2026-03-07 15:34:29
The Vietnam draft conscripted hundreds of thousands of young Americans into an integrated military. I combine near-random draft lottery variation with administrative voter data to study the long-run racial integration effects of coerced national service. Black and Native American veterans became more likely to marry white spouses, identify as Republicans, and live in more-integrated neighborhoods. Improved economic standing may partly mediate these effects. Effects are larger for Southerners and are precisely null for white veterans. Coerced military service generates substantial but asymmetric cross-racial political convergence and racial integration: Vietnam-era service caused about 20 percent of affected cohorts’ interracial marriages.
That is from a recent NBER working paper by Zachary Bleemer.
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2026-03-07 13:50:37
Take some policy, action, or person whom you regard as morally questionable and indeed is morally questionable. That same policy, action, or person does some bad things, bad in conquentialist terms I now mean. Practically bad, utilitarian bad.
The odds are that you overrate the badness of those consequences by some considerable degree.
Even very smart people do this. Sometimes they do it more, because they can come up with more elaborate arguments for why the bad consequences are completely disastrous.
They might overrate the badness of those consequences by as much as 5x or 10x (gdp is a huge mound of stuff!).
So if you want to have better opinions, look for the cases where you do this and stop doing it.
Easy-peasy!
And good luck with that.
The post A simple way to improve your thought and conclusions appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-03-07 03:05:40
When Milton Friedman pondered what would happen if a helicopter dropped $1,000 from the sky, he likely never imagined that one day a military cargo plane would scatter millions of dollars into one of Bolivia’s largest cities.
But while the Nobel Prize-winning economist worried about the inflation that an influx of cash could generate, the impact in El Alto — where a cash-packed plane crashed and killed 24 people last week while spreading 423 million bolivianos ($62 million) — is one of widespread confusion.
The new currency was legitimately printed, but the central bank has voided its serial numbers to prevent its use. While thousands swarmed the site to pick up the banknotes in one of Latin America’s poorest nations, authorities have tried to burn and destroy the new cash, arresting dozens and raiding homes in a rushed hunt for the missing bills.
That has sent Bolivians into a frenzy. No longer able to quickly tell if a banknote is valid or voided and fearing the crackdown, businesses don’t know what bills to accept anymore, leaving customers frustrated and panicked that their real money is now worthless.
“Just today, everyone refused to take my money five times,” said Yoselin Diaz, 27, who was lining up at the central bank’s main offices in La Paz. “I tried on the minibus and nothing, then I tried to buy some things and nothing, later I went to buy a photo for my father’s grave and even the funeral homes wouldn’t accept it.”
…Bolivia’s central bank has defended its measures to destroy and void the fresh cash, citing not just the principle of keeping stolen money from entering the financial system but also the need to quell social strife. At its height, authorities said about 20,000 people were trying to collect the banknotes as police fired tear gas at them.
Here is more from Bloomberg, via John de Palma.
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2026-03-07 00:38:53
1. Special tribute issue on James C. Scott.
2. Gauti Eggertsson: “I now find myself replicating papers and experimenting with frontier methods in an evening or a few days using Claude Code. That would have taken weeks before — which in practice meant I wouldn’t have done it at all.” And yet his vision is still far too conservative.
5. The price of war.
6. Is China an expansionist power? And China fact of the day.
7. Paul Graham on branding, design, and watches.
8. António Lobo Antunes, RIP ( NYT).
9. In fact in the Gulf there are too many vulnerable targets.
The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-03-06 15:49:02
We propose a novel identification strategy to isolate exogenous immigration shocks across US counties, by interacting quasi-random variations in the composition of ancestry across counties with the contemporaneous inflow of migrants from different countries. We show a positive causal impact of immigration on local innovation and wages at the five-year horizon. The positive dynamic impact of immigration on innovation and wages dominates the short-run negative impact of increased labor supply. A structural estimation of a model of endogenous growth and migrations suggests the increased immigration to the United States since 1965 may have increased innovation and wages by 5 percent.
That is from a new AER paper by Stephen J. Terry, et.al.
The post Immigration, innovation, and growth appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-03-06 13:26:19
We’ve just published the video on YouTube, X, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. We also published some extended show notes and the transcript on Substack.
I thought they did an excellent job here, and lots of fresh material. We start with the fertility crisis:
Murphy: We’ve always had a majority young society, and in our lifetime, we’ll have this transition to majority old society. When you make this transition and it impacts so many different areas of life, do you still believe that technology can solve our way out of it?
Cowen: Solved is never quite the word. But the older people in this room and I guess that’s only me. We have the luxury of having seen what old people were like in the 1960s and 70s, and mostly they were a wreck. So, so many people would be shot by 60. And now there are many 80-year-olds who are more dynamic than a typical 60-year-old might have been, say, in 1972.
So that will somewhat help keep us more equally dynamic. So there are countervailing trends which are quite positive. There might be You could call them mind altering substances that would help older people be young again, like Viagra for the mind. I’m not predicting that. I’m just saying there’s a lot of variables here, and I think we’ll have recourse to many interventions that will help keep things going at an acceptable level.
And this:
Murphy: Do you believe that there is life on the moons of Saturn?
Cowen: I would bet 60/40 yes. But it wouldn’t be life like us. You know, it might be little shrimpy things or even just something like bacteria. Maybe [the moons of]Jupiter also.
Interesting throughout. Here are links on Nebular and Finn Murphy.
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