2026-01-17 17:19:36
From a new QJE paper by Timothy Besley, Christopher Dann, and Sacha Dray:
This paper explores the relationship between economic growth and trust in government using variation in GDP growth experienced over a lifetime since birth. We assemble a newly harmonized global dataset across eleven major opinion surveys, comprising 3.3 million respondents in 166 countries since 1990. Exploiting cohort-level variation, we find that individuals who experience higher GDP growth are more prone to trust their governments, with larger effects found in democracies. Higher growth experiences are also associated with improved perceptions of government performance and living standards. We find no similar channel between growth experience and interpersonal trust. Second, more recent growth experiences appear to matter most for trust in government, with no detectable effect of growth experienced during one’s formative years, closer to birth or before birth. Third, we find evidence of a “trust paradox” whereby average trust in government is lower in democracies than in autocracies. Our results are robust to a range of falsification exercises, robustness checks and single-country evidence using the American National Election Studies and the Swiss Household Panel.
Via Alexander Berger.
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2026-01-17 14:13:54
That is a short essay by Arnold Kling. Excerpt:
Tyler’s Vision
As a student, you work with a mentor. At the beginning of each term, you and your mentor decide which courses you will take. If there are other students on campus taking them, great. If not, maybe you can take them with students at other schools, meeting remotely.
For each course, an AI can design the syllabus. Tyler gave an example of a syllabus generated by ChatGPT for a course on Tudor England. If you can find a qualified teacher for that course, great. If not, you could try learning it from ChatGPT, which would provide lessons, conversations, and learning assessments (tests).
Tyler thinks that 1/3 of higher ed right now should consist of teaching students how to work with AI. I do that by assigning a vibe-coding project, and by encouraging “vibe reading” and “vibe writing.”
The reason for proposing such a high proportion of effort to learning to work with AI is because we are in a transition period, where the capabilities of AI are changing rapidly. Once capabilities settle down, best practices will become established, and knowledge of how to use AI will be ingrained. For now, it is very hard to keep up.
It is possible, of course, that Tyler and I could be wrong. It could be that the best approach for higher ed is to keep students as far from AI as one can. I can respect someone who favors an anti-AI approach.
But I am disturbed by the lack of humility that often accompanies the anti-AI position in higher education. I have difficulty comprehending how faculty, at UATX and elsewhere, can express their anti-AI views with such vehemence and overconfidence. They come across to me like dinosaurs muttering that the meteor is not going to matter to them.
I believe the talk will be put online, but a few extra points here.
First, the one-third time spent learning how to use AI is not at the expense of studying other topics. You might for instance learn how to use AI to better understand Homer’s Odyssey. Or whatever.
Second, I remain a strong believer in spending many hours requiring the students to write (and thus think) without AI. Given the properties of statistical sampling, the anti-cheating solution here requires that only a small percentage of writing hours be spent locked in a room without AI.
Third, for a small school, which of course includes U. Austin, so often the choice is not “AI education vs. non-AI education,” rather “AI education vs. the class not being offered at all.”
Why should not a school experiment with two to three percent of its credits being AI offerings in this or other related manners? Then see how students respond.
The post “Tyler Cowen’s AI campus” appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-01-17 03:38:35
You should take these as quite context-specific numbers rather than as absolutes, nonetheless this is interesting:
Scientists who engage in AI-augmented research publish 3.02 times more papers, receive 4.84 times more citations and become research project leaders 1.37 years earlier than those who do not. By contrast, AI adoption shrinks the collective volume of scientific topics studied by 4.63% and decreases scientists’ engagement with one another by 22%.
Here is the full Nature piece by Qianyue Hao, Fengli Xu, Yong Li, and James Evans. The end sentence of course does not have to be a negative. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The post Claims about AI and science appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-01-17 02:57:37
Via Kevin Bryan.
The post The share of factor income paid to computers appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-01-17 00:28:48
2. Daniel Walker Howe, RIP (NYT). I recommend his books on early to mid- 19th century American history.
3. “…the 2nd least mobile player in the NBA on defense.”
4. Anthropic Economic Index report.
5. AI progress in the last fifteen days.
7. Eric Drexler on a hypercapable world.
The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-01-16 15:15:58
The lowest-hanging fruit is to simply legalize selling groceries in more of the city. The most egregious planning barrier is that grocery stores over 10,000 square feet are not generally allowed as-of-right in so-called “M” districts, which are the easiest places to find sites large enough to accommodate the large stores that national grocers are used to. Many of these districts are mapped in places that are not what people have in mind when they think “industrial” — mixed-use neighborhoods with lots of housing like stretches of Williamsburg’s Bedford Avenue and almost all of Gowanus, even post-rezoning, are in fact mapped as industrial districts.
To open a full-sized grocery store in these areas, a developer must seek a “special permit,” which requires the full City Council to get together and vote for an exception to the rules. This is a long, uncertain process, and has in the past even been an invitation to corruption.
Most famously, the City Council uses this power to keep out Walmart at the behest of unions and community groups. Thwarted in its plans to open a store in East New York — a low-income Brooklyn neighborhood that could desperately use more grocery options — the nation’s largest grocer instead serves New Yorkers with a store just beyond the Queens/Nassau line in Valley Stream, rumored to be the busiest Walmart in the country. New Yorkers with a car and the willingness to schlep beyond city limits — or pay the Instacart premium — get access to cheaper groceries; the rest get locked out.
When politicians are willing to approve a grocery store, the price can be high.
That is by Stephen Smith, via Josh Barro.
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