2026-02-08 17:03:56
That is the new Knausgaard book, excellent and moving. Better than any Knausgaard work other than the first two volumes of My Struggle. The ending is especially good and meaningful, revising much of what came before. You can buy it here.
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2026-02-08 13:45:24
From Anonymous:
Hello Professor Cowen,
I hope all is well with you and that you have navigated the recent weather alright.
I have a thought that I wanted to run by you that related to phones and teen anxiety.
You have cited a variety of studies that say that phones and social media do not cause anxiety. As you may recall, I have taught junior high and high school for almost 30 years. I did see a big spike in anxiety for my students, especially females, around the years 2010-2017/18ish. I used to think “phones,” but now I’m not sure. The anxiety spike has declined. My last ‘anxious’ class of seniors are now seniors in college. Students today are on the phones as much as those in the past.
Here is my theory: Students started to feel more anxious around 2010 because they could sense the coming seismic cultural and political shifts coming, of which phones were a harbinger or carrier. They were mostly not conscious of this, and couldn’t express it, but they were trying to cope.
Now, they have coped. My current seniors have unusual political ideas but are mostly optimistic. I contrast them to a centrist friend of mine who does some DC work and constantly thinks the sky is falling.
Now, adults are more anxious, not students. Adults are starting to see these seismic shifts and they are trying to cope. Perhaps they are projecting their own anxiety onto their kids, and are behind the times with the cause. Phones may have helped drive anxiety 10 years ago, but maybe not anymore. Students have coped and adjusted to a new equilibrium.
It is also possible that phones serve as a good/useful “myth” (I mean this in a positive sense) for the shifts we are seeing and the anxiety many feel . We need something tangible to hold our thoughts on the shifts in culture, and we have chosen phones. Thus, the clash over phones today might be between those who think in mythic/symbolic ways, and those who think in more scientific ways. Both are right in their own perspective. The new cultural and political shifts over the last 10-15 years would naturally bring on anxiety. Phones are not the cause of the shift, but a good symbol of it.
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2026-02-08 02:12:32
The most successful economics blog in the world is called Marginal Revolution.
That is not an accident….Consider a few common mistakes that reappear whenever marginal thinking is abandoned:
One of the most uncomfortable implications of marginal analysis is that reallocation is essential. Labor and capital must sometimes leave declining uses so they can enter expanding ones. That process is rarely smooth, and never painless. But blocking it does not make an economy more humane; it makes it poorer.
The twentieth century gave this insight a name. Joseph Schumpeter called it creative destruction. János Kornai warned that when losses are systematically covered—when budget constraints are soft—adjustment never happens, inefficiency becomes chronic, and stagnation follows.
Marginal analysis explains why. If losses have no consequences, margins lose meaning. Prices stop signaling scarcity. Productivity differences stop guiding allocation. The economy becomes a museum of preserved structures rather than a system that adapts.
Excellent throughout, here is the link.
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2026-02-08 00:28:02
1. Indeed the Turner watercolor went for 165k, well above the estimate. The Hubert Robert for 53k.
2. Reason and Rationality program for middle school students. High school program here.
3. In defense of hallucinations? Note that Princeton Law Review does not exist.
4. Economics of a Super Bowl ad.
5. Searchable database of every book mentioned on Conversations with Tyler.
6. Prophets of the Leopold Aschenbrenner.
7. David Pilling reviews Joe Studwell’s new Africa book (FT).
8. Are there just as many female autistics?
9. Brazil is still in better fiscal shape than is Argentina.
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2026-02-07 15:14:05
Mostly about the economics of food, this is from their episode summary:
If you want to understand food – and eat better – economics is a good place to start. How do immigration patterns shape a country’s cuisine? How do labour laws make our working lunches worse? And why do strip malls serve such good grub?
About 33 minutes, here are the links:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/30oLOLQZvGmvxJzA31X3qK
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2026-02-07 13:33:21
To illustrate this challenge of measurement and inference, Figure 7 presents Romanian birth rates before, during, and after the imposition of an infamously coercive policy aimed at raising births. In 1966, a dictatorial government imposed Decree 770, which banned abortion and made modern contraception effectively inaccessible. The figure extends an idea from Sobotka, Matysiak, and Brzozowska (2019), which compares cohort and period fertility rates in Romania over a similar evaluation window. We add data from Bulgaria, Romania’s neighbor that was also communist during the time of the policy and that might plausibly serve as a control, shedding light on what course Romanian fertility might have followed after 1967 if not for the policy. Panel A plots period birth rates in the two countries and shows that Romania and Bulgaria had substantially similar trends and levels in period total fertility rates before and after the Romanian policy window. Focusing on panel A of Figure 7, it is clear that birth rates in Romania changed dramatically following the start of the policy, as families were taken by surprise. TFR nearly doubled in the year that followed. The sharp timing of this apparent impact following the policy change, together with the availability of data from neighboring Bulgaria to serve as a control, suggests the possibility of a difference-in-differences analysis comparing birth rates pre– and post–Decree 770 in Romania and Bulgaria.
But while such an analysis could answer the narrow question of the causal effect of Decree 770 on the total fertility rate in 1967, it may nonetheless reveal little in terms of the impact of the policy on the number of children Romanian women had over their lifetimes. After the initial rise in TFR, birth rates soon began falling quickly in Romania, as behavior adapted to the new policy regime. If, for example, an unexpected pregnancy results in a birth at a young age in 1968, a woman may choose and succeed at reducing the probability of a pregnancy in subsequent years, and still achieve the same lifetime count of children.
For a discussion of the theoretically ambiguous impact of abortion restrictions on birth rates, see Lawson and Spears (2025). Of course, the extent of persistence from period fertility to completed fertility depends on the details: A shock that encourages earlier-than-desired births, as Romania’s might have, allows for adjustment later in life. But it may be harder, later in life, to adjust for a policy or event shock that leads to fewer births early in life.Panel B of Figure 7 plots completed cohort fertility. As in earlier figures, cohorts are plotted along the horizontal axis according to the year in which they turned 30. Although Romanian completed cohort fertility began at a higher level than in Bulgaria over the available data series, completed cohort fertility in Romania did not maintain a sizable upward trend relative Bulgaria during the period that Decree 770 was in force.
That is from the recent Geruso and Spears JEP survey piece on whether we can expect fertility rates to rebound in the future. By the way, after Hungary’s subsidy-driven baby boom, the country is now having a baby bust, it is possible that similar mechanisms are operating.
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Transcript: What an economist eats for lunch (in 2026), with Tyler Cowen—FT
via FT’s The Economics Show with Soumaya Keynes episode page Rules for dining from the world’s foremost foodie economist.