Saturday assorted links

1. Nuclear Navy construction costs. 2. Joel Mokyr reviews Koyama and Rubin. 3. TFR isn’t so stable over time. 4. Richard Taruskin, RIP (NYT). 5. How DeSantis is changing Florida universities. 6. Electrophysiological effects of Angela Merkel’s voice. 7. “Massive cricket-processing facility comes online in London, Ont..“ The post Saturday assorted...

3h

Marijuana Legalization and Fertility

State-level marijuana legalization has unintended consequences, including its effect on fertility. Marijuana use is associated with behaviors that increase fertility as well as physical changes that lower fertility. In this paper, I use a difference-in-differences design that exploits variation in medical and recreational marijuana legalization across...

12h

*Empires of Ideas*

The author is William C. Kirby and the subtitle is Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China.  The shocker is that this is actually a good book.  In contrast, hardly any books on these topics are good.  This book is substantive on virtually every page, the author actually understands how universities work, and, get this…you have...

15h

Friday assorted links

1. The track record of mid-20th century futurists. 2. Eli Dourado on why go to space. 3. Many chess players have been disappointing us as of late. 4. What Future Fund is up to. 5. Further exploration of the Antikythera shipwreck (NYT). 6. Austin Vernon and Eli Dourado on energy superabundance. 7. The best paid poet of all time? The post Friday...

1d

Institutional Review Boards Should be Curtailed

A good piece on IRBs from CSPI by Willy Chertman: Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) are ethics committees, ideally composed of scientific peers and lay community members, that review research before it can be conducted. Their ostensible purpose is to protect research subjects from research harms. But oftentimes, IRBs are costly, slow, and do more...

1d

Scottish Enlightenment vs. Irish Enlightenment

The Scottish Enlightenment seems like a real enlightenment to most observers, the 18th century Irish Enlightenment (Swift, Berkeley, Burke, toss in James Barry too) does not.  In my admittedly unorthodox view, I think the Irish Enlightenment simply had different concerns but was no less of an enlightenment.  Much of the Scottish Enlightenment was concerned...

1d

The marginal value of informal access to health care

To assess the importance of unequal access to medical expertise and services, we estimate the causal effects of having a child who is a doctor on parents’ mortality and health care use. We use data from parents of almost 22,000 participants in admission lotteries to medical school in the Netherlands. Our findings indicate that informal access to medical...

2d

Thursday assorted links

1. Does hot water freeze faster than cold? 2. Overview of the economic crisis in Sri Lanka. 3. Gary Leff on the pilot shortage. 4. Zvi with a vaccines update. 5. Weekly ocean freight rates down forty percent from highs. 6. Jonathan Adler on the new EPA ruling. The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

2d

What Caused the Murder Spike?

I think there’s clear evidence that the current murder spike was caused primarily by the 2020 BLM protests. The timing matches the protests well, and the pandemic poorly. The spike is concentrated in black communities and not in any of the other communities affected by the pandemic. It matches homicide spikes corresponding to other anti-police protests,...

2d

My Conversation with Barkha Dutt

Here is the link, and here is part of the CWT summary: Barkha joined Tyler to discuss how Westerners can gain a more complete picture of India, the misogyny still embedded in Indian society, why family law should be agnostic of religious belief, the causes of declining fertility in India, why relations between Hindus and Muslims seem to be worsening,...

2d