2026-04-23 02:03:23
Professor Cowen,
Built a county-level AI displacement model across all 3,204 US counties. Top 5 most exposed counties are all in the DC metro, not the Rust Belt.
https://jakeprokopets.substack.com/p/why-the-most-ai-exposed-counties
18, built it in three days.
Jake Prokopets
The post The exposed counties (from my email) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-04-22 23:48:13
1. On health care price transparency.
2. Interview with Sindarov’s trainer.
3. Tariff increases are contractionary.
5. U.S. manufacturing capacity has been growing for sixteen consecutive quarters.
6. Dean Ball book on AI is coming.
7. DEI statement requirements in academic hiring have more than halved within a year.
8. Christopher Phelan nominated to be CEA chair.
The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-04-22 19:21:26
VinNews: The Rockland County Legislature approved amendments to the Home Improvement Law, dissolving the existing Home Improvement Licensing Board and shifting primary licensing authority to the Legislature itself…Under the new rules, the former licensing board will be reduced to an advisory role, losing its power to issue or revoke licenses. Licensing responsibilities will now fall under the Rockland County Legislature…
This is an interesting change and worth studying. In the Licensing Racket, which I reviewed for the WSJ, Rebecca Haw Allensworth emphasizes that occupational licensing boards put the fox in charge of the chickens:
Governments enact occupational-licensing laws but rarely handle regulation directly—there’s no Bureau of Hair Braiding. Instead, interpretation and enforcement are delegated to licensing boards, typically dominated by members of the profession. Occupational licensing is self-regulation. The outcome is predictable: Driven by self-interest, professional identity and culture, these boards consistently favor their own members over consumers.
Ms. Allensworth conducted exhaustive research for “The Licensing Racket,” spending hundreds of hours attending board meetings—often as the only nonboard member present. At the Tennessee board of alarm-system contractors, most of the complaints come from consumers who report the sort of issues that licensing is meant to prevent: poor installation, code violations, high-pressure sales tactics and exploitation of the elderly. But the board dismisses most of these complaints against its own members, and is far more aggressive in disciplining unlicensed handymen who occasionally install alarm systems. As Ms. Allensworth notes, “the board was ten times more likely to take action in a case alleging unlicensed practice than one complaining about service quality or safety.”
Moving regulation out of the hands of the regulated could be an improvement but there are also advantages to self-regulation. See my review for other reform possibilities.
Hat tip: Heshy.
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2026-04-22 15:27:12
From Finbar Curtin and Matthew G. Burgess, here is the paper. Here is the thread, worth a read. Important stuff, I hope to hear more about this. The whole climate to gdp transmission thing does not seem to be working very well?
The post The empirically inscrutable climate-economy relationship appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-04-22 12:36:08
We do not know whether technological unemployment swept across England in the wake of the British Industrial Revolution. In this paper, I propose an approach to quantify jobs lost to, and created by, creative destruction in the 19th century. Using over 170 million individual records from the full-count British census (1851–1911), I generate sub-industry “task” level occupational data. I apply this to the English bootmaking industry as it mechanized. The new data reveal sharp structural changes: 152,000 artisanal jobs disappeared as skills became obsolete, while 144,000 new jobs emerged. However, incumbent bootmakers were rarely displaced. Instead, the decline was driven by young men no longer entering the artisanal trade. These findings challenge assumptions about displacement, showing how slow adoption and persistent demand can shield existing workers, while opportunities vanish for new entrants.
That is a recent paper by Hillary Vipond, a recent PhD from LSE. Via Lukas Freund. Here are other papers by Hillary, some of them on what we can learn about automation from economic history. Here is Hillary on Twitter.
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2026-04-22 03:47:44
Created by Alex T., and of course GPT as well.
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