The Shortest Novel About Odysseus After His Return Home

One night, now old and flabby and starting to forget, he leaves his home secretly. He’s sick of everything, so he heads back one last time to see the places, women, and wonders he had once encountered. To go back again into his draimed memory to see how it had been and who he had been. Because thanks to the bitter irony of old age, he has begun to transform into the Nobody, the name he had once cleverly used when introducing himself to the Cyclops.

Telemachus finds him in the evening, collapsed by the boat, only a hundred yards from home, with no idea what he is doing there and where he had been heading.

They take him back to a house with some woman he no longer remembers.

The novel is Time Shelter, and the premise is that refuges are built for people with Alzheimer’s, reflecting life from past decades, for instance the 1960s.  But then people from the present start wanting to live in them.

The post Odysseus notes appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

2. Mini Cities.

3. The new Claude, on Mondrian.

4. More on cybersecurity and cyberdefense.  And Simon Willison on The Incident.  And early AI fears were not about LLMs, and that makes a big difference.

5. Critique of the new 76ers.

6. Anthropic economic research futures allocating $200 million to RCTs.

7. Interview with Emily Wilson.  Excellent piece, many of you underrate her.

The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

To study whether and how academics respond to political pressure, we exploit a natural experiment: the publication in early 2025 of a “blacklist” of words flagged by the U.S. government. We find that the release of this list led to a sharp reduction in the use of these flagged words among economists at universities that rely heavily on federal funding, relative to scholars from institutions that are less dependent on federal funding or based in the UK. The drop is driven by content related to gender, race, and environment. We show that changes are not simply semantic but reflect actual paper content and that neither the individual funding status nor time-invariant author characteristics are driving the effects. We also document interesting heterogeneous effects by department quality and author gender and ethnicity. Our findings are consistent with the idea that scholars respond strongly to political pressure.

That is from a new paper by Dominic Rohner, Oliver Vanden Eynde, and Philine Widmer.  I should note that the authors frame their results in terms of “Science under threat,” which indeed is in the title of their paper.  I do see some of that in operation, but I also see a lot of “removing incentives for pandering.”  Your own weights here may vary.

The post A natural experiment in economics appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Farmers in Parana, Brazil, struggling to get banks to loan them cash, became the first to tokenize livestock and place 10 dairy milk cows’ tokens for trade on the country’s B3 national stock exchange. They generated nearly $20,000 in credit backed by their cattle, signaling the potential of tokenizing RWAs as a financing tool.

The dairy cow tokenization in Brazil is a world first and serves as a test in a real-world scenario in which farmers are facing increasingly stringent lending limits imposed by local banks on small agricultural businesses.

“We take the cow, which is a real and tangible asset, and transform it into a digital asset backed by a unique code monitored in real time,” Thiago Martins of Cowmed, a Brazilian Agtec company, told CNNBrasil recently.

…“This digitization allows for formal registration with B3 as a movable asset,” Martins added. “The process is simple and gives the producer an advantageous opportunity to finance themselves, opening a new alternative for collateral at a time of strong credit restrictions in agribusiness.”

To turn cattle into trusted financial guarantees or collateral without requiring inspectors to visit the property, Cowmed equips cows with an AI-powered Smarty Collar. These collars constantly monitor health, behavior, and location. The raw data is then converted into an encrypted digital identity tied directly to the B3 credit agreement.

Continuous tracking of cattle prevents farmers from double-pledging the same cattle across multiple loans. It also includes built-in safeguards that allow the farmer to swap one dead cow for a live one.

Cowmed already tracks about 100,000 dairy cows across more than 1,000 farms. The herd is worth over $395 million. The company expects up to 20% of its network to adopt this tokenized financing model, unlocking $77.6 million in fresh credit for the agricultural sector.

Here is the full story.

The post Crypto markets in everything? (moo) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

When it comes to Lebron, had he wanted to finish his career with the guys he enjoys playing with the most, he would have opted for Golden State (Steph and Draymond).

If he had wanted to choose his favored organization, he would have signed with Miami.

Furthering the NBA prospects of his son Bronny, and having more time with family, would have meant staying in Los Angeles.

The hometown, sentimental choice would have been Cleveland.

As it turned out, he wanted to maximize his chances of winning a title, and with a team that did not just win a title (which rules out OKC, NYC).  That meant signing with Philadelphia. Which is what he did.

What will your final major career decision look like?

The post The Decision, the sequel appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

2. Why the Clarity Act is mired in muck (NYT).

3. Jim Olds on the new science plan.

4. Cyber capabilities of Kimi 3?

5. “Following a standard workplace safety check, I have just received an email from a university administrator in which my custom of keeping books on the shelves in my office is described as “the unnecessary storing of combustible materials”.” Link here.

6. Are current science books for children demotivating?

7. Brazilian murder rate is down 40% from its 2017 peak.

8. Is the number of words we speak each day dropping by 300 each year?

The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

IJ: On Wednesday, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia struck down a D.C. law that barred therapists from other jurisdictions from doing online teletherapy visits with clients in D.C. The decision comes nearly six years after Virginia-based counselor Elizabeth Brokamp teamed up with the Institute for Justice (IJ) to file a lawsuit arguing the law violated the First Amendment.

“This decision is a victory for anyone who speaks for a living,” said IJ Deputy Director of Litigation Robert McNamara. “Elizabeth’s victory here confirms that the First Amendment protects useful speech, including counseling, and that licensing boards can’t censor speech simply because someone doesn’t have their permission to talk.”

Congrats to the IJ! Now, we need to get rid of all the other bans on patients hiring physicians from other states. As I wrote last year:

During the pandemic, many restrictions on telemedicine were lifted, making it far easier for physicians to treat patients across state lines. That window has largely closed. Today, unless a doctor is separately licensed in a patient’s state—or the states have a formal agreement—remote care is often illegal. So if you live in Virginia and want a second opinion from a Mayo Clinic physician in Florida, you may have to fly to Florida, unless that Florida physician happens to hold a Virginia license.

The standard framing says this is a problem of physician licensing. That leads directly to calls for interstate compacts or federalizing medical licensure. Mutual recognition is good. Driver’s licenses are issued by states but are valid in every state. No one complains that Florida’s regime endangers Virginians. But mutual recognition or federal licensing is not the only solution nor the only way to think about this issue.

The real issue isn’t who licenses doctors. It’s that patients are forbidden from choosing a licensed doctor in another state. We can keep state-level licensing, but free the patient. Let any American consult any physician licensed in any state. That’s competitive federalism—no compacts, no federal agency, just patient choice.

Hat tip: Joel Selanikio.

The post Talk Therapy is Speech appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The post European Fact of the Day, Again appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

1. “This happened sooner than I expected, and the story is more dramatic than I expected,” therefore I am more worried than before.

2. “This happened, and the inferior Chinese cyber-defense seems to have performed just fine,” therefore I am less worried than before.

3. “This happened, and as far as we can tell, absolutely no one was harmed,” therefore I am less worried than before.

Obviously the net impact, from those bare hypotheses, is indeterminate.  And yet few people seem to be paying much heed to #2 or #3.  Joshua Saxe from the cyber world has some relevant observations.  And perhaps other updates are needed as well.

The post The optimal Bayesian update? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

2. Christian Kracht, Eurotrash, A Novel.  I was put off by the title, but it turns out this is a fun and high-level short Swiss novel about driving around Switzerland with your semi-crazy eighty-year-old mother on a road trip.  It helps to have some knowledge of both Switzerland and broader German-language literature.

3. Walter Kempowski, Alles Umsonst.  From 2006, could this be the best German-language novel since Sebald?  It is about the pending doom from the Russian army approaching on East Prussia in 1945, and how the different characters deal with that, set on a German estate.  Applicable to many other real world situations as well.  There is an English-language translation, I am not sure how good it is.  In any case an important and very good work of fiction.

4. Lars Behrisch, Democracy’s Double Helix: Participation, Equality and Revolution in Early Modern Europe.  A good book about how the roots of semi-democratic decision-making are found in 16th century Europe, and stemmed from new needs to assemble various military and fiscal coalitions.  Looks at the problem more broadly, in geographic terms, than most comparable studies.

5. Katie Kitamura, Audition.  A fun short novel, full of mystery and suspense, good for those who like puzzles in their writing.

The post What I’ve been reading appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

2. Anthropic chief economist on AI and unemployment.

3. Whales use different vowels when ships are around.

4. Oliver Kim on McNamara.

5. Large language models can predict the results of social science experiments.

6. Alexander Salter Substack on space economics.

7. New Google data and study on AI and the economy.

8. Does it matter if you don’t like the characters?

The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The post Alex Tabarrok on the Economic Analysis of Crime appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Gita Gopinath…is an Indian-American economist who is currently serving as the Gregory and Ania Coffey professor of Economics at Harvard University and previously served as the first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), from 21 January 2022 to 31 August 2025. Before that she also served as chief economist of the IMF between 2019 and 2022.

Here is Gita on scholar.google.com, she is an expert in international finance and exchange rates, and also international capital flows, among other topics.  Here is Gita on Twitter.  So what should I ask her?

The post What should I ask Gita Gopinath? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Tyler and Andrew discuss whether it was inevitable we’d rediscover Vermeer, how that vanishingly rare sect left its fingerprints all over his life, why the Met has misread its own Allegory of the Catholic Faith, whether Vermeer painted for money or pointedly refused to, where the Gardner’s stolen Concert might be, why Dutch music never blossomed as much as Dutch painting did, how the Church of England rivaled the Cultural Revolution in wiping out British art, whether you can still spot an English painting on sight, the love that saturates late Rembrandt and the mystery of his soaring print prices, the nail on the wall that proves two Vermeer paintings are a pair, why the French are to blame for George Stubbs’ lack of status, whether we can still love Malevich, why Andrews calls recent Richter “almost like printing money,” why female artists and antique textiles remain absurdly cheap, why nobody builds beautiful neighborhoods any longer, and much more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: In what sense was Vermeer a liberal?

GRAHAM-DIXON: Well, the main discovery of my book is that Vermeer was among the very first pioneers of what we now call the liberal tradition.

COWEN: What we now call the Netherlands, then the Dutch Republic.

GRAHAM-DIXON: In the Dutch Republic, and the Dutch contribution to the Enlightenment, which is the origins of the liberal tradition, has been very much forgotten. That’s absolutely at the heart of my book, is an attempt to remember these people, to bring them back into the place in history that they deserve. I’m not only talking about Vermeer. I’m talking about his friends, his patrons, because that’s the discovery of the book, is that he and his friends were a remarkable group of people, and they have been completely forgotten, and what they believed has been largely forgotten too. We need to remember it now, probably more than ever.

COWEN: This was also a religious movement.

GRAHAM-DIXON: Yes.

COWEN: Doctrinally, how would they have been different from, say, Protestants in England? The Collegiants, the Remonstrants?

GRAHAM-DIXON: Yes. Vermeer’s patrons, it emerges, and Vermeer himself, were part of a Protestant sect in Holland called the Remonstrants. They had a more extreme manifestation called the Collegiants, and they were unique among all Christian denominations of that time in being utterly opposed to division, hostility, enmity. The only thing they wanted was to bring all Christians, indeed all people—they included Jewish people and Muslim people—they wanted to bring everyone together within a faith that only really cleaved to the essentials of what Jesus Christ said, particularly in the Sermon on the Mount.

They said, “If you actually follow Jesus properly, you can never make war. You can never persecute someone who differs from your opinion. You can never pick on somebody because they believe something different.” They were very, very tolerationist. They formed the first pacifist movement in European history. They lived in a time of appalling warfare, the Thirty Years’ War, probably the worst war in the history of the modern West. Fifteen million out of 20 million German people died in the course of 30 years, and the 5 million who were left, all the women had been violated, and all the men only have one arm or one leg. It was truly atrocious.

They’re responding to real traumatic historical events. They’re responding to what is going on around the corner from where they live. They come up with this very, very beautiful approach to life, full of optimism, full of idealism. For about 20 years, the Dutch Republic actually lives by these codes of belief to a great extent. It’s the only tolerant country in Europe.

And this:

COWEN: What makes George Stubbs such an underrated painter?

GRAHAM-DIXON: I think he’s been underrated forever because of his subject matter. I blame the French. The French in the 17th century invented a system for ranking works of art by their subject matter. Up at the top, you and I, we could put on some armor and confront each other with swords, and Poussin would paint us. That would be a history painting done from the life. That would be at the pinnacle. Then would be a painting of an event, maybe a meeting between great men. Then, below that, there would be a portrait.

You’d keep going down, and eventually you’d get to paintings of still lifes, like flowers and fruit, or paintings of animals. These were the lowest works of art because they featured the basest things. I think that Stubbs, to a certain extent, was the victim of that.

COWEN: Are we now able to see them properly?

GRAHAM-DIXON: Yes. It’s been no problem since Stubbs and Constable, more than anyone else, slightly controversial to say, but I think they paved the way for modernism because they showed, not necessarily deliberately, but they showed that anything could be painted, anything at all, like a piece of mud or a piece of a river could be painted in such a way as to touch on the very highest thoughts and ideas and beliefs and feelings that subject matter is completely, in a sense, irrelevant. Cézanne picked up on that when he said, “I want to stun Paris with an apple. I’ll paint an apple, and I’ll paint it with such astonishing concentration that you’ll see it as an epistemological challenge to all of your philosophy.”

I think that French art gets that from British art because British art has to be like that because that’s all the aristocrats are going to commission. They look down on people like Stubbs, in a sense. If I’m an aristocrat in the 18th century and I want a really important picture, I’ll go to Italy and I’ll buy one, thank you very much, and I’ll buy my history painting from Titian. You, sir, Stubbs, you just paint my horse. It’s my racehorse, and I’m very fond of him. Paint him well and don’t scare him.

Recommended, interesting throughout.  And here is Andrew’s very interesting new book on Vermeer.

The post My excellent Conversation with Andrew Graham-Dixon appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Something that the Ukraine and Iran wars have taught me is that for a lot of countries, including very big countries, there are a small number of buildings and infrastructure components that are required for their economy to function.

And in countries that aren’t protected by oceans, like the US, drones completely change everything.

You can just make a list of oil refineries and production plants and the infrastructure around their main exports, and you can just attack them and destroy them and take them off the list.

4 years ago I would have thought there are too many of these components and they’re too easy to recreate, but both of these collisions have taught me that there are far fewer and that many of them will take years, if not over a decade, to rebuild.

It’s very strange to me that drones can now effectively harm the economy of a country.

That is from Daniel Miessler.  While I am glad Russia is on the receiving end of this right now, this is arguably our biggest pending problem, bigger than what people typically refer to as AI risk.

The post Solve for the equilibrium appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.