2026-04-18 15:12:34
This paper studies the impact of birthright citizenship on youth crime. We leverage a German reform which automatically granted birthright citizenship to eligible immigrant children born in Germany after January 1, 2000 and administrative crime data from three federal states. We find that immigrant youth who acquired citizenship at birth are substantially less likely to engage in criminal activity, with estimates indicating a 70% reduction in crime. These results are particularly relevant in light of ongoing debates in the U.S. about abolishing birthright citizenship. Our findings suggest that inclusive citizenship policies can reduce crime and its associated costs, which in turn could strengthen social cohesion.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
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2026-04-18 12:11:42
Roumak Das, a grade 11 student from West Bengal, and Samik Goyal, a 12th grader from Patiala, received their grants to travel to the International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence 2025 in Beijing, where Roumak won a gold medal and Samik a silver medal. Roumak’s grant also supports his college applications, and Samik’s grant supports SPOI, dedicated to teaching informatics to school students.
Ishaan Gangwani, 17, received his grant to develop InkVell, an AI-native LaTeX editor, and to support his travel to the International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence 2025 in Beijing.
Ronald Abraham received a career development grant for Veeraa, to build a crowdfunding and growth platform for India’s community leaders.
Tristan Wagner received his grant to explore low-cost autoinjectors for treating anaphylaxis and snakebite envenoming in India.
Michael Grasa received his grant to test a transparent, falsifiability-first approach to decoding the Indus Valley script, releasing versioned overlays and open datasets for replication or refutation.
Jasraj Budigam, 16, received his grant to develop CapNav-Lite, an adaptive AI navigation system that personalizes power-wheelchair control to each user within minutes on everyday hardware.
Mannat Kaur, 17, freshman at Stanford University, received her grant to continue developing research on wastewater recycling and its integration into the built environment and low-carbon housing.
Vineela Upadhyayula, Hari Krishna Upadhyayula, and Phani Madhav Upadhyayula received their grant for NeuraEase, to build a wearable-driven AI detection and management of acute dysregulation events in neurodivergence and neurological disorders, including autistic meltdowns.
Arnav Kumar and Gavneesh, cofounders of Vyobha Aerospace, received their grant to build regional eVTOL aircraft with fractional ownership at the cost of a car.
Aditya Raj Chopra, a high school senior, received a general career development grant.
Ansh Mishra, 17, received his grant to build reliable and accessible bionic prosthetic hands.
Vasu Dubey, 22, received his grant to build a machine-learning-based medical device for speech restoration in laryngectomy patients.
Snehadeep Kumar, 21, received his grant for Nebula Space Organisation, to build ultra-low-cost Earth-imaging CubeSats and a global imagery platform that makes space data accessible to everyone.
Uttam Singh and Ayush Das received their grant for Nakshatra Maps, to help people navigate indoor and outdoor public spaces with dynamic hyperlocal interactive maps, AR navigation, and smart emergency evacuation.
Mankaran Singh received his grant to build frictionless human-robot interaction for machines operating in human-centric environments.
Sommaiya Angrish, 21, an alt Hindi-pop musician, received his grant to work on his third album, rooted in his personal healing journey.
Achyut Tiwari, 24, received his grant for GeoLiquefy, an AI system forecasting earthquake-related soil liquefaction from geotechnical data for engineers, insurers, and risk assessors.
Devayan Das, 19, a biotech undergraduate, received his grant to develop dissolvable tissue culture nutrient blocks that simplify lab workflows and turn lab prep into a plug-and-play process.
Ayush Kale, a materials engineer, received his grant for EarthSprint Solutions, to transform agricultural waste into low-carbon, high-performance cement blocks.
Mohd Fahad Eqbal, 24, received his grant for Chakraswap, to scale an affordable battery swap network for e-rickshaw drivers.
Satyamedh Hulyalkar received his grant to develop a LoRa-based self-healing mesh network for agricultural and monitoring use cases.
Shivam Parashar received his grant for GreenScore, to build an industrial effluent monitoring system combining machine learning and IoT to keep Indian rivers clean.
Anand Unni received his grant for Nayaneethi Policy Collective, to develop a public policy curriculum and a community of public policy thinkers and analysts in Kerala, and strengthen the demand side of public policy.
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV India announcement is here. More about the winners of EV India second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth cohorts. To apply for EV India, use the EV application, click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.
And here is Nabeel’s AI engine for other EV winners. Here are the other EV cohorts.
If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at [email protected].
TC: This post is from Shruti, and I thank her for her amazing work on this!
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2026-04-18 02:26:36
From 1857:
The Persians were great sticklers for ceremony, it turned out, and now that the treaty was ratified, they expected an exchange of gifts to mark the important occasion. At Spence’s [a leading diplomat of the time] insistence, the United States spent $10,000 (close to $1 million in today’s money) on diamond-studded snuffboxes and weapons for the shah. The State Department protested bitterly, as it was not in the habit of spending such outrageous sums, but Spence put his foot down, knowing that these gifts paled in comparison with what Persia had received from Napoleon and others. Spence’s brother Charles was dispatched to Tehran to deliver the gifts in person — a gesture the shah appreciated so much that he decorates the young man with the Order of the Lion and the Sun, the country’s highest honor.
That is from John Ghazvinian America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present, a very good book.
The post That was then, this is now appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-04-17 23:57:21
1. Conversations about boring topics are more interesting than we think.
2. What will be scarce. And Andy Hall on using AI to boost economics research.
3. Virginia passes reasonable AI legislation.
4. AI-generated movie trailer. And the short movie.
6. Objection.ai.
7. A neglected cost of restricting data centers. And on not waking up a loser.
The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-04-17 19:41:07
I know I cannot “talk most of you into Duchamp,” but I will say this is one of the best museum shows I have seen, ever. Putting aside your view of Duchamp as an artist, it is remarkably well-curated and instructive. It shows a large number of works I had not seen before and places them in proper context. They are knockouts, and probably you have not seen them. You might even be too focused on the urinal, and yes that is in the show too, though with proper context.
I also learned a good deal about the history of modern art from the exhibit, and now I appreciate Man Ray, Picabia, and others more as well. I also now better understand the connection of Duchamp’s work to his early representational paintings, how exactly he evolved toward bicycle wheels, how central the “nude descending a staircase” image was to him, his obsessions with boxes, his artistic connections to chess, his connections to pornography, what he did to end his career, and much more.
So if you are at all tempted, you absolutely should go to this exhibit. Supplement it with a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, because a few of his most important works cannot be moved from that site.
Here is a very good NYT review. And here is a more negative review of the show, though perhaps not for the reasons you might be expecting.
Context is that which is scarce!
And here is some context for you.
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2026-04-17 12:53:27
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Kim Bowes is an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania whose book, Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent, Tyler calls perhaps his favorite economics book of 2025. By sifting through the material remains of Roman life — shoes, bricks, ceramics, and the like — she uncovers a picture of ordinary Romans who could evidently afford to buy multiple sets of colorful clothes, use gold coins for daily transactions, and eat peppercorns sourced from thousands of miles away. This vast web of commerce, she argues, both bound the empire together and provided the tax base that kept it running — and when it unraveled, Rome unraveled with it.
Tyler and Kim discuss what would surprise a modern visitor to a Roman elite home, what early Roman Christianity actually looked like on the ground, why Romans never developed formal economic reasoning, what decentralized money-lending reveals about the Roman state, whether there were anything like forward markets, why Romans continued to use coins even as the empire debased them, the economics of Roman slavery, whether Roman recipes taste any good, the Romans as hyper-scalers rather than inventors, what Rome made of China and Egypt, why Kim’s not a fan of the Vesuvius challenge, the practicalities of landscape archaeology, how a vast belt of factories along the Tiber Valley went undiscovered until twenty years ago, where to go on a three-week tour of the Roman Empire, what she thinks is ultimately behind Rome’s unraveling, and much more.
Here is an excerpt with some economics:
COWEN: Say, when the government is clipping the silver coins and lowering their silver content, as we now know in economic theory, this will imply at least some inflationary pressure. Are there Roman writers who understood that and laid it out, or they’re just vague public complaints about government clipping the coins?
BOWES: They’re not so much clipping them as they are minting them with less silver, which amounts to the same thing. It’s just a little bit classier and harder to detect. Absolutely, people know that they’re doing this. What I think is most interesting and what we’re all still wrestling with is, from even before Nero onwards, Roman emperors recognized the advantage to the fisc to basically producing coins with less silver.
Then they start to have silver problems, and they start really pulling the silver out of their coins, and nobody cares. That is to say, people care, and they notice, but the convenience of the Roman coin of the realm, the denarius, which is made with silver, outweighs—that’s a little bit of a pun—the actual silver content of that coin, and so people are willing to just suck it up and deal, and they keep using it.
There is inflation, and inflation, we can now tell, thanks to some great papyri from Egypt, trends upwards very slowly over the first century, the second century, the third century, but it’s not proportional to the amount of silver that’s being pulled out of the coins. People basically still have trust in their coinage, which really shows the degree to which the state has convinced people, simply by supporting ordinary people’s coin use, that the coins work and that they’re going to back their coins, even though they’re slightly pulling the silver out.
COWEN: Why was there so much decentralized money lending? You would think that banks would have economies of scale, offer better terms, just like I wouldn’t borrow money from my friends, I would go to the bank. Why doesn’t the Roman Empire evolve that way?
BOWES: The Roman Empire confuses us, I think, because on the one hand, it looks like a really big state that ought to do things that big states do. The Roman big state is really a mask for an empire of friends and family. You borrow money from friends and family. Banks, such as they exist, are really nothing more than friends and family, so even when you have actual banks, they tend to be largely constituted by a single family.
The difference that you’re making between borrowing from a bank and borrowing from your family is much less clear-cut in a world in which the bank is your family, or the bank is a family that is friends of yours. It’s not that Romans don’t use banks, they do use banks. We can see the most often wealthier Romans using banks. It’s a lot harder to see the 90 percent using banks, and they seem to more often default to the immediate circle of people that they know, which again, it’s not such a huge distinction. In a world in which there’s no FDIC, in which the bank isn’t guaranteed and protected by the state in the way in which our banks are, the distinction between bank and family, bank and friends, is much less clear.
Interesting and engaging throughout, definitely recommended. You can buy Kim’s excellent book here.
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