Authorities in Beijing have barred two executives from a Singapore-based AI firm from leaving China amid a review of the company’s $2 billion acquisition by U.S. social media giant Meta, according to a report by the Financial Times on Wednesday.
2026-03-27 00:14:03
From The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution:
The day before drafting this paragraph, I blogged a paper on confidence gaps between men and women. It was a paper written by economists, published in the prestigious American Economic Review, the profession’s number one journal. Is this actually sociology, or personality or social psychology, or part of some gender studies field? No one in the economics profession cares to discuss that anymore. It is not that there is a dogmatic attachment to what used to be called “economic imperialism,” rather the view is that if the paper is good enough … it is good enough to publish. I also recently read a paper on using cell phone data to estimate how many people actually were attending church. Freakonomics guru Steve Levitt wrote and published well-known papers on the choice of baby names and corruption in Sumo wrestling116See Exley and Nielsen (2024), and on cell phones see Pope (2024)..
The dirty little secret is that what distinguishes economics as a field, right now, is a mix of higher standards, harder work, better math, and higher IQs. That is the real (dare I say marginal?) contribution of “empirical economics today,” not marginalism per se, though of course contemporary models typically are consistent with marginalist reasoning…
One modest sign of all these changes is how many advisors, when speaking to individuals considering economics graduate school, recommend math or even computer science as a possible background undergraduate major. While most are still undergraduate economics majors, if only because that is where their interest in economics came from, no one seems to mind if they are not. These days, a background in mathematics or computer science is at least as useful for the graduate work to come. Once you get to graduate school, you will have to learn plenty of math and programming anyway, so why not start off in those fields? The prevailing attitude is that the economics you can figure out along the way, or for some topics you may not need to know much of it at all. How complicated are all those economic principles anyway? General skills of apprenticeship and plain ol’ hard work are growing in importance too, as top graduate programs increasingly want their incoming students to have done a “predoc” with an accomplished researcher somewhere along the way.
That is from the chapter on the future of economics in a world with advanced AI.
Addendum: On The Marginal Revolution book, I would most of all like to thank Jeff Holmes for the great job he did on the project, all of the actual work (other than the writing) is from him. He is also producer of CWT, I owe much to him!
The post What is economics these days? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-03-26 22:50:47
1. Tracy Kidder, RIP (NYT).
2. Pat Steir, RIP (NYT).
3. How software businesses will survive.
4. Arnold Kling on economics and AI.
6. Will science remain legible?
The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-03-26 13:22:10
I am offering a new piece of work — I do not quite call it a book — online and free. It has four chapters, is about 40,000 words, is fully written by me (not a word from the AIs), and it is attached to an AI with a dual page display, in this case Claude. Think of it as a non-fiction novella of sorts, you can access it here. You can read it on the screen, turn it into a pdf (and upload into your own AI), send it to your Kindle, or discuss it with Claude.
Here is the Table of Contents:
1. What Is Marginalism?
2. William Stanley Jevons, Builder and Destroyer of Marginalism
3. Why Did It Take So Long for the Science of Economics to Develop?
4. Why Marginalism Will Dwindle, and What Will Replace It?
Here are the first few paragraphs of the work:
How is it that ideas, and human capabilities, become lost? And how is that new insights come to pass? If eventually the insight seems obvious, why didn’t we see it before? Or maybe we did see it before, but didn’t really know we were on to something important? Why do new insights arrive suddenly, in a kind of flood? How do new worldviews replace older ones?
And what does all of that have to do with the future of science, the future of research, and the future of economics in particular? Especially when we try to understand how the ongoing artificial intelligence revolution is going to reshape human knowledge, and the all-important question of what economists should do.
Those are the motivating questions behind this work, but I will address them in what is initially an indirect fashion. I will start by considering a case study, namely the most important revolution in economics, the Marginal Revolution (to be defined shortly). The Marginal Revolution made modern economics possible. What was the Marginal Revolution? How did it start? Why did it take so very long to come to fruition? From those investigations we will get a sense of how economic ideas, and sometimes ideas more generally, develop. And that in turn will help us see where the science, art, and practice of economics is headed today.
Recommended! I will be covering it more soon.
The post *The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-03-26 07:33:56
Authorities in Beijing have barred two executives from a Singapore-based AI firm from leaving China amid a review of the company’s $2 billion acquisition by U.S. social media giant Meta, according to a report by the Financial Times on Wednesday.
Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao — the CEO and chief scientist, respectively, of Manus — were summoned to Beijing this month and questioned over a possible violation of foreign direct investment reporting rules related to the acquisition before being told they could not leave the country, the report said.
Here is more from The Washington Post. In my view, the American lead in AI is somewhat larger than a model comparison alone might suggest.
The post Solve for the China tech equilibrium appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-03-26 00:00:03
1. New restaurant at Abbeyleix, Ireland.
2. Trade in AI-related products.
4. David Pilling on an ancestor of David Hume and rhino horns (FT).
5. Can LLMs discover novel economic theories?
6. The social science on social media can be very lazy.
8. New Paul McCartney album is coming.
9. The Hungarian opposition has a real lead now.
The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-03-25 22:08:38
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. Here is Wikipedia:
Hoyer was born in Wilhelm-Pieck-Stadt Guben, Bezirk Cottbus, German Democratic Republic (GDR), where her mother was a teacher and her father an officer of the National People’s Army. She received a Master’s degree from the University of Jena and moved to the United Kingdom in about 2010.
Hoyer is a visiting research fellow at King’s College London and has published two books about the history of Germany. She is also a journalist for The Spectator, The Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, UnHerd, and Die Welt.
Her first book, Blood and Iron, about the German Empire from 1871 to 1918, was well reviewed, even though some reviewers suggested that she had played down the negative aspects of the period and of Otto von Bismarck‘s legacy. Her second book, Beyond the Wall, about the history of the GDR from 1949 to 1990, was well reviewed in the United Kingdom, but less well received in Germany.
She also has a new, forthcoming book on the history of the city of Weimar, namely Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe. So what should I ask her?
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