Marginal Revolution

Marginal Revolution is nominally about economics, and it's not entirely not about AI, but AI is a fairly small part of what they cover: https://marginalrevolution.com/ I follow a fair number of people who would, back in the day, have been classic bloggers, but are now doing Substack, and rarely even mention AI. Here's one I like enough that I actually pay for it: https://walkingtheworld.substack.com/

I recommend against books; they're expensive and typically the page count is too high for the number of ideas unless you are really interested in the academics of it. I get a lot more out of Wikipedia [0], blogs and YouTube (although the quality of information on YouTube is typically low). That being said, if you want some recommendations I'd suggest Tyler Cowen [1] as a good clearinghouse for topical ideas and John Cochrane [2] as an interesting read. I picked an article from the last 7 days where you can see the ZIRP in the graphs, it is all the points where US Fed Funds rate was at 0. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy [1] https://marginalrevolution.com/ [2] https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/inflation-and-the-macroeconomy?utm_…

Interestingly Cowen and Tabarrok follow this topic closely on Marginal Revolution. also some interesting insights in the comments section there, which is mostly economics-oriented. https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=Argentina (advise: skip all other random talk about AI, LLMs and ML stuff, you may easily get outraged)

Marginalrevolution is a good blog, covering current affairs, economics, finance and technology issues. One of the posters, Tyler Cowen, is great at aggregating and summarising information and it’s a combination of links and quite short thought pieces that get posted daily. https://marginalrevolution.com/ Matt Levine writes a great daily newsletter, Money Stuff. Often there is a topic in finance that I don’t really understand - recent examples are GameStop, FTX, Silicon Valley bank. He summarises the issue in a very clear but also funny and engaging way. You can sign up to the newsletter for free. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levine

Cowen is absolutely one of the best out there too, but I do wish he got in deeper with his guests! His blog Marginal Revolution is also consistently interesting and he has a good map of great spots to eat across the DMV https://marginalrevolution.com/ https://tylercowensethnicdiningguide.com/

There are a couple of blogs I read that get good comments, but most either do not or have the comments closed. The commonality between the few with good comments section is that the topic of the blog is relatively niche and the commentors tend to have deep subject matter knowledge. It's worth noting one major exception to this pattern: Marginal Revolution (https://marginalrevolution.com/) is a very general blog, has a large readership, and still gets good comments on it (a lot of trolls too).

I had never heard of this award and the author doesn't give great evidence that it actually has a great success rate. Looking at the past winners: https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=emergent+ventures+winners A number of award winners are already very accomplished. In this most recent cohort, there's a woman who's a professor at Brown, has a PhD from Harvard, and written multiple books. It would be interesting to see how accomplished the award winners are and how early in their careers they received the award.

Not sure if you mean "individuals" compared to companies or organizations, or actually just solo bloggers, so I'll include a few that have more than one individual author but are "personal". https://marginalrevolution.com/ - on economics but so much else https://avc.com/ - Fred has some of the best startup insights https://abovethecrowd.com/ - Gurley doesn't blog much but when he does it's great

Other related posts including quotes from supporting experts: https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=first+doses+first This is more about looking at the ability of our systems to change their response in emergencies; why are obvious things so hard to do, when they both fully make sense, and are supported by an interested group of experts, against a larger but less interested group of conventional, rule-following experts?

1. https://marginalrevolution.com - Economics blog 2. https://hckrnews.com - Great HN aggregation 3. https://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=MPX&issuedby=MPX&… - The forecast discussion from my local National Weather Service Office. These are great, written by an actual person providing color commentary on the weather in my area. 4. http://techmeme.com - Tech news aggregator

The best I know of: http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/?s=covid https://www.arnoldkling.com/ . https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=covid https://marginalrevolution.com/about Those are two blogs that I think everyone should subscribe to. arnoldkling.com is particularly interesting because it seems to have unusually high quality in the comments section.

I actually just ran across this article talking about the romanticization of hunter gatherer cultures. http://quillette.com/2017/12/16/romanticizing-hunter-gatherer/ The tl;dr; seems to be that there was one paper 50 years ago that everyone cites around how great it is to be a !Kung. But that the study didn't take into account some of the downsides, and it also happened to be a particularly fruitful year for the tribe. (BTW, an extra shout out to http://marginalrevolution.com which is where I found the link to the article. I mention it here, because it seems like a site that a large cross section of HN would enjoy on a regular basis, as it's a very thoughtful Econ blog.)

> This seems like part of the general trend to value the "rock stars" of every field while diminishing the field in general. This is precisely the topic of Tyler Cowen's Average is Over[0]: > Cowen forecasts that modern economies are delaminating into two groups: a small minority of highly educated and capable of working collaboratively with automated systems will become a wealthy aristocracy; the vast majority will earn little or nothing, surviving on low-priced goods created by the first group, living in shantytowns working with highly automated production systems. Cowen's blog, Marginal Revolution[1], is also worth a read. 0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_is_Over 1: http://marginalrevolution.com/

http://marginalrevolution.com and http://kottke.org are both longtime favorites of mine, featuring interesting content ranging from economics to food to philosophy to art...

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/ is great for understanding what's going on right now There was a fantastic 1980 PBS (video) series called Free to Choose, by Nobel-Prize winning economist Milton Friedman and his wife Rose. It's available for free viewing here: http://miltonfriedman.blogspot.com/ Once you get into economics, you will like this blog: http://marginalrevolution.com/

http://www.marginalrevolution.com is brilliant. Also try Delicious.com, Popurl.com and Slashdot.

http://www.marginalrevolution.com is your best bet Through posts it links to all of the other good econ blogs: Krugman, Mankiw, as well as good articles in FT, NYTimes, Economist, etc. Economic texts are notoriously boring, blogs are a good solution to that problem

Found via http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ , a great, very readable blog about economics.

Given the headline I expected more of an argument about how Obama's stimulus plan is Keynesianism's first "true" test. Really the argument amounts to this: 1. FDR didn't really try Keynesianism until he was forced to during WWII (the 30s didn't count). Too little Keynes. 2. The whiz kids of the 60s took Keynes too seriously. 3. The ~$650 billion Obama wants to spend follows directly from Keynes's formula. Goldilocks Keynes. Not particularly rigorous, but the link to the "Marginal Revolution" blog might be fruitful. http://www.marginalrevolution.com/

Here are the blogs I'd start with: For behavioral and general economics, my two favorites are Tyler Cowen and The Big Picture http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ http://bigpicture.typepad.com/ For Development/Macroeconomics two great ones (besides Becker/Posner) are Greg Mankiw & Danny Rodrik http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/ http://rodrik.typepad.com/ Mankiw is a bit more traditional than Rodrik, so they tend to have some great back & forth, and when the discussion jumps above college-level they tend to link/explain things. </econ nerd>

> I don't think pricing is a signal. Then I recommend that you begin reading http://marginalrevolution.com/ as soon as possible.

I don't know a good book but I can recommend an excellent blog, Marginal Revolution: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ Not the intro-topics sort of material, but very interesting. Closer to Freakonomics style.

Economics? Get a good, mainstream textbook (read the alternative stuff after you have a good grasp of the regular material, if you want). Here's one that's free: http://www.introecon.com/ Also, following blogs is a good way to learn. I like this one: http://economistsview.typepad.com/ and this one: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ Start with those, and they'll link to others.

Right now, I only have subscriptions to the NYTimes (US) and FT (international). But mostly I find out interesting stuff from https://marginalrevolution.com/ (which usually have links to FT, Bloomberg, WP, WSJ, etc.) I was once a New Yorker subscriber, but I no longer have patience for long form writing. I also once had subscriptions to the Montreal Gazette and Globe and Mail, which were pretty good for local and domestic news respectively (but only if you're Canadian). I also once subscribed to the Walrus when Jonathan Kay was editor, but it was too boring (it's Canadian, I'm Canadian, but I don't relate to anything they write about -- but I think they've gotten more interesting since). The Economist -- I'm torn. A lot of the writing sounds smart, but many of the articles are written by young Oxbridge PPE grads who can turn a phrase but don't have a lot of real world experience. The Economist seems to be read by people who want to seem smart, who want to hold an elite-certified opinion, but don't seem to want to to do the work to actually go deep on topics and would rather outsource their opinion formation to the Economist. I also once had a subscription to Foreign Affairs. Excellent long-form articles that I no longer have any patience for. You do get the occasional long form article that is so relevant and engaging that you're forced to read it to the end, but these are few and far between. I've gone back to reading books.

This piece is an op-ed, not straight reporting. Tyler Cowen, its author, is a noted economist (with libertarian leanings), and he favors competition in many forms. Anyone curious about him and his views should read his blog Marginal Revolution and listen to his podcast. They're both smart: https://marginalrevolution.com/ https://conversationswithtyler.com/ Tyler has written extensively about stagnation in the American economy. Part of that stagnation is the decreasing mobility of Americans. I very much agree with him that governments should compete for residents, especially the right kind of residents. It takes hard work to build a successful city. If we look at San Francisco, we see a city that has done everything it can to drive away many residents, and in so doing, destroyed its tax base, leading to a budget crisis. A great lesson in what not to do! Why should there not be a market for talent, where the towns and cities of America compete to make themselves more livable, better centers of serendipity, better providers of public services? That sounds great to me. In an earlier America, some cities took this mandate very seriously. For anyone curious, Stanley Marcus of Neiman Marcus tells the story of about the leaders of Dallas deliberately made it attractive to early residents in order to build their town. His biographical book is called "Minding the Store."

You are correct about the dynamics of wage labor during the industrial revolution. However, I can't say I agree with this: > Modern automation on the other hand seems to mostly just replaced many low and medium paying jobs with a smaller number of high paying ones. Modern automation created so much prosperity that we now have significant portions of the population doing things that 19th century people would scarcely call "jobs" -- Tyler Cowen, an economist, collects many of those on his blog, see https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=new+service+sector+jobs . Additionally, many jobs that would be recognizable to them are now done by greatly increased number of people. Consider, for example, a job of university administrator: as such, this job would make sense to 19th century people. However, the idea that university employs more administrative than research or teaching staff would seem rather ludicrous to them. The reason we can do it is that the productive sector of the economy creates so much surplus, that we can through regulation, taxation, and social custom funnel so much of it to people doing jobs that are not by any means crucial to the functioning or prosperity of the society.

It seems likely that it’ll be a V-shaped recession, sharp drop followed by sharp recovery, unless there’s a complete mess made of economic policy like when the Fed turned a normal economic contraction into the Great Depression. Lots of people getting temporarily sick and permanently dead doesn’t destroy much physical capital and the casualties are disproportionately borne by those least engaged in the workforce. > The 1957 Asian Flu Pandemic killed around 70 to 100 thousand people in the United States (the 57 flu was not as infectious or deadly as COVID-19). In the last quarter of 1957 the growth rate (on an annualized basis) was -4% and in the first quarter of 1958, -10%, the largest such decline in post WWII history, bigger even than in the financial crisis. By the third and fourth quarters of 1958, however, the growth rate had surged back up to nearly 10% and for the year as a whole GDP declined by less than 1%–a bad recession, 3rd worst by depth in post WWII history, but not unprecedented. https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=1957+flu

Great! and if enforcement were consistent, rule-breaking behavior would probably decline: > Quick, clear and consistent also works in controlling crime. It’s not a coincidence that the same approach works for parenting and crime control because the problems are largely the same. Moreover, in both domains quick, clear and consistent punishment need not be severe. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/09/what-was-gar…

I agree that Wikipedia wasn't the best source to go for criticism: Wikipedia is very sympathetic to the claims like in the book, so the criticism section is very weak sauce. It is indeed noble that the authors responded to the criticism, but unlike what Wikipedia seems to imply, they didn't manage to rescue their argument. See https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/03/the-spirit-l… from another comment.

Start exercising hard. You're not going to go pro, but 40-50 is the best decade to get into peak shape and participate in some new recreational sports or activities. I may get some flak for this, but start paying attention to skincare. Botox + anti-aging treatments, well applied, can do an awful lot of good. Stay up-to-date on new tech, particularly AI. Tyler Cowen was talking about this last month, basically saying that the people who are now 40 are going to be the ones most at risk of being left behind. (http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/05/what-is-the-b…