2026-05-01 02:07:39
2. An SRO approaching to regulating AI.
3. Dwarkesh: “We don’t talk enough about how any state or group which is harvesting encrypted packets right now will be able to read those contents once quantum computers arrive. There’s a huge espionage and transparency overhang on any information that is currently “secret” and hasn’t been encrypted using post-quantum cryptography.”
4. Craig Venter, RIP. Here is the NYT obituary.
6. With the UAE’s departure, OPEC will become much more an instrument of Iranian power (FT). But also weaker.
The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-05-01 00:07:35
Teen fertility collapsed globally starting around 2007. This affected countries across the income and policy spectrum. This paper argues that smartphones changed how teens spend time with each other, and that this change in turn drove the collapse in teen fertility. Once enough teens are on the phone, being on the phone is where the peer network is; in-person time falls sharply, and with it the unstructured contact in which most unintended teen conceptions occur. A coordination model formalizes this tipping: as the smartphone price falls, the in-person equilibrium ceases to exist and the economy moves to a phone-mediated one. Within the United States, terrainruggedness variation in broadband and 4G coverage identifies a causal effect on teen fertility, and time-use diaries show in-person socializing among teens roughly halving while digital leisure roughly tripled. A parallel design for England and Wales recovers the same acceleration and the same effect of mobile coverage on teen conceptions, ruling out country-specific contraceptive-access and welfare-reform stories. The model predicts that the shift towards the phone-mediated equilibrium affects multiple aspects of teen behavior. The same instrument that produces a collapse in teen fertility produces a surge in teen suicides.
That is from a recent paper by Nathan Hudson and Hernan Moscoso Boedo.
The post The collapse of teen fertility in the digital era appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-04-30 19:18:46
The Breakthrough Institute (BTI) found that “just 10 organizations initiated 35% of the total NEPA cases brought by NGOs.” The Sierra Club and its local chapters alone were responsible for more than 14% of these lawsuits. The dominance of a small number of groups is more pronounced in forest management and energy cases; only 10 groups filed 67% and 48% of these cases, respectively. In BTI’s “The Procedural Hangover: How NEPA Litigation Obstructs Critical Projects” follow-up, which expanded the analysis to district and circuit court NEPA cases, Alliance for the Wild Rockies and the Center for Biological Diversity were responsible for 24% of all litigation against public lands management decisions.
To paraphrase Alex Tabarrok, federal environmental agencies seem to exist to manage the obsessions of a tiny number of neurotic—and possibly malicious—environmental NGOs.
Grant Mulligan’s excellent post shows in detail how environmental groups use the courts to block projects—including environmental projects. But Mulligan finds that a disproportionate share of the lawsuits come from a handful of relatively small organizations. A textbook case of the tyranny of the complainers.
The lawsuits give environmentalists a bad name but the key point is that many environmental groups are not reflexively anti-development.
What are the largest environmental groups doing with their money if not suing to stop development? Two of the three biggest, the Wildlife Conservation Society and San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, primarily operate zoos. Land trusts like TNC, The Conservation Fund, and Ducks Unlimited protect land directly. Many also work on research and policy to varying degrees. Contrary to the typical narrative, many operate pro-market, abundance-style projects.
TNC has several programs that align with the abundance agenda. TNC’s Power of Place research and policy work is aimed at facilitating the build-out of renewable energy and transmission infrastructure. The idea behind the research is to identify and speed the permitting and development of renewable energy projects that won’t interfere with important conservation areas. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) used the research as part of its Western Solar Plan, which aims to promote solar development on public land. TNC also wants permitting reform, and their mapping efforts are an example of what environmentalism that builds could look like — identify critical habitats that need protecting and guard them closely while unleashing building everywhere else.4
While the tyrannical minority has held up forest management projects, TNC has been an advocate and practitioner of forest thinning and prescribed burns to prevent catastrophic wildfires for more than 60 years. In California, they’re part of a coalition working to thin millions of acres of overgrown forests.
TNC isn’t alone. Audubon’s renewables siting work, Ducks Unlimited’s water infrastructure projects, and the Conservation Fund’s Working Lands programs all follow the same pattern of balancing environmental protections with economic imperatives. Plenty of green groups agree, as Larry Selzer, Conservation Fund’s President and CEO, says in Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, “we have to build, and build, and build.”
I’m not trying to defend all the choices of TNC or suggest that the big environmental NGOs don’t promote their share of bad policies. I had plenty of discussions with degrowthers when I worked at TNC that made me want to pull my hair out. I’ve also written about the need for environmentalism to be more positive-sum in frustration over zero-sum environmental positions. But on the whole, environmentalists have been made too convenient a villain by abundance advocates. Environmentalists aren’t as uniformly obstructionist, degrowth, and misanthropic as commonly believed.5
Understanding that only a vocal minority of environmentalists are anti-progress, procedural complainers is important because abundance advocates and environmentalists aren’t natural enemies—and assuming they are serves neither side.
The post Pro-Development Environmentalists appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-04-30 15:19:06
Mr Bessent’s bullishness notwithstanding, this month his department released a proposal that would treat stablecoin issuers as financial institutions for the purposes of anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer laws. This means adopting the same onerous monitoring and compliance procedures as banks, adding to the cost of launching and managing a new coin.
Here is more from Buttonwood at The Economist.
The post Stablecoin sentences to ponder appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-04-30 12:26:56
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Craig discuss why webpage design has gotten worse for 30 years, what Craig’s “obsessive customer service disorder” taught him about human nature, why trusting people and maintaining a nine-second rule for scams aren’t as contradictory as they sound, why roommate ads are a better way to find love, why Craigslist never added seller evaluations, why Leonard Cohen speaks to him more than Bob Dylan, what William Gibson’s Neuromancer got right about the internet, why Jackson Lamb is now one of his role models, why large foundations lose accountability, what two painful Ivy League grants taught him philanthropy, what he gets from rescuing pigeons, the hard lesson he learned about confronting people who lie for a living, his favorite TV shows and movies, the one genuine luxury he can’t go without, what he still needs to learn, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: What is scarce in your life then? You’re giving away money. You don’t have to run the company on a day-to-day basis. We’d all like more years to live, but what is it that if you had more of it, you could be more effective with?
NEWMARK: I guess, ideally, I would have more social skills—meaning, some.
COWEN: We’re simulating social skills just fine here.
NEWMARK: That’s the phrase I use. At least on my part, what looks like social skills is just fakery. I can do it for short amounts of time, maybe 90 minutes. I’ve given up, though, on actually accumulating social skills, getting better at it. More to the point, I try to get into positions where other people can show social skills.
COWEN: One journalist once described you as having “obsessive customer service disorder.” Isn’t that a social skill?
NEWMARK: That’s more obsession, so it’s pathological, but a good one. I believe that you should treat people like you want to be treated. Think of the many times that you needed customer service. Sometimes you can get good customer service, but that’s the exception. That’s no reason for us not to provide a good customer service. Like earlier today, someone sent in a grant proposal, and I had to tell them that they forgot to sign the thing, a very minor thing. More importantly, I’m telling people they need to do some planning for good communications because their work is much less valuable if they can’t talk about it effectively.
COWEN: According to Susan Freese, who wrote about you, in one year, you answered 40,000 customer service emails. Is that possibly true? If so, what did you learn about humanity doing that?
Recommended, charming and engaging throughout.
The post My very charming Conversation with Craig Newmark appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-04-30 01:04:43
2. Will MacAskill and Rob Wiblin podcast.
4. Nick Pope died too early (NYT).
5. Estimating the returns to education, adjusting for genes.
6. Professor Slop.
8. Beyond the valley of the goblins.
The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.