2026-01-24 04:38:42
The Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University will be hosting another Summer Institute on the History of Economics from June 2-11, 2026. The program is designed for students in graduate programs in economics, though students in graduate school in other fields as well as recently minted PhDs will also be considered.
Students will be competitively selected and successful applicants will receive free housing, access to readings, and stipends for travel and food. The deadline for applying is March 9.
We are very excited about this year’s program, which will focus on giving participants the tools to set up and teach their own undergraduate course in the history of economic thought. There will also be sessions devoted to showing how concepts and ideas from the history of economics might be introduced into other classes. The sessions will be run by Duke faculty members Jason Brent, Bruce Caldwell, Kevin Hoover, and Steve Medema. More information on the Summer Institute is available at our website, https://hope.econ.duke.edu/2026-summer-institute
The post Duke Summer Institute on the History of Economics appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-01-24 00:46:54
1. The value of aspiration in Ethiopia.
2. Supply of silver thievery is elastic.
3. AI and children, some principles from Dean Ball. A much-needed corrective.
4. Now more middle class in Mexico than poor?
5. “Schrödinger’s cat just got bigger: quantum physicists create largest ever ‘superposition’” ????
6. The new Alex Honnold climb (NYT).
The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-01-23 20:18:12
The Los Angeles City Council recently voted to increase the fee to file an objection to new housing. The fee for an “aggrieved person” to file an objection to development is currently $178 and will rise to $229. Good news, right? But here’s the rest of the story: it costs the city about $22,000 to investigate and process each objection. This means objections are subsidized by roughly $21,800 per case—a subsidy rate of nearly 99%.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the equation:
While fees will remain relatively low for housing project opponents, developers will have to pay $22,453 to appeal projects that previously had been denied.
In other words, objecting to new housing is massively subsidized, while appeals to build new housing are charged at full cost—more than 100 times higher than aggrieved complainer fees. This appears to violate the department’s own guidelines, which state:
When a service or activity benefits the public at large, there is generally little to no recommended fee amount. Conversely, when a service or activity wholly benefits an individual or entity, the cost recovery is generally closer or equal to 100 percent.
Expanding housing supply benefits the public at large, while objections typically serve narrow private interests. Thus, by the department’s own logic, it’s the developers who should be given low fees not the complainers.
Addendum: See also my previous post The Tyranny of the Complainers.
The post The Tyranny of the Complainers II appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-01-23 15:43:53
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. She has a new and very good book out, namely Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia. I will focus on that topic, but she has done much else as well. From Wikipedia:
…a Russian-born American journalist. Her articles have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New Republic, Politico, and The Atlantic. Ioffe has appeared on television programs on MSNBC, CBS, PBS, and other news channels as a Russia expert. She is the Washington correspondent for the website Puck.
And here is Julia on Twitter. So what should I ask her?
The post What should I ask Julia Ioffe? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-01-23 13:24:50
I think this is spot on. The most useful work in the coming years will be about leveraging AI to help improve and reform liberal democracy, the rule of law, separation of powers, free speech, coordination, and constitutional safeguards.
One heuristic I have for AI is: if somone can instantiate their preference or desire really easily, if principal agent problems are materially reduced, if you can no longer rely on inefficiency or bloat as indirect hedge – then the ‘rules of the game’ matter more than ever.
These are all very difficult questions with or without AI. And I’m concerned with two things in particular: first, the easy appeal of anti-elite populism – people who just think ‘well let’s have vetocracy everywhere, let’s leverage the emotions of the masses for short term gain’.
And second, the appeal of scheme-y behaviour – instrumental convergence for political operators. This is harder to pin down, but basically a variant of “I want goal X, so anything that gets me closer to this goal is good” – what leads to all sorts of bad policy and unsavoury alliances.
And instead of trying to 4D chess it or try to recreate politics from first principles, I think technologists should actively enage with experts in all sorts of discplines: constitutional scholars, public choice economists, game theorists etc. Converesely, many of these experts should engage with technologists more instead of coping with obsolete op-eds about how AI is fake or something.
Lastly, improved AI capabilities means you can now use these systems for more things than you could have before. I couldn’t write software a year ago and now I can create a viable app in a day. This dynamic will continue, and will reward people who are agentic and creative.
Are you a local councillor? Well now you have 1000 agents at your disposal – what can you now that that was otherwise unthinkable? Are you someone who lives in their district? Now you have even better tools to hold them to account. Are you an academic? Great, now consider how the many bylaws, rules, structures, institutions, incentives are messing up incentives and progress, what should be improved, and how to get streamlined coordination rather than automated obstruction.
Here is the link. Here is the related Dean Ball tweet.
The post Seb Krier appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-01-23 04:49:43
Keep in mind I am not out to design the best, highest-tech solution, rather something that non-white-pilled normies might experiment with on a short-term basis.
The post My AI and education talk at University of Austin appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.