2026-04-18 02:26:36
From 1857:
The Persians were great sticklers for ceremony, it turned out, and now that the treaty was ratified, they expected an exchange of gifts to mark the important occasion. At Spence’s [a leading diplomat of the time] insistence, the United States spent $10,000 (close to $1 million in today’s money) on diamond-studded snuffboxes and weapons for the shah. The State Department protested bitterly, as it was not in the habit of spending such outrageous sums, but Spence put his foot down, knowing that these gifts paled in comparison with what Persia had received from Napoleon and others. Spence’s brother Charles was dispatched to Tehran to deliver the gifts in person — a gesture the shah appreciated so much that he decorates the young man with the Order of the Lion and the Sun, the country’s highest honor.
That is from John Ghazvinian America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present, a very good book.
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2026-04-17 23:57:21
1. Conversations about boring topics are more interesting than we think.
2. What will be scarce. And Andy Hall on using AI to boost economics research.
3. Virginia passes reasonable AI legislation.
4. AI-generated movie trailer. And the short movie.
6. Objection.ai.
7. A neglected cost of restricting data centers. And on not waking up a loser.
The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-04-17 19:41:07
I know I cannot “talk most of you into Duchamp,” but I will say this is one of the best museum shows I have seen, ever. Putting aside your view of Duchamp as an artist, it is remarkably well-curated and instructive. It shows a large number of works I had not seen before and places them in proper context. They are knockouts, and probably you have not seen them. You might even be too focused on the urinal, and yes that is in the show too, though with proper context.
I also learned a good deal about the history of modern art from the exhibit, and now I appreciate Man Ray, Picabia, and others more as well. I also now better understand the connection of Duchamp’s work to his early representational paintings, how exactly he evolved toward bicycle wheels, how central the “nude descending a staircase” image was to him, his obsessions with boxes, his artistic connections to chess, his connections to pornography, what he did to end his career, and much more.
So if you are at all tempted, you absolutely should go to this exhibit. Supplement it with a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, because a few of his most important works cannot be moved from that site.
Here is a very good NYT review. And here is a more negative review of the show, though perhaps not for the reasons you might be expecting.
Context is that which is scarce!
And here is some context for you.
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2026-04-17 12:53:27
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Kim Bowes is an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania whose book, Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent, Tyler calls perhaps his favorite economics book of 2025. By sifting through the material remains of Roman life — shoes, bricks, ceramics, and the like — she uncovers a picture of ordinary Romans who could evidently afford to buy multiple sets of colorful clothes, use gold coins for daily transactions, and eat peppercorns sourced from thousands of miles away. This vast web of commerce, she argues, both bound the empire together and provided the tax base that kept it running — and when it unraveled, Rome unraveled with it.
Tyler and Kim discuss what would surprise a modern visitor to a Roman elite home, what early Roman Christianity actually looked like on the ground, why Romans never developed formal economic reasoning, what decentralized money-lending reveals about the Roman state, whether there were anything like forward markets, why Romans continued to use coins even as the empire debased them, the economics of Roman slavery, whether Roman recipes taste any good, the Romans as hyper-scalers rather than inventors, what Rome made of China and Egypt, why Kim’s not a fan of the Vesuvius challenge, the practicalities of landscape archaeology, how a vast belt of factories along the Tiber Valley went undiscovered until twenty years ago, where to go on a three-week tour of the Roman Empire, what she thinks is ultimately behind Rome’s unraveling, and much more.
Here is an excerpt with some economics:
COWEN: Say, when the government is clipping the silver coins and lowering their silver content, as we now know in economic theory, this will imply at least some inflationary pressure. Are there Roman writers who understood that and laid it out, or they’re just vague public complaints about government clipping the coins?
BOWES: They’re not so much clipping them as they are minting them with less silver, which amounts to the same thing. It’s just a little bit classier and harder to detect. Absolutely, people know that they’re doing this. What I think is most interesting and what we’re all still wrestling with is, from even before Nero onwards, Roman emperors recognized the advantage to the fisc to basically producing coins with less silver.
Then they start to have silver problems, and they start really pulling the silver out of their coins, and nobody cares. That is to say, people care, and they notice, but the convenience of the Roman coin of the realm, the denarius, which is made with silver, outweighs—that’s a little bit of a pun—the actual silver content of that coin, and so people are willing to just suck it up and deal, and they keep using it.
There is inflation, and inflation, we can now tell, thanks to some great papyri from Egypt, trends upwards very slowly over the first century, the second century, the third century, but it’s not proportional to the amount of silver that’s being pulled out of the coins. People basically still have trust in their coinage, which really shows the degree to which the state has convinced people, simply by supporting ordinary people’s coin use, that the coins work and that they’re going to back their coins, even though they’re slightly pulling the silver out.
COWEN: Why was there so much decentralized money lending? You would think that banks would have economies of scale, offer better terms, just like I wouldn’t borrow money from my friends, I would go to the bank. Why doesn’t the Roman Empire evolve that way?
BOWES: The Roman Empire confuses us, I think, because on the one hand, it looks like a really big state that ought to do things that big states do. The Roman big state is really a mask for an empire of friends and family. You borrow money from friends and family. Banks, such as they exist, are really nothing more than friends and family, so even when you have actual banks, they tend to be largely constituted by a single family.
The difference that you’re making between borrowing from a bank and borrowing from your family is much less clear-cut in a world in which the bank is your family, or the bank is a family that is friends of yours. It’s not that Romans don’t use banks, they do use banks. We can see the most often wealthier Romans using banks. It’s a lot harder to see the 90 percent using banks, and they seem to more often default to the immediate circle of people that they know, which again, it’s not such a huge distinction. In a world in which there’s no FDIC, in which the bank isn’t guaranteed and protected by the state in the way in which our banks are, the distinction between bank and family, bank and friends, is much less clear.
Interesting and engaging throughout, definitely recommended. You can buy Kim’s excellent book here.
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2026-04-17 02:53:07
A new venture, focusing on evidence-based approaches to economic development globally. Here is Paul Niehaus on GiveDirectly and the evidence for cash-based transfers. Here is the home page and a link to subscribe.
The post In Development magazine appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-04-17 00:01:37
1. Kasparov analyzes the rise of Sindarov.
2. Podcast on Houellebecq’s Submission. With transcript.
3. “A majority of Australian children under age 16 still use social media apps despite a ban implemented in December, according to new research.
Sixty-one percent of Australian children between the ages of 12 and 15 told researchers from a prominent UK foundation and an Australian youth research agency that they can still access accounts on major platforms just as they did before the ban was put in place.” Link here.
4. “If anything, nationalists are fighting to reassure pro-EU voters. Marine Le Pen has softened her line on Brussels over the years to remain electorally competitive in France. Giorgia Meloni has mostly co-operated with the EU during her three-and-a-half surprising years as a hard-right Italian prime minister. Both will have watched events in Hungary over the weekend and felt themselves vindicated. Of all the varied reasons for Viktor Orbán’s landslide defeat, the public’s desire to mend relations with the EU was prominent. The election winner Péter Magyar, no kind of liberal, and in fact a former Orbán man, favours a “return to Europe”.” (Ganesh in the FT)
5. Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia. And a useful thread.
6. Alex Imas on the evolution of employment with AI.
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