2. Profile of Joe Lonsdale.  And from the NYT, mostly on Cicero and homelessness.

3. Graceland just isn’t that impressive.

4. Mill, Hayek, and liberalism.

5. Interview with Peter McCrory, Head Economist at Anthropic.

6. Will AI intensify or weaken market competition?

7. This economist is not a nominalist.

The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

One of the reasons that I oppose the extension of democratic politics into every aspect of modern life is precisely that in trying to do too much, democracy delivers incoherence, gridlock and frustration, forces that eventually undermine its own legitimacy. I worry about democratic legitimacy because I see democracy as a check and balance on Leviathan (while Heath sees it as a check on government by experts).

The legislature has become a sideshow. But I worry, because the more Congress is held in contempt the greater the support for a bold executive that takes charge, makes decisions and gets things done. Under these pressures, executive power has grown not just in the United States but also in Canada and Great Britain (on this theme see F.H. Buckley’s The Once and Future King.) But for all its faults, the legislature and the rule of law are more conducive to liberty than the executive and the administrative state. Legislators are satisfied with reelection and a bit of pork but executives hunger for greatness and in so doing they promote the real dangers, idolatry, the centralization of power and war.

In short, I worry that the pathologies of democracy drive the demand not for rational, technocratic government but for Caesarism.

I should note that this was before Donald Trump was a Republican presidential contender, let alone a candidate for office.

Addendum: See also  my review of Enlightenment 2.0. It has some good lines!

The propagandizing messages of markets and politics are also very different. Market messages are largely inclusive and cosmopolitan. Coca-Cola advertises “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” because they’d like the world to buy a Coke. Firms do try to build brand affiliation but they rarely do so by promoting hatred of their competitors. Pepsi doesn’t tell the Pepsi Generation that Coke drinkers are stealing their jobs and spitting on their gods.

Hat tip: @kingofthecoastt who recently tweeted about the original post.

The post Democracy and Caeserism appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Some of the points I stressed were the following:

1. Whatever one might take a “constitution” to mean in this context, it needs to borrow more from analogs to case law and the common law.

2. Along related lines, think more in terms of “Talmud,” and not just in terms of “Torah.”

3. Work to help build out a quality secondary literature on the AI constitutions and related documents.  Currently this does not exist.

4. Consider how a panel of diverse AIs, with different prompts, could help to evaluate to what extent Claude (and other AI models) were acting in accord with their constitutions.

5. Have a final board of human adjudicators, functioning in a manner analogous to an independent judiciary.  To the extent the panel of diverse AIs might have concerns about Claude not following its constitution, those AIs could alert the human adjudicators to what was going on.  Those human adjudicators could then have authority over potential changes and remedies.

Here a recent short post on using internal courts and the common law to help govern/self-govern AI.  And on the courts.

I thank Anthropic for having us in.

The post My recent visit to Anthropic appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

But because agents often require guidance or additional context as they move through their tasks, Sharma, 27, finds himself wanting to be available to them around the clock and forgoing a regular sleep schedule as a result. Until recently, he couldn’t monitor them remotely through a phone or smartwatch.

“The cost of the agents’ being blocked for eight hours is way too high,” he says. “They can be done with their work at any point of time, in the middle of the night.”

Founders have long put in punishing hours in the name of building the next big thing. But the growing capabilities of AI agents—and the speed at which the models powering them are evolving—give new meaning to working yourself to the bone…

“They just demand your attention,” he says. “Does it need anything? Can I help it in any way?”

…Pezaris, who lives in San Mateo, Calif., typically works from 7:30 a.m. to 2 a.m. He estimates Proxon, which employs six human developers, is operating 30 times faster than it would without agents. But agent work begets human work: Onboarding customers at a faster clip means needing to respond to more customer requests, for example.

There is also an agent FOMO multiplier effect. “Every minute that I’m not working, I’m missing out on not doing a week’s worth of work,” says Pezaris.

Here is more from Katherine Bindley at the WSJ.  As I have been joking in some of my talks, we need to start taking bets on when the AI leisure dividend will arrive.  It will, but not just yet…

The post The new agentic O-ring world appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Europe just had its best reporting season in years. Companies in the benchmark Stoxx Europe 600 index boosted earnings per share by 18% on average in the second quarter compared with a year earlier. Earnings barely grew at all in 2025 and 2024 as the strongest companies in the index were offset by weaker players.

Growth is now widening beyond a narrow group of AI and bank stocks, according to Gerry Fowler, who leads the European equity strategy team at UBS. Government spending and private investment in priorities like infrastructure, energy security and defense are creating real opportunities.

The Stoxx Europe 600 is up 10% so far this year, a bit less than the S&P 500’s 12% gain. European stocks have underperformed the U.S. since the mid-2000s, but the gap has narrowed lately.

Here is more from the WSJ.

The post Has the European turnaround finally arrived? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

2. Niall Ferguson vs. Iain Banks, and against some other stufff too (TFP).

3. NYT obituary for Victor Niederhoffer.

4. “Engineered systems known as harnesses largely complete contracts in real time, make external work more observable than employment, and carry context and control across the firm’s edge.” (speculative)

5. Flypaper effect for AI safety work? A bit unfair, but not altogether wrong either.  Always ponder the possible secondary consequences!

6. Amended results on prediction markets.

The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

This study examines how Americans’ time with friends has changed over the week, focusing not on how much social interaction has declined but on when it has. Using American Time Use Survey data from 2003 to 2024 (N = 243,095), I map hourly patterns of “friend time” across the days of the week. In the early 2000s, social life followed a clear weekly rhythm: Modest weekday interaction built toward pronounced peaks on Friday and Saturday nights. Since the mid-2010s, that rhythm has collapsed. Friday night, once a central site of social activity, now looks like a typical weeknight. Saturday remains elevated but less so than before. Overall, time with friends has fallen by more than half. The mix of social activities, however, has remained stable. Americans have not replaced one form of interaction with another; they have reduced social interaction across the board. These findings point to a temporal reorganization of social life marked by the disappearance of the “night out.”

That is by Neal Caren, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.  So what did you go last evening?

The post The End of Friday Nights with Friends appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Annie M. Lowrey…is an American journalist who writes on politics and economic policy for The Atlantic. Previously, Lowrey covered economic policy for The New York Times and prior to that was the Moneybox columnist for Slate. She was also a staff writer for the Washington Independent and was on the editorial staffs of Foreign Policy and The New Yorker. She is a proponent of universal basic income.

So what should I ask her?

The post What should I ask Annie Lowrey? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The post This brew, at least, is from Ashburn, Virginia appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

2. New Spanish-language edition of Bioy Casares on Borges coming out.  The older edition was, among other things, too heavy to lug around or bring on a trip.

3. The market for data is the market of the future.

4. If Uzbekistan were excluded, the damages would look similar to earlier work.

5. James Broughel on capitalizing AI agents.  And more on the same.

6. How calibrated are Kalshi prediction markets?

The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Abstract: The holdout problem presents a pervasive challenge in situations that require the assembly of independently controlled assets, where due to complementarity the combined whole is worth more than the sum of its parts. One avenue for addressing holdout problems involves contingent contracts, where agreements are conditional upon reaching a predetermined threshold. This paper reports an experiment to investigate a new refund bonus contingent mechanism, in which asset owners who agree to participate (e.g., sell their asset) receive a bonus payment if the required threshold for project success is not met. The refund bonus eliminates failure equilibria and improves the frequency of successfully reaching the threshold in the symmetric mixed strategy equilibrium. In the experiment, individual asset holders choose each round whether to accept an offer to sell. Multiple owners must accept for the (contingent) sale to materialize, and holdout owners who do not sell can earn more, so the game has the strategic incentives of a volunteer’s dilemma. The data show that the bonus mechanism increases agreements to sell, the frequency of successful projects, and efficiency. By the second half of the experimental sessions, the total number of sales is 35 percent higher and the threshold is met nearly twice as often with the bonus than without.

I also cover this paper in my Refund Bonus (aka Dominant Assurance Contract) Explainer.

The post Breaking Ground: Can Refund Bonuses Solve the Holdout Problem? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The post Rick Rubin podcasts with me appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Early signs of tech-driven improvements in productivity growth could herald a sustained strengthening in the UK’s economic outlook, analysts have said, in a turnaround after years of underperformance. Private sector productivity grew by 1.8 per cent in the second quarter compared with a year earlier, up from 1.2 per cent previously, according to analysis of official data by investment bank Morgan Stanley.

The rise extended gains since 2024 and reduced the growth gap with the US. The reasons behind the upsurge are heavily contested, but some analysts point to increasing AI adoption in sectors including information technology and business services.

If the recent productivity acceleration can be sustained over years, it could bolster incomes and help alleviate some of the strains on Britain’s public finances.

Here is more from Sam Fleming and Amy Borrett at the FT.

The post Green shoots for the UK? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

U.S. tariff rates in 2025 rose to levels not seen since the Great Depression, yet imports increased. To account for the missing trade collapse, we develop an open-economy New Keynesian model with tariff heterogeneity, inventories, and shocks to investment that capture the AI-driven boom. The model matches the untargeted paths of imports, output, and inflation; we use it to decompose the effects of tariffs and the investment boom. Absent the investment boom, imports would have fallen by 10 percent and activity would have contracted by 0.7 percent. The effects of tariffs depend on which goods are tariffed: tariffs on consumption and intermediates act like shocks to supply; tariffs on capital goods act like shocks to demand. The concentration of the 2025 tariff increases on consumption goods and the relative sparing of capital goods limited the damage to output while amplifying the inflationary impulse.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Francesco Ferrante, Andrea Prestipino, Andrea Raffo & Michael E. Waugh.

The post More evidence on the effects of recent tariffs appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

EV India winners featured: Naman Pushp https://x.com/therealnamzoo?s=11
Khushi Mittal: https://khushimittal.com
Shreeporna Rao: https://x.com/shreepoorna365?s=11
Samay Sanghvi: https://www.thealmanac.ai/article/samaysanghvii
Angad Daryani: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angaddaryani?utm_source=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=member_ios

The post Indian documentary covers EV winners appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.