2026-03-21 14:46:56
In 18 parts, Lang explores some of Smith’s central themes, including one of the book’s most famous passages, where Smith uses a wool coat worn by a very poor Scottish worker as a way to examine trade. “He asks, ‘Did you ever think of how many people need to be employed in order to make that coat?’” says Lang, whose movement “the woolen coat” names all the artisans and laborers who contributed to the garment in song:
the shepherd
the sorter of the wool
the wool-comber or carder
the dyer
the spinner
the weaver
the fuller
There are also the workers on the ship that brought in the dye and all the people who built the ship. An ordinary coat is revealed to be a kind of miracle of skilled labor and global collaboration, the product of “many thousands” of workers coming together in (selfish) harmony. Part of me wanted to run out of the theater right then and buy something … perhaps a coat… for America.
Here is more from Bloomberg, via John De Palma. The opera seems to be ultimately a rather gloomy view of the book?
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2026-03-21 12:41:46
From 2014 to 2024, Canada’s real GDP per capita adjusted for purchasing power parity grew by just 3.2 percent in total, an anemic 0.4 percent per year on average, and the third lowest among 38 advanced nations. Over the same period, the United States posted 20.2 percent total growth (1.9 percent annually), and the OECD average reached 15.3 percent (1.4 percent annually). The measurement shortcomings cannot explain five-to six-fold differences in growth rates.
And:
The analysis estimates that a substantial share of Canadians who would rank among top earners in Canada have emigrated to the United States—roughly 40 percent of potential top 1 percent earners and 30 to 50 percent of the next nine percentiles. Canadian-born individuals in the United States are more educated than native-born Americans, earn substantially more, and cluster disproportionately in top income deciles.
Canada is effectively exporting its inequality to the U.S. The brain drain simultaneously lowers our average income while raising American income, accounting for a significant share of the persistent GDP gap.
Here is the full piece.
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2026-03-21 01:14:59
An AI memory startup called Memvid is offering $800 for a one-day, eight-hour shift for one candidate to “bully” AI chatbots by telling them what to do on camera.
Business Insider reported this week that Memvid wants someone to spend eight hours testing and critiquing the memory of popular AI chatbots, effectively paying $100 an hour for what they have branded as a “professional AI bully” role. The worker’s job is to examine where chatbots lose track of details, forget context or misrepresent data, and then feed those findings back to Memvid so the startup can improve its products.
“You’ll spend a full 8-hour day interacting with leading AI chatbots — and your only job is to be brutally honest about how frustrating they are,” the job listing reads.
The draw is that the role doesn’t require a computer science background, AI credentials or any kind of work experience. “No prior AI bullying experience required — we all start somewhere,” the listing reads.
The requirements are deeply personal. The first requirement is an “extensive personal history of being let down by technology,” and the second desired trait is “the patience to ask a chatbot the same question four times (and the rage when it still gets it wrong).”
Here is the full article, via the excellent Samir Varma.
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2026-03-20 23:47:16
1. Using LLMs to study deregulation.
2. New edition of On Liberty now lists Harriet Taylor as co-author.
3. The popularity of AI writing (NYT).
4. St Nicholas Cabasilas Institute For Orthodoxy & Liberty.
5. Is proportional representation working in the Netherlands?
7. Did Canadian happiness plummet?
The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-03-20 23:10:04
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2026-03-20 19:17:07
In the Danish mortgage market every mortgage is backed by a corresponding bond. Thus, if a home buyer takes out a 500k mortgage at 3% interest, a bond is issued that pays the lender 3% interest on 500k. I’ve written about this system several times before. It has two distinct advantages.
In the US, a mortgage can be pre-paid only at a par. As a result, if interest rates rise, home owners don’t want to move because moving would require them giving up a 3% mortgage and replace it with say a 6% mortgage. This is called the lock-in effect. Lock-in can be quite severe. Fonseca and Liu find:
Using individual-level credit record data and variation in the timing of mortgage origination, we show that a 1 percentage point decline in the difference between mortgage rates locked in at origination and current rates reduces moving by 9% overall and 16% between 2022 and 2024, and this relationship is asymmetric. Mortgage lock-in also dampens flows in and out of self-employment and the responsiveness to shocks to nearby employment opportunities that require moving, measured as wage growth within a 50- to 150-mile ring and instrumented with a shift-share instrument.
What about in Denmark? The Danes definitely take advantage of the opportunity to buy-back. Part of this is due to tax advantages but those are just a transfer. More importantly, Danes don’t get locked in. A new paper by Berger, Jeong, Marx, Olesen, and Tourre compares mobility across Denmark and the US:
We study Danish fixed-rate mortgage contracts, which are identical to those in the United States except that borrowers may repurchase their mortgages at market value. Using Danish administrative data, we show that households actively buy back debt when mortgage prices fall below par and that household mobility is largely insensitive when existing mortgage rates are below prevailing market rates — unlike in the United States, where moving rates fall sharply as rates rise. We develop an equilibrium model that explains these patterns and show that introducing a repurchase-at market option into U.S. mortgages substantially reduces interest-rate-induced lock-in with limited effects on equilibrium mortgage rates.
The last point is especially important because you might wonder whether we are assuming a free lunch? After all, if US borrowers lose when they have to pre-pay at par then lenders surely gain. And if lenders gain on pre-payment then they will be willing to lend at lower rates on mortgage initiation. No free lunch, right? The logic is correct but note that the gain to lenders comes mainly from the relatively small set of households that move despite lock-in so the pre-payment bonus to lenders is quite small. Under the author’s calibrated model, mortgage interest rates in the US would rise by only 18 basis points on average if the US moved to a Danish type system.
In other words, there actually is a free or at least a low-priced lunch because lock-in is bad for homeowners and it doesn’t benefit lenders. As a result, moving to a Danish system would create net benefits.
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