You heard from Alex on that topic recently, here is my contribution in the form of a Bloomberg column: According to new research from economists at the University of Oregon and the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, new low-skilled immigrants to the US are a net fiscal plus — each adding an estimated $750 a year to government coffers at the federal, state and local levels. And their contribution to the entire economy is likely larger still. These new measures do not deny the standard assessments of the potential fiscal costs of immigrants. Rather, they consider an additional positi ..read more

Israel and Iran bombed each other like three weeks ago and now oil prices are low enough that the SPR [Strategic Petroleum Reserve] is looking at buying That is from Matthew Zeitlin.  One read of the current equilibrium is that both Iran and Israel have shown they really do not want to escalate, or perhaps are not able to escalate.  Arguably that was less obvious two months ago. It is hard to establish such credibility unless things get really hairy, and then both parties pull back from the brink. I don’t think that is the only way to read recent events.  An alternative would ..read more

1. Berkeley festival of smart internet writers, you can apply to go. 2. Lyman Stone on urban density and fertility. 3. Joseph Heath articles, some about Canada. 4. Using social contagion to improve health outcomes in Honduras. 5. Can tech solve the problem of inequality? 6. The economics of Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries. The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         ..read more

Maybe by less than people had thought, here is a new ReStat paper by Gillian Brunet: I use newly-digitized contract data on U.S. war production spending over 1940-1945 to analyze the macroeconomic effects of U.S. military spending in World War II. I find personal income multipliers of 0.34 over two years and 0.49 over three years. Personal income multipliers may substantially understate GDP multipliers, perhaps by as much as 50%. Employment estimates imply costs per job-year over the same time horizons of $405,013 and $232,268 in 2015 dollars, suggesting job creation was limited. I also find ..read more

There were significant differences in SI between psychologists and AI’s ChatGPT-4 and Bing. ChatGPT-4 exceeded 100% of all the psychologists, and Bing outperformed 50% of PhD holders and 90% of bachelor’s holders. The differences in SI between Google Bard and bachelor students were not significant, whereas the differences with PhDs were significant; Where 90% of PhD holders excel on Google Bird. That is from a new paper by Nabil Saleh Sufyan, et.al.  In the “good ol’ days” we thought that was the task where AI would never have much of a fighting chance.  Now the bets models are jus ..read more

1. “Authors who were perceived as female responded at similar rates regardless of the pronouns in the requester’s email. Authors who were perceived as male were less likely to respond to emails from requesters with they/them pronouns than all other conditions. This work finds that people who use they/them pronouns experience bias in real-world situations due solely to their gender pronouns.”  Link here. 2. U.S. murder rates are plummeting. 3. Sam Hammond’s 95 theses on AI, not my views but interesting. 4. Do sperm whale songs have an alphabet of sorts? (NYT) 5. Preference falsification at ..read more

We document a convex relationship between earnings rank and cognitive ability for men in Finland and Norway using administrative data on over 350,000 men in each country: the top earnings percentile score on average 1 standard deviation higher than median earners, while median earners score about 0.5 standard deviation higher than the bottom percentile of earners. Top earners also have substantially less variation in cognitive test scores. While some high-scoring men are observed to have very low earnings, the lowest cognitive scores are almost absent among the top earners. Overall, the joint ..read more

The real, inflation-adjusted, price of gold is high. Historically, a high real gold price has been associated with low inflation-adjusted gold returns over the subsequent 10 years. Further, historically the realized 10-year rate of inflation has had close to no impact on realized 10-year nominal and real gold returns. An influx of investment in gold (from gold-owning ETFs, Costco shoppers, “de-dollarizing” central banks and possibly others) has seemingly doubled the real price of gold relative to pre-influx times. Today’s golden dilemma is yesterday’s golden dilemma: has an influx of gold buy ..read more

1. “Taken together, our findings confirm that restricting future fossil fuel use will accelerate current-day consumption.” 2. New survey of genonomics, NBER. 3. Dmitri Alperovitch on Taiwan and Ukraine. 4. “The top immigration authority in Mexico is now operating as its own criminal entity extorting, kidnapping and smuggling migrants all across the country.” 5. Scriabin, Opus 42, no.5. The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         Comments #4- Someone should tell people we have open borders and stop ... by steve In reply to N ..read more

You will find it here, recommended. The post My choral music playlist for Rick Rubin appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.       Related Stories My Conversation with the excellent Coleman Hughes Culture splat (a few broad spoilers)   ..read more