2026-01-19 00:09:32
Here is the link, I should add that in addition to my enthusiasm for the students, the faculty also seemed quite good, most of all knowledgeable and open. I know very little about how the school is run, you might try this short piece from Arnold Kling, who has been visiting there for a week.
Here is an excerpt from Tim:
Tyler made a remark that he didn’t think fighting grade inflation matters very much. I respect his opinion, but I think he’s wrong. And I hope I can change his mind. Here’s why I care so much about it, and why I think a GPA target is the only — literally the only — effective solution. A college cannot fight grade inflation with rhetoric and goals and hand-wringing. Genuine academic rigor requires strong limits on what faculty can do with grades.
Professors everywhere have a large incentive to give higher grades. The situation has inflated asymptotically to the ceiling for 8 decades, particularly at the Ivies…
At University of Austin, all professors have to give an average grade of B. Here is more from Tim:
Consequences?
Some of you have asked me what I think of the recent Politico article on University of Austin. First, I have not been involved in any of the cited disputes, so I cannot speak to their details. Second, I do not not not speak for the University at all (while I am on the Advisory Board, it is an unpaid position with no authority or fiduciary responsibility and my advice/consultation has been on the AI topic). But I would make these more general points:
a. If a university decided to be based explicitly on classical liberal perspectives and principles, I would think that is great (not saying what is the best way to describe U. Austin, this is a general observation). I would however worry that the decision is not sustainable over time at much scale, given the career incentives of so many of the people who will be hired.
b. If that decision to be “classically liberal in orientation” required the administration to set some general principles to try to assure that the faculty at said school did not evolve into being like the faculty almost everywhere else, I would be fine with that.
c. I think such a school, over time, if it stuck to its principles, would end up with more de facto free speech than most other institutions of higher education.
d. I am glad that Notre Dame and Georgetown are Catholic schools, that UC Santa Cruz was founded as a kind of hippie school, that there is Yeshiva, the New School, HBCUs, and so on. I favor schools being “more different” ideologically in a variety of directions, including those I do not agree with, which of course will cover the majority of cases. My main objection is that many of the “Catholic” schools for instance are not very Catholic anymore, having been taken over by a kind of rampant general professionalism. I hope University of Austin avoids that fate. I should add that I am well aware that the general rise in fixed costs makes such endeavors much harder to sustain these days. I would like to reverse that general trend, and that is one reason for my interest in online and AI-oriented methods in education.
e. To innovate, more and more schools will have to move away from the old “faculty control” model. This change is already substantially underway, sans the innovation however.
f. Failure to contextualize is often the greatest “sin” of media articles offering coverage of disputes.
Returning to the University of Austin, right now their entering class is about 100 students, and they offer 35 classes a semester. It is one floor in an office building, and it is not costing any taxpayer dollars. It is a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket. GMU alone has about 40,000 students, and is basically a city. My Principles class this last fall alone had about 3.5x more students than are in the entire U. Austin.
If you are very upset by whatever is going on at U. Austin, or not going on, or whatever…I would say that is the real story.
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2026-01-18 16:25:25
From a new paper by Ariel Coremberg and Emilio Ocampo:
This paper challenges the increasingly popular view that Argentina’s economy performed relatively well under the corporatist import substitution industrialization (CISI) regime until the mid-1970s, and that its much-debated decline began only after 1975. Instead, it advances the alternative hypothesis that although real GDP per capita growth during this period was high by Argentina’s historical standards, it was low relative to the rest of the world, to typical comparator countries, and to what was achievable given the country’s factor endowments and investment levels. Distortions in relative prices and systemic capital misallocation generated significant inefficiencies that constrained economic dynamism and limited productivity gains. We support this hypothesis using a range of empirical methodologies—including comparative GDP per capita ratios, convergence analysis, growth accounting, and cyclical peak-to-peak analysis— complemented by historical interpretation. Although post-1955 modifications to the CISI regime temporarily improved performance, by the early 1970s it had exhausted its capacity to sustain growth. The prolonged stagnation that followed the 1975 crisis can be explained by the inability of successive governments to overcome the resistance of entrenched interest groups and thus complete the transition to an open market economy. Abrupt regime reversals fostered social conflict, political instability, and macroeconomic uncertainty, all of which undermined the sustained productivity gains required for long-term growth.
Via the excellent Samir Varma.
The post When did Argentina lose its way? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-01-18 13:03:15
We explore the role of immediate next door neighbors in affecting children’s later life occupation choice. Using linked historical census records for over 6 million boys and 4 million girls, we reconstruct neighborhood microgeography to estimate how growing up next door to someone in a particular occupation affects a child’s probability of working in that occupation as an adult, relative to other children who grew up farther away on the same street. Living next door to someone as a child increases the probability of having the same occupation as them 30 years later by about 10 percent. As an additional source of exogenous variation in exposure to next door neighbors, we exploit untimely neighbor deaths and find smaller and insignificant exposure effects for children who grew up next to a neighbor with an untimely death. We find larger exposure effects when intensity of exposure is expected to be higher, and document larger occupational transmission in more connected neighborhoods and when next door neighbors are the same race or ethnicity or have children of similar ages. Childhood exposure to next door neighbors has real economic consequences: children who grow up next to neighbors in high income or education occupations see significant gains in adult income and education, even relative to other children living on the same street, suggesting that neighborhood networks significantly contribute to economic mobility.
That is from a recent paper by Michael Andrews, Ryan Hill, Joseph Price, and Riley Wilson. Via Kris Gulati.
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2026-01-18 04:31:37
I loved this documentary, all three hours of it. Perhaps you need to be American, and to have lived in Pee-wee’s decades? In any case, the film is a wonderful reflection on self-knowledge, the changing status of “coming out” as gay in American history, celebrity, how fame happens, hippie culture, cancel culture, who your real friends are, narcissism, and much more. Pee-wee collaborated with the making of the film, but it seems pretty honest in portraying his life and later legal troubles. It turns out he was dying of cancer for years, but did not let on to the filmmakers. Here is the official trailer.
The post *Pee-wee as himself* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-01-18 01:52:20
1. Another AI-generated hit song.
4. Egg prices fell about twenty percent this year, GPT will tell you that supply is elastic.
5. How difficult is Spanish to understand in various countries? (I think Chilean Spanish is not as tough as suggested here.)
7. The premium that USG was paying on ten-year Treasuries is mostly gone.
The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-01-17 17:19:36
From a new QJE paper by Timothy Besley, Christopher Dann, and Sacha Dray:
This paper explores the relationship between economic growth and trust in government using variation in GDP growth experienced over a lifetime since birth. We assemble a newly harmonized global dataset across eleven major opinion surveys, comprising 3.3 million respondents in 166 countries since 1990. Exploiting cohort-level variation, we find that individuals who experience higher GDP growth are more prone to trust their governments, with larger effects found in democracies. Higher growth experiences are also associated with improved perceptions of government performance and living standards. We find no similar channel between growth experience and interpersonal trust. Second, more recent growth experiences appear to matter most for trust in government, with no detectable effect of growth experienced during one’s formative years, closer to birth or before birth. Third, we find evidence of a “trust paradox” whereby average trust in government is lower in democracies than in autocracies. Our results are robust to a range of falsification exercises, robustness checks and single-country evidence using the American National Election Studies and the Swiss Household Panel.
Via Alexander Berger.
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