2026-05-03 00:52:16
2. How is it that Jakarta has improved so much?
3. The Coasean perspective at Stripe.
4. Becker-Posner blog has been put back online.
6. Competition in health insurance markets.
7. A Stockholm cafe run by AI?
The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-05-02 15:38:26
Major public intellectuals and politicians have responded by arguing that children should rarely, if ever, participate in digital spaces. As a result, many schools in the US now demand that students seal their smartphones in magnetic pouches. A number of countries, including Australia, the United Kingdom and France, are even considering or have already implemented bans on social media accounts for children and teenagers.
Such restrictions, however, are not the tools of liberation we may imagine them to be.
In fact, for some children, the internet may be one of the last remaining spaces where they can grow up doing what children everywhere have evolved to do: independently play and explore with their peers.
Here is more from anthropologist Eli Stark-Elster. I would add a point. I do accept the evidence suggesting that limiting or banning cell phones in schools brings marginally better academic results. Yet the people who advocate such policies never point out that so many schools are just deadly dull and not very intellectually stimulating? Often what is on the phone is in fact more interesting and sometimes more instructive as well, even if the students do worse in terms of the standards set by the school.
The post Have online worlds become the last free places for children? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-05-02 12:35:38
Michael Pettis frequently claims that, by running large surpluses, China is forcing “the demand-suppressing cost of their policies onto their trading partners.” The idea here is relatively straightforward: by disincentivizing consumption within China, China’s policies are reducing domestic demand, which, ceteris paribus, reduces global demand.
The problem with this logic should be fairly obvious: ceteris is not in fact paribus. It assumes other countries passively hold their own demand fixed in response to suppressed Chinese demand. But if that were the case, we should expect to see excess unemployment in the rest of the world in response to rising Chinese surpluses.
The empirical record decisively rejects this prediction: both US and EU unemployment was falling during China Shock 1.0 (2000-08), and post-2021 we’ve seen falling unemployment in the EU and stable full-employment in the US.
Monetary policy in other countries adjusts, preventing any shortfall of demand. The more sophisticated version of this argument recognizes that it only bites if other countries are constrained by the zero lower bound (ZLB). In that case, monetary policy cannot lower interest rates to offset a fall in demand elsewhere in the world.
But reports of the death of domestic demand levers at the ZLB have been greatly exaggerated. The monetary authority can raise the inflation target, implement (NGDP or price) level targeting, use forward guidance, and open up the spigots on QE. Furthermore, fiscal policy remains an adequate tool for boosting demand.
That is from J. Zachary Mazlish, the rest of the post has separate interesting points about China shock 2.0
The post Words of wisdom, on China shock 2.0 appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-05-02 01:54:59
This coming Tuesday at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, here is the event information, with three others as well. With debate partner Brandon Ogbunu I will be arguing the “yes” side, science is too risk-averse. Self-recommended!
Here is the Open to Debate Substack.
The post My NPR debate on whether science is too risk-averse appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-05-01 23:42:10
1. Does trade cause peace? (FT)
2. Where the goblins came from.
3. The next big advance to come from AI?
4. Georg Baselitz, RIP. And now in English. I am happy to own a print of his, one of the upside-down eagles.
6. In spite of what polling says, political events do not much affect voter attitudes?
The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-05-01 17:35:17
The subtitle is How the Nature of Belief Shapes the Fate of Societies. Here is Ryan doing a podcast with Brink Lindsey. As Brink writes:
All of the blessings of modernity, Ryan Avent argues in a fascinating new book, rest on faith. It is our faith in others, our ability to trust strangers we will never meet, that makes possible the large-scale cooperation that has given us science, modern economic growth, and liberal democracy. But if everything depends on our ability to weave and maintain particular webs of complex meaning, what happens when we allow those webs to weaken and fray? In his book In Good Faith, Ryan contends that the dysfunctions and discontents plaguing 21st century democracies reflect such underlying neglect.
I am pleased to see “thought books,” as one might call them, headed in this direction and I was happy to blurb Ryan’s latest effort.
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