huitzitziltzin

Amusingly does not work for safari on iPhone. Ok ok I have the maps app and that’s what they want me to use but if I am on mobile now and I want to click to check it out right now… well, maybe I won’t come back to try it later, guys??

Feels a little like they rushed it to meet some Q3 launch timeline?

“ The method requires repeated random assignment of managers to multiple teams and controls for individuals’ skills.”

That’s an extremely extremely demanding condition very unlikely to be satisfied in practice, IMO. Even conditionally exogenous given covariates is hard to swallow.

I am skeptical of nearly all gen ai applications, including this one. However, if humans can hallucinate weapons of mass destruction in Iraq I guess we are no worse off than we are with the status quo.

No offense intended, but your comment reads a bit like a word salad of some economics concepts which you likely don’t fully understand.

- “presumes that workers might never beat the prisoners dilemma” - that has nothing to do with demand curves. I have no idea what you are talking about.

- “[presumes??] that consumers will never make any informed purchase” - nothing of the sort is true.

- “selling light bulbs that expire in weeks is better for the supply curve.” What??

(Former) econ prof here (now in industry), though definitely not at Harvard.

To be honest "draw a map of a rail yard" or "write up a waybill" does not seem like the kind of exam material college students should be engaging in in 2024. The standard is higher now, a lot of the material more difficult and the questions have changed. The material being tested on that exam looks like middle-high school in parts?

In an _intro_ economics class I'd like students to understand what we (think we) know about supply and demand and apply it to relevant public policy issues - housing supply, taxation of vices, etc. I'd like them to discuss policy trade offs.

"Railroad economics" was presumably an elective, where the standards now would be even higher than in my intro class.

That is an outstanding book. I second the recommendation.

I’ll even make a (sincere!) claim that I suspect will inspire a lot of angry attempts at rebuttals:

The 20 foot shipping container has had a greater impact on the world than large language models are likely to ever achieve.

Read the book first and then tell me why you think I’m wrong. (I’m not wrong :) )

This is an accurate description of what my large R1 research university did after Covid to maintain enrollment. It’s a heavily tuition driven place without the tens of billions of endowment dollars an Ivy has.

They “opened the floodgates” to students to maintain enrollment, in the words of a colleague. People who would have been denied without a second thought pre-COVID were admitted. The acceptance rate went from 40%-50% to 80%+. (Numbers are approximate.)

Accepting these students required adding two levels (at least!) of remedial math below what used to be the absolute last resort, “should you really be in college?” remedial math class we had pre covid. These new classes basically taught middle school level material or lower.

Nearly all of the students taking those classes don’t belong in college bc they are totally unqualified to do college level work. It’s irresponsible to admit them, charge them $200,000, then graduate them as heavily indebted but basically high school educated adults. They have no skills.

I can’t make up for their failure to learn math in (as this author correctly says) 5th - 12th grade.

I make this comment to note that the situation hasn’t changed.

Also: to the extent that anyone is looking for villains on student debt (overall the “crisis” is overblown but there absolutely are students who get screwed), blame the universities which admit unqualified students and also the high schools and middle schools which utterly failed them.

Also blame our failure to pay math teachers more than PE teachers. There are a lot of villains. The system is horrible.

The craziest part of this article is the phrase “may be” in the headline.

Seriously embarrassing for a major newspaper to take this at all seriously. What do you say to child who thinks he remembers a past life? You say “hey - that never happened don’t worry about it.” What a complete waste of time.

And this part: “Scientists say consciousness is produced by the brain…” - there is no other side to that position. There’s nothing else there.

(Yes, I would say the same to a kid about life after death too.)

You are correct and I’m happy to discount. The older of the two patients in the original example was under 50. That’s a lot of QALYs. Even at an implausibly high discount rate it makes sense.

The outcomes reported in the article are suggestive of a large decrease in mortality due to heart attack. Even assuming the effect is much smaller than reported, more widespread use of ecmo machines makes a lot of sense.

Hello - it's your friendly neighborhood health economist (and I have worked on a topic adjacent to ECMO machines).

ECMO is unambiguously cost effective (even at US prices!) for the infant. (I'm not defending US prices - needless to say if anything is cost effective at US prices it's passed the hardest cost effectiveness test.) It's also cost effective (even at US prices) for the older patient. Honestly the cited figure of $213,000 is nothing compared to the value of a statistical life (for the infant) or a bit under half of one (for the adult)

There should be more of these machines and they should be in wider use. The possible impact on heart attack mortality alone is enough to justify wider investment and exploratory use more broadly, even if the precise effects end up being smaller than that's cited in the article.

This is a great example of technological change pushing the boundaries of what's possible in health care. (And frankly... even though I am not defending US health care prices, a high price for this new technology is exactly the kind of signal you want to send to entrepreneurial types, several of whom appear in the article. If ECMO can be taken out of the ICU (by some future version of the machine) that seems highly likely to generate huge benefits.)

Sure, there are some moral issues to be worked out. Those issues would be much better worked out while a bunch of patients who would otherwise died are plugged into ECMO machines...

I thought this kind of small-sample, theory-free, tell-any-story-you-want statistical significance mining exercise was out of style! This study is like an unwelcome blast from the 2010's or earlier!

Details are pretty limited in the linked article, but what’s described does sound like a price fixing agreement. Doesn’t matter if it’s “family ranchers” or someone else - that’s illegal, as it should be.

$60 M for absolutely cutting edge dick joke generation in next gen LLMs.

I question whether Reddit data is worth anything at all.

On a continent with one billion people, this service with 2.1 million subscribers has “zoomed past” Netflix which has 1.8…

I don’t think either firm is contending for a throne from which one can be dethroned. Not with those numbers.

It should have been immediately obvious to everyone that this was a scam. Anyone who has a money printer by definition does not need your help. If you are being asked to invest there is risk. If you are being told it’s a sure thing you are being lied to. Setting aside the obvious stupidity of finding your investment opportunities on Instagram of all the ridiculous places…

This is the correct answer and would get the agreement of probably better than 95% of the profession.

The suggestion above that JEL is a top five is bizarre. The CS equivalent is saying that the book “learn python in 21 days” is a top outlet for CS research.

The authors of this paper should be deeply embarrassed about the way they handled that data, but I’m slightly relieved to see that this garbage was published in a tenth-rate journal no one has ever heard of. (Though to be clear there are definitely problems with what gets through in top journals too!)

This is complete nonsense. There are a ton of environmental economists. It’s an active and vigorous field. There are “environmental and X” people for many other economics subfields, e.g., macro, development, structural, etc. There are a ton of people doing work on climate related topics.

By contrast I have never heard of this person. She’s not the first or the only or even an influential figure in the area of environmental economics.

Don’t assume the field doesn’t care about the environment just bc one article says so.

More than a year into ChatGPT and… unemployment is at historic lows.

I don’t remotely see the present generation of LLMs as being “labor replacing tools.” I’m aware of empirical work which shows them to be useful complements to human judgment, not substitutes for the same. I’m also aware of one study showing (iirc) less work for illustrators on an online job board. That latter case is the only case im aware of where workers have been replaced though if you have citations to actual empirical evidence for job losses please comment!

An alternative theory: Part of what AI CEO’s are doing is marketing their products. If you want to get investors and customers to pay your very expensive compute bill you’d better sell your product. You can sell your product by claiming it can replace workers. That doesn’t mean it can do it. If the current generation of LLMs can replace workers, that is not obvious.

Perhaps some future generation might be, but that will require something fundamentally different than what’s currently available. (And no I don’t think “more data” is enough.)

Look, it sounds like the price of skiing has increased a lot and the market is not that competitive. (The relevant market from an antitrust perspective isn’t “ski resorts” though - “winter recreation” or “general outdoor recreation” are much more plausible.)

To blame Vail Resorts for high housing costs is just stupid. Any ski town in Colorado could make it easier to build housing. They don’t. Nor do the non-ski-towns along the I-70 corridor. They all make it extremely difficult. Assign blame where it is actually due. Vail Resorts may be loathsome for a lot of reasons but don’t blame them for housing costs.

This article simultaneously says “here are a bunch of things we claim happened” and then paragraphs later quotes experts who say they could not have or did not happen that way. Why is this valuable? I know as little as I did before reading it.

I am not a lawyer and for all I know this could be “fair use”. I leave that to courts and legislators.

This claim by OpenAI seems false though:

“The company recently made … [an argument] to the UK House of Lords, claiming no AI system like ChatGPT can be built without access to copyrighted content.”

What does OpenAI want the system to do that requires copyrighted content? The universe of material out of copyright is extremely large. Is it not fit for the (unclear?) purpose or is it just more expensive to access??

Especially if they are not simultaneously able to eliminate the risk that the system then regurgitates it verbatim, which (IANAL!) looks like a copyright violation.

I would not want to kill this very promising (though wildly overrated) technology w/ bad regulations but copyright is important and should be respected.

Not at all!

Sure those are great textbooks. If you want the history of economic thought though you might be more interested in the people and times which led to the ideas in the book. You won’t get enough of that in mankiw.

As to why the mankiw book is used at Harvard… maybe we should have a talk about monopolies… ;)

That’s just a joke it’s a good textbook but its status as the standard at Harvard is only partially related to its quality.

Why in the world would either of those ever be assigned in an economics class?

Especially on the history of economic thought! Marx has had about 0 influence on modern economics.

Sure he’s an influential figure in world history and should be taught there but in a class on the history of economics??? No way.

Graeber is an even less plausible choice.

This is not at all a serious syllabus on this topic. I cannot understand the inclusion of ChatGPT.

If you want a nice, single-volume history try Roger backhouse’s “the ordinary business of life”, soon to come in a second edition.

There is a much older book by schumpeter but it’s extremely dated as well as overly long.

The paper is total garbage but they do put gdp in the specification. No one should take this “result” remotely seriously though.

Dealt with him via TACC for a big simulation I did and was grateful enough for his help to buy a paper copy of the first volume in the series. Very interesting though a bit outside of my area. I will look at the others and encourage anyone interested to check them out.

At the very least Tom Sargent and the New York Fed see it differently so you may by the odd man out. If you haven’t checked out the quant Econ project you are missing a great resource for exactly the problems you are working on.

How would you pay for the very expensive work of developing an entire operating system without a revenue stream…? This is such a weird take. Obviously they don’t do it as a charity.