2026-04-03 19:21:49
In our textbook, Modern Principles, Tyler and I emphasize that Congress and the President are subject to a higher law, the law of supply and demand. In an excellent column, Jason Furman gives a clear example of how difficult it is to fight the law of inelastic demand:
…Today a given number of autoworkers can make, according to my calculations, three times as many cars in a year as they could 50 years ago.
The problem is that consumers do not want three times as many cars. Even as people get richer, they increase their spending on manufactured goods only modestly, preferring instead to spend more on services like travel, health care and dining out. There are only so many cars a family can own, but that’s not the case for expensive vacations or fancy meals. As a result we have fewer people working in auto factories and more people working in luxury resorts and the like.
These forces — rising productivity but steady demand — explain why the United States was losing manufacturing job share as far back as the 1950s and 1960s, long before trade became a major factor.
The post The President(s) Fought the Law and the Law Won appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-04-03 14:35:12
From the still-active Sam Petzman:
I document a sudden, sharp and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness in the US population. It occurred during 2020, the year of the Covid pandemic, and mainly persists through 2024. This happiness crash spread across nearly all typical demographics and geographies. The happiest groups pre-Covid (e.g., whites, high income, well-educated and politically/ideologically right-leaning) tend to show the largest happiness reductions. The glaring exception is marital status, which has consistently been an important marker for happiness. The already wide happiness premium for marriage has, if anything, become slightly wider. With both married and unmarried reporting large declines in happiness the country has become segregated: slightly over half-the married adults-remain happy on balance; the unmarried, nearly half, are now distinctly unhappy. I also show that across a number of aspects of personal and social capital post-Covid deterioration is the norm, including a collapse of belief in the fairness of others and of trust in the US Supreme Court.
Here is the paper, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
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2026-04-03 12:38:47
1. Allister Sparks, The Mind of South Africa: The Story of the Rise and Fall of Apartheid. This history book actually tries to explain to the reader how things were. Oh such books are so rare! (Why is that?) Definitely recommended, written at the very end of the apartheid era which gives it yet another angle of interest.
2. Nic von Wielligh and Lydia von Wielligh-Steyn, The Bomb: South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Programme. I had been looking for a book on this topic for a long time, and finally I found the right one in a South African bookshop. They did build six atomic bombs, almost seven, and this is the story of how that started and was later reversed. Hundreds of pages of substantive detail, and I had not realized how much the conflict in Angola, and Cuban/Soviet involvement, was a major factor in the whole episode.
3. David Stuart, The Four Heavens: A New History of the Ancient Maya. We keep on learning lots about the Maya, and this is the best book to follow what has been going on. Well-written and clear, and it does not numb your mind with details you may not care about.
4. Mark B. Smith, Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization 1953-1991. I am seeing an increasing number of excellent books on what the Soviet Union really was. This one is well written, broad in scope, and yet rich in detail, treating the covered era as a living, breathing time in human history. It makes the time and place imaginable. The book also goes a long way toward disaggregating different Soviet eras, rather than just the end of Stalinism.
5. Kevin Hartnett, The Proof is in the Code: How a Truth Machine is Transforming Math and AI. A very useful book about the history of proving math theorems by computer.
The post What I’ve been reading appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-04-02 23:54:55
1. The most important woman in Kant’s life.
2. Incentives matter? Dealing with Iranian scientists (New Yorker).
5. The next generation of books and publishing?
6. More Scott Sumner movie reviews.
7. How people actually use ChatGPT. A massive new dataset from OpenAI.
8. They added a baby to the end of Tristan!???
9. Results on reproducibility. And a simple visual, comparing different fields. “Education” does not do great. And the Nature link. None of this should come as a surprise.
10. Resilient societies: a Mercatus call for proposals.
11. “There are now ten toilets in space.” (And the aliens?)
12. The anti-data center coalitions and their squabbles.
Lots to read and ponder in today’s links…
The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-04-02 22:35:01
From his house in Los Angeles, Mr. Gallagher, 41, used A.I. to write the code for the software that powers his company, produce the website copy, generate the images and videos for ads and handle customer service. He created A.I. systems to analyze his business’s performance. And he outsourced the other stuff he couldn’t do himself.
His start-up, Medvi, a telehealth provider of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, got 300 customers in its first month. In its second month, it gained 1,000 more. In 2025, Medvi’s first full year in business, the company generated $401 million in sales.
Mr. Gallagher then hired his only employee, his younger brother, Elliot. This year, they are on track to do $1.8 billion in sales.
Here is more from Erin Griffith at the NYT. Maybe Sam said “one person” running a billion dollar company, but if the two are closely genetically related still I will count this.
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2026-04-02 21:38:39
China’s share in US imports at 9% is back down to what it was right before China joined the WTO (2001).
Addendum: If you are curious, here is GPT on how much is now shipped through third countries.
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