Authorities in Beijing have barred two executives from a Singapore-based AI firm from leaving China amid a review of the company’s $2 billion acquisition by U.S. social media giant Meta, according to a report by the Financial Times on Wednesday.
2026-03-26 13:22:10
I am offering a new piece of work — I do not quite call it a book — online and free. It has four chapters, is about 40,000 words, is fully written by me (not a word from the AIs), and it is attached to an AI with a dual page display, in this case Claude. Think of it as a non-fiction novella of sorts, you can access it here. You can read it on the screen, turn it into a pdf (and upload into your own AI), send it to your Kindle, or discuss it with Claude.
Here is the Table of Contents:
1. What Is Marginalism?
2. William Stanley Jevons, Builder and Destroyer of Marginalism
3. Why Did It Take So Long for the Science of Economics to Develop?
4. Why Marginalism Will Dwindle, and What Will Replace It?
Here are the first few paragraphs of the work:
How is it that ideas, and human capabilities, become lost? And how is that new insights come to pass? If eventually the insight seems obvious, why didn’t we see it before? Or maybe we did see it before, but didn’t really know we were on to something important? Why do new insights arrive suddenly, in a kind of flood? How do new worldviews replace older ones?
And what does all of that have to do with the future of science, the future of research, and the future of economics in particular? Especially when we try to understand how the ongoing artificial intelligence revolution is going to reshape human knowledge, and the all-important question of what economists should do.
Those are the motivating questions behind this work, but I will address them in what is initially an indirect fashion. I will start by considering a case study, namely the most important revolution in economics, the Marginal Revolution (to be defined shortly). The Marginal Revolution made modern economics possible. What was the Marginal Revolution? How did it start? Why did it take so very long to come to fruition? From those investigations we will get a sense of how economic ideas, and sometimes ideas more generally, develop. And that in turn will help us see where the science, art, and practice of economics is headed today.
Recommended! I will be covering it more soon.
The post *The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-03-26 07:33:56
Authorities in Beijing have barred two executives from a Singapore-based AI firm from leaving China amid a review of the company’s $2 billion acquisition by U.S. social media giant Meta, according to a report by the Financial Times on Wednesday.
Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao — the CEO and chief scientist, respectively, of Manus — were summoned to Beijing this month and questioned over a possible violation of foreign direct investment reporting rules related to the acquisition before being told they could not leave the country, the report said.
Here is more from The Washington Post. In my view, the American lead in AI is somewhat larger than a model comparison alone might suggest.
The post Solve for the China tech equilibrium appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-03-26 00:00:03
1. New restaurant at Abbeyleix, Ireland.
2. Trade in AI-related products.
4. David Pilling on an ancestor of David Hume and rhino horns (FT).
5. Can LLMs discover novel economic theories?
6. The social science on social media can be very lazy.
8. New Paul McCartney album is coming.
9. The Hungarian opposition has a real lead now.
The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-03-25 22:08:38
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. Here is Wikipedia:
Hoyer was born in Wilhelm-Pieck-Stadt Guben, Bezirk Cottbus, German Democratic Republic (GDR), where her mother was a teacher and her father an officer of the National People’s Army. She received a Master’s degree from the University of Jena and moved to the United Kingdom in about 2010.
Hoyer is a visiting research fellow at King’s College London and has published two books about the history of Germany. She is also a journalist for The Spectator, The Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, UnHerd, and Die Welt.
Her first book, Blood and Iron, about the German Empire from 1871 to 1918, was well reviewed, even though some reviewers suggested that she had played down the negative aspects of the period and of Otto von Bismarck‘s legacy. Her second book, Beyond the Wall, about the history of the GDR from 1949 to 1990, was well reviewed in the United Kingdom, but less well received in Germany.
She also has a new, forthcoming book on the history of the city of Weimar, namely Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe. So what should I ask her?
The post What should I ask Katja Hoyer? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-03-25 14:41:00
Large-scale, voluntary space settlement must be economically rational to be viable. Here, we deploy the Roy model, an economic model used to understand immigration, to illuminate the economic factors important for space settlement and develop qualitative understanding of robust features of space settlement that do not depend on the details of the space economy. We find that getting the cost of living in space down by approximately 2 orders of magnitude is necessary to generate a space population on the order of 1 million people and the typical net utility of immigrating will be on the order of this cost. In addition, if the space economy is driven by productive activities of space settlers and there is some correlation between Earth and space skills and income, space settlers are likely to be drawn from the upper tail of Earth income distribution. An ideal way to incentivize immigration by these high-skill, high-income individuals is to declare the space economy free of redistributive taxes. Alternatively, if space settlement is driven by an insurance policy on civilization involving monetary transfers from Earth to space settlers, the space settlers are likely to be drawn from the lower tail of Earth income distribution, and only minimal marginal income beyond the cost of living in space will be necessary to create positive net utility of immigrating for them. The usefulness of the Roy model is demonstrated by its flexibility in providing qualitative insight in these disparate situations.
That is from a new paper by Dorian S. Abbot and Anup Malani.
The post An economic framework for space immigration appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-03-25 12:39:08
Here is the link, here is one excerpt:
What was your path into AI, and what are you working on now?
I first became interested in AI when I saw the chess computer Tinker Belle wheeled into a New Jersey chess tournament in I think 1975. I followed the Kasparov matches closely, and the more general progress of AI in chess. I read chess master David Levy telling me that chess was far too intuitive for computers ever to do well. He was wrong, and then I realized that AI could be intuitive and creative too. That was a long time ago.
In 2013 I published a book on the future of AI called Average is Over. I feel it has predicted our current time very accurately. I also taught Asimov’s I, Robot – a work far ahead of its time – for twenty years.
Right now I am simply working to keep afloat and to stay abreast of recent AI developments. I blog and write columns on the topic frequently, and have regular visits to the major labs. I encourage universities to experiment with AI education.
I mention William Byrd and Paul McCartney as well.
The post Ryan Hauser interviews me in print appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.