2025-08-29 23:55:25
1. New results on the detection of AI writing.
2. Jasmine Sun visits China and Shenzhen.
3. Emotional intelligence measures for different LLMs.
4. One description of the new cultural vibes. Not exactly my view, but of interest.
5. Africa needs lots of large private sector firms.
6. Progressives have a birth rate problem.
7. Noah Smith reviews Dan Wang.
The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2025-08-29 19:19:33
Trump has put tariffs on the economics agenda in a way that hasn’t been true for decades. As a new semester of principles of economics begins, here are some resources for teaching tariffs.
Comparative Advantage (video)
The Microeconomics of Tariffs and Protectionism (video)
Why Do Domestic Prices Rise with Tariffs? (post)
Trade Diversion (Why Tariffs on More Countries Can Be Better) (post)
Manufacturing and Trade (post), Manufacturing Went South (post) and Tariffs Hurt Manufacturing (post)
Three Simple Rules of Trade Policy (Lerner symmetry, imports are inputs, trade balances and capital flows; post)
Tariffs and Taxes (post), Tariffs are a Terrible Way to Raise Revenue (Albrecht post) and Consistency on Tariffs and Taxes (post)
Globalization: Economics, Culture and the Future (video)
The Tariff Tracker, great source for real time tracking of prices such as below (the data can be downloaded):
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2025-08-29 19:15:14
Boarding houses were made illegal by zoning that enforced single family homes and by rules limiting occupancy, demanding every room have a private bathroom, outlawing shared kitchens, requiring parking spaces for every resident etc.
How States and Cities Decimated Americans’ Lowest-Cost Housing Option is an excellent, hard-hitting piece making and extending these points and significantly it’s not from a libertarian think tank but Pew:
Low-cost micro-units, often called single-room occupancies, or SROs, were once a reliable form of housing for the United States’ poorest residents of, and newcomers to, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and many other major U.S. cities. Well into the 20th century, SROs were the least expensive option on the housing market, providing a small room with a shared bathroom and sometimes a shared kitchen for a price that is unimaginable today—as little as $100 to $300 a month (in 2025 dollars).
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, landlords converted thousands of houses, hotels, apartment buildings, and commercial buildings into SROs, and by 1950, SRO units made up about 10% of all rental units in some major cities. But beginning in the mid-1950s, as some politicians and vocal members of the public turned against SROs and the people who lived in them, major cities across the country revised zoning and building codes to force or encourage landlords to eliminate SRO units and to prohibit the development of new ones. Over the next several decades, governments and developers gradually demolished thousands of SROs or converted them to other uses, including boutique hotels for tourists. And as SROs disappeared, homelessness—which had been rare from at least the end of the Great Depression to the late 1970s—exploded nationwide.
The Pew piece does an excellent job of documenting how laws are beginning to change. I especially appreciated this point: the simplest reform is to stop making it illegal for unrelated people to share a home!
Perhaps the simplest method of creating low-cost shared housing is to allow unrelated individuals to share a house in the same way that relatives are allowed to share a house.67 But many communities limit the number of unrelated people who can live together—in some places, to as few as two. Such laws make sharing a house for a group of roommates—which usually enables rents lower than having an individual apartment—illegal. The U.S. has a record number of unused bedrooms, but many cannot be rented because of restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates, even if that would be the most profitable use for the landlord and the most affordable option for the tenants.68 To enable this low-cost housing option, Iowa, Oregon, and Colorado all passed bipartisan legislation to strike down local codes that prohibit house-sharing (in 2017, 2021, and 2024, respectively).69
So many of our problems are created by busybodies and do-gooders who prevent people from using their own property.
The post The War on Roommates: Why Is Sharing a House Illegal? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2025-08-29 15:10:51
This paper documents discrimination in the formation of professional networks among academic economists. We created 80 bot accounts that claim to be PhD students differing in three characteristics: gender (male or female), race (Black or White), and university affiliation (top- or lower-ranked). The bots randomly followed 6,920 users in the #EconTwitter community. Follow-back rates were 12 percent higher for White students compared to Black students, 21 percent higher for students from top-ranked universities compared to those from lower-ranked institutions, and 25 percent higher for female compared to male students. Notably, the racial gap persists even among students from top-ranked institutions.
That is from a new AERInsights paper by Nicolás Ajzenman, Bruno Ferman, and Pedro C. Sant’Anna. Here is a useful picture from the paper. Being at a top school, or at least pretending to be, is what really matters?
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2025-08-29 12:45:50
We model populism as the dissemination of a false “alternative reality,” according to which the intellectual elite conspires against the populist for purely ideological reasons. If enough voters are receptive to it, this alternative reality—by discrediting the elite’s truthful message—reduces political accountability. Elite criticism, because it is more consistent with the alternative reality, strengthens receptive voters’ support for the populist. Alternative realities are endogenously conspiratorial to resist evidence better. Populists, to leverage or strengthen beliefs in the alternative reality, enact harmful policies that may disproportionately harm the non-elite. These results explain previously unexplained facts about populism.
That is from the latest AER, by Adam Szeidl and Ferenc Szucs. In other words, a lot of you are falling for it.
The post A Model of Populism as a Conspiracy Theory appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2025-08-29 04:31:29
Tremendous progress in the field of prebiotic chemistry has shown how simple compounds available on ancient Earth could have given rise to the molecular building blocks of life1. The current challenge is to work out how these building blocks could have assembled into functional polymers, such as peptides and nucleic acids, in the absence of biological systems. Prebiotic peptide assembly from amino acids is particularly difficult to establish, given that the intricate biological machinery used today to synthesize peptides obscures the origins of the process. Writing in Nature, Singh et al.2 report chemistry that could plausibly have facilitated a key step of peptide synthesis during the prebiotic era.
Here is the link. Here is WaPo coverage.
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