2025-12-05 15:22:31
From a forthcoming paper by Thomas Drechsel:
This paper combines new data and a narrative approach to identify variation in political pressure on the Federal Reserve. From archival records, I build a data set of personal interactions between U.S. Presidents and Fed officials between 1933 and 2016. Since personal interactions do not necessarily reflect political pressure, I develop a narrative identification strategy based on President Nixon’s pressure on Fed Chair Burns. I exploit this narrative through restrictions on a structural vector autoregression that includes the President-Fed interaction data. I find that political pressure to ease monetary policy (i) increases the price level strongly and persistently, (ii) does not lead to positive effects on real economic activity, (iii) contributed to inflationary episodes outside of the Nixon era, and (iv) transmits differently from a typical monetary policy easing, by having a stronger effect on inflation expectations. Quantitatively, increasing political pressure by half as much as Nixon, for six months, raises the price level by about 7% over the following decade.
That is not entirely a positive omen for the current day.
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2025-12-05 13:16:48
Geby Jaff, Berkeley, publication medium for AI-generated science.
Laura Ryan, London, data for the AIs.
Tara Rezaei, MIT, general career support/AI/o1.
Mihir Rao, Princeton, bio and AI.
Lorna MacLean, London, AI medical diagnosis of endometriosis.
David Yu, Waterloo, Ontario/Taiwan, fellowship program for agentic Taiwanese college students.
Aniket Panjwani, Lombard, Illinois, EconNow, AI-based software for economics.
Zixuan (Eric) Ma, GMU, to write about China.
Ivan Khalamendyk, Lviv, “I’m an independent Ukrainian physicist developing a ψ-field model of the universe – a single real wave ψ(x,t) that reproduces quantum matter, forces and gravity.”
José Luis Sabau, Mexico City, Perpetuo, Substack for Mexico.
Soleil Wizman, Yale University, longevity.
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2025-12-05 03:38:47
International Holding Company has been growing:
IHC’s $240bn market capitalisation makes it by far the biggest constituent of the Abu Dhabi stock exchange, taking up 41.5 per cent of the FTSE ADX General Index — a figure that rises still further when listed subsidiaries such as Alpha Dhabi and 2PointZero are included.
First Abu Dhabi Bank, the country’s largest lender and runner-up at a 10 per cent weighting, is also chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon. Because IHC is ultimately controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon, who is also the UAE’s national security adviser and chairs two of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth funds, academics classify it as a “state-related entity”.
IHC in turn consists of about 1500 firms, though consolidation is promised. Here is the full FT article.
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2025-12-05 00:59:12
1. Protestant magic and occultism in Ireland.
2. Funny that academics should feel the need to provide a defense of the positive benefits of status.
3. Immersive summer workshops on rationality for teens.
4. New Justin Sandefur blog/newsletter.
5. Evan Goldfine music recommendations.
6. Kelsey Piper on the case for one-boxing.
7. Sugars essential for life found on a raw asteroid.
The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2025-12-04 20:18:59
The latest issue of the journal Innovations focuses on health care and is excellent. It’s a very special issue–a double Tabarrok issue!
My paper, Operation Warp Speed: Negative and Positive Lessons for New Industrial Policy, asks what can learn from the tremendous success of OWS about an OWS for X? What are the opportunities and the dangers?
My son Maxwell Tabarrok’s paper is Peptide-DB: A Million-Peptide Database to Accelerate Science. Max’s paper combines economics and science policy. Open databases are a public good and so are underprovided. A case in point is that there is no big database for anti-microbial peptides despite the evident utility of such a database for using ML techniques to create new antibiotics. The NIH and other organizations have successfully filled this gap with databases in the past such as PubChem, the HGP, and ProteinDB. A million-peptide database is well within their reach:
The existing data infrastructure for antimicrobial peptides is tiny and scattered: a few thousand sequences with a couple of useful biological assays are scattered across dozens of data providers. No one in science today has the incentives to create this data. Pharma companies can’t make money from it and researchers can’t produce any splashy publications. This means that researchers are duplicating the expensive legwork of collating and cleaning all of this
data and are not getting optimal results, as this is simply not enough information to take full advantage of the ML approach. Scientific funding organizations, including the NIH and the NSF, can fix this problem. The scientific knowledge required to massively scale the data we have on antimicrobial peptides is well established and ready to go. It wouldn’t be too expensive or take too long to get a clean dataset of a million peptides or more, and to have detailed information on their activity against the most important resistant pathogens as well as its toxicity to human cells. This is well within the scale of the successful projects these organizations have funded in the past, including PubChem, the HGP, and ProteinDB.
Naturally, I am biased towards Tabarrok-articles but another important paper is Reorganizing the CDC for Effective Public Health Emergency Response by Gowda, Ranasinghe, and Phan. As Michael Lewis wrote in The Premonition by the time of COVID the CDC had became more akin to an academic department than a virus fighting agency:
The CDC did many things. It published learned papers on health crises, after the fact. It managed, very carefully, public perception of itself. But when the shooting started, it leapt into the nearest hole, while others took fire.
Gowda, Ranasinghe, and Phan agree.
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed significant weaknesses in the CDC’s response system. Its traditional strengths in testing, pathogen dentification, and disease investigation and tracking faltered. The legacy of Alexander Langmuir, a pioneering epidemiologist who infused the CDC with epidemiological principles in the 1950s, now seems a distant memory. Tasks as basic as collecting and providing timely COVID-19 data, along with data analysis and epidemiological modeling—both of which should have been the core capability of the CDC—became alarmingly difficult and had to be handled by nongovernmental organizations, such as the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center.
A closer examination of the CDC’s workforce composition reveals the root cause: a mere fraction of its employees are epidemiologists and data scientists. The agency has seen an increasing emphasis on academic exploration at the expense of on the-ground action and support for frontline health departments. (Armstrong & Griffin, 2022).
The authors propose to reinvigorate the CDC by integrating it with the more practical and active U.S. Public Health Service. This is a very good suggestion.
For one more check out Bai, Hyman and Silver as a primer on Improving Health Care. The entire issue is excellent.
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2025-12-04 18:35:37
100 South Koreans will have an estimated 15 grandchildren
Barring a change in current levels. Here is the link.
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