2026-04-07 00:18:52
1. Distill your Chinese co-workers? (speculative)
2. Creating artificial gravity in space?
3. Good news for your testicles?
4. The contingencies of the South African economy.
5. AI aggregation and knowledge.
6. The real effects of nominal interest rates.
7. Might Venezuela grow twelve percent this year?
The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-04-06 19:18:51
The annual Public Choice Outreach Conference is a crash course in public choice. The conference is designed for undergraduates and graduates in a wide variety of fields. It’s entirely free. Indeed scholarships are available! The conference will be held Friday June12- Sunday June 14 , near Washington, DC in Reston, VA. Lots of great speakers including Tyler, myself, Bryan Caplan, Robin Hanson, Jon Klick, Shruti Rajagopalan and more.
Please apply and encourage your students to apply.
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2026-04-06 14:27:19
We study how international migrant income prospects affect long-run development in origin areas. We leverage the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis exchange rate shocks in a shift-share identification strategy across Philippine provinces. Initial migrant income shocks are magnified six-fold over time, increasing domestic income, education levels, migrant skills, and high-skilled migration. Remarkably, 74.9 percent of long-run income gains come from domestic rather than migrant income. Trade driven impacts of exchange rate shocks are orthogonal to effects via migrant income. A structural model reveals that 19.7 percent of long-run income gains stem from educational investments. International migration fosters broad economic development in origin communities.
That is from a recent AER piece by Gaurav Khanna, Emir Murathanoglu, Caroline Theoharides, and Dean Yang. Here is a good thread on the piece.
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2026-04-06 13:15:04
Declining fertility and population loss pose significant challenges for state and federal local governments responsible for providing a range of services to citizens, including education, health care, and infrastructure. Indeed, many areas are already experiencing outright population decline, with roughly half of U.S. counties losing population between 2010 and 2020. This paper examines how shrinking and aging populations affect the operations and fiscal sustainability of state and local governments. Preliminary evidence presented in this paper suggests that scaling down educational services is considerably more difficult than scaling up. The estimated per-enrollee cost increases associated with a 10 percent enrollment decline are four times larger than the cost decreases associated with a 10 percent enrollment increase. Regions with contracting populations will face additional challenges as a smaller working-age population bears the burden of funding pensions and retiree health plans for larger aging cohorts. While lower fertility can create a short run fiscal dividend as local governments serve fewer children, that dividend will only be realized if state and local public officials make efficient retrenchment a priority.
From Jeffrey Clemens, via the excellent Kevin Lewis. As I think JFV mentioned lately, we have not done enough thinking about what a society with low TFR really is going to look like after a while.
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2026-04-06 01:57:45
If you have no particular intellectual interests or ambitions and are content with the company of your family and friends, then life on Iceland must be very pleasant, because the inhabitants are friendly, tolerant, and sane. They are genuinely proud of their country and its history, but without the least trace of hysterical nationalism. I always found that they welcome criticism. But I had the feeling, also, that for myself it was already too late. We are all too deeply involved Europe to be able, or even to wish to escape. Though I am sure you would enjoy a visit as much as I did, I think that, in the long run, the Scandinavian sanity would be too much for you, as it is for me. The truth is, we are both only really happy living among lunatics.
That is from W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland, from 1937, which is one of the better travel books, if indeed that is what it is.
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2026-04-05 23:46:48
This leads us to the next of Freud’s major contributions to neuroscience: his realization that cognition is, at bottom, wishful.
That is from the new and notable Mark Solms, The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing. This is a good book for people who underrated Freud, or think he is a mere charlatan.
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