2026-03-11 15:20:34
A New Jersey Girl Scout troop has taken cookie sales to new heights, setting up shop right outside a popular cannabis dispensary.
A South Jersey-based troop recently teamed up with Daylite Dispensary in Mount Laurel to sell their beloved cookies at the cannabis shop this cookie season.
“You use cannabis, you get the munchies,” Daylite Dispensary owner Steve Cassidy told NJ.com “There’s a connection between snacks and cannabis and the fact that we don’t have to pretend that doesn’t exist anymore is really awesome.”
Daylite became Mount Laurel’s first dispensary when it opened in 2023. Cassidy said the idea was proposed back in 2024, but it was turned down by Girl Scouts of Central & Southern New Jersey, the Girl Scout council that oversees troops in the region.
When the idea reemerged ahead of this year’s cookie season, the troop was allowed to sell cookies at Daylite on a trial basis, according to Cassidy.
Here is the full story, via someone else.
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2026-03-11 12:32:57
Citi sees Latin America as one of the main winners of the “great trade realignment”
A new Citi report positions Latin America as one of the main winners of what it calls the “great trade realignment”, as global supply chains shift toward a more multipolar structure driven by tariff volatility, AI adoption and nearshoring trends.
Trade flows from Latin America to ASEAN countries surged 82% between 2019 and 2024, while exports from China to the region grew 59% over the same period.
Latin America’s exports to North America also rose 43% in the same period.
Citi highlights the region’s growing role as a vital supplier of critical minerals to Asia’s electronics industry, an agricultural alternative to the United States for products like soybeans, and an increasingly attractive destination for foreign direct investment, which grew 12% in the first half of 2025 against a negative trend in other developed economies.
Here is the link.
The post Latin America and the Great Trade realignment appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-03-11 10:25:24
The Five Tastes: Delicious Recipes for Chinese Flavor, due out this fall. Via Joe Powers in the MR comments section. Hers are the very best Chinese cookbooks and they are also wonderful books more generally. She has been a CWT guest three times now. Let us hope a fourth episode is in order…
The post The forthcoming Fuchsia Dunlop book appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-03-11 02:36:47
We examine the historical frequency of stock market booms, crashes, and bubbles in the United States from 1792 to 2024 using aggregate market data and industry-level portfolios. We define a bubble as a large boom followed by a crash that reverses the market’s prior gains. Bubbles are extremely rare. We extend the industry-level analysis of Greenwood, Shleifer, and You (2019) through 2024 and replicate their findings out of sample using Cowles Commission industry data from 1871 to 1938. Booms do not reliably predict crashes, but they do predict higher subsequent volatility, increasing the likelihood of both large gains and large losses.
That is from a new NBER working paper by William N. Goetzmann, Otto Manninen, and James Tyler.
The post How frequent are price bubbles? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-03-11 00:08:48
1. Metropolitan Opera is trying to raise money (NYT).
2. How to write a LOTR bestseller (short video, with profanity).
3. Good WSJ review of the new Macca movie.
The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-03-10 19:15:44
I tweeted: Should I be worried or reassured that my taxi driver isn’t wearing a seat belt? An econ puzzle.
Most replies said I should be worried. I think that is correct and it reveals something of importance. First note that there is an incentive and a selection effect. All else equal, a driver without a seat belt should drive more carefully—that’s the rational response to increased personal risk. But drivers who forgo seat belts are probably more risk-loving or less safety-conscious across many dimensions. I think the replies were correct, the second effect, the selection effect, dominates: be worried.
What makes this an economics puzzle is that it reveals a failure of the standard adverse selection story. Adverse selection predicts that if someone wants to buy a lot of life insurance, the seller should be suspicious—fearing the buyer knows something about their own health that the seller doesn’t. Unusually healthy people, by the same logic, should buy less life insurance.
Notice the parallel to the taxi driver: the driver is buying less insurance (by not wearing a seat belt) and so, by adverse selection logic, should be the safer type. But that’s exactly backwards.
In reality, people who buy a lot of life insurance tend to be the kind of people who take care of themselves on many margins—they eat well, exercise, go to the doctor. Insurers know this, which is why the per-unit price of life insurance falls with quantity. Big buyers are the good risk, not the bad one.
The taxi driver puzzle is a clean real-world case where the selection effect runs opposite to what adverse selection theory predicts. Adverse selection theory is correct that information asymmetries can challenge markets but it’s often not obvious which way the asymmetry runs (who know more about your life expectancy, you or an insurance company with millions of data points?). Moreover, preferences and norms can make the selection run the opposite way so be worried about the taxi driver without a seat belt and be happy when someone demands a lot of life insurance.
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