2026-04-08 14:52:55
We study the effects of large-scale humanitarian aid using novel data from the American Relief Administration’s (ARA) intervention during the 1921-1922 famine in Soviet Russia. We find that the allocation of relief closely tracked underlying food scarcity and was uncorrelated with subnational politics. We show that ARA rations reduced food prices, raised caloric intake, lowered the prevalence of relapsing fever, and increased rural birth cohorts. The aid benefited poorest peasants most and proved most effective in provinces with higher levels of human capital. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that, absent ARA relief, the 1926 population would have been 4.4 million lower.
That is from a new paper by Natalya Naumenko (my colleague), Volha Charnysh, and Andrei Markevich.
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2026-04-08 12:58:59
Here is one very good paragraph of many:
Cowen is excellent on the question of why the marginalist insight had to wait so long, and why it eventually came in a simultaneous eruption across countries and three intellectual temperaments. The answer involves the slow assembly of preconditions: advances in calculus, the rise of statistical thought, the professionalization of economics as a discipline, and certain changes in the philosophy of science associated with the Victorian debate between inductive and deductive methods. Progress in science, Cowen suggests, is rarely a matter of the lone genius, but rather of the alignment of previously dispersed elements. The genius arrives when the ground has been prepared to receive the insight.
And another:
There is a discomforting codicil to all of this. Perhaps, Cowen suggests near the book’s end, the intuitions of 20th-century microeconomics were always a kind of compensation for a deeper ignorance. Perhaps we elevated intuitive reasoning, with its clean parables of marginal utility, and elegant supply-and-demand diagrams, because they were what we had, and we mistook their availability for adequacy. Machine learning models that find hundreds of thousands of factors in financial data are not exactly refuting marginalism. They are revealing the scale of what marginalism was never equipped to see. Our intuitions were always a small corner of understanding, swimming in a larger froth of epistemic chaos. The illusion has been stripped bare.
Here is the full review. Here is the book itself. Via Mike Doherty.
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2026-04-08 10:27:29
1. Claims about the role of China, and its economics. And there is a lot of remaining uncertainty, but here is one of the saner Iran war takes.
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2026-04-08 02:16:58
Here is the document, excerpt:
In January, I released the results of an experiment showing how Claude Code could helpfully extend old papers “automagically.” It was pretty astonishing to me. Claude was able to come up with a plan, scrape the web, write code, run regressions, create tables and figures, and write a whole memo on what it had found—all in about 45 minutes.
Are AI tools perfect? No. Claude made some interesting mistakes in that extension, and since then, I’ve seen it make a whole bunch more. Are human researchers perfect, though? Hell no.
The evidence that AI tools should now be an essential part of your toolkit is overwhelming—look at the recent work that my Stanford colleague Yiqing Xu has put out, for example, which allows for the automated verification of empirical research. This is so clearly valuable. When it comes to empirical work, we’re never going back to the pre-AI world.
Here is a thread on the paper, heedworthy throughout. If you do not have some kind of decent plan here, other economists will leave you in the dust. Even if it is only a minority of “other economists” their total leverage and impact will be extreme.
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2026-04-08 02:14:25
1. Natasha Sarin on slow motion bank runs? (NYT)
2. The Moon. And the colors.
3. How free market is Hungary?
4. “Where no human hand has touched the refereeing process.”
5. Is Clavier-Übung III the most underrated music by Bach? (NYT)
6. Ethnic targeting of bioweapons is not so easy.
7. Did Protestants give co-eds to China?
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2026-04-08 01:52:34
Here is his home page:
Ludwig Straub is a professor of economics at Harvard University. His research areas are macroeconomics and international economics. Among his topics of interest are the recent decline in the natural rate of interest, rising levels of private and public debt, and the transmission of monetary and fiscal policy. Ludwig also has an active research agenda solving and analyzing heterogeneous-agent models. Among his most recent papers is a 2025 paper studying the short-run effects of tariff shocks.
Here is his Google Scholar page. The Medal citation gives an overview of his work. Congratulations!
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