not the best news from Argentina…
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said “all options” are on the table for the Trump administration to support Argentina through a bout of severe market volatility, throwing a lifeline to libertarian president Javier Milei.
In comments on X, Bessent said that financial assistance could include purchases of Argentina’s currency or sovereign debt by a fund controlled by the US Treasury. Milei, a close ally of Donald Trump, is trying to contain a run on the peso and slide in asset prices after a disappointing local election result unnerved markets.
Milei and Bessent are set to meet Trump in New York on Tuesday…
He said that options for a support package “may include, but are not limited to, swap lines, direct currency purchases, and purchases of US dollar-denominated government debt from Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund”.
But that is not surprising either, not if you have been reading MR. Here is more from the FT.
H1-B visa fees and the academic job market
Assume the courts do not strike this down (perhaps they will?).
Will foreigners still be hired at the entry level with an extra 100k surcharge? I would think not,as university budgets are tight these days. I presume there is some way to turn them down legally, without courting discrimination lawsuits?
What if you ask them to accept a lower starting wage? A different deal in some other manner, such as no summer money or a higher teaching load? Is that legal? Will schools have the stomach to even try? I would guess not. Is there a way to amortize the 100k over five or six years? What if the new hire leaves the institution in year three of the deal?
In economics at least, a pretty high percentage of the graduate students at top institutions do not have green cards or citizenships.
So how exactly is this going to work? There are not so many jobs in Europe, not enough to absorb those students even if they wish to work there. Will many drop out right now? And if the flow of graduate students is not replenished, given that entry into the US job market is now tougher, how many graduate programs will close up?
Will Chinese universities suddenly hire a lot more quality talent?
Here is some related discussion on Twitter.
As they say, solve for the equilibrium…
AI and weather tracking as a very positive intervention
India’s monsoon season was unusual this year, but many farmers there had new AI weather-forecasting tools to help them ride out the storms.
Google’s open-source artificial intelligence model NeuralGCM and the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts’s AI systems are making sophisticated and granular forecasting data available to even the smallest farms in poor areas. Thanks to the open-source AI, and decades of rainfall data, the Indian government sent out forecasts to 38 million farmers to warn them about looming monsoons.
The initiative to help farmers adapt is the latest example of how companies are expanding their weather-tracking capabilities amid mounting concerns about extreme weather and climate change.
The effort is part of a growing “democratization of weather forecasting,” said Pedram Hassanzadeh, a researcher at the University of Chicago who focuses on machine learning and extreme weather. Researchers from the university partnered with the Indian government to gather and send out the monsoon predictions.
“Up until very recently, to run a weather model, you needed a 100 million-dollar supercomputer,” said Olivia Graham, a product manager at Google Research. But now, farmers in India can make better-informed agricultural decisions quickly, she said.
These projects seem to have very high benefit to cost ratios. Here is one relevant RCT, here is another. Here is more from the WSJ, via Michael Kremer. Here is a useful and informative press release.
Sunday assorted links
1. Are the super-wealthy abandoning art markets?
2. Why are Talenti gelato jars so hard to open? Hot water works for me.
3. New Mexico will offer free child care and preschool for all families.
4. How men and women rank movies differently.
5. “Unsurprisingly, she’s not planning a trip any time soon. Tourism has just never been her thing.”
7. “AI Music Artist Lands Multi-Million Dollar Record Deal.“
What to read for travel
When you land in a new destination, what should you read? It’s hard to find good material with search engines because the space is SEO’d so aggressively. A Wikipedia article is fine insofar as it goes, but inevitably misses much of the texture of a place. I think it’d be neat if there was some kind of service that collated great travel writing — especially pieces that capture something of the context of a place. (See the Davies post below.) To this end, I made guide.world.
From Patrick Collison, recommended, lots of great reading (and travel) there.
The forthcoming Joe Studwell book on Africa
How Africa Works: Success and Failure on the World’s Last Development Frontier.
Self-recommending…
A simple metric for choosing immigrants for America
I often hear the following standards suggested:
1. Use willingness to pay for entry.
2. Take people from high IQ countries.
3. Take people from high trust countries.
4. Take people from similar countries, which I suppose means Canada and Australia?
5. Take people with graduate degrees.
I will not evaluate those one-by-one, only to note they are not the very worst standards you might apply. Instead, I have a new idea, which consists of two parts. Apply strict (but not low “n”) standards for admission and then:
6. Take people from populous countries with high cognitive variance, and
7. All other things equal, prefer people from very distant countries.
That in essence suggests taking in people from China, India, and Russia, which are indeed countries with high cognitive variance. And today that is quite possibly the right thing to do. You will note that none of those countries count as especially high trust, and India at least has very mixed IQ readings, I am not sure about Russia given the rural idiocy there.
To understand that standard in more general terms, #6 gets you geniuses and the extremely ambitious. They are the ones who can fight through your immigration thicket, and will be motivated to do so. And because they are coming from screwed up countries, many of them will be quite keen to leave. They also will be used to fighting very hard to get ahead, more so than a lot of the graduate students who might come from Sweden.
#7 recognizes that a lot of people from nearby countries will come simply because it is convenient. And because of “the gravity equation.” So you should discriminate against them somewhat. Note that because borders are somewhat porous, you are going to get a lot of them anyway. That is OK, but you can then penalize them a bit in the standards process, in essence to get the same net “tax” on entry. And because their home countries are nearby, they might be a little slower to assimilate.
To be clear this is a recipe for America in 2025. A lot of other countries might do better opting for the boring Macedonian dentist, because they will not get top talent anyway. Or America in 1770, when building out a core population, might have done well with what was in essence a version of #3, with a bit of #2 and #4. Which is more or less what we did, though not by conscious design (borders were open).
Worth a ponder. These questions are underdiscussed. I am not sure this proposal is the best idea, but it occurred to me it never has been presented before.
The Industrial Revolution in the United States: 1790-1870
This chapter explores the distinctive trajectory of American industrialization up to 1870, emphasizing how the United States adapted and transformed British technologies to suit its unique economic and resource conditions. Rather than a straightforward transfer of innovations, the chapter argues that American industrial development was shaped by path-dependent processes and historical contingencies—such as the Embargo Act of 1807 and government sponsorship of firearms production—that enabled the emergence of a domestic innovation ecosystem. The chapter offers fresh insights into how high-pressure steam engines, vertically integrated textile mills, and precision manufacturing techniques evolved in response to labor scarcity, capital constraints, and abundant natural resources. A particularly novel contribution is the detailed analysis of how American manufacturers substituted mechanization and organizational innovation for skilled labor, leading to the development of technologies that were not only distinct from their British counterparts but also foundational for the Second Industrial Revolution. The chapter also highlights the democratization of invention, showing how economic incentives and institutional support fostered widespread innovation among ordinary citizens. By integrating technological, economic, and institutional perspectives, this chapter provides a compelling explanation for why the United States developed a robust manufacturing sector despite seemingly unfavorable initial conditions.
That is from a recent NBER working paper by Joshua L. Rosenbloom.